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Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts: Rust and Bone’s Tender Heart

November 30, 2012

Midway through a luncheon celebrating Rust and Bone, news came that the French film starring Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts was nominated for an Independent Spirit Best International film award. Not even a glass was raised, as if awards for this edgy movie were simply a matter of course.

SONY Pictures Classics’ Michael Barker said he and his partner Tom Bernard backed Rust and Bone even before they read the script, making a deal with director Jacques Audiard after A Prophet’s critical success for his next film, whatever it might be. Then they get a script: A woman loses her legs, befriends a bouncer who also fights and has a son, eh, why not, Barker laughs, throwing up his arms. Like A Prophet with its insider prison view, the film offers a glimpse into a world unto itself: Picture the saturated, happy colors of resorts in travel brochures. Now imagine the opposite, beaches in dour tones in perpetual off-season. That is the look of Rust and Bone.

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Independent Film Project’s Gotham Awards: Don’t Hate Me Because I Won

November 28, 2012

Jared Leto won the audience award at the annual IFP’s Gotham Awards at Cipriani Wall Street for his movie Artifacts; the film was mostly unknown to most at my table of industry insiders, but that sums up the theme of this, the ultimate alternative awards ceremony that even has a category, Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You. That award went to An Oversimplification of her Beauty, by the way. Meantime Leto, chatting at cocktails prior to receiving the award said he had just arrived from LA and left his bag on the plane. Seat of pants, he seemed to think the award should go to Beasts of the Southern Wild, the most edgy and mythic film of the year. Not to worry. Benh Zeitlin, the creator of that film took away many of the evening’s honors, including the Best Breakthrough Director and newly minted Bingham Ray award, after the pioneering champion of independent films who died suddenly in Park City this past January.

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Girls’ Night Out: Zero Dark Thirty and the Death of Osama bin Laden

November 26, 2012

Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s take on the hunt for Osama bin Laden, a thrilling Zero Dark Thirty, begins with torture so brutal I found it an eye averting experience. But not CIA operative Maya (the delicate, fine-boned, redhead Jessica Chastain) on assignment, recruited after high school to work on the war on terrorism. “She’s a killer,” or “The Girl,” as identified by CIA higher ups and we see her refusing to leave the room as “Amar” is water boarded, her pale eyes wide.

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Flight Director Robert Zemeckis Flies

November 24, 2012

On the face of it, Flight is your standard redemption story. Taking you aboard a plane falling apart in heavy winds, Flight is not what it seems. Audiences may be expecting Airplane! without the laughs, or a claustrophobic bumpy drama aboard a doomed vehicle. The film is about character, extending beyond the lead to nuanced supporting roles.

The story of a flawed man enabled by the fact that he rarely loses control, Flight follows pilot Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington), seen drinking heavily before and during this disaster. Fueled by a variety of substances, he maintains his demeanor, landing the plane with less damage than you would imagine. He is a hero, but as a husband, father, lover, he’s the proverbial eh, plane wreck. That a hotel mini-bar can be scarier than a plane flailing in midair is a measure of this classic cautionary tale, one of the best pictures as award season approaches. Expect too a nod to John Gatins for his original screenplay.

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Documentaries on the Case: The Central Park Five and Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God

November 23, 2012

On April 19, 1989, you could not miss the headlines—and the horror of the Central Park jogger case. A white woman in a tracksuit, pummeled, raped, unconscious. Who did this? Packs of wild black boys aprowl in the park. Case closed.

The Central Park Five, the final non-fiction feature in the DOC NYC Fest last week, a deft examination of the most publicized rape case in NY history, questions the handling of this case: the arrest and conviction of 5 black teens seemed to put the unsettling crime at rest. Now, so many years later, the 5 young men attempt to put their lives together after a 2002 exoneration that got little press attention. No one so much as said sorry.

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Talking Back at Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

November 18, 2012

It seemed a delicious idea, seeing Edward Albee’s Tony award winning play, Talking Back at Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf about George and Martha, a university couple whose marriage unravels over cocktails with a younger couple one night –with an audience of couples counselors. This riveting revival, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s production at the Booth Theater for the play’s 50th anniversary, is however, so disarming that even a group of trained professionals, seemed flummoxed by the brilliant banter and blatant betrayal, caustic jabs and casual sex. Questions to the actors following Thursday night’s performance were about whether or not they take the emotion home with them. Answer: a complicated yes, as you would imagine. From the first “What a dump!” till dawn, this scathing examination of what is real, what imagined, what illusions keep us afloat, hits home. There’s not a more harrowing spectacle of marital evisceration on Broadway.

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On the Road: The Vehicle Gets a Tune Up

November 16, 2012

En route to L.A. for its West Coast premiere, Director Walter Salles introduced a private screening of his new film, On the Road, last week, pointing out that as a teen in his native Brazil, he was drawn to the characters in Jack Kerouac’s novel; they represented a freedom foreign to his homeland, where writing was censored. “This book about the creative process, this ode to literature, got to me. The characters became my heroes,” he said noting too his current inspirations: poets Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane Di Prima and Gary Snyder. So charming that Peggy Siegal now calls him her new BFF, Salles took on the making of this film, a project that has eluded Francis Ford Coppola for decades. In 2004, after he saw Salles’ Motorcycle Diaries, Coppola asked him to consider the un-filmable beat classic.

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Silver Linings Playbook: Reading the Signs with Jacki Weaver

November 16, 2012

The winner of audience awards in Toronto, the Hamptons, and other film festivals, David O. Russell’s new movie, Silver Linings Playbook is not only a crowd pleaser, it has the gravitas to make it to the top awards. This movie is to Philadelphia, The Eagles and football what Lowell, Massachusetts and the ring was to The Fighter: all you need is (heart).

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Inventing David Geffen on PBS: What Am I Gonna Do With Cher?

November 6, 2012

David Geffen is so funny, sharing anecdotes featuring a Who’s Who in music and movies for the two-hour PBS documentary, Inventing David Geffen, you would never know that he actually dislikes public speaking. A self-proclaimed dummy in his Brooklyn elementary school, by 1976 he had sold several companies and had amassed a billion dollars. As he says at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame dinner upon receiving an award, “I never thought I would get one of these. I have no talent.” And yet interviews with those who have worked with this mogul in the entertainment industry—Barry Diller, Clive Davis, Ahmet Ertegun, Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Mike Nichols, Jann Wenner, Elton John, Lorne Michaels, among many others—attest otherwise: all seem to agree, the man has chutzpah.

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Barack Obama in SEAL Team Six: The Raid on Osama Bin Laden

November 3, 2012

A force of nature himself, Harvey Weinstein did not let impending Hurricane Sandy deter his plan for a screening of Seal Team Six in Washington, said director John Stockwell at a post-storm screening hosted by Peggy Siegal in New York this week. “Harvey likes to stir things up,” he said. Wanting to insure that key political figures would see the dramatization of the real life hunt for Osama Bin Laden and raid that ended in his death, to air on the National Geographic Channel on Sunday night, his plan is to show the film in time for Tuesday’s election.

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Roman Polanski: Wanted, Desired, and in his Own Words

October 27, 2012

Known as much for his personal life as for his film career, director Roman Polanski’s last scandal, for having illegal sex with a 13 year old and his flight from justice, still polarizes the public. “I don’t care,” said one viewer after a private screening of a new documentary, Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir, a conversation between his longtime friend, producer Andrew Braunsberg and the filmmaker while he was under house arrest in Gstaad, Switzerland, “he still had sex with a teen.”

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Bowling for Our Time and West Side Story on Broadway

October 24, 2012

Among the many theater talents donning their bowling shoes at Lucky Strike on Monday night in support of Our Time—Paul Rudd, Steve Kazee, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Eve Plumb, Noah Emmerich, Mariska Hargitay, to name a few, one stood out: Julianna Padilla. A young woman who bravely introduced herself in a determined effort, illustrating a mastery of strength over stutter, then blew the crowd away singing “Put Your Hand Up,” her own composition. Her act illustrated the success of an organization committed to helping young people who stutter step forward in school, theater, and life with skill and confidence.

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Dr. Ruth on Sex in The Sessions

October 20, 2012

Excuse the pun: When Peggy Siegal introduced The Sessions as the feel good movie of the year at a special screening Thursday night, she was not kidding. Based on the true story of Mark O’Brien, a poet who spent much of his time in an iron lung, a result of childhood polio, The Sessions tells of his “first time” at age 38, thanks to the permission he gets from a Catholic priest (William H. Macy) and the expertise of a sexual surrogate (Helen Hunt as you have never seen her).

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Chasing Ice: Weather Woes: Meltdown in the Forecast

October 18, 2012

A documentary exploring one photographer’s obsession with man in nature, Chasing Ice must be one of the most beautiful films of the year. But the raw splendor of ice, in the far reaches of Iceland and Greenland to name a few locations, belies a grim truth: global warming is real. As photographer James Balog pointed out at a special screening Wednesday night that included Harry Belafonte, Judd Hirsch, Israel Horowitz, Josh Mostel, among many others at the Museum of Art and Design, the public perception is that there is a debate going, but in actual fact the science on global warming is clear. The question is, what are we going to do about climate change while we have a chance?

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The Girl on HBO: Do Blondes Have More Fun?

October 16, 2012

British actress Sienna Miller plays Tippi Hedren to Toby Jones’ Alfred Hitchcock in the HBO movie The Girl. Observing the movie’s star at this year’s Hamptons International Film Festival receive honors at “Variety’s 10 to Watch: Breakthrough Performers of 2012,” a brunch held at Nick & Toni’s, you think, oh yes, blondes have it all. The group includes a blond or two: Dree Hemingway who headlines Starlet assures viewers that she had a body double in some of her most risqué scenes. But to see The Girl, which airs this weekend, is to witness vulnerability.

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Substance Abuse: Flight Closes the New York Film Festival

October 15, 2012

Flight, Robert Zemeckis’s new movie, closed the New York Film Festival with a bang, taking you aboard a plane falling apart in heavy winds. Pilot Whip (Denzel Washington), seen drinking heavily before and during this disaster, maintains his demeanor, landing the plane with less damage than you would imagine. He is a hero, but as a husband, father, lover, he’s the proverbial eh, plane wreck.

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Two Films from Israel at the New York Film Festival: Fill the Void and The Gatekeepers

October 11, 2012

Is it too soon to talk about Foreign Film Oscars? Fill the Void, Rama Burshtein’s glimpse into Tel Aviv’s Hasidic world, Israel’s entry for Academy Award consideration, should make the top five. Among the many pleasures of the New York Film Festival in its 50^th year, this stunning drama takes the viewer into the marriage practices of a hermetic community, offering an intimate, if fictional view, of how matches are made. Ultimately a love story, Fill the Void is most surprising in revealing unexpected emotional connection and subdued passion in places where love is most often a last consideration.

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Ann Roth: Reluctant Honoree at the Hamptons International Film Festival

October 9, 2012

How do you pay tribute to a star in the film industry, playfully dubbed “The Meryl Streep of Costume Design?” That was the dilemma Nathan Lane faced in front of a crowd at the Hamptons International Film Festival that included Scott Rudin, Bruce Weber, and eh, Meryl Streep. “You have to say something nice,” said Lane by way of lauding Ann Roth’s genius. But Roth would have none of it. Horrified when director Mike Nichols announced that they’d worked together for 47 years, she seemed horrified that she was honored at all.

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Grace on Broadway: Let Us Now Pray

October 6, 2012

The play Grace, written by Craig Wright and directed by Dexter Bullard, takes stylistic liberties, showing the end at the beginning, and playing scenes in reverse, almost cinematically, so that the actor Paul Rudd walks backwards trying desperately to return to pre-cataclysmic grace. But as you can guess, some things you simply can’t take back, particularly if there is a weapon involved, and you know, in theater, what happens once you see a gun. Of all the risks taken in Grace, however, the biggest is seeing the ever affable, perfect Paul Rudd pushed to the edge, as the maniacal heavy.

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Boy Overboard with Tiger: Life of Pi Opens The New York Film Festival

September 29, 2012

To mark the 50^th anniversary of the prestigious New York Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center premiered Ang Lee’s new movie, Life of Pi, based on Yann Martel’s popular novel. Introducing this spectacular 3D adventure tale about a boy shipwrecked on the high seas, sharing a lifeboat and survival strategies with a Bengal tiger, the modest director said he defied some moviemaking wisdom, Never film kids, animals, and water, or shoot in 3D. He smiled slyly. Then Life of Pi began: beautiful birds seemed to fly through the cavernous Alice Tully Hall, with menacing creatures to come. At movie’s end, many viewers like Carol Kane said they watched in tears.

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Not 83 Anymore: Vampire Daughter in Hotel Transylvania

September 28, 2012

You know the 3D animated feature Hotel Transylvania is for kids because it starts with diaper changing, fart, and piss jokes aplenty. Fortunately, it moves on to be a father-daughter tale about tolerance.

Mavis is turning 118 and her doting dad Count Dracula wants to throw her the party of the year. The venue is the castle/ hotel he’s built to shut her in. The guests are the ghouls she’s grown to love. The cuisine may involve a 21 year old red-headed human named Jonathan, unwittingly crashing, with backpack and hopes for adventure. Appearing to be related to Frankenstein, he helps plan the party. One “zing” leads to another.

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Revisiting Death Row: The Exonerated and The American Theater Wing Honors the Redgraves

September 25, 2012

To know that the American justice system is flawed, just say OJ. That name is invoked in the theater piece The Exonerated, now revived for its 10^th anniversary at the Culture Project with its script by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, woven from court transcripts, interviews and testimonies of those jailed and sentenced to die for crimes they did not commit. At Sunday’s matinee, a rotating cast of actors: Stockard Channing, Brian Dennehy, Chris Sarandon, Delroy Lindo– joined in with Jim Bracchitta, Amelia Campbell, Bruce Kronenberg, Curtis McClarin, April Yvette Thompson, JD Williams— to tell horrific tales of incarceration.

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Penny Marshall’s My Mother Was Nuts at The Monkey Bar

September 20, 2012

If Penny Marshall’s honking nasalese leaps off the pages of her memoir, My Mother was Nuts, it’s not because she wrote the book. Rather, this is the work of a ghost writer, the best in the business, Todd Gold, said Marshall’s literary agent Daniel Strone of this well known secret. If he is writing Ann-Margret, he revealed, he’s playing the piano. If it’s Penny, he’s smoking and sipping martinis. He’s a chameleon. He’s Zelig.

This reporter is not spilling beans, simply separating the literary from the likes of celebrity memoirs, which have to be coaxed, cajoled, and bought into being. If I feared the demise of “the book” for the more ephemeral cyber publishing, Dan Strone assures me, there will always be a demand for celebrity memoirs, and none of their sort will spill their story for free. Whew! At least one book genre is here to stay.

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The Master: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Naturalist Fable and Francine

September 15, 2012

You cannot take your eyes off The Master, neither Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film nor Philip Seymour Hoffman in the role of Lancaster Dodd. Whether the fascination is a result of the film’s having been shot in rich 65 mm film stock, a visual treat evocative of the way films used to look, or because Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix in the role of Freddie Quell, a World War II navy veteran who literally washes up on the beach display behavior that is perplexing, a pas de deux of power and subservience.

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Hamptons Journal: The History of Art and The Big Apple Circus

September 2, 2012

Audrey Flack and the History of Art String Band offers a crash course in such giant art figures as Caravaggio, Camille Claudel, Lee Krasner, Van Gogh, Picasso, Mary Cassat, and Jackson Pollock. “Oh, oh, action Jackson,” sings Flack, an early photorealist painter, sculptor of goddesses, and resident of East Hampton, strumming her banjo and accompanied by stellar musicians: Johnny (Jackpot) Coughlin, Walter Us, David Roger Grossman, Adam Grimshaw and his wife Deborah Grimshaw, who blows everyone away on violin. Last weekend, the band performed at Guild Hall to benefit individuals with autism and their families. Caroline Doctorow and Evan Frankel opened the set. The evening also featured rare footage by Hans Namuth of Pollock working his drip technique at his home in Springs. Dick Cavett M.C.’d. Filling in the pauses left while Flack adjusted banjo strings, Cavett regaled the crowd with stories about Groucho Marx and Gore Vidal, such as, when asked if he was having a good time, Groucho replied, Yes, but not tonight. Au contraire, this was a very good night indeed.

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