Gossip Central

Out to Lunch with Charlize Theron

It is hard to feel sorry for Charlize Theron. The Academy Award winning actress, for the role of Aileen Wuomos in Monster when she famously puffed up and made up to emphasize the serial killer’s tough look, is in fact very pretty, like the most popular girl in your high school. The gorgeous blond of your fantasy who has everything, is exactly the role she plays as Mavis Gary, a writer of young adult fiction loosely based on her memories of teen glory in Mercury, Minnesota in Jason Reitman’s Young Adult, script by Diablo Cody. And yet, her behavior trying to snatch back her happily married boyfriend is so unspeakable, you find her a pitiable, abject, lonely, delusional masochist and alcoholic who self-mutilates pulling out her hair. Ech!

Gotham Awards: Let the Season Begin

You could say that the Gotham Awards has edge, and heart, marking the official start of the awards season. Cavernous Cipriani’s on Wall Street was the scene of great film industry camaraderie on Monday night. An “Oscars” night for indie films, with categories like “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You,” the evening shines a light on many films that will make the trip to Los Angeles for the Golden Globes and Academy Awards, as say, The King’s Speech, did last year.

This year, George Clooney may not be an indie leading man; that fact was not missed in this crowd. Much loved, he was the butt of at least one joke. In The Descendants, Alexander Payne’s latest film, he leads a stunning cast. The film is high on critics’ Best Picture lists. In the Gotham’s category of Best Ensemble Performance, Mike Mills’ excellent Beginners beat them out. Did you see it? Exactly. Christopher Plummer, picking up the prize, noted co-star Ewan MacGregor was off working in Africa. “I hate him,” he laughed.

Kim Cattrall in Noel Coward’s Private Lives

Deauville, 1930’s. The fine Private Lives revival directed by Richard Eyre at the Music Box Theater opens on a posh hotel terrace. The view must be amazing, you imagine as two couples on honeymoon in adjoining suites gaze over the audience to a yacht in the harbor. On the right, Elyot answers one jealous question after another about his first wife Amanda. His pretty blond new wife may sense Amanda’s shadowy presence. On the left, another newly wed man echoes the insecurities to his wife wrapped audaciously in a towel. Of course, the audience gets the conceit from the start; these in fact are one another’s exes, in the flesh! Yet the beauty of Private Lives is Noel Coward’s language, the hilarious barbs and banter, foreplay to out and out brawl. You cannot resist the unexpected laugh when Elyot, says, “Don’t quibble, Sybil.”

Old School is New Again: Hugo and The Artist

In Martin Scorsese’s homage to cinema history, Hugo, there’s a delicious moment, one of many in this stunning 3D epic, when two children, Hugo and Isabelle attend a black & white silent Harold Lloyd movie and the actor dangles from the hands of a giant clock. Of course this image prefigures a scene when Hugo (Asa Butterfield, the accomplished star of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas) who works the clocks at Paris’ Gare Montparnasse ends up in a similar posture hanging on a snowy ledge, hiding from the station’s inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen). But the delight of this old movie for the children, the happiness in their faces, is truly what Scorsese is going for and achieves so masterfully in Hugo, arriving in time for the holidays and an assured “Best Picture” contender this season. “Hugo is a family movie,” introduced Scorsese at Monday night’s Ziegfeld premiere, and it took a beat to realize precisely what kind of family he had in mind.

The Sound of Mumbai on HBO2

Sheila Nevins knows how to pick them. At HBO2 where documentaries are her domain, so to speak, she reigns supreme. But “don’t call me lucky,” she cautioned members of New York Women in Film and Television at a special breakfast, lest anyone might envy her this dream job. To get to this place is a lot of work. Part of that work is selecting films for HBO2 to produce as she did with the Paradise Lost trilogy, sending a film team to West Memphis to see what they can find out about a sensational murder story. And sometimes it is just seeing a film she wished she had made as in the case of The Sound of Mumbai to air on HBO on November 23.

David Cronenberg’s Talking Cure: The Interview

 “All of David’s movies are about the body,” said producer Jeremy Thomas, when Cronenberg’s new film A Dangerous Method screened at this year’s New York Film Festival, “This time the body part is the brain.” Given that the brain can be the sexiest organ, you can think of A Dangerous Method, based on a stage play by the screenwriter Christopher Hampton as a love triangle with a twist: the players are the historic Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), and their patient Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), who became a writer and psychoanalyst in her own right. “They were incredible free thinkers,” Thomas went on. “David could have made this material salacious but he handled it with delicacy.”

Mother's Worst Nightmare: Ezra Miller in Another Happy Day and We Need to Talk About Kevin

It was an unexpected Ezra Miller film festival: two movies premiering back to back this week, co-starring this gifted 19 year-old in roles that might give new parents pause. He's got this character nailed, the disaffected, edgy son with degrees of menace. Naturally the films in question, Sam Levinson's Another Happy Day and Lynne Ramsey's We Need to Talk About Kevin are all about the formidable moms, played by Ellen Barkin and Tilda Swinton. 

Breaking the Ice with Guy Maddin

Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin has perhaps one of the most rarefied visions of anyone working in film: operatic, on a tilt, jawdropping. This weekend, his talent for bringing together elements, yes, Icelandic music from the Middle Ages to a unique historic moment in Canadian history, comes to the Walter Reade Theater for a program commissioned for this year's PERFORMA 11, the new visual art performance biennial. I had the opportunity to speak to Maddin about his TALES OF THE GIMLI HOSPITAL: REFRAMED, a dreamlike re-imagining of his first film from 1988, with a new score by Icelandic musicians including Aono Jikken Ensemble and former members of mum.

Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays on Minetta Lane

Who doesn't love a wedding? What little girl doesn't adore the Barbie decked in tiered white tulle? Or fetishize her. Who ever thought such beloved and at times tacky traditions would be so political?  And also terrifying? Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays at the Minetta Lane Theater, features eight playlets by the playwrights Mo Gaffney, Jordan Harrison, Moises Kaufman, Neil LaBute, Wendy MacLeod, Jose Rivera, Paul Rudnick, and Doug Wright. If you cry at weddings, straight or gay, you can consider these cathartic canapés.

More Marilyn: Monroe Photos at the Milk Gallery

A lovely ingénue strolled about the Milk Gallery in a black Dior with train, a replica of a dress worn by Marilyn Monroe in an iconic photograph by Bert Stern. The exhibition, Picturing Marilyn, a joint effort by Staley Wise and The Weinstein Company was an attempt to stage a surreal visitation in tandem with the release of the film, My Week with Marilyn. The young actress was in fact Dree Hemingway, great granddaughter of Ernest and daughter of Mariel who might have been her age when she starred in Woody Allen's Manhattan. Also present at Wednesday's opening were hosts Harvey Weinstein, Dominic Cooper, Celeste Holm, and many well-wishers: Andrea Riseborough, Christie Brinkley, Harry Benson, Vogue's Grace Coddington, among them.