Burroughs: The Movie opens with a clip from Saturday Night Live. The actress/ model Lauren Hutton introduces William S. Burroughs, proclaiming him the greatest living American writer, in her view. That last qualifier had to be included so that it would not look like a hoax, SNL’s music director Hal Willner told me last night at the stellar revival of the documentary at the New York Film Festival, 31 years after its premiere screening at this prestigious festival. Its subject, the iconic Burroughs, and director, Howard Brookner, a young filmmaker who died of AIDS in 1989 at age 35, are now long gone, but vivid in the memory of Jim Jarmusch and Tom DiCillo, despite the drugs they took in the making of the film. Speaking of Burroughs' subversive behavior, his antics with guns, everyone lauded the work of literary executor James Grauerholz in keeping Burroughs in line, even moving him to Lawrence, Kansas.
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- 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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“I’m an actress,” exclaims Molly Ringwald on opening night of her Café Carlyle cabaret act, as if we could forget. Playful, she suggested we forego formalities and all the clichés of lounge singers, and end her set of classics from the American songbook by pretending to walk offstage, to be followed by resounding claps and screams of “Encore.” As she feigned surprise at being coaxed back for another song, she proclaimed, “I’m so touched.” Thus flaunting cabaret tradition, Ringwald was a grown up version of the cheeky and vulnerable teens we remember and loved in John Hughes’ “The Breakfast Club,” “Pretty in Pink,” and “Sixteen Candles.” -
Bill Murray’s got some moves in St. Vincent, a big-hearted movie that had its New York premiere last night, a few days prior to opening the Hamptons International Film Festival this coming weekend. Murray’s shimmying in his seedy Sheepshead Bay kitchen, and singing to Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm,” are some of the film’s many highlights, but he has nothing on Naomi Watts’ pole dancing with a baby bump. You have never seen Watts like this, a “lady of the night,” her Australian accent turned Russian. Harvey Weinstein called her to ask, do you want to do something different. This funny role of Daka, is, well, just that, revealing her chops as a genuine comedienne. But how could it be otherwise opposite Murray, Chris O’Dowd, and Melissa McCarthy, a dream ensemble sure to garner acting nominations in the coming season. They mixed it up with McCarthy in the straight role, playing the mother of Jaedan Lieberher, one of those wise-beyond-his-years kids, utterly polite considering the grownup shenanigans, and the movie’s real star. -
Film audiences may flock to The Good Lie, a compelling drama because Reese Witherspoon is one of the stars, but they will fall in love with Arnold Oceng, Ger Duany, rapper Emmanuel Jal, and Kuoth Wiel; the story, about the lost boys and girls of Sudan during the terrible reign of war lords, The Good Lie is about their experience. As children their characters had to flee their homeland, walking thousands of miles to the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. The dangerous African terrain is gorgeously shot under Philippe Falardeau’s fine direction. After 13 years, the orphans come to the United States, among the last to make that journey before 9/11 closed down those doors and possibilities for emigration. Once here, the boys need to find jobs, and learn our ways one electric light switch at a time, and that’s where Reese Witherspoon comes in to help with the transition. The Good Lie, a seeming oxymoron, takes its title from a dilemma solved by Huck Finn in saving Jim in Mark Twain’s classic, as Mamere (Oceng) learns from a literature class to adapt to American culture. The Good Lie speaks to a brave, resonant heroic act that reveals his character’s essential decency. -
The buzz continues for the documentary Keep On Keepin’ On, even this early in awards season: this documentary may follow 20 Feet from Stardom to Oscars. The documentary’s catchy title, Keep On Keepin’ On, comes from the legendary trumpeter Clark Terry, now 94, a line he uses to inspire young musicians such as Justin Kauflin, a blind pianist composer he’s nurtured. Both star in the movie, along with Quincy Jones, who has taken Kauflin on tour and recorded an album with him this summer. What do they have in common? All can call the legendary Clark Terry their teacher. Add to the list, Alan Hicks, the Australian drummer and surfer who made this debut documentary, along with his “mate,” –that is, friend–Adam Hart. The film won the Hamptons International Film Festival’s Summerdocs audience award, and will be featured during the festival this October. -
A Neil LaBute play is a genre unto itself, as illustrated by his new one, The Money Shot, an MCC production now deploying expletives at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Needless to say, the title relates to the range and depth of a particular sexual act, as La Bute one ups the tradition forged by God of Carnage, Yasmina Reza’s play: a two-couples-in-a-sitting room template that also featured projectile vomit.In this case, the setting is a swank home nestled in the Hollywood Hills, and the couples, movie stars more into branding than art, compete for bragging rights. The hosts, Karen (Elizabeth Reaser) and Bev (Callie Thorne), an editor who also wrestles, vie with their guests, Steve (Fred Weller) and Missy (Gia Crovatin), his younger blond wife. In a movie they are scheduled to shoot, Karen and Steve are asked to have onscreen sex, and they want to ponder the options over dinner.
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Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s Pulitzer Prize winning play staged like a Feydeau farce! Doors slam on a boisterous set aclutter with tchotchkes and eccentrics as fireworks go off from the basement. Where there’s smoke, there’s . . . No, no, not revolutionary bombs! Scott Ellis’ revival of You Can’t Take It With You at the Longacre Theater sets the stage on fire! -
David Cronenberg turns horror to comedy in his latest feature Maps to the Stars, based on fiction by Bruce Wagner. Hollywood is known more for its superficiality than for depths of any kind, so exploring themes of damaged children, incest, and high narcissism set in L.A., you may come up with a movie as disturbing as Maps to the Stars. Unless you take it as comedy, which Cronenberg claims was his intention. His star Julianne Moore came away from Cannes with a best actress prize for her turn as Havana Segrand, a waning star beset by frightening visions of her mother (Sarah Gadon). She has a laughing fit discovering that the child of a rival actress has been killed, leaving a coveted role, in fact a remake of one in which her mother starred, to her. Mothers and daughters are toxic in this movie. Quipped Bruce Wagner at the NYFF’s Q&A, “I saw this as a tender coming of age story. And much like Boyhood, it took a long time to make.” -
On the last day of shooting Lily of the Feast, a feature set in 1970’s Williamsburg, Troy Garity, in a suit, sits on the edge of a bathtub, counting. The L.A. based actor, son of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden plays Santo Bastucci, a young man with a gift for memorizing numbers, a handy skill, and members of the mob are making offers he can’t refuse. The bathroom is miniscule in the soundstage clutter of Windmill Studios in Brooklyn, a set specifically designed for the movie by its director, Federico Castelluccio. We know him as Carmella’s heartthrob in HBO’s The Sopranos, when things are not going so great between this suburban mob wife and husband Tony, but here for Lily of the Feast, director Castelluccio, a known fine artist, extends his art to the screen. As many have told me, in making the feature length version of this story from a short, his artistic vision informs every frame. The film also stars Paul Sorvino and David Proval and is a passion project for screenwriter/ producer Michael Ricigliano, Jr. who grew up in this neighborhood. -
Rita Wilson told a funny story about having worked with Bobby Short, resident star singer pianist at this special supper club back in the day. “It was a commercial,” she laughed and sang a few notes from the Charlie ad, and we never really met. That was my brush with greatness.” That statement seemed odd given that she’s married to Tom Hanks who had Barry Diller, David Geffen, and Mike Nichols at his table to hear her perform her songs on opening night. But in many ways the charm of Rita Wilson’s Café Carlyle act is to confess just how hard it was to get there, given she’s risk averse. When she asked how long it took the audience, one man said, two and a half hours. Well, it took me decades, countered this actress, movie producer, and accomplished songwriter, who had some formidable risks to overcome: her parents fled oppressive regimes in Greece and Bulgaria. “You want to talk about risks!” Raised in Los Angeles, Rita Wilson idolized the musicians, songwriters and singers from Laurel Canyon: Carole King, Linda Rondstat, James Taylor, and especially Joni Mitchell; their influence on her music is resonant: “Joni” is an homage. But her themes are evident in the original numbers, “What You See is What You Get” and “Grateful.” -
The Pearl Theater’s revival of Uncle Vanya illustrates this fine company’s signature charm, and does one better, doing Anton Chekhov the good service of playing his tragicomedy for humor over gravitas. Christopher Durang’s Tony-winning Chekhov sendup, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, made it all laughs. At the Pearl, when the characters speak lines like “I’m so bored,” the line is more than a cute dig to anyone without the means to live in their upscale country home with servants. On opening night this week, Dominic Cuskern, who plays the revered, hypochondriac professor spoke about these “characters,” egotistical eccentrics, the housebound enslaved by their sense of duty, the lovelorn consumed by suppressed passions. They’re funny! -
Ethan Hawke made it to the Stone Rose Lounge for the premiere of Denzel Washington’s new movie The Equalizer. Co-host of the party, Hawke proclaimed that the big blast action movie was polar opposite to the documentary he made about Seymour Bernstein, a poetic composer/ pianist/ educator, one of many highlights of the New York Film Festival opening this week. Superficially, Hawke is right. Denzel Washington plays a classic epic-scale do-gooder, up against the Russian mob in The Equalizer. His formidable opponents sport ominous tattoos and hit the girls they’ve forced into prostitution. Denzel, as Robert, quietly shuffles through the movie making a lot of noise, reading books for pleasure, and mentoring the young. Tough, he can skewer a fat neck with a corkscrew. Blood obscures inked skin, as a late night Home Depot offers a playground of lethal weaponry. And yes, Pushkin, the main Moscow honcho fries in this sure to be blockbuster.
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Jeff Goldblum wears a pork pie hat and wide grin in his Café Carlyle debut, even when heckled by a man who wanted less talk and more music. But the performance, in which he acts as quiz show host, pianist and front man for the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, a grand name for a jazz ensemble, proceeds amiably with more shmooze than most events at the legendary Carlyle. At Tuesday’s opening, Goldblum recounted how Woody Allen, who plays at the Carlyle on Monday nights, suggested The Fly actor make this scene. He also stopped the music to shout out to Edward Norton who attended with his pal Fisher Stevens, and Al Roker, celebrating his wedding anniversary. -
Mosab Hassan Yousef fixes you with his intense, messianic gaze, hardly seeming to blink. The son of a Hamas founder, dubbed “the green prince,” he gave intelligence to the Israeli Shin Bet, went into exile, and wrote a book about his experience, Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices. His Shin Bet handler Gonen Ben Yitzhak is softly intense, a grandson of Polish Holocaust survivors; he left the Shin Bet and stepped up to help Mosab, when he faced deportation from his new home in the United States. The relationship between Arabs forced into spying against their communities, and their Israeli handlers is a trope now familiar in the west from last year’s fiction films Bethlehem and Omar, with fatal results. The story of Mosab and Gonen, as recounted in the current documentary, The Green Prince, offers a contrast, and a paradigm for peace, even as the headlines look bleaker than ever. Eschewing notions of “occupation” and other rhetoric, these men spoke to me last week about the movies and the Middle East: -
Along with Glenn Close, Meryl Streep hosted a premiere screening this week of Israel Horovitz’ My Old Lady at MoMA. Her family in tow, husband Don Gummer and daughter Mamie, she was celebrating her pal Kevin Kline’s lead performance in this charming romance set in Paris, as well as Horovitz’ debut as filmmaker. At 75, Israel Horovitz, author of 70 stage plays, took this one, popularly performed all over the world in many languages, and adapted it for the screen. His daughter Rachael Horovitz produced. He got Kevin Kline, as he recounted introducing the evening: at last Kline gets the girl. Horovitz got Dame Maggie Smith to play the titular old lady because at least she doesn’t die. -
A fashion insider once told me, the clothes displayed on runways are entertainment. They don’t exist. In the case of the Brooklyn Museum’s spectacular history of high heels, Killer Heels, many will thank heaven: the footwear in videos and traditional museum cases looks that thrillingly treacherous. A Christian Louboutin ballet flat hoisted vertical on a stiletto for example may be a fetish item, to be worn perhaps by a prima ballerina in perpetual en pointe. True, some historic pumps from Delman’s dated late 1930’s look chicly dowdy, some Asian influenced styles look like artful clogs, Ferragamo’s pumps for Marilyn Monroe are simply elegant, but Louboutin’s “Lipspike’s Bootie” or Koolhaas’s “Gaga Shoe” are pure weaponry. -
Stories about firefighters conjure images of 9/11, inevitably, as no one can forget the enormous sacrifice of those men climbing up the stairs as others rushed down. In the documentary, A Good Job, images of the site the day after haunt, well after the documentary, directed by Liz Garbus, finishes with its final big hugs: actor Steve Buscemi and each of the brave men and women he interviews. Having been a fireman in Engine 55 in the early ‘80’s after his father insisted he take the civil service exam, Buscemi was compelled to join that company, in full gear, going down to the disaster site on Sept. 12, to help recover what they could of the station’s five missing men. He took a video camera, and the scale of rubble even today so many years after the fact seems incredible. Now on the week of 9/11 commemoration, this documentary is Buscemi’s tribute to a job he left, and to the firefighters with whom he still feels bonded.
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No one missed the irony of a John Waters retrospective at The Walter Reade Theater across Lincoln Center’s plaza from Fashion Week. On opening night, Waters, in hot red pants and print jacket, introduced the Female Trouble screening noting that he had to explain to drag queens that cha-cha heels, coveted by his heroine Dawn Davenport for Christmas, did not refer to spiked but to the flatter more chunky kind. It’s that attention to detail, however gross, that makes a John Waters flick so distinct, and his characters performed by Divine, Cookie Mueller, Edith Massey, among those no longer with us, indelible, owing more to DeKooning’s grotesques than to anything on a fashion runway. -
What is grass? This is a question posed by Walt Whitman in his epic poem Leaves of Grass, offering an image of the most democratic of God’s greens, plentifully available to everyone from paupers to princes. The same question posed at Guild Hall’s August 23 panel, moderated by Edwina von Gal, made grass an image of golf courses, majestically manicured lawns, and the moneyed elite, often maintained with the use of toxins. The panel wanted to offer alternatives, to preserve our planet, and to save the populace from diseases such as cancer. Paul Tukey, spoke of the lessons learned from his grandma in Maine, about the “poop loop,” the benefits of dandelions, and compost tea.
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The Overnighters, Jesse Moss’ much lauded film at Sundance, screened last night at Guild Hall, a finale for the Hamptons International Film Festival Summerdocs series. Thinking he was following the story of the many men who descended on North Dakota looking for work in the fracking boom there, Jesse Moss found a compelling central character, Pastor Jay Reinke, who took many of these migrants into his Lutheran church, much to the horror of the community. With a surprising reveal, the documentary demonstrates the power of non-fiction filmmaking to touch un-scriptable hidden truths. With the industry’s large machinery cutting into the once spectacular landscape as backdrop, the film could have focused on the all too tragic toll of our country’s dependence on oil, but instead it homes in on grim lives that are far removed from the riches of East Hampton, where a lavish pre-screening party at Mary Jane and Charles Brock’s residence featured the magician Mark Mitton who made Hilaria Baldwin’s mega carat diamond ring morph into one larger. -
The war in Vietnam still conjures volatile emotions for those who lived during that heady time in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s. That’s why Alec Baldwin insisted that the audience at Guild Hall Saturday night ask only questions related to the documentary, Last Days in Vietnam; host of the Hamptons International Film Festival’s Summerdocs series, he anticipated that the politics surrounding America’s intervention might cloud the story Rory Kennedy’s new film had to tell: about the evacuation of Saigon in 1975, as the city fell to North Vietnam troops. Americans like Stuart Herrington, an intelligence officer stationed there after the Paris Accords cease fire, promised not to leave behind the hundreds of South Vietnamese who would surely be executed or sent to re-education camps. That was a promise that he and others would not be able to keep. -
At Guild Hall, when Florence Fabricant asked CNN’s Anthony Bourdain at a recent Q&A, which country was most surprising, he quickly answered Iran. Most Americans have not been there, and I seized a moment of opportunity. Now, he said ruefully, would not be the time. This celebrity food maven sniffs out countries of smelly dysfunction over orderly functionality. And Iran surprised him with a people that had the attitude, Are you American? We don’t care what the government is doing; welcome, we want to know you. In a Teheran restaurant where they put flags on diners’ tables, they apologized, Sorry, all our American flags were burnt. Congo, he said was perhaps the most dangerous, run amok with warlords and militias. You don’t want to mess around. One minute you are fine, and the next everyone is glaring at you for being CIA. Known for his culinary adventures to these exotic locales, when he’s back in the states, Bourdain says he loves best a bite at the deli; the flipping of burgers in his Hamptons backyard fills him with bliss. -
Your first perception as you drive up to Fred Stelle’s serene North Haven waterfront acreage is Wow, fruit trees. Pears aplenty not yet ripe. Abundant apples showing a blush, anticipating autumn. And beyond, a vintage house, a former actors’ colony during the Depression, getting a bit of this architect’s signature touch with a bit of construction. All he ever wanted, Stelle said addressing a group of journalists on a pre-tour visit, was to plant fruit trees. Exemplifying the challenge of this year’s garden as art tour, how to accomplish gardening without the use of chemicals, he explained how he was able to live his dream against popular wisdom. Everyone told him, you cannot have fruit trees without spraying toxins. And he has spent seven years figuring out how to defy that advice. Yes, this year’s tour comes with a message: as many consumers are concerned with conserving our planet, and keeping our children healthy, it starts with the soil. Of the gardens open to visitors this year, an annual benefit to Guild Hall, all are the result of chemical free planting. It was a relief to see that in the three cases visited last week, values of beauty and utility were not compromised.
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When critics talk about the heyday of American filmmaking in the 1970’s, director Robert Altman was not only a part of that flourishing, he was at the forefront. With movies like McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), Nashville (1975), and Three Women (1977), my personal favorites—his films did not seem to operate by any predictable formula. A new documentary, Altman, will air on EPIX, directed by Ron Mann, featuring interviews with Kathryn Altman, Lily Tomlin, Robin Williams, Julianne Moore, Sally Kellerman, Keith Carradine, Lyle Lovett, James Caan, and many other stars who worked in his films.One of the interviewees, Elliott Gould starred in The Long Goodbye (1973), as Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s famed fictional detective. In a recent phone conversation about this legendary director, Gould explained what made working with Altman so special.
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When we first see Kevin Costner in the indie movie Black and White, he’s got his head in his hands. His neck is large and wrinkled, befitting an older man in distress. His wife has died in an accident, causing a new stage in his already beleaguered life as it unfolds in Mike Binder’s latest film. The well-to-do couple was raising their granddaughter Eloise after their daughter died in childbirth. Her black crack-head father is MIA. Now Costner’s Elliot is on his own, and the father’s mother—an entrepreneur with attitude galore played by Octavia Spencer takes him to court. At a sneak preview in East Hampton this weekend, prior to a featured upcoming screening at this fall's Toronto International Film Festival, Binder introduced the movie and its star to the all-white audience, explaining that the story of raising a biracial child whose custory was challenged by a black paternal grandmother, was based on his own experience.
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