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about: Regina Weinreich

  • Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in 80 for Brady: Ageless Football Fans

    80 for Brady
    It is a truth widely acknowledged, don’t mess with gray haired ladies, (and others in Barbarella wigs). Based on a true story of four fans in love with Tom Brady, the new movie, 80 for Brady, features the Frankie & Gracie team, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, plus Sally Field and Rita Moreno; these women look good at any age. One way or another, they are determined to make it to the Superbowl. Winning a contest, they now have tickets, and this being a road movie with some action-packed scenes in the field, albeit geriatric style, the comedy comes in how they get to Houston and make the big football scene.

    Mishaps abound: lost and counterfeit tickets, slow movement as desire demands speed, life’s thornier issues of health, death, –and then there’s the question of how do you kidnap someone napping from a nursing home? Only Sally Field, an academic, has a partner, a fellow academic played by Bob Balaban, who insists that she advise him on a speech, oblivious to where she has fled, and so needy, he forgets to put on his pants. Forgetting is a good part of the joke.

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  • Oscar Nominations: The Andrea Riseborough Upset

    OSCARS 2023
    Oscar watchers did not see Andrea Riseborough coming, even though she was on the tip of Cate Blanchett’s lips as she accepted a Critics Choice award for Best Actress for her tour de force performance in Tar. In almost a whisper, the formidable Blanchett, a frontrunner who has already won a slew of awards, noted Riseborough, not even mentioning a movie she leads, To Leslie. A hugely solid actress, Riseborough is in the back story of many films, a minor character or supporting role. A British actress, she was a factory worker in Made in Dagenham. She’s played Wallis Simpson. Reaching back to the biopic about Billie Jean King, she played a sly, deceitful love interest to the tennis star with Emma Stone in the lead. She’s in David O. Russell’s most recent film Amsterdam, and when the premiere took over Alice Tully Hall, she graced the long cast line onstage. Present for a long time, in To Leslie, an indie film celebrated by a Hollywood elite, Andrea Riseborough finally leads.

    Unseated is a list of fine actresses including Danielle Deadwyler, Viola Davis, as many have noted. Many ponder how this nomination will affect the Best Actress win, but for now, whatever conversation the Oscars inspire, this nod has mixed up a predictable roster that includes Michelle Yeoh, Michelle Williams, and Ana de Armas for her heartbreaking turn as Marilyn Monroe in Blonde.

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  • Steven Spielberg at the Golden Globes: The Awards Season Heats Up

    Ke and Steven
    Everyone gets a kick out of Jennifer Coolidge’s loopy discourse. As demonstrated at the Golden Globes ceremony this week, nobody does it better, but the antic Ke Huy Quan, whose award for Best Supporting Actor-Motion Picture for his work in Everything Everywhere All at Once started the evening off, comes close. In a flash of serious reflection and gratitude, he shouted out to Steven Spielberg for casting him in his debut movie, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Seated closeby, with his new movie’s cast and crew, Spielberg looked genuinely pleased. While Quan went on to a few more roles—in Goonies, for example—the young actor could not get work for decades until the Daniels put him in their new movie, such a mash up of martial arts and narrative high jinks, there’s never a dull pause in the multiverse. Quan’s heartfelt speech became a bookend to the historic Globe’s night that, in the end, honored Steven Spielberg for Best Director-Motion Picture and Best Picture-Drama for his quasi-autobiographical The Fabelmans.

    Picking up his statue for directing, Spielberg spoke about his movie, what it meant to finally address his own story. His words struck a chord. Having thought about it for years, he hit 74. What was he waiting for? True, not everyone has a mother who danced provocatively at family camping trips, or brought home a pet monkey, or who, so utterly free, went off with her husband’s best friend. That’s one part of his origin story. Another, the anti-Semitism Spielberg endured as a teen struck another chord. He did what he had to do, discovering that story-telling—for him with his camera—could make him popular. Or at least respected. Or at least keep him alive. The parameters are emblematic of what it took in his era for Jewish kids to survive, and speaks to the larger story of how the young come into their own next moment.

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  • Martin Scorsese to Cate Blanchett at the New York Film Critics Circle Gala: Where Are You Going with This?

    KateJoining the party at Tao Downtown on a screen, Martin Scorsese looked genuinely bewildered as he presented the Best Picture award to the movie Tar, noting the extraordinary performance of its star Cate Blanchett. As Lydia Tar, a genius orchestra conductor, Blanchett rages and purrs, at times in impeccable German. Scorsese has indeed worked with an actor or two but seemed awed over Blanchett: given she can do anything, and is, perhaps the actress of her generation: how far is she willing to go? Tar is on many “best” lists as it turns the cliché of the toxic male around, but the question is not how far Lydia Tar can go, but, for me, how far she has come.

    The standout scene is when she returns home to Staten Island, as Linda. Here was the modest provincial place she had to flee to self-invent, to flourish in her music, and, horrifically, to nurture a monstrously warped ego. Discussing the film with its director Todd Field, I mention this resonant film moment. In writing it, he said, he was exploring, how does a talented person break into the elite cultural world of orchestras. He was thinking of Billy Strayhorn and how he fixed himself up to see Duke Ellington, into his idea of the cool Manhattan jazz society, and how everyone then looked to copy his style, his idea of how to be cool.

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  • Common’s Broadway Debut in Between Riverside and Crazy

    Between Riversiade
    The play Between Riverside and Crazy at the Helen Hayes Theater opens on the Tony awarded actor Stephen McKinley Henderson seated in a wheelchair in a well-worn kitchen at breakfast, looking like a black Buddha in a flannel shirt. The audience silently takes in the clutter of appliances and china laden cupboards. It is multi-Grammy-winner Common, making his Broadway debut, who arrives to great applause. It’s the kind of topsy turvy posturing that occurs often enough in theater. Not everyone is a Common-like instantly known star, but, by the time the play twists and turns to its conclusion, well, we know where the high wattage is coming from.

    It helps that Common is soft-spoken as Junior. Piping down as the menage in this sprawling Riverside Drive apartment cranks up is just the right volume. Junior’s girlfriend Lulu (Rosal Colon) is a loud piece of work dressed in butt-cheek-exposing cut offs. We’re not quite sure what granola munching Oswaldo (Victor Almanzar), a drug addict, is doing squatting here, but that’s okay. Henderson’s character, Pop, likes his company. In fact, this place is Pop’s, and since his wife died, everyone is welcome. That includes a former colleague, Detective O’Connor (Elizabeth Canavan) and her fiancé Lieutenant Caro (a splendid Michael Rispoli) who come to dinner with an agenda. They need Pop to sign some papers.

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  • Wendell Pierce in Death of a Salesman: Attention Was Paid

    Death of a Salesman
    Willy Loman, Arthur Miller’s Everyman, is a plum role for any actor: the character speaks to everyone. Wendell Pierce’s portrayal of this “salesman,” puts this emblematic character, the center of Death of a Salesman, through the Hudson Theater roof in this latest superb revival, recently moved from London. Back in the day, Miller oversaw a production in Beijing. Even under Communism, men, fathers, heads of households, could relate to the dreams that propel Loman’s arc, even if they are more fantasy than real. The play’s toxic male energy, passed from Willy to his sons Biff and Happy, is grounded by his wife Linda with Sharon D. Clarke doing the heavy lifting, guarding Willy’s illusions of grandeur even from their boys, who inherit and suffer his pathological delusions. All this is the play’s familiar territory, but now the family is black in a white community, spinning the story in a fascinating way.

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  • Some Like It Hot: “Nobody’s Perfect,” But Maybe This Musical Comes Close

    Some Like it Hot
    The musical Some Like It Hot, based on the beloved movie, tweaks its source, seeing in the original the chance to be both color and gender savvy. To recap the basic storyline, Joe and Jerry are a couple of working musicians who land a gig at a swank Chicago joint run by the mob. In between sets, they witness a gangland rub out, and now they are on the run for their lives. Hiding in plain sight, they dress as women and join an all-girls touring band heading for California. In the movie, Tony Curtis, Joe, and Jack Lemmon, Jerry, are pretty in disguise. Here, Joe (Christian Borle), not to face-shame, is goofy on a good day, but Jerry, redubbed Daphne (J. Harrison Ghee) looks as gorgeous and glamorous as Diana Ross. As Daphne, Jerry finds new depth and does not shy from engagement to Osgood (Kevin Del Aguila)—just because he was born a man. Osgood is understandably crazy about Daphne just the same. And boy, can these hoofers tap!

    Sugar Kane, –that’s the Marilyn Monroe character– still drinks and distrusts sax players. Here, a wonderful Adrianna Hicks, fresh off Six, shows ample song and dance chops; a sexy Sugar, she forms a tapping trio with Josephine and Daphne to lead the band, kept in check and on schedule by Sweet Sue (NaTasha Yvette Williams). Wise, she knows her mixed race band might not fare well in the South.

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  • Bruce Weber’s Homage to Paolo di Paolo, Italian Master Photographer

    Bruce WebberIf you think scenic Sicily is having a moment in this season’s White Lotus, check out the Italy of Bruce Weber’s ravishing The Treasure of his Youth: The Photographs of Paolo di Paolo. Opening with archival shots of children on the street, a girl on communion day, Anna Magnani with her dog, Marcello Mastroanni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the documentary arrives at a provocative and hilarious clip of Sophia Loren in a striptease from Vittorio de Sica’s Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. Marcello howls with desire.

    Illustrating his childhood love affair with Italy through Italian cinema, Weber in voiceover reveals a happy discovery: At a gallery in Rome, he and his wife Nan Bush were struck seeing prints from a prominent photojournalist of the late 1950’s, who, at the height of fame, after the breakup of a love affair in the ‘60’s, retired to the countryside. Signed Paolo di Paolo, the photos became the inspiration for this film.

    When Weber called, Paolo’s daughter Silvia had to explain who this American photographer was. It was she who, rummaging through the basement looking for skis one day, found a chest full of negatives and pushed her father to tell his story. Charming and dapper, di Paolo at 94, recounts his life, living under fascism, leaving his home to find the world, his first commission photographing a debutante ball with 2,000 guests, and a welter of celebrity artists including Tennessee Williams, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Taylor; Weber’s film was set to wrap after covering Paolo’s first ever photography retrospective, “Mondo Perduto,” when di Paolo was commissioned to shoot the Valentino couture fashion show in Paris. He speaks humbly of his art, “I did it as an amateur, because I loved it. My luck was to know important people.”

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  • Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt: Again, The Holocaust

    Leapold2Those of us marked by a personal Holocaust history may be damaged by this cataclysmic event’s long shadow. Playwright Tom Stoppard evaded this essential legacy, as Hermoine Lee spelled out his background in her excellent recent biography. Beautifully staged at the Longacre Theater under Patrick Marber’s fine direction, Tom Stoppard’s fictional telling of his family story in his latest play Leopoldstadt raises a question: is assimilation good for the Jews? Is it ever possible to truly fit in?

    I ask this way because as the drama opens, in an elegant living room, teeming with life, culture, and refined sensibility, a question is posed: what sort of ornament should top the Christmas tree? The Vienna depicted is modern indeed in 1899. Hermann (David Krumholz), a factory owner who has converted to Catholicism is in heated discussion with Ludwig, his brother-in-law (Brandon Uranowitz) on such topics as Jewish persecution in faraway places, numbers theory, Freud, Zionism; one might imagine the educated, wealthy class would concern itself with the issues of the day. The family settles on a Star of David.

    Stoppard being Stoppard, sex and betrayal are part of the human-scale drama. The women, Gretl (Faye Castelow), Hermann’s wife, agrees to join Hanna (Colleen Litchfield), Ludwig’s sister, in a playful dalliance with men in uniform and ends up in an adulterous tryst. But as we are well aware, the consequences of these betrayals are trivial beside the larger story of Europe and fascism’s rise. Following the Anschluss in 1938, the family, now in drab dress is casually taunted by the Nazis who arrive at the stripped-down apartment to evacuate them. In the same drawing room, –after, in 1955–, a character named Leonard pared to Len (Arty Froushan), resembling a young Stoppard, meets with surviving cousins who tell him how everyone was murdered. Gretl’s portrait may stand for stolen property, but the very last word of the play says it all, “Auschwitz.”

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  • Audra McDonald in Ohio State Murders: Yes, Bring on the Tonys 

    Play
    In a role that looks to garner a 7th Tony Award for Audra McDonald, the actress plays a poet returning to her school to give a lecture about her work. She must explain the source of her grim images. From this start, Ohio State Murders, a tight 75-minute tour de force from 91-year-old playwright Adrienne Kennedy, holds you in its grip. Yes, there is a murder—actually 2– and the way a poet might narrate such a tale, in fragments, is breathtaking. 

    Insanely, this is Kennedy’s Broadway debut—in the newly refurbished, sparkling James Earl Jones Theater. Where has she been, with her erudition, her language, her sharp focus on the plight of smart women, on race? The play is based on Kennedy’s own experiences with racism while attending the mostly white Ohio State University in the ‘50’s. A black woman, no matter how gifted, was never considered eligible to major in literature. So, as depicted in the play, when a young lecturer arrives and reads from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the part where a stunned Tess confesses to murder, Suzanne Alexander, as she’s called, is smitten. To be fair, we are too. Who has not had a crush on a charismatic prof? This one, Robert Hampshire, very white and wan– with Bryce Pinkham in the role– reads with passion. You can guess some of what happens here, in an outlying house near an abyss—but not the key, shocking details.

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  • Neil Diamond on Broadway in A Beautiful Noise: Portrait of the Performer in Treatment 

    Neil Diamond
    Fans and first-nighters greeted Neil Diamond as he emerged from a black town car on West 44 Street at the Broadhurst Theater for A Beautiful Noise’s opening with a rousing “Sweet Caroline.” Who doesn’t love Neil Diamond? Well, it turns out from this jukebox musical about his life, he doesn’t.

    As it begins, an old version of himself (Mark Jacoby) is seated in a large leather chair opposite a shrink (Linda Powell). They are trying to figure out how to work together; his song book becomes the scaffolding for a narrative that looks like it will yield the desired music, the occasion for how he wrote it, and a window into his life. Alas, Portnoy’s Complaint, another vehicle for a deep dive into a Jewish boy from Brooklyn’s psyche, this is not. But here’s the good news: Will Swenson, as the young songwriter, emerges, electrifying the audience with his renditions of Neil Diamond hits.

    Well, it is useless to quibble about how a Broadway show misses the chance to tell a real story in its manner of shaping an entertainment– unless you want to believe that Neil Diamond’s fame, like the sequined outfits he wore, was so blinding, he never actually got to know the source of his insecurities. Covering his auspicious debut writing songs for the Monkees, performing at The Bitter End, the show looks at his domestic life: only the first two wives are present onstage, performed by Jessie Fisher and Robyn Hurder, with various couches indicating home. Just as well because he was mostly absent, touring obsessively. In a Playbill note, he endorses this project as therapeutic, “wishing perhaps that only if I could make a few edits in the script, it would change some of the reality of what I was seeing.”

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  • Remembering Aline Kominsky-Crumb

    Crumb
    The Crumb documentary is ruining my life, complained Aline Kominsky-Crumb in 1993, as Terry Zwigoff’s biopic about Robert Crumb, her husband, gained acclaim, becoming a darling on the festival circuit. “Next thing you know, we’ll be invited to the Jerusalem Film Festival.” All of this drama was played out in a comic strip that appeared in The New Yorker magazine. Festival director Leah von Leer saw an opportunity and wrote to the Crumbs. “Your nightmare has come true. You are officially invited.”

    Nominated for an academy award for best documentary feature, Crumb was a revealing look not only of this famous cartooning couple but Robert’s unusual family, capturing his highly eccentric and artistic brothers just before one committed suicide. Passionate for jazz, Robert had a huge record collection. Vinyl filled a room. Fearing an atmosphere of violence in their area of California, where gun ownership was de rigeuer, the Crumbs left for the south of France and lived in a multistoried house carved out of the rock on the banks of the Vidourle.

    This much I knew when I encountered Robert and Aline in the lobby of our hotel in Jerusalem; I too came with a film, a documentary about the writer/composer Paul Bowles who lived in Tangier. “Did your records make it across the Atlantic?” I asked him as a way of saying hello. The Crumbs and my family—my husband Bob Salpeter, our two daughters, and my mother aged 73 and a survivor of Auschwitz –hung out. While Aline and I gabbed away getting to know one another—we had grown up in the New York City boroughs, finding our escape to Manhattan; we had ties to the Soho Weekly News– Robert was helping my mother navigate the streets, gentle as could be. Aline dubbed her own mother Blabette, but genuinely liked mine grasping her spirituality.

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  • Gotham Awards Celebrating the Best of the Indies

    Gothem Awards 2022“Ooh, what’s that?” Adam Sandler ogled my pasta as he breezed by our table at Cipriani Wall Street for the Gotham Awards. “I’ll eat that,” the funny man made a bee-line to his table. Later on, well fed, he brought the cavernous house down accepting the Performer Tribute Award from the Safdie brothers, his Uncut Gems directors, a thank-you monologue created, he said, by his Youtube and Lululemon loving teen daughters, delivered in a strange Southern accent. Just what you’d expect at the Gotham Awards!

    Jennifer Lawrence—here to present Best Feature– called this special night a bellwether for the film award season! This annual celebration of Indie films honors non-Hollywood fare; then again, every year the lines blur, as this gorgeous filet mignon dinner becomes more and more elegant, hmm, upscale—i.e. with sponsors including Variety and Cadillac (yes, a sedan was parked outside the restrooms), the program now printed on gloss, it is always a wonder that the downtown vibe remains: it’s industry insiders just happy to be clinking glasses, be they of Fuji water and Blue Moon beer, catching up.

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  • Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan in She Said: Naming Predators’ Names

    Weinstien
    As Harvey Weinstein sits in court in California on charges of rape and the former president Donald Trump, an alleged abuser, announces he will run again, the new movie, She Said, is a ripped-off-the-headlines thriller, telling the story of two investigative journalists who exposed the practice of abuse in the workplace. Of course, for Weinstein, co-founder of Miramax, that would be the movie business. You could say that New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor are the Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on this issue, as She Said shows their dedication to hearing victims’ accounts, and the exhausting, exhilarating process of getting them to go on record. No, this is not Watergate, but a system far more insidious in its established acceptance worldwide, undermining women and their dreams.

    The She Said casting is exceptional: two of the women hurt by Weinstein are played by Samantha Morton and Jennifer Ehle. Great actresses, their characters meet with the reporters. Their careers broken, they have moved on, haunted by their anguished past. They go public at great risk. For many who have never experienced assault by a boss, it may be easy to dismiss their sensitivity, to say, get over it. But the movie makes it clear that powerful predators are enabled by others. After Rose McGowan and others came forward, 86 women finally accused Harvey Weinstein, enough to make you wonder how this family man and astute film professional with an amazing success story had any time for luring young, naïve women to his hotel room for work related meetings, where he insisted upon sexual favors while clad in a bathrobe or naked. An army of helpful assistants and lawyers, eyes wide shut, covered up the tracks, leading women
    on, or paying them off for their silence, forcing them to sign impenetrable non-disclosure agreements.

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  • Jennifer Connelly’s Good Hair and Tight Sails in Top Gun: Maverick

    Top Gun
    One of the highest grossing films in the history of movies, Top Gun: Maverick, a sequel decades after the first 1986 Top Gun film, exemplifies why old-fashioned story-telling wins. As producer Jerry Bruckheimer said following a special screening at the Whitby Hotel this week, it’s an action movie wrapped around a love story. You cannot beat the aerial sequences, sleek planes on a mission to destroy an enemy arsenal. But the Top Gun team, led by “Maverick,” Tom Cruise at his best, heroic and sensitive, features pilots you can love. Particularly fine are “Rooster,” a son-surrogate played by Miles Teller, “Ice,” a touching Val Kilmer, his character, a rival to Cruise in the original, so debilitated by terminal throat cancer he communicates by texting, and “Hangman,” a fresh, snide Glen Powell. And, who knew Maverick had a woman in the wings? And what a woman! Jennifer Connelly is stunning as Penny who tends her own bar.

    Director Joseph Kosinski said it’s her intelligence that made him want her for the movie, and that unbelievably, Jennifer had never worked with Tom Cruise before. Their chemistry is visceral as she flips her auburn mane, bringing out something in Cruise we’ve never seen before, and it’s thrilling. Jennifer Connelly said it was all in the wig.

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  • Tangled Up in Tulsa: Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song

    Bob Dylan’s massive archive is now on view in Tulsa, at the Bob Dylan Center right next door to the Woody Guthrie Museum. Artifacts of these two music giants make a must-see stop on any American culture tour. But Tulsa? Why there, everyone asks. For his stuff to be situated next to his hero’s, Dylan would have agreed to any place. Tulsa is not particularly relevant to his biography, but, as his new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, illustrates with great gusto, his sources and inspirations can be far-ranging, and belong to one place in particular—here, the place where democracy lives. They belong where, in a Whitmanesque sense, people of all stations in life can sit side by side—at least theoretically. An homage to a highly idiosyncratic American songbook, Dylan revels in behind-the-scenes stories of the famous as he honors the work of less well known artists.

    Bob Dylan Center
    Yes, he goes deep into how Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” had its lyrics adjusted. Referring to The Who’s “My Generation,” he proclaims, “Every generation gets to pick and choose what they want from the generations before with the same arrogance and ego-driven self-importance that the previous generations had when they picked the bones of the ones before them.” Yes, he calls Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” “an update of the iconic beat generation masterpiece by Jack Kerouac.” Maybe taking a cue from Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues which in other places he calls an important influence on his writing, each entry reads like a satori, a nugget of supreme wisdom. Short and to the point, each might follow a Kerouacean writerly strategy to simply fill up the page, like a jazz riff, stopping “where the page stops.” But Dylan doesn’t let his ideas spill one to the next.

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  • Michelle Williams in The Fabelmans: Steven Spielberg’s Bildungsroman

    Speilburg

    Taking liberally from his own biography, Steven Spielberg creates a portrait of the artist as a young man in his latest film, The Fabelmans. It is no accident that the word fable echoes within this title, nor that the child to adolescent to teen and adult depicted is on a journey to discover his unique voice—through a moving picture camera lens. But the real star of this fictive tale is his mother called Mitzi, tremendously appealing with Michelle Williams in the role. An elfin creature with talents beyond her burnt eggs and salami, Mitzi is a soak-up-all-the-oxygen-in-the-room sort, and the epicenter of Sam’s consciousness. Flirting, even with Sam, Mitzi sings and plays the piano for her family and remains an unfailing support to her son’s filmmaking ambitions. Michelle finesses Mitzi even at her most wacky. Yes, his father (Paul Dano, excellent) plays an important part too–as does his best friend Ben (Seth Rogen, wonderful) who, by the way, makes off with his mother; that story underpins much of Sam’s emotional energy without undermining his gifts as a visual artist.

    Some other characters along the way need mention: Judd Hirsch as Uncle Boris, Jeanne Berlin as Hadassah Fabelman, and David Lynch as John Ford. The film engages in numerous ways, especially as it references many of Spielberg’s greatest hits: E. T., Jaws, among others. Serious matters: his parents’ divorce, the anti-Semitism he experienced in school, the beatings he endures facing the school’s jocks, and Jesus as a romantic rival—All are part of the journey as Sam makes movies featuring train crashes, blood spurting war battles, and teen beach parties.

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  • Hugh Jackman in Florian Zeller’s The Son: Dance Man in a Drama

    The sonaAAA

    It’s a far cry from The Music Man’s River City, Iowa to the swell NYC apartments and boardrooms of Florian Zeller’s The Son. The film is the latest in a trilogy that began with The Father, based on a stage play, with The Mother to follow. In The Father, you may recall, Anthony Hopkins won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance as a lovably demented dad to Olivia Coleman. You never quite know when he’s seeing/ hearing/ telling the truth. It’s a tour de force of the man’s inner mind, and it was riveting. 

    In The Son, Hopkins appears again in a pivotal scene, stone cold as a father to Hugh Jackman, a father who is facing some parenting challenges. Jackman sang and danced his way into Marion the librarian (Sutton Foster’s) heart in the recent Music Man revival on Broadway. And in The Son, as Peter, he does a funky hip slide that looks like it will bond him to his teen son Nicholas (Zen McGrath) who is having mental issues related to his dad’s divorce from his mom, Kate (Laura Dern in a moving role). Until Beth (a superb and sexy Vanessa Kirby), his father’s new wife, gets into the act, and all sours.

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  • Topdog/Underdog Revival at the Golden: History Does Repeat

    Top Dog

    The stakes are huge for two brothers named Lincoln and Booth who live in a one-room fleabag joint with no running water. Carrying history itself, these brothers—well, living conditions are the least of their problems. Sibling rivalry aside, Topdog/ Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize winning play now in a superb revival at the Golden Theater, feels essential, as a game of one-upmanship, as “civil” war re-enactment, or a reckoning of what it means when members of the same family vie for dominance.

    Opening with Booth (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) honing his three card monte skills, this play is hilarious. Soon, Linc (Corey Hawkins) interrupts, a black man in white face. His hat and waistcoat give him away—his job is portraying President Abraham Lincoln, shot constantly in an arcade show. That’s his day job. The doubling and tripling in this conceit are enough to give you dread as Linc practices his skills at dying. Skilled at shoplifting, Booth wears a big coat the better to bring home purloined goods, neatly padding him every which way. Clothes do make the man, and don’t forget the matching ties, the belt. Snip the label. The actors are particularly wonderful – however different—showing a comic physicality, without ever becoming slapstick. Director Kenny Leon milks these moments, dressing and undressing his actors, unpeeling memories of an untoward childhood. Abandoned by their parents as teens, at least Booth had older brother Linc.

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  • Body Language: The Whale and Triangle of Sadness in the Hamptons

    The whale

    At this year’s Hamptons International Film Festival, blame it on the vagaries of programming, but on one day two films featured such egregious abuse of the body, as if to highlight human excesses of all kinds. I speak of copious consumption of junk food, fine champagne to wash down, and then up projectile vomit, and consequent brown spewing toilets. A coincidence?

    In Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, Brendan Fraser plays Charlie, a dying obese man. That’s too bad because he also appreciates his estranged daughter (Sadie Sink), and poetry, the true meaning of self in Whitman’s Song of Myself and the rhythmic cadences of Melville’s Moby Dick, about an obsessed sea captain on a death wish. In case you ever wondered how people can eat themselves to oblivion, you may find the answer here, but a whole lot more. As the classic literature suggests a spiritual component to the sins of the flesh, Charlie consumes pizza, meatball heroes with extra cheese, you name it. As a visual experience, it is painful to see him move around his drab, depressing apartment—until he achieves the transcendence he seeks.

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  • HIFF: Brunch with 3 Directors: Oliver Hermanus, Peter Hedges, and Volker Schlondorff 

    Hampton Film Festable
    You cannot take your eyes off Bill Nighy in his superb performance in Living, Oliver Hermanus’ film, the Hamptons International Film Festival opening night feature. A remake of Akira Kurasawa’s Ikiru with a script by Kazuo Ishigura, Living follows a man played by Nighy, a higher up in a bureaucracy that specializes—as is the nature of bureaucracies—in getting nothing done. At a desk piled high with folders of delayed projects, Nighy is overwhelmed by the pyramid of inaction until a younger man joins the firm, the wonderful Alex Sharp, and Nighy learns he has but a short time to live. A young, perky woman (Aimee Lou Wood) shows him how to “live,” providing an education far from the scandal his family thinks. From South Africa, Oliver Hermanus moved to London to make this feature, and moreover, moved to our table at Nick & Toni’s restaurant for the annual filmmakers’ brunch. The hardest part of making the film, he said, was casting on Zoom, exulting now in casting a series he’s been hired to direct in person. 

    Director Peter Hedges joined the brunch table too. His The Same Storm utilizes laptops and cell phones to get into the lives of 24 characters during the Covid lockdown.

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  • Nan Goldin at the New York Film Festival in Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

    Nan GoldenAt the NYFF press conference following a screening of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, photographer Nan Goldin seemed as surprised as anyone that Laura Poitras included footage of her family story, weaving together decades of her artistic risk-taking. From the time that she left her childhood home in the suburbs for a life documenting a demimonde of friends, like herself, on a cultural fringe, she has harbored the memory of her sister, a rebel who taught Nan how to rebel. That rebellion led to activism. 

    Poitras came on board to help complete a film project that began with some footage of Goldin and P.A.I.N. demonstrating. The group which she helped to found continues to challenge the opioid industry Nan Goldin barely survived, and now she wants to give voice to the thousands who died as a result of addiction: in particular, P.A.I.N targets the Sackler family who put their name on arts institutions in New York, Paris, London, etc., from the vast amounts of money they made through Purdue Pharma promoting drugs like oxycontin, and other pain killers they pushed as non-addictive.

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  • White Noise Opens the New York Film Festival with a Bang

    Film Festable
    The 60th New York Film Festival opens with a lot of noise, White Noise, that is. Noah Baumbach’s movie, adapted from Don DeLillo’s classic American 1985 novel, features the kind of ambient sound that barely registers, punctuated by the boom of train/freighter collisions in combustible flames exuding plumes of smoke. It’s a canvas of the senses, in grays and vivid crayon color—all the distractible elements necessary for survival in the face of definite death. In Samuel Beckett’s hands, this dilemma is sparely etched. But guided by DeLillo’s images of American detritus, Noah Baumbach succeeds in answering the question of how can anyone make a movie out of the satiric cacophony/ harmony of White Noise? Or, perhaps even more relatable, how would you respond to a “toxic airborne event?”

    He succeeds well, utilizing station wagons and the A&P supermarket to full luster. Not since Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California” have the aisles popped with shoppers and products strategically placed in happy familiarity. Mountains of everything a consumer would want to hoard.

    His first adaptation, Baumbach claims to have been thinking about this project ever since as a teen his father put the novel in his hands. It helps that his father, novelist Jonathan Baumbach, was a professor at Brooklyn College and a writer wracked with his own existential dread, all familiar territory for the young Baumbach to mine. On a college campus setting, Jack Gladney (the excellent Adam Driver) is a celebrity academic, a specialist in Hitler studies. His colleague, Murray Suskind, (wonderful Don Cheadle) teaches Elvis. A beautifully choreographed lecture shows how enthusiasm for each of these idolized “superstars” flattens any moral, ethical consideration. Jack’s wife Babette (Greta Gerwig with big hair reminiscent of Melanie Griffith’s in Working Girl–no doubt costume designer Ann Roth’s touch), tries to cure her affliction: fear of death, much to the alarm of their three eldest children who chatter from beginning to end. Baumbach directed them to do that, as if they were an ongoing radio–back-sound being the point—punctuated by Danny Elfman’s music and a surprise joyful ending from LCD Soundsystem: to “new body rhumba.”

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  • David O. Russell’s Amsterdam Premieres

    Movie Blog
    “I’ve gone epic,” exuded the director David O. Russell at the lavish premiere of this movie Amsterdam at Alice Tully Hall this week. Epic and a surprise, Drake, one of the producers, introduced the screening. Epic might also refer to the scope of the film, set in World War I, the so-called Great War, The War to End All Wars. Or epic could refer to his characters, fictional representations of historic or quasi-historic figures performed by an epic cast: Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, the two Mikes, Myers and Shannon, Alessandro Nivola, Matthias Schoenaerts, Rami Malek, Anya Taylor-Joy, Timothy Olyphant, Taylor Swift—yes, that Taylor Swift, and Robert De Niro, many of whom joined Russell in a post screening Q&A with Ben Stiller. Of course, Ben Stiller being Ben Stiller, his first question was: wasn’t Flirting with Disaster—in which he had starred– your favorite film? 

    Everyone got the joke, warmed up by having seen the new film, Amsterdam. History-based, it is also funny. Turns out, David O. Russell loves history, and over the past six years enlisted Bale and Robbie to help him write a script unearthing little known events involving war, espionage, exploitative leaders of finance and industry, democracy, and all matters on the idea of history repeating itself. Rami Malek said that making this film with David O. Russell made him think of that saying in a less negative way, not so much doomed, as the values of love, friendship, and optimism prevail, also repeating themselves.

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  • At the Hamptons International Film Festival: Desperate Souls, Dark City, and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy

    Hamptons Film Festable
    Entering its 4th decade, the upcoming Hamptons International Film Festival features an impressive slate of offerings: Empire of Light, The Son, My Policeman, The Banshees of Inisherin, to name just a few that have wowed audiences at Toronto and other festivals. One documentary that premiered in Venice and played in Telluride is coming too: Nancy Buirski’s Desperate Souls, Dark City, and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy. 

    Inspired by Glenn Frankel’s book, Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic, Buirski had the idea to make a film focused on Midnight Cowboy’s “moment,” asking, what has made this 1969 film about two unlikely outcasts, adrift in NYC, so memorable and so life-changing to many viewers?

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