Everybody Knows . . . Elizabeth Murray premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival’s closing weekend. Even as the artist Elizabeth Murray was making news, installing the major retrospective of her extraordinary sculptural paintings at MoMA in 2005, one of 4 women so respectfully displayed, room after room on MoMA’s 6th floor galleries, she was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Film production designer Kristi Zea was already making a documentary about her and her prolific career. Unlike writer Nora Ephron, say, who made the decision to keep her illness under wraps, Murray was open about the disease that she would fight valiantly working at her studio. And now Zea had a theme for her documentary: “The tone of the movie changed. Suddenly we had a story we did not know we had. What I found out,” said Kristi Zea just before the film’s premiere screening at the Whitney Museum, part of the Tribeca Film Festival, “was how much people loved her. She was ambitious, didn’t take no for an answer. ‘Everybody knows’ was the name of her last painting. That has so many connotations: everybody knows that I am sick, everybody knows me but they don’t.”
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Nobody moves like Chita Rivera. With all due respect to Catherine Zeta-Jones who earned an Oscar for her film role as Velma in Chicago, with one quick pelvic thrust in director Rob Marshall’s direction for Rivera’s opening night at the Carlyle, Chita Rivera blows away all competition. Of course she originated the role of Velma in 1975, only one of her iconic Broadway performances in a career that includes Bye Bye Birdie, The Rink, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and West Side Story. Her set at the Carlyle, “An Evening of My Favorite Songs,” features ample samples from her shows accompanied by an expert band, with music director Michael Croiter on guitar, Michael Patrick Walker, associate music director on piano, Jim Donica’s bass and Dan Willis reeds. And, there are stories galore from this Broadway legend, who starts her set with “I Won’t Dance,” and says, “I have trouble standing still.” From her, that’s a promise.
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The essential ingredients in John Carney’s films: music and heart—see Once (2007) and Begin Again (2013)— bubble up in ample supply in his new one, Sing Street. The movie had its premiere Tuesday night at Metrograph, a new old space on Ludlow and Canal, just around the corner from necktie designer Alexander Olch’s chic boutique on Orchard. Metrograph is Olch’s place too: he’s combining his love of movies with his awesome garment-making skills. There, Courtney Love, Rudy Guiliani, Terry George, Paul Haggis, and many others picked up their popcorn and pop and planted themselves in the plush chairs for the screening. The seating seems kind of free form, yet perfect for viewing Sing Street, a coming of age tale sure to be a hit, with the most appealing and talented characters this side of Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! -
At Café Carlyle this week, Katherine Jenkins’ magnificent voice fills the intimate room with Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” even before she gets to the stage, a wonder in a strapless magnetic blue ball gown. Billed as a Welsh superstar, a title you would never dispute, she sings opera, folk songs, and show tunes, and tells tales of the Carlyle’s special resonance for her, having lunch with the Queen, touring with Andrea Bocelli, and being summoned by Andrew Lloyd Webber, to sample some “Phantom of the Opera” compositions. At times, you think the glasses on your table will shatter, but Katherine Jenkins is in total control for her set, “Viva la Diva.” -
Arthur Miller was well served on Broadway this season with revivals of A View from the Bridge and The Crucible, both brilliantly directed by Ivo van Hove. At the Walter Kerr Theater, the spirits in The Crucible come alive, and for a moment the girls possessed by demons and led by Saoirse Ronan’s Abigail look like they escaped from Mathilda, wreaking noisy havoc in unison, their inner demons like locusts in formation, moving to Philip Glass’ original and eerily percussive music. As Act II opens, this choreographed chaos is a thrilling sight, and terrifying too. Coming at a time in life when sexuality awakens, these girls in knee socks and short skirts express no less than the confusing physicality of early womanhood. Abigail especially has transgressed with John Proctor in the person of Ben Whishaw who was in fact the spirit Ariel in Julie Taymor’s The Tempest, and the creepy serial killer protagonist of Perfume. As Proctor, Whishaw wishes he’s had nothing to do with the nanny, Abigail, but now risen up in fury, she’s bent on revenge.Of course, written in 1953, the irrational, manipulative, political Salem tribunal led by Ciaran Hinds, possessed by a chilling perverse logic, reflects upon the McCarthy era and its “witch hunt” that ruined many a life particularly in the arts community. But the play would not have its allusive force if not for its very grounding in human frailty. If you see it in this framework, and with the superb performances of Sophie Okonedo as the good wife Elizabeth, and a fine supporting cast including Tina Benko, Tavi Gevinson, and Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut, as in A View from the Bridge, forbidden sex has reared its ugly head.
Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
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Off the charts irrepressible, Jerry Lewis, a few days after his 90th birthday, took charge at his own Q&A at MoMA after a screening of his first movie in 18 years, Max Rose. From a script written by first time director Daniel Noah, who persisted through many rejections from those who think you cannot make money on a movie about old people, Max Rose finally got to Lewis who accepted the offer to star. And from the looks of their relationship onstage at MoMA, it was made in heaven. Not so for the moderator, critic David Kehr, who became the target of many Lewis jabs: “Are you going to hang around long?” Fortunately, Kehr had a sense of humor and a thick skin sitting through as Lewis interviewed himself. -
A political theme ran through this year’s Sarasota Film Festival extending to its yearly event Cinema Tropicale redubbed Cinema Politicale. At the huge bash at Michael’s on East, a near naked man wore stars and stripes body paint in red, white, and blue. Guests included Matthew Modine, represented at the festival with a screening of Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 war movie that registers anti-war. At a resonant panel, three shorts Modine conceived screened, all revealing his deeply felt philosophy. One was made after 9/11. He interviewed people in Washington Square Park to show what America looks like in all its diversity. He’s also a producer and narrator of the documentary The Brainwashing of my Dad. Director Jen Senko traces the transformation of America through talk radio and the advent of meanness through her father who was, in her youth, a devoted John F. Kennedy democrat. Noting his profound change, the documentary features Rush Limbaugh stoking fear and racism through calculated mistruths. The movie goes far to show how we got to where we are.
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Rumer Willis, eldest daughter of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis may have her own take on love. At 28, she’s a headliner at the famed Café Carlyle with a jazzy, pop show that looks at love from many angles. Covering Doris Day’s “Perhaps,” she imagines a new honesty in the cha-cha beat. For Buddy Johnson’s “Since I Fell for You,” she croons, and goes softer where Liza Minelli belts Kander & Ebb’s “Maybe This Time.” Bringing her life partner and music director Tye Blue to the stage—“We have a lot in common. We both like boys”—she sings “Class” from Chicago; this number made me wish I had seen her as Roxie last year. -
Depending on what era formed you, you can relate to a piece of Gloria Vanderbilt. If you are old enough, it’s the “Poor Little Rich Girl” headlines, or maybe it’s her dating Frank Sinatra, or the designer jeans with the swan logo. Women wore her name across their derrieres. She’s lived every era fully, and as her son Anderson Cooper maintains, she’s still looking for the next great love, just around the corner. Anything can happen, of course, but at 92 no one is taking chances: Mother and son have co-authored a book, The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son on Life, Love, and Loss. Vanderbilt will have a show of her art, paintings, drawings and dream boxes, and Cooper and Vanderbilt star in a documentary by Liz Garbus called Nothing Left Unsaid, which brings her complicated story line into a coherent narrative. To air this weekend on HBO, Nothing Left Unsaid is a portrait of an American original. Introducing at the Time Warner Center, HBO’s Sheila Nevins said, “It’s beautiful. And if I haven’t called all my films beautiful, it’s too bad. This one really is.” -
The woman to my left at the Paris Theater premiere of The Girlfriend Experience pulled a lipstick out of her Prada bag and applied the nude Bobbi Brown in one swift motion without a mirror. I do that with my way more risky Russian red MAC, I thought, feeling competitive, and contemplating the series sample I was about to see. Is close female scrutiny what “the girlfriend experience” is all about? Is it a series in spiritual kinship to Claudia Weill’s “Girlfriends” from 1978? Or maybe HBO’s “Girls”? Well no, in the two episodes screened, we saw a smart young law firm intern, played by Riley Keough, Elvis Presley’s granddaughter, turn predator at a bar, have random sex (as in Erica Jong’s famed “zipless fuck”), become a high-priced call girl, and couple with her woman friend. This sexy drama will play out on Starz starting on April 10, for old school viewing, and will also be available for binge watching. So this is what Steven Soderbergh has been doing since he renounced filmmaking! -
The subtitle of the unflinching documentary, Robert Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, comes from Senator Jesse Helms, enemy of free expression, hallmark of our democracy. Bookending the movie about the photographer who came of age in the ‘60’s and died at age 42 of AIDS in 1989, the senator’s words are meant to denigrate the art of one of the era’s most gifted photographers, and to usher in a new era of conservative repression. In fact, if you look at the pictures as instructed—and they are amply provided in this rich film to air on April 4 on HBO, you will see classic harmonies of shapes, genitals posed as objects of design, pistils and lilies so idealized, flowers exude an austere eroticism. Original and emblematic of the bygone moment from which the demimonde portraits emerged, Mapplethorpe’s work is simply beautiful. -
The sweet twang of bluegrass is just the right sound for the sweet happy ending of “Bright Star,” a musical based on a newspaper item found by Edie Brickell describing a miracle. Working with Steve Martin, a not so wild and crazy guy in his current incarnation as Americana icon, the two have composed country songs for a band that plays from inside an A-frame house. Pushed along Broadway’s Cort Theater stage as scenes change, the house is home to a family near Asheville, North Carolina, when son Billy Cane (A. J. Shively)) comes back from the war, and wants to be a writer. This post-war moment flashes back twenty-three years, to a spirited girl named Alice Murphy, with a story to tell. -
Steven Page, a guy-next-door type who co-founded a Canadian pop band called the Barenaked Ladies, and left to pursue a solo career in 2009, performs at the Café Carlyle for two weeks. You won’t be singing along to his tunes of day-to-day male angst. That’s because his tunes are not familiar: he has composed all of his material with several collaborators including Craig Northey who joins him on electric guitar and vocals. Page moves between piano and acoustic guitar, and Kevin Fox plays the cello. The ensemble makes for an excellent accompaniment to songs about a songwriter who may or may not have gone dry: “No Song Left to Save Me,” he sings with heartfelt verve in this highly entertaining show. -
The patron saint of smart New York women, Nora Ephron is sorely missed. We have not seen her like since 2012 when she died at age 71 of pneumonia and leukemia. Not that you could refashion her particular savvy, audacity, and wit. Now her son Jacob Bernstein has made a film about her, Everything is Copy: Nora Ephron Scripted & Unscripted to air on March 21 on HBO, and it is so full of memorable interviews with her on Charlie Rose and Dick Cavett, you can feel her presence in our midst. -
Joan Osborne’s many fans expected her to sing her signature “One of Us” at the Café Carlyle this week, but instead she sang a specially designed show of Bob Dylan tunes, and had us all in a head bobbing sing-along. “Who knew the Carlyle could become a hootenanny,” she quipped after telling tales of performing at Delta 88 and Mondo Cane on Bleecker Street. Bringing her downtown bluesy flair uptown, from “Highway 61,” to “Tangled Up in Blue,” to “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” some songs well rehearsed and some just winging it, the evening was a rediscovery of familiar Dylan, re-mined for new riches. -
Forget Cats. So much has spun off T. S. Eliot’s poetry, the Wasteland and Four Quartets scribe would be especially laughing from the grave with Noah Haidle’s surreal play Smokefall, a MCC production at the Lucille Lortel Theater. If you pay attention to the Playbill’s author note where Haidle claims to be living in Detroit with his wife and their nine cats, you can guess what you are in for. Details matter. The colonel (Tom Bloom), one of play’s characters, has dementia and still manages to advise, never go to Detroit. Among the other odd characters residing in the family’s house in Grand Rapids, Michigan is his daughter Violet (Robin Tunney in her stage debut), pregnant with twin boys, and granddaughter Beauty (Taylor Richardson), silent for most of the play. She’s decided never to speak again after hearing her parents quarrel. Her diet consists of earth, tree bark and paint, particularly of a sea green hue. Picky, picky! Most formidable is Footnote (Zachary Quinto), a narrator of this family’s lore, a philosopher, who doubles as one of the twins about to be born. Yes, prepare for birth! -
Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, a popular film series at Lincoln Center, was particularly robust this year. Following upon the American Academy Awards season, Rendez-vous was especially refreshing with so many films directed by women. In general, the French film industry seems less mired in obsessions with political diversity, and P.C. poses. Men and women act in one another’s films with such fluidity, it is hard to label any one filmmaker as simply director, actor, or writer. How do you get a movie made? Well, the process starts with a good script. Julie Delpy’s Lolo, Alice Winocour’s Disorder, Emmanuelle Bercot’s Standing Tall, and Maiwenn’s My King were all scripted and directed by these talented women. Bercot starred in Maiwenn’s feature. And Alice Winocour co-wrote Deniz Gamze Erguven’s Mustang, one of this year’s Best Foreign Language Oscar contenders. Of the full-length fiction features, Mustang’s was the only woman director. During Rendez-vous, which ended last night, I had an opportunity to speak to several filmmakers about their work, and the challenges of making film in France. Great news: these films are all coming to a theater near you.
Julie Delpy’s comedy, Lolo opened this weekend to strong reviews. This actor/writer/director is well-known to American audiences, notably for Two Days in New York which starred Chris Rock as the straight man to utter eccentrics.
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Cults, car chases, a kid with lazer beam eyes, a satellite from outer space! What more could you want in a movie? As director Jeff Nichols said over high tea at 21 this week, “I wanted to make a sci fi-chase movie.” As he did in his film Take Shelter, Nichols cast Michael Shannon as his alter ego, a man exploring new roles in his life as he marries and becomes a father. In Midnight Special, the typical family is complicated by the paranormal, and the bizarre codes of “the Ranch,” led by Sam Shepard who needs the boy and his powers. The only recourse is to flee. -
What a coup! Publicist Peggy Siegal exulted in the day’s headlines: drones taking down 150 al-Shabab inductees in Africa. The occasion was a luncheon at la Grenouille to celebrate the movie Eye in the Sky. Directed by Gavin Hood and starring Helen Mirren, with Alan Rickman in his last performance for the screen, this nail-biting drama, a behind the scenes look at what it takes to fight terrorism could not be more relevant, and Siegal feigned taking credit for planting the story to support the film opening this week.Mirren plays Colonel Powell, who displays the remarkable cool and determination necessary in the decision making process. Do we proceed, and bomb three wanted terrorists and two men wearing suicide vests, when there is possible collateral damage in the person of a single little girl selling bread nearby, or do we risk the possibility of the martyrs killing dozens in a marketplace or other densely populated location just to save the girl? The movie teeters on this narrow edge. Alan Rickman delivers a key line: “Never tell a soldier that he does not know the cost of war.” -
Sarah Jessica Parker is a terrific actress. That’s what artist Eric Fishl, in his role as Guild Hall’s President of the Arts and gala host, said on Tuesday night at the Rainbow Room where the Sex & the City star was being feted for a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Performing Arts. On the red carpet, she gave her insider East Hampton shopping tips to one reporter and told another about her new HBO series Divorce: “I play a married woman, sort of.” And then accepting her trophy, she deftly segued to delivering an awards presentation to Ruth Appelhof, Guild Hall’s executive director, now retiring after sixteen years. We should have realized the bait and switch: husband Matthew Broderick was nowhere in sight, in fact attending the opening night of Disaster! Then again, where was she last year when he was awarded? Doesn’t “lifetime achievement” mean anything? -
A local Liberian warlord’s women in a bare hut in Eclipsed at the Golden Theater are called wife #1, #3, and #4, but as written by Danai Gurira, they could not be more individual if you knew them by their mother-given names. Unseen, when he comes by, “C.O.” beckons them. Each returns to the room, hollow eyed, and sponges off her private parts. #2 has taken arms: gun toting and tough, she bears rice and vitriol. They only way to keep the warring men off, is to fight. This all woman production, directed by Liesl Tommy, is feminist, empowering in the proverbial world gone mad. Finding humor and heart in the most atrocious circumstance, this transplant from the Public Theater is essential theater. -
Aretha’s no Mavis! The declaration gets a laugh in Jessica Edwards’ documentary Mavis! on HBO. Last week’s premiere screening at the Alliance Francais, was the film party of the season: inspiring at 76, Mavis Staple is a dynamo. When Edwards heard her perform at the band shell in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, she knew she had to make a film about her. Mavis Staples started making gospel 65 years ago with her family, The Staples Singers. She’s influenced Bonnie Raitt, Prince, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, and Bob Dylan, who, as a young folksinger when they used to tour together, asked her dad for her hand in marriage. “You’d better talk to Mavis,” he said. -
“I’m in a roomful of people I know,” Rita Wilson began her intimate set at the Café Carlyle on Thursday. Though this was not opening night, the room took on an extra glow: on one side sat Michael J. Fox, on the other, Tom Brokaw, Carolina Herrera, Ken Auletta, Richard Cohen, and William Ivey Long who told me he dressed Wilson for her role as Roxy Hart in “Chicago.” Sprinkling her songs with anecdotes involving her husband, she’d say, “Picture Tom Hanks,” and you could see him trying to mollify a disgruntled guest at the hotel. Though she claimed he’s the opposite of every thing she thought she wanted in a man, you could see he’s the love of her life. Another refrain was the unforgettable title of her new album, “Rita Wilson.” -
Todd Haynes’ film Carol, an evocative love story set in the 1950’s, adapted from an edgy Patricia Highsmith novel, The Price of Salt, is nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Original Score, composed by Carter Burwell. His music can be heard in several current movies including the Oscar nominated animated Anomalisa, and the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar!. I caught up with the Carol composer by phone in early February, when he was in Hollywood for the pre-Oscar luncheon for those nominated, to talk about Oscars, his work on Carol, and the Motion Picture Academy. -
The Hunting Ground, a powerful documentary from filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, shines a light on the widespread phenomenon of rape on college campuses. The film’s music supervisor Bonnie Greenberg called Diane Warren to write the music. The prolific and popular songwriter with 7 Oscar nods immediately said yes. Now, with “Til it Happens to You,” that makes 8 nominations for Original Song. In a recent phone interview, I asked her about this song, and collaborating with Lady Gaga.
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