The subject of race was addressed head on at a luncheon celebrating the film “12 Years a Slave,” easily the film of the year in an awards season gathering momentum. “I’m a black man, as if you didn’t notice, and part of the global identity of slavery” said director Steve McQueen on a panel led by Amanda Foreman at the Lotos Club on Tuesday. The director was seated between two of his stars Chitwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong’o and in front of guests who included the luncheon’s host George C. Wolfe, Geoffrey Fletcher, Spike Lee, Thulani Davis, Walter Mosley, and many more of the city’s cultural and industry elite, but the context of McQueen’s remark was an answer to a question about his being a British citizen making art of a particularly American experience, and embarrassment. With family from the West Indies, he pointed out, we are all part of a diaspora, and that understanding makes the horrors of plantation life witnessed in his powerful movie all the more dreadful, and close to home no matter what your color or ethnicity.
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Among the many ways the pioneering comedienne Moms Mabley was a pioneer was that she performed at the Apollo in 1939, five years after the Harlem theater opened. In her signature hats, mismatched housedresses, and gummy lips, she was a hoot, although her jokes consisted mostly in telling the truth. Her deadpan was killer. She came from North Carolina, and avowed, she had no use for older men. Often escorted about by younger men, she was happiest in the company of women. Dressed most elegantly in tails, she was a sharp contrast to her stage look. A mystery endures as to whether or not she was raped, twice. As a teen she had two children who were given up for adoption. A veteran of the “Chitlin’ Circuit” of black vaudevillians, she influenced every comic today, especially Whoopi Goldberg who produced and directed this documentary portrait, “Moms Mabley: I Got Somethin’ to Tell You,” to air on HBO on November 18. -
Even by Peggy Siegal’s usual high celebrity quotient, the event was a coup: Hillary Clinton’s introduction of a short documentary, White Gold, at its premiere at MoMA. Last Wednesday, she addressed a packed screening room: Candice Bergen, Christie Brinkley, Chuck Close, Albert Maysles, Barbara Kopple, Lawrence O’Donnell, David Schwimmer, and many others. The film’s subject, the dire plight of Africa’s elephant population would serve as horror enough. Images of elephants mutilated for their tusks are graphic, potent reminders that attention must be paid, not just for preservation of a magnificent species, but as a deterrent to something close to Clinton’s office: Security. As the documentary narrated by Clinton makes clear, the tusks are coveted by a growing middle class in China, eager for the trinkets carved out of the valuable ivory. But utilizing more and more sophisticated techniques for the plunder, terrorist groups benefit from the economics of this big business. As she suggested, director Arne Glimcher and others like Sigourney Weaver who starred as Dian Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist, a 1988 feature shedding light on the poaching of Africa’s wildlife, the market for ivory should end.Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
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Puffing vigorously on a cigarette substitute, Art Spiegelman addressed journalists at the Jewish Museum at a recent opening of an exhibition “Co-mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics and Scraps.” Referring to his most potent inspiration for subversive art, “Mad Magazine,” he jokes, he’s convinced, the Viet Nam War protests would not have happened had it not been for the influence of this satirical comic magazine on Spiegelman’s generation. What, me worry? Alfred E. Neuman’s laugh line teased young readers to check between the words and pictures for hidden truth. The sumptuous retrospective of Spiegelman’s career at the Jewish Museum including his work in underground Raw, to book covers as in his Paul Auster New York Trilogy art, to the highbrow and controversial The New Yorker covers, illustrates a much wider range, but he is best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning Maus, based on his relationship with his father Vladek, a Holocaust survivor. Whatever else the artist has done, including an upcoming collaboration with Phillip Johnston, “Wordless!” at Brooklyn Academy of Music, his work is overwhelmed by Maus: “Holocaust trumps Art,” he laughs in mock ruefulness. -
In The Great Beauty, a gorgeously shot picture of contemporary Rome, albeit fictional, it is refreshing to see that this tourist mecca of monumental historic significance has a shallow center just like all the other important world cities of note. You could say this movie whose central character is a writer of one novel so many years ago who has evolved into a journalist of art, parties, and society gossip is like the visual equivalent of T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” with references to a glorious cultural past that now simply exists in fragments. When he is charged with being a misogynist, that character, Jeb Gambardella, corrects the accusation: No, I am a misanthropist. And while he wears this name as a badge of honor to go along with his impeccably tailored suits, fortunately the film does not agree with him. Within this engrossing spectacle, some of the most dramatic faces this side of Fellini scowl and grin. You have to love them. -
Disney scores again! First it was multi-Oscar winning Mary Poppins, now Saving Mr. Banks, a biopic of Mary Poppins writer P. L. Travers. In the person of Emma Thompson she’s stern, a bit of a frump, Britishly out of step, yet endearing as she comes around giving Walt Disney the rights to make this classic musical. Let’s face it: who can say no to Tom Hanks? Set in two time frames, the 1960’s when Disney finally got Travers to agree and the 1930’s back brush Australia where Travers nee Helen Goff grew up, a daughter of an alcoholic with lofty dreams played movingly by Colin Farrell. Featuring a stellar supporting cast of Jason Schwartzman, Paul Giamatti, Rachel Griffiths, Kathy Baker, B. J. Novak, the miracle of this movie is its tone: with sad and funny in equal measure, Saving Mr. Banks will surely top award season lists. -
Who or what could upstage these musicians: Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Alicia Keys, Michael Stipe, Chris Martin, Eddie Vedder, Roger Waters, The Rolling Stones, Sir Paul McCartney? Maybe a big storm. Aerial shots of the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy are intercut with concert footage in the new documentary 12-12-12. These shots of homes a pile of debris, water coursing through residential neighborhoods like a wild river, houses ablaze, and the people whose lives were upturned, speak volumes. The movie, under Amir Bar Lev’s deft direction, makes a big impression. Harvey Weinstein approached him, admiring his work on The Tillman Story, and work began roughly 10 days before the concert. “I hired a bunch of fellow filmmakers I admire here in town and we all fanned out around the Garden and collected material ad hoc,” wrote Bar Lev in a recent email. With a focus on helping, as the behind the scenes glimpse illustrates: whatever could go wrong did: including the Internet breakdown when people who wanted to pledge money couldn’t. Eric Schmidt was called in to the rescue. -
If you could mate John Waters with Charles Ludlam, the offspring might be Mink Stole and Penny Arcade, lead performers in a new production of Tennessee Williams’ “The Mutilated.” First seen in 1966 as a one-acter on Broadway, coupled with “The Gnadiges Fraulein,” the program entitled “Slapstick Tragedy,” the play has been relegated to a theatrical dust heap. Seen in its new jazzy production under the fine direction of Cosmin Chivu at the New Ohio Theater, "The Mutilated" resonates with familiar Tennessee tropes and showcases these over-the-top performers in a New Orleans demimonde, imaginatively on the same streetcar line as the Wingfields’ in Glass Menagerie. -
Bill Cosby must have been feeling frisky. Arriving at the Madison Square Garden Theater for the 7th annual “Stand Up for Heroes” benefit this week, he wrapped Cindy Adams in his homey sweater and began to roughhouse the gossip columnist. Recovering from the encounter, Adams asked, is my hair still up? It was. And Cosby in a lineup of comedians that included Jon Stewart, Jim Gaffigan, Jerry Seinfeld, killed with a routine about his family growing up, the discipline meted out to the kids. “Stand Up for Heroes” has become so popular, organizers had to change venues doubling their audience. -
When Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione died on October 10, 2010, the obituaries dwelled on him as pornographer. That got the attention of filmmaker, Barry Avrich, a documentarian who specializes in the dramatic arc of moguls who peak and fall as a result of their own hubris: his Show Stopper told the story of theatrical producer Garth Drabinsky, for example of one larger than life figure. He also made Unauthorized: The Harvey Weinstein Project in 2011. Bob Guccione, relegated to the dust heap of porn magnate didn’t cut it, and Avrich set out to find out more. The result, Filthy Gorgeous, an illuminating documentary portrait, airs on EPIX this Friday. The big reveal: Bob Guccione, whose interests also went to math and science (he created Omni Magazine), wanted to be remembered as a fine arts painter. And guess what: he could paint. -
Old Harlem is celebrated in Harlem, and on Broadway in After Midnight. Last weekend, a ribbon cutting at Minton’s, Richard Parson’s supper club, marks the return of a legendary Harlem jazz joint, where large photos of Duke and Dizzy, Ella and Billie grace a renovated dining room and all eyes lead to a small back room stage ready for the downbeat. That spirit travels downtown, to a show featuring the big sound, the moves, the silver and white elegance of a bygone era. “It’s gonna be good,” Wynton Marsalis grinned confidently as Hugh Jackman with Deborra Lee Furness, Mary Louise Parker, Barbara Walters, and many others filed into the at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre for opening night of After Midnight, a revue evoking The Cotton Club of the 1920’s. -
First to say, A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the newly built Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn, is jaw-dropping great. When you tell its creator Julie Taymor, she shrugs and says, Well, it’s Shakespeare’s play. Uh, yes, but what Taymor has done with a work you know so well is utterly astounding, melding storytelling techniques she learned studying Asian puppetry with the bard’s language and whimsy. Collaborating with composer Eliot Goldenthal, she has taken what we admire most about her innovative The Lion King, Titus Andronicus, The Tempest, and even the beleaguered Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark to a new level. First rate too are the performances she elicits from an ensemble headed by her Puck, a pint sized British actress named Kathryn Hunter, Oberon, her master (David Harewood), Titania (Tina Benko), and Bottom (Max Casella), to single out some of the fine acting.
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Death has a sweet-tongued tone, like a benevolent grandpa narrating the movie of Markus Zusak’s much beloved novel, The Book Thief, as he picks off characters on the large canvas of small town Germany during World War II. Yes the citizenry suffered bombings, conscription into the army, and deprivations of all kinds. But at least they weren’t hunted down like vermin. At a recent luncheon at Michael’s, “the book thief,” Sophie Nelisse, her blue eyes wide and apple cheeks impossibly healthy says kids her age, 13, don’t know this history, even in Montreal, her native city, which, like Toronto and other large Canadian cities, has a significant population of Jews and Holocaust survivors. So the question is, will this movie teach them something about a dark time? -
At Alice Tully Hall last week, at a “global premiere” showcasing 10 short films, Eva Longoria announced that she had always wanted to be a stuntwoman. The five foot tall actress was turned down for that career, but a film she stars in and directs was featured among the 10 for “Project Imaginat10n,” a film festival inspired by photos, the brainchild of Ron Howard working with Canon. His daughter Bryce Dallas Howard, who made an acclaimed feature in the festival’s inaugural year, was one of the judges. Eva Longoria joined Jamie Foxx, James Murphy, Georgina Chapman, Kalman Apple, Biz Stone, Ronnie Allman, Jared Nelson, Julian Higgins, and Arrius Sorbonne for this distinction. In “Out of the Blue,” Longoria cast herself as an action hero mom fighting off a formidable foe. In Georgina Chapman’s delicate love story, “A Dream of Flying,” a girl played at one stage of life by Dree Hemingway, is stopped from flying. Jamie Foxx shot his film, “…And She Was My Eve,” about a man searching for the perfect mate, in Brooklyn. Harvey Weinstein, Danny Strong, Alexis Bledel, and Vincent Katheiser were among those cheering the filmmakers on. As to Eva Longoria, she’s clearly ready to be cast in the next great blockbuster; she might even direct.Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
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When we first meet them in this laugh out loud comedy Last Vegas, Robert DeNiro, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Kline, and Michael Douglas look like they might have wandered off the set of a movie called Bad Grandpas. But then, as they go off to Las Vegas for a wild pre-nuptial blast for Billy (Douglas), all cleaned up, they veer close to GQ models. The now familiar Sex & the City shot: the four stars walking in slow motion toward you, has you realizing, as one bosomy broad in the movie does, that mature may not be so bad. Disarmingly funny despite being predictable, the movie comes with a message about ageing, mature love, and friendship, points affirmed by a lounge singer in the shimmering sheaths of Mary Steenburgen who wrote a special song for the film. Following surgery, the actress had an anesthesia induced epiphany, discovering that she wanted to sing and compose music—and guess what, she’s good. At the premiere this week, the Ziegfeld was chockablock with well-wishers who made their way to the “21” Club to sample the beef and yes, gamble at roulette. Morgan Freeman affirmed he did his own dancing, and DeNiro reprised his Raging Bull boxing chops. Director Jon Turteltaub said the dynamic foursome took their scenes in stride. In this company, no one dared play diva.Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
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The lovers in Felix van Groeningen’sThe Broken Circle Breakdown, Belgium’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar, live and love so intensely, you know from the start that something has to give. It was too good to last, says Elise (Veerle Baetens), a tattoo artist as her marriage to Didier (Johan Heldenbergh), a banjo player in a bluegrass band, goes to a place few people ever experience, even in movies. A possible exception may be Derek Gianfrance’s Blue Valentine, which also features a beloved child, heated sex, and shall we say, irreconcilable differences. Here the frisson results from tragedy moving irrevocably toward more tragedy. Ranking “Broken Circle” by tissues, it achieves a ten, even when it veers political with a tirade against the American freeze on stem cell research during the W. Bush administration. Which is why, at the end of a special screening this week at The Tribeca Film Center, guests needed a drink. Accompanied by mussels, fries, and individually prepared Belgian waffles, Belgian beer was a must. A specialty of Belgium, each kind –and there are many—has a glass of its own. “Palm,” mildly sweet and delicious in a wide mouthed wine glass, offered solace. But even days later, the deeply felt emotion of The Broken Circle Breakdown lingers in the heart.Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
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Only some of the crowd greeting French designer Jean-Paul Gaultier at the Brooklyn Museum, wore his clothes, easily identified by the tab on the back. But many chose the occasion of the opening of a lavish exhibition, “The Fashion World of Jean-Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk,” to pay tribute, riffing on his most camp and louche looks without actually wearing HIS designs. That’s to be expected for the man who gave Madonna the pointy cone bra! But upstairs on the museum’s fifth floor, rooms fitted with mannequins whose facial expressions move in delight or dismay display his art in a spectacular show to rival the splendid Alexander McQueen at the Metropolitan Museum a few seasons back.
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Rock icon and beat poet, Lou Reed had an edgy downtown presence. My Lou Reed stories: so engrossed in his music, head stuck to the ground under a table at the Bottom Line to get a better shot. I swear never to become a photographer. At St. Mark’s Church: Lou Reed and Allen Ginsberg mix it up. Allen sings accompanied by his harmonium. Lou reads his poems. At White’s in Montauk: Lou waits in line like everyone else, a skinny guy in grubs. As visual artist: His high gloss photos at the Hermes boutique on Madison. Scapes looking like those drawings we made with crayolas covered in greasy black. Scratching the squiggles. The self-portraits look down to earth enough to have been done by Lou Reed. Well, they are his after all. His voice on Doc Pomus’ diaries in the documentary about the famed songwriter. When last we ran into him, at the stellar Chuck Close exhibition at Guild Hall, near Chuck’s giant portrait of him, he was happy to say that he would celebrate William Burroughs’ centennial this coming year. Ahhhhh! We will miss him.Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
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In Sharr White’s new play The Snow Geese at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Mary-Louise Parker as Elizabeth wears black, in mourning for her dead husband, but really she is attired in Jane Greenwood’s circa 1917 period detail, eh weeds, for a lost way of life. Under Daniel Sullivan’s direction, a family who thinks it has money, now doesn’t. Two brothers (Evan Jongkeit and Brian Cross, both very fine) vie in Oedipal conflict. Max Hohmann (Danny Burstein), a doctor put out of business because he is German, administers laudanum while his wife and Elizabeth’s sister Clarissa (Victoria Clark) keeps everyone in line. The pretty Ukrainian maid Victoria (Jessica Love) learns to make coffee, now that she’s a refugee from former upper class wealth. A gun brandished, fires off. Wild geese fly afrenzy as if in Hitchcock’s The Birds. As soon as you know the house will go, you are in Chekhov country, even though the setting is rural New York. -
The Jazz Foundation of America’s loft party, an annual concert to benefit a vital organization that helps players with medical expenses, housing, recording, you name it, is wall to wall music occupying three large spaces simultaneously. It is hard to know which room to occupy,–choices must be made– but when we heard that Kenny Barron would be playing in the Jazz Loft, we simply had to be there. We caught the tail end of Sharon Clark who scats like Ella, singing “Moonlight in Vermont” and “You’d be So Nice (To Come Home To).” And then Chad Smith from the Red Hot Chili Peppers introduced Kenny Barron’s trio featuring David “Happy” Williams on bass and Victor Lewis on drums performing “Blue Monk,” “Dialogues in Blue,” Eubie Blake’s “Memories of You,” and “Autumn Leaves.” Kenny Barron asked if anyone noticed he forgot the bridge on the Eubie Blake. No one complained. -
After much buzz on the festival circuit, including Sundance, Venice, Toronto, to name a few, Kill Your Darlings opens the Hamptons International Film Festival tonight.Before there was Neal Cassady to whom the writer Jack Kerouac was in thrall, there was Lucien Carr. A St. Louis friend of William Burroughs, Carr was a fast and scary driver, catalyst for acts of rebellion, and key player in perhaps the first bit of beat scandal, the murder of Dave Kammerer, his former boy scout leader and stalker, with a boy scout knife. “Kill” co-screenwriters, director John Krokidas and Austin Bunn, play fast and loose with beat lore, favoring a point of view from Allen Ginsberg’s journals, fashioning a gay coming of age tale featuring a deflowering when they could have sought out the more fully formed fictions in Kerouac’s ample telling and retelling. They clearly wanted to tell a gay story, and in skewing events this way, describing a period when heterosexual yearnings too had a subversive edge, they come closer to a beat vibe than any other movie fictionalization thus far. They even make leering Dave Kammerer (Michael C. Hall) seem sympathetic.
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The songwriter of rock & roll classics like “This Magic Moment,” “Teenager in Love,” “Viva Las Vegas,”—yes, Elvis Presley’s hit– and “Save the Last Dance for Me,” Jerome Felder, AKA Doc Pomus, was an American original. A Brooklyn boy, crippled by polio as a child, he was big hearted enough to charm the girl he loved as well as just about everyone in the music industry of his time. You may not remember his name now as much as the music he sang and wrote, but the documentary directed by Peter Miller and Will Hecter, and co-produced by his daughter Sharyn Felder, AKA Doc Pomus, will keep you humming tunes you know and love. -
She may have been jet lagged and slightly tipsy from a drink or two at a pre-Tribute dinner at the New York Film Festival evening in her honor, but that did not make Cate Blanchett babble like Jasmine, her character in the latest Woody Allen movie. Quite the contrary, articulate, generous, and funny, Blanchett fielded questions from the Film Society’s Kent Jones, speaking about her astounding wide-ranging career and the directors she has worked with at the tribute Q&A at Alice Tully Hall. Of Woody, she spoke of the rigors of getting it right as there’s no post-production. Surprise for Cate: Woody Allen taped a congratulatory message to her. Her reply: He must have been thinking of Winslet.
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A buoyant crowd settled into lunch at The Explorers’ Club to celebrate Gravity. Producer David Heyman exulted about the beauty of the film, about two astronauts stranded in the weightless ether. Wow, “You should see the sun on the Ganges! It’s amazing!”This movie does what CGI, 3D, all the bells and whistles of movie technology were meant to do, put audiences literally there, in this case, outer space. Under the superb direction of Alfonso Cuaron, with whom Heyman had worked before on the most critically successful of the Harry Potter franchises, “Prisoner of Azkaban,” the director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki and visual effects supervisor Tim Webber even invented a trick or two. But Heyman could not say enough about the two actors who suffered the rigors of those heavy space suits for the 62 day shoot with nary a complaint. All you see is part of their faces, eyes and breath registering joy, fear, relief, humor, whatever is required, creating, in fact, an old school narrative.
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Just as the news seems bleak, a government shut down translating to national parks closing their gates to tourists, and workers home without pay, Google’s celebration of Yosemite’s anniversary seems especially ironic. The documentary Inequality for All turns its penetrating gaze onto another piece of evidence of meltdown: the vast gap between the 1% and 99%. The film delves into how we got to this economic chasm, which while not necessarily a new question, is interesting to look at spelled out, graphs and all. What’s new is the focus on former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and his optimism.
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