Gossip Central

Sicko

By anyone's measurements, director Michael Moore is a large guy. Huge. Still, he will tell you: from whence he comes (Flint, Michigan, setting for his first hit “Roger and Me”), he's not big at all. His new movie “Sicko” shines a harsh, chilling light on the American health care system. No wonder he's dieting as a preventative: his do-it-yourself get-in-shape stay-healthy plan features lots of fiber and walking at least a half hour a day. He's lost some weight, he says, and plans to film his continuing efforts for his next movie. At the Hamptons “Sicko” premiere he told me, “His movies have a theme. And his next one will be personal.” Not that “Bowling for Columbine,” “Fahrenheit 9/11,” and “Sicko” aren't coming from a personal place, of course. Following the screening, guests at the celebration dinner at Prime 103 were abuzz with health obsessions. Donna Karan went head to head with Moore on the subject of her holistic seminars, integrating diet (she's eating raw), yoga, and meditation. She wants to bring this practice into the schools. She looks great, by the way, with her hair pulled back, what she refers to as instant non-surgical face lift. And, she ate none of the breaded chicken entrée, requesting a veggie plate instead. Lee Lee Sobieski chatted with Moore as well, about working with his hero: Stanley Kubrick. Sobieski was in “Eyes Wide Shut” when the legendary director died mid-filming. Also on hand was Roy Scheider. Last year after “Jaws” was screened at Guild Hall, Scheider joined Steven Spielberg for an interview. The film holds up so well. Who knew the shark was made of latex! But I remember Roy most fondly as the notorious Dr. Benway in David Cronenberg's movie of Burroughs's “Naked Lunch.” Now there's a doctor! We talked about his working in Cronenberg's Tangier--crafted in a Toronto warehouse complete with djellaba-clad extras leading donkeys carrying mint over the medina cobblestones--after the plan to film in North Africa was kaboshed by the first Gulf War.

              “Sicko” must be seen, no matter what you think of Moore, his methods, manners and maneuverings. Even detractors who find Moore's whimsical leaps maddening must admit, the man will do anything to bring a concern to the table. He takes 9/11 rescuers to Guantanamo Bay prison by boat, and screaming into a bullhorn, demands the same splendid medical care given to terrorists for these heroes who have been denied help. This is a hilarious moment, and as staged as a Christo sculpture. When his flotilla is turned away, he detours to Havana and asks some men hanging out on the street where the nearest physician can be found. “What did you notice about the Cuban doctors?” he asked me as the flourless chocolate cake was served. Those doctors were gorgeous, I said. Like Latin lovers, like movie stars. Michael Moore was going for their human touch.
          It's been fun seeing his reviews. This week alone, David Denby in The New Yorker bashed the movie while David Edelstein in New York Magazine called it his best. Whatever. This is one conversation, like the one about global warming, that we cannot afford to ignore.
                                                                                     Regina Weinreich



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Sicko (trailer)

Designing Hollywood/ Broken English

Monday was a big night for premieres and awards. While “Sicko” and “Broken English” vied for the party crowd, I went to the New York Women in Film and Television annual gala at the Time Warner Center, celebrating the careers of three behind-the-scenes artists: Robin Wright Penn on video congratulated makeup artist Toy Van Lierop; filmmaker Mary Harron presented the award to hair stylist Michelle Johnson; wearing her own short do pinned high with a feather, Johnson styled the wigs for Gretchen Mol/ Betty Page's dark pageboy and Sarah Jessica Parker / Carrie Bradshaw's do's and don't's on “Sex and the City;” Thandie Newton who played Will Smith's wife in “The Pursuit of Happyness” presented the award to costume designer Sharen Davis, who dressed the divas in Ray and Dreamgirls. Hollywood is, after all, the conversion of big talent with big budget.

On the modest indie scene, Broken English, starring Parker Posey, Drea de Matteo, and Melvil Poupaud is  Zoe Cassavetes' feature debut. Posey plays a lonely thirty-something New York woman looking for love (and marriage) in all the wrong places--until she meets a free spirited Frenchman (Poupaud). De Matteo plays her best friend, married but not particularly thrilled.  On the proverbial day after the premiere, De Matteo, pregnant in real life, could not be interviewed but the rest of the gang was game, if perhaps hung over. Cassavetes, at 36, follows in her illustrious family tradition. Having grown up in the Hollywood Hills, she says that her legendary father, while immersed in moviemaking, always stood apart, making edgy, spontaneous films like “Shadows” with edgy friends. Cassavetes cast her mom, Gena Rowlands, as the mom always trying to fix up her single daughter. So is this autobiographical? It could be in the sense that the mood smacks of a familiar ethos. Poupaud, the sensitive younger man, if not a marriage object, is a very tasty substitute for Parker's woman looking to break her patterns. When asked what she thought of older women dating younger men, Parker Posey replied, “Well, only if they love their mother.”

                                                                                                                   Regina Weinreich

Songs of Innocence and Experience at the Metropolitan Room

The title of William Blake's great epic of pre-and post-expulsion from Eden is an apt image for two recent pleasurable evenings at The Metropolitan Room. The pain and wisdom of  “experience” could define the themes performed theatrically by the veteran singer Julie Wilson accompanied on piano by Christopher Denny. With knowing, teasing eye-lash batting and brisk throws of her boas, red and black, over a sequined shoulder, she plays provocateur singing standards like “It Was Fascination,” “Let Me Entertain You,” “Good Morning Heartache,” “I Won't Say I Will But (I Won't Say I Won't),” and “The Ladies Who Lunch,” which she dedicated to “the girls who stay smart.” She's a woman of a certain age, unabashed 82, and she still has “It.”
Channeling the looks of Elizabeth Taylor in her National Velvet years, newcomer Judy Butterfield takes the stage in hair barrettes and an off the shoulder gown; if she is representative, the next generation of cabaret stars is coquettish and refined. A protégé of Andrea Marcovicci, Butterfield orchestrated her show, Judy Sings Judy: Songs of a Young Garland, to trace the earlier, lesser performed career of the singer who took us “over the rainbow.” Smart and funny, Butterfield mixes the music with anecdotes: how Judy got her name (Frances Ethel Gumm just wouldn't do), how she got her contract with MGM (performing “Eli Eli,” a song she learned for a bar mitzvah for Louis B. Mayer), how she sang for Clark Gable's 36th birthday (Dear Mr. Gable, she chimed to a framed picture of the star, “You Made Me Love You”), all the while taking us through Garland's greatest hits: “Zing Went the Strings of my Heart,” “Clang Clang Clang Went the Trolley,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” among others. With Michael Lavine on piano, she does a duet Garland had performed with Mickey Rooney: “Good Morning, Good Morning” and, reminding us that as a friend in the movies, Mickey sometimes left her alone, she sings: “They're Writing Songs of Love, But Not for Me.” By the time she brings down the house with the signature “Over the Rainbow,” you know you are in the presence of a talent on the brink; at 17, she's that good.

                                                                                        Regina Weinreich

Some Enchanted Evening

The famed cinematographer Lajos Koltai strolled about the premiere of Evening, his second film as director, his shock of silver hair set off by the tasteful black attire now worn by men in the arts. (See Richard Serra, Brice Marden, etc.) “Do you still like my film?” he asked in heavily accented English, smiling and modest.
        When I met the Hungarian filmmaker the week before, he seemed pleased but puzzled at having landed this job. Known for his stunning work behind the lens with his countryman Istvan Szabo ("Being Julia," "Sunshine," "Mephisto") and the Italian director Guiseppe Tornatore ("Malena"), among others, Koltai would seem an unlikely choice for this drama of high WASPS set partly in a Newport mansion; in fact, it strains the imagination to think that his directorial debut, "Fateless," a gorgeously shot film seen through the eyes of a boy amidst the horrors of the Holocaust, would lead here, but if the producers were gambling, looking for a particular non-Hollywood touch despite a dream all-star cast including Claire Danes, Meryl Streep, Natasha Richardson, Toni Collette, and Vanessa Redgrave, the risk paid off.
         Based on the Susan Minot novel with a screenplay she wrote with Michael Cunningham, "Evening" intertwines a present day narrative of a dying woman (Redgrave) with that of a cataclysmic time in her youth. Glenn Close plays the matriarch of a family on the eve of her daughter's wedding. At the Bowery Hotel where Bruce Weber, Donna Karan, Sam Waterston, partied with the cast that also features Patrick White, Mamie Gummer, and Hugh Dancy, Close told me how eager she was to work with Koltai nicknamed Sutyi, after they had worked together in Szabo's "Meeting Venus." He has that touch.
        Having never met Redgrave, he was certain he wanted her for the film; he could do it only with her, he said dramatically. Their meeting was so intimate, as if they had always known they would work together. Richardson joined them at her hotel and inspired a key scene in the movie. Richardson and Redgrave recounted a childhood story to the director. When her mother was away, particularly during a painful period devoted to political activity, Richardson would plead, “I want you back.” That line was added to the film, in a poignant deathbed scene created to take advantage of the serendipitous mother-daughter casting.

            Meryl Streep plays her daughter Mamie Gummer's character, older, in the present day plot. When asked about the casting of her mother, Gummer quipped, “Oh yeah, I had to call in a few favors.”

                                                                                                            Regina Weinreich

Evening (trailer)

The Whitney Goes Psychedelic/ Monterey Pop

Riffing on the old saying, “If you remember the '60's, you weren't there,” guest curator, Christoph Grunenberg of the Tate Liverpool where the show originated, introduced the new exhibit at the Whitney, revealing that he, being both young and German, in fact was not there. For the rest of us, the Whitney's “Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era” revives the images and sensations, providing a context that we never knew was there. This fact illustrates an important lesson: once an event is codified as history, history can be, in fact, unrecognizable. I remember the '60's and it didn't look quite like this--everyone's trip being somewhat individual--but it is fascinating to see it in the fruitful conjuring of someone else's fantasy. 
       Never mind that the art was so bad, or that so much personally resonant stuff, like the iconic Robert Crumb's  Cheap Thrills album cover, is absent. (It is however included in the show's fine catalogue.) Or that the political context is minimized to, say, samples of the East Village Other, Mao images, much in this fun anyway exhibit is evocative of that heady time: lounging environments with boundaries blurred (enter without imbibing contraband); sheer color makes you think of  “marmalade skies” (Translucent orange and mushy?)!
The catalogue features Dave Hickey's excellent essay “Freaks,” a sophisticated stoner/critic's view of the aesthetics; Chrissie Iles' “Liquid Dreams” makes the connection to Brion Gysin's important contribution of the “Dream Machine” and the work in poetry, photography and film of Ira Cohen, and an essay by Barry Miles limns the parallel development of the London Psychedelic School. The Summer of Love is now contained and codified.
     For sound and feel, see Monterey Pop, the 1968 concert film by D.A. Pennebaker, the real '60's, now out in a 40th anniversary DVD. Big Brother & the Holding Company, The Mamas & the Papas, Jimi Hendrix, Ravi Shankar, Hugh Masekela, Janis Joplin doing Ball & Chain . . . . . Inhaling optional.

                                                                                               Regina Weinreich

Remembering Simon Wiesenthal

In the unique category of Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal stands alone. Most survivors of the Holocaust emerged from World War II broken and unable to speak about what had occurred in Europe following the Germans' master plan to rid the world of its Jews. Simon Wiesenthal, an Austrian with an extreme case of survivor guilt could not let the matter-and the dead-rest, and from the liberation of the camps made it his mission to hunt down those responsible for the murder of the six million-and four million more. This we know. And this is why, more than any other reason it is important to see the documentary, I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life and Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal. What should impress anyone is the ordinariness of Wiesenthal. Having met him in Jerusalem at the first gathering of Holocaust survivors in 1981, I saw his humility; he had the mien of all the other accented older Jewish men, viewing the mixed blessing of life as something of a miracle. Already famous by then for having brought Adolf Eichmann to justice in a riveting televised trial, Wiesenthal was like the neighbor next door, without a whiff of self-promotion or interest in the spotlight. I cannot say the same for others of the “Holocaust industry.” (See My Holocaust, Tova Reich's scathing satiric novel that glimpses how some wear a mantle of persecution as a badge of entitlement.) The documentary, made by an Academy Award winning team, could go farther to explore the implications of Wiesenthal's work: i.e., is the electric chair, or capital punishment a just, moral, or even satisfying solution? Ferreted out, several of the SS, such as Franz Stangl, commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka, simply died of a heart attack.  Still, there is much to learn from Wiesenthal's example. The hunt for Hitler's hit men was not easy, fully occupying any spare time this family man who worked as an architect might have. The film makes evident the toll on his wife and daughter who had to make a life in thinly cloaked hostile Austria after the war and often suffered his absence. Nevertheless the idea that the individual can make a difference is inspiring, and should embolden us all to work against those who diminish the possibilities for human life. Simon Wiesenthal's work was plain. Nicole Kidman's voice-over narration provides all the glamour.

                                                                                                                    Regina Weinreich