In Eugene O’Neill’s 1943 play, A Moon for the Misbegotten, faithfully revived at The Pearl Theatre, the mores of the time seem antiquated but the performances by Kim Martin-Cotten as farm woman Josie Hogan, and Andrew May as her well educated yet drunken landlord Jim Tyrone, Jr. are pitch perfect. She, ungainly and with a rough tongue, he finely groomed, his language elegant if slurred from drink, make for as unlikely a pair as befits drama or life. In a ruse concocted by her father Phil Hogan (the Pearl’s ribald Dan Daily) to catch them in bed so that he will be forced to marry her—a plot point that seems refreshingly silly in today’s world, it is soon revealed just which of these characters is the most to be admired, and what slim pickin’s rural life has for her. The men, especially the tortured Tyrone, have the mobility to leave the farm, as Josie’s brother, Mike (the Pearl’s fine Sean McNall) does early on. Under J. R. Sullivan’s expert direction, the play offers a beautifully wrought glimpse of O’Neill’s characters’ inner worlds.
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Teenhood is not for sissies. Lee Hirsch and Cynthia Lowen’s documentary Bully opens with the dead-eyed gaze of a man, a father, talking about the suicide of his son, a victim of bullying. As if ripped from the proverbial front pages, the movie resonates with public awareness of this mean-spirited practice akin to the Rutgers webcam privacy violation that resulted in one young man’s suicide and another’s conviction for a crime. Bully comes with its own baggage: the M.P.A.A. “R” rating for six instances of the “f” word that will result in a censoring of the film from the population that most needs to see it, school-agers. No matter that the offense as heard in some footage aboard a school bus is the voice of a nasty, potty-mouthed boy deploying a threat to a girl that he will “f” her in the most vicious, unconscionable way. Did the board actually watch the movie? This rating is a lame, knee jerk response. And it is not just for kids. Grownups, parents and school officials need extra doses of this movie which features one of the most obtuse vice principals ever witnessed, claiming the school bus riders are “angels.” Harvey Weinstein pointed out an irony: the country’s top movie, the fantasy world survival story, Hunger Games, has a PG-13 rating while showing teens killing teens. In any case, as of this writing, Harvey Weinstein has decided to release the film with no rating.
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My favorite Sara Driver story involves her 1981 film of Paul Bowles’s short story, “You Are Not I.” Long thought lost, a print of the 48-minute film was discovered in 2008 among Bowles’ possessions in Tangier, Morocco in his driver’s insecticide-laden basement. Now restored, the film was featured at several conferences and festivals celebrating the author’s centennial last year. In its own right, Sara Driver’s work has been feted in Buenos Aires, Reykjavik, and Thessalonika, among other places.This weekend You Are Not I screens in a retrospective at Anthology Film Archives, “Sleepwalking: The Films of Sara Driver,” along with her films Sleepwalk (1986), When Pigs Fly (1994), and Bowery—Spring, an 11-minute documentary from 1994. Also marking the occasion of a newly minted boxed DVD set of Driver’s work, the series will feature films Driver found inspiring, among them Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People and Charlotte Zwerin and Bruce Ricker’s Thelonius Monk: Straight No Chaser.
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Admiring the television series Roots as a boy, Yale educated and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores a passion for genetics and genealogies in a new PBS series, Finding Your Roots, to start this Sunday. Featuring Mayor Cory Booker and Congressman John Lewis in the season premiere, a private screening wowed audiences at Lincoln Center’s Rose Hall on Monday. The episode intertwines the history of these two prominent Americans to reveal a poignant story of slavery, the struggle for civil rights, and a proud new generation of leaders. The backstories, developed through copious research of public records, an oral tradition of family lore, and DNA testing, are remarkable–so amazing, in fact, you wonder, what if these findings are wrong? No matter, the discovery makes for great television. -
Our winter may be mild but the cold breeze off Lincoln Center last week for the premiere of Frozen Planet was distinct, in the teeth-chattering presence of cool sculptures of an ice waterfall and ice penguins. And inside Alice Tully Hall, the temperature was brisk too. The Discovery Channel’s documentary series Frozen Planet, “The Ends of the Earth” to air on March 18, proves that good storytelling features sex and violence, even if it is family entertainment. As Alec Baldwin narrates, giant polar bears can sniff the scent of a female seven miles away, and stepping through the snow in her footsteps, they stalk her, often mounting her bloodied, having successfully fought off a contender. -
Petite and utterly adorable, the French movie star Audrey Tautou will always be known as the “Amelie” girl for her delightful performance in the 2001 film. On closing night of this year’s Rendez-vous with French Cinema, she was the guest of honor at a soiree at the upper East side Cultural Services of the French Embassy, attending with a posse that included her hairdresser. Her new movie Delicacy, opening in New York this week, has an office romance at its core. In a far corner of the elegant Fifth Avenue townhouse, Tautou, dark curls bobbing, spoke about why her character would enter into an inexplicable love affair with a dull witted co-worker. “You don’t know where love comes from. He touched her in a deep place,” said Tautou her hands gesticulating wildly. Next up for her is a movie with Cedric Klapisch, Casse Tete Chinoise, an expression that translates loosely to “head crushing anxiety,” to be shot soon in Chinatown. When asked if there is an American director with whom she’d like to work, she did not hesitate: “Alexander Payne. I adored his About Schmidt.” The French do love what they love. -
Meet the family at the core of Nina Raine’s smartly wise, well acted and subtle drama Tribes at the Barrow Street Theater: three grown kids and parents all living under the same roof. Opening on what might be a typical dinner for these upper class, articulate intellectuals, cacophony reigns as speakers clamor for attention; for clarity, Christopher (Jeff Perry), the dad of this unruly clan, whips out the Lacan. Or maybe the act is to belittle as this retired academic’s specialty is language, and the uses and abuses thereof. As barbs fly, soon you see that one son sits in eye bulging silence craning to look fully at his siblings’ faces attempting to read their lips. Deaf, Billy was not brought up signing. In denial about his “disability,” it turns out, the family has, so to speak, turned a deaf ear. -
Lasse Hallstrom’s new movie, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, is a romance with an improbable premise. A liberal minded sheik wants to bring salmon to his native Yemen, not the kind you eat, but those that need a waterway for jumping and swimming upstream to spawn. This feat involves more than irrigating the Negev. Being rather wealthy, the sheik (Amr Waked) has the means to bulldoze, build a dam, whatever is necessary. But Harriet (Emily Blunt), his energetic and perky facilitator, needs to enlist an expert fly fisher Fred (Ewan MacGregor) to make the improbable happen. Kristen Scott Thomas plays the heavy, press secretary for the British prime minister who milks every photo op. And then, there’s a plot to kill the sheik, far too progressive to get away with his vision. -
For the same reasons that Sarah Palin is a riveting figure in American politics, the HBO movie Game Change is an astonishingly smart look at her and the world that put her in the position of John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election. Even when played by Julianne Moore, you cannot take your eyes off Sarah Palin. -
If you want to ensure a successful awards dinner, have Marshall Brickman as your M.C. A creator of the musical Jersey Boys, he has a wealth of mob related anecdotes, and with the aplomb of a seasoned comic, he delivers. At Guild Hall’s annual gala, rooftop at the St. Regis on Monday night, he told a story about an inmate who wanted him to do a sequel called, “Has Anybody Seen Frankie?” Declining, he now fears for his life.
Given the decidedly downtown edge to the awardees, the speeches were rather formal. Lou Reed presented to Laurie Anderson for Performing Arts. A “woman who can do anything,” Anderson thanked two people, one who taught her how to say no, the other yes. When she asked the famously reclusive Thomas Pynchon for the rights to make an opera of his Gravity’s Rainbow, he wrote back, fine, with one restriction, it must be for one instrument, the banjo. The other was Buddhist Trungpa Rinpoche advising, “You need to learn the skill of feeling sad without being sad. We all have to find the way ourselves.”
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It’s a great year for Harvey Weinstein. The Weinstein Company co-chairman is the 2012 recipient of the Legion d’ Honneur awarded by France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy. The distinction was conferred last July but Weinstein wisely requested, according to a press release, “to keep the honor private to avoid a conflict of interest with Academy Award Best Picture winner The Artist.” -
Woody Allen may have won this year’s Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for his whimsical movie, Midnight in Paris, with its time tripping to the 1920’s when Gertrude Stein held court in her salon. But Paris had another literary heyday in the mid-century when another round of Americans, among them George Plimpton, James Baldwin, Peter Stone, Irwin Shaw, Barney Rosset, Richard Seaver, and the beats hung out. Rosset died last week at age 89, and for those who valued his contribution to upholding first amendment rights in this country, his championing the works of artists, transgressive in subject and language (Beckett, Burroughs, Miller, Lawrence, Genet, Ionesco) the event truly marks the end of an era. People said the same when Dick Seaver died in 2009, but this time we really, really mean it. -
A sublime vocalist, Dianne Reeves took the stage at the Rose Theater of Jazz at Lincoln Center, glamorous in blue and aware that this was Oscar weekend. Having performed her era evoking music for George Clooney’s 2005 Good Night, and Good Luck, his film about Edward R. Murrow, the only other black and white film to be nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award before The Artist, she has seen the handsome Clooney up close; she offered “and he’s real nice.” Wishing she could be there in L.A. to support him now, she went on to perform a repertoire of standards that included “One for my Baby (and One for the Road),” “Stormy Weather,” “Our Love is Here to Stay,” “Twelfth of Never,” and backed up by a superb ensemble featuring Peter Martin on piano, Reginald Veal on bass, Terreon Gully on drums, and the guitars of Romero Lubambo and Peter Sprague, she scatted a tune inspired by a jet lagged night in Barcelona watching CNN on television. She heard a singer and “this is how she sounded to me,” recounted Reeves as she launched into her tune imitating Spanish. -
On the 6th floor of the Museum of Modern Art, Cindy Sherman is just where you want her, everywhere. In a retrospective of her work opening Sunday, in every portrait, her image –made up, masked, reconfigured –shocks, satirizes, surprises with its smart take on contemporary looks, fashion, and ideas of what it means to be visible: portraits from every period in her career, from black and white film stills evoking no particular picture specifically, to the clown series, to the more recent grand portraits of be-pearled and head-banded Park Avenue matrons with enigmatic and sad Mona Lisa smiles or smirks suggesting dubious delight, dismay and possible disgust. Ladies locked in luxury. -
Vanderbilt Hall, a cavernous space at the entrance of historic Grand Central Station, was fitted with Oscar statuettes, for an exhibition to bring the yearly awards events to everyone, commuters and those, like me, who love to pass through this cherished landmark, en route to Broadway, Barney’s and Bergdorf’s. Just before ribbon cutting, I had a chance to chat with Melissa Leo. The Academy Award winner for Supporting Actress in last year’s The Fighter made this stop en route to L.A. to present the Best Supporting Actor award on Sunday night. “I wouldn’t mind sharing a stage with any one of those guys,” she ventured gamely about Jonah Hill, Kenneth Branagh, Nick Nolte, Max von Sydow, and front-runner Christopher Plummer. -
Getting to her parents’ house, a posh Palm Springs place in sand tones of bland and blander, Brooke Wyeth has to navigate past a sign that directs to “other desert cities,” but I don’t think the cities out west are the ones to keep an eye on in Jon Robin Baitz’s outstanding play, Other Desert Cities, now moved to Broadway’s Booth Theater. Retaining Stockard Channing and Stacy Keach in the parental roles of Polly and Lyman Wyeth from the Lincoln Center production, the play now features Justin Kirk as their son Trip, Judith Light as Polly’s sister and one-time writing partner Silda, and Rachel Griffiths as Brooke who has come from Sag Harbor for the holidays armed with her new, soon-to-be-published memoir. To borrow an idea from a known adage, if you see a lethal manuscript, the pages are going to fly. -
On the morning the Golden Globe nominations were announced, Woody Harrelson broke decorum, plugging his new film Rampart in which he plays an out of control cop. Not nominated, his testosterone-fueled performance nevertheless illustrates this Maui-based actor’s ferocity, playing a character very little like his green (he grows his own produce), peace loving, pot-smoking self. Just before opening, I caught up with Oren Moverman at the Gramercy Park Hotel restaurant where the Israeli born Rampart writer/director filled in Woody’s missing link. -
They are not called Loving for nothing. Loving is simply their name. You could not find a true tale more tailor-made for Valentine’s Day than the story that ended laws against interracial marriage in America in the mid-‘60’s. A documentary featuring archival footage and period photography, The Loving Story airs on HBO on February 14. The line you will remember is, “Tell the judge, I love my wife and I will not leave her.” -
In this its second year featuring a lively weekend of films focused on women and leadership, the Athena Awards, founded by Kathryn Kolbert and Melissa Silverstein and held at Barnard College, honored The Tempest director Julie Taymor, Moneyball’s producer Rachael Horovitz, Pariah’s director Dee Rees and producer Nekisa Cooper, and the Fempire: Young Adult writer Diablo Cody, , Liz Meriwether, and Lorene Scafaria. A Laura Ziskind Lifetime Achievement Award was inaugurated in memory of this noted film producer and activist in cancer research. Recipients are asked to adhere to only one caveat: they must speak about a woman who has influenced or inspired them, not their mother. An act of rebellion, this rule was immediately violated.
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“It’s harsh,” said Polish director Agnieszka Holland introducing her new movie, In Darkness at a special screening at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens last month. Literally dark, In Darkness, to open this week in New York, takes place under ground in the sewers of Lvov, Poland in Holocaust era Europe. Based on Robert Marshall’s book, In the Sewers of Lvov, about the story of Jews hiding in the wet, stinky sludge and the Polish thief and sewer worker, Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), who helps them survive, at times, the rats—seen and unseen, the soundtrack of their scurrying and little squeals is terrifically powerful–seem more menacing than the Nazis hunting for Jews above ground. -
On a balmy New York evening with snow a distant memory, the corners of the Crosby Hotel were fitted with white stuff, the waiters sported big ski lodge sweaters and snow boots, and the décor, usually warm, was even cozier. The occasion was a screening of an episode of Lilyhammer, the first of five original series planned for Netflix. Harvey Weinstein and Netflix's chief content officer Ted Sarandos hosted the evening, with help from uber party planner Peggy Siegal. Starring E Street Band guitarist and The Sopranos veteran Steven Van Zandt, Lillyhammer begs the question, where can mob fugitives go to hide? Even ex-Sopranos? Well, how about Lillehammer, the remote town in Norway that famously hosted the Olympics in 1984? It looked pristine, beautiful, Frankie ("The Fixer") Tagliano explains even as he brings his ways of getting things done (i.e. bribes, blackmail) to cut through the country’s bureaucracy. Talk about a clash of cultures! -
A controversy over whether or not the original 1935 opera Porgy & Bess can work, pared down, cut in music and story, clouds over what should be a celebration. Filled with perhaps the most well known lyrics in the American songbook, Porgy & Bess in any variation is welcome.The current version at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, with book redone by Suzan-Lori Parks and Diedre L. Murray, and directed by Diane Paulus is a crowd pleasing musical. Having seen much of what Paulus has done in recent years, with her interest in bringing high brow art to a place in popular culture: Shakespeare’ Midsummer Night’s Dream as The Donkey Show, Turandot as a wrestling competition, and Hair both in Central Park and on Broadway with audience participation, the variations in this Porgy & Bess seem tame by comparison.
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A conceit, an ironic barb, wit can be searing and funny. In the case of Margaret Edson’s Wit, the Tony winning play now in a Manhattan Theatre Club revival at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre under the fine direction of Lynne Meadow, Wit follows the journey of Vivian Bearing, a name that loosely translates to “enduring life,” a college professor specializing in 17th century metaphysical poetry, in the verse of John Donne to be specific, author of “Death Be Not Proud.” As performed by Sex & the City’s Cynthia Nixon, she is a brainy Everyman/woman, precious in what she knows and does, vital in knowledge, commitment, and contribution to life, devastating to lose. And lose her we do. Sorry for the spoiler: she dies at Wit’s end. -
“Fame is fleeting,” said Harvey Weinstein introducing Coriolanus last week at the film’s Paris Theater premiere. Juxtaposing the all night Golden Globe parties with his turn on television with Uggie, the canine star of his movie The Artist, Weinstein noted, one minute I’m accepting awards (The Artist, My Week with Marilyn, The Iron Lady, were among Weinstein films honored with top prizes), the next I’m on the Today show with a dog. But what a dog!Anticipating the Best Picture Oscar nod, Uggie’s P.R. people called for a photo op at the Empire State Building, on the 86th floor deck. With his trainer and owner Omar von Muller, the Jack Russell terrier played dead and eh, manned a skateboard. Ever since Cannes, this “rescued” dog has been a secret darling of the film: at the New York Film Festival opening, The Artist director Michel Hazanavicius was asked how he worked with the dog. Sausages. The reply seems to have gone viral.
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The Pearl Theatre Company revival of George Bernard Shaw’s The Philanderer had many in the audience wondering why this delightful and deliciously scandalous play is not produced more often. Of course the sex implied and on view between corseted women and waist-coated men is nothing to raise a contemporary eyebrow, but in its day, 1893, it was banned for fifteen years.
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