recent posts
- Adrien Brody and Tessa Thompson Debut on Broadway in The Fear of Thirteen
- Lorne Premieres at Lincoln Center: Glimpsing Lorne Michaels Backstage at Saturday Night Live
- Alden Ehrenreich and Patrick Ball: The Men in Becky Shaw on Broadway
- Audra McDonald and “Original Nepo Baby” Gwyneth Paltrow: Honorees at the NYWFT Muse Awards 23 March 2026
- Zach Bryan Buys the On the Road Scroll/ Happy Birthday, Jack Kerouac!
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The Year of Magical Thinking, a one-woman play based on Joan Didion's 2005 memoir of the same name, was a hit on Broadway in 2007, directed by David Hare. On Monday, the play was reprised for a farewell performance by the premiere actress of her generation Vanessa Redgrave, who as fate would have it inhabits the role in a most ironic way. Centered on the year when Didion lost both her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, and her beloved daughter Quintana, the play could resonate with anyone's loss, but Redgrave was meant to perform it just when her daughter Natasha Richardson died in a freak accident skiing with her sons, and it made last night's benefit for UNICEF at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine even more poignant. Vanessa Redgrave spoke the words of Joan Didion, explaining, magical thinking is when you decide not to throw away the deceased's shoes, as he will need them when he returns. It's a trick of the mind, a cushion if you will, against the full impact of the unbearable. A performance by a string ensemble, young musicians from the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, created by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said to promote a dialogue among Israelis, Palestinians and other Arabs, preceded the play. At the evening's end, both Redgrave and Didion took bows, each overwhelmed by roses. The audience: Lynn Redgrave, Wallace Shawn, Christine Baranski among those in the cavernous church, as well as another premiere actress of her generation, Meryl Streep, hung back for a while, unable to leave. Stephen Daldry observed of Redgrave, “She is one strong woman.” That goes for Joan Didion too.
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If the view from under the Brighton Beach el is not quite today's world vision, it offers a nostalgia trip to the late1930's that is worth glimpsing, especially through Neil Simon's round lenses. The subject of Brighton Beach Memoirs, directed by David Cromer, is a budding writer's coming of age. Eugene Morris Jerome, a stand-in for the playwright played by Noah Robbins, a young actor who somewhat resembles Adrien Brody if he were a nerd, narrates the story of his family as he, post-Bar Mitzvah, still home, ventures toward young manhood. He is aided along the way by parents at a time when father knew best, and mother, worried and fed her brood-as fits their economy, liver and lima beans. From an upstairs bedroom in the two-story house, a set beautifully designed by John Lee Beatty, Eugene's brother Stanley (in an excellent performance by Santino Fontana) coaches his younger brother in the fine arts of masturbation and voyeurism, particularly centered around their cousin who along with her mother and sister is now living with them. A war on the other side of the world threatens to provide them with yet another set of relatives escaping Hitler, and you know that this household, though scrapping along between paychecks, would accommodate the expansion. The story follows the rhythms of each character, Eugene's widowed aunt, Blanche (performed winningly by Woody Allen veteran Jessica Hecht), the young sickly Laurie (Gracie Bea Lawrence) studying for her history test, her older sister Nora (Alexandra Socha) headed for Broadway, or probably not, as she goes out at all hours sporting red lipstick. Stanley, himself trying to figure out his next moment, may join the army, and while the upstairs bedrooms and porch provide places for family members to converse and conspire, all come together at the dinner table, where Eugene drops his napkin, the better to see what's under Nora's skirt, and where the others succeed or fail to speak their mind. Overseeing all is Kate Jerome (a good Laurie Metcalf in a role made famous by Linda Lavin) whose illogical logic as mom, through Simon's one- liners and a lot of rolling eyeball, is often the butt and source of the play's abundant humor. You see the hardship of this quintessential Jewish mother in her calculated shtick. But you wish for more warmth, a heimish-je ne sais quoi quality in Jewish family life that is missing and necessary to make this batter leaven and rise. Needless to say, Eugene finally sees the peaks of the Himalayas. You may think you know what this means but see the play to get the full funny impact. In November, this revival will play in repertory with its sequel, Broadway Bound, and I for one can't wait.
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The anticipation for Memphis, a new musical with an original book, was palpable. As far as Broadway musicals go, it's been a long season of revivals. But, despite its entertaining, energetic appeal, Memphis sounds like something you've heard before. Take a bit of Hairspray (crossing the race divide in music) and sprinkle with Dreamgirls (black showgirl on the rise) and you get the genre. The music by Bon Jovi's David Bryan and Joe DiPietro evokes period rock, blues and gospel, managing to miss the real Memphis, especially its sound in the '50's, aching with themes of interracial romance and cultural change. Martin Luther King Jr. died in Memphis. Memphis was Stax Records' home. Failing to utilize the unique Memphis sound is a big mistake, a failed opportunity that makes you wonder why the talents who put together this show chose this historically rich city at all. Still, Chad Kimball winningly plays Huey Calhoun, a white boy who stumbles into a Beale Street black saloon one night lured by the sound. There he meets the love of his life, a fired up singer named Felicia (Montego Glover), her brother Delray (J. Bernard Calloway) who owns the joint, and a bartender Gator (Derrick Baskin), silent after seeing his father lynched. After following his passion for this music, transgressive for the time, Huey becomes the number one DJ at the radio station where he befriends James Monroe Iglehart as Bobby, a janitor whose dancing is especially good, defying his robust figure. Over all, Sergio Trujillo's choreography soars. Huey's mother (Cass Morgan) is not too keen on her son's fixation with the black subculture but by Act II, she's joined their church. On opening night, the legendary ducks from Memphis's Peabody Hotel were imported for publicity, providing a nod to that great American city. To know its authentic musical history, though, see D. A. Pennebaker's documentary, Only the Strong Survive: Rufus Thomas and his daughter Carla, now that's Memphis.
And, this past weekend Marilyn Maye wrapped up an eleven-night reprise of her homage to Johnny Mercer at the Metropolitan Room. Front row center in this intimate club sat her regulars, the guys who attended every performance for this sharp 81 year old whose energy seems as unstoppable as her voice. Scattered elsewhere were Frank Langella, Tyne Daly, Phyllis Newman and Michael Feinstein. If you want to talk about authentic saloon singing, it was right here
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What can you say about a woman who vanishes in the proverbial thin air? The mysteries about the remarkable Amelia Earhart and her disappearance in 1937 with her navigator Fred Noonan (Christopher Eccleston) over the Pacific Ocean persist and make ideal fodder for biographies and biopics. As Amelia, in the new movie directed by Mira Nair, Hilary Swank sports a boyish haircut that reminds us of her Oscar winning role in Boys Don't Cry. Earhart is the ideal and idealized woman of her time, a role model for young aviatrixes, and women everywhere. When asked for advice, she says, Don't let anyone turn you around, a great message for anyone gifted with her passion. Aside from flying, she also has a knack for finding wonderful, enabling men: her husband George Putnam (Richard Gere still a heartthrob with silver hair) and lover Gene Vidal (a debonair Ewan McGregor). Yes, there is a cameo of his son, the young Gore Vidal, but my favorite is scene-stealing Cherry Jones as Eleanor Roosevelt when Amelia takes the first lady for a midnight spin. The movie features many in air scenes of canyons, deserts, gorgeous views galore shot in radiant light, as well as the pilots in their storm-hounded cockpits. Also highlighted is how Amelia Earhart was marketed in her time, posing for clothing ads in trendy plaid shirts and jumpsuits, endorsing a line of luggage. That aspect of her career was underscored at the movie's world premiere on Tuesday night with an afterparty at Bloomingdale's also sponsored by Vanity Fair. Celebrants-Harry Connick Jr. and Julie Taymor among them–filed past the purses, ascended the escalator to the third floor, and munched on hors d'ouevres amidst the Missonis. Fashions worn by the fictional Earhart were on display. This glossy film works best as a romance thrillingly propelled by the tragic irony of the lead's demise. Hilary Swank is surely on her way to well-deserved nominations and awards for her performance. As a portrait of a historic figure, Amelia Earhart remains elusive, flawlessly imagined, and as vapid as the mists.
Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
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The revival of David Mamet's 1992 Oleanna in current production at the Golden Theater stars one of my favorite actors Bill Pullman whose elastic face and frenetic movements are on full display in this theatrical pas de deux with the patrician, cool Julia Stiles. They play John, a professor on the verge of tenure and closing on a new house, and Carol, a student who is failing his class. As with all Mamet's plays-most recently seen in last year's superb production of “Speed the Plow”-the subject is language, the rapid fire staccato of one liners, half completed words, thoughtful and thoughtless arguments that make up contemporary conversation, confrontation, and conflict. Oleanna became topical in its day as it coincided with the Clarence Thomas/ Anita Hill contretemps, which was its good fortune and bad. Something is lost when Mamet is used to exemplify sociology or current events. Post scandal for 2009, Oleanna has been resurrected to examine these issues anew. That seems to be the premise of the talk-backs scheduled at play's end to engage the audience with issues of possible sexual harassment. Whose side are you on? Experts-in legal fields, psychiatry, want us to engage in this discourse as led by the jovial comic radio host Lionel last night. (Other hosts will fare otherwise, I'm sure.) Well, I am on the side of good theater. I am also drawn to Bill Pullman who, even when his character is rudely and tragically taking calls on his cell phone instead of giving Carol her due attention, is still mesmerizing, a good reason to see this play. A confession, I never understood how Meg Ryan's character could abandon him in “Sleepless in Seattle.” In “A League of Their Own,” I understood Geena Davis' character leaving baseball when he returns from war. And, when Sandra Bullock's character falls for him in “While You Were Sleeping,” I was already there. The eminent culture critic Greil Marcus in his book “The Shape of Things to Come” waxes poetic on the subject of Bill Pullman's face in David Lynch's masterpiece, “Lost Highway.” Pullman, for his part, is as proud of the fine work he does in theater as he is in the romantic comedies for which he is best known: he performed on Broadway in Edward Albee's “Who is Sylvia? or The Goat” and more recently in “Peter and Jerry,” and wrote a play that was produced in San Francisco. Not surprising, in person his face is extraordinarily expressive as he enthuses about his roles. In the movie “Bottle Shock,” for example, he said about shooting one pivotal scene in which lacking a corkscrew, he assails a bottle with an unsheathed scabbard. The bottle was scored, he said, and at first the top just flipped over limply instead of flying off with gusto. That's an apt image for this play: veering off Mamet's prodigious verbal strength, even at the end when John and Carol get physical, this Oleanna has the same flat effect.
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Beat era poet Ira Cohen eloquently sets the mood for Abel Ferrara's new movie, Chelsea on the Rocks about the legendary hotel on 23rd Street, reciting his own verse. Ferrara, the downtown filmmaker who recently made Go Go Tales, one of the hits of last year's New York Film Festival, seems to want to mark the end of an era showing how the hotel is turning a corner from being a haven for down and out artists, writers and rock stars, and a locus for anyone coming to town with a yearning for bohemia or just wanting to be hip, to becoming a cash cow for a new set of corporate type owners. Famously, Sex Pistol's Sid Vicious killed Nancy Spungeon there, and then killed himself. What was it like in those glamorous years? Tenants used to say, you didn't want to share an elevator with this pair. They just might fall on you. Including interviews with Dennis Hopper, Raymond Foye, Zev Greenfield and others, the film is more a tableau of a historically rich and hash feuled milieu akin to the Beat Hotel in Paris in the late '50's and early '60's than a traditional documentary. Prior hotelier and art lover Stanley Bard famously gave Ethan Hawke a free room when his marriage to Uma Thurman broke up. The nostalgic mood is, we will never see his like again.A photo of William S. Burroughs with Andy Warhol hanging out at the Chelsea is resonant. This marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Burroughs's iconic Naked Lunch. This guru of the beat movement will be feted at St. Mark's Church, New York University, Columbia University and School of Visual Arts., and will feature a group reading by Genesis P. Orridge, John Giorno, and Simon Pettet on Wednesday at St. Mark's Church, a panel of Burroughs influenced writers on Thursday at NYU including Penny Arcade and Jurgen Ploog. On Friday, Columbia University presents an exhibition of manuscripts at Butler Library as well as panels featuring biographer Barry Miles and Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset who first put out the outrageous Naked Lunch in America. On Saturday, at Visual Arts Theater on 23 Street, a film program including the East Coast premiere of the Danish documentary Words of Advice and excerpts from Alan Govenar's Beat Hotel is followed by performers and poets: Anne Waldman, Eric Anderson, and Michael McClure. Saturday Night Live's Hal Willner brings surprise guests to the table, hosted by yours truly. For more information: http://www.nakedlunch.org.
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In his introduction to the iconic book of photographs, The Americans, Jack Kerouac wrote, You Got Eyes, honoring photographer Robert Frank as if he were a jazzman, You Can Play. Now these words are writ large at the Metropolitan Museum's fine show, Looking In, exhibiting the 83 photos that were published in the original book from the mid-1950's, some contact sheets that reveal much about how this artist made his choices and cropped his work, as well as earlier photo sequences and related essays and correspondence. The result is a thrilling glimpse into the development of Frank's unique sensibility, and a prophetic time capsule. There aren't many works that changed the way people see: this book is one of them.
The Americans, like Kerouac's On the Road, reflects a cross-country car trip. Its vision is a sad America of individuals caught in a wide expanse of highways, connecting, but not, disenfranchised from the American Dream. Robert Frank, having recently arrived from Switzerland, made the trip on a Guggenheim scholarship in 1955-6, and its look at America is one that you could argue can only be seen by an outsider: An empty chair in a barbershop seen through a screen door in McClellanville, South Carolina. U.S. 285 in New Mexico, the line dividing the road leading to a hazy horizon. Drugstore in Detroit, the black counter woman serving whites with large posters advertising “Orange Whip 10 cents” looming overhead. A movie premiere in Hollywood shows a glamorous blond with a far off gaze, background animated onlookers in focus. Robert Frank's family huddled in the back seat of a car, its headlight beaming.
The catalogue accompanying the exhibition features excellent essays providing the backstory to Frank's road trip as well as the history of the book's critical reception. Luc Sante relates the vision in The Americans to another Frank/Kerouac collaboration, the film Pull My Daisy. “The intersection of the two men may have lasted less than two years, finally, but it was momentous, with echoes that have persisted ever since. The road they separately traveled and chronicled has done nothing but expand in the popular imagination, becoming the site for a paradigmatic rite of passage.”
Interestingly enough, the opening of the Met's exhibition coincides with the release of Michael Moore's new satiric opus, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” and the timing could not be more apt, as each reveals an underbelly of America, beatific citizens somehow left behind. With respect to Obama-bashers and their ilk, these are “real Americans,” for anyone with eyes. -
The Oak Room at the Plaza was chockablock with funny women, celebrating Joy Behar's new television show on HLN, to premiere on September 29, where this funny woman will opine on pop culture to politics. It's a yenta convention, observed one partier. Introducing Joy, Barbara Walters quipped that she thought it would be Star Jones or Rosie who would graduate from “The View” -neither was present. After Walters' very public contretemps, they were not expected. And Joy Behar who will retain that coveted View seat countered Barbara's accolades, saying that Libya's President Mouammar Kadhafi had a built a tent in Bedford just for his interview. He was waiting for Barbara now. (In fact, at the UN across town, world leaders were clogging the streets. Outside the Plaza, sat a motorcade with chauffeurs talked Turkish into their cell phones.) And so the evening went: Lorraine Bracco could not walk in her skyhigh platforms. “What was I thinking? She said stumbling over for a photo. My kids insisted,” said the former shrink on the Sopranos who told me she was on her way to LA to film a pilot for a new HBO series. Suze Orman was not dispensing advice on money for the evening, but for this occasion comedy is recession proof: champagne, filet and a magnificent salmon. Others on the scene: Joan Rivers, Angela LaGreca, Hoda Kotb, and guys too, like Larry King, Bob Balaban and Reverend Al Sharpton. Susie Essman said she wrote up the experience of having her bridal announcement on the pages of the New York Times-that's chapter 11 of her new book, “What Would Susie Say?” (October, 2009). “Curb Your Enthusiasm” just started its new season and, as Susie Greene, when it comes to Larry, she holds nothing back. I tell her she cracks me up giving it to that Larry David, unrelenting, even if he is an SOB. She laughs, “Oh, he can take it.”
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Filmmaker Michael Moore apologized for being late to the premiere of his new movie, Capitalism: A Love Story. President Obama, a guest on David Letterman, was clogging traffic and Moore got caught up in his motorcade. “We could have just kept going,” said Moore from the stage of Alice Tully Hall before a packed and patient audience that included actors like Allison Janney, Tovah Feldshuh, and Wallace Shawn, as well as a family, the Hackers, who had been evicted from their home on land that had been owned by their family for decades. Their tale of woe is just one illustrating the ills of capitalism limned in this typical Moore satire. Yes, this big hearted guy is up to the old shenanigans, those high jinks we've grown to love from his Roger & Me, featured in the New York Film Festival 20 years ago, through such Moore classics as Bowling For Columbine, Fahrenheit 911, Sicko, only this time the ironies cut even closer to the bone. Sure, some of his visual riffs run inconclusive, manipulated to make a point about enemies as familiar as Bank of America, Citicorp, and Goldman Sachs, and a government who, since 1980, in Moore's estimation, runs our country like a corporation without compassion or even the checks and balances in place that made our country so successful in the post Depression era. Not only do you see people evicted from their homes, corporations that take life insurance policies out on their employees thereby benefiting from their deaths, but we also see civil disobedience: workers refusing to leave a factory without the pay owed to them, and a family squatting in the home from which they were evicted, the legal theft, a byproduct of capitalism. Moore shows clergymen denouncing capitalism as evil and, in a hilarious visual, Bush invoking national fear while the room around him crumbles. What is the cure to capitalism? Democracy, says Moore.Whatever you may think of Michael Moore and his movies, one great reason to see this one is the footage he uncovered in an archive in South Carolina of President Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights which ensures the right of individuals to have a job, a fair wage, and health care. Said Moore in the Q&A with Tina Brown following the film, “Americans are going to see for the first time what Roosevelt hoped this country could be.” Someone from the audience then asked, does he think Obama has lived up to his expectations. “I want Obama to see my film,” he replied. “I think the Justice Department should conduct an investigation of Goldman Sachs. My movies are acts of patriotism and hope.”One further irony: large tour buses took the euphoric crowd downtown to a lavish after party in a penthouse one could only be describe as illustrating another side of capitalism: a show apartment with spectacular views and game rooms clearly meant for a Master of the Universe, or at least, a hedge fund guy from the 1990's.
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The actor Ben Whishaw has that dying poet thing down. In Jane Campion's new movie Bright Star, he is a tender presence, portraying the ill-fated John Keats who dies at age 25 before fulfilling the bright future suggested by the poetry that survives him, including “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” “Endymion,” “Lamia,” and his famous odes. To make such a stunning movie that can convey the poet, his muse, and their world, that at the same time defies the conventions of period drama, is indeed a feat that augurs a bright future for the Australian Campion, and her distributor Apparition in their debut venture. Hosting the movie's stellar premiere at the Paris Theater with an afterparty at Rouge Tomate, Apparition's Bob and Jeannie Berney were joined by Campion, Whishaw, Abbie Cornish who plays Fanny Brawne, the poet's neighbor and muse, Paul Schneider as Charles Browne, his friend and fellow writer, composer Mark Bradshaw, producer Jan Chapman, and a collection of the finest directors: Mira Nair, Tamara Jenkins, Sofia Coppola, Julie Taymor, and fiction writer Joyce Carol Oates, among them, who all happen to be women. An impressive turn out for a special luncheon the next day at the Plaza's Oak Room, included producer Christine Vachon, director Joan Micklin Silver, and Barbara Kopple. You can hear the award buzz with such fine films as “Bright Star,” Kathryn Bigelow's “Hurt Locker,” and the forthcoming “Amelia,” directed by Mira Nair: this is our year.At this point, so many years after the second wave of feminism in the 1970's, is it fair to ask: are women different? More, is their aesthetic different? Let's not forget: Among her many distinctions, in 1993 Jane Campion brought us “The Piano.” Under her distinctive direction, in a role of innocent betrayal, young Anna Paquin won an Oscar and a maverick Harvey Keitel famously and unselfconsciously bared all, providing full frontal views. Paul Schneider who plays Keats's brash and bloated friend Charles Browne with a heavy brogue, offered some insight. Surprisingly, Schneider is slender and hales from Asheville, North Carolina. As a measure of tribute to Campion, he said, if asked to do so, he would trust her to film him nude too. Given the emotion of the love story, Keats with his Fanny Brawne, the movie is chaste, with a PG rating; no bodies writhing suggestively, and yet the screen quivers with repressed longing. After much acclaim at Cannes, Campion, who wears her grayed hair straight and a silver peace sign around her neck sat down to croissants at Soho Grand Hotel with a group of reporters in mid-summer and addressed some issues:Q: The opening image is a closeup of a needle piercing fabric. Why was it significant to emphasize this detail?Sewing was really important to me. I took 4 years off to be with my daughter. I wondered what would happen. I took up sewing. At the same time I read Andrew Motion's biography of Keats and was drawn to the love story said to have inspired the poem, “Bright Star.” Fanny Brawne was an ardent seamstress. I began to embroider pillow cases. I collect women's sewing, embroidered table cloths. The work takes hours and hours and there is no recompense. I see this work as a metaphor for women's lives: no body gives a damn.Q: You spoke about that at Cannes and challenged women to speak out, to be tougher. What is the situation for women making film in Australia?Feminism flourished in Australia because it had no natural predators. There was no dialogue, therefore, no combat. Feminism swept like a bush fire. Women got public funding. Guys were searching around to find a woman to front their projects. Jan [Chapman] gave me my first job after film school. Before you hire her, they said, meet some guys. Jan gave me a script for television feature and we got to know each other. She's honest and smart, the pre-eminent film producer in Australia, and never lost her humanity. I like to work with friends. I've worked with males too.Q: Do you fear that critics will disparage this movie as a chick flick?Men love this movie. They love the idea of being loved by a woman like that. It's surprising: it gives them permission to be emotional as well. Tenderness, delicacy, emotion, what's wrong with these things? Men love tenderness. People are witnessing what it is to be in the body of a human being. The romance in the movie is painful-like an addiction-a disease. Romance involves identity loss-merging with the other. In a healthy relationship, you maintain your own identity. You come together and apart. Some people don't like that: you mean I have to be myself? Bugger.Q: Please talk about becoming an artist.I felt I was hiding and it was uncomfortable. I was in art school and the subject was not involving. I wanted to expose myself, my real concerns, what I was really curious about. What was holding me back was fear of exposure. When you are young you are innocent. You become self-conscious and then you have to earn that innocence again through knowledge. I feel like I've become innocent again. But I had to work for it.Q: Can you talk a bit about how your work with these actors.You have to say this is it, you don't have to try to be Keats, or try to be Fanny-just BE Keats, Fanny, that's all you've got. I trust the actors to bring their own kind of fusion. Ben [Whishaw] is exceptional, a little inscrutable, kind, like an angel. Abbie Cornish-she's very unusual and independent. She has a strong intuitive sense in performance; she protects her choices and is not easily dissuaded against what she thinks is right. Paul Schneider can be spontaneous and funny. When I contacted him he said, It's so weird that you rang me up because I have a ticket to “The Piano” in my wallet all this time and that's why I went to art school, film school. He showed me the ticket. He could be the Jack Nicholson of his generation. He'll be singled out by critics. He is so funny to work with. One day he was pretending to breast feed off the second assistant. That is how wild he is.Q: Is it easier today for young people?You have to be a kind of freak-not listen to public opinion–got to have a little more enthusiasm than fear.Q: In your movie, Fanny's family is so supportive of her. Did you take that from your own family?From my research I learned Mrs. Brawne was very well liked. My own family is a lot tougher. They'll say your hair looks terrible when no one else will tell you. That's their idea of love. My model for the Brawne family is my yoga teacher's family, an Indian family. They are so accepting, gentle and loving. And I could see from being around them how powerful that can be. That's probably why Fanny survived the experience. Her mother really did say to Keats, you can come back and marry our Fanny. She probably guessed he wouldn't be coming back, but she was exceptional and kind.Q: In fact the mother-daughter relationship seems quite unusual. Was your mother supportive?My mother could crush me. She was orphaned at the age of 9. She really didn't have much to lean on. There was alcoholism, depression. It was important for me to go through that with her. She was astute: If she read a poem or Shakespeare, she would get to the heart of that meaning. Being with her taught me: jobs are probably more secure than husbands.Q: Who inspires you?Louise Bourgeois, Alice Munro, the Brontes, George Eliot. Michelle Obama. My next project is a film of Munro's story, Runaways.Q: Only 3 women directors were nominated for an Oscar. Do you think you will be nominated?I'll be thrilled for the film. More people will hear about it.
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The name of this riveting documentary, the latest by Joe Berlinger, puns on its subject, oil, at the same time that it indicts an industry for its indifference to a people and part of our planet it views as expendable. In Ecuador, in a place that was once a paradise, slick inky pools stagnate where fresh water used to flow, and people die like flies. The water is an undrinkable brown, and children suffer incurable skin disease or succumb to cancer. An on-going lawsuit against Chevron (which purchased Texaco), for drilling in the '60's and '70's provides a narrative thread with a charismatic cast of characters including a native, Pablo Fajardo, an attorney whose brother was assassinated because he tried to investigate “the situation.” Fajardo received the 2008 Goldman Environmental Prize and is honored at a concert by Sting. At the time he was thinking, Who is Sting? What are the Police?“Crude” opened this week. The actress and movie producer Trudie Styler who with her husband Sting created The Rainforest Foundation attended the screening. In Crude, she is seen wearing a white scarf; speaking with the Ecuadorian people, she promises to bring their message to our world. Knowing this is just a temporary measure, she brings water containers to catch fresh rain. The real goal is to have Chevron clean up the mess. I asked her what were the conditions of her visit. “You have to wear layers,” she told me, “to prevent being bitten by chiggers. We stayed in pensiones and ate fruit. The Amazon is unspeakably hot, and then there's the pervasive smell of gasoline.” Joe Berlinger said that after he became aware of the problem, he could no longer return to his home in Westchester, to his children who each have their own room, without addressing this egregious situation. Documentaries always depend upon those found gems, in this case, Sara McMillan, Chevron's Chief Environmental Scientist who attests without irony, without question, that she would never condone the actions of a company in polluting, or behaving negligently or criminally. Of course there are those who will take her at her word and believe that the Ecuadorians are seizing the moment to make big bucks from a huge, wealthy corporation. That's why you have to see this film. She provides great humor and the filmmakers use her commentary judiciously. When I say how much I enjoyed her interview, Berlinger smiles wryly and says, “yeah, she drank the Kool-Aid.”
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On the final evening of Guild Hall's superb film series programmed by Gavin Wiesen who also led the Q&A, the actress Candice Bergen introduced her late husband Louis Malle's masterpiece about growing up during the German occupation of France. The events take place in a convent school outside of Paris where Julien and his older brother board. Three new students are introduced to the mischievous crowd, and before too long Julien forges a friendship with the very talented Jean after a bit of rivalry. Needless to say, the newcomer is Jewish and after a betrayal, by the end, the Nazis have sniffed out these children pretending to be Catholic, leaving an indelible impression on young Julien (the Louis Malle surrogate). Bergin said that of all the films Malle made, this was the one he waited to tell, it was that close to the bone. She said that after the film had been nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1987, the filmmaker flew his children in from France, to attend the Hollywood ceremony–he was that sure–only to suffer the embarrassment of losing. After that, he returned to making films in Europe. Alan Alda, Bob Balaban, and Joy Behar, were among those who stopped to chat, wanting to congratulate Candice Bergen and Chloe, her daughter with Malle, on this fine evening. Stories of the Occupation have only just begun. Malle's realistic memoir is a perfect counterpoint to the playful pastiche of Tarantino's Inglouious Basterds and anticipates the film of Irena Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise.
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Quentin Tarantino's saturated colors in his new work, “Inglourious Basterds,” illustrate his concern with make-believe. Which is why when a steamed up friend called to say he is an “Anti-Semitic” jerk, the audience at the Academy of Motion Pictures's screening she attended speechless in dismay, I knew that despite my being beach-side and remote from its NY premiere and other press openings, I needed to see it toute suite. “I can't wait to hear what someone like you thinks of it,” she said. Someone like me being a noted child of Holocaust survivors who often writes about films on or related to the subject.
I am late to the table on Tarantino's epic fable, but I take him at his word when he says this is a spaghetti Western with WWII iconography. If anything, the movie is an equal opportunity offender, being neither about the Holocaust, nor about Jews. It is about the color red. Tarantino's red is hot like Valentino's red, deeply satisfying and passionate, which makes it cool. From Diane Kruger's lipstick and nail lacquer, to Melanie Laurent's dress for Goebbel's movie premiere, to Nazi banners and heads as they are being scalped, this red is as thrilling as seeing cartoon Jews enacting violence to cartoon Nazis. For anyone who has grown up with the image of Jews as hapless victims, despite the historical record of ghetto uprisings and other acts of resistance, the punishment enacted by Brad Pitt's Lt. Aldo Raine, painfully carving out swastikas in the forehead of his Nazi survivors to permanently brand them seems fanciful and reasonable. So marked, they must always remember while others never forget. In the movie in my brain about what happens next in America's Nantucket for his charismatic SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), –well, unlike most real life Nazis (read: murderous Anti-Semites), he's got some 'splainin' to do.
And as red is subject, the subtext is language. (Note the title's deliberate misspelling.) Brad Pitt's Anglo-Italian is as funny as his Tennessee drawl, giving him away just as a German's accent cannot be placed causing a barroom bloodbath. Revealing a gift for comedy, Pitt gets bigger laughs as his character is clueless about how much his sound betrays. On a more serious note, early on when the multi-lingual Landa sniffs out Jews from under the floorboards of the farmer's house in the movie's chapter 1, their ignorance of English helps his firing squad with easy extermination. What might Tarantino be saying about language, verbal and visual? Daring to play fast and loose with WWII pop-even kitsch– images, for me he suggests the dearth of issues they are really speaking about, or merely covering up. What I have to come to terms with regarding Quentin Tarantino is how much I want to hold onto history, even with fictions where I am required to let it go. -
Ulrike Meinhof, a prominent left-wing journalist in '70's Germany found the revolutionary spirit of the R.A.F. so appealing, she abandoned her children to join up with a counterculture much like the U. S. Weather Underground in its terrorist tactics. Andreas Baader was one of its leaders along with Gudrun Ensslin and other young people who protested the policies of their elders during this volatile period of the Vietnam War when Germany became an accomplice to America's war in Southeast Asia. The writer Stefan Aust's riveting Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. (Oxford) came out in the mid-'80's and now a film, directed by Uli Edel (Last Exit to Brooklyn)–epic length, Oscar and Globe nominated for Best Foreign Language Film–opens on Friday. All 150 minutes of it are mesmerizing thanks to the fine work of the German actors: Martina Gedeck as Ulrike, Moritz Bleibtreu as Andreas and Johanna Wokalek as Gudrun, with Bruno Ganz as the Head of the German Police Force who brings them in. A fast-paced action adventure that takes you from Meinhof's troubled marriage through the current events of the time, the police taking action against peaceful protesters through the group's bombings of key government buildings, bank robberies, their schooling in terrorism at an Al Fatah camp in Jordan, incarceration, solitary confinement, trial (dialogue verbatim from actual transcripts), and suicides. If you've been napping during this summer of economic woes, this film will wake you up.What makes the coming of this film in the present moment so fascinating is that we have all but forgotten the intensity of that period, the fervor of politics, here protesting the Vietnam war, in Germany, resisting American imperialism supported by the contrite German establishment of the post-World War II era. An audience as interesting as this subject assembled for a private screening last week, hosted by The Atlantic: Dick Cavett, Bob Jamieson, Morley Safer, S. I. Newhouse, Lillian Ross, Susan Brownmiller, Alix Kates Shulman, Dick Wittenborn, Tova Feldshuh, Albert Maysles, Julie Taymor, among them. But oddly, Brooke Astor's son and his wife, embroiled in a much-publicized trial for tampering with his mother's will, sat in the third row. Fortunately those who stayed for the Q&A with author and Der Spiegel editor, Stefan Aust, interviewed by Boykin Curry, were more concerned with history than with the tribulations of the super rich and greedy, however juicy the scandal.Audience responses to the film were favorable: Several felt that the film glamorized the revolutionaries who were essentially using acts of terror to make their points. While it was hard to stay neutral, the film made efforts to do so. Bernt Eichinger's screenplay, on which Aust consulted, is careful to illustrate the loss of revolutionary vision. Pointing out that terrorism is like a religion, Aust spoke about the dilution of ideals: the second generation wanted to get the first out of prison, but after the first generation committed suicide, what did they have to do? They lost their focus, momentum. As we filed out of the theater, a Harvard student, an intern at the New York Observer stopped me to ask, Do you think this film is specific to Germany? My response was an immediate, No. I replied by recounting heady times in America: the tear gassing, and mace and weapons used against college students of that time, of how an American vice president declared war against the young, calling college students, draft evaders, “Effete snobs.” These were the sentiments reflected in movies like “Easy Rider” and “Joe,” that eventually led to the tragedy of Kent State, of an older generation so bewildered by the youth rebellion, they used violence as a knee-jerk response. The more radical factions of SDS, the accidental blowing up of a townhouse used as a bomb factory on West 11 Street were some of the manifestations of revolutionary zeal turned violent. Everyone needs to see this movie to remember a time when feelings were more aroused by ideologies than buried by the long sleep of consumer culture. Wrong-headed, extreme in principles and procedures, terrorism can never be condoned, glorified, or presented as an option. How do you explain “The Baader Meinhof Complex?” As Aust said, “They were in love with a myth, the myth of revolution.”
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Women of the 1950's were transitional-that is, they were betwixt what Richard Pryor referred to as the “Great Pussy Drought” and the era of sexual liberation of the 1960's and beyond. One such woman, Ann Devereau, the actor George Hamilton's mother, fled her philandering husband in 1953 in a baby blue Cadillac Coupe de Ville convertible, her sons in tow. Now her cross-country journey has been made into the film, My One and Only, starring Renee Zellweger and featuring a car load of character actors from Chris Noth to Troy Garity, Eric McCormack, and Nick Stahl, each one portraying a would-be suitor, as a woman then was simply defined by, legitimized by, respected through her marriage. Kevin Bacon plays her bandleader husband in this beautifully shot road movie. This picaresque of adventure after poignant adventure with disappointing men reminds us of the long way women have come. Her son George, the one who grows up to become the famous actor, is a break through role for the very talented Logan Lerman. After a private screening at Goose Creek in East Hampton, Zellweger sat with her parents for a Mexican dinner at Blue Parrot, partly owned by Jon Bon Jovi who greeted friends celebrating the new film. The party was sponsored by Carolina Herrera, who designed Zellweger's gown for her Oscar win as Best Supporting Actress in “Cold Mountain." Chatting at one table was Bob Colacello, the Vanity Fair writer who rightly proclaimed that this restaurant retained the feel of the old Hamptons; art dealer Larry Gagosian reminded everyone of how George Hamilton was always seen sunning with a visor to intensify the rays; designer Marc Jacobs in signature kilt and Doc Martens hugged Gagosian as he spoke, and handsome Argentinian Nacho Figueras, was so old-school gentlemanly he kissed my hand as we were introduced. He loves Montauk best of all the towns out east, the world famous polo player said, but he has to live in Bridgehampton, near his horse. Producer Norton Herrick, a real estate mogul from New Jersey, talked about his career turn to film, about distributing this gem himself. George Hamilton, deeply tanned, was looking ahead. He loved the way he was depicted in the movie, he told me, and wished he could be that young star, starting out now.
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Montauk's Ditch Beach is a natural for surfers. That's why the auction held at the Surf Lodge last weekend sponsored by Cavi, and with proceeds going to a needy local family, featured specially crafted boards and artwork depicting this beach's bluffs and beauty. Now refurbished from its local Irish pub flavor, the interior of this elite spot has the ambiance of a lava lamp. But outside, perfect for sunset ogling, mannequins sporting Cavi's special surf-side attire served as backdrop for photos and paintings from local artists wanting to contribute to a worthy cause. Walter Oost the famed Sports Illustrated photographer donated a framed collage of his journals, his wife Eva, one of her classic floral paintings. Jewelry designer Helen Fiquellora was on hand, having contributed a white gold surfboard charm on a chain. No fewer than five women had on her signature gold hoop earrings with diamond chip. Being a non-surfer, I appreciate the splendors of Ditch differently; from the shore, I envy the agility and passion of those wet suit clad silhouettes riding the waves:
Moody morning
Surfers crest in the mist.Few haiku poets attended the annual East Hampton library book sale on Saturday, unless you count Billy Collins' baseball haiku. Writers of all kinds sat at tables amidst piles of their books. Celebrity hounds gathered around Barbara Walters and Alec Baldwin for their memoirs, Candace Bushnell, Jay McInerny and Dirk Wittenborn for fiction, critic Morris Dickstein has a new book about the Depression with the legs of showgirls on the cover; painter Eric Fishl and writer A. M. Homes' new collaboration drew crowds, and Charla Krupp sat ready to tell everyone how not to look old. Food writer Florence Fabrikant left early as her name card beside a vacant chair read: Sold Out. Try Bookhampton.
And another author was in town as well: former presidential contender Howard Dean spoke about his new book, Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform at the Springs home of Bonnie Maslin and Yehuda Nir. Before praising President Obama's health plan, Dean too was humbled by nature, worried about competing with the setting sun
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What are the chances that on a given day you can see performances by American theater masters influenced by the Japanese arts? On Sunday afternoon, a little known, experimental work by Tennessee Williams, “The Day a Man Died,” was performed at East Hampton's Ross School. Forget the romantic reveries of “Glass Menagerie,” “Cat on a Hot, Tin Roof,” and “Streetcar Named Desire”-the plays on which Williams' iconic legacy is based. Part of the Tennessee Williams Festival that also revived “Sweet Bird of Youth” in Provincetown earlier this summer, the one-act play features a painter inspired by Jackson Pollock in a final swoon. According to director David Kaplan, “Williams seems to have been aware of and appropriated the effects of the Japanese Gutai artists, who crawled in the mud, painted with their feet, shot paint from guns, crashed through paper walls, and staged performances well before the artists commonly credited with their invention, Robert Rauschenberg, Allan Kaprow, and Yves Klein.” Williams had known Pollock in the '40's and after a 1957 visit with Larry Rivers in Southampton, the playwright constructed this theater piece illustrating the artist's passionate painting as crazed performance. The actor Jeff Christian in g-string is head to toe encrusted in color: red, yellow, his spine delineated in black. His mistress (a fine-boned Jennie Moreau in a Liz Taylor a la “Butterfield 8” wig) bares her breasts, cajoles the artist and feeds his self-doubt. Subtitled “An Occidental Noh Play,” the work nods to the 14th century form that combines music, dance, and storytelling. First staged in Chicago, the play is presented in conjunction with the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center's exhibition: “Under Each Other's Spell: Gutai and New York.” At the reception held at the Pollock-Krasner house, the director of this historic Springs foundation, Helen Harrison, spoke about her early misgivings when offered the script to “The Day a Man Died,” but then revisited the work after its success in Chicago. The actress Sylvia Miles who had starred earlier this summer in the Williams work in Provincetown attended, and in a brief tete a tete with Moreau, the young actress invited the legendary Miles back to Provincetown for a final performance: “Come up. Let's play.”
“KOOL: Dancing in my Mind,” a multi-media performance /portrait of the choreographer and dancer Suzushi Hanayagi by Robert Wilson, Carla Blank, and Richard Rutkowski was conceived as a tribute to the Japanese artist who collaborated with Wilson on 15 works. Originally part of the Guggenheim Museum's stunning exhibition, “The Third Mind: American Arts Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989,” the work was revived at Guild Hall for two sold-out performances. On Sunday evening, Robert Wilson introduced the performance explaining Suzushi's important influence, and how, sad to say, having not heard from her, in 2007 he found her in an Osaka nursing home in a wheelchair suffering from Alzheimer's. Nevertheless the artists planned their final collaboration, as Suzushi assured Wilson the subtitle of the piece. With Rutkowski's archival video of the Japanese performer in kimono melding traditional dance with modern moves, six dancers of varied age and gender performed excerpts from her collaborations with Wilson and Blank: 1990's solo experiments with jazz, classic Japanese dance, juxtaposed with video portraits of Hanayagi's face, hands, and feet. Each gesture of the moving figures could be frozen as a complete thoroughly absorbing, emotional work of art. In movement, the work is sublime. -
On Friday night, East Hampton's Guild Hall was packed for the Hamptons International Film Festival SummerDoc's screening of a new documentary opening next week. “It Might Get Loud” limns the history of rock & roll from the perspective of three generations of electric guitar players, interweaving interviews and performances, archival and live, featuring Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, U2's The Edge, and Jack White of The White Stripes. This film offers an insider glimpse of these artists, the back story of their music performed on instruments they found or invented, the evolution of their craft. Taking a page from legendary films like “Last of the Blue Devils” which brought together Count Basie, Big Joe Turner, and Jay McShann for a jazz summit in Kansas City, this film climaxes on a day when these guitarists came together to play, teach, and share their stories. Let's just say, hearing the opening chords of “Stairway to Heaven,” I was transported to the person I was back in the day. Clearly I was not alone: Alec Baldwin moderating the Q&A, evoked the excitement of those years, describing the anticipation of a new Led Zep album, having the joint rolled in the ready, and laying out (he demonstrated almost falling off his chair) listening. This movie has that nostalgic pull, as well as bringing something new. Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim (Academy Award winning “An Inconvenient Truth”) fielded questions and rock journalist Lisa Robinson said she thought Keith Richard was the best guitar artist ever. No one mentioned a pivotal guitar event: Bob Dylan switching mid concert from acoustic to electric guitar, being hissed as a sellout and stormed off the Newport stage by an angry crowd, The sound of the electric guitar, now the mainstay of the rock idiom, was that controversial.
The Blue Parrot was the scene of the after party hosted by Tom Scott of Plum TV. Over marguerites, guacamole, and quesadillas, Davis Guggenheim told me, he was not of those Guggenheims: “While they were sipping champagne in their Venice villa, my grandfather was selling shoes in the Midwest.” His wife, Elizabeth Shue, sorely missed from movies after her tour de force performance in “Leaving Las Vegas,” said she has two new films, one an indie, the other commercial and sure to give me nightmares. When asked, who was the bigger pain in the ass to work with, Al Gore or the famously difficult Jimmy Page, Guggenheim declined to comment.
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