Gossip Central

Ronald Harwood: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

At a recent luncheon celebrating Julian Schnabel's ravishing new movie at the Brasserie Ruhlman in Rockefeller Center, the screenwriter Ronald Harwood was in the midst of a scandal. Having assured us he was quite boring, he had the actress Lori Singer on his lap, saying, “You have no idea what this does for an old man.” A man of the theater, famous for “The Dresser,” and a former president of PEN, Harwood sprinkles his conversation with references to friends, John LeCarre, Harold Pinter, among them; he also wrote the script for Mike Newell's “Love in the Time of Cholera.” The last time I saw “Ronnie,” he was entertaining interviewers' questions in Cannes for Roman Polanski's The Pianist. The director gave only one press conference and Harwood, the producer Alain Sarde, the star Adrien Brody were left talking to reporters. The rest is history: Oscars went to the picture, the director, the star, and to Ronald Harwood for Best Adapted Screenplay. This grand slam is about to happen again. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly tops my list for Best Picture. And, I am not alone. The enthusiasm, in advanced buzz and reviews was noted by Producer Jon Kilik, distinguished for many fine works including Babel, who called The Diving Bell his favorite. Actors Mathieu Amalric, Marie-Josee Croze , Olatz Lopez Garmendia (Schnabel's wife), Emmanuelle Seigner (Polanski's wife) were joined by Ben Gazzarra, something of a father figure to Schnabel. “It is the best film,” the director declared in his usual bravado. He happens to be right.

Regina Weinreich                   Site design, SalpeterVentura, LLC

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (trailer)

The Savages: Intimate without the Crackle

Director/writer Tamara Jenkins was ebullient, her dark tendrils electric in response to the enthusiasm for her new film “The Savages,” opening this week. Hold the special effects, the car chases. In the spirit of “Away from Her,” a film by Sarah Polley starring Julie Christie, this gem which has had a buzz since it premiered in Sundance last January, features a brother and sister in the complicated and real dimension of caring for their estranged father now suffering from dementia. A panel followed the screening on Monday night at the Tribeca Film Center: the stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, Laura Linney, and Philip Bosco, took questions regarding the sibling relationship, described in its intimacy without sexual tension, as being devoid of  “crackle.” Amazing how much “snap” and “pop” is achieved when actors this good work with such a well-conceived, sensitive script. So much is conveyed without wordy back story; John and Wendy were abandoned by their mother, raised by an abusive and emotionally distant father who now needs them. How these smart, sophisticated people, he a professor of theater in Buffalo and she a NYC playwright, are damaged. From the opening shots of elderly cheerleaders in a retirement community in Arizona, in an American southwest of pink stucco and green cacti, where Leonard fingers an angry message on the bathroom wall using his own feces, you know you are in good hands.

                                                Regina Weinreich

The Savages (trailer)

Park Avenue Potluck

You think catered, posh not “potluck” when you ponder how people entertain above 57th Street. But that's the humble concept behind a new cookbook, “Park Avenue Potluck: Recipes from New York's Savviest Hostesses.” Opening with what you should have in your cupboard (whoa, hold the imported quail eggs), this book has recipes that are doable, unpretentious, and utterly festive. The conceit calls to mind a dinner I once attended on Park Avenue in the early '90's. The hostess served a homey meal of brisket and then suggested the party of 25 take dessert roaming about her ample apartment adorned with surreal art, that is, famously framed in fur. On every surface were giant platters with chocolate cake and white icing filling. The sweet seemed familiar in a Proustian way and the guests were gobbling them down ravenously, much to the joy of our hostess, who, when pressed, confessed they were unwrapped devil dogs. Similarly, the recipes in this new cookbook, while evoking “old money,” are down-to-earth, delicious in a satisfying and far from Dean & Deluca way, yet worthy of any shop featuring fine homemade delicacies. Not that we scorn D&D, a guilty pleasure and huge, if pricy, treat. Better, when you buy this cookbook, the money goes to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. That combo of nurturing and charity compelled women you may recognize from the society pages to give away their hostess-with-the-mostest secrets. Edited by famed NY Times food writer Florence Fabricant and designed by her daughter Patricia Fabricant for Rizzoli, the book is fast becoming the most important tome on my kitchen shelf. Challenged by the impending holidays and the imperative of making it new for my family of regulars, I am freshening up my repertoire with some trial runs: “Pond Water” (from the chapter called “Libations,” for grownups only), “Indulgent Spiced Pecans” (from “Small Bites”), “Avocadoes Argentina” (“Salads of Substance”), “Yanna's Moussaka” (“Casseroles for a Crowd”) “Holiday Pot Roast” (“Mains with Meat and Poultry;” there's one for seafood), and “Perfect Potato Salad” (“Stunning Sides”); I simply can't decide among “The Sweet Life” offerings: “Chocolate Souffle”? “Vera's Farina Halvah”? This past weekend at a book signing at Wines by Morrells in East Hampton, I sampled “Millionaire Turtles,” contributed by Karen May. Each morsel tapped my inner hedonist.  Get “Park Avenue Potluck” for yourself and three for your favorite friends. Eat your way to heaven.

                                                       Regina Weinreich

Love Conquers All in Steal a Pencil for Me

Say Holocaust and people roll their eyes. Not that again. Is it over-kill? Over-saturation in film? Or just over? A new documentary, a hit at the recent Hamptons International Film Festival, illustrates: even during a time of haunting horror, humans do what they do, finding hope in the endurance of love. Corny as it sounds, hearing Jack Polak (93) and Ina Soep (83) tell their story in “Steal a Pencil for Me,” is uplifting. In Westerbork, a transit camp in Holland (Anne Frank and her family went there on their way to Bergen-Belsen), Jack and Ina wrote love letters to one another. You would think, given the dire circumstances, this on-going epistolary courtship would be impossible, even dangerous, but what made it most difficult was the presence of Jack's wife Manja who forbade him his trysts with Ina. “I was in the camps with my wife and my girlfriend,” deadpans Jack, “and, believe me, it wasn't easy.”
             Filmmaker Michele Ohayon took great care to provide unusual period footage. You will not see the piles of bones or skeletal men in stripes showing their tattoos. As this charismatic couple, now Manhattanites with children and grandchildren, recounts the sad and familiar history of being taken from their homes, elders boarding trains to “the East,” loved ones shot on the spot, Ohayon balances the Dutch Jewish experience with rich detail of the present. Jack's gregarious personality and candor are evident in a scene returning to the camp. Ina's attention to her hair becomes a humorous leitmotif. The tender letters inform this work and join Anne Frank's diary, and Sala Garncarz Kirschner's 350 letters and a diary as important Holocaust documents, not recreations of memory, or the imagination, but primary sources in themselves. Woven together, these form a superb documentary. Do not miss it.

          Regina Weinreich  

Steal a Pencil for Me (trailer)

I Am There: Todd Haynes and Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan was not there to celebrate Todd Haynes's movie “I'm Not There,” a biopic of sorts about the iconic songwriter/performer, but Haynes played M.C. at the Beacon Theater on Broadway this past Wednesday. Al Kooper, a sideman for Dylan in the '60's, Calexico, Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, the Million Dollar Bashers, Yo La Tengo, the Roots were there,--and in a tepid cameo Heath Ledger introduced a variety of music idioms smoothly covered the essential Bob Dylan. Having attended the infamous Newport concert where fans of Dylan on acoustic guitar stormed the stage when he went electric after the intermission, this event was tame and civilized by comparison. I guess in this era of tame and civilized when it comes to the anti-war spirit that spawned this sound in the first place, that's what you get. Todd Haynes's film is, however, challenging in that Dylan is evoked in six fragments, that is, six strands of his life, with six actors who are playing Dylan, but not by name. A clever conceit, this structure is actually a daring way to portray a legend who is simply hard to pin down. In one storyline, Cate Blanchett is made up to look exactly like Dylan in D. A. Pennebaker's classic “Don't Look Back,” little black suit, skinny tie, Jewish frizz and all. And while Haynes acknowledged this borrowing during a press conference at The New York Film Festival earlier this fall, it does not appear anywhere in the movie. The Pennebakers may not be thrilled, but then again why should they care? IFC will soon screen a new documentary comprised of Pennebaker's unused footage of the same UK tour that inspired his earlier landmark film.
                  Meantime a few blocks south at the Walter Reade theater, D. A. Pennebaker, his wife and filmmaking partner Chris Hegedus, and others of the Pennebaker clan were helping the Coen brothers celebrate their new film, “No Country for Old Men,” based on the Cormac McCarthy novel. The stars Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem were there. Bardem sported his real hair and not the creepy page-boy worn in this film and in the recent “Goya's Ghosts.” The handsome actors held court at the packed after-party where French fries were served up wrapped in paper French bistro style and the grilled cheese had a kick.
                                                                                                 Regina Weinreich

I'm Not There (trailer)

Martin Puryear at MOMA, Water at the American Museum of Natural History: Featuring the Elements

MOMA's second floor atrium now exhibits five large scale wooden objects: one, a wheelbarrow carrying a Sisyphus-sized boulder with a tree limb coming out of it leads your gaze upward to the top floor. Seen from the sixth floor where another 40 sculptures grace several galleries, the work's base is miniscule, from below monumental, yet intimate. Another, a sinewy ladder (“Ladder for Booker T. Washington”) that could have emerged from a Chagall painting is dramatic against a gray-blue wall. Working with wood in every conceivable way, dark, light, shaved thin, thick, woven like a basket, thatched becoming hair, each piece redefines this material, suggesting it as a new element. Unlike the sculpture of Richard Serra, large rusted assemblies that divvy up space and provide a spiritual vibe, Martin Puryear's work in various species of wood, or wire mesh coated in tar, is mythic, suggesting narrative, an unidentifiable familiarity. The sculptor, now having an exhibition of his work from the '70's to the present at MOMA told the curator that he was inspired less by art museums than by natural history. What might he say about the water exhibit now at the American Museum of Natural History? Comprehensive in scope, exploring every use and possibility, the show is a culmination of much research. Scientists study water in asteroids, water surrounding a remote island 1200 miles south of Hawaii, the Congo River to keep us abreast of water's flow and the life it supports amidst the current fear that this is a diminishing resource. Non-renewable, what we have is what we will always have, and that idea makes this exhibition reach far beyond the museum's fascinating and eminently educational displays of water's uses to the global environmental debate.

Regina Weinreich