The most stunning film of the year, Wong Kar Wai’s The Grandmaster displays a fight genre as ballet, limning a history of Ip Man, Bruce Lee’s martial arts teacher. Introducing the movie at its U.S. premiere last week, with Samuel L. Jackson, Susan Sarandon, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson in attendance, director Wong said, “People think of kung fu as chop suey. It is not chop suey.” Although what looks like the slicing of hands is part of the movement, as designed by Yuen Wo Ping, choreographer of The Matrix, Kill Bill and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the martial arts are less violent, even when blood flows, and more poetry. A courtesan differentiates the styles for Ip Man (Tony Leung) with Ziyi Zhang, who plays Gong Er, learning her father’s tradition of Bagua style, a lethal “64 hands” technique by secretly watching him. Viewers who might avert their eyes at such spectacle will be awed, in particular at a fight scene set against a moving train in the snow. Quite simply, you are watching an exquisite silent movie, independent of dialogue, in thrall to evocative music. In close-up much of the time, the actors’ faces large across the screen, an intimate drama unfolds even as the settings in Southern and Northern China are epic, and meant to show the passing of an era.
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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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A revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is always welcome, with its lively music, antic humor, acrobatic sight gags, and Feydeau-like farce. Minus the slamming doors, it’s a carnival with a plot at Bay Street Theater.This colorful production in Sag Harbor, the third of Bay Street’s summer offerings, is especially engaging family fun: featuring Peter Scolari as the ingenious slave Pseudolus. Switching happy/sad on the proverbial dime, he has what it takes to be a free man, shrewdly bargaining with his young master Hero (Nick Verina) to win his autonomy if he can help this lad woo the girl next door, a virgin courtesan-in-waiting named Philia (Lora Lee Gayer); a vacuous beauty, she has been sold off to a soldier, a hunky Miles Gloriosus (Nathaniel Hackmann). These three are delicious stock characters: under Marcia Milgrom Dodges’ deft direction, Hero is the equivalent of a Jewish son preparing to become a doctor, Philia puts a new spin on the concept of dumb blond, and Miles Gloriosus is conceit writ large.
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By the time we got there, the tent at Gardiner’s Farm was chockablock with browsers and book buyers, especially at one table where Gwyneth Paltrow signed copies of her It’s All Good: Delicious, Easy Recipes That Will Make You Look Good and Feel Great. Oglers snapped shots of her and Apple and Moses and Chris Martin. Nearby Robert A. Caro sat behind a pile of his now classic The Power Broker and newer biographies of Lyndon Johnson, Eric Fishl signed his autobiography, Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas, and Clive Davis autographed The Soundtrack of My Life, excited for the book party to follow at Larry Gagosian’s. Kitty Pilgrim and Kitty Kelley had books, as did Philippe Petit and Nile Rodgers, although by the time we got to them, they had sold out. On the far side, Dr. Ruth in orange print had an assortment of her sexual how-to guides. Overheard: a fan said she looked like sherbet. He could eat her with a spoon. Not missing a beat, the pint-sized sex therapist replied: I’d like that. -
“This is our best show ever,” exulted Guild Hall Executive Director Ruth Appelhof, repeating what she says every August, as she greets guests for the late summer exhibition. She may be right this time. Chuck Close’s signature portraits writ large occupy the elegant space like old friends, one gallery devoted to recent work, the other to earlier work, like a graphic self-portrait on a simple grid from 1974, bespectacled with flowing hair. His new self-portrait on tapestry hung alongside Lou (as in Reed), Lucas (Samaras) and Roy (Lichtenstein) is a rich evocation of himself, bald. You can feel every wrinkle. In a colorful dashiki print suit, the artist wheeled in on his customized chair, designed, he once told me at an exhibition at Pace Gallery, so that he can crane up and chat at cocktail parties, eye to eye. Eying the tattooed visitor who asked him to pose for a photo, Close said he wanted a tattoo, the image on signs for handicapped parking. -
In the new movie about Apple Computers founder Steve Jobs with Ashton Kutcher in the lead, Jobs drops acid, eh, windowpane, with a woman he has just bed, and takes another tab for his girlfriend. You could call that ‘70’s “rude.” Cut to a blanket spread outdoors, where, between his best friend and girlfriend, he stares at the sky, thinking different. In realizing his window on the world so to speak, he will damage each of them. For every inspirational speech introducing yet a new more inventive product than the last, Jobs, so focused on his vision, loses his connection to those who love him. That is what makes him so compelling a figure, so flawed; in Joshua Michael Stern’s film, he’s in a league with Picasso. -
Famous for casting many of the Woody Allen films, including the most recent Blue Jasmine, Juliet Taylor made her way around the rooftop at the Gramercy Park Hotel, among actors Dana Delany, John Ventimiglia, Sakina Jaffrey, after a screening of a film she did not cast. Finally recognized for their important contribution to films, casting directors take center stage in the documentary Casting By, directed by Tom Donahue whose prior credits include the satiric, Guest of Cindy Sherman. Shining a light on one aspect of the film art so under the radar, casting directors do not have an Oscar category, the film, which also features footage from that great era of filmmaking, the ‘70’s, asks, shouldn’t they? After all, who do you remember from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? Redford and Newman, of course. Juliet Taylor said she had a great time getting Blanchett for Blue Jasmine, as she always does casting Woody Allen’s films, and, like Penelope Cruz and Dianne Wiest, Best Supporting Actresses, Cate Blanchett may achieve Academy recognition.
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Now prominent among music legends, Bette Midler reminisces about her stint as a Harlette back in the day in the much celebrated documentary Twenty Feet from Stardom. Along with Sting, Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, she acknowledges the mega talent of the backup singers—now famously Merry Clayton, Judith Hill— who make the superstar performers look and sound even greater. Having made the twenty foot leap herself, Bette Midler was perfect for this job: in an inspired moment Peggy Siegal who has a genius for these connections, asked her, superb in her one-woman run as Sue Mengers on Broadway, to front, ah, host a special lunch on Monday, in celebration of this, perhaps the most successful documentary of the year. At the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, in a dining room overlooking Central Park, guests Bernadette Peters, Susan Sarandon, Julie Taymor, Celia Weston, Dan Hedaya, Albert Maysles chatted about the making of documentary films, meeting Prince for the first time, and Ava Gardner’s memoirs.
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Even Lady Gaga in her most monster-friendly would merely blend in at the Watermill Center’s annual summer benefit, themed Devil’s Heaven. A woman in a red cocktail dress with matching angel wings was a random guest. Artist Evangelia Rantou performed a solo with chairs from Medea, collapsing her stilt-like props mid-pool. A tethered artist struggled Sisyphus-style grasping at dry ground. Another met the crowds at the entrance; hung, he stood for hours on his toes, dangling from a noose. And Hugh Jackman, more song & dance man than Wolverine, played peek-a-boo with performers painted to blend into trees. Coming up on one, with her leg held so high, her most private genitalia at eye level, I had to gasp until she draped herself around her tree. Surely a Satan’s heaven would be Hell, no place for shock, or the demure. Always the benevolent if devilish host, Robert Wilson roamed about the ample space making everyone feel right at home. -
Blythe Danner in an evening gown? Yes, of course. How about a clown suit? She does that too, and she sings and dances in the medley of one act plays, Tonight at 8:30, penned by Noel Coward and directed by Tony Walton now showing at Guild Hall. The third play, “Red Peppers,” features Danner in a vaudeville duet with Simon Jones. This sublime actress, as comic as DeNiro’s wife in The Focker movies as she was playing Matthew Broderick’s socialite mom in Nice Work if You Can Get It on Broadway, channels Lucille Ball. -
“Jasmine was a gift of a role,” said Cate Blanchett at the New York premiere of Blue Jasmine, Woody Allen’s new movie. As the wife of a shady financial wheeler-dealer who has bankrupted his clients and was, by the way, a philanderer as well, Blanchett’s Jasmine is Ruth Madoff, fragile by way of Blanche DuBois, even though, as she said, “We never discussed that,” that is, the resemblance to the tabloids or Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire: “her downfall is so present for a lot of people.” Of course, Woody was absent for the star-studded premiere, sending a text that was read out loud at MoMA: “I am in the south of France and cannot attend. I truly wish I were in New York and cannot attend.” In fact, he is shooting his as-yet-unnamed French movie with Colin Firth and Emma Stone. While his films are not in competition with each other, he has to go far to best Blue Jasmine, one of the finest in his prolific career, turning in this one from his signature comedy to tragedy. -
Mason, as played by The Newsroom’s John Gallagher, Jr. does not scream sexy when we first see him in the new film Short Term 12. Recounting an incident involving a runaway from the facility for difficult teens where he works, he describes a moment of taco tummy, when his body fluids give out all over his shorts and sneakers. Eeew, TMI, you think, thanks for sharing, but as this movie progresses and you see his dedication to helping his charges extends to anything that will reign in their impulse to act out, he becomes more and more appealing. A foster child himself, lucky to have landed in a loving family, Mason especially adores his girlfriend Grace (Brie Larson), the soul of this movie.
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Kevin Pearce is lucky to be alive. When you see this expert snowboarder taking the near fatal plunge in Lucy Walker’s riveting documentary, The Crash Reel, to air on July 15 on HBO, you know the outcome won’t be good. His rival for competitions and the Olympics, Shaun White, was the subject of a 2008 documentary, Don’t Look Down, about this sport, which many think is not Olympic-worthy. White too has had his share of spills and, in this movie’s most painful moments, some athletes have died. But the movie is more than a cautionary tale about an increasingly more dangerous sport as athletes become more challenged. Detailing Kevin’s long period of recovery, the film is about the strong family that supported him along the way. You see Kevin blowing glass with his dad Simon, whose Park Avenue shop displays his state-of-the-art glassware. The film pays special attention to his brother David, who has Down Syndrome. When David pleads with his brother not to return to the sport Kevin loves, saying “I don’t want to see you die,” you see the tear-filled eyes of mom Pia, and the film’s tension is to see how Kevin will resolve his longing to compete in this sport, and his new reality. -
At the VIP (polo) lounge set up at Nova’s Ark, a Bridgehampton sculpture field, two giants went head to head: Edward Albee and Faith Ringgold. A former assistant to Larry Rivers was on the panel too, but David Joel, executive director of the Larry Rivers Foundation, did not get quite as many questions from a crowd that had gathered at this year’s ArtHamptons. Why did you choose Montauk? a woman asked of Edward Albee, honored for his philanthropy in the arts. Have you ever been there? was his cheeky reply, before moving on to a riff about the beauty, nurturing and relaxed atmosphere, of artists outside the commerce of art who are invited to his foundation set up at the remote end of the east end. What plays do you like? None that are popular now, was the reply. And what books are you reading? Zoobiquity, about the relation of man to animals, said the playwright of Zoo Story, pointing out, we are the only animals consciously creating art. Faith Ringgold, honored for lifetime achievement, a red scarf wrapped about her head, said she was inspired by Albee to make a painting, “Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?” -
Introducing Bay Street Theater’s current production on Saturday night, of Charles Ludlam’s 1983 breakout masterpiece The Mystery of Irma Vep: A Penny Dreadful, the actor Richard Kind had to kill time. Opening on the same night as Sag Harbor’s fireworks, Vep was set for 7, but the audience, delayed by more than usual heavy Hamptons traffic, was still making its way, including Joan Copeland, Arthur Miller’s 91 year old sister, who was driving from Amagansett, from obstacle to detour. “Soon you will hear the sounds of a popcorn maker,” said Kind, and then the revival began its camp mash up of Daphne DuMaurier meets the Werewolf, Vampire, and Mummy. -
“It’s a film about justice and injustice,” said Harvey Weinstein, introducing Fruitvale Station, a debut film by Ryan Coogler who wrote and directed, based on a true story in San Francisco. That story is unfortunately echoed in a trial we are all watching on television, seeking resolution for the death of Trayvon Martin. In the 2009 case, a BART policeman shot Oscar Grant who was out celebrating New Year’s Eve with friends in Oakland, at the Fruitvale Station train platform. With a screenplay masterfully leading up to this fate, the events evolve like a thriller, and even though you know scene by well-constructed scene how it will end, you still root for Oscar, hoping the violence will never come. -
What would the July 4 holiday weekend be without fireworks? Somehow the ones emerging from the faucets of ordinary citizens who happen to live where fracking chemicals have infiltrated the water system are not what the patriotic have in mind. The onscreen vision of pipes aflame, along with director Josh Fox’s banjo playing, were part of the spectacle of a special evening at Guild Hall, the second of the Hamptons International Film Festival’s Summerdocs series. When Josh Fox made his Oscar nominated documentary Gasland in 2010, the thorough expose had many thinking, what more could he have to say? The answer is plenty, to judge from the two-hour sequel to air on HBO Monday night. This story is an ongoing investigation of the practice of hydraulic drilling, meant to end our dependency on foreign oil and keep our energy sources here at home. Which sounds like a good plan, but as the documentary demonstrates, we need to pay attention to a hidden agenda that benefits the fossil fuel industry, while raping the environment. Fracking for the Fatherland? Think again. -
As emcee at the Nantucket Film Festival’s Tribute ceremony, at a former casino in Siasconset, on the island’s far end, mild mannered Brian Williams brought down the house riffing on an unfortunate white Buick Enclave rental, local produce like urine cheese, and pervasive V necked cashmere. Such was the truth-telling, even preppie WASPs lost control of their reticence on family secrets. Maybe Nantucket’s signature fog and rain contributed to the mood swings: count the suicides. Williams went dark, confessing he had an Irish uncle who died of drink. Who knew?And so crazy got even crazier at last week’s film fest where a restored theater called Dreamland is the main venue, rife for celluloid induced mental states. There, Barbara Kopple, honored for best non-fiction storytelling screened her new documentary, Running from Crazy, tells the Hemingway family story through a focus on Mariel Hemingway’s activism on a family problem that affected her grandfather Ernest, sister Margaux, and several other family members, suicide.
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The masculinity of his myth and prose style made Ernest Hemingway the writer to topple for a generation of novelists in the last century. But beyond the Hemingway Code of virile heroics: man against nature, as traveler, or in war, as illustrated in such iconic works as The Sun Also Rises, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Old Man and the Sea, even A Moveable Feast, the Hemingway family inherited an untoward legacy of suicide. As told in Barbara Kopple’s new documentary film, Running from Crazy, to be featured this week at The Nantucket Film Festival where the two time academy award winning documentarian will be awarded for Special Achievement in Documentary Storytelling, there were 7 suicides, including Hemingway’s father and granddaughter, the model and actress Margaux. As a mom, fearful of this legacy, her sister and main focus of this film, Mariel Hemingway reveals a family history that is to a large degree a cautionary tale for her own daughters, and a story of hope. -
The night was not exactly like the baudy The Aristocrats, a film featuring comedians telling roughly the same story, each one raunchier than the one before. At the Waldorf Astoria on Monday night, a Who’s Who of comedy, a lineup that included John Stamos, Bob Newhart, Joan Rivers, Tony Danza, Kathy Griffin, Lewis Black (“Rickles rickles you exquisitely”), Louis CK (“Rickles meets the missile before it hits”), Regis Philbin, Bob Costas, and Robert DeNiro, “the serious actor,” got up to insult the master of insult comedy, Mr. Don Rickles in awarding him for The Friars Lifetime Achievement in Comedy. Clips from others: David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld, Howard Stern, Jon Stewart, all had the same conceit: pretending they wished to be there (NOT)! Perhaps Rickles wanted to prove a point, but especially Bob Saget, the dirtiest of the dirty Aristocrat storytellers was asked to keep it clean. Without the four-letter words, the cussing, it’s amazing how funny he can be, quipping, “I’m Jewish, circumsized 9 times. Enjoy the calamari.” -
It’s not likely you’ll want to take your kids to SeaWorld after seeing Blackfish, a riveting documentary expose starring former trainers of orca whales, taken from the wild. It is hard to get warm and fuzzy over fish that weigh a few thousand pounds each, no matter how many times they leap to the ball or roll over on command, but once you see the pups separated from their mothers, or hear the sound they make when they grieve, this movie has you by the heartstrings. -
Central Park offers a natural bucolic setting for Shakespeare’s lighter fare, but with this year’s Comedy of Errors, its lush greens frame an urban stage for Ephesus, a fictive town in upstate New York that harbors mob types among its citizenry. At center, three buildings rotate in the foreground representing by turns a train station (Adirondack Transit Lines), brothel, hotel, jewelry shop, a private home, Saint Bridget’s abbey with an homage to Edward Hopper’s as the back street. This smalltown, USA designed by John Lee Beatty ideally serves the shenanigans involving a set of twins, attended by another set of twins, just the fodder for Shakespearean mistaken identities. Three couples jitterbug as a preamble, signaling a jazz age time shift for the Chaplin meets Gumby of Dromio (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and the dapper man he serves Antipholus (Hamish Linklater). A Duke (Skipp Sudduth) whose voice is more Guys & Dolls—or a nod to James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano—metes justice. -
This season’s extravaganza 3D epic, WWZ based on Max Brooks’ 2006 novel and directed by Mark Forster opens with a traffic jam in Philadelphia: a family– Dad is Brad Pitt, his wife Karen (The Killing’s Mireille Enos), and their two daughters, trapped in a car. Soon you learn the cause: a Zombie takeover. On Monday, Times Square mimicked art, with pedestrians clogging a narrowed Broadway for the movie’s red carpet premiere, proving people will do anything to catch a glimpse of Brad Pitt. It’s hard to say which, art or life, was more fearsome. -
She may not be as famous as her sister in soul, Aretha Franklin, but that does not make Merry Clayton any less of a diva. Her story may be famous in music history: as told in the documentary Twenty Feet from Stardom, pregnant and in curlers, she got a call in the middle of the night to sing with The Rolling Stones. That haunting riff at center in Gimme Shelter, the one you think of, almost a howl, “rape, murder, just a shot away,” that’s Clayton. Even Mick Jagger seems amazed at how the sound was made. Filmmaker Morgan Neville had to admit, after making this documentary about backup singers, he can never listen to music the same way again. Audiences are likely to feel the same. -
Among many resonant moments in Liz Garbus’s documentary Love, Marilyn, a pouf-lipped Lindsay Lohan reads from Marilyn Monroe’s diary, one in an ensemble of A-list blond stars –and a few brunettes– including Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood, Jennifer Ehle, Elizabeth Banks, Viola Davis, Glenn Close, Marisa Tomei, Lily Taylor. When a cache of diaries, poems and letters by the doomed star left to Lee Strasberg surfaced in 2010, producer Stanley Buchthal edited the published book, Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012) and initiated this film project, to air on HBO on June 17. -
New plays by the eminent American playwrights Neil LaBute and John Guare are an event. In Reasons to be Happy at the Lucille Lortel Theater, LaBute, who also directs, rekindles the relationship of Greg and Steph from his 2008 Reasons to be Pretty, retooling these characters with the fine actors Josh Hamilton and Jenna Fischer. As it opens in a torrent of invectives, Steph is pissed that Greg is making it with her close friend Carly (a terrific Leslie Bibb), and Greg, still passively aggressive, unable to commit, or if able, to commit so broadly as to cancel himself out, represents a form of modern man in a condition of unmanly moral and ethical vacillation, a legacy more of Prufrock than Hemingway’s adventurers. Greg hides behind books, or words, as Steph accuses. You want to scream at him too: Step up to the plate!
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