recent posts

about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Television

  • Fireworks in the Water Line: Gasland II on HBO

    What would the July 4 holiday weekend be without fireworks? Somehow the ones emerging from the faucets of ordinary citizens who happen to live where fracking chemicals have infiltrated the water system are not what the patriotic have in mind. The onscreen vision of pipes aflame, along with director Josh Fox’s banjo playing, were part…

  • Don Rickles “Rickled” at the Friars Club Roast –eh, Toast

    The night was not exactly like the baudy The Aristocrats, a film featuring comedians telling roughly the same story, each one raunchier than the one before. At the Waldorf Astoria on Monday night, a Who’s Who of comedy, a lineup that included John Stamos, Bob Newhart, Joan Rivers, Tony Danza, Kathy Griffin, Lewis Black (“Rickles rickles you…

  • Walking the Walk: Twenty Feet from Stardom

    She may not be as famous as her sister in soul, Aretha Franklin, but that does not make Merry Clayton any less of a diva. Her story may be famous in music history: as told in the documentary Twenty Feet from Stardom, pregnant and in curlers, she got a call in the middle of the…

  • Please Kill Me: Punk, Richard Hell, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Conceits of Fashion, NYWFT Designing Women

    For those of us who remember the thrilling violence enacted by James Chance & the Contortions, the muted manifestations of “punk” at the Metropolitan Museum are outrage mediated, excitement without menace, and a study of how revolution passes into history. The crafted looks of Vivienne Westwood, Helmut Lang, Dolce & Gabbana, and others, including Guido…

  • Alexander Skarsgard’s Eyes: The East’s New York Premiere

    The East, a thriller co-written by Brit Marling, who stars, and Zal Batmanglu, who directs, features a Svengali type character played to mesmerizing perfection by Alexander Skarsgard. At the film's New York premiere party at Hotel Chantelle’s Rooftop on Monday, the actor who has no doubt honed his skills at fixing you in his gaze in…

  • Mel Brooks: Make a Noise: American Master at the 92 Street Y

    If this were Dutch Masters instead of American Masters, I’d have a box of cigars, gripes Mel Brooks about the enterprise of including a documentary about him in the prestigious PBS series. On Wednesday night, an audience at the 92 Street Y got a sneak preview of the show, Mel Brooks: Make a Noise, that will air Monday night.…

  • SNL’s Hal Willner Produces Music for A Great Night in Harlem at the Apollo

    It’s always Howdy Doody time in music producer Hal Willner’s workspace at the Film Center building in Manhattan. Best known for producing music for Saturday Night Live, Willner shares his lair with many antique puppets, Jackie Gleason memorabilia including a Ralph Cramden bus driver’s suit, as well as DVD’s of Shoah and other Holocaust films. He jokes,…

  • HBO’s Vice: Welcome to the War Zone

    Heads roll, as do other body parts. Literally. In “Killer Kids of the Taliban,” little boys tell you that the imam assured them, the bomb strapped to their bodies explodes outward, murdering everyone in its path but not them. And in case you were wondering which border is the world’s most dangerous (Pakistan-India) or how…

  • Barbara Walters in Our Nixon

    It was like travelling to the moon, to an alien place, said Barbara Walters about her trip to China with the president during the Nixon administration. If he were here right now, he was so awkward, he wanted so much to be liked, he would tell a dirty joke. Speaking from the stage at the…

  • Ode to Girls: Girl Rising

    The documentary Girl Rising—the title evokes uprising– mixes urgency with great storytelling appeal. The latest moment of the feminist revolution is not about debating issues of women’s equality in the workplace. It is about changing the world one girl at a time through education. Coming just after the recent PBS series, MAKERS, a history of…

  • Writers Guild of America Remembers Nora Ephron: Words Matter

    At B. B. King’s on Sunday night, at the Writers Guild of America Award ceremony, amidst a lot of foul-mouthed laughs and sober minded speeches, writer/ director Nora Ephron was remembered. As a young novelist, Meg Wolitzer attested, she received a most important recognition when Nora Ephron called to say she wanted to adapt her…

  • The Americans at The Russian Tea Room

    Brrrrr! On this chilly weekend, the new FX television series The Americans premiered at the DGA Theater: a young couple played by Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell enter a Maryland motel room circa 1960’s. Russian spies, they are finding the U.S. summer brutal. Spying an air conditioner, they are relieved to bask in the frigid…

  • Inventing David Geffen on PBS: What Am I Gonna Do With Cher?

    David Geffen is so funny, sharing anecdotes featuring a Who’s Who in music and movies for the two-hour PBS documentary, Inventing David Geffen, you would never know that he actually dislikes public speaking. A self-proclaimed dummy in his Brooklyn elementary school, by 1976 he had sold several companies and had amassed a billion dollars. As…

  • Ethel: A Daughter’s Tale, Summerdocs Finale

    In Ethel, a new HBO documentary that premiered at Sundance and was screened in East Hampton as the finale of the Hamptons International Film Festival Summerdocs series at Guild Hall, the fascination with all things Kennedy shifts to the legacy of Robert, murdered in 1968 while campaigning for president of the United States. The filmmaker…

  • Deconstructing Dad: An Anxiety of Influence

    Perusing a photo of his father in a boat on his honeymoon, smile wide and happy, in his documentary Deconstructing Dad, noted film editor and director Stan Warnow says ruefully, I never saw him this way. Filling in the Freudian gap might be reason enough to make this film, but there’s also the fact that…

  • The Good, the Bad, and the Sexy: Push Girls on the Sundance Channel

    “I just celebrated twenty years of my accident,” announced Auti Angel at a luncheon at Robert for the reality show Push Girls. Premiering on the Sundance Channel, the show features four feisty and beautiful wheel chair bound stars, three friends–Tiphany Adams and Angela Rockwood as well as Auti– who are car accident survivors, and Mia…

  • Girls Just Wanna Have: HBO’s Girls and Mary Harron’s Moth Diaries

    Grounded in a current day realism about sex, friendship, and work for recent college grads, HBO’s much touted series Girls, airs this weekend. To focus on one aspect of its satire, in Girls, sex is free and freely given, an unsatisfying service by the girls, done with bewildered cads, happy to get what they can.…

  • Chill with Frozen Planet on Discovery

    Our winter may be mild but the cold breeze off Lincoln Center last week for the premiere of Frozen Planet was distinct, in the teeth-chattering presence of cool sculptures of an ice waterfall and ice penguins. And inside Alice Tully Hall, the temperature was brisk too. The Discovery Channel’s documentary series Frozen Planet, “The Ends…

  • Game Change on HBO: Sarah Palin, See this Movie!

    For the same reasons that Sarah Palin is a riveting figure in American politics, the HBO movie Game Change is an astonishingly smart look at her and the world that put her in the position of John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election. Even when played by Julianne Moore, you cannot take your…

  • The Loving Story on HBO for Valentine’s Day

    They are not called Loving for nothing. Loving is simply their name. You could not find a true tale more tailor-made for Valentine’s Day than the story that ended laws against interracial marriage in America in the mid-‘60’s. A documentary featuring archival footage and period photography, The Loving Story airs on HBO on February 14.…

  • Lilyhammer: A Gangster’s Rap

    On a balmy New York evening with snow a distant memory, the corners of the Crosby Hotel were fitted with white stuff, the waiters sported big ski lodge sweaters and snow boots, and the décor, usually warm, was even cozier. The occasion was a screening of an episode of Lilyhammer, the first of five original series…

  • The Sound of Mumbai on HBO2

    Sheila Nevins knows how to pick them. At HBO2 where documentaries are her domain, so to speak, she reigns supreme. But “don’t call me lucky,” she cautioned members of New York Women in Film and Television at a special breakfast, lest anyone might envy her this dream job. To get to this place is a…

  • Dee Dee Ricks Bares Breast on HBO

    Dee Dee Ricks is shameless in a very good way. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007, this single mother, a success on Wall Street with lots of money to burn, as she puts it, realized that her boys, then 5 and 3, would not remember her if the disease progressed to a…

  • Erin Burnett Anchors Out Front

    In the elevator moving 9 floors up the Museum of Art and Design to Robert Restaurant, C and Jeffrey Toobin hotly debated the news of the day: the trial of Dr. Conrad Murray. Would Michael Jackson's doctor be convicted of involuntary manslaughter? Chances are he'll get off. Then again, . . . . Doors opened…

  • Women War & Peace: Power Breakfast for PBS Premiere

    Just a few blocks from the UN with police lining Lexington Avenue preparing for President Obama's visit, the Four Seasons Restaurant was the site of a power summit on world peace. A new WNET 5-part series focused on the critical role of women worldwide in war stricken regions is to air on 5 consecutive Tuesdays…