A riveting, bejowled Woody Harrelson occupies the screen making LBJ something he wasn’t: a most charismatic president. Insecure, politically ambitious, Johnson became president under abject circumstances: the presidency was thrust upon him when JFK was assassinated. He wanted the job, but not that way. His personality, his conflicts with Bobby Kennedy, well played by Michael Stahl-David, and this liminal two-week period, form the core of Rob Reiner’s latest film, LBJ, from a script by Joey Hartstone. This week after a screening, Harrelson, Stahl-David, and Hartstone joined Reiner and Steve Schmidt for a panel at “21.” That Harrelson played Schmidt in the television movie Game Change became the inside joke of the lunchtime event. Then again, Harrelson is one of the great, most versatile actors of his generation. So yes, he can even play a Republican.
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Journalists are imperiled all over the world, especially women, and more, women in cultures where rights for women at large are not guaranteed. Illustrating the remarkable contribution of women journalists, their courage, commitment, and sacrifice, the International Women’s Media Foundation luncheon, hosted by Cynthia McFadden and Norah O’Donnell at Cipriani 42 Street this week, began with mention of Daphne Caruana Galizia, who died of a car bomb last Monday in Malta. She had been investigating and reporting on her government’s connection to the Panama Papers. At a table adjacent to mine sat the parents of slain Swedish born journalist Kim Wall. As Andrea Mitchell, awarded for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism, wryly pointed out, a healthy news corps is our only way of watching what is going on, an alert to corrupt regimes. But of course in some circles, news is maligned as “fake,” and one of the honorees, Yemeni correspondent for Al Jazeera, Hadeel Al-Yamani, was denied a visa under the current United States policy. What threat does Hadeel Al-Yamani pose to the borders of America, asked Andrea Mitchell. If we can’t extend a visa to her, what is our freedom? -
In Wonder Wheel, Woody Allen’s latest movie, Justin Timberlake narrates this tale as Mickey, a drama student at NYU and lifeguard at Bay 7 in Coney Island. A cute guy, and a gentleman, he’s into romance, and falls in love with two women: first, a would-be actress, now a waitress at Ruby’s Clam House, Ginny (Kate Winslet) is older than Mickey and married to a recovering drinker (Jim Belushi), who runs a merry-go-round. They live in the shadow of the Wonder Wheel, with Ginny’s son Richie (Jack Gore) from her first marriage, a nice boy in the habit of setting fires. The second is Carolina (Juno Temple), ex-wife of a mobster and Humpty’s daughter, and just the right age for Mickey, except that she is marked; two thugs from the world of the Sopranos loom large in a black car (Tony Sirico and Steve Schirripa), look to take her out. That’s the set up for Woody’s familiar tropes on tragedy shot on the stunning tuttifruiti boardwalk and sand by the great Vittorio Storaro. -
“The last time I cast a nine-year old boy,” said director Simon Curtis this week, “it was Daniel Radcliffe.” This time, for his new movie Goodbye Christopher Robin, about the making of the Winnie the Pooh books, Curtis was referring to the impossibly adorable dimpled Will Tilston who plays author A. A. Milne’s son. At the premiere this week at The New York Public Library, after screenings at last week’s Hamptons International Film Festival, Will, who never acted before and who has never been to New York before was feted along with Domhnall Gleeson who plays his father Alan, and Margot Robbie, his mother Daphne. Forget the grim and lonely childhood Christopher Robin suffered with these self-involved parents. Festooned with giant Pooh bears, the library’s first floor had the majesty and magic of The Hundred Acre Wood, but best of all, at center was a vitrine with the original stuffed animals, including the beloved Eeyore, Tanga, Piglet, and Tigger, part of the NYPL collection. -
Rita Wilson brings charm, confidence, and the comforts of relaxing with a close girlfriend to her supper club act at the Café Carlyle. “Tonight is going to be about relief from the world,” she says, and you believe her, because her lively combination of country and rock music is appealing, and because with all her L. A. glamor, movie star allure—when she casually mentions her husband, she says “Picture Tom Hanks,” because he is, –she is grounded enough to know what you want. -
Kumail Nanjiani was in a heated conversation with Bob Balaban at Nick & Toni’s in East Hampton. Without ever having met him before, the Silicon Valleystar named a character in his hit movie of last summer, The Big Sick, on Balaban, and so it seemed at Variety’s 10 to Watch brunch that only six degrees of separation, or intimacy, existed among the talented young actors present for this beloved program of the Hamptons International Film Festival.
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Even when she’s coaxing a cockroach out of her purse as a down and out chanteuse in 1930’s Paris, as she does as Victoria in the 1982 Blake Edwards directed comedy Victor/Victoria, Julie Andrews is classy. Screened at the Hamptons International Film Festival this weekend, just prior to a Q&A with Alec Baldwin, a Lifetime Achievement Award presentation, and a private party to celebrate the actress most well known as Mary Poppins and Maria from The Sound of Music, the movie’s gender bending issues feel charming and slightly retro in today’s world, and make for excellent entertainment. While Victor/Victoria earned several Oscar nominations, it won for Henry Mancini’s original music; Mancini’s widow was in attendance at the Guild Hall ceremony, a highpoint of this premier film festival, now in its 25th year. -
Director Steven Spielberg seems too young to have a biopic made about him, a filmmaker perpetually in mid-career. His The Post, about the Pentagon Papers will be out this November, he told the crowd pressing around him at HBO’s dinner at Lincoln following the Alice Tully Hall premiere of Spielberg, to air this week. Documentary filmmaker Susan Lacy goes far creating a narrative of Spielberg’s career—and what a career so far! Beginning with footage of the epic movie, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia as inspiration, the film shows Spielberg sneaking onto the Universal Studios lot and literally, in due time, commanding an office and a world in which to operate. -
Duncan Sheik, composer of the musical, Spring Awakening, a huge hit on Broadway in 2007, takes the Café Carlyle stage this week for a brief run of his original songs. You may remember, the musical is based on a 19th century play about teens discovering their sexuality, portraying rape, suicide and abortion. “If you think it gets more happy and exciting than this,” he said at the opening, after singing some rather eh, moody songs about “losses I must bear,” “don’t hold your breath.” He thanked the audience, including a friend who was celebrating his birthday, for allowing him to test this material, and never thinking he’d be nostalgic for the “halcyon days of the George W. Bush years,” he became political with “Star Field on Red Lines.” -
At the Q&A following a recent screening of The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) at The New York Film Festival, viewers professed to have seen themselves and loved ones in the story of a family immersed in the elder care of their father, Harold Meyerowitz, a narcissistic sculptor played to perfection by Dustin Hoffman. To say that his sons, –brilliant performances by Adam Sandler as Danny, and Ben Stiller as Matthew, –are engaged in the Freudian paradigm as rivals to each other in the grip of questionable parenting, is to describe in broad terms the specificity of Noah Baumbach’s fine script, and superb direction. Baumbach has made many movies since his memorable The Squid and the Whale, and this film follows closely, a next step in fictionalizing his own family story. As the writer Paul Bowles used to say, fiction must be truer than the table you can touch. By any measure of literary fiction, this film is a masterful rendition of a New York based family of our time. -
After a replay of the infamous “Palestinian Chicken” episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm on HBO last month, with a scene in which Larry David has sex with the gorgeous Arab restaurant hostess, professing his return to the homeland, so to speak, viewers thought they had seen the limits, but no, the new season features the no-boundaries curmudgeon in fresh forms of insult and hilarity. HBO hosted a premiere screening last week for a who’s who of television and comedy at the SVA Theater, including Amy Schumer, Steve Buscemi, Mark Feuerstein, Lawrence O’Donnell, Aida Turturro accompanied by Michael Gandolfini, and the cast Susie Essman, Jeff Garland, Cheryl Hines, and many more. -
Richard Linklater follows his Everybody Wants Some!!, an affable college boy sports romp, with Last Flag Flying, a buddy movie with older guys, featuring Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, and Laurence Fishburne, who played a soldier in Vietnam in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, back in the day, good preparation for this role. Three Vietnam vets on the road, what a set up for wild ride with bad boy shades of Last Vegas! Opening the New York Film Festival, the film touches on war, but stays closer to its aftereffects on survivors and their loved ones. Carell’s Larry sets the events in motion, traveling to find Cranston’s Sal, an alcoholic bartender, and Fishburne’s Mueller, a pious reverend. Gathering them together for a road trip, Larry wants these men, who behaved badly together in Southeast Asia, to help him bury his son, just killed in Iraq. -
Laura Osnes is the consummate performer for large Broadway musicals, and at the Café Carlyle this week, she scales back her American sweetheart persona to the intimate stage, accompanied by Ted Sperling’s piano and extensive lore, and scene partner Ryan Silverman, amping up her considerable charm. The program entitled “Cockeyed Optimists: The World of Rodgers and Hammerstein” pays homage to these masters of musical story telling with selections from Cinderella, South Pacific, Carousel, The Sound of Music, and Allegra, all songs wonderfully familiar, but at times strategically mashed up, so there is always an element of surprise, a great pleasure of this show.
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Those of us who remember the events of 1973, including the tennis match between feminist Billie Jean King and chauvinist pig Bobby Riggs, see King’s triumph in the larger context of Roe v. Wade, and other advances for women. In the thoroughly enjoyable new movie, The Battle of the Sexes, filmmakers Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, the directors of the hit, Little Miss Sunshine, score big again with a delightful cast that includes Elisabeth Shue as Riggs’ icy wife and Bill Pullman as tennis promoter Jack Kramer, and a spare telling from Simon Beaufoy’s screenplay that mostly avoids historic clutter, and culminates in the match itself. Even though you know the outcome, the tennis is thrilling. -
You know what they say about show business! At Cipriani 42 Street this week the American Theater Wing celebrated its first 100 years with a great show. Tony Bennett took the stage, to speak the Wing's praises. Broadway stars Brian Stokes Mitchell, Norm Lewis, Rebecca Luker, Beth Malone, Natalie Cortez, Howard McGillin, and Santino Fontana performed favorites from Phantom of the Opera, Fun Home, Company, and other Broadway hit musicals. Laura Osnes who will begin a residency at the Café Carlyle this week sang from South Pacific. Taylor Trensch sang from Rent; currently starring in Hello, Dolly!, he will take over the title role in Dear Evan Hansen. Heather Headley brought the house down with her rendition of “What I Did for Love” from A Chorus Line. Who could possibly follow that act? School of Rock’s bass guitarist Evie Dolan just seized the moment singing “Aquarius” from Hair, and leading the entire group in “Let the Sunshine In.” -
No one does queen better than Judi Dench! And director Stephen Frears has some experience with queens too, having directed The Queen with Helen Mirren as Elizabeth. In his new film, Victoria and Abdul, Dench plays Queen Victoria as both bored old lady and lonely royal, fatigued by outliving everyone she has ever loved. Into this privileged deprivation comes a lowly, handsome servant (Ali Fazal) from India who gives the queen another chapter, conversing with her on many subjects including exotic fruit, such as mango, and teaching her Urdu, much to the horror of her court, and to the heir to her throne, “Bertie” (the divine Eddie Izzard). Based on a cache of letters and other writings unearthed in 2010 from Abdul Karim, a real-life personage whose existence was entirely unknown until the recent find, Victoria and Abdul tells a new story in the well-mined history of the British monarchy. -
Guinean dancer Sidiki Conde walks on his hands as a result of a childhood accident, but that doesn’t stop him from performing traditional dance, and drumming, dedicated to his mother, and motherland. This weekend he and Sheila Kay Adams, a banjo playing balladeer from North Carolina entertained at Cinema Village, following the premiere of Alan Govenar’s new film Extraordinary Ordinary People. A smorgasbord of unique artists making exceptional art, the film focuses on winners of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Heritage Award, endangered in our anti-arts political climate along with the NEA itself. This exuberant film makes each art sampled, from oud playing to basket weaving to bobbin lace making, feel indispensible. -
Angelina Jolie’s latest directorial –and humanitarian–effort, First They Killed My Father, the film version of Loung Ung’s well-received book from 2000, adds to this gifted director’s body of work illuminating injustice. A personal history of the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia seen through the eyes of a 5 year old little girl, the movie softens what we know, while revealing hard hitting and harrowing details of indoctrination, starvation, torture. Driven from her comfortable city apartment in Phnom Penh with her family, Loung’s survival through the loss of both parents, and two siblings, is the film’s riveting journey. And as she showed in her earlier films, Jolie’s tough storytelling on difficult subjects has a higher purpose, a mission to teach compassion. This is an important film, yes, and Jolie deserves accolades for her fine work as director.
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You are never too old to practice yoga—or too young. Nina Salpeter teamed up with her father, award-winning graphic designer Bob Salpeter to create a book Teach Your Child Yoga, to help parents teach yoga to children from one to six years old. Taking known positions, such as “downward facing dog” and “lotus,” to name just two, Nina Salpeter has teased out the family-friendly ingredients, animals, and comfort food—(she calls the familiar cross legged seating, “criss cross apple sauce,”)– in order to capture the essence of each pose, providing a visual prompt that brings the images close to a child’s experience. -
A fetus is found in a sex worker’s womb, her dead body encased in a valise washed up on shore in Sydney. Crime detective Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss) is on the case, and meets up with her biological daughter, the product of a gang rape when she was 16. Mary (Alice Englert), now 17, has issues with her adoptive mother Julia (Nicole Kidman), and wants to marry a dubious much older type. These mother-daughter themes swirl around the two episodes of Top of the Lake: China Girl, premiering this week on SundanceTV. Jane Campion is the show’s creator, and these two “chapters,” as she calls them, indicate this director’s ease with the long form of television series, as she told me at a Thursday’s Film Society of Lincoln Center preview. That Alice Englert is her daughter adds a layer of maternity to this series. -
It is not easy to capture a writer’s creative process in a movie, especially when the artist was determined to stay out of the public eye. Danny Strong took on that task in his Rebel in the Rye, the story of J. D. Salinger’s coming of age as a writer, culminating in the publication of Catcher in the Rye, and the protagonist Holden Caulfield’s curious effect on readers. As the film illustrates, fans stalked Salinger, wearing Caulfield’s red hunting hat and proclaiming in so many words, Holden Caulfield, c’est moi.A first time director, Danny Strong, well known as an actor and screenwriter (The Butler, The Hunger Games, among his many credits), based the work on Kenneth Slawenski’s critical biography, and was challenged to complete shooting in 26 days, he told me at the movie’s premiere at Metrograph this week.
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Herb Alpert and Lani Hall, partners in music and marriage for 43 years, still have that “Look of Love.” While he plays his sweet trumpet, bringing in the crowd at the Café Carlyle an entertaining night of his greatest hits, Lani Hall sits beside him, her big eyes trained on him, head and body grooving to his trumpet. Her crystalline vocals in Portuguese and Spanish perfectly put everyone in the Tijuana/ Jobim mood. “I love it when she talks to me in Yiddish,” he laughs, and their ensemble with Bill Cantos on piano, Hussain Jiffrey—from Sri Lanka– on a six-string bass he can play like a guitar, and Michael Shapiro on drums create a musical dialogue all their own. -
James Ivory, with his partner Ismail Merchant, famously made outstanding films, often based on literary works, for several decades. Charles Cohen, known for distributing fine foreign films, has restored their sumptuous Heat and Dust (1983), his third Merchant-Ivory classic, after Howard’s End (1991) and Maurice (1987) to be revived through his Cohen Film Collection. Set in India in two time frames, the 1920’s and 1980’s, featuring two women protagonists Olivia and Anne played by Greta Scaachi and Julie Christie, Heat and Dust feels contemporary in its portrayal of strong-willed women. Just before the film’s opening at the Quad Cinema this week, I spoke to James Ivory about his work with his longtime artistic collaborators, producer Ismail Merchant and writer Ruth Prawer Jahbvala. This legendary director filled me in on the change in audience reception for films set in India, and his latest project on Luca Guadagnino’s script for Call Me By Your Name, based on Andre Aciman’s novel, a selection in the upcoming New York Film Festival. -
It almost sounded like a good word about ISIS as filmmaker Bryan Fogel compared the tactics of the Russian Government with respect to whistleblowers, to the terrorists we know and fear at the final evening in the HIFF Summerdocs series at Guild Hall. He was saying that when they off people, ISIS steps up and takes responsibility, even bragging about their actions. Not so the Russians: when key individuals suddenly and inexplicably die of a heart attack, suspect foul play. They practice denial to the hilt. Fogel’s film Icarus, now on Netflix is about doping in sports, officially sanctioned by governments to get the win, specifically at the Olympics. Why do we even have them? The question is chilling about an institution that has always stood for excellence. -
Eric Fischl might be the East End’s busiest artist: aside from painting, and showing his work, the North Haven-based painter is President of Guild Hall’s Academy of the Arts, and active with his wife April Gornik in the effort to rebuild the Sag Harbor Cinema as a community film and arts center. When he was tapped to create a poster for this year’s Hamptons International Film Festival, now in its 25th year, he immediately said yes: “I am honored to be part of it. This poster is my fourth,” the artist told me in a recent interview. “I did the first festival. That’s why they asked me.”
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