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Sundance Preview: Tripping with Alex Gibney

January 20, 2011

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

January 18, 2011

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?

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?

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

January 12, 2011

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

January 11, 2011

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

December 29, 2010

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

December 28, 2010

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

December 23, 2010

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

December 15, 2010

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

December 10, 2010

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

December 6, 2010

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

December 1, 2010

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

November 30, 2010

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

November 27, 2010

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

November 23, 2010

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
Sheryl Crow Rocks the Armory for Cancer Research

November 22, 2010

Last Thursday evening at the Park Avenue Armory, after the consumption of an elegant dinner and the auctioning of many fine items including the most adorable black and white spaniel, Sheryl Crow rocked the cavernous house. In sequins over jeans, she sang her signature songs: “If it Makes You Happy” and “Soak Up the Sun.” More important, she, a cancer survivor, sang the praises of Dr. Samuel Waxman. This was the 13th annual Collaborating for the Cure Benefit for the Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation and from the looks of this crowd, young and enterprising, money appeared to have no limit. The live auction alone garnered nearly $1 million.

According to a press release, the foundation has awarded $75 million to researchers worldwide since its inception in 1976. When I first attended such a benefit, in 2009, I was pondering an irony: my mother, the late Pola Weinreich died in the care of this world-renowned oncologist at Mount Sinai in 1996. When I spoke to him, reminding him of an event commonplace to him and devastating to me, he spoke to me for several minutes while others tried to get his attention. Did I give her the best care I could? he sincerely wanted to know. A sign of a good doctor, he very much wanted to talk about her demise and the deadly disease that he was hoping to cure in his lifetime with the foundation he created 34 years ago.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
The Wit and Wisdom of Fran Lebowitz

November 22, 2010

Fran Lebowitz is a motormouth, so all you really have to do is press “ON.” That makes television a perfect medium for this unusual talker, who, part James Thurber, part Dorothy Parker, part Oscar Levant, thrives at public speaking. With her signature man tailored white shirt, Savile Row suit jacket over jeans and cowboy boots, she makes for a handsome and distinctive subject for the wonderfully entertaining documentary portrait directed by Martin Scorcese to air tonight on HBO.

For those who find this film remarkably unlike others in the famed director's oeuvre, you can see his back as Ellen Kuras's excellent camera work grazes his shoulder. Set against Edward Sorel's tableau of literary types at The Waverly Inn, the downtown eatery part-owned by the film's producer Graydon Carter, the interview with Lebowitz features her opinions and bon bots on everything: how Andy made fame famous telling Candy Darling that she was more than Marilyn, she was a superstar; this was a joke that came to define the Zeitgeist, but ironically, it also comes to explain Fran Lebowitz.

Like the twin towers looming behind the set in an old Conan clip, Lebowitz, the author of the essay collections, Metropolitan Life (1978) and Social Studies (1981) a writer who has not published a book in thirty or so years, is an endangered species, a living reminder of how far we have come from a time when smart people are prized. Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the film is her self deprecation about what she calls her “writer's blockade.” For a documentary portrait, Public Speaking is withholding. You find out Lebowitz is Jewish, gay, an only child. But where exactly does she live? What is her domestic scene? How does she support herself? She seems sui generis, an original. How do you pull that off in our consumer culture?

Lebowitz tells a funny story about going to Sweden with her good pal Toni Morrison, as she was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, how at the dinner Lebowitz was seated at the kids' table where the next in age was 12. She also does a rant about strollers. So you might come away thinking that she doesn't like children. Au contraire! At the premiere at The Four Seasons last week, a lavish gathering of literary types like Morrison, Lynn Nesbit and Lynne Tillman, I chatted with Wilford Hemans, a middle school principal for whom Fran Lebowitz sits in at a yearly event. Rather than go off to a reception, he recounted, Lebowitz remains in the classroom with students helping them write. Who knew this famous curmudgeon could also be lovable?

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
Tiny Furniture: What is Wrong with this Picture?

November 14, 2010

A fresher, smarter movie you are not likely to see this season than “Tiny Furniture,” written, directed by, and starring Lena Dunham, a sweet-faced young woman festooned with tasteful tattoos. A film within the film shows her in a bikini, not a perfect ten, but you've got to give her snaps for this vanity defying display. Shot in her family's downtown loft, the film features her mother, the artist Laurie Simmons, as well as her sister, Grace Dunham, as her mother and sister respectively. You could logically assume that much of the material is autobiographical, and as such, a Zeitgeist marking moment.

On Wednesday, after the premiere at MoMA, one ecstatic viewer asked Simmons, would she please raise his children, a remark that took her off guard. She responded gamely, that parenting was not a job she was particularly prepared to do. Listening to this, a mother of girls with one as my date, both of whom like Lena Dunham attended a NYC private school, I wondered what was bothering me. From the look of it, Simmons as a parent seemed loving, yet self-involved, indulging her kids, perhaps to make up for not entirely focusing on them. She teaches her daughter a few good lessons about entitlement, un-hypocritically permits a boyfriend to sleep in her bed (sex at 20 is simply taken for granted), and generally allows her girls to learn as they go. The results are tough and funny.

I laughed. I cried. My daughter observed that some of the dialogue sounded eerily familiar as if Dunham had secretly mic-ed our place. What disturbed me was where this film went as a record of a girl's post-college sexual evolution. Aura as a character is not adept at self-protection, alarmingly generous to strangers, allowing her self to be used. She makes it with one guy in a metal tube, a found, if claustrophobic, shelter. Aside from the sight gag and any metaphoric implications, it looks fine for him, painful for her. A rude awakening: those rumors about all the blowjobs status-seeking girls were giving classmates INSTEAD of sex-(Clinton, are you listening?)– are true. Young men seem as immature and insensitive as they were decades ago. Dunham's fictive mother, like most, is spared the realities of where her child's sexual liberation has led, but as film viewer like me, Simmons must now know. Maybe moms have been teaching the wrong lessons and should, along with our lack of guidance in such matters, be handing out copies of “The Joy of Sex.” Is my complaint just a throw back to the “Satisfaction”-seeking 'seventies? Free to enjoy sex, our girls-with a nod to Cyndi Lauper– should be wanting more fun

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
David Amram at 80

November 13, 2010

No one can believe David Amram is now 80. Yes, you can do the math. But, to see him cavorting about the ample stage in front of a packed Symphony Space on Thursday for his birthday celebration was surely to see a man in mid-life: Hence the title, “The First 80 Years.”

In typical Amram style, performances of this quintessential American composer and ethnomusicologist's “greatest hits” were not self-reflexive, but rather homages to the greats he performed with, learned from, those who inspired him: Odetta, Joe Papp, Woody Guthrie, Frank McCourt, Max Roach, Dizzy, and Kerouac. In memory of Floyd Red Crow Westerman, he played with Tokasin Ghosthorse on Lakota Courting Flutes. The Queens College Orchestra conducted by Maurice Peress played “This Land is Your Land,” and I could feel his Whitmanesque expansive juxtapositions. Similarly his “Home on the Range” was bebop Americana.

Perhaps my favorite part of the evening was the medley of his music for movies: “Splendor in the Grass,” the original “Manchurian Candidate” where John Frankenheimer just directed him, Take it where it takes you. And of course, “Pull My Daisy,” Working with Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie and also a version created for a documentary I worked on in the 1980's, “The Beat Generation: An American Dream.” Scatting his signature “senior” spontaneous bop, he sounds good, a hip guy in a suit with pipes and pennywhistles hanging off his neck making it up as it suits him. The actor John Ventimiglia brought this sequence home with his reading of the last paragraph of Kerouac's “On the Road:” And don't you know that god is Pooh Bear.

Surrounded by family, his kids, Adira, Alana, Adam, his ex wife Laura Lee, and many fans and friends including Jacques D'Amboise, Barbara Kopple, Ira Gittler, Malachy McCourt, Ray Mantilla and John McEwan of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, David Amram hosted the evening without sentimentality, without excess, eschewing the typical testimonials for such a grand occasion. After all, we've got the next 80 to anticipate and cherish.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
Dining Royally: The King’s Speech

November 12, 2010

At “21” last Tuesday, it was a case of multiple events. Newt Gingrich graciously held the door for me as Joan Didion stood in the foyer of the legendary restaurant. I wondered was this Grande Dame of Letters going to his book party on the second floor? No, she went straight to the third, to a princely luncheon for “The King's Speech.” Director Tom Hooper stood, clinked his glass embossed with a big D for DeLeon Tequila, host of this grand occasion, his new film already touted as a sure Oscar contender if not win for Best Feature and Director. Noting how pleased he was to be greeting us, he reminded everyone that the Duke of York before he became King George VI, the subject of his movie, could not get out the words of a simple two-word toast. All he had to say was, “The King.” Holding up his royal quaff, Hooper added two more: “Colin Firth.”

Indeed, Firth, the handsome actor who played Mr. Darcy, wooed Bridget Jones, and starred in last year's Tom Ford movie debut, “A Single Man,” commanded court over a table that included Christine Baranski, Harvey Weinstein, Stephen Daldry, and Candice Bergen. The buzz: he will win for Best Actor, and should have for last year's film about a gay man's grief over the death of his lover. In “The King's Speech,” he reddens as if to explode stammering through his words. He has the audience in tears.

The night before, his co-star in the role of Queen Mother, Helena Bonham Carter held court at another soiree sponsored by DeLeon at the refurbished swank 44 at the Royalton Hotel. Introducing her at the Ziegfeld screening, Hooper had called her a genius, and truly in this role she grounds the volatile relationship between the king and Lionel Logue, his speech coach, a commoner who becomes his friend (a deeply-affecting Geoffrey Rush). Eve Best, who plays the movie's scandal-ridden Wallis Simpson chatted with Stella Powell Jones, granddaughter of Harold Pinter. Director Amir Bar-Lev talked about casting his next film, a biopic about Jerry Garcia. Many eyed the elegant DeLeon bottles with their heavy intricately crafted silver stoppers hoping to spirit the smooth liquor into the night.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
Wild at Heart: 127 Hours and Practice of the Wild

November 5, 2010

Director Danny Boyle is a master cineaste of potty detail. Who can forget the toilet swim in “Trainspotting”? Or the latrines of “Slumdog Millionaire”? In “127 Hours,” the most revolting is Aron Ralston (James Franco) drinking his own urine in a life saving moment when he is pinned under a boulder in Blue John Canyon in Utah. Unless you want to count the anatomical detail of his cutting through his own arm, already turning gray/green under the rock's weight. This sequence would be grim as it sounds except that the fine script Boyle penned with Simon Beaufoy based on Ralston's book, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place,” includes Ralston's interviewing himself on the folly of his having taken this adventure without telling anyone, including-eh, especially his mother–where he was going. Oops! There's a whole bit about his not taking her phone calls, which, under the circumstances, he regrets. The director also delights in illustrating his hallucinations as Ralson sees his life flash before him with a buzzard circling overhead.

At the premiere screening on Tuesday, you could hear the proverbial pin drop in the audience that included Susan Sarandon, Zoe Lister-Jones, Daryl Wein, Padma Lakshmi, and Mario Cantone. James Franco moved through the crowd at The Bunker Club, seeming to avoid the beautiful models circling about him at the Gucci-sponsored after party. It must be good to be James Franco these days, with several movies out, including Howl, his evocation of the poet Allen Ginsberg.

The real Aron Ralston sat on a banquette surrounded by close friends; he let me feel his hook hand. Picture a metal lobster claw. Assuring me his life was going fine, he is now a family man, teaching his son all about the outdoors. He still climbs and enjoys the wild as a matter of habit, pride, and identity. And how is his mother? She's having a great time, he told me. They were just back from the London premiere parties. And now he tells her his every move.

Yes, nature can be menacing, ominous, life threatening, indifferent but it can also be the source of great poetry. Opening this week at Quad Cinema is a documentary, Practice of the Wild featuring a conversation between writers who celebrate Nature: Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder and novelist Jim Harrison. Having lived in Japan and with his interest in the monastic life, Snyder was a catalyst in bringing eastern culture to the US in the mid-century. His journey mountain climbing with Jack Kerouac is immortalized in the novel “The Dharma Bums,” where, as the character Japhy Ryder, he teaches the discipline of haiku composition to the beat writer. The great pleasures of this documentary are the extraordinary views of the central California coast, and the poetry readings. The interview with poet Michael McClure is especially resonant. The film's transcript is part of a new poetry-packed book, “The Etiquette of Freedom.” Snyder recounts his experience climbing the Matterhorn on the Northern Sierra boundary line. There, a huge boulder did not trap them; instead, the rock reflected heat. Ahhhh!

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
Gents-Who Lunch: Nigel Cole and Alfred Uhry

November 3, 2010

The subject of equal pay for skilled workers is of course a serious subject, but in “Made in Dagenham,” a little known but true story about a strike at a Ford plant in mid-century England is told with such heart and humor, many will call it a comedy. On Monday Rouge Tomate was bustling for a luncheon hosted by ReVive and Laura Mercier celebrating the film and its actors Sally Hawkins, the feisty Rita who leads the women seamstresses in a work strike, and Miranda Richardson, formidable and funny as Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity.

Of the casting, director Nigel Cole said, never believe a director who says he always wanted so and so for the part. They always have a string of actors and they keep going down the list. In this case, he got everyone he wanted including Rosamund Pike who plays an upper class wife stuck in stifling domesticity. Cole made another crowd-pleaser featuring feisty women, Calendar Girls. That's the one where all these women over 40 take their clothes off for a calendar to raise money. There I was with all of them, laughed Cole. We didn't know but the actors wanted to rehearse with the actual women and they made a pact, insisting on being entirely naked, even when they did not have to be. We found out: nudity on the set is a good way to get people to work hard. As no one wants to actually look, so they suddenly get eye-averting busy. With Helen Mirren, he quipped, the trouble is to get her to keep her clothes on.

The director continued with hilarious on-the-set tales, concluding with his time directing Christopher Walken having sex with Sharon Stone in “$5 a Day,” a movie so fraught with legal troubles, it went straight to video. How do you direct a sex scene? You have to be specific. You have to say where to put your hands, and so on, because everyone is embarrassed: maybe others don't do what I do at home. With Walken and Stone, all you had to do was call action. We wanted to hose them down.

Dana Ivey brought playwright Alfred Uhry to the lunch. His 1987 Pulitzer Prize winning play, Driving Miss Daisy opened last week on Broadway. Even the critics who ponder the slight story line of the spry 72 year old white Jewish matron in Atlanta whose son Boolie hires a black man to chauffeur her around are enchanted with the acting. To age to somewhere in her 90's, all Vanessa Redgrave has to do is water her eyes dim and go gummy, drawing her lips over her perfect set of teeth. And James Earl Jones as Hoke Coleburn, shuffling about, bearing the weight of racism, does more than drive her to temple. A hotter couple you are not going to see on Broadway for tender banter.

The play's riches come across in a scene where Daisy is to attend a Martin Luther King benefit and her son (the excellent Boyd Gaines) decides it is not to his advantage to go. You recognize with pain how many decisions are made this way.

Uhry has acknowledged his joy in having had wonderful actors performing in the play and movie versions of his work, including Jessica Tandy, Morgan Freeman, and Dana Ivey, present company his favorite Daisy.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
Eliot Spitzer & the Madam Co-Star in Client 9

October 31, 2010

Even as a CNN political talk show host, the specter of scandal haunts Eliot Spitzer. Oscar winning Alex Gibney seized the moment to document the fallen governor who many believe might have been president. At the movie’s premier last week, the filmmaker addressed a screening room at the Tribeca Grand Hotel packed with a who’s who of documentary filmmakers, Barbara Kopple, Chris Hegedus, D. A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles, Kate Davis, as well as writers Erica Jong and others mesmerized by the epic dimension of the Spitzer story. Mostly people wanted to know how Gibney got his interview subjects to talk, and were surprised to learn how very eager they were to do so, especially such enemies as Joe Bruno and AIG’s Hank Greenberg. When Gibney unspooled this work-in-progress at the Tribeca Film Festival last spring, Client 9 was a working title. He was just releasing Casino Jack, about Jack Abramoff. I caught up with him in the offices of Magnolia Pictures.

Weinreich: You are showing an untitled Spitzer documentary. Is there a connection between questions raised about government, politics, and money in Jack’s story with Eliot Spitzer?

Gibney: The Spitzer story is more complicated. Unlike Casino Jack, there’s no easy prescriptive answer to Eliot Spitzer, but I was interested in him as a character, in his rise and his fall. He is one of the few who understands the political economy, the wicked games that are played in the financial community, and he knew how to get tough. The SEC wasn’t doing it. I admire him.

After the scandal happened, everybody was talking about it; still is, because it cuts very deep. How do we choose our public officials? What do we need them for? What about relations between men and women? How do we parse that? Spitzer is not the only powerful man who was unfaithful to his wife, but it was a spectacular moment because the way he presented himself he was so unlikely a character a candidate for using prostitutes. He prosecuted people for having done the same.

There’s no doubt that his enemies were gleeful. That’s part of the film, the political blood sport. And a lot of the people who went after him, as with Clinton, were guilty of the same or similar crimes. Eliot Spitzer didn’t corner the market on hypocrisy.

At last week’s after event at Kastel at Trump Soho, partiers munched on lamb chops and fois gras canapés, and mused on another unlikely star of the movie: the now 26 year old Cecile (CeCe) Suwal, former Madam of the Emporers Club, an active if unaware participant in bringing the former governor down. Giggling, rolling her eyes through her interview, she becomes the movie’s unlikely co-star-and comic relief. You simply cannot make a character like this up!

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
New York Film Festival and Hamptons International Film Festival: Autumn in NY

October 15, 2010

The great pleasures of the fall film season, the venerable NYFF in its 48th year and HIF F, 18 and growing, leave me reeling (no pun), reflecting upon the awards season ahead. To make a comparison over many years of immersion, the NYFF offers the more daring and experimental in world cinema-I am thinking now of two American films, Julie Taymor's “The Tempest” and Kelly Reichardt's “Meek's Cutoff ,” both visually stunning, risk taking entertainments, the first being Shakespeare Taymor style, with Helen Mirren as Prospera and an all-star cast: Alfred Molina, Chris Cooper, Ben Whishaw, to name a few, The Tempest is a gorgeous visual treat. NYFF's “Meek's Cutoff” stars Michelle Williams in an intensely beautiful film that moves at the pace of buzzards circling their prey.

This must be Williams' year. One of the treats of the Hamptons: she stars with Ryan Gosling in “Blue Valentine,” a movie that reveals a relationship so raw it feels like you are seeing it with its guts hanging out. The truth of these performances is memorable, and illustrates a fundamental characteristic of the Hamptons festival: the films have heart, starting with the opening night's “Barney's Version.”

While the Hamptons was always a fun festival, its focus was not always clear. That perception has changed. Moving the dates to the holiday weekend has made a difference even if the Hamptons now overlaps with the NYFF. Silvercup Studio head Stuart Suna, Board Chair since the beginning, took credit for the fine weather, but much is owed to the leadership of Karen Arikian and her team, including Programming Director David Nugent. The choices were simply excellent.

Tom Hooper's “The King's Speech” features award worthy performances by Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, and Helena Bonham Carter in a supporting role. This film with the unlikely subject of King George getting over his stammering has won several audience awards at various festivals and will surely bring award nods to everyone involved: at a dinner at 75 Main in Southampton to honor the film, screenwriter David Seidler said he will bring the play version to Broadway.

But it is “Black Swan” that haunts me most. Darren Aronofsky follows his trend of taking extreme characters on a fatal flying leap-see “The Wrestler”-with Natalie Portman as a young ballerina to star in a variation of Swan Lake directed by Vincent Cassell. You are never sure whether the untoward events are all inside Portman's head but nobody plays sexy and perverse as well as Cassell. Rodarte's costumes add to the spectacular in this film, influenced by Polanski's “Repulsion” and Haneke's “The Piano Teacher.” At the Hamptons Q&A, Aronofsky told a crowd that included Madonna and James Franco: Portman, a trained dancer as a teen, did most of her own work.

Also at the Hamptons: producer, distributor, all around film impresario Ben Barenholtz was toasted at an industry tribute at Montauk's Second House Tavern by the Coen Brothers and many others. Marcia Gay Harden was M.C. The next day, the Coen's “Miller's Crossing” starring Harden in her film debut was screened, reminding everyone that the Coen Brothers, so good now, were so good then. Barenholtz was an executive producer of the film. So how does it feel to be toasted like a marshmallow in the Hamptons? “It felt good.”

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
Sally Hawkins Helicoptered in for the Hamptons International Film Festival

October 11, 2010

The crowd-pleasing “Made in Dagenham,” about a strike for equal pay for women workers at a Ford plant in mid-'60's England, will remind many viewers of “Norma Rae.” With a winning performance by Sally Hawkins in the lead as Rita, this labor world variation of “the little engine that could” has a charm all its own.

“Made in Dagenham”'s overt feminist message will resonate for everyone in the current economics of layoffs and fair wages; yet, an aspect of women's sensibility is played for irresistible comedy. No matter how heavy the problems of their world, style is part of the discourse–beyond the period detail of Rita's co-worker Brenda's beehive (Angela Riseborough who was so good in last spring's off Broadway play The Pride), or Sandra's (Jamie Winstone) hot pants. Unexpectedly championed by an upper class fellow mom, Lisa Hopkins (the elegant Rosamund Pike), a well-educated housewife stifled in domesticity, Rita admires her red dress and learns the designer is Byblos. Clearly a moment of recognition, many women at the screening chuckled. Later, when Rita meets the Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity (Miranda Richardson), the gravitas of an impending strike is punctuated with a light-hearted fashion tip.

The star of Mike Leigh's “Happy-Go-Lucky,” Sally Hawkins is now performing in Roundabout Theater's production of Mrs. Warren's Profession. Leigh, with whom she remains friends, attended a performance when he was in town presenting his new movie “Another Year,” one of my favorites from this past New York Film Festival. In East Hampton on Sunday for a special screening of “Made in Dagenham” and dinner at Della Femina hosted by Judy Licht, Hawkins in a smart black suit and multi-tiered crystal necklace and earrings chatted about her work, reviews good and bad. Yes, in real life, the work concerns of a talented actress –whose career is most definitely assured– seem gender free. But another conversation was just as real: a mutual admiration for jewelry.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
Barney’s Version: A Who’s Who of Canada

October 8, 2010

One of the great pleasures of Barney’s Version, the opening night feature of the Hamptons International Film Festival, was the parade of Canadian filmmakers in cameo roles: David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, among them. It’s as if this funny, sad, smart film set in Montreal andbased on Mordechai Richler’s last novel, had its own inside jokes.

Producer Robert Lantos told a packed audience on Thursday night in East Hampton, he shepherded this film into creation after Richler’s death. The two had formed a friendship and realizing that this was probably Richler’s finest work, Lantos persevered through severalscreenplays and a number of key changes. One was moving the locationof the protagonist’s early years and first marriage to Rome instead of Paris. While giving readings in Italy, Richler had been surprised thathis book had become a huge hit there. Here in Canada, I am a novelist, he told Lantos, but in Italy, I am arockstar. And so this change had the author’s blessing. The moviepremiered in Venice and made front-page news for days.

Paul Giamatti plays the protagonist of the title, a Jewish producer of shlock television; his shlemiel persona rivals that of Larry David. Ironically lucky and luckless in love, he is married first to a painter who commits suicide, then a Jewish Canadian Princess (Minnie Driver), and then to the elegant Miriam Grant. British actress Rosamund Pike who ages miraculously through this story, based herrestrained performance on Richler’s widow Florence who at 80, said Lantos, still has the stately demeanor of her youth. Pike’sperformance anchors a cast that also includes Dustin Hoffman as Barney’s father, a Jewish cop. Hoffman will surely be nominated for a Best Supporting Oscar. Even dead in a tawdry brothel, he steals theshow.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura