At 89, David Amram is not slowing down. Celebrating his birthday at the Museum of the City of New York, and an exhibition of Fred McDarragh’s iconic photos from Greenwich Village back in the day, Amram, as times nicknamed “jamram,” led a jazz quintet: a brilliant Vic Juris on guitar, Rene Hart on bass, Kevin Twigg on drums and glockenspiel, Elliot Peper on bongos, and his son Adam Amram on congas. Plus guests: Paquito D’Rivera, Lea DeLaria, Martha Redbone, and Tom Chapin. Yes, the evening evoked the village’s storied past with songs from Pete Seeger and others. Looking out to the packed audience, Amram welcomed younger folk, and to those older than he, he quipped, “You shouldn’t be out so late.”
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- KNIFE: THE ATTEMPTED MURDER OF SALMAN RUSHDIE PREMIERES
- Celebrating Allen Ginsberg, Rock Star
- Marisa Tomei and Matthew Broderick at Guild Hall: The Plight of an Upper West Side Arts Space Gives A-List Actors The Big Chill
- Raul Esparza and Lily Rabe in The Winter’s Tale: Wet in Central Park
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Amidst the shit storm of impeachment inquiry of the president Spike Lee calls “Agent Orange,” noting heavy toxins, the documentary The Edge of Democracy tells a political history set in Brazil, juxtaposed with the personal story of the director Petra Costa’s family. This relentless political drama can be seen as a cautionary tale, or just a grim look at what our world endures today as lies gain stature, dignity falls away, and everywhere, the people lose. At a special screening at MoMA, part of the current Contenders series auguring awards ahead, Lee introduced the film to a packed crowd. Most chilling in Brazil’s case, deposed officials refused to step down claiming corruption, the equivalent of “fake news.” -
Out of the blue comes Dark Waters, Todd Haynes’ new film based on his star, Mark Ruffalo’s environmental passions. Fear of the water depicted in this legal procedural is not because of sharks, but because of industry, specifically the story of Dupont’s deliberate poisoning of landfill resulting in the death of animals and cancer in humans. The film did not take the conventional festival circuit, and, unlike the saturated colors of movies Carol or Mildred Pierce, takes director Haynes into a dark mood and commercial genre; he handles it well crafting drama from a ripped from-the-headlines scandal, focusing on the tireless efforts of a corporate lawyer, Rob Bilott, whose firm sides with industry.Meeting up with Bilett at the Lincoln Restaurant this week, at the movie’s premiere, we learned how the story is not yet over, with lawsuits accruing beyond the film’s final frame. But, as the film suggests, is it too late? The lethal chemical was also an ingredient of Teflon, a household brand, and everyone alive has ingested some amount.
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Longtime documentarian Frederick Wiseman was on a roll. First celebrated this week as a NYPL Literary Lion, he was then honored with the Critics’ Choice Documentary Lifetime Achievement Award redubbed for the late D. A. Pennebaker. With this renaming, Chris Hegedus, Pennebaker’s film and life partner for 43 years presented the statue to Frederick Wiseman noting his achievement in avoiding the usual devices such as voiceovers and talking heads, just turning his lens on a subject. And Wiseman especially admired Pennebaker: “He had fun making movies, and so do I.”No one seemed to be having more fun at BRIC than pint-sized sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the subject of this year’s documentary, Ask Dr. Ruth. “I’m presenting shorts,” she announced proudly. “Even if that is because I’m short, just remember, size does not matter.”
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A bookish night at the New York Public Library, the Literary Lions gala celebrates writers. Charlie Rose attended, and was ensconced in conversation as pigs in blankets were passed. Jean Doumanian confessed to hating long cocktail hours, but the gabfest went on for a while. Writers do have stories. Julie Taymor is finishing her film on Gloria Steinem, and Gay Talese, ever the dapper gadabout, said he went out to screenings and book events galore, even stepping out to a pub to watch television, if nothing else was on his social calendar. -
Stradivarius comes to mind when you think of special violins, but Niccolo Paganini preferred the strings of Guarneri Del Gesu. This week, in honor of the virtuoso’s 237th birthday, his ancestor Maria Elena Paganini orchestrated a huge celebration, ushered in with cocktails at Ascent Lounge overlooking Central Park featuring a performance by some extraordinary players, music director Edmond Fokker van Crayestein, Elly Suh, Kevin Zhu, Sabrina-Vivian Hopcker, and followed by a spectacular concert at Carnegie Hall. But the violins were the special guests, each one valued at roughly $10 million. Undaunted by their luxe value, the violinists took their instruments in stride: “They must be played.” -
The women in the Roger Ailes story are fierce, ambitious blonds, at least those in the forefront of the movie Bombshell, a truthful account of the demise of the Fox News CEO: Truthful, because, at a recent screening of Bombshell, many close to the story of how Gretchen Carlson refused to compromise in her lawsuit against Ailes cheered at the recognition of the scandal depicted just the way they remembered it. -
The stakes could not be higher in Feras Fayyad’s relentless documentary The Cave. Set in an underground hospital on the outskirts of Damascus, the sounds of classical music juxtaposed with the thunder of bombs give you the yin and yang of experience in Syria under siege, the forces of life competing with those of death. With Dr. Amani Ballour in charge, a young woman with nerves of steel who must face evil as well as the distrust of men in a culture where a mother who cannot feed her children fears the societal norms that prevent her from taking a job more than imminent death, “the cave” becomes a last refuge of humanity. Speaking about his focus on women in this culture, the director becomes tearful thinking about his mother. This week at the movie’s premiere at the Walter Reade theater, he sat between his producers, Sigrid Dyekjaer and Kirstine Barfod from a Copenhagen based production company, and spoke about the horrors faced in his country, worsened in the last week with the American pull out of troops: he admitted for the first time that his mother was a Kurd. -
Putting a new spin on Hitchcock, no one does horror with the class of Brian De Palma. At the Hamptons International Film Festival this weekend, the man who gave us Dressed to Kill, Scarface, and The Untouchables, among other classics of American cinema, sat for a conversation with Alec Baldwin, an actor who has worked with many a director and could add his observations, anecdotes, and impersonations to liven up a discussion with a master about such topics as the choice of D.P. for various films. As a result, Baldwin’s comments come to the fore, and De Palma’s extensive career was elicited in waves. No matter, that was the best way to do it, said Piper De Palma, the director’s daughter, named after the actress Piper Laurie (so sinister as the mother in Carrie) who presented her father with the crystal award for Lifetime Achievement. -
A glamorous crowd packed Cipriani 42nd Street for the fifth annual Global Lyme Alliance gala: sparkly gowns and tuxes for a stellar event put together by the incomparable Larry Scott. Hosted by Rosanna Scotto, the benefit, to end the insidious Lyme epidemic, featured speeches from Lyme survivors and performances by a Big Apple Circus juggler who did amazing work with pink umbrellas, and by Tootsie Tony winner Santino Fontana accompanied by newcomer Ashley Kobre, a graduating senior from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, singing “I’m So Pretty” from Cinderella. -
Director Noah Baumbach knows from divorce, and has made films that have illuminated sides of that subject throughout his career. His 2005 Squid and the Whale comes to mind, and the family in The Meyerowitz Stories (2017) is riddled with marital fragility, and resilience. Each hews close to the director’s family background. Baumbach’s new film, Marriage Story, seems most immediately to be informed by his own real-life divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh in that we are looking at a couple of charming, good looking, articulate artists, with the superb actors Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson in the leads, but look again. The writing takes it somewhere else. At a press conference following a New York Film Festival screening this week, Baumbach claimed to want to tell a love story in a different way: “Sometimes you can see it more when it comes apart.” -
Trust Martin Scorsese. If he makes a 3 ½ hour film, he will have you by the throat, riveted and wondering where the time went. Such is The Irishman, his latest masterwork, which opened the New York Film Festival this week. Featuring a trifecta of characters in the personae of Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, adding Harvey Keitel for extra oomph, it’s a dream team tale with great work by Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale, and Anna Paquin, but this is less a girl’s story than a picture of America at a pivotal moment when the historic violence of political assassinations –JFK to name one–echoed the small mayhem of mob vendettas.Framed on this large canvas by an old man in a wheelchair recounting his life at a nursing home, The Irishman is a confession with no hope for redemption. The Irishman is Frank Sheeran (DeNiro) and he paints houses, code for doing hits. Much has been written about the aging and de-aging techniques used in this film, as the sequences jump time, but old or young, the characters in Frank’s world come live in superb storytelling.
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The special screening of Nanfu Wang’s One Child Nation, hosted by Oscar winners Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin at Lincoln Center this week, had some special guests among the attending elite of New York documentary filmmakers: Woody Allen and his wife Soon-Yi. The subject of this riveting documentary is the effect of China’s one child policy in that country. Said to help with population control, the rule of law, enforced in China from 1979 to 2015, severely punished families for having more than what was allowed, with forced sterilization and late term abortions. In the general propaganda extolling the virtues of keeping down the country’s birthrate, pop culture musical numbers show festively dressed women singing how wonderful life is with only one. Needless to say, families were devastated. -
Just as Lord and Lady Grantham are thinking of downsizing,
the King and Queen decide to visit, setting off the lavish fairy tale
that is Downton Abbey: The Movie. The smartly dressed crowd at Alice
Tully Hall cheered as John Lunn’s symphonic music swelled, a rich
reminder of what was left behind when the last PBS season ended in
Julian Fellowes’ extravagant entertainment, and what now, in the form
of a feature-length film, ushers in two hours of sheer pleasure. -
Marital infidelity is that slippery slope, just ask the characters in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal in a superb revival at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater. Coming from a fictional literary elite, meaning they are also verbally gifted, and would have to be for Pinter’s poetry, Jerry (Charlie Cox) and Emma (Zawe Ashton) think they’ve gotten away with a seven -year affair when they meet up two years after their trysts ended. A book agent and a gallerist, they’ve been cheating on Robert, her publisher husband (Tom Hiddleston), who is also his best friend. Got that? Famously for this Pinter play, the events unravel backwards in time, much being made of when and how the betrayed know what. The truth is slippery. -
Starring Oscar awarded F. Murray Abraham and Mercedes Ruehl, the reading of Jules Feiffer’s 2003 play A Bad Friend at Guild Hall, could not have featured more good friends. Under the expert direction of Harris Yulin who also read, along with the outstanding Tedra Millan, Dave Quay, and Josh Gladstone, one of the East End’s finest character actors, the reading thrilled an audience of Feiffer’s friends (Monte Farber and Amy Zerner, Audrey Flack, Susan Lacy, Celia Weston, among them), his wife Joan Holden, and the author himself. -
Singer Jenni Muldaur brought a party to Guild Hall for the holiday weekend, doing duets with performers who she’s assured the stellar crowd,are really truly her friends. What a night: the Wainrights, father and son, Loudon the 3rd, and Rufus, plus Teddy Thompson, and Isaac Mizrahi who joined in—briefly– for Leonard Cohen’s “Halleluliah!” We were witnessing music dynasties performing country, rock, iconic American music genres. I loved Jenni on the harmonica, covering Bo Diddley and Dylan, and the opening act, the ukulele stylings of Patty Marx and Roz Chast. This hilarious duet proves: it takes a special kind of chops to make music that off so funny. -
Photo: Roger FriedmanRob Reiner was the surprise guest at Guild Hall for Celebrity Autobiography, a riotous show based on a single conceit. It’s not that the lives of celebrities are merely a hoot, but that read aloud, the unintentional humor is mind-blowing. Case in point, Tiger Woods’ sexual innuendo describing his golf strategies in Tiger Woods: The Making of a Champion. Or Reiner as Arnold Schwartzenegger’s dialogues with himself, emboldening the workings of an already outsized ego, or Joe Namath’s obsession with his hair, in Alan Zweibel’s voice. When performed onstage for an audience by first class actors, the results are laugh out loud good. That is the engine that fuels Celebrity Autobiography, a hit every year on and off Broadway, and at Guild Hall. The brainchild of playwright/actor Eugene Pack, who, upon reading Vanna Speaks, producer Merv Griffith’s miraculously talented letter turner on Wheel of Fortune, discovered that describing in detail what it is that Vanna White brings to the game, is its own game. And so he had Lewis Black reading White.
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Photo: Nina SalpeterShowtime’s The Affair returns to Montauk for its final season, to a preview decktop screening at Gurney’s. With the drizzle and ocean breezes, fans felt right at home with the first episode: Helen (the remarkable Maura Tierney) ministers to both the death of Vic (Omar Metwally) and the birth of his son, Ed. Noah (a quizzical Dominic West) lends a helping hand. And in mini segments Noah discusses the film of his roman-a-clef, Descent, with its star; Joanie Lockheart (Anna Paquin), at a moment in the future, deals with family and missing her mother and father. The question is, do we miss them too?
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If you ask me what is the funniest show I have seen all summer, it is Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo at Purist Magazine’s Connect 4 Ideas Festival. The CNN commentators, brothers in arms, told how they got to where they are, even as Cuomo was wrapping up a week of scandal involving an Italian-American putdown turned violent. Without recounting the experience, let us just say, the media star did not shirk the subject, hit it straight on, as he and Lemon went through their bona fides through the lens of loved ones shown onstage behind them in photographs, from the bittersweet loss of Lemon’s sister Lisa to Cuomo’s dad Mario. This deft taming of the elephant in the room at Guild Hall took place in the company of family and friends, and in something unusual in the media, with the support of another kind of bond through CNN. -
Come out of the dark: Ugo Rondinone’s work at Guild Hall lifts us in radiant shots of sunlight. In the two large gallery spaces the walls are bare, lit by fluorescen fixtures. You might be mistaken to think you are in Walmart under this austere light, but the effect on the art is, well, looking in full sun, stunning. In one gallery, a series of graphic yet shimmering circles in gold and yellow are juxtaposed with Guild Hall’s regal space. In another gallery, large hoops made of twigs work as frames, and the few hung on the wall with nails suggest Christ’s crown of thorns, a beatific sight. In a third gallery, hung shingle style, are hundreds of children’s drawings of the sun, some in blazing color. Everywhere at Guild Hall, the suggestion of hope offers a glimpse of a better future. -
Back in 2002, the one and only time I attended the Cannes Film Festival, I was at dinner with D. A. Pennebaker, his wife and film partner Chris Hegedus, and my friend Roger Friedman who had made a film with the documentary team called Only the Strong Survive, an important historical exploration of R&B and soul music that was premiering at the festival. I was attending as a journalist, but Pennebaker knew I was a scholar of the beat generation literati, and as he did with every subject you
could mention, he had a story to tell.On this occasion, he recounted his having talked to Kerouac about doing a film of On the Road, that is, Kerouac asked him to do it, just as he imagined Marlon Brando starring. Penny, as he is known, was going to start the film with the character of Dean, the legendary “son of a Denver wino” stealing cars, maneuvering them around a parking lot. It was Penny who gave me a new window into the subject I thought, after having written several books on Kerouac, I knew very well: how the newly created highway system in America promoted the fantasy of fast car escapes from the restrictions of society: Huck Finn’s raft supplanted by the automobile. The film never left their machinations.
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Even before its third show of the season opened this weekend, Bay Street’s revival of the 1946 musical Annie Get Your Gun was extended. The demand was that great, for Irving Berlin’s classic songbook score, and Dorothy Fields’ clever lyrics for such standards: “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly,” and many more, in a show that on the surface is a show within shows, featuring lead characters who are competitors and who, natch, fall in love. That winning formula cannot be beat: Bay Street’s first-rate production does it proud!Set against a backdrop of rolling hills with fine musicians nestled in, the play is funny, charming; every song, dance and scene rises above the noise of our current events. When Annie and her love-at-first-sight beau/ foe Frank Butler sing, “They Say It’s Wonderful” in Act 1, I was melting in my seat. A leitmotif for Act 2, their romance holds sway, much because of the talents of the two leads, Matthew Saldivar as Frank Butler and especially Alexandra Socha as Annie Oakley. A coming of age story too, this is her show.
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In Sagaponack, the house Richard Zoglin shared with his late wife Charla Krupp sits nestled on wooded grounds: immaculate, swimming pool, antique adorned, just the way she, a style editor for Glamour and In Style Magazine, left it. By contrast, the subject of Zoglin’s new book, Elvis in Vegas: How the King Reinvented the Las Vegas Show, which tells “The King’s” story in transforming Las Vegas entertainment, is as much about the place itself in all its tawdry madness: a culmination of Zoglin’s work in his last two books, Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-Up in the ‘70’s Changed America, and Hope: Entertainer of the Century, taken together, his books form a trilogy in the history of American entertainment, well researched and themselves well, highly entertaining. -
Many who grew up watching 60 Minutes regularly will find Avi Belkin’s documentary, Mike Wallace is Here, a trip down memory lane. And still, this fresh look at a premiere television show, and career we thought we knew, offers many surprises. Wallace worked his charm and good looks on commercials, and other odd acting jobs. When he first came on board for this great show, known for superb reporting, his colleagues thought he would not be rigorous enough. He proved them wrong. And at a recent special screening at the Whitby Hotel, with 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Croft attending, as well as a stellar group of documentarians, Barbara Kopple, Karen Goodman, Katherina Otto-Bernstein, the consensus was, here was a serious journalist, and an impressive, entertaining look at an esteemed part of American culture by an Israeli filmmaker.
