The movie, The Iceman, is all the chillier because it is based on a true story. A hit man procedural directed by Ariel Vromen, the film opens with a close up of Michael Shannon as contract killer Richard Kuklinski looking haggard and hirsute, being asked if he has any regrets. Moving back in time to the ‘70’s, we see him tender, courting his would be wife, Deborah, and then we see his short fuse, in a back alley pool hall, when he feels dissed. Given its subject matter, a contract killer responsible for offing over 100 men, The Iceman shows remarkable restraint: you see some straight ahead violence, throats are deftly slit, but even more terrifying is the sight of doomed men pleading for their lives, or packed as human ice bricks. The ensemble work is first rate, with Ray Liotta as a mob boss and John Ventimiglia as his knife-happy underling. Chris Evans as Mr. Freezy is both butcher and soft ice cream salesman, with David Schwimmer, Robert Davi and James Franco, heartless losers in smaller roles.
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One of super agent Sue Mengers’ many rules for dealing with divas is never remind them of the beginning when you are walking them down the red carpet on the way to the Oscars. For example, do not say to Diana Ross, we are a far cry from when you were giving Berry Gordy blowjobs in the back seat of a limo. Taking that cue, it would be just wrong to remind the Divine Miss M of her work at the Continental Baths backed by the Harlettes before her Broadway revue, Clams on the Halfshell. Then again, she was so fabulous back in the day, and incarnating Sue Mengers, in I'll Eat You Last, a show that does not even touch her mega singing chops, she’s fabulous now. -
Gloria Steinem, often considered the face of feminism, attended a film by Saudi Arabian Haifaa al Mansour. Premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival this past weekend, Wadjda was celebrated at an afterparty at D.C. Moore Gallery in Chelsea. Amidst painted photographs by Duane Michals and paintings by Milton Avery, the filmmaker chatted with Queen Noor of Jordan and others, women decidedly international from the Middle East. Regal with her hair in a French twist, the queen wore a long skirt and jean jacket. Waiters passed hors d’oeuvres, including bite sized BLT’s, leading one to ponder, whose idea was it to serve bacon to Saudis?Haifaa al Mansour said it was not easy for a woman to make films in her country, but this film had government support. When asked what traditions she was following, she said, “There are no traditions.”
Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
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On that cataclysmic day when Bernie Madoff was arrested, his loyal personal secretary Eleanor Squillari was convinced they had made a mistake. Life at the “lipstick building,” headquarters of the largest scale Ponzi scheme in financial history was wholesome and nurturing. They were family. But when she phoned Bernie to ask what gives, he was abrupt and perfunctory. And that’s when it hit her: this was for real. -
In North Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, two young men live in a rundown house, Phillip, an agile shut-in, and Treat, a menacing low level thief, in Lyle Kessler’s Orphans at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. The play’s first time on Broadway, it will be interesting to see how the Tony Award committee will categorize this testosterone-ridden three-hander, as this fine production is sure to contend for top prizes. The third character, a Chicago businessman, Harold, enters the ménage: at first a willing caller wanting another drink, he becomes a kidnap victim when Treat smells the opportunity for quick cash. Soon a power shift: The rope bound Harold, with a nod to Houdini, frees himself and takes on a parental role. -
Thor Heyerdahl’s legendary journey from Peru to Polynesia on a raft was made famous in the Oscar winning documentary made in 1950, Kon-Tiki. In a new film of this voyage, Kon-Tiki, made with a fine cast of Norwegian actors, Thor Heyerdahl (Pal Sverre Hagen) enters The Explorers Club hoping to find support for this mad trip, and last week, in anticipation of the film’s opening and an exhibition of the raft, The Weinstein Company hosted a luncheon for a small group at The Explorers Club.After welcoming everyone, including Josh Bernstein, Richard Wiese, Lawrence O’Donnell, Chuck Scarborough, and Glenn Close, Harvey Weinstein recounted the importance of Kon-Tiki to him as an elementary schooler. As he exuded about the “show and tell” he did on the amazing story of this Pacific Ocean crossing, you could see the boy in the man.
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Even at 9 AM, you want a whiskey when you’re talking about Ken Loach’s new movie The Angels' Share, screenplay by Paul Laverty, especially as you want to brace yourself for the political and economic realities of this master storyteller’s work. Meeting Paul Laverty at the Nomad Hotel over a latte and chocolate croissant, I have to tell this lawyer turned writer in no uncertain terms that one of his collaborations with director Ken Loach, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, is on my list for best movie I wish never to see again. It was that powerful, that good, and that disturbing. And so I greeted the new film, about a young man from a difficult, violent background who attempts to rise above his circumstances when everyone around him is pulling him back down, with fear that Loach would do it to me again: that is, have me rooting for The Angels' Share’s protagonist, a young guy named Robbie (Paul Brannigan) who tries to make good and discovers he has a real nose for fine aged whiskey, only to disappoint me with an unremittingly sad end. I was not prepared to be so pleasantly surprised with The Angels' Share’s generous humanity. -
Fresh from D. C., from a concert at the White House, Sam Moore performed his “Hold On, I’m Coming,” “Something is Wrong with My Baby,” “Soul Man” revue at the We Are Family Foundation Benefit on Thursday night, a tribute to Sting and Trudie Styler for their humanitarian efforts. An impassioned Slater Jewell-Kemker (20) and an equally impressive young man Ndaba Mandela, yes, Nelson’s grandson, spoke about the rock couple’s work as founders of their Rainforest Foundation, as did Caryl M. Stern, President and CEO of U. S. Fund for Unicef. Then Sting and Trudie accepted their award, with Trudie doing all of the talking, explaining how, on a trip to Brazil, they learned that the logging industry was stripping indigenous peoples of their home, burning down the rainforest. They set up their foundation to help save the land from private, commercial interests and are now operating in 23 countries. Trudie Styler affirmed their mission, “Compassion for one another makes us special. Our destiny on this planet is a common destiny.” -
This entertaining show may be billed as a jazz quartet, but as aficionados know, John Pizzarelli has a secret weapon: his dad. As he tells you, Bucky Pizzarelli, now 87 and seated beside him, has a long and distinguished career on guitar performing with Vaughn Monroe and other big bands of that era, but with his son John—and another son, Martin on bass—(that must be the family rebellion), the show at the Carlyle that started this week is comprised of smooth standards sprinkled with patter, as if son John, front man on guitar who also sings, needs to tell Bucky just where to come in. -
For Holocaust remembrance 2013, what do we remember? As my mother, a survivor of the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, and liberated from Stutthof used to teach us, life is a gift. And it really does matter, how you survive.Stories of survival can read like fairy tales, best case scenarios fueled by heroism, ingenuity, and luck. In the documentary No Place on Earth, guided by a strong-minded matriarch, Esther Stermer, who insisted that rather than follow their town in Ukraine to the ghettos and camps, the younger men should find hiding places. The family hid in caves, large enough in places, and also sufficiently sinewy and muddy to elude anyone trying to look for them.
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Here is a musical on Broadway with a philosophy a girl can love: Kinky Boots starts with a rousing tribute “The Most Beautiful Thing,” to shoes. On a pedestal sit a pair of red patent leather pumps to die for. Fetish, to be sure—“Sex is in the Heel”, Kinky Boots, at the Al Hirschfeld Theater, is comprised of music by rocker Cyndi Lauper with book by Harvey Fierstein based on a charming and memorable British film of the same title, Kinky Boots is also a feel good extravaganza of leggy drag queens and divas including two major talents, Stark Sands and Billy Porter, who as Charlie Price and be-sequined performer Lola, dare to ask the quintessential Fierstein question: what is a man? (This may not be simply a matter of footwear.) -
Heads roll, as do other body parts. Literally. In “Killer Kids of the Taliban,” little boys tell you that the imam assured them, the bomb strapped to their bodies explodes outward, murdering everyone in its path but not them. And in case you were wondering which border is the world’s most dangerous (Pakistan-India) or how to make a gun out of scrap metal, Vice on HBO is the show for you. Showrunners, Shane Smith and Ryan Duffy, the most affable hosts you will see on a news program, started posting their videos of trips to challenged areas on YouTube, and now HBO has picked them up big time. Committed to exposing the most absurd, mind-bending stories on the rapidly morphing human condition, the show, airing on Friday, is executive produced by Smith, Eddy Moretti and Bill Maher, with Fareed Zakaria as consulting producer. Curious and fun,Ryan Duffy, a riot of tattoos, rides in a car with arguably the world’s most endangered species, a man running for election in the Philippines. Don’t worry, says the targeted would-be official, the car is bullet proof. Duffy’s deadpan is worth watching all on its own. -
Tom Hanks sporting ‘80’s-ish facial hair was explaining the difference between his naturally grown mustache and that of the character he portrays in his Broadway debut Lucky Guy, the play by the late Nora Ephron based on the life of Mike McAlary. His went out in tough bristles, Hanks gesticulated madly bringing his hands under his nose where a tight, well clipped fringe sat by contrast. A gaggle of interviewers laughed.
The mood at the Broadhurst Theater and at Gotham Hall for Lucky Guy’s opening night on Monday was bittersweet exuberance: with the tearful final moment of the play, when Hanks, as McAlary after a near death accident and sick with the cancer that killed him, delivers a weighty speech and a portrait of Nora Ephron hangs over the stage. Hanks was not the only one crying.
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It was like travelling to the moon, to an alien place, said Barbara Walters about her trip to China with the president during the Nixon administration. If he were here right now, he was so awkward, he wanted so much to be liked, he would tell a dirty joke. Speaking from the stage at the Walter Reade Theater after a screening of Our Nixon, the documentary by Penny Lane and Brian Frye on closing night of the New Directors/ New Films series, she went on about that historic China trip: “Everyone was wearing Mao outfits. You could not tell the men from the woman. I was there to buy gifts for Henry Kissinger’s girlfriends,” she quipped. That was Tricky Dick with Plastic Pat, who finally came into her own as an interesting First Lady, only for Nixon to resign. “We forget how good he was on foreign policy. He deserves to have a better reputation than he has.” -
Shoulder to shoulder like Homeric heroes, Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper descended the long stairs at the Landmark Theater on Thursday night, joining Eva Mendes, Ray Liotta, Dane DeHaan and others of the cast and crew onstage for the premiere of Derek Cianfrance’s new movie, The Place Beyond the Pines. The two actors, perhaps the best of their generation, deliver deft performances as their fictive lives twine, one a carny, the other a cop, in this triptych about fathers and sons on the American landscape, making this the most thrilling two and a half hours of storytelling in the cinemas right now. -
On the eve of this year’s New Directors / New Films Festival, a collaboration between The Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, the Titus I theater was abuzz with downtown indie elite: Sofia Coppola, Alex Karpovsky, Elizabeth Olsen, John Cameron Mitchell, Mark Birbiglia, Julia Garner, and photographer Bob Gruen. Gimme the Loot, Adam Leon’s film about two graffiti artists attempting to raise money by any means for the ultimate NYC art project, had its premiere. Featured in the 2012 ND/NF, Gimme the Loot was introduced with the kind of praise reserved for films by Almodovar, whose name was invoked in the introduction, films that will be discussed forever for moving the medium forward. In this film’s case, the language is fresh, that is, bold, bawdy, and brimming with life. The scammers, actors Tashiana Washington and Ty Hickson, and a rich girl played by Zoe Lescaze remain memorable. -
Truman Capote’s glory days as a celebrated writer were revisited at the opening of Richard Greenberg’s, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, on Wednesday night at the Cort Theater, and a black & white ball—eh bash at the Edison Ballroom. The play starts with a narrator called Fred reminiscing about a New York brownstone where he once lived, and a particularly spectacular neighbor, Holly Golightly with whom he partied and took baths. The tall and lanky, handsome “Fred” (Cory Michael Smith) may be the epitome of everything that the “bulldog” Capote was not, but the self-invented Holly (Emilia Clarke), one of his greatest creations, hews close to the author’s bone. -
As the manager of a girl band looking, Dave Lovelace (Chris O’Dowd) teaches the four Aboriginal singers the distinction between country western and soul music: both are about loss, but in country western, they just resign themselves to it and whine. In soul, they yearn to get back what they had. In 1968 Australia, this useful information helps to catalyze these young women; they switch to soul, come of age, break some ethnic barriers, leaving behind family, including a child for opportunities in Viet Nam singing for American troops. That child, Tony Briggs, wrote a stage play based on the adventures of his brave mom and her pals, and now a movie—in fact, the feel good movie of the year– The Sapphires has dazzled audiences, making its rounds through various festivals including last year’s Cannes. -
Whenever I am blue, I can snap out of it conjuring Sigourney Weaver’s image as Snow White. That was the take away when I saw Christopher Durang’s Chekhovian mash up, Masha, Sonia, Vanya and Spike at Lincoln Center in December. Now the enterprise has moved to Broadway, its Sturm und Drang at a Bucks County country house on a pond successfully transported to The Golden Theater. Act I is a sendup of Chekhovian tropes with prescient views on real estate and familiar philosophical exclamations like “I’m in mourning for my life!” In Durang’s whimsical mix master, as directed by Nicholas Martin, the tragic—and neurotic– circumstance of everyday life turns to high hilarity.
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If you want to get attention at a swank party at The Four Seasons, do not walk the carpet behind Katie Holmes. In a dark lacy shirtwaist, the star had the photographers snapping steady and at least one observer noted, she could play another Kate—Middleton in a biopic about the British royal couple. Yes, The Observer fete had everything, including a British contingent: author Amanda Foreman served on the 2012 judging panel for the esteemed literary award, Man Booker Prize for Fiction, with Dan Stevens. Yes, Dan Stevens, or Matthew Crawley to you, offed in a car crash at the end of Season Three, leaving viewers beyond anxious about the future of Downton Abbey. It took three beats to register exactly who he was, standing there, handsomely familiar, blond hair darkened and spiky for a new movie, A Walk Among Tombstones, he is shooting with co-star Liam Neeson. But what was Dan Stevens doing HERE? Turns out he is not just another pretty face but commands the online quarterly, The Junket, and writes a column for the Daily Telegraph, having read English literature at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Did he really, really want to leave Downton Abbey, this reporter asked gamely. Yes, but not that way.
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The summer of 1969, with Stonewall in June and Woodstock in August, represents a shift in the American ethos. These events meet in a new play Hit the Wall at the Barrow Street Theater. Woodstock may evoke the peace and love generation, and to a lesser degree, the look and sound is represented in Hit the Wall by a trio of musicians, a girl guitarist in headband and slovenly dress with her bra showing in the back recalls that bygone era. Hey, at least she wears one! But Stonewall is another thing unto itself: a routine raid on a gay bar in Greenwich Village, a stone’s throw from this theater, turns into a full scale riot, inaugurating change that still resonates. Hit the Wall is a reminder of early violence, a turning point. Today, same sex couples still arouse volatile passions for some. -
The documentary Girl Rising—the title evokes uprising– mixes urgency with great storytelling appeal. The latest moment of the feminist revolution is not about debating issues of women’s equality in the workplace. It is about changing the world one girl at a time through education.Coming just after the recent PBS series, MAKERS, a history of the recent phase of the Women’s Movement in America in all its diversity, Girl Rising asks the question, how do we nurture girls to become “makers” of their own destiny? Taking its agenda global, Girl Rising addresses the dire subjects of girls’ vulnerability –to poverty, human trafficking, bonding which is a form of slavery, child marriage, and assassination for the simple desire to go to school.
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Director Regis Roinsard was particularly excited when his film, Populaire, opened the annual Rendez-vous with French Cinema at the Paris Theater. He exulted introducing his stars Romain Duris and Deborah Francois. Evoking Doris Day and Audrey Hepburn movies, Populaire follows this festival’s first night traditions as a frothy comedy with old-fashioned sexist overtones, charming as only the French can make them! Populaire turns out to be a pink typewriter Francois’s character uses to win a ‘50’s era typing competition and land the man of her dreams played with fetching allure by Duris. What surprises, as Roinsard explained at the French Cultural Services afterparty, is that this was a first feature, based on a historic typing competition. Influenced by American movies, he wanted to make it into a love story. Of course, at the end, as the tap tap tap accelerates, the industrial types imagine the word machine’s future: the ball, with all the letters of the alphabet contained in a golfball-sized metal sphere, rotating as it makes its marks. -
If “This Guy’s in Love with You” means anything, Herb Alpert and Lani Hall’s show at the Café Carlyle offers, in Alpert’s words, “music that is very déjà-vu.” Performing several decades worth of their hits and American songbook classics like “Close to You,” “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” this couple of 39 years, go through their signature repertoire sprinkled with anecdotes and backstory, backed by a first-rate band: Bill Cantos on piano, Hussain Jiffry on bass, and Michael Shapiro on drums. And because the Carlyle is such an intimate room –(I enjoyed seeing it on this week’s episode of Girls)–Alpert likes to kibitz with the audience, asking for questions—this is the ultimate in interactive, with one caveat, no requests. But that didn’t stop first-nighters, including Regis and Joy Philbin and producer Tommy LiPuma and a fan all the way from Korea among them, from shouting out favorites anyway. “Rise,” yelled one enthusiast, and they did. -
The award season is all about superlatives and thank you speeches but for East Hampton’s Guild Hall Lifetime Achievement Awards it is about community and family. Marshall Brickman, Master of Ceremonies at a most packed ballroom at the Plaza for the annual Lifetime Achievement Awards on Monday night, paid homage to Peter Stone who held this honor for years. Of course, in theater Brickman is known for Jersey Boys and The Addams Family, and so, when he introduced Nathan Lane, winner for Performing Arts, he knew from what he spoke as Lane had originated the role of Gomez Addams: for rehearsal, he was off book, that is, knew his lines by heart, and knew everybody else’s lines too. Director Jack O’Brien screamed a cathartic scream realizing that their new play, The Nance, starring Lane, was only three weeks away from opening. That work, which he will direct from a script by Douglas Carter Beane, should be wonderful, if his work on the new book of Cinderella, which opened on Sunday night at the Broadway Theater is any indication, but more on that later. Ever charming, ever quipping, Nathan Lane took the stage retooling the award season bromide: “I didn’t prepare a speech. I didn’t think I would win.”
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