Page 27

Magnus: Portrait of a Chess Champion

November 20, 2016

The timing of Benjamin Ree’s documentary Magnus is pure genius. What can be better than watching a film about Magnus Carlson while the 2016 World Chess Championship is being contested at the South Seaport in New York City?

A vivid portrait of the 25-year-old world chess champion’s life, talent and dedication, the film offers a glimpse into his background. A child prodigy, Magnus’ incredible mind and memory are vividly displayed. At age 13, he drew with world champion Gary Kasparov. Albert Einstein, after discussions with the Russian chess great Mikhail Botvinnik immediately saw the infinite variations in chess and was puzzled why Botvinnik’s great mind put all this thought in this game. After seeing this film I had the same thought about Magnus. Why didn’t Magnus put his amazing mind to work curing cancer instead of touring and playing the eccentrics and other greats addicted to the game?

(more…)
From Burroughs to Uncle Howard: An Interview with Aaron Brookner

November 19, 2016

The new documentary Uncle Howard is an inspired compilation of recovered footage, interviews, a story of discovery by Aaron Brookner, a filmmaker who followed in his uncle’s craft. A passing of a baton, you could say, Uncle Howard reflects Aaron Brookner’s determination to ensure his uncle’s legacy. Aaron was seven when Howard Brookner, died of AIDS in 1989. Some family films show them together, a handsome, charming young man with a cute little boy.

(more…)
Disturbing the Peace: A Vision of Hope

November 15, 2016

The riveting documentary Disturbing the Peace takes a hard look at the Middle East conflict from the perspective of former enemy combatants, some of whom have spent significant prison time, who are now challenging the status quo and finding ways to shatter a destructive narrative of war. You’d think forging a path toward peace would be a boon to all. Last month, at the Hamptons International Film Festival, I had the opportunity to sit down with a delegation, filmmakers Stephen Apkon and Marcina Hale, and several of their subjects from Combatants for Peace: Sulaiman Khatib, Palestinian co-founder, Chen Alon and Avner Wishnitzer, Israeli co-founders, and Mohammed Ouedah, Palestinian General Director. Middle East politics arouse intense passions, but to engage with this group it became imperative to look beyond my own given history.

(more…)
Amy Adams in Arrival: Master of Tongues

November 12, 2016

In the movie Arrival, Amy Adams plays Louise, a linguist dealing with some creatures from outer space in Denis Villaneuve’s parable bringing into our world beings from the beyond. They appear to be giant floaty plasma mushrooms and arrive in an ovoid structure with one part flat. An academic with some sorrow in her past, Louise is enlisted to communicate. Amidst a world of aggressive action against the unknown, the message in how she figures out their language is to behave with gentle caution, with heart open, and optimistic courage. In a movie that values the pleasures of compassion, Amy Adams is not your usual action hero.

(more…)
Judy Collins at Café Carlyle: Leonard Cohen’s Legacy

November 11, 2016

Judy Collins ended her set at the Café Carlyle yesterday with Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne,” a bittersweet homage to the Canadian novelist, composer, and performer—as it turned out. Of course “Suzanne,” from her 1966 album In My Life, is a standard part of her repertoire; it was only after her opening night that guests learned of Leonard Cohen’s death at 82, and looking back, this encore had special resonance.

(more…)
Michael Moore Prescient Pollster: Predicting the Improbable Presidency

November 10, 2016

Documentary filmmakers gathered at Criterion offices the day after presidential election 2016 to celebrate Kristen Johnson’s Cameraperson, a compilation of her work shooting for prominent directors like Laura Poitras (Citizen Four) and Michael Moore (Trumpland), who were slated to join Johnson on a panel. Given the election results the night before, the event was nearly cancelled but the participants decided to proceed, modifying the agenda to include discussion of the proverbial elephant in the room. Readers of Moore’s blog since July were well aware of this premier satirist’s warnings, that disenfranchised white men would swing for Trump, and they did, shaking up even the most astute pollsters. Now, suffering election hangover, everyone wanted to know, what do we do next?

(more…)
Warren Beatty Feted at Museum of the Moving Image Gala

November 6, 2016

Warren Beatty, Hollywood legend and famed boulevardier, starred in or directed and wrote the movies Splendor in the Grass, Bonnie and Clyde, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Shampoo, Bulworth, and Reds, to name a few, so now that he has his first film in many years, the long awaited Rules Rules Don’t Apply, it is fitting that the Museum of the Moving Image Image honor him. From this great night of speeches and clips this week, an observation beyond Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” was evident: eccentric, beyond the pale, this man is much beloved.

(more…)
Viggo Mortensen’s Hippie Heroics in Captain Fantastic

November 5, 2016

The movie Captain Fantastic sounds like an action adventure, and it is, if you consider parenting a thrilling sport. The opening shows bare chested young people making their way through the forest, foraging for food, dismembering prey, a primitive tribe. But no, the movie takes place in the “so-called” present civilized world, in a family whose father played with handsome hippie looks by Viggo Mortensen, home schools his six children in the ways of the wilderness, that is, if you call a teepee a home. Beautifully acted with a stellar cast including Kathryn Hahn, Steve Zahn, and the great Frank Langella, as written and directed by Matt Ross, Captain Fantastic is the best movie about parenting I’ve ever seen.

(more…)
David O. Russell Does Good Work: Ghetto Film School Partners with Glenholme

November 3, 2016

David O. Russell, the director of the popular films The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, and Joy, is a major force behind The Ghetto Film School, an institution in Harlem dedicated to filmmaking. This year, under the tutelage of Joe Hill, the Ghetto Film School teamed up with Glenholme School in Washington, Connecticut to teach the craft of filmmaking to special needs students. Said David O. Russell, a Glenholme boardmember, this collaboration came as a surprise. Last week at Glenholme’s annual gala, at the Bryant Park Grill, Russell presented a special award to Joe Hill, a founder of Ghetto Film School. The night reflecting something of a bromance of these two men dedicated to nurturing young talent and celebrating the next generation of great American storytellers.

(more…)
Jon Stewart’s Twitter War with Donald Trump at Stand Up for Heroes

November 2, 2016

In its tenth year, Stand Up for Heroes remains one of the great nights, with Bruce Springsteen performing an acoustic “Dancin’ in the Dark” spiced with dirty jokes. And after a decade of working it, Bruce’s comic timing is almost as good as his philanthropy. After Bob Woodruff was nearly killed, embedded with troops in Iraq in 2006, he and his wife Lee started this benefit celebrating the bravery of our military and raising funds to help those wounded. Working with Caroline Hirsch and Andrew Fox, the Woodruffs host this event, also the opening of the New York Comedy Festival, and last night Jim Gaffigan, Louis CK, Jerry Seinfeld, and Jon Stewart, who, in the spirit of the upcoming election recounted a tale of unprovoked, unsavory, racist tweets from Trump.

(more…)
Nathan Lane Leads a Star Studded “The Front Page” at the Broadhurst Theater

October 30, 2016

Wisdom has it, according to my dentist, the more star power a play has, the less it shines. Not so in the case of The Front Page revival at the Broadhurst Theater. Superbly cast with major Broadway veterans, Nathan Lane, Robert Morse, and Jefferson Mays, luminaries of stage and screen, John Goodman and Holland Taylor, and fine familiar faces: Dylan Baker, Dann Florek, Christopher McDonald, Halley Feiffer, Sherie Rene Scott, and Micah Stock, The Front Page is a laugh riot, with timely jibes at the print media. John Slattery, of Mad Men, as Hildy Johnson, a rising reporter about to be married, cracks everyone up when he says he’s looking at a career change, to advertising.

(more…)
Jeremy Irons Does the Math in The Man Who Knew Infinity

October 29, 2016

At a special dinner honoring The Man Who Knew Infinity movie, and Academy Award winner Jeremy Irons at Bagatelle in the Meatpacking district this week, the discussion was on how you play a math geek. The answer: you have a secret weapon, a real math geek who can teach you how to scribble those equations effectively on a chalkboard. The man in question, Manjul Bhargava, was honored with a Fields Medal; Neil DeGrasse Tyson, “just your neighborhood astrophysicist,” as he describes himself, explained just how impressive the Fields Medal, is. It’s like the Nobel Prize.

(more…)
Ana Gasteyer: So Hip at the Café Carlyle

October 27, 2016

Fans who loved Ana Gasteyer’s Saturday Night Live teacher trip with Will Farrell will find her cabaret show at the Café Carlyle a reminder, it’s just acting, or maybe just acting out. In the intimacy of this premiere supper club, located, as Gasteyer redubbed the neighborhood SoDal, that is South of Dalton, invoking the city’s most famous prep school, you know this funny woman, –remarking “It’s very fancy up here,” –is going to violate something sacred. That may be a response to her mother’s judging she’s developed into a “handsome woman,” whatever that means, and so she explains her act: “I’ll be working out my issues with you.”

(more…)
Newtown: Sandy Hook Promise Infuses a Documentary

October 26, 2016

It’s been nearly four years since the Newtown Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting: 26 dead, 20 at age 6, and the memory is still green. Documentarians Kim A. Snyder and Maria Cuomo Cole went to Newtown, Ct. shortly after the event, and spoke to family, friends, and survivors to get a picture of how a community grieves. Their film Newtown barely mentions the shooter, a young man of no particular politics who was armed with an assault rifle that he took from his mother’s house after killing her. Newtown focuses on the community, detailing the aftermath for three families; we take in this tragedy’s particularity: Newtown stands out from other horrendous shootings that followed. This could be our town, our school, children we know and love. As one bereaved father asks, what did we do wrong that morning sending our children off? Nothing. The children were where they should be, safe at school.

(more…)
Isabelle Huppert as the New Woman in Elle at the New York Film Festival

October 24, 2016

By the New York Film Festival’s final weekend, it felt like a French takeover: Isabelle Huppert was everywhere. Starring in two films, Mia Hansen-Love’s Things to Come, and Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, the actress went from press conference to dinner at Bar Boulud, her husband and son in tow. Elle is the French entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, and it is safe to say, it is out of the box. For a precursor out of Isabelle Huppert’s hundred or so films, think of Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, and Huppert’s frank portrayal of a woman’s sexuality. Elle opens with the unmistakable sounds of excessive breathing and violent wallops, in fact a rape as seen through the eyes of a cat.

(more…)
Leonardo DiCaprio in Before the Flood: Our Last Best Hope

October 22, 2016

Leonardo DiCaprio’s Before the Flood, a documentary exploring this critical historic moment when we can actually do something about climate change premiered this week at the United Nations. Most compelling about this National Geographic film is its focus on the personal. Screened at the General Assembly Ecosoc Chamber with luminaries present, the film opens with Leo remembering a painting by Hieronymus Bosch from his childhood, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” a triptych that goes from rich, saturated, edenic visions to bleak, scorched landscape. The focus on Leo’s journey is an effective way for viewers to grasp the immense problem of global warming.

(more…)
Michael Moore’s Trumpland, Hillary, and Women’s Suffrage

October 20, 2016

Michael Moore is so passionate about America’s future, he had to make a movie converting Trump Republicans to Hillary. He’s never voted for her, he says to a select audience of about 700 at the Murphy Theater in Wilmington, Ohio, the birthplace of the banana split, and you can continue hating her if you already do, just vote for Hillary.

(more…)
Mary-Louise Parker and Denis Arndt in Heisenberg: A New Science of Uncertainties

October 17, 2016

In the age of Internet dating sites, Manhattan Theater Club’s staging of Simon Stephens’ play Heisenberg, newly arrived to the Samuel J. Friedman Theater on Broadway after a successful off Broadway run, offers a unique point of engagement. Georgie (Mary-Louise Parker), a wacky, damaged young woman impulsively kisses a man on the neck on a London subway station. The man, named Alex (Denis Arndt), older (75!), a butcher by trade, and not a likely match for her at 42, becomes a verbal sparring partner, and bedmate. The title suggests science, a specific and famous theory related to uncertainty, but the real science here is chemistry. As odd as they seem together as a couple, a perfection develops, a negotiation of possibilities that may become a blueprint for alternatives to traditional girl meets boy, well suited to our times.

(more…)
Christine Ebersole at Café Carlyle: After the Ball

October 15, 2016

Broadway diva is one name for Christine Ebersole, and at her sublime performance in the intimacy of the Café Carlyle, call her “working mom.” Her medley of “Inchworm,” “Autumn Leaves,” “(Have I Stayed) Too Long at the Fair” suggests a big-hearted view of love that could embrace children. She has three, adopted, and now finds herself an empty nester. Five years since her last run at the Carlyle, she’s looking for renewal, including in the mirror in the mash up of “Look at that Face/ What Did You Do to Your Face” which adds extra meaning to the Dorothy Fields and Jerome Kern classic, “The Way You Look Tonight.”

(more…)
Riz Ahmed, Mahershala Ali, Aja Naomi King, Kara Hayward: Among the 10 to Watch at the Hamptons International Film Festival

October 12, 2016

The "10 to Watch" program at the Hamptons International Film Festival, used to be called “Rising Stars,” from which a very talented group of actors including Emily Blunt, Adam Driver, Alicia Vikander, and Dane DeHaan, rose. This year, the 4 of the 10 attending, Riz Ahmed, Mahershala Ali, Aja Naomi King, and Kara Hayward, all have distinguished careers: Ahmed starred in HBO’s The Night Of, Ali in various television roles as a bad guy, King in How to Get Away With Murder, and Hayward, the envy of them all, landed a starring role in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom at age 12.

(more…)
HBO’s Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds Premieres at the New York Film Festival: New Meaning to the Word “Swing”

October 11, 2016

Carrie Fisher made a wildly entertaining show about her story of growing up the child of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher: Wishful Drinking also became a popular HBO film. A casualty of her parents’ divorce with a sharply bracing sense of humor, Carrie Fisher now stars with her mother in a new documentary, aptly named Bright Lights. This week, the movie, to air on HBO, premiered at the New York Film Festival. Now 84 and living in Beverly Hills in a house next to Carrie’s, Debbie Reynolds missed this swell night. But she announced on the phone for the Alice Tully Hall audience: “I adore my children, and I’m not going to give up acting.” And then, because she loves to, she sang “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

(more…)
Alec Baldwin Races Back to the Hamptons International Film Festival After his SNL Stint as Trump

October 10, 2016

Alec Baldwin does a spot on, hilarious Donald Trump, grimacing his way through his current vulgarity against women. That’s why SNL called him back to Manhattan this weekend even while he was hosting his baby, the Hamptons International Film Festival. By Sunday he was back east, at the annual chairman’s reception, addressing the crowd including Alex Gibney, Mariska Hargitay, Bob Balaban and many others. This is, after all, his first year as co-chairman. And now he’s announced that he wants to make a documentary about Peggy Siegal!

(more…)
Kelli O’Hara Sings “If You Knew Susie” at Hope Rising Benefit

October 4, 2016

Best known for her leading roles in recent Broadway revivals The King and I, South Pacific, and Nice Work If You Can Get It, Kelli O’Hara sang at a dinner to benefit the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration (AFTD) at the Pierre Hotel last week. Of course she sang “I Have Dreamed” and “I Could Have Danced All Night,” but her rendition of “If You Knew Susie,” not part of her repertoire, was bittersweet, as it was a personal tribute to Susan Newhouse, a vibrant philanthropist who succumbed to this disease, a form of dementia. Donald Newhouse presented the Susan Newhouse and SI Newhouse Award of Hope to David Zaslav, President and CEO of Discovery Communications.

(more…)
Ava DuVernay’s The 13th: New York Film Festival Opening Night

October 3, 2016

This year the New York Film Festival opened with a documentary! Capturing a distinct Zeitgeist moment, in The 13th, Ava DuVernay limns a history of racism in America from the time of the 13^th Amendment to the present through the filter of prisons and policies of mass incarceration, seen as the equivalent or updated version of slavery. Her narrative is compelling, a clear-eyed history crafted from archival footage and interviews. Many are talking Oscar for Best Picture.

(more…)
Dennis Hopper in The Last Film Festival: A Tribute

October 1, 2016

We are mid-festival season with the venerable New York Film Festival opened this week, and the Hamptons International Film Festival next, but one festival that spoofs them all is shown in an indie comedy, The Last Film Festival, co-written and directed by Linda Yellen. Starring Dennis Hopper, ultra handsome in his very last film, and the delicious Jacqueline Bisset, this film is a laugh-out-loud riot, a mash up in the manner of Robert Altman and Christopher Guest, even though an end note says the influence was 1946 Cannes, when Hitchcock’s Notorious was screened wrong reel first. But that is just one funny moment in The Last Film Festival, which also features raucous sex, a locker room catfight between older and younger actresses, and about everything you can do with a man in a wheelchair.

(more…)