Just as this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winners, three women President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee, and Tawakkol Karman, were announced, this film season features two films, The Iron Lady and The Lady. Both films focus on women rulers, one, Margaret Thatcher, a hawk, the other Aung San Suu Kyi, a dove who is in fact a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Both films reflect the steely nerve it takes to lead, revealing there is no one stereotype for women heads of state. In the parlance of the 1970’s wave of feminism, they may be called “lady,” but these ain’t no white glove and pearls sporting eye candy, even if they are wearing these accessories as Thatcher does.
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- 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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When The Help came out earlier this year, it quickly became the movie to see. Excellent performances, a great script based on Kathryn Stockett’s best selling novel, and a glimpse into the South and the great domestic divide between privileged white homemakers and the black women who raised them. At a luncheon last week at Desmond’s, Montego Glover, Nikki James, Anna Deveare Smith, and Billie Jean King celebrated the film’s happy arrival on DVD with two of the stars, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer, who got up to answer questions about the film. Set designers Rena DeAngelo and Mark Ricker were also on hand to explain how much of the film’s antique look came from flea markets. -
Alan Rickman warned me about this: In his new play at the Golden Theater on Broadway, Seminar by Theresa Rebeck, directed by Sam Gold, Rickman plays a well-established teacher of a private writers’ workshop. He cajoles and humiliates his students, sleeps with them, getting his point across. -
Last night at Avery Fisher Hall, introducing his latest masterfully shot and beautifully acted Rockwellesque epic movie, War Horse, director Steven Spielberg noted with pride that the play version was “on the boards” across the Lincoln Center complex. Then, he brought his performers to the stage one by one, with the exception of “Joey,” the film’s star. That’s because there are so many “Joeys,” he explained, seven would be jealous. -
When Elaine Kaufman died last December 3, she left a city of broken hearts. For months, "Elaine’s" lingered on, a nostalgic haven for “regulars,” but many still had to admit, Elaine’s was simply not the same without Elaine. When the doors closed, finally, that simply left a stratum of the entertainment world, eh, homeless. That night, Showbiz411's Roger Friedman filmed a final night with anecdotes galore about the legendary upper East Side joint, providing, along with archival interview footage of Elaine herself, enough material to keep a memorial for her, masterfully planned by Friedman and Fred Rappaport, lively for more than its 3 ½ hour extravaganza of clips and entertainment. -
It is hard to feel sorry for Charlize Theron. The Academy Award winning actress, for the role of Aileen Wuomos in Monster when she famously puffed up and made up to emphasize the serial killer’s tough look, is in fact very pretty, like the most popular girl in your high school. The gorgeous blond of your fantasy who has everything, is exactly the role she plays as Mavis Gary, a writer of young adult fiction loosely based on her memories of teen glory in Mercury, Minnesota in Jason Reitman’s Young Adult, script by Diablo Cody. And yet, her behavior trying to snatch back her happily married boyfriend is so unspeakable, you find her a pitiable, abject, lonely, delusional masochist and alcoholic who self-mutilates pulling out her hair. Ech! -
You could say that the Gotham Awards has edge, and heart, marking the official start of the awards season. Cavernous Cipriani’s on Wall Street was the scene of great film industry camaraderie on Monday night. An “Oscars” night for indie films, with categories like “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You,” the evening shines a light on many films that will make the trip to Los Angeles for the Golden Globes and Academy Awards, as say, The King’s Speech, did last year.This year, George Clooney may not be an indie leading man; that fact was not missed in this crowd. Much loved, he was the butt of at least one joke. In The Descendants, Alexander Payne’s latest film, he leads a stunning cast. The film is high on critics’ Best Picture lists. In the Gotham’s category of Best Ensemble Performance, Mike Mills’ excellent Beginners beat them out. Did you see it? Exactly. Christopher Plummer, picking up the prize, noted co-star Ewan MacGregor was off working in Africa. “I hate him,” he laughed.
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Deauville, 1930’s. The fine Private Lives revival directed by Richard Eyre at the Music Box Theater opens on a posh hotel terrace. The view must be amazing, you imagine as two couples on honeymoon in adjoining suites gaze over the audience to a yacht in the harbor. On the right, Elyot answers one jealous question after another about his first wife Amanda. His pretty blond new wife may sense Amanda’s shadowy presence. On the left, another newly wed man echoes the insecurities to his wife wrapped audaciously in a towel. Of course, the audience gets the conceit from the start; these in fact are one another’s exes, in the flesh! Yet the beauty of Private Lives is Noel Coward’s language, the hilarious barbs and banter, foreplay to out and out brawl. You cannot resist the unexpected laugh when Elyot, says, “Don’t quibble, Sybil.” -
In Martin Scorsese’s homage to cinema history, Hugo, there’s a delicious moment, one of many in this stunning 3D epic, when two children, Hugo and Isabelle attend a black & white silent Harold Lloyd movie and the actor dangles from the hands of a giant clock. Of course this image prefigures a scene when Hugo (Asa Butterfield, the accomplished star of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas) who works the clocks at Paris’ Gare Montparnasse ends up in a similar posture hanging on a snowy ledge, hiding from the station’s inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen). But the delight of this old movie for the children, the happiness in their faces, is truly what Scorsese is going for and achieves so masterfully in Hugo, arriving in time for the holidays and an assured “Best Picture” contender this season. “Hugo is a family movie,” introduced Scorsese at Monday night’s Ziegfeld premiere, and it took a beat to realize precisely what kind of family he had in mind. -
Sheila Nevins knows how to pick them. At HBO2 where documentaries are her domain, so to speak, she reigns supreme. But “don’t call me lucky,” she cautioned members of New York Women in Film and Television at a special breakfast, lest anyone might envy her this dream job. To get to this place is a lot of work. Part of that work is selecting films for HBO2 to produce as she did with the Paradise Lost trilogy, sending a film team to West Memphis to see what they can find out about a sensational murder story. And sometimes it is just seeing a film she wished she had made as in the case of The Sound of Mumbai to air on HBO on November 23. -
“All of David’s movies are about the body,” said producer Jeremy Thomas, when Cronenberg’s new film A Dangerous Method screened at this year’s New York Film Festival, “This time the body part is the brain.” Given that the brain can be the sexiest organ, you can think of A Dangerous Method, based on a stage play by the screenwriter Christopher Hampton as a love triangle with a twist: the players are the historic Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), and their patient Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), who became a writer and psychoanalyst in her own right. “They were incredible free thinkers,” Thomas went on. “David could have made this material salacious but he handled it with delicacy.” -
It was an unexpected Ezra Miller film festival: two movies premiering back to back this week, co-starring this gifted 19 year-old in roles that might give new parents pause. He's got this character nailed, the disaffected, edgy son with degrees of menace. Naturally the films in question, Sam Levinson's Another Happy Day and Lynne Ramsey's We Need to Talk About Kevin are all about the formidable moms, played by Ellen Barkin and Tilda Swinton. -
Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin has perhaps one of the most rarefied visions of anyone working in film: operatic, on a tilt, jawdropping. This weekend, his talent for bringing together elements, yes, Icelandic music from the Middle Ages to a unique historic moment in Canadian history, comes to the Walter Reade Theater for a program commissioned for this year's PERFORMA 11, the new visual art performance biennial. I had the opportunity to speak to Maddin about his TALES OF THE GIMLI HOSPITAL: REFRAMED, a dreamlike re-imagining of his first film from 1988, with a new score by Icelandic musicians including Aono Jikken Ensemble and former members of mum. -
Who doesn't love a wedding? What little girl doesn't adore the Barbie decked in tiered white tulle? Or fetishize her. Who ever thought such beloved and at times tacky traditions would be so political? And also terrifying? Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays at the Minetta Lane Theater, features eight playlets by the playwrights Mo Gaffney, Jordan Harrison, Moises Kaufman, Neil LaBute, Wendy MacLeod, Jose Rivera, Paul Rudnick, and Doug Wright. If you cry at weddings, straight or gay, you can consider these cathartic canapés. -
A lovely ingénue strolled about the Milk Gallery in a black Dior with train, a replica of a dress worn by Marilyn Monroe in an iconic photograph by Bert Stern. The exhibition, Picturing Marilyn, a joint effort by Staley Wise and The Weinstein Company was an attempt to stage a surreal visitation in tandem with the release of the film, My Week with Marilyn. The young actress was in fact Dree Hemingway, great granddaughter of Ernest and daughter of Mariel who might have been her age when she starred in Woody Allen's Manhattan. Also present at Wednesday's opening were hosts Harvey Weinstein, Dominic Cooper, Celeste Holm, and many well-wishers: Andrea Riseborough, Christie Brinkley, Harry Benson, Vogue's Grace Coddington, among them. -
In its 5th year, The Bob Woodruff Foundation and The New York Comedy Festival's night of Stand Up for Heroes, featured a number of comedy's best voices, Ricky Gervais, Jim Gaffigan, Seth Myers, and Jon Stewart among them, but this annual laugh fest to benefit something very serious also had a few personalities less known for making people laugh. Bill Clinton thought it odd he'd open at a comedy night and had a great moment reminding the packed Beacon Theater that through genome research he's learned that he, Hillary and Chelsea are all descended from Neanderthals. Even Bruce Springsteen got into the comedy: showing off New Jersey moxie and menschlechkeit, he graces this stage every year, rocking out and auctioning off a guitar or two.
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Begowned in gold Versace at Monday night's Glamour's Women of the Year Awards, Jennifer Lopez said little about the ups and downs in her life and career, but said the women in her life-mom, sisters, friends– encircled her and got her through. “T,” a survivor of the child sex trade wore a sparkly Tory Burch, telling her horror story of being forced to the streets at age 10. Jennifer Aniston, a consummate comic herself introduced Chelsea Handler, while Marc Jacobs honored his friend Cindy Sherman. An iconic Sherman just went for the highest price ever for a photograph by any artist. Condoleeza Rice introduced Laura Bush and the Bush girls who quipped that they'd learned a lot from reading Glamour. The biggest laugh: suggesting Laura could drive her man wild. -
Werner Herzog is all over DOC NYC. In this, its second year, his film Into the Abyss was screened opening night on Wednesday. The famed German director quipped that all of his films could have this title. Indeed, last year his Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a 3D undersea archeological expedition kicked off the inaugural DOC NYC. The high grossing documentary might qualify-caves, massive bodies of water, get it?– but for entirely different reasons. -
What were Laurel & Hardy doing at the annual jazz loft party? One of many great pleasures of this night of superb sound to benefit the Jazz Foundation of America's efforts to help musicians in need was Steven Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra performing some wildly original accompaniment to the comic duo's silent movies, “Double Whoopie” and “Wrong Again.” But that's the kind of night it was on Saturday: while the northeast was challenged with a pre-Halloween ice storm, jazz devotees showed up and made their way around Chelsea's Hudson Studios drink in hand following their ears to hear a who's who of jazz royalty. -
At 15, Abigail Breslin wears makeup. Clad in day-glo chartreuse for the premiere of her new movie, Janie Jones, she's now a young starlet. Based on director David M. Rosenthal's real-life discovery of his preteen daughter who he never knew existed, this evocative father-daughter indie film also stars Alessandro Nivola as an infantile alcoholic rocker on tour. Saddled with Janie when her drug addict mom (Elisabeth Shue) drops her off and splits, Nivola's character Ethan Brand does some growing up himself taking on the role of dad. -
The fans outlying MoMA for the New York premiere of The Rum Diary were quadruple deep, awaiting the arrival of the star, Johnny Depp. Too bad the Titus I screening room was three quarters filled. Apparently the star did not want a full house. Why? Let's call it the vagaries of stardom. I had met Depp before, before his turn as Jack Sparrow turned him quirky. At the premiere of an earlier film we talked about his double roles in Julian Schnabel's Before Night Falls (brilliant), and his passion for beat literature. With Hunter S. Thompson, it's guilt by association. -
Dee Dee Ricks is shameless in a very good way. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007, this single mother, a success on Wall Street with lots of money to burn, as she puts it, realized that her boys, then 5 and 3, would not remember her if the disease progressed to a worst case scenario. And so she filmed every moment of her cancer battle: doctor visits, chemo, double mastectomy, hair loss, wig creation, reconstructive surgery and without a blink, her breasts before and after. Her film, The Education of Dee Dee Ricks, directed by Perri Peltz, will air on October 27 on HBO. Throughout, she appears remarkably up beat and fearless even while expressing her darkest moments. -
With the writing talents of Ethan Coen, Elaine May, and Woody Allen, featuring performances by an ensemble that includes Marlo Thomas, Steve Guttenberg, and Julie Kavner, under the direction of John Turturro, the 3 one-acters that comprise Relatively Speaking at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre are exactly as you would expect, very funny. On Wednesday, my husband and I, fans of all three writers, enjoyed a fine night of theater, as good as can be. A delicious debate ensued. Which was best?
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British children may have been promised oranges and sunshine as they were deported to Australia in the '60's and '70's in a scandalous child trafficking operation affecting some 130,000 kids, but that is hardly what they found there. The children, aged 3 to 13, often left in child care by unwed mothers, were lied to, told their families were dead. In Australia, most were enlisted in a labor pool, forced into hard construction and menial jobs, beaten into servility, and many raped. This piece of twentieth century horror might have been swept aside but a social worker in Nottingham, Margaret Humphreys, dedicated herself to helping the children, now grown, find their families. She is also asking for accountability from agencies in both governments. Her story is told in the film, Oranges and Sunshine, directed by Jim Loach and starring Emily Watson, featured in this year's Hamptons International Film Festival. While it is not a documentary, Oranges and Sunshine faithfully portrays the shocking truth. -
Jean Dujardin, star of the much acclaimed movie, The Artist, conceived and directed by Michel Hazanavicius, is dubbed the French George Clooney. Silent, and black & white, The Artist is the perfect foreign film, playfully incarnating the era of Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks, a Gallic homage with no accents. Shot in Hollywood with a supporting cast of American actors, Penelope Ann Miller, John Goodman, James Cromwell and Beth Grant, among them, the film limns the career of a fictional actor, George Valentin, who after a near tragic prideful “fall” makes the transition from silent films to talkies, with the love of a young actress played with eye fluttering excellence by the director's wife Berenice Bejo and accompanied by Ludovic Bource's evocative original music. Helping Peppy Miller become a star, George shows her how to pencil in a beauty mark. Their tap duet is surely the most joyful finale in recent movies. A classic love story, The Artist is an exhilarating nod to old Hollywood as only the French could make.
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