“This is a competition disguised as a film festival,” said First Time Film Festival co-founder Johanna Bennett, before introducing a panel featuring Harry Belafonte on Saturday morning at The Players Club. Twelve first films are screening and a winner will get distribution. Just when you thought the world had enough film festivals! But in addition to discovering new talent, the festival celebrates the old in a unique way. Successful filmmakers love their first films, and so, as a unique feature of this festival, Darren Aronofsky, Barbara Kopple, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Nancy Savoca, Hal Hartley, Christine Vachon, Melvin van Peeples, and Todd Solonz will show their debut work. On Friday night, Sofia Coppola screened The Virgin Suicides, with a Q&A that lasted twice the allotted time, illustrating that passion, First Fest co-founder Mandy Ward pointed out, surprised at how well this venture is going—after only one day. (The festival ends with an awards ceremony on Monday night at the Players Club, with Johanna Bennett’s father Tony, Ellen Burstyn, Martin Scorsese, and others.)
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Sounds like a joke, but Hunger Games composer T Bone Burnett, took a break to record his own original music for the documentary, A Place at the Table, a film illuminating the problem of hunger in America. This subject is no joke. Directed by Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson, this film follows a few emblematic young citizens, a Colorado fifth grader named Rosie, a Mississippi second grader with severe health problems named Tremonica, a Philadelphia mom named Barbie, determined, hard working good people, who happen to live outside the food eh, network. Food insecure, they don’t know where their next meal is coming from. Literally. Barbie has to travel by bus to find a market that sells fruits and vegetables. Local stores are stocked with processed items providing minimally nutritious calories for her children. And she is lucky she can feed them. Rosie in a ramshackle rural community in a gorgeous mountainous landscape, relies on donations. On a panel this week at The Crosby Hotel, spokesmen Jeff Bridges and the Silverbush’s husband Tom Colicchio, star of television’s “Top Chef” made a key point: here is one problem that is fixable. -
In a new play The Madrid, Edie Falco works with her Nurse Jackie producer, the playwright Liz Flahive. As Martha, Falco seems to be as self-medicated as she is in her Showtime role. The Madrid, a Manhattan Theater Club production at City Center Stage 1, opens in a classroom where Martha is animated and engaged, teaching her kindergarteners about family until one (Brooke Ashley Laine) asks, do you have children. Her eyes glaze as the scene changes. Under Leigh Silverman’s able direction, so does the play’s tone. Now a family is looking for Martha, or noticing she’s gone. Family members, neighbors (John Ellison Conley, Heidi Schreck, Christopher Evan Welch) react. Her husband wants to sell the furniture. Even her mother, a good Frances Sternhagen, gets into the action, but she doesn’t have much to do, except crash her car in the hope that Martha will return. -
You want to scream, “Check out your sense of entitlement,” at the characters in Paul Downs Colaizzo’s richly evocative debut play Really Really, an MCC production downtown at the Lucille Lortel Theater, directed by David Cromer. That line, so memorable from Lena Dunham’s film Tiny Furniture, may not go far enough to cover the dire consequences of actions taken by this college group, illustrating a “Generation Me” philosophy that hews terrifyingly close to a Darwinian survival of the fittest. This is the generation born after Roe v. Wade, the most wanted generation, Colaizzo explained at the opening last week, defined by extreme narcissism and outsized sense of entitlement. -
In New York on Oscar Sunday, the red carpet will be more than a runway for hopefuls in borrowed gowns and glitter. Chef Daniel Boulud will host a special dinner and viewing of the awards show for the east coast Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at his Restaurant Daniel. The signature drink, a moired pomegranate colored cocktail with an ice cube ball featuring a mini gold statue of that hunk of an award, is called Red Carpet: pear infused vodka, Saint Germain, an elderflower liqueur, topped with champagne.
With the ultimate in Gallic grace, Boulud explained his party raison d’etre: I envy Wolfgang in Los Angeles, so we are celebrating here in New York. He and the Daniel staff worked hard to create canapes that correspond with the films:
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At B. B. King’s on Sunday night, at the Writers Guild of America Award ceremony, amidst a lot of foul-mouthed laughs and sober minded speeches, writer/ director Nora Ephron was remembered. As a young novelist, Meg Wolitzer attested, she received a most important recognition when Nora Ephron called to say she wanted to adapt her book, This is Your Life (1988), for film. Ephron, who died last summer of cancer, was a champion of young talent. When Lena Dunham got up to receive her prize for new series, she too spoke about Ephron seeking her out. The Girls originator and star also told a story when at 15 her mom took her to Caroline’s Comedy Club to hear Lisa Lampanelli.
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You could say that the chemistry between Katie (Julianne Hough) and Alex (Josh Duhamel) is incendiary in the psychological thriller cum romance Safe Haven. This film by Lasse Hallstrom based upon a Nicholas Sparks novel may be on trend in some unforeseen ways. Without spoiling the inflammatory (pun intended) end for its assured volume of fans, no one you fall in love with dies. But there’s some serious damage to property. That detail may resonate for recent hurricane, tornado, and blizzard victims. -
From beginning to end, John Lloyd Young’s performance at the Café Carlyle was a love affair attuned to the Valentine’s Day of your youth. “You’re Just Too Good to be True,” the Tony winning original “Frankie Valli” from “Jersey Boys” crooned, to “How Can I Be Sure,” followed by an homage to the room itself. Richard Rodgers lived here, Elaine Stritch still lives here, now it’s “My Turn.” Noting too the canvas murals by costume designer Marcel Vertes who died in 1961, the dimple chinned Young seemed to be pinching himself that he would now be working in such a swell place. -
Back in the day, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was all the rage. Paperbacks of A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) could be seen stuffed in jean pockets on college campuses, on subways. Even mainstream readers who were not particularly into poetry loved the surreal imagery of this verse. A decade later, books by Allen Ginsberg were not as popular, and those of Jack Kerouac were mainly out of print. Present at the historic Six Gallery reading where Ginsberg’s reading of Howl galvanized a poetry movement, and Kerouac passed a bottle of tokay, Ferlinghetti took action suggesting he put Ginsberg’s beat epic into print. This was the official dawning of a particularly American avant-garde literary movement: especially as founder of City Lights Books, publishing house and iconic San Francisco store, Ferlinghetti was at the center of The Beat Generation. -
The Women’s Movement is not only about Gloria Steinem, she will readily tell you. First, as Rita Mae Brown exclaims in MAKERS, a documentary chronicling the most recent phase of the Women’s Movement, she’s drop dead gorgeous. Then again, she’s smart, talented, and even when the focus is on her, as when she walked the red carpet at the Makers’ premiere at Alice Tully Hall on Wednesday night, she really wants to home in on YOU, who you are, what you dream. This poise, an outward gaze, gives Steinem enormous power. -
Innovative in its time, Cabaret, the quintessential movie musical marked its anniversary with a special screening last week at The Ziegfeld Theater where it premiered forty years ago. The stars, Liza Minelli, Joel Grey, Michael York, and Marisa Berenson joined Robert Osbourne onstage, answering some questions about the making of this landmark song and dance Fosse film, the 1973 Academy Award winner for Best Picture. Minelli and Grey earned actor Oscars as well, the film 8 in all. Liza Minelli attended the Oscar ceremony with her father Vincent Minelli, who helped her create her character’s Sally Bowles’ look, showing her pictures of Theda Barra and Louise Brooks. When she asked him what he thought, he said, “Strange and wonderful.” Funny to see her, in close up, the line crossed in heavy, eye-popping mascara and green nails. How did Bob Fosse create the 1931 Weimar Germany’s Kit Kat Club’s “divine decadence?”
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On Wednesday morning, just after the premiere of Neil Barsky’s documentary Koch, the news came on a television crawl: Ed Koch had missed the party, hospitalized. And this morning, on the film’s opening day, he has died. His tenure as New York mayor was not exactly “the best of times,” given a span of three-terms (1977-1989), they weren’t the worst either. They did rename a bridge after him. But even in the traditions of outsized mayoral personalities, his was particularly large, which makes the movie about him a blessing and now a bittersweet remembrance. -
Back in 2007 when I first took on gossipcentral.com, I wrote about “Sundance Envy,” an oft misdiagnosed disease with one symptom: celluloid deprivation in January. Dr. Freud, are you listening? It is not that I yearn for icy ski conditions. This year Sundance seemed particularly alluring to me with two beat era films, movies of Kerouac’s Big Sur and of his 1945 collaboration with William S. Burroughs, And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks, published in 2008, that became Kill Your Darlings. The latter boasted a big star: Daniel Radcliffe, and some indie favorites: Ben Foster and Elizabeth Olsen, two television stars Michael C. Hall and Jack Huston, and one newcomer, Dane DeHaan. Touted as a little-known scandal, for me, the story of the murder of Dave Kammerer (Hall) by Lucien Carr (DeHaan), the young would be poet he was stalking ever since they met in the boy scouts, years before, was a story I knew quite well from Jack Kerouac’s books, The Town & the City, Vanity of Duluoz, and a ton of secondary literature. -
Brrrrr! On this chilly weekend, the new FX television series The Americans premiered at the DGA Theater: a young couple played by Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell enter a Maryland motel room circa 1960’s. Russian spies, they are finding the U.S. summer brutal. Spying an air conditioner, they are relieved to bask in the frigid air. Talk about the Cold War! -
Even in the age of terrorism, the terror of the last century’s The Holocaust, has not lost its hold on the artistic imagination. As the victims of The Shoah are remembered at the United Nations and in synagogues worldwide, films continue to shed light on that darkest hour of the twentieth century. The Jewish Film Festival, an annual collaboration between the Film Society at Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum just ended with the New York premiere of Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic of Hannah Arendt, the writer/philosopher/educator, an émigré who covered the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem for The New Yorker magazine, famously coining the phrase, “the banality of evil.” -
Who knew host Meredith Vieira could swear like a trucker, or imagine herself at 59 as a dead Pussy Galore? But as the television personality reminded a packed Cipriani’s on 42nd street for the National Board of Review’s Awards Gala on Tuesday night, paraphrasing Jessica Chastain’s “Maya” in Zero Dark Thirty: “I’m the Motherf—ker in charge.”Excuse me, but there were children in the room: Quvenzhane Wallis, from Beasts of the Southern Wild and Tom Holland from The Impossible each received Breakthrough Performance Awards. And while John Krasinski defined “freedom of expression” as “taking a chance,” speaking about the award given to Promised Land, others took the phrase more liberally.
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Having dined royally on Les Miserables, a musical that has its characters literally singing idealistic and starving to death, well-wishers came together for lunch at Michael’s on Tuessday–four tables worth in the garden room– to congratulate Tom Hooper on his stellar achievement directing this film. But, why now, the day of the National Board of Review awards where the Les Mis ensemble would be honored, and a few days before Oscar nominations would be announced? -
Around midnight on Monday night, the area around Crimson had a pulse. Four women from Amsterdam stood outside the club looking for Chris Rock. A crowd rushed screaming “Daniel” on East 21st street. Was it Craig, sneaking a Bond-worthy getaway in a black tricked out SUV? Or was it Day Lewis, who was honored as Best Actor for his portrayal of Lincoln? Earlier, Rock had presented a Best Non-Fiction Film award to Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon for Central Park Five, but not before shouting out to Steven Spielberg, awed: Lincoln, man, he freed the slaves! -
At a luncheon at “21” early last December, Jessica Chastain was relieved. Not because her new film Zero Dark Thirty was chosen as Best Film by the New York Film Critics Circle and National Board of Review, but because her secret could now be known. For a year after she was slated for the lead in this thriller based on the CIA’s mission to find and kill Osama bin Laden, she could tell no one about the film, as if CIA rules applied to her. While her mouth was zipped, many thought she would be playing one of the wives of a Navy SEAL. Yeah, you can be barefoot in the kitchen, she quipped about this attitude. Radiant in a light purple Elie Saab ensemble, Chastain worked the room in Ferragamo platforms, happy at last she could speak about her performance as “the girl,” as the real-life operative was known to CIA higher ups. -
Kerouac aficionados will have a fine time teasing out details director Walter Salles and scriptwriter Jose Rivera took from the 1957 On the Road publication vs. the 1951 scroll text, the ur-Road first published in 2007. For example, the first line of the new movie focuses on the father, but then the story flips to the fictional characters familiar to readers since 1957. In a further innovation, viewers will note that Sal Paradise (Sam Riley) talks to his mother (Marie Ginette-Guay) in a curious French, referencing Kerouac’s French Canadian roots. The writer, from an ethnic neighborhood in Lowell, Massachusetts, spoke a dialect called joual.Interviewing surviving members of the beat generation in their research, the filmmakers spoke to Joyce Johnson, Kerouac’s girlfriend at the time that On the Road was published to become an overnight bestseller. The author of the memoir Minor Characters told them about her own study of Kerouac’s language. Looking for ways to give Sal speech, the filmmakers incorporated this source, reaching outside Kerouac’s text in creating French dialogue between mother and son. Recently published, Joyce Johnson’s new biography,The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac, traces the development of Kerouac’s prose style, showing how his French freed him to create his famous spontaneous narrative.
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Standing high on a stepladder, Dr. Mehmet Oz addressed the crowd at Le Cirque, at cocktails for Silver Linings Playbook director David O. Russell and his star Robert DeNiro. The talk show host applied his professional expertise, noting the unexpected relevance of SLP to current events, the horrific tragedy in Newtown, Ct. as this audience award winning movie shines a light on mental health in America. Dr. Oz mentioned the moment when DeNiro as Pat Sr. asks his son (Bradley Cooper), recently released from a mental facility, has he taken the right dose of his meds. Pat Jr. and Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), out on their first date at a diner discuss the relative ups and downs of anti-depressants. Looking around the room at film insiders, he commented on edge-fueled creativity. -
While The Hobbit, Peter Jackson’s prequel to his Tolkien inspired Lord of the Rings series, leads the box office charts, the New Zealand director was in town last week for its premiere, but that was not the only film he has opening. The next night, he introduced his film of passion, West of Memphis, the documentary he and partner Fran Walsh produced and funded themselves, a cause celebre in the United States revisiting the murder of three 8 year olds in 1993, and the three teens, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie
Misskelley, who went to jail for the crime.
Amy Berg directs the documentary feature, focusing on the case of the only WM3 on death row, Damien Echols, who with his wife Lorri Davis, also produced West of Memphis. While Damien Echols acknowledged Peter Jackson for saving his life, all agree, this film and Echols’ story would not be known if not for the decades-in-the-making trilogy, that covered the case as it was evolving, Paradise Lost, produced for HBO by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky.
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They’ve been going non-stop. With New York screenings and lavish dinners, a quick jump across the pond for the London premiere, and back for the New York party at MoMA and appearances on many talk shows, Hugh Jackman was positive we’d all be sick of him by now. From his Jean Valjean role in Les Miserables, transformed from the bitter prisoner hunted by Javert to a spiritually liberated and rich factory owner, and his generous on-the-spot performances at various celebrations including a lunch hosted by Ron Meyer, Jackman is truly a songman you want to have around.
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Fresh from Kennedy Center Honors, the actor Dustin Hoffman was promoting his new movie, Quartet, his directorial debut. At a Q&A following a screening last week, the Academy Award winning actor noted the relationship between acting and directing. When he was starting out, he wanted to direct. He had a dream: You could be the next Kazan, he was told, and he looked for projects to direct. He was supposed to direct Dead Poets Society and be in it. When he hesitated, the role went to Robin Williams. Decades later, he directs Quartet, and was named Best Breakthrough Director at the Hollywood Film Awards.Given that producers have been reluctant to allow him to direct without acting in the movie, he is vindicated, even though at 75, he would fit right in. -
Squalor, sewers, Dickensian suffering, a splendor of operatic riches! If you are director Tom Hooper, how do you follow the drama of last year’s multi-Oscar winning King’s Speech? A film of one of the most beloved Broadway musical epics, Les Miserables, set in the days of the French Revolution a la Victor Hugo might not be the obvious choice. Then again, Hooper is a filmmaker who has challenged himself with every project. The John Adams series for HBO comes to mind. So a musical? Why not.
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