In Katori Hall's play The Mountaintop, taking place on the fateful night that Martin Luther King was assassinated, a maid named Camae, delivering room service says, “Let me take you to the mountaintop.” And every way you can imagine to take that statement, a play off the speech the iconic Dr. King gave that afternoon, works.
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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Marilyn Monroe may have been the original superstar, from the era when such mega stardom was invented. Her public and private persona remains infinitely fascinating, even when she is portrayed, pouting, petulant, and persuasive by the actress Michelle Williams. On Sunday, the movie, My Week With Marilyn, directed by Simon Curtis premiered at the New York Film Festival, its centerpiece, and it is a gem. -
For documentary filmmakers, it doesn't get better than this: having your work bring about change.In 1993, a newspaper item about the murder of three 8-year olds in West Memphis and the three teenaged boys arrested for the crime piqued the interest of HBO's Sheila Nevins. She called the filmmaking team of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, sending them south to document the case. The filmmakers thought they were going to tell a tale about guilty teens and Satanic rituals in the heartland. Finding the evidence overwhelming that the men were innocent, instead they made a movie that pointed toward a miscarriage of justice. Two earlier versions of the documentary, shown at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's New Directions/ New Films festival and HBO galvanized support for the convicted young men. After 18 years in prison, the men were released this past August.
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Uptown at the Walter Reade Theater on Thursday night, the vibe was decidedly downtown. The occasion: the New York Film Festival screening of director Sara Driver's film of a Paul Bowles short story, “You Are Not I.” -
If the world ends any time soon, as threatened for 2012, what will the last day on earth look like? That is the dominant conceit for two films in this year's New York Film Festival: Lars von Trier in his film Melancholia imagines a planet hurtling toward Earth disrupting the kind of human rituals this director is so good at skewing, and starring a fine ensemble: Kirsten Dunst, Kiefer Sutherland, Alexander Skarsgard, and Charlotte Gainsburg who starred in von Trier's last festival offering, the controversial Manderlay, with Willem Dafoe. This last is worth mentioning as Dafoe stars in Abel Ferrara's film, 4:44 Last Day on Earth, less fanciful and more rooted in the realities of a downtown New York junkie's existence. -
Fans of Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage will wonder what happened when that Tony winning stage play was adapted for the screen by the playwright for her friend, director Roman Polanski, and redubbed simply, Carnage. At Alice Tully Hall last night where the movie opened the New York Film Festival audiences cheered Polanski’s credit, knowing that this master Academy Award winning filmmaker would not attend. He was, as it were, a presence in absence. -
In the elevator moving 9 floors up the Museum of Art and Design to Robert Restaurant, C and Jeffrey Toobin hotly debated the news of the day: the trial of Dr. Conrad Murray. Would Michael Jackson's doctor be convicted of involuntary manslaughter? Chances are he'll get off. Then again, . . . . Doors opened to a throng of television news A-listers abuzz, celebrating Erin Burnett's upcoming show, Out Front, to premiere Monday. Cameras flashed. Anderson Cooper posed in front of the CNN scrim. -
Just a few blocks from the UN with police lining Lexington Avenue preparing for President Obama's visit, the Four Seasons Restaurant was the site of a power summit on world peace. A new WNET 5-part series focused on the critical role of women worldwide in war stricken regions is to air on 5 consecutive Tuesdays starting October 11 on PBS, and the mood was fierce to say, without women at the table, there will be no peace. -
If novelists John le Carre and Alan Furst were interested in true-life stories, they might have written books about William Colby. Instead his son Carl Colby, a documentary filmmaker who has made award-winning films on Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Frank Gehry, and Bob Marley, among others, has turned his ample investigative attention to the life of his father, a military man and CIA director whose career spanned ill-fated chapters of American history: the Kennedy presidency and the Vietnam War. George Bush Sr. followed him as CIA head.By everyone's admission, William Colby was a man with many secrets, a more than fertile subject even in the conventional Freudian paradigm. The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby features extensive interviews with Donald Rumsfeld, Brent Scowcroft, Bob Kerrey, Zbigniew Brzezinski, James Schlesinger, Bob Woodward, Seymour Hersh, Tim Weiner, a heady 85 in all; the film works best as a family story set against post WWII.
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Forget the red carpet. The drum beats on Fifth Avenue and 125th Street drew a select audience into the National Black Theatre for the eagerly awaited world premiere of Radha Blank's SEED. The 5-character drama involving a social worker, a family, and a prison inmate, against a back screen of the New York City subways and Harlem environs is fresh, lively, and let's just say, features one of the funniest exchanges ever to take place at a DuaneReade. -
In Robert Creeley's poem, I Know A Man, an unnamed narrator urges his friend John, which is not his name, to buy a goddamn big car/ “drive, he sd for christ's sake, look out where yr going,” predating the spirit of a current slick and stylish movie, Drive, directed by Copenhagen-based Nicolas Winding Refn, who won Best Director in Cannes. On a recent afternoon over an iced cappuccino at Gemma in The Bowery Hotel, I talked to Refn about the making of Drive, his casting of Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Christina Hendricks, Albert Brooks, and his “vision.” -
The actress Jessica Chastain, lovely in a lace Carolina Herrera dress, plunked herself down on a cushion removing her beige platforms in relief after rounds of photos and interviews. A publicist was sheltering the petite redhead from the Post's Page Six editor. This was the after party for a new film, Take Shelter, at the Vault at Pfaff's, where the wait staff was dressed in Christian Siriano strapless chiffon cocktail dresses with bejeweled waistbands in celebration of that downtown boite's opening. Chastain's deglamorized look in Take Shelter as the loyal wife of a troubled construction worker, t-shirts and non-designer jeans with tousled mane, might be closer to the real Jessica. One of the great pleasures of this Sundance favorite is seeing Chastain's work with Michael Shannon. -
You could feel the weight of the occasion at the Milk Gallery in the Meatpacking on Thursday night, the site of a portrait exhibition and screening of a documentary marking the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Not that NYC was lacking in remembrance, but these photographs of key players in the event and after by Marco Grob for Time Magazine's tribute volume, Portraits of Resilience embody ennobling gravitas, the kind of historic moment captured in oils by the great masters. -
Film director Paul Morrissey, erstwhile manager of Andy Warhol's Factory, has been dogged, his career overshadowed by the Warhol legend. His iconic films Trash, Lonesome Cowboys, Heat, and Flesh were merely presented by Warhol and so deemed the artist's films, while it was Morrissey who actually made them. “Andy had Asperger's Syndrome; he didn't do anything,” groused Morrissey to interviewer James Toback at a special screening of his latest film News from Nowhere last Tuesday at the Walter Reade Theater. “What did Andy do?”Fans, many friends and neighbors like Bruce Weber, were able to revisit Morrissey's unique vision at the News from Nowhere screening. The new movie, the best ever filmed in Montauk, Long Island, is a testament to Morrissey's artistry. A handsome and mysterious stranger, an Argentine illegal worker (Demian Gabriel) arrives by fishing boat, and connects with an assortment of eccentrics, most notably an older woman (Warhol superstar Viva) who occupies a rundown and secluded oceanfront compound of old style, grand, shingled houses and bungalows. The site was the property Morrissey owned with Warhol since 1971. Before selling it two years ago, Morrissey decided to make a film there, a final homage.
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Anticipating great gusts and flooding, many Hamptonites chose the real-life drama of celebrity lives as read by celebrities over the real-life drama of storms at Guild Hall last Friday night. Matthew Broderick reading Tommy Lee's advice on what to do with a woman's “gummy bear” stole a show that also featured Mario Cantone revealing what Tallulah Bankhead did with a variety of cats and Joy Behar reading from Madonna's now out-of-print sex book.The entire company, including Nathan Lane, Tovah Feldshuh, Scott Adsit, Dayle Reyfel, and Celebrity Autobiography creator Eugene Pack chimed in on that ultra Hollywood scandal, the Liz Taylor-Debbie Reynolds-Eddie Fisher-Richard Burton story as told through the prism of several tell-alls. Lane was suave as Mike Todd, Behar nasal as a hotel operator, with Feldshuh as a most glamorous Liz. And I thought I heard it all in Carrie Fisher's one-woman Wishful Drinking!
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As the eastern coast of the United States gears up for a big storm due to hit on Sunday, many are stocking water, batteries, whatever in case they can't make it to “higher ground.” Coincidentally a beautiful, grace-full film called Higher Ground, directed by Vera Farmiga who also stars, opened Friday, about a woman's spiritual progression initiated by a near death experience. -
The idea of an 11 year old from an affluent Parisian family who decides to commit suicide at age 12 because her “fishbowl” life is “not for her” does not strike me as funny, but it is a reigning conceit of Mona Achache's crowd-pleasing film The Hedgehog, based on Muriel Barbery's much beloved novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog. The “hedgehog” of the title, a sad and lonely apartment building concierge played by the wonderful actress Josiane Balasko experiences an awakening thanks to her neighbor, Kazuro Ozu (Togo Igawa). The precocious preteen is watching.Before opening theatrically this week, the 2009 film traveled to American film festivals, winning many audience awards. I caught up with Balasko in July, for a rooftop coffee in a midtown hotel.
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The revival of Enter Laughing that opened Saturday night at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor had me howling so hard I nearly needed my own reviving. That's because Richard Kind is impossibly funny, and Josh Grisetti matches him zany move for move in the role of David Kolowitz. A cross between PeeWee Herman and Alan Cumming, he's hilarious when he enters laughing, trying out every guffaw, hiccup, chuckle, snort, belly-wrenching hoot in his repertoire.
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As we watch the Republicans plan their strategy for toppling the American president, the question of what makes a good leader, indeed, a good man (of either gender) is played out, not in our current political arena, but onstage at the Malcom X & Dr.Betty Shabazz Memorial and Education Center, at the Classical Theatre of Harlem's concise, snazzy production of Shakespeare's Henry V. -
For a public person, Gloria Steinem, 77, the writer and activist who is for many people the face of feminism, knows how to get up close and personal. Last week, at the Time Warner Center premiere for the documentary limning her life and career, Gloria Steinem: In Her Own Words to air on HBO on August 15, most in attendance were too young to have seen her in action in the '60's and '70's, or the historic moments that defined her career and this chapter of the struggle for women's rights: her reportage as a Playboy bunny, the founding of Ms. Magazine, bra burning, Roe v. Wade, and much more. -
To imagine Richard Prince doing drip paintings in honor of Jackson Pollock is too linear a concept for what Prince does in Guild Hall's new exhibition, Richard Prince: Covering Pollock. The iconic abstract expressionist is pure subject for Prince's collages, repetitions in the manner of Warhol, Rauchenberg-like juxtapositions. He's evoking a whole lot more than just Pollock in this homage.
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How old am I? asked Eli Wallach playfully. The occasion was a staged reading of works by Tennessee Williams, from memoirs, letters, and scenes from his work, most memorably The Glass Menagerie in honor of the playwright's centennial year.91, averred a reporter.
With a smile, his finger gestured up. Meeting the challenge the reporter counted to 95. His face glowed. That's it.
Do the math. Tennessee would have been only 5 years older and yet he seems to have come from a different era than this veteran actor who was quick to tell me he appeared in two recent movies: Oliver Stone's Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps and Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer.
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After the American writer Jack Kerouac's On the Road hit the bestseller lists in 1957, its characters were instantly immortalized, but not as fictional creations. Much to the author's horror, they became fodder for the needy mid-century Zeitgeist, heroes of an alternative lifestyle. You can read shy Kerouac's Big Sur, an account of his nervous breakdown, to understand his terror at girls trying to climb into his window to bed him, thinking the sexy guy based on Neal Cassady was really the author. Or, you can see Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood's “archival cinema verite” documentary Magic Trip to see Neal Cassady's next chapter, as the driver of Ken Kesey's bus Further. -
Making theater requires a lot of planning. In fact, it takes about five years to produce the average opera. Imagine only having 24 hours to write, compose, cast, direct, rehearse, and perform a show! In the documentary One Night Stand, which premiered last week at Newfest, filmmakers Elisabeth Sperling and Trish Dalton provide a behind-the-scenes view of the annual fundraising event, The 24 Hour Plays.
During the festival, which has taken place in late winter or early spring for the past four years, volunteer writers, composers, directors and performers are put into groups and produce four separate twenty minute plays within the span of a day. And you thought your job was stressful!
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The parties are planned for the fall, at least 4 of them in Milan, Berlin, New York, and Paris, for the internationally famous artist Robert Wilson's 70th birthday. But on Saturday night, he presided over the 18th annual summer benefit for the Byrd Hoffman Watermill Center. Celebrating collaboration in the arts, the extravaganza featured an array of wildly clad actors in outlandish poses and postures, in haute melodrama befitting the theme: Voluptuous Panic; taken together throughout the Center's ample 8 acres, 20 site-specific installations and performances created by young international artists, the Center became a carnival of splendor and silver body paint. You never knew what might come peeking through the trees, or underfoot, as in two heads poking up through the straw ground cover. For all his avant-garde vision, Wilson stays close to the classics: One upcoming premiere, a production of The Odyssey for October, 2012, in Athens.
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