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.”
recent posts
- Marisa Tomei and Matthew Broderick at Guild Hall: The Plight of an Upper West Side Arts Space Gives A-List Actors The Big Chill
- Raul Esparza and Lily Rabe in The Winter’s Tale: Wet in Central Park
- Authors Night in East Hampton: If it’s Not One Thing It’s Your Mother
- Documentaries: Jocelyn Wildenstein The Lion Queen/ Tovah: How Jewish is It?
- 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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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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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). -
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? -
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. -
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. -
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 50th 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. -
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. -
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. -
To mark the 50th 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. -
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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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 10th 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. -
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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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. -
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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In Ethel, a new HBO documentary that premiered at Sundance and was screened in East Hampton as the finale of the Hamptons International Film Festival Summerdocs series at Guild Hall, the fascination with all things Kennedy shifts to the legacy of Robert, murdered in 1968 while campaigning for president of the United States. The filmmaker Rory Kennedy, his 11th child, was born a few months later, and while her quest to mine the material of her father’s life might have been her mission, she focuses instead on the role of her mother in their remarkable marriage, and in the aftermath of his death. -
Rounding his shoulders and shuffling his steps, Alec Baldwin does a sheepish, lowkey Justin Bieber. Strutting tall and leggy, Christie Brinkley does a bravura Miley Cyrus, explaining how the teen’s name morphed from Destiny to Smiley, to, well, you know, and how lucky she was when free tampons poured forth from a vending machine just as she’d run out of change.The body language is all affect but the words come from the actual autobiographies of these famed youth who have barely lived or done enough to merit a complete sentence, but that’s the conceit of “Celebrity Autobiography,”
the hilarious brainchild of playwright and actor Eugene Pack. “We could not make this stuff up,” Pack said of an evening at Guild Hall on Friday night that also included the wisdom of Diana Ross (Dayle Reyfel), David Hasselhoff (Jerry O’Connell), Ricky Martin (Pack), and poetry by Suzanne Somers (Brinkley), to mention a few whose words spoken make for unintentional comedy.
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“Non-fiction for sale here,” hawked comedian Robert Klein, seated in a row of writers under the Author’s Night tent at Gardiner’s Farm this past Saturday. Readers crowded about, one wanting to know whether the location in his memoir’s title, The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue, was in Brooklyn or the Bronx. The Bronx, said Klein, selling soft. Jeffrey Lyons was back with the paperback of his book; Dr. Ruth attended for the first time with what else, sex advice; other authors included David Margolick, Martin Amis, David Baldacci, Robert Caro, Dava Sobel, Ken Auletta, Sam Talbott, Lynn Sherr with Swim: Why We Love the Water. -
Richard Gere in Arbitrage does for Brioni what he did for Armani in American Gigolo. He looks good in a suit. On Sunday night for the new movie’s East Hampton premiere, he wore a blue denim shirt, his signature look out east. The film, written and directed by Nicholas Jarecki, is suit specific, Brioni donated, which is why when Gere’s character Robert Miller burns one to cover up a scandal, it hurts. Playing a rich and powerful mogul is not a stretch for Gere. Married to Ellen (Susan Sarandon), Miller appears to be an upstanding family man, a model billionaire, involved in charities. In the film’s reality, Miller is involved in some high stakes shady dealings with another big time player (Graydon Carter in a standout performance). Honesty is beside the point. -
A fine new musical had its world premiere at Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theater last night, Big Maybelle: Soul of the Blues at Bay Street, based on Maybelle Smith, a blues singer from the early 20th century, who once opened for Billie Holliday and toured America in the perilous segregation era, plagued by diabetes, an unhealthy girth, and low self-esteem. The Tony Award winning Lillias White has the chops to portray her, accompanied by a stellar band, narrating a classic horror tale of drug and sexual abuse, but most of all, performing her material with measures of sass and grace.
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“Beach Life,” the new exhibition at Guild Hall features Eric Fishl’s large-scale oils, including “The Gang” from 2006. The 84 x 108” canvas has the artist’s swimsuit clad wife April Gornik walking toward the viewer, and many of his painter posse and others—including Donald Sultan, Ross Bleckner, and Ralph Gibson-– looking on. On Friday evening, many of them were on hand for the show’s opening and Guild Hall’s annual summer gala under a tent at nearby Gardiner’s Farm. Present too: models adorned with gorgeous Van Cleef & Arpels jewels, honorees Esty and Dan Brodsky, and DJ Alexandra Richards. Board member, Alec Baldwin attended with his new wife Hilaria. M. C. Joy Behar quipped, “He’s so taken with his yoga teacher, he can barely breathe.” -
The wow kicks in early at these exceptional shows at museums uptown and down. First at the Whitney: Polka dots, the signature pattern for the artist Yayoi Kusama now in her ‘80’s, are appropriated for fashion. Louis Vuitton is doing for her designs what the luxury line does collaborating with Takashi Murakami. The museum features a roomful of canvases in yellows and reds, a display of summer joy for an artist who retreated from the art world for awhile, suffering a mental breakdown. In July, a party of a press opening at the museum with champagne and hibiscus cocktails, smoked salmon and quiche, was followed by a ribbon cutting at the Louis Vuitton Fifth Avenue store, the dots and her image complete with orange wig in its windows. Compelling and sexy, the museum retrospective features soft sculpture, phalluses embedded in shoes, on a jacket, on furnishings. Old maybe, from the sixties, but newly fresh, and titillating. -
The Big Bang may have been the theme of this year’s Watermill Center extravaganza of a summer gala, with its outsized red phalluses, neon ninjas, and popping balloons, but many East End events make big noise.At the Watermill Center on Saturday night, even a heavy downpour did not deter a dancer clad in wedding white from writhing in dirt. A few minutes in, she was muddied, as if coated in primal ooze. A woman in yellow used a leaf blower to inflate giant white latex that went POP from the exertion. The rain caused onlookers to retreat from the art laden paths the better to view the art for auction under a tent: works by Marina Abramovic, Sandro Chia, William Wegman, Shirin Neshat, Dennis Oppenheim, Alexandra Posen, Lola Schnabel, to name a few. The challenge to stay dry also brought viewers to the edgy video installation, Mike Kelley 1954-2012 in collaboration with the LUMA Foundation, in the center’s exhibition space.
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Is it too soon to think about Oscar contenders for non-fiction films? Several summer/ early fall releases are especially noteworthy. Not only is Ai Weiwei Never Sorry the story of a major visual artist in China who has felt the wrath of his government for speaking out, but a film that utilizes the social media, as this savvy artist’s blogs, tweets, and emails have had a huge impact on his artistic/ political message. -
In case the Hamptons edenic sun and sand are not enough, you can always shop. That was the message at a deluxe event sponsored by Social Life Magazine and Rand Luxury at East Hamptons Studios last weekend. Bringing St. Barth’s to the Hamptons is not much of a stretch, as some of the promo materials pointed out. Surely you will need a Lord of the Rings pinball machine in your mini mansion, or Pac Man. For dining out you may accessorize with diamond jewels from Dannini and a suit with pin stripes woven in of 22 karat gold thread, starting price $30,000. If you want to spend money on something that moves, try a champagne leather lined Ferrari convertible. And while all of this may seem excessive to those of us who remember the times when you were overdressed at the beach if your jeans were clean, this lifestyle jump makes Tiffany’s in East Hampton look quaint.
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