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about: Regina Weinreich

  • My Rendez-Vous with French Cinema

    If you ever had a doubt that the French are obsessed with love, or at least have a different mindset about all variations: amour fou, fidelity, passion, adultery than we puritanical Americans, check out their movies. On this matter, the French are consistent.

    Even in an epic length period drama like The Princess of Montpensierwith its sweeping battle scenes and violence, the love the young womanof the title experiences for Henri de Guise (Gaspard Ulliel), the rakish heartthrob of her youth is what matters most to director Bertrand Tavernier. Adapted from a 16th century 30 page story by Madame de Lafayette, the film also features Lambert Wilson, perhapsthe most appealing of French actors (see the very fine Of Gods and Men), as Chabanne, a soldier who transgresses military code by murdering a pregnant woman, driving his long blade through her belly, for which he renounces violence.Most tender are Marie’s scenes with Chabanne who instructs her in literature, philosophy, and all mattersof the court.      

    Deneuve But as the popular Rendez-vous with French Cinema festival screens in the week ahead, love takes many forms: In the opening night film, Francois Ozon’s Potiche, the trophy wife played by Catherine Deneuvein curlers and professing bourgeois bliss, reconnects with an old love, bringing the iconic actress together again with that grand and sexy bear, Gerard Depardieu. When the memory of an old liaison re-ignites their heat, a hilarious moment occurs: she puts him off,“Not at our age.”

    Most rendez-vous fare is less prudent. In quiet ways, gems such as Love Like Poison, Katell Quillevere’s coming of age drama about a 14 year old girl and a choirboy, and Martin Provost’s The Long Falling with Yolande Moreau, the story of asmall-town woman who kills her abusive husband, reveal complex shades of the love theme. While Antony Cordier’s Happy Few, about two couples who swap while maintaining their own marriages, offers a rare admission for the French: the psychological damage of mixing and matching partners.

    Alas, while it is not always certain that French movies will have a U.S. theatrical release, fortunately, some will. Opening soon, Poticheis very funny, often laugh out loud silly, a fun diversion. I simply would not miss The Princess of Montpensier.

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • David Lindsay-Abaire’s Independent Spirit: Good People:

    GoodPeople
    On a particular Saturday afternoon at the Manhattan Theater Club production of his new play Good People, playwright David Lindsay-Abaire revealed to an exuberant matinee crowd that the compelling characters he created for this play were known to him from his upbringing in South Boston–even down to the detail of the bingo games his mother enjoyed, as well as the googly eyed rabbit figurines. He might have been in Los Angeles that weekend: nominated for an Independent Spirit writing award for the screenplay of his drama, Rabbit Hole, or to support Nicole Kidman who was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar in the film. But obvious to all, Lindsay-Abaire was happy to be at the talk back for Good People.

    Of course the word good is edgy. When asked which character is good, he said all of them. Or, none of them. Or maybe Stevie at the end if you define a good person, as the play does, as one who will give money to someone who needs it. In this working class environment in tough times, Margie, as perfectly acted by Frances McDormand under the expert direction of Daniel Sullivan is trapped in “Southie”: we see her, boldly honest, loyal, and, as in all great theater going back to Oedipus, proud to a fault; she is the instrument of her own fate. Margaret is a woman of such low expectations, you ask, could she have
    gotten out of South Boston.

    The unwed mother of a mentally challenged grown up daughter, Margie creates some suspense around the father. When Margie loses her job at the convenience store, she goes to see Mike (a fine Tate Donovan), a high school flame who broke away from the neighborhood and became a successful fertility doctor. Now living in Chestnut Hill with a much younger wife (Renee Elise Goldsberry) whose color adds to the layering of discourse in this racially loaded province, Mike has morphed, in Margie’s words, joining the “lace curtain Irish.” Deploying one zinger after another, Margie is especially good at showing those around her exactly who they are. Most people, good and otherwise, can muster more self-preserving diplomacy.

    The excellent sets (Jon Lee Beatty) and costumes (David Zinn) especially evoke the noble but worn environs of the bingo crowd: the greedy landlady Dottie played by Estelle Parsons, a neighbor, Jean (Becky Ann Baker), and Stevie, Margie’s former boss (Patrick Carroll) functioning like a Greek chorus, egging Margie on and taking her back, wounded yet strong after her glimpse into Mike’s new life with all its bourgeois grandeur outside Southie. “I thought the house would have columns,” she says giving the place a once-over.

    David Lindsay-Adaire mines his hometown frontier well, neatly marking the fault line between white and blue collar. He wanted to write about class in America, he said, a subject the British do so well. Just maybe as Americans continue to feel the effects of recession economics, the subject of class may be all too resonant. 

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Alec Baldwin, Naughty and Nice, Museum of the Moving Image Honoree

    Baldwinwm Co-host with Anne Hathaway at the Academy Awards show in Los Angeles, James Franco picks up his cell phone, a prop for peering into the dreams of the show's prior beloved M.C., Alec Baldwin. The Inception parody is played for laughs, but those in the know were poised to honor Baldwin's career the next night, in New York, at the annual tribute gala for the Museum of the Moving Image. Could this versatile actor be in two places at once?

    Ubiquitous in the Hamptons, for example, and loveably so, Baldwin lends his name and talent to many arts projects on Long Island's east end. Starring in last summer's production of Equus at Guild Hall, Baldwin was the engine for mounting the critically acclaimed production, said Tony Walton. The director, along with Richard Gere, Gay Talese, Michael Lynne, Bob Balaban, and jazz documentarian Bruce Ricker, joined the eclectic crowd at Cipriani 42nd Street for good food, clips and speakers. 

    Mercedes Ruehl, Michael Keaton, Tim Curry, Ben Stiller, Jimmy Fallon, Edie Falco, and Tina Fey spoke about working with Alec, commenting on his professionalism and comic timing. Ruehl who worked with him in Married to the Mob (1988), emphasized his political commitment, cautioning on conflicts in campaign financing. He turned out to be right, she said of her fellow activist. Fey revealed, the role of Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock was written for him: “Alec is a writer's dream,” she noted. “He speaks fast.” 
    The night-which was also a farewell dinner for Rochelle Slovin, the Museum's director for 30 years– would not have been complete without a clip of that unforgettable moment from It's Complicated, with Alec's leap, naked, onto the bed, his privates covered by a laptop, and Steve Martin's reaction shot as he sees his rival for Meryl Streep on Skype. Noticeably absent though was the SNL skit, Alec with Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, and eh, Sarah Palin.

    Alec Baldwin does seem to be everywhere, but as Patricia Clarkson put it, “You want him everywhere.”

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Allen Ginsberg at the Oscars, at MoMA, at Large .

    Allen_Ginsberg_-_young When James Franco co-hosts the Oscars this weekend, it won't be as the bespectacled poet Allen Ginsberg he so lovingly portrayed in the movie Howl. Of course, Franco may win the Best Actor Oscar for his work in 127 Hours, but his Ginsberg is spot on. 

    The multi- talented Franco has good taste in poets, currently immersed in projects involving American literary giants Harte Crane (the Bridge) and William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury). And Allen Ginsberg had good vision: even before Warhol made fame famous, the poet understood fame's power as a marketing tool.  He may remain the most famous poet of the Beat Generation literati, but even till the time of his death in 1997, he worked diligently, championing his close associates, Kerouac, Burroughs, Corso, Micheline, Huncke, Whalen, etc. so that they too would be known. Who wants to be the sole famed figure in his coterie, he would say.

    Now Allen Ginsberg seems to be everywhere: Witness his moving (literally in motion) portrait on the 6th floor of MoMA, in a fine show featuring Andy Warhol's screen tests. In perfect synergy, his face looms large with those of Dennis Hopper, Edie Sedgwick, and others. James Franco's excellent performance is freshly available on the Howl DVD, along with an audio feature, Franco reading Howl. 

    And, an exhibition of Ginsberg's photography-yes he was a visual artist too– is displayed at the Howard Greenberg Gallery. A handsome book, Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg, accompanies the show. While it is not the first collection of the poet's photos, the book includes many well-known pictures-i.e. Kerouac smoking on a fire escape-as well as lesser known Robert Frank, Peter Orlovsky, and New York back alley takes. A distinct feature of Ginsberg's work is the hand scrawled caption situating those he shot in the historic moment. 

    Recently, the yearly reading of Howl at Columbia University with music by David Amram attracted crowds to that institution's Philosophy Hall. An irony was not missed: in his days at Columbia he represented rebellious youth, and now more than a decade dead, he is revered as the poet of our time.

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

     

  • Fashion Week: Night Out with The Blonds

    Blonds-fashion-week Fashion shows are theater, and some are more theater than most. No Fashion Week is complete without the runway extravaganza presented by The Blonds. Last night at Milk Studios in the meatpacking, a pair of Chinese dancing dragons opened a show that featured the designers' signature corsets bespangled and beaded, sequined and jeweled, tube dresses, cat suits, cinchers and capelets; a black and white “poncho” would be fabulous on say, Liza Minelli. One model sported a gold pagoda headpiece to match her gold corset, a spectacle that is only matched by the attending audience who seize the occasion for theater of their own. 

    Trends included faux fur headpieces complete with animal ears pointing up, and layers of eyelashes-mainly on men, as well as an array of thigh high platform boots. Kenny Kenny was perhaps the most demure I've ever seen him wearing hats piled on one another. “I couldn't get the right height,” he explained of the fedora styles that gave him extra brims as well. Amanda LaPorte is styled as Marilyn Monroe, except the deep dip of “her” red, sheer cocktail sheath revealed several inches of ass cleavage. You could see a lot of “work” was done. 

    My favorite outfit was a total python look, boots, pants, corset, worn with great style by Andrea, a stockbroker by day, and a collector of the The Blonds' designs. Each piece is hand crafted, a one of a kind. Where could you wear such an ensemble? By day I wear business suits, she said. I wear this to clubs, to dinner with my husband on the weekends. I was delighted to see The Blonds' art so tastefully put together on a real woman, because it matched my own fashion fantasies. Corey Grant, an interior designer with partner Christopher who has a preppie look except for his necklace, big fans of the Blonds, explained, unlike the shows now in tents at Lincoln Center, “There's not one buyer in the room. This is uptown coming downtown.”  

    Other fans included singer Kerri Hilson, Nigel Barker, Miss J, and Jay Manuel, stars of America's Next Top Models, as well as dandy Patrick MacDonald, and Larissa in her very own signature cheekbones. I caught up with Justin James, a long drink of water, elegantly attired in gunmetal silk suit and high heels. He had done the show's wigs, glittery head dresses inspired by Japanese anime. Show over by 8:15, he was outside grabbing a cigarette: “Now I can go home to bed.”

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Vidal Sassoon: The Movie on a Bad Hair Night

    Vidal SassoonThe Movie On a frigid Wednesday last week, an inexplicable friction left my hair standing on end. Good thing I would be meeting Vidal Sassoon tonight, for the premiere of a documentary Vidal Sassoon: The Movie. I could ask this artist whose shapes defined the look of the ’60’s about the electric gravity defying moment, about the taming of frizz, about my lifelong obsession with hair. 

    Directed by Craig Teper, the documentary did not feature curls, alas, except maybe Vogue’s Grace Coddington, a radiant redhead whose bob in Sassoon’s ’60’s heyday molded well under his expert heated direction. Rather, it offered glimpses of this American success story: A Jew from England, who never really connected with his father, spent many early years in an orphanage, who sang in synagogue, rose to fame as an artist haircutter, a television personality, and a businessman with a well-known product line. The film limned his fitness regime, work ethic, first marriages, and the tragic overdose of his daughter Catya. Impeccable demeanor intact, he is now happily married to Ronnie, a dark haired woman with bangs, 30 year his junior. 

    “We both finally got it right,” Ronnie said of this successful marriage at the party at Michael’s where cocktails made with Cointreau and Remy Martin were the drinks of the evening. Marisa Berenson said because she keeps it long, Sassoon never styled her hair, but back in the day, she did wear a lot of wigs inspired by his asymmetrical designs. Stylist Phillip Bloch contemplated his murderous Fashion Week schedule. The film’s producer, Michael Gordon, founder of Bumble & Bumble, said he wanted to document Sassoon’s remarkable career in a book and movie because hair dressers, often embarrassed to say what they do, get no respect. 

    Now 83, Sassoon looks at the exceptional trajectory of his life with pride. He did not tell me much about how to solve my hair issues, but did say that at age 79, when he was approached to make the movie, he demurred, “Don’t you think I’m a bit young?”

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Fearless Arianna Acknowledged at the Inaugural Athena Film Festival

    Athena
    Is there a “celluloid ceiling?” In this take on the “glass” ceiling, women in the film and entertainment industry can only go so far. That last year's Best Director Oscar went to Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman ever to receive it, says much. So it was with great fanfare on Thursday night in Diana Hall of Barnard College that the brand new Athena Film Festival was launched, founded by Kathryn Kolbert and Melissa Silverstein, focusing on work by and about women and awarding women a newly minted prize for their achievements: Delia Ephron, Chris Hegedus, Tanya Hamilton, Abby Disney, Gini Reticker, Debra Zimmerman, Anne Thompson, Nancy Schreiber, Debra Martin Chase, Leslie Bennetts took the stage. One impressive, talented woman followed the one before, taking home a gorgeous crystal statue. 

    As master of ceremonies Lynn Sherr pointed out: Athena is, after all, a Greek goddess, known for wisdom, intelligence, beauty, and eh, chastity.

    Honorees were asked to speak about women who inspired them. While the names of mothers, mentors, and Hilary Clinton were invoked, Leslie Bennetts, Vanity Fair writer spoke about another Greek goddess, Arianna Huffington who that week had sold her unpaid blogger empire to AOL. Huffington had written a book about fearlessness, a necessary component of her personal reinvention. But, Bennetts also said that she did not admire Huffington's “business model.” True, as reported, nearly $300 million cash goes to her for this merger–a staggering fortune by anyone's estimation. One has to wonder at the moral imperative: why not throw some to the writers who write for nothing? That was on the tip of Bill Maher's lips when he had Arianna's face looming large on his show the following night. That question is on the tip of everyone's lips but no one wants to ask it; no one wants to burn that bridge, not even the fearless Maher! 
    Where is the fearless soul who will acknowledge the elephant in the room?

    Blogging -like much on the Internet –remains an enterprise like the wild, wild west, a frontier with few parameters. Leaving the stage, Bennetts told me that she has posted on Huffington, but only as a marketing tool, when she has needed to bring attention to a new book: “Why should I write for nothing when I can get paid?” she asked. 

    At least this ceiling is gender-blind.

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Tennessee Williams Remembered at the 92nd Street Y

    Tennessee_williams-by-answersdotcom
    In the midst of the Oscar season tumult, it is reassuring to think of our most poetic and prolific American playwright Tennessee Williams as the author of scripts that became celebrated films. Case in point, Baby Doll (1956), directed by Elia Kazan with gorgeous performances, controversial in their time by Caroll Baker, her brutish husband played by Karl Malden, and introducing a young and suave Eli Wallach. Yes, Baker is a virginal, kittenish coquette on the verge of losing her innocence. The script like much of Williams' work features fragile women, women like Glass Menagerie's Amanda and Streetcar's Blanche, maddened. You imagine them productive and happy under other circumstances, while the men in their lives, sub-conscious, unreflective, with the sensitivity of gnats buzz about noisily doing what they do.

    This week the 92nd Street Y hosted a Williams celebration co-curated by David Kaplan and Thomas Keith with a sampling of readings and historic performances, a special event much like the tribute at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 2009, when Williams was inducted into the Poet's Corner. The casting was brilliant, bringing onto the Y's stage actresses closely associated with Tennessee Williams' work. Olympia Dukakis currently starring in the Roundabout Theater's production of Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore on Broadway performed the famous speech from that 1964 play about her fourth husband whose demise she occasioned by giving him a car. 

    Jessica Lange had starred as Amanda in a recent production of Glass Menagerie, but at the Y performed from Night of the Iguana. Zoe Kazan, granddaughter of the famed director, performed a scene from Mister Paradise. Alec Baldwin had starred on Broadway as Stanley, but kissed Angelica Torn long and hard as Mitch to her Blanche. Torn, the daughter of longtime actors associated with Williams, Geraldine Page and Rip Torn, had known the playwright as a young girl. In a particularly poignant moment, Marian Seldes read from a 1947 letter to Elia Kazan.

    Another exceptional moment was the legendary Sylvia Miles performing the role of the Princess from Sweet Bird of Youth. Miles originated the character of Mrs. Ware in Vieux Carre. Williams had written a variation of Milk Train just for her, and she performed as Maxine in the 1963 Broadway revival of Night of the Iguana. At the Y, Miles exhibited her famed comic timing, especially intoning the name of her character, the actress  Alexandra Del Lago. “I am Alexandra del Lago,” she later said, identifying utterly with the playwright's sensiblity. “Everything that happens to her has happened to me.”

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Revolutions of the Mind: Three Sisters and Mistakes Were Made

    As everyone is glued to media, watching a real-life revolution disrupt and otherwise transform Egypt, revolutions of a quieter, less violent but powerful sort erupt off-Broadway in two plays in limited run that I would not miss. 

    Three sisters2
    Chekhov is surely the poet of thwarted dreams, of aristocratic manners mutating to modernity. As staged at Classic Stage Company, with a text adapted by Paul Schmidt, and ably directed by Austin Pendleton, Three Sisters, with a dazzling ensemble of  actors, invites you to a sumptuous spread: fine china, crystal goblets, white linens on a gigantic table suggest an opulent feast for many guests. But be ware that table, a contrivance (the sets are by Walter Spangler) that turns into the house's upstairs bedrooms. Hoisted aside by play's end, the wooden platform suggests a guillotine, all promise of hope, old world finery, and intellect, cut.     

    Olga (Jessica Hecht), Masha (Maggie Gyllenhaal), and Irina (Juliet Rylance), the sisters of the title are situated in the countryside longing to be in Moscow. Their boredom is interrupted by the presence of the military, which for each sister presents, at least temporarily, a way out. Peter Sarsgaard plays Verushnin. Masha, married to someone older and more dull than wise, hopes to leave with him. The youngest, Irina, will settle for marriage with Baron Tuzenbach (a well-cast dreamy Ebon Moss-Bachrach), while Olga follows her path as an unmarried teacher. Their brother Andrey (Josh Hamilton) marries a vulgar village girl Natasha (a spirited Marin Ireland) who dresses garishly and systematically forces the sisters out of the homestead -but alas, not to the Moscow of their dreams. And that promise of a sumptuous feast -well, nourishing soup and warming glasses of tea are served to brooding souls enlivened up by the most crass among them: Natasha and Solyony (a very fine Anson Mount) destroy the order irrevocably, as small town life flows on. 

     
    Mistakesweremade
    If you were watching last week's SAG awards, you may have noticed too, that when the Best Ensemble award was presented to the Boardwalk Empire group, a dozen or so New York actors stormed the stage but the actor playing Special Agent Nelson Van Alden was missing: Michael Shannon was back east playing a theater producer, Felix Artifex, in Craig Wright's masterfully written almost one-man tour de force called Mistakes Were Made. Shannon's Artifex, a theater producer, juggles buttons on the telephone making conversation with an array of characters as he attempts to make a play set in the French Revolution called “Mistakes Were Made.” His secretary (Mierka Girten) -we see her shadow behind a scrim-announces: “Johnny Bledsoe on line 1,” “Dolores (the ex-wife) on line 2,” as he bellows, argues, playing unseen, unheard characters off one another. Onstage, he speaks to Denise, a large gold fish in a tank (puppeteer Sam Deutsch) who appears to grimace at the audience. Being a New York type, Artifex deploys an arsenal of ironic, gnomic, one-liners: “Life is an opportunity to make things happen,” “What is more important than maintaining one's enthusiasm?” “Thank you for being you,” he bullshits. But here's where the totally contemporary language melds eerily with current events. Trying to get the big star Johnny Bledsoe interested in the project, he suggests a rewrite to the play's author: How about adding a young girl dying on the ground, blood gushing, saying to her heroic brother, Even if I die, the revolution would be worth it.

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

  • Words and Pictures: at Tibor de Nagy and Condo’s Subversive Art at The New Museum

    On a random Friday afternoon between snowstorms, visitors to Tibor de Nagy's midtown gallery for the “Painters & Poets” exhibit marveled at the small press editions in vitrines (with work by Joe Brainard, Kenward Elmslie, Charles Henri Ford, and Allen Ginsberg) and whimsical black & white films by Rudy Burkhardt starring his artworld buddies: Larry Rivers, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Alex Katz, etc. Playwright Jon Robin Baitz, poet Honore Moore, actor Bob Dishy, and painter Duncan Hannah milled about. Jane Freilicher came by too. Her painting, “The Painting Table” (1954) is perhaps the centerpiece of the show along with Rivers' and O'Hara's “Portrait and Poem Painting” (1961) the art that graces the handsome catalogue. The exhibit includes work by Fairfield Porter, Joan Mitchell, a religious triptych by Red Grooms and poet Anne Waldman. Not an opening or special viewing, the afternoon had the exhilarating spark of a Happening. 

    The collaboration of artists and poets is of course not new, but the show celebrates a unique New York moment when publications were small, and the cross fertilization of artistic energy gave rise to The New York School of Poetry, the beat and other literary movements. Commerce, though not ignored, was not at the forefront of art. But that of course was pre-Warhol.

    Artist George Condo has some literary cred: he collaborated with Burroughs and Ginsberg, and coming from Lowell, Massachusetts, the working class milieu that spawned Jack Kerouac, he wrote a spirited intro for Kerouac's “Book of Sketches.” 

    KanyeGeorgeCondoMarcJacobs
    George Condo, the artist as Warholian “superstar,” is affirmed at the New Museum's survey of his career, “Mental States,” where Condo posing with Kanye West and Marc Jacobs at the shows' opening, signifying a synergy of arts and marketplace. Just look at those portraits in the show's main gallery on the 4th floor, hung in important frames, the Guston/ Crumb/ Picasso/ Looney Tune inspired, pod heads juxtaposed with abstract riffs on Old Masters oils. Artist Judy Hudson observed, “Here we are at Disney World again.” The whole enterprise is a subversive riff on art history, including the gnarly bronze busts titled “Dionysus,” “The Old Sea Hag,” “Perseus,” “Tristessa,” etc. 

    Bronzeheards
    Down what feels like a secret staircase to the 3rd floor where smaller spaces house works of various themes, LeeLee Sobieski and others crammed into the largest gallery focused on abstract work. You can say, Condo mines the collaborative; his imagination is keyed in with music, and with celebrity. 
    Especially the notorious. One room themed, “Manic Society” features finely wrought paintings of a toothy screaming priest, of sex on a striped couch; the figures form a two-headed beast both bizarre and frightening. This unforgettable picture is called “The Return of Client No. 9.” 

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • I (Heart) The Fighter

    Thefighter
    With Oscar nominations close at hand, Frank Rich's New York Times column on the values illustrated in two top movies, True Grit and The Social Network hit home, affirming America's premier art form. Rich's discourse on the unexpected success of the Coen Brothers' western in the time of Facebook suggests another film: The Fighter. This beautifully wrought film is on every critic's select list, but the debate for Oscars centers on The Social Network and The King's Speech, each taking the lead for many awards. Last week's retrospective of David O. Russell's career at The Museum of the Moving Image had me thinking of a new category: Movie with the Biggest Heart. The Fighter may vie with Toy Story 3, but in the end would topple all contenders. 

    First, the real-life location of Lowell, Massachusetts, a red brick urban center with distinct ethnic enclaves, is the perfect breeding ground for the Great American Story. The director has a real feel for such places, having worked for a time in Lewiston, Maine. Then, the performances: at center is Mark Wahlberg in the role of Micky Ward, praised as masterful and understated. Around him swirl some outsized characters, Golden Globe winners Melissa Leo as Alice Ward and Christian Bale as Dicky, over the top as the real life personae are. (By the way, look out for Leo in the upcoming HBO movie, Mildred Pierce.)  And when Letterman asked Dustin Hoffman what performance he thought stood out this year, the “Huckabees” veteran picked Amy Adams in this movie, the “MTV girl” and only woman whose hair was not teased out of the frame. 

    At a luncheon at 21 last week celebrating the director's career, you could see where this movie with heart gets its soul. David O. Russell worked the room focusing on each guest: hosts Spike Jonze and Geoffrey Fletcher, director John Cameron Mitchell, and other movie insiders and well-wishers. Russell said he had never eaten in the legendary restaurant before. When Jeannie Berlin came to say hello, Russell sang her praises for a movie that meant so much to him as a teen, what else? The Heartbreak Kid. The 1972 one. And so it went. 

    Later that night in Astoria, reported Russell: the kick off to the retrospective week was “particularly great” with about 300 people showing up. Spike Jonze, conducting the Q&A, was “very gracious in his subversive way.” When Russell offered him a cinnamon Altoid, the box got passed around the audience too: “It was very real and alive.” Rosie Perez was there, as was Jonze's mom Sandy who said “the nicest things about me that almost made me cry.” 

    I'm told that the Academy voters are unpredictable. So maybe those seeking movies that reflect “another America” -in Frank Rich's words– can consider the one that's here. Maybe this is the year of The Fighter that could. 

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Sundance Preview: Tripping with Alex Gibney

    Magictrip
    The idea for Alex Gibney's new film Magic Trip began at Sundance and climaxes with a world premiere at the film festival this weekend. 

    En route to Sundance to show Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), Gibney and editor Alison Ellwood, found a New Yorker article by Robert Stone that piqued their interest: Ken Kesey, the celebrated author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest who died in 2001, left behind an unfinished film. They quickly acquired the rights, and found that completing Kesey's vision was its own arduous trip. Said Gibney in a recent interview: “Showing this at Sundance is coming home again.”

    Magic Trip poses a question: When did the '60's start? Everyone thinks it was all tie dye and flowers but really it was Donna Reed shirtwaists and winged gas-guzzlers in suburban driveways, idyllic America from the decade before. That is, until everything changed in 1963, the year of conflicting images: the Kennedy assassination and the coming World's Fair, catalyst for Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters' 1964 LSD fueled road trip in a hand painted school bus dubbed Further. 

    Yes, the Pranksters and their iconic Further were famously immortalized in Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, but less known are the 40 hours of 16mm footage the prankster's took consciously following an unscripted script that featured themselves as characters: Kesey was Swashbuckler, Ken Babbs was Intrepid Traveler, George Walker was Hardly Visible, Steve Lambrecht was Zonker, and others. The women were bold, one pregnant: Gretchen Fetchin, Stark Naked. Trucks refused to pass when she perched panty-clad on the bus's rear.

    The driver Neal Cassady was Speed Limit. But in this movie the beat icon shakes off the myths about him, seeming paternal. Gibney points out, taking a fatherly precaution, Cassady checks Further's tires before taking the trip west. The footage of Neal Cassady is particularly rare, emphasizing his tragedy: after On the Road, he was cast into a role he was not prepared to play. And, glimpsed at a party in New York, slumped in a chair, the writer Jack Kerouac seems out of it, definitely on his down journey.

    Finding this footage badly damaged, cut up and scratched, and inexpert to say the least, Gibney, with the help of the History Channel and Martin Scorsese's film preservation foundation, worked his own magic transforming the material, restoring audio and visuals, even hiring a lip reader to help sync sound to make “an immersion experience” of that remarkable trip. “We were like archaeologists working carefully and delicately,” he said.

    A high moment (pun intended) is a fully realized acid trip. Said Gibney: “We did not want a stylized LSD trip, or a cartoon. We wanted to come out of the material that was there.” Research into Kesey's romance with LSD revealed the irony the great counter culture drug originated in experiments by the CIA, not to liberate, but to enslave, to be used for interrogation, even torture.

    Guided by those who were there, Gibney began with conventional interviews: “but they seemed like a film we had already seen extolling 'the halcyon days of yesteryear.'” Then his team found transcripts of audiotapes John Teton made with the Pranksters and put those together with film. The effect is kaleidoscopic, voices at times difficult to identify over pictures reflect the larger Prankster mindset. 

    “The Pranksters had a saying, 'You're either on the bus or off the bus.' We decided to make a film to give the feeling of being on the bus literally and figuratively.”

    Said Gibney of his choices: “The big break for us was another Kesey book, The Further Inquiry. He wrote it like a live court case and screenplay for what they wanted to make:

    “The pranksters had a vision of the film but I don't think they ever realized it. As filmmakers they were wildly enthusiastic and captured great images. But there were huge technical problems: being good farm boys they bought the best equipment, the best cameras, recorders. They didn't think they needed to hire a cameraman. In some of the footage, a soundman is seen with wires in his mouth. They were running the audiotapes off the generator on the bus and so they ran tape recordings at wildly different speeds. Alison Ellwood who co-directed and edited with me went through all the footage. She never found a sync point.”

    As to the music: “We heard some songs on the recordings and found better recordings. We used their vibe to guide us. We included John Coltrane tunes and used his son Ravi, done in the spirit of Coltrane.
    We used music of 1964 or before, “The Wanderer,” for example. Once they get back from the trip we use Dead music-they were then known as “The Warlocks,” that's The Dead before they were The Dead– then later, “Truckin,” later Dead.

    Magic Trip is an event. While the trend for filmmakers tackling the challenge of mid-twentieth century culture is to create fiction-i.e., the recent movie Howl, the upcoming On the Road, good as these works may be, they are representations. This, said Gibney, “is the real deal,” not a documentary per se, “I call it archival cinema verite.” 

    Sundance, prepare to be dazzled.

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Off-Broadway: Love, Loss, and What I Wore, The Divine Sister, You’ve Got Hate Mail

    Love Loss America Ferrera huddled in a back booth at B. Smith restaurant chatting with her pal, Gilmore Girl Alexis Bledel, the occasion: the 500th performance of the off-Broadway gem, Love Loss and What I Wore, by Nora and Delia Ephron based on a book by Ilene Beckerman aka Gingy. Nearby sat Nikki Blonsky, Judy Gold, Anita Gillette, Pauletta Washington (who I'd first met at last spring's Fences opening night with her husband Denzel); the fine actresses in the new ensemble held court at tables crowded with celebrants, including Ferrera's fiancé Ryan Piers Williams and Gilmore grandma actress Kelly Bishop. I have seen the play 3 times but that does not qualify me as a regular, Gingy says. Like Gingy and the Ephron sisters, enthusiasts come every time the cast changes, every month. Some regulars caravan it, Jodi Schoenbrun Carter, the Westside Theatre's associate general manager tells me: “We know them by name.” So, this play is more than just a stellar theater event, it's a haven, and a happening. Ferrera, a veteran Love, Loss performer, soon to be seen in episodes of The Good Wife, would return, the Ugly Betty star says, if she can clear a month out of her schedule.     

    Because the work is resonant for all things girlie, especially wardrobe, it is easy for audiences to remember that special dress they cherished, that hideous hat they hated and were forced to wear by protective moms. Nikki Blonsky said she had a dress that she lost 65 pounds to wear; now her clothes are custom made. The Hairspray film star in her stage debut now wants to play, if she could only grow taller and older, Mary Poppins. Are there any producers in the house?

    Devine sisters Meantime downtown at the Soho Playhouse production of Charles Busch's comedy, The Divine Sister, Charles Busch as Mother Superior at St. Veronica's convent is eh, no Mary Poppins. Rolling her triple lashed eyes heavenward at the shenanigans of nuns on a mission, foundlings reunited with parents, mistaken identities, lost love, guilt and sin, sin, sin, Charles Busch is his most delicious baring leg in a trim '40's pencil skirt. Joining him in this hilarious romp is an A-team ensemble of the ridiculous, Julie Halston, Alison Fraser, Amy Rutberg, Jennifer Van Dyck, and Jonathan Walker. Is there nothing left sacred?

    HateMail1 And there's a lot of Internet potty mouth going on at the Triad cabaret theater on 72nd Street in You've Got Hate Mail, a comedy by Billy Van Zandt and Jane Milmore. Five actors sit at computers ferociously composing email. Van Zandt is Richard, husband of Stephanie (Jane Milmore), cheating with Wanda (Fran Solgan), conspiring with George (Glenn Jones), and despising Peg (Barbara Bonilla). Get it? Well, you may think you do but behind this very funny theater piece lurk many surprises. Moral: Beware what you post.

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

     

  • New York Film Critics Circle Contretemps

    NYFCC
    You expect an awards event to be a love fest with presenters presenting in exalted tones and awardees waxing benighted, and grateful. That was true in part at last night's New York Film Critics Circle festivities at Crimson. But when Darren Aronofsky got up to speak about Black Swan's cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, awarded for that film's beautiful visuals, things got ugly. 

    The director, taking revenge for a negative review, took a swipe at Armond White, chair of the organization whose critique of his film in New York Press he found nasty, and the banter went on from there about the nature of artists and the people who judge their work. As Annette Bening put it gracefully, actors are like fragile gardenias and she and her husband Warren Beatty, also present, protect one another. 

    Director James Toback, presenting to Charles Ferguson for his deft and not-Wall-Street-friendly documentary, Inside Job, hurled some invective at President Obama for allowing the continuation of economic plunder left over from the Bush years. When it comes to politics, at the podium, everyone's a critic.

    Then again, the evening had its share of lovin' too. Best Supporting Actress Melissa Leo spoke about Alice Ward, the Lowell mother of nine she portrays in The Fighter. Ward is hospitalized in Boston and a hundred friends and family stay by her side cheering her on to recovery. Director David O. Russell stood behind her and she playfully asked him not to stare at her tush. Australian actress Jacki Weaver, who plays a Ma Barker type psycho mom in Animal Kingdom, winner for Best First Film, introduced David Michod, the movie's mastermind. Ed Norton presented the award for Best Screenplay to Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg for The Kids Are All Right, noting that their script extends the idea of what is “normal” in families. Presenting the Best Supporting Actor award to Mark Ruffalo, Michelle Willliams lovingly described her friend in the act of wiping kids' vomit. “And it wasn't even his kid,” said the star of this year's Blue Valentine. 

    In a rare category, the publicist Jeff Hill was also recognized for his contribution to the film industry. Accepting the Best Actor accolade, Colin Firth summed up the evening: “That's what I love about New York. The critics!"

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Colin Firth: A Matter of History

    Colin Firth
    Sir Harold Evans, host with biographer Amanda Foreman, at a private luncheon on Monday could not resist mentioning the rare honor of being in a room with not only the dashing if shy “Mr. Darcy,” but the stubborn “Elizabeth Bennett,” memorable roles for Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle, the fine actors who now share screen time in The King's Speech. If Mr. Darcy is every girl's crush, as played by Colin Firth, the fantasy increases exponentially. As the stuttering King George, father of the British queen, the actor is tall, handsome, and irresistible. He sweeps through award season, winning Best Actor accolades.    

    The event was not about heart throbs, but about history. Sir Harold remembered being a small boy glued to the radio in his air raid shelter, as were so many Brits, when Neville Chamberlain announced what the war meant to him, and when King George VI made the famed “king's speech.” Firth emphasized the Aristotelian value of story-telling from the perspective of royalty, how the foibles of characters like Oedipus, Odysseus, and so on are human and moreso. Director Tom Hooper in the interest of research hoped he could have had tea with the queen to ask about her father; he joked at taking over the reign just to feel what that was like. Instead, he announced a valuable find, the diary of speech teacher Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) who brings about the king's epiphany.    

    So was attention paid to every historic detail and nuance?Not entirely, according to Winston Churchill's granddaughter, Edwina Sandys. She is married to Richard Kaplan, a New York raised architect who said his wife noted, the character playing her granddad was smoking a cigar as he walked through rooms at the palace. Her critique: Churchill would never have done that.     

    Ah, the day was young for Firth. Off to the next, the New York Film Critics Circle awards dinner at Crimson, Colin Firth would receive the Best Actor award presented by Stanley Tucci. Extolling the virtues and extraordinary talent of his friend, the New York actor quipped he finds him “irritating” and hopes he can grow up to be just like him. Gamely, Firth accepted his prize saying, that's why he loves New York, not the food, theater, but the critics.

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Remembering Paul Bowles

    Bowles The American writer and composer Paul Bowles-born in Queens, New York– would be 100 years old tomorrow. In our age of instant fame, it is useful to think about an artist who was famous for not being in the limelight. In his time, the cult of personality was taking hold, and would worsen in the days of Warhol, auguring the era of the “superstar.” (Although after seeing the current show of his screen work at MoMA, Warhol managed to make a formidable art of “stardom,” as both celebration of the self and ironic take on it.) Old-fashioned, gentlemanly, and romantically pure, Paul Bowles shunned post-war American culture.

    In the 1950's with the advent of television a new invention, the talk show, provided extraordinary access to the widest audience then imaginable. Bowles retreated to Tangier, Morocco-first visited in 1931 at the suggestion of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas— where he lived modestly in an apartment that had the look of a spare place in Greenwich Village. In fact, when Bowles was famous as a composer of incidental music for the plays of Tennessee Williams and Lillian Hellman on Broadway, and wrote music reviews for the Herald Tribune under the editorship of fellow composer Virgil Thomson, he and his wife, the writer Jane Bowles, lived for a time on 10th Street, between 5th and 6th. He also shared a house in Brooklyn Heights with W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee. The Chelsea Hotel was also home, for a while.“The writer doesn't exist,” Bowles, handsome as a matinee idol, famously exclaimed. What mattered is the work. His autobiography, Without Stopping (1972), was famously dubbed “Without Telling” by fellow novelist William Burroughs. A who's who of the 20th century, the book features anecdotes of friendship and collaboration with Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, Ned Rorem, and Salvador Dali.    

    Even after this illustrious and glamorous early career as composer, Bowles became famous as a writer, perhaps following the example of his wife's most celebrated work, a novella published in 1943 called Two Serious Ladies (now available in a handsome edition, see http://www.sortof.com). His first novel, The Sheltering Sky (1949) became a film in 1989, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and starring Debra Winger and John Malkovich. Three other novels would follow: Let it Come Down (1952), The Spider's House (1955), and Up Above the World (1966). A collection of his travel writings has been reissued, Travels: Collected Writings, 1950-1993, (see http://www.sortof.com). A master of the short story, his Collected Stories 1939-1974 (Black Sparrow) remains a favorite. Readers fascinated by a westerner's take on life in a Muslim culture will do well to read such stories as “A Distant Episode,” “Pages from Cold Point,” “The Time of Friendship,” and the fable, “The Hyena.” The story, “You Are Not I” was made into a film by Sara Driver in the early 1980's. Thought lost, a print was found in Bowles's apartment and then taken to his driver's house and stored. Recently discovered and restored, the film of “You Are Not I” is a brilliant evocation of this writer's unique sensibility. In addition, Bowles' literary career includes translations of the Moroccan writers and storytellers, Larbi Layachi, Mohamed Choukri, Mohammed Mrabet, and Ahmed Yacoubi. For updates on all things Bowles including centennial celebrations, see http://www.paulbowles.org.

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Sofia Coppola’s American Dream: Somewhere

    Somewhere
    LA's Chateau Marmont commands center stage in much of the coverage of Sofia Coppola's new movie Somewhere, but taking a cue from the title, the subject is anywhere but that famed hotel, where in a bygone era John Belushi died of a drug overdose. 

    Stephen Dorff plays a big star named Johnny Marco, encased in celebrity there. Smoking, drinking, picking up an endless supply of women, he is, perhaps, a 2010 embodiment of “living the dream,” but no matter how many synchronized pole dancers wiggle their wares before him, the empty space between his ears is palpable. At a fictive press conference, one reporter asks in a familiar rhetorical tone, Who is Johnny Marco? Indeed.

    Of course Somewhere was awarded top prize at the Venice Film Festival; in one sequence, the star –his wise, doting daughter Cleo in tow (a lovely performance by Elle Fanning)– go to Italy as part of a promotion tour. You have to love how Coppola doesn't bother with subtitles, engaging her “lost in translation” metaphor: in whatever language, you know what is said. The gesture is all. You get the gushing: Oh those gesticulating Italians! It's like watching a reality show with a Fellini soundtrack. 
    Smart, emblematic, Somewhere is a must-see movie. Granted, you have to get used to its languorous LA rhythms as you enter Johnny Marco's consciousness. Somewhere ends with the beginning of a new story that you script in your head, with the stripped-down tropes of the American dream: a road and a man. The frontier is just on the horizon.

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Blue Valentine: View from a Bridge

    BlueValentine
    In a beautifully crafted movie poised for awards and holiday box office, Blue Valentine puts a wacky mirror on that fragile thing: marriage. 

    Moving back and forth in easy yet thrilling fluidly from the present problems to past passions, Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams) try to repair their romance in a future themed motel room with a rotating bed that gets a lot of laughs. As illustrated here, between these two people who are at times mature, at others infantile, marriage on the fritz is not funny, but wrenching. Flashbacks to their courtship feature some of the sweetest sex ever shown in movies; the raw magnetism is important to understanding their connection, earning this finely wrought, sensitive movie a punishing NC-13 rating. Even at the premiere earlier this month at the Standard Hotel -a place, I'm told, where peeping toms line up on the Highline to see occupants in “the act” –director Derek Cianfrance and his stars Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams were sweating their appeal of this rating which was finally overturned the next day to an R. Everyone agreed, you can show violence and sleaze with no untoward consequences, but just try a little tenderness to grab those censors by the throat.

    Perhaps Cianfrance will be recognized for his direction, although his team should also be awarded for Best Original Script. Gosling's ukulele version of “You Always Hurt the One You Love” and Williams's tap dance are precious hidden talents revealed. For many volatile scenes, improvisation by the actors was key to the sometime duet/ duel. When Dean senses Cindy is holding something back as they traverse the Manhattan Bridge, Gosling spontaneously climbs up the wire fence, ready to jump. All I told him was, do whatever it takes, said Cianfrance.  All I told her was, don't tell no matter what. Thank goodness, she does.

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

     

  • True Grit: Grit Lock: The Coen Brothers Ride Again

    True Grit
    Is it a spoof, seriously played for laughs? A Hollywood vehicle or art house gem? With the superb Jeff Bridges as a gun-slinging Falstaff, Matt Damon as straight man, Josh Brolin as slick-haired villain, the usual assortment of pock-marked outlaws, and the debut of a wise, sensible, and precocious fourteen year old Hailee Steinfeld, the remake of True Grit is a sure hit for a Best Picture Oscar nod. 

    True, the movie was shunned by the Globes nominators who might have included it in their non-dramatic Best Picture lineup, but the wisdom is that the foreign press does not favor Westerns. 

    At yesterday's premiere at the Ziegfeld, no one seemed to care. Frances McDormand avoided the red carpet. A crowd that included John Legend, Robert De Niro, Stephen Daldry, Richard Belzer, Jesse Eisenberg, and Coen Bros. veteran Marcia Gay Harden (she debuted in Miller's Crossing) trekked cross-town in the cold night, spilling into The Four Seasons for a wildly packed after party where “pickled buffalo tongue” (see the film) was not on the buffet. 

    Ethan Coen spoke about reaching back to the 1968 Charles Portis novel, originally a series for the Saturday Evening Post on which the original 1969 western, True Grit with John Wayne, was based. (Portis is still around, he said, and has not yet seen the film.) Indeed, what makes this movie so special is the archaic sounding language, delightful once you get into its rhythms, particularly poetic in a courtroom scene where Rooster Cogburn (Bridges) explains a horse theft. 

    The ever-affable Bridges held court in the famed restaurant; he spoke glowingly of working with the Coens again. “They know what they are doing,” he said, just as they did in The Big Lebowski, a movie that baffled critics when it first came out and is now a cult classic. Then Bridges went head to head with the legendary Sylvia Miles on the subject of Best Actor Oscars.

    Of course now True Grit will ride with the brilliant front-runners for the Academy Award: The King's Speech, The Fighter, and Black Swan, but hey, when it comes to this sort of shoot out, the Coens are used to it. 

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Going Natural: Kirsten Dunst in All Good Things

    Kristen There is nothing natural about the bizarre tale that inspired director Andrew Jarecki to make his new film All Good Things. And yet, at a luncheon at Michael's today, introducing his star, Kirsten Dunst –in an Oscar-worthy performance as a doomed young woman whose disappearance 18 years ago remains a mystery– he claims that her naturalness drew him to her, signing her on even before he got Ryan Gosling to play the husband. Of course, the director of the documentary, Capturing the Friedmans, is no stranger to the ways reality can out spook the imagination. Taking a headline-grabbing story of the real cross-dressing Robert Durst, replete with unsolved crimes, Andrew Jarecki's creation is like a true-life novelization that would make Truman Capote proud-or maybe even jealous.     

    Looking radiant despite having just arrived from San Francisco where she wrapped her role as Camille in the much-anticipated film of the iconic Kerouac novel, On the Road, Dunts told me this role provided the challenge of having to stay believably with a man who becomes increasingly more violent. She praised Ryan Gosling's performance, noting that often actors portray only the creepy side of a creep. From the beginning of their on-screen relationship, when as newlyweds they go off to Vermont to open a natural foods store called All Good Things, Gosling shows a quiet charm. You wish his father, played by the irresistible Frank Langella had not prevailed, luring the couple back to the family business in Manhattan real estate. Langella said at the movie's premiere at Buddakan last week, this is his year for playing aging Jewish men, referring of course to his part in Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps.    

    A second unsolved murder involves a writer played by Lily Rabe wearing an unnatural black wig. Said the lovely blond now starring in the acclaimed Merchant of Venice on Broadway, we styled this character around the hair. The real woman had a distinctive Cleopatra look. Yikes! We hardly recognized her.

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Elaine Kaufman Remembered

    Elain kaufman
    Back in the day when writers were king, Elaine's was the place for book parties. That's how I first came there, to celebrate new publications by George Plimpton, Kurt Vonnegut. Bunches of us cabbed over from director Robert Altman's memorial service at Radio City Music Hall, to hang out and reminisce with his widow Kathryn, with actors who all cherished the memory of working with him, Lily Tomlin and Marisa Berenson among them. Everybody loves Elaine's (to echo the title of a book about her legendary restaurant) for these memories of a bygone era, now officially marked by Elaine Kaufman's passing.

    More recently, Patrick McMullan had a gathering there with all the tables pushed aside and banquettes set up for lounging. The downtown Warholians came uptown to Elaine's. Bobby Zarem entertained clients there and I remember stopping by the table chatting with James Franco at a time when he was offered the script of On the Road, in a previous incarnation, before the project went to Walter Salles to direct. One night I snapped a shot of Elaine with Michele Lee showing off a ring, a gift from Elaine. The place was as important for industry updates, as it was home to Elaine's friends. 

    On a random night, Elaine would be there, a grand pasha.  She loved my pal Roger Friedman who always had his birthday there, and she would send over a special cake, a special bottle of bubbly. Or course she was generous, but most memorable was her rancor. Seeing stragglers work the room, she would caution them against sitting unless dinner was ordered at once. I'm told she could be violent, expelling offenders to Second Avenue, but I never saw her that way.

    For me, the bark was worse than the bite. She pegged me with her owl eyes to make sure I knew the score. She cautioned me against toasting with a glass of water. That's bad luck, she instructed. The glass had to contain something intoxicating, some brew. And one night I made the mistake of asking her what was good. The veal chop she said without missing a beat-insisting upon the most expensive item on that night's menu, one that would ensure its place around a person's heart when eaten before bedtime. Insulting her, I ordered “Dani's salad” an antipasto salad I named for a French journalist who used to ask it: fresh arugula, cheese and salami, a meal that I thought would be less heavy for 'round midnight. Winking, the waiter knew exactly what I wanted. I wish I had ordered the veal chop. Even as she scolded me, there was always a friendly edge. While the food could be merely okay, the nourishment was always great.

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Black Swan: Nightmare in a Tutu

    Black Swan Much will be written about “Black Swan,” a movie that viewers will either love or hate for its melding of a ballerina story with classic horror motifs. What saves Darren Aronofsky’s study in female masochism from descending into schlock gothic?  The performances are superb, with ample ballet sequences. But a shard of broken mirror in this story is to a piece of glass in Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher,” a lethal weapon. I was stunned when I first saw the film at the Hamptons International Film Festival, in a theater where you could hear the proverbial pin drop, and equally stunned upon second viewing last night at the Ziegfeld premiere, where a few titters registered that some were not as awed as I was by the movie’s extravagant emotion.

    You may imagine that the finale, the dying of the dancing swan, metaphoric for a girl’s loss of virginity, a figment of a girl’s warped mind, or just plain old death, would be a mother’s worst nightmare, but so is the mother-daughter relationship at the movie’s heart. This horror, over-wrought yet persuasive in characters portrayed by Barbara Hershey and Natalie Portman is an unsettling wacky mirror itself, as is the ballet master charming and cruel as played by Vincent Cassell, also fine as a scoundrel in the French import “Mesrine.” 

    A lavish party ensued at the St. Regis, with a smorgasbord of pastas, the perfect dancer fuel, and a life-sized mannequin in tutu and swan feather headgear, legs akimbo, rotating eerily around an axis. The actor Jean Reno reunited with Portman now in a ruby Dior gown, so many years after they worked together—she a child– in “The Professional.” Mila Kunis who had removed her Louboutins for hotel slippers said she had no training as a dancer before she was tapped to play this breakthrough role as Portman’s friend/ lover/ rival. One question on many men’s lips was for Vincent Cassell who attended the premiere with his mother: where’s Monica?

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Dickie Does Crack: The Fighter

    Mark wahlbergFighter Lowell, Massachusetts, with its ethnic enclaves and brick mills is the perfect breeding ground for the great American story: Jack Kerouac, the French-Canadian author of the iconic novel of the 1950's On the Road, famously came from there. And so did Dickie Ekland, an Irish fighter who knocked out Sugar Ray Leonard in 1978, or so his legend goes.  In “The Fighter,” David O. Russell's riveting new movie, we learn that Eklund -played by the handsome Christian Bale turned gaunt, his cheeks hollowed out, his teeth bad– was a crack head. Thinking a film within the film documents his comeback in the ring, Eklund has a rude awakening. That film is a cautionary tale about drug abuse, and the larger narrative of “The Fighter” becomes an epic of the resilience of family, of redemption, complete with a platinum dyed Greek chorus of sisters, and the rise of Dickie's younger brother, boxer Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg). Their mother Alice doubles as manager: for Melissa Leo in a teased blond beehive rumored to be her very own, this may be her Oscar winning role.    

    At a luncheon at The Four Seasons this week, Melissa Leo showed me how the layers of her red hare growing out with some ends looking dipped in platinum. An actor who inhabits the soul of her characters, Leo, perhaps most memorable as a tough mother in “Frozen River,” said she used to dance on stilts, a skill captured by Henry Jaglom in his movie “Love, Always.” Actors Sylvia Miles, Tina Louise, and Bob Dishy lauded her performance and that of Mark Wahlberg who grew up in Dorchester, Boston, not far from Lowell, and remembers Micky Ward. Insisting on performing his own fights, Wahlberg said the part was difficult because he had to keep training to be in shape for the movie's on again off schedule. Director David O. Russell who made the quirky “I (Heart) Huckabees” shot the film with many close-ups to keep the intimacy, and retain the small town feel of Lowell. With his signature hat and cigar Bert Sugar, boxing historian, and Lou di Bella, a boxing promoter sat at a nearby table as Russell, Leo, and Wahlberg greeted guests. Was it my imagination, or could I see the contours of Wahlberg's biceps against the fabric of his suit?

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Foreign Films for Oscars: Outside the Law

    OutsideLaw

    Charles Cohen, of the newly minted Cohen Media Group, introduced his distribution company and their inaugural film, the Algerian entry into the Oscars race, “Outside the Law,” at a luncheon at The Four Seasons last week. Of the 65 films Charles Cohen put forward by their countries as contenders for the Best Foreign Film Academy Award, this epic drama of occupation and resistance through the story of a family of brothers is on many a short list.

    Paris-based writer/ director Rachid Bouchareb is familiar to American audiences through his previous film, “Indigenes” (or Days of Glory), nominated for the Foreign Film Oscar in 2006; before that, his “Poussieres de vie” had been a 1995 nominee. His films tend to limn the same themes: colonialism, immigration, occupation, and multi-racial, multi-cultural issues that resonate particularly in North Africa and the Middle East. “Outside the Law,” at least chronologically, picks up where “Indigenes” leaves off, in 1945.
    Filmmaker Paul Morrissey, upon hearing an outline of “Outside the Law,” how a family was expelled from their ancestral home in Algeria and ended up in France with three sons each in his way participating in the movement for Algerian independence, declared he would like to see a comedy from this director. Sure enough, the Paris-born Algerian Rachid Bouchareb told me he will now stay in Los Angeles to finish a script with Larry Gross, a comedy to star Queen Latifa and Jamel Debbouze, the brother Said who becomes a boxing impresario in “Outside the Law. “

    And what does he think about the possibility of again being nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, and maybe winning? Scorcese was nominated seven times before he won, smiled Rachid Bouchareb. This would make only three for me.

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • David Duchovny’s Theater Debut: Neil LaBute’s Break of Noon

    Niel LaBute
    With a minimum of Neil LaBute's provocative, poetic potty mouth, his new play, “The Break of Noon,” opens with the sole survivor of an office massacre wrapped in a blanket, his ankle sheathed in a blood soaked cloth. Going over the gory details, this man-aptly named John Smith– is stunned at how the gunman made a special point of slitting the throat of one victim as she played dead — somehow, miraculously, missing killing him. Having seen The Light, Smith concludes that god has saved him for a purpose, and now he must spread His Word.

    Under any circumstances, delivering this monologue would prove a challenge, but David Duchovny on the opening night of his theater debut of this world premiere of this MCC production at the Lucille Lortel Theater, had a bad cold. Nevertheless, the X-Files/ Californication actor, performed with the conviction of a cad turned evangelical. Under the fine direction of Jo Bonney, he embellishes his horror tale turned heavenward in ensuing scenes, going one-on-one with his ex-wife, her cousin who is his ex-girlfriend, his lawyer, a detective, a talk show host, and a naughty nurse-clad call girl whose mother was among the murdered. The ensemble, featuring Amanda Peet, John Earl Jelks, and Tracee Chimo, all in double roles, is superb. Chimo in particular as a bubble-headed television personality and er, prostitute giving head is hilarious.     

    Well, said Duchovny at the cozy after party at 49 Grove, technically he had done some theater before, in a school production of “The Gift of the Magi,” delivering frankincense, or was it myrrh? His real life wife, Tea Leoni chatted with Jessica Hecht discovering their children are the same age; New York based actors Ben Stiller with Christine Taylor, Tovah Feldshuh and Eric Bogosian were joined by X-File co-star Gillian Anderson who flew in from London for the occasion. Neil LaBute, as is his habit, missed his opening night.

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura