Gossip Central

Sidney Lumet: In Praise of Melodrama

“I would have loved to have been at the opening performance of “Oedipus Rex” when that meshuginah comes out with his eyeballs in his hands,” said Sidney Lumet in his conversation with Adam Green at Bay Street Theater at last week's Hampton's International Film Festival. The famed director of “Before the Devil Knows You're Dead,” his latest in a distinguished career of classics, spoke about his new film as melodrama, that is “reality pushed to the extreme of the highly improbable-not impossible, improbable.” The last time I saw him at the Sag Harbor theater was for the opening of “Blue Light,” in 1994, when he directed Dianne Wiest and Mercedes Ruehl in the world premiere of a play based on Cynthia Ozick's novella, “The Shawl,” about a Holocaust survivor and a denier. Sprinkling his speech with Yiddishisms, he noted his beginnings as an actor in the Yiddish theater on Manhattan's Lower East Side. After service in WWII, he turned to directing, and is regarded an “actor's director.” Last night at the Times Center, at a tribute hosted by the Museum of the Moving Image, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, and Marisa Tomei, stars of the new movie opening today, testified to that reputation. The film about a botched robbery is also about family, with seething father/son themes worthy of Sophocles, with Biblical brother/brother rivalries, and a mismatched marriage. The film opens with a graphic sex scene featuring Hoffman and Tomei. After a career of avoiding such scenes because they always look fake, the actors lubricated with Vaseline, Lumet told David Schwartz in an interview, that he added to the script by Kelly Masterson by choreographing every move. Both stars are naked, doing “it” and I don't mean in the missionary position. Lumet worried how Hoffman would handle that more than Tomei: “you know,” he said, “Philip is not Brad Pitt.” Marisa, in an act of generosity just jumped on the bed, slapped her behind and said, “come on, Philip,” recounted Lumet. And then later in a sex scene with Hawke, Ethan wouldn't get naked unless everyone including the crew, stripped. Not missing a beat, David Schwartz asked, “So how did it feel directing in the nude?”

                                                                                         Regina Weinreich

Before the Devil Knows You'r Dead (trailer)

15th Hamptons International Film Festival

With key personnel Denise Kasell and Rajaendra Roy moving on to other enterprises, some were wondering whether or not the Hamptons International Film Festival would meet the fine quality of the past: great films, parties, people. And in fact it has. Located in East Hampton, Montauk, Southampton and Sag Harbor, this festival remains the place to be in mid-October. If one may quibble, the only problem is seeing all the films you want to see. The offerings are that good. My favorites: Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly which was chosen for the festival's Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Prize in Science and Technology and Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, both featured in The New York Film Festival which closed the week before. Despite this honor, Schnabel was a no-show, but last Friday Sidney Lumet, the 83 year old director of such classics as Dog Day Afternoon and Network, conversed at the sold-out Bay Street Theater with writer Adam Green, about his award-filled career and fondness for melodrama.
            Talk about melodrama, Lumet would love Paul Schrader's morality thriller, The Walker, another festival film I sampled, to open in December. At a reception for director Robert Altman at Elaine's following his memorial service in February, the actresses Lily Tomlin and Lauren Bacall had a tete-a-tete about a new film they had just made. Now I know what they were chatting about. These actors join Kristin Scott Thomas as Washington, D.C. socialites often escorted about by their “gay best friend,” Woody Harrelson in a nuanced performance as a bon-vivante suddenly implicated in a murder.
            The quirky Kabluey stars Lisa Kudrow in a distinctly non-Phoebe role as a mother at loose ends awaiting the return of her husband from service in Iraq. Her big-hearted but ne'er-do-well brother-in-law shows up to help. Played by Scott Prendergast (who also directs) in an oversized, warm and fuzzy blue costume, he is hilarious and pathetic on an American highway.
            At a party at Nick & Toni's marking the 40th anniversary of New Line Cinema Kudrow mugged for photos with Amanda Peet, the star of Martian Child, opening this week and also starring John Cusack who was on hand along with painter Eric Fischl, director/actor Bob Balaban, and Raj Roy, now at MOMA, among the New Line well-wishers. Kudrow told me that for independent films, she chooses roles that are far from her Friends persona. While she is excellent in Kabluey opening in 2008, her character is a bit dour and sad. This comic actor laughs in only one scene, clad in bra and undies, when she's having an affair.
                                                  Regina Weinreich

Catherine and Chiara

Catherine Deneuve and Chiara Mastroianni, mother and daughter take seats in a posh suite at the Waldorf Astoria for a press conference about their new movie “Persepolis,” the closing night selection for the New York Film Festival. Each one distinctly gorgeous, the iconic Deneuve beautifully coiffed and her daughter who looks like a female version of her dad, Marcello, all that glamour when only their voices are featured. Based on the graphic memoir and directed by its author Marjane Satrapi, the new film, feature-length animation in black and white, is a bildungsroman set in Iran, from the time of the shah to sometime in the present. Marjane, a little girl accustomed to play, must take the veil, see her beloved uncle jailed, and bear family life in an atmosphere of fear under a repressive regime. As is illustrated in the Pulitzer Prize winning graphic memoir, Maus--Art Spiegelman's work being a major influence along with the stark images in the films of F. W. Murnau--much can be shown in cartoon form. Being French, Deneuve lights up a cigarette, and has to put it out as a journalist protests. Perhaps unaccustomed to such reprimand, Deneuve obliges but asks, “Since when? Since it is forbidden to smoke in America ?” Deneuve had wanted to do a voice and had read Persepolis, hugely popular in France, so when this film project came along she thought it was a great idea. She has been daring in her choices in recent years. Last year she played a queen for laughs, in the film “Palais Royale” directed by the comedienne Valerie LeMercier.  But how different is it when the body is not involved? “The acting in “Persepolis” is the same as if you were physically involved because this script is realistic” says Mastroianni. “It's not like you have to be a duck.”“That would be appealing,” says Deneuve, not missing a beat. Do you think of yourself as an ambassador when you do foreign publicity for a film? “No,” says Catherine Deneuve. “Yes,” protests her daughter, “as the Queen of France.”

                                                                      Regina Weinreich

Persepolis (trailer)

Go Go Tales

Friday night director Abel Ferrara was seen cajoling people on the street near the Walter Reade Theater, begging them to attend the New York Film Festival's midnight screening of his comedy, Go Go Tales, about a downtown club on the decline. “We'll find a place to put your bags,” he pleaded with one passerby referring to the man's rolling suitcase. Handsome in a rugged way with a huge Frankenstein head, Ferrara looks thuggish for a moment, perhaps frightening, and then his face melts into a soft vulnerability. You do not want to say no to him. In the meantime, in the theater's lobby, a cocktail reception was underway. Sylvia Miles, in a top hat, was the hub of activity, photos and chat. Playing the landlord of the go go club, Miles is the only woman in the film wearing clothes (a fake Chanel houndstooth suit and velvet headband); she has the film's best scenes, holding a fire hose in one hilarious moment and as a barfly with a foul mouth; in a stroke of genius, she sings a ditty intoning “bed, bath, and beyond” over the movie's end credits. Willem Dafoe was also on hand, as he was the week before, on the festival's opening night. At Tavern on the Green he escorted guests into the swell schmooze fest as if he were in character, the club's proprietor desperate to keep it alive. Rushing by was a tony crowd-including Leelee Sobieski looking very Hollywood in a slinky gown, directors Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, actors Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jason Schwartzman, Adrian Brody with his mom, photographer Sylvia Plachy-- you just wanted to ask Willem, “Where are the pole dancers?”

                                                                                     Regina Weinreich

Go Go Tales Clip

Ginsberg's "Howl"

As we are marking anniversaries, today is the 50th of Allen Ginsberg's landmark epic “Howl,” and the obscenity trial defending the poem's right to be published and read on the radio. A big deal upholding our first amendment, this court decision continues as a debate in the wake of Janet Jackson's “wardrobe malfunction” and other scandals distracting us from the real obscenities, like poverty, genocide, war, etc. In the face of people massacred in Darfur, does it really matter whether the “f” word or any other such language strategically suited to a poem about individuality, and the right we enjoy as Americans to “howl,” is printed or performed? Will the poem's language sully our children's minds? Not if “Howl” is understood as the art it is. In April of 1997, when Ginsberg died, he was waging this war for freedom of speech, because even after the momentous decision, these rights have been whittled down. First, an annual reading of “Howl” on Pacifica radio (WBAI) was restricted to non prime time hours, and later prohibitive altogether because of the huge fines now applied for each word of “obscenity” aired. And so, the anniversary also marks a continued battle for first amendment rights.
           Allen Ginsberg remains as relevant today as he was in the '50's and beyond as seminal Beat Generation author along with Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. In one story line in Todd Haynes' new movie, “I'm Not There,” featured in the New York Film Festival this week, about Bob Dylan's life and music, a fictive Allen Ginsberg and his companion Peter Orlovsky ask Dylan (a tour de force performance by Cate Blanchett) whether or not he has “sold out?” This satiric scene is a clever evocation of those heady times, as Dylan kept reinventing himself, defying easy categorizations as folk, rock, country artist. Even his fans didn't get it. In America, freedom to grow and express oneself, so much at the heart of our constitution, remains a challenge, perhaps THE challenge. In the land of the free and the brave, it's hard to be free and brave.

                                                                                     Regina Weinreich