Call it anything, but do not call Creed Rocky VII. Explaining why he agreed to come out of Rocky retirement for Ryan Coogler’s movie in which the illegitimate son of Apollo Creed persuades Rocky to train him, Stallone said it was Ryan Coogler’s vision. The occasion was a celebratory dinner at Patsy’s, the legendary Italian restaurant in midtown, and producer Irwin Winkler and co-star Tessa Thompson were there to talk about this movie. What you can say is, this role for Stallone in Creed is paying back big time as the actor makes his way through the award season having garnered several nominations for Best Supporting Actor, including the Golden Globes this coming weekend.
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Billed as “Back to Where it All Began,” David Amram’s program for last week’s engagement at The Theater for the New City, was a continuation of his 85th birthday celebration, a party that maybe began on his actual birthday in November, but knowing David, may never actually cease till his 86th. It was supposed to end at midnight, but was still going strong at 12:30 A.M. when folks of lesser constitution left the still packed room. That may be because the program was so content rich, with Amram’s greatest hits as a composer and performer for all these decades. A week later, the evening may still be in its infancy. -
Two of the most powerful performances in movies this year have perhaps the least dialogue: Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant and Benicio del in Sicario.For a two-and half hour movie, the dialogue in Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu’s The Revenant could probably fill a page. The story, about a survivor of a bear attack seeking revenge in the American frontier, is all action, much of it brutal. The bear attack pits man against nature: a mother bear goes after the man, mauling him badly, but the landscape itself cold and harsh too seems a malevolent force for the Indians, trappers, and cavalry in these wilds in 1820. Leonardo DiCaprio, bearded as Hugh Glass, is not his usual handsome self but a primal force seeking out John Fitzgerald (an excellent Tom Hardy), the man who took what was most precious to him, and left him for dead. The acting is all in Leo’s eyes.
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The Bolshoi Ballet, the very symbol of Russian culture around the world, gets a backstage look in the new documentary Bolshoi Babylon, to air on HBO on December 21. The film has made the rounds of festivals including DOC NYC in November, when I had a chance to talk to the filmmakers: Nick Read and Mark Franchetti, a journalist based in Moscow, a correspondent for The Sunday Times of London, said they had no interest in the Bolshoi before three years ago, when Sergei Filin, the Bolshoi’s artistic director, was attacked with acid outside his home. Three weeks later, a soloist, Pavel V. Dmitrichenko, was arrested for this horrific crime, ordered because of a casting decision: his girlfriend had been overlooked for the role of Odette-Odile in Swan Lake. The filmmakers came together to examine what this shocking incident said about the ballet, and Russia itself. -
The eight gunslingers in Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight really are hateful, so why do we like watching them so much, and so long, 3 and a half hours, give or take, including an overture and intermission. Not only can’t you take your eyes off them, you want to catch every word of Quentin Tarantino’s clever script. Utilizing the tropes of Westerns—he claims The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly was a big influence– Tarantino’s Western borders on horror, as the eight come together in a cabin in a snowstorm. Act I features a stagecoach: John Ruth (Kurt Russell), a bounty hunter, wants to bring his charge, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), to Red Rock for hanging, and for the reward. Another bounty hunter, Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), wants a ride. He wisely advises, better to bring her in dead. Driving past a Christ on the Cross, this company arrives at a storm hounded pit stop, and the rest of the bearded group: Bruce Dern, Tim Roth, Demian Bichir, Michael Madsen, and Walton Goggins. You might say, after watching these mesmerizing events, for these men crucifixion might be a blessing. -
In the era of television, Susan Lucci reigns supreme. In Joy, David O. Russell’s latest movie, the Mangano household, an alternate universe of domestic dysfunction, Joy’s mom Terry has taken to bed, and to watching a soap with Lucci in the lead. A gun is an option for solving the soap’s operatic greed. In Joy’s story, life follows daytime drama. Joy’s menagerie includes her mom Terry (Virginia Madsen), dad Rudy (Robert De Niro), half sister Peggy (Elisabeth Rohm), her ex (Edgar Ramirez and her kids. She must provide. If a gun is on the table she’s going to pick it up, but it’s just the business we’re in. Keep your enemies close.
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Steve Jobs, a biopic about the famed Apple founder starring Michael Fassbender, opened in early fall, and has been holding steady in the wake of the award season roll-out. Audiences will be taking another look at this excellent film now that Steve Jobs is getting some awards attention: Golden Globes, SAG, among them. -
A film set in Auschwitz, Son of Saul is the one to beat for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. As this import from Hungary makes its rounds through the festivals, achieving accolades and nominations galore, a question arises: is it that juries favor Holocaust films, or is Son of Saul a really good film? Speaking to the film’s ingenuity, another question arises: how do you make a film set in the horror of genocide, where every image –like the pile of human bones– is a cliché, and much of the nature of the place has been fetishized, or deemed better left to the imagination? What exactly do you see? -
Like the comedy teams of old, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Fey and Poehler offer irresistible side splitting guffaws in Sisters, their new movie that opened this week at the Ziegfeld with a party at MoMA. The art museum’s lobby was transformed into a lavish party space with a tropical theme, echoing the party central to Sister’s plot: James Brolin and Dianne Wiest play parents, still vibrant and sexy; their late launching 40-ish daughters stage one last adolescent Animal House-style fling in their just sold family house in Florida. Rachel Dratch, Maya Rudolph, Kate MacKinnan, and scene-stealing Bobby Moynihan pop up, providing SNL worthy laughs. The movie party gets raucous and raunchy, and the sisters grow up, sort of, in Paula Pell’s superbly riotous script that hones close to home. Pell’s parents came up from Florida for this premiere, attesting to truth in comedy. -
It was compelling 20 years ago and even more compelling now: The O.J. Simpson story has not left the public imagination. FX has made a 10-part series called American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson based on Jeffrey Toobin’s book, to air in February. The two parts screened this week brought back the story, adding more to the historic events that ushered in the eras of tabloid news, reality television, with its volatile themes of domestic violence and race in America. There is no doubt: this will be another kind of sensation: a television drama of a drama that unfolded on television. -
First the announcement: the kids in School of Rock bringing down the house at the Winter Garden Theater are playing their own instruments. As this rousing show hews close to the 2003 Richard Linklater movie on which it is based, everyone knows the terrain. Rock is freedom, man, and the joy of School of Rock comes from some brilliant casting: Alex Brightman’s Dewey literally channels Jack Black, and those kids are a force unto themselves. A concert musical in the end, it breaks the Broadway form in introducing the band by actor name. By that time you are out of your seat thumping the beat. -
When the New York Film Critics Circle named Michael Keaton Best Actor, the game changed for Spotlight. The ensemble cast had been honored at the Gotham Awards the night before; up until that point critics and pundits found it difficult to discern a lead actor among the fine ones in this movie. But this win for Keaton makes sense on so many levels: He portrays the Spotlight bureau chief Walter “Robby” Robinson who, as a character grows and changes in the manner of a classic protagonist, allowing Keaton to be considered for the prize he did not receive for his lead turn in last year’s Birdman. The Best Supporting spot can go to Mark Ruffalo who plays Michael Rizendes, one of the key Spotlight reporters on the Boston Globe story about pervasive abuse of young people by Catholic priests. Bringing the film into sharper focus, Spotlight is about the media’s role in the cover-up. -
Harvey Weinstein threw a swell party for Helen Mirren this week at House of Elyx, a chic loft in the Meatpacking that Mickey Rourke used to own. Standing and greeting guests for two hours, Mirren chatted with admirers of her work in Woman in Gold, based on the true story of Maria Altmann, who with her lawyer E. Randol Schoenberg took on the Austrian government to regain Klimt’s famous painting, Nazi-held loot in the Holocaust. The drink of the night: a special cocktail with a gold leaf and Absolut Elyx served in old-fashioned champagne glasses. Mirren talks clothes: she wore a floral Dolce & Gabbana shape hugging sheath, the better to be seen, she said, among the sea of black that marks a New York social event. She talks human rights: reminding a clutch of fans of her speech at the Gotham Awards where she segued from marital sex to the plight of the poet Ashraf Fayadh in Saudi Arabia sentenced to death for his writing. “I was among people of influence,” she explained, and urged everyone to take action through PEN. -
That Spotlight won Best Feature at the Gotham Awards last night was not a surprise. These awards, usually celebrating the edgy in filmmaking, noted Carol and Tangerine and The Diary of a Teenage Girl, but the win for Spotlight, for many, is an indication of a sweep in the months ahead. Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer’s script won the Best Screenplay award. The Spotlight ensemble seemed poised for this recognition: everyone but Stanley Tucci was present for its Best Ensemble special Jury award: Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Liev Schreiber, John Slattery, Brian D’Arcy James, Billy Crudup, and Rachel McAdams posed for cameras, and shouted out to the newspaper men on whom many of their characters were based. -
If you are going to celebrate a movie following a group of guys who make a lot of money, The Four Seasons is a good place to be. So it seemed as director Adam McKay, his stars Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling, Pitt’s Plan B producing partners DeDe Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, and co-screenwriter with McKay Charles Randolph joined Malcom Gladwell for a panel discussing the making of the film The Big Short, based on the book by Michael Lewis. Steve Carell and Christian Bale, not present at the luncheon, square off the stellar cast. A great entertainment, fast paced like an action flick,The Big Short limns the economic collapse of 2008 through the machinations of four men. -
On screen Bill Pullman is that guy, rarely first choice for the girl, but you spend a lot of watching wondering exactly why not: see Sleepless in Seattle, or While You Were Sleeping; he comes late, back from the war, in the movie A League of their Own, and Geena Davis leaves baseball for his shy winsome character. Perfect for the romantic comedy genre, Bill Pullman was also a brilliant fit for David Lynch in his Lost Highway, an observation made by Greil Marcus in his The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, in which he could trace the American landscape across Bill Pullman’s face: “I always saw something in his eyes,” Marcus quotes Lynch, and it’s that quality that makes him a tender American icon on film.
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Don’t expect Die Hard Bruce Willis in his Broadway debut in Misery at the Broadhurst Theater. As best-selling author Paul Sheldon in the play based on a beloved if frightening film based on a beloved if frightening Stephen King book, Willis drops the tough guy pose, making most of his moves in a vertical position. That’s because he’s been in a terrible car crash, and fortunately saved from the wreck by his # One Fan, Annie Wilkes, as feisty and superb as the seasoned actor Laurie Metcalf gets. Annie has made up a lovely bedroom for him in her house, and she’s got plans, wielding both a mallet and a rifle as needed. A good case could be made for gun control, at least background checks for crazies. -
The Oscar buzz around Todd Haynes’ new movie Carol may focus on the two women Cate Blanchett’s Carol and Rooney Mara’s Therese, but Phyllis Nagy’s adapted screenplay, from Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt, will surely garner an Oscar nod too. The story of two women, an upper class suburban housewife and mother, and a shopgirl cum photographer, and their love affair, subversive for the early 1950’s, is timely, with a screenplay that is intelligent, and avoids clichés and sentimentality. Carol is married to Harge (an excellent Kyle Chandler), handsome and moneyed, but the marriage is cold. Yes, there is sex, but not lurid. -
A master storyteller in the tradition of medieval balladeers, Sting recounted a childhood experience at a celebration this week of his The Last Ship from the River of the Northern City, a handcrafted boxed edition of his Last Ship lyrics with woodcuts by “luminist” painter Stephen Hannock, published by Two Ponds Press. Growing up in his Northern English city of Newcastle, near Scotland and water, Sting used to attend official ship christenings. Because dignitaries and royals would attend too, his mother would dress him in Sunday best, attire he hated. Once he saw the queen there, and in a moment fantasized that they had made eye contact, a personal connection. He saw the fancy automobile in which she arrived and imagined a different life from the one he was clearly destined for. And now of course he lives in Manhattan. He pointed to the spectacular panorama from the 44th floor of the Hearst Building, and, accompanying himself on guitar, sang: “Dead Man’s Boots,” “The Night the Pugilist Learned to Dance,” and “The Last Ship.” -
The stage at the Lyceum Theater for this exceptional theater event, the current revival of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge looks like a set for a boxing match, with audience on three sides, not the more traditional sitting room of a Brooklyn apartment. Director Ivo van Hove’s vision goes for the iconic: a fight ring, a stand-in for a battle of emotion. Unlike a previous New York revival where an actual bridge looked to the joining of boroughs, in this production’s abstract conception, the bridge, a device for transitions may refer to coming to America, old school mores versus new, life and death. The bridge may be the play’s trans-Atlantic journey from London’s Young Vic production to these shores. Most powerfully, here invisible, the bridge is yours to imagine. -
In celebration of their new cookbook, Fig & Olive: The Cuisine of the French Riviera, Francine and Laurent Halasz, mother and her devoted son, greeted dinner guests with glasses of Veuve Clicquot and warmth at the Fig & Olive restaurant in the Meatpacking this week. Laurent especially emphasized the work of his mother in creating the special recipes contained in the book, an Assouline publication, and for their restaurants. With smiles to all, Francine, gorgeous in red, worked the room, not saying much as she does not speak English, but you could see that the room was packed with grateful diners, already high on champagne, and spirited by the chestnut and butternut squash soup with Grenache Syrah pairing. -
The sixth annual DOC NYC festival opened on Thursday with Miss Sharon Jones!, Barbara Kopple’s documentary about soul singer Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. Early on we see Sharon Jones getting her short braids shorn, an accommodation to her stage two pancreatic cancer as she was being treated with chemo. A pint-sized dynamo, Sharon Jones is a tough person to keep down. The film follows her care in Sharon Springs, New York with her friend Megan, a healer, who blends green smoothies to ensure Jones stays on a healthy diet. Her doctors are on board too, and her band mates who depend on the gigs. Brothers, they form a bond through their music and lives, escorting Jones to her doctors, as well as backing her onstage. They know that Sharon Jones is an indomitable force with raging talent, and they’ve held together for decades. For performances alone, this is a film to see. At Lugo where an after screening party was a celebration of this film and the week of documentaries to come, Barbara Kopple spoke about how Miss Sharon Jones! fits into her exceptional body of work: “It’s about family.” -
Aaron Mark’s play, Empanada Loca, a dramatic monologue that zips by in 95 minutes, starts in the dark. A voice, a light, and then Dolores! As Dolores, Daphne Rubin-Vega, her cheeks hollow as a skeleton, framed by her hoodie, recounts her life story, how she came to live here in the lowest recesses of a subway tunnel. The fine staging is minimalist at the Labyrinth Theater, just lights in a black box with a massage table at center. Infinitely resourceful, a skill she picked up in prison, Dolores has wired the space for lighting, she says with pride, so a visitor can actually see her, and get used to the dark, as she did, although the food’s not great down here several levels down, and loneliness is an issue. -
At 21 Club this week, screenwriter/ director Oren Moverman spoke excitedly about his new vocation as activist. Co-writer of Love & Mercy, Moverman was largely responsible for crafting a script, not your standard issue biopic about Beach Boy Brian Wilson, but a complex view of this iconic musician at two distinct points of his life. Early on, Paul Dano plays Brian Wilson, and later John Cusack, when he is out of the public eye, and totally under the control of Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti) for his growing psychosis. In a real life love story, Melinda, a car salesperson with soul (a wonderful Elizabeth Banks) rescues him. -
Philippe Sands, an eminent London-based human rights lawyer, stands in a grassy field near Lvov, the Polish/Ukrainian home of his grandfather in the documentary, What our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy. By the end of the Holocaust, eighty members of his family had been murdered and disposed of in this place. He stands in this mass burial site with two men, each sons of high-ranking Nazis responsible for the murders in this area. Sands claims to want accountability: one of these sons, Niklas Frank, hated his father, and what he did. The other, Horst von Wachter, still cannot come to terms with his father’s direct command of these horrors. Now in his 70’s Horst laments the loss of his childhood from the time he was six, and little else. In the film, he is relieved, and pleased, when Ukrainians in nationalist Waffen SS uniforms congratulate Horst for his father’s wartime actions. Unsettling viewing, this provocative documentary is a picture of the complexities that still dominate the psyche of those related to the Holocaust.
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