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about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Television

  • Ricky Jay Shows his Cards at the Paley Center for Media

    How many assistants does it take to cut a watermelon? One of 52, if you ask master conjurer Ricky Jay who wowed the crowd at The Paley Center for Media last Thursday night. He has starred in a show, “Ricky Jay and his 52 Assistants” for years, expertly fanning his deck at nightclubs around the…

  • Regarding Susan Sontag on HBO

    Back in the day, Susan Sontag was the big anxiety of influence. Public intellectual, essayist, activist, provocateur, critic, and novelist, she was the giant thinker to topple for any woman. Few could claim her intellectual maternity. “I feel sorry for you,” said one male professor to the women in his class, as if we were…

  • Thanks For the Memories: An Interview with Richard Zoglin on Bob Hope

    In his long dynamic career, Bob Hope’s story resonates as a cultural history of the last decade: a rags-to-riches immigrant, he was a pioneer in vaudeville, inventing stand up as we know it: he worked in movies and on television, and entertained the troops abroad. Not only was his profile, a ski slope nose, a…

  • Jake Gyllenhaal’s Eyes in Nightcrawler

    Jake Gyllenhaal’s Leo Bloom in Nightcrawler is as creepy as the movie’s title suggests. A bug-eyed loner who preys on the misfortunes of others, Bloom’s very language appropriates television-speak with information garnered on the Internet to make him reptilian. Negotiating his way through interactions, he acquires a camera and means to follow disasters, and finds…

  • James Brown on HBO: Deconstructing Mr. Dynamite’s Moves

    Alex Gibney’s documentary, Mr. Dynamite, limns the extraordinary rise of James Brown’s career, and more: interviews with his sidemen give a history of rhythm and blues, and race. Mick Jagger talks about coming to the Apollo to see James Brown and trying to simulate, and surpass, the legendary performer’s signature moves. Jazz musicians Fred Wesley…

  • Steve Buscemi’s Day Job: HBO’s A Good Job: Stories of the FDNY

    Stories about firefighters conjure images of 9/11, inevitably, as no one can forget the enormous sacrifice of those men climbing up the stairs as others rushed down. In the documentary, A Good Job, images of the site the day after haunt, well after the documentary, directed by Liz Garbus, finishes with its final big hugs:…

  • Remembering Robert Altman in a Documentary on EPIX

    When critics talk about the heyday of American filmmaking in the 1970’s, director Robert Altman was not only a part of that flourishing, he was at the forefront. With movies like McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), Nashville (1975), and Three Women (1977), my personal favorites—his films did not seem to operate by any predictable formula.…

  • An Interview with Andrei Sannikov on the HBO Documentary, Dangerous Acts Starring the Unstable Elements of Belarus

    The tensions between Ukraine and Russia make the news daily, but in Belarus, a regime has been in place for 20 years, imprisoning opposition, or eliminating it altogether. Andrei Sannikov, now in exile in Warsaw, Poland, attempted to run against President Alexander Lukashenko. After participating in a protest, he was imprisoned and tortured. On June…

  • Charlie Rose and Richard Plepler Honored at the Museum of the Moving Image Benefit at the St. Regis

    You’ve got to love a guy whose ex-wife speaks well of him, and so, in crafting a speech to honor Charlie Rose, Gayle King, called her to get some anecdotes. King was not the only one at the podium. It takes three women to toast him, and so his co-anchors on CBS This Morning, King…

  • Robert De Niro’s Anxiety of Influence: Remembering the Artist Premieres

    Back in the 1970’s when Robert De Niro was breaking out in films—Bang the Drum Slowly, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver—his dad Robert De Niro, Sr. was a painter of note, influenced by the European modernists Manet, Matisse, and Picasso, but never to equal the fame of his actor son. By the time De Niro, Sr.…

  • Burt’s Buzz and Elena: Documentary Premieres

    Burt of Burt’s Bees, honey-bee pollen and beeswax skin care products sold in supermarkets and pharmacies all across American, really exists, and he even looks just like the illustration on the yellow packaging: a bearded Walt Whitman type with shades and hat. Amazing! As the documentary about him, Burt’s Buzz, reveals about the originator of…

  • Rob Reiner Honored with the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s 41st Chaplin Award

    Needless to say, certain tropes follow actor/ director/successful-son-of-a-famous father Rob Reiner around: one is the epithet “Meathead” from his role on the great television sitcom “All in the Family,” and the other is “I’ll have what she’s having,” the signature Katz’s deli line uttered by Reiner’s mother Estelle upon seeing Meg Ryan’s character Sally fake an orgasm in the…

  • Kevin Spacey: Museum of the Moving Image Tribute

    Sprinkling his talk with the “F” word, Kevin Spacey recounted the wellworn story of how his idol Jack Lemmon encouraged him when Spacey was a 13 year old. “That was a touch of terrific,” Lemmon said to the aspiring actor, after seeing him perform at an acting seminar in Los Angeles, and 13 years later…

  • Maria Shriver Shines a Light on the Financial Plight of Many American Women: “Paycheck to Paycheck” on HBO

    Introducing a new documentary at HBO, “Paycheck to Paycheck: The Life and Times of Katrina Gilbert,” Executive Director Sheila Nevins paused at the podium to ask Trent Gilbert whether or not he was feeling safe. The dimpled 4 year old who nearly steals the show from his mom, was seated in the back of the…

  • The Americans at the Plaza

    Season two of the award-winning, much acclaimed FX cold war series The Americans kicks off this week, proving that Americans were ready to embrace a television series about appealing KGB operatives: Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell. Without giving away too much of a sensational first episode, at one point the couple is caught in flagrante delicto by…

  • Josh Groban’s Master Class on HBO

    For the 18th edition of YoungArts on HBO, Josh Groban, the youngest ever to give such a class, challenges three YoungArts alumni to write a song in two days. Karen Goodman and Kirk Simon, Academy Award winning documentarians, follow the creation and ultimate performances of the SB3 (Super Baby 3), Miranda Scott Johnson, David Stewart, Jr.,…

  • Salinger: The Documentary on PBS

    It’s fitting that the 200th episode of American Masters on PBS features writer J. D. Salinger, an author so influential it is hard to imagine the course of 20th century American literature without his imprint of lost innocence in the novel The Catcher in the Rye. Not only are at least three assassination attempts attributed to this…

  • Sam Berns, Star of Life According to Sam Dies at Age 17

      Among the fine documentaries on the short list for Oscars is HBO’s Life According to Sam. Not your usual leading man, its star Sam Berns was an odd looking teen, bald and pin headed because of a genetic disease, Progeria, so rare few have heard of it. Last summer Life According to Sam made…

  • Marvin Hamlisch Loved Sweets

    The entertaining PBS portrait of composer Marvin Hamlisch, aptly titled, “What He Did For Love,” provides the music, his method for creating it, and the man. Fortunately for producer Dori Berinstein, and for us, Hamlisch was often photographed and the footage of him performing, accepting awards, Pulitzer, Oscars, Emmys, Tonys, so much a part of…

  • Moms Mabley: I Got Somethin’ to Tell You on HBO

    Among the many ways the pioneering comedienne Moms Mabley was a pioneer was that she performed at the Apollo in 1939, five years after the Harlem theater opened. In her signature hats, mismatched housedresses, and gummy lips, she was a hoot, although her jokes consisted mostly in telling the truth. Her deadpan was killer. She…

  • J.D. Salinger: The Ultimate Celebrity

    The biggest revelation in the new documentary Salinger is that The Catcher in the Rye author was not a recluse. Rather fame averse and a champion of innocence as his signature books show, he simply removed himself to a New Hampshire retreat and wrote more books without a plan for their publication. The second reveal,…

  • Casting By on HBO Offers a Glimpse of Film History

    Famous for casting many of the Woody Allen films, including the most recent Blue Jasmine, Juliet Taylor made her way around the rooftop at the Gramercy Park Hotel, among actors Dana Delany, John Ventimiglia, Sakina Jaffrey, after a screening of a film she did not cast. Finally recognized for their important contribution to films, casting…

  • Bette Midler Hosts a Lunch for Twenty Feet from Stardom

    Now prominent among music legends, Bette Midler reminisces about her stint as a Harlette back in the day in the much celebrated documentary Twenty Feet from Stardom. Along with Sting, Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, she acknowledges the mega talent of the backup singers—now famously Merry Clayton, Judith Hill— who make the superstar performers look and…

  • Hearthrobs and Heart Breakers: John Gallagher, Jr. in Short Term 12, The Cheshire Murders on HBO

    Mason, as played by The Newsroom’s John Gallagher, Jr. does not scream sexy when we first see him in the new film Short Term 12. Recounting an incident involving a runaway from the facility for difficult teens where he works, he describes a moment of taco tummy, when his body fluids give out all over…

  • Crashing In Two Documentaries: The Crash Reel on HBO and EPIX’s TWA Flight 800

    Kevin Pearce is lucky to be alive. When you see this expert snowboarder taking the near fatal plunge in Lucy Walker’s riveting documentary, The Crash Reel, to air on July 15 on HBO, you know the outcome won’t be good. His rival for competitions and the Olympics, Shaun White, was the subject of a 2008…