Comedian Tina Fey and Don Katz founder and CEO of Audible, Inc. were honored by New York Stage and Film at their winter gala this week. Attending the dinner at Pier Sixty with the hope of scoring some tickets to Hamilton—yes, still—I was soon apprised that the bidding for them started at $4,000. I could dream on. This was a night for funny with Tina Fey feted, introduced by Andrea Martin, and with Dana Delany introducing Don Katz. Tina Fey’s posse included some funny women Carol Kane and Ellie Kemper. But first an incredible line up of actors including John Slattery and Jayne Houdyshell read vignettes to illustrate the magic of Audible.
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- 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
- Authors Night in East Hampton: If it’s Not One Thing It’s Your Mother
- Documentaries: Jocelyn Wildenstein The Lion Queen/ Tovah: How Jewish is It?
- Hamptons Journal: John Waters at Guild Hall: “Gay is not Enough” / “Cagney” at Bay Street/ “Signs” at the Bridgehampton Museum Tractor Barn
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“Fairy tales are not for children,” said Guillermo del Toro, introducing his fabulous film The Shape of Water at a special screening this week. “They were created during times of war, pestilence, famine,” he went on, explaining the oft occurrence of violence, mutilation, and monsters. His masterpiece, Pan’s Labyrinth, a fable seen through the eyes of a child is now updated in this movie full of awe and unlikely romance featuring a creature from the sea as his new “innocent.” His savior is a mute cleaning woman in a Baltimore research facility, Elisa, a gorgeously realized role from Sally Hawkins. Early on during this award season, this performance, a tour de force of facial expressions and fanciful nods to movie musical genres, was high on the list for Best Actress. Now with the opening of the film, Sally Hawkins should be first up on that list. For many, The Shape of Water is the film of the year. -
It was lovely to see Saoirse Ronan win the Best Actress Gotham Award for her role as “Lady Bird”/ Christine in Greta Gerwig’s debut film as a director. Especially so, because her mother, who lives in Ireland, was present at Cipriani Wall Street, and Gerwig initially titled the film, “Mothers and Daughters.” I saw the film for a second time at a recent screening at the Crosby Hotel hosted by Candice Bergen and Chloe Malle, mother and daughter. While Gerwig will admit the film hews close to some biographical detail, for example, that it is set in Sacramento, California, and she did in fact attend Catholic school, she veers off in many ways from her own story. Women of her age will surely identify with Ronan’s Lady Bird, her wrongheaded choices in boys, friends, habits like smoking, just about everything. -
As film celebrations go, Monday’s IFP Gotham Awards was the quintessential New York night with many honored acknowledging their Big Apple core: tributee Dustin Hoffman recalled the days when he first arrived in the city, his recent mention in the news on the list for misconduct, blissfully omitted. With John Cameron Mitchell as M. C., the event at Cipriani Wall Street avoided the politics of the day—sexual harassment, white supremacy, the void in good leadership—focusing, mostly, on the art of cinema. But that does not mean the night lacked political moment as Dan Rather, exemplar of truth to power journalism, presented a humanitarian tribute award to Al Gore who gamely got up to remind everyone of the progress of global warming, and the necessity to face the challenge of our planet now. -
Alexandra Dean’s documentary, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, emphasizes the actress’ contribution to a world outside the shallows of Hollywood. The stunning brunette Hedy Lamarr defied the illogical adage: if a woman is beautiful surely she can’t have brains too. Then again, few people of any gender have the kind of brains Lamarr had; she was an inventor of a code, a communication system involving randomly operating frequencies, devised to help in the war effort. Who dares to think like that? In the context of our current discourse about sexual harassment, in her time the objectification of women was simply show business as usual. But whip smart, Lamarr managed, escaping a boring marriage in Vienna, finding her way out of Nazi occupied Europe to America aboard a ship on which movie mogul Louis B. Mayer was also a passenger, and making sure she got his attention. Her beauty took her far. -
Just announced, the movie Call Me By Your Name garnered six Independent Spirit Award nominations, more than any other film. On the same day, Andre Aciman and Luca Guadagnino, just back from Italy, spoke about the film at the New York Public Library at 42nd Street.“I hate the word adaptation,” said Andre Aciman, about, eh, the adaptation of his 2007 novel Call Me By Your Name by James Ivory for the new movie of that title, directed by Luca Guadagnino. Aciman addressed a crowded auditorium of fans at the Library: “They cut this and add that,” he explained, so authors complain, “but I could see that film can do things that cannot be done in a book.”
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Ever since the movie Get Out opened last February, people have been talking. Is this edgy horror story a vision of blacks’ worst nightmares? Or, are whites more disturbed by the social satire? Comedian/ writer/ director Jordan Peele’s smart movie puts this discourse on the table. For anyone still in the dark, the plot goes like this: Daniel Kaluuya and Allison Williams star as a mixed race couple. William’s Rose, maybe named for Rosemary’s Baby, brings her boyfriend Chris (Kaluuya) to meet the parents, in a country house deep in the woods. Let’s just say, deer crossing the road are not the only casualty. Part Stepford Wives, part Night of the Living Dead, the scariest movie of the year features faces frozen in civility, and the sinister sound of a spoon tapping a teacup.
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The Oscar winning actress Gloria Grahame was hardly Hollywood royalty, a sulky blond bombshell playing bad girls and good. The movie Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, directed by Paul McGuigan and based on Peter Turner’s memoir of his affair with the American actress, takes you from her saucy time meeting Turner, a Brit much younger than she, through her final days. The actress Annette Bening, Hollywood royalty for sure, is down to earth; despite critical praise for many glorious performances including last year’s Mike Mills movie, as the matriarch in Twentieth Century Women, she has not yet won an Academy Award. Bening’s Gloria Grahame as an older and wiser version of her character in The Grifters. Last year, her husband Warren Beatty was honored at the Museum of the Moving Image, and she will be feted this year at their gala in December. Is this sublime actress on the road to an Oscar nod at last? -
In The Band’s Visit, eight members of a police band from Alexandria, Egypt, uniformed in powder blue, peer out from the Ethel Barrymore theater stage looking for their airport bus connection. As in the 2007 movie on which this delightful musical is based, through miscommunications, humorous language blips, the band ends up in the wrong place, in a small town in the Israeli desert and must spend the night. Following the motif of strangers coming to a place and changing it—and themselves– forever, the play is a picture of diplomacy, with the band’s conductor Tewfiq (Tony Shalhoub) meeting Dina (Katrina Lenk), at the café where she works: “Welcome to Nowhere,” she sings, her ultimate perception of Arab men: Omar Shariff. Tewfiq could be a muted variation, once he takes off his hat. -
“Brooklyn is in the house,” laughs Spike Lee from the stage of the Paramount during his conversation with Maurice Wallace, a high point of last weekend’s Virginia Film Festival. The security at the historic theater is something akin to that in airports, producing long lines for avid film lovers. Spike Lee, in an astute bit of festival programming, was invited to show his documentary, I Can’t Breathe, an interview with Ramsey Orta who took the cellphone footage of Eric Garner dying at the hands of Staten Island police, screened in a double bill with his 4 Little Girls (1997). Before making a quick turnaround, flying back to Brooklyn for the premiere of his Netflix series, “She’s Gotta Have It,” based on his movie, Lee announced his next project teaming up with Get Out director Jordan Peele to make Black Clansman, starring John David Washington, Denzel’s son in the title role, and Adam Driver as the white man who portrays him in the clan. -
Guitarist John Pizzarelli and singer Jessica Molaskey are man and wife, and married in music. Headlining the Café Carlyle this week, their act is a sublime mix called “The Little Things You Do Together” after a Stephen Sondheim tune; they perform standards such as Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields’ “A Fine Romance,” a Joni Mitchell favorite, “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” and Sondheim’s classic “Children Will Listen” and “Finishing the Hat.” Jessica sits back as John does “Baubles, Bangles, and Beads,” and then exclaims, “Now you know why we are together for 20 years. He had me at ‘baubles.’” Cute, yes, and their banter works as well onstage as it does on the radio, even when they plug their respective albums, such as her new “Portraits of Joni,” urging your purchase. (They have a kid in college.) Yes, they can sing! -
At the New York Public Library Lions Gala on Monday night, a Who’s Who of writers –and readers—gathered to celebrate five Tom Brokaw, Michael Chabon, Carla Hayden, Colson Whitehead, and Robert Wilson. The gorgeously refurbished readers’ room on the library’s third floor was transformed into a book-lined palace dining hall, for Norm Lewis performing Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” followed by a red ribbon ceremony, “medalling” the literary “lions.” Unlike most events of this nature, few speeches got in the way of the fine dinner and din of lively conversation. -
“Every time you make a documentary,” said Errol Morris accepting a lifetime achievement award at the 2nd Annual Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards ceremony this week, “you get to reinvent the form. When I sold my series, Wormwood to Netflix, I sold it as the Everything Bagel.. -
A documentary by Jason Wise about Rose Marie, Wait For Your Laugh, is a trip down show biz memory lane. Reaching back to the early part of the 20th century, the anecdote-rich film reveals a remarkable career in vaudeville, radio and early television. At age 4, Rose Marie got her big break when the performer Evelyn Nesbit reached out into the audience at a club and lifted up the child who was singing with her. They did a duet, and the rest is history. -
When former vice president Al Gore was running for president, few thought he was the life of the party. That lack of pizzazz may have posed a problem for a presidential candidate, who, you may recall won the popular vote. Now comfortably removed from the White House scene, he’s way past that moment, raising awareness for environmental issues, particularly global warming. And last week, celebrating the DVD for An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power at The Monkey Bar, he addressed the crowd, cracked jokes, and chatted with everyone. The party was his! -
In Marjorie Prime, in a not so far away future, humans will have primes, that is, hologram avatars of our deceased loved ones, enabling us to continue to work out the dicey parts of human relationships. This is the hopeful premise of Jordan Harrison’s award winning play Marjorie Prime, on which the movie of Marjorie Prime is based. Scripted by Michael Almeyreda who also directs Lois Smith, the original Marjorie Prime of the play, and an ensemble that includes Jon Hamm, Geena Davis and Tim Robbins, the movie hews close to the universal drama of family histories, how memory shapes and recasts the stories we tell about our intimate past. -
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. -
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.”
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