Gossip Central

Awards, Academy and Guild Hall

Maybe I'm suffering from award deprivation as opposed to the usual fatigue, but I found the Academy Awards show unsurprising but satisfying, from Barbara Walters' pre-event interview with the modest Ellen Page, to Marion Cotillard's win. Wearing a white, detailed Jean Paul Gaultier gown, Cotillard has old school glamour; having met her on opening night of last year's Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (this year's opens this Friday) when “La Vie en Rose” premiered, I knew she was charming and fresh. I was pleased to have Forest Whitaker's prediction affirmed--that he would be handing the statue to her. The academy did not spread the wealth. Often the major writing, directing, and best film honors are divided, but hey, just the idea that the Coens' quirky, indie sensibility could reign supreme at the venerable Oscars is ok by me. I just wish Julian Schnabel's “Diving Bell and the Butterfly” had received greater recognition. Among his important credits, the outsized painter is responsible for having put Javier Bardem on American radar, as Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, caught in Castro's revolution! I got every word of Javier's Best Supporting acceptance speech for playing the creepy villain in “No Country for Old Men”-his salute to mom and country--and I don't know Spanish!
     As for satisfying awards events, you cannot beat Guild Hall's gala, held every year at The Rainbow Room. Great people, food, and speeches. Yes, speeches. But with this year's Lifetime Achievement Awards going to artist David Salle, playwright Joe Pintauro, and filmmaker Mel Brooks-yes, that Mel Brooks, this year's event on March 3 will be extra hilarious, and also a reminder of what an excellent arts institution can provide a community. At a pre-awards cocktail party at the Core Club last month, David Salle and I talked about an extraordinary dance performance held last summer in Tony Ingraio's East Hampton sculpture garden. Salle had created a silver tree for the bare stage, a luminous tree that made everything around it shine. That's a great metaphor for Guild Hall.

Regina Weinreich             

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

The Counterfeiters

Gone are the days of mea culpa, when Germans responding to Daniel Goldhagen's indictment in his 1996 book, “Hitler's Willing Executioners,” openly discussed their shameful participation in the Holocaust as a way of expiating their guilt.  Stefan Ruzowitzy, director of “The Counterfeiters,” the Austrian selection for Best Foreign Film Oscar and one of the five nominees, said at a recent dinner hosted by Elie Wiesel and Sony Picture Classics, the film is not doing well in either his native country or in Germany.  In German speaking lands, the pervasive, “enough already,” “been there, done that,” overrides interest in this thrilling story set in the concentration camps of Mathausen and Sachsenhausen. Taken prisoner by the Nazis, a Jewish counterfeiter, Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), is forced to lead a team of prisoners in first forging the British pound and then the dollar in the attempt to destroy the Allies' economy while fattening the Third Reich's coffers. Ruzowitzy's tight, fast-paced script is based upon the book, “The Devil's Workshop,” by Adolf Burger, himself an accomplice to Operation Bernhard, as this historic incident is called, played deftly by August Diehl. “Sally,” the talented forger is a rogue by any measure and one great attribute of this film is that it does not sentimentalize Holocaust events or the untoward Jewish experience. The German officers taunt, humiliate, and murder their prisoners for stooping to the most immoral activity to survive. And the Jews are portrayed realistically, that is, while moments of compassion do occur, they also betray one another and rise to levels of unspeakable behavior as needed to live yet one more day. As played by Markovics, a well-known Austrian theater actor, Sally has a facial twitch and elastic body. His spirited tango dance underscores his dream of residing in Argentina, where the real-life Sorowitsch ended up after the war, but not before going to Monte Carlo with a suitcase of notes to be lost at the gambling tables. There, in this film's fiction, he hooks up with Dolores Chaplin, yes, another of Charlie's granddaughters. Realizing that the success of his movie would depend upon attention to detail, Ruzowitzy searched museums for authentic period printing presses, only to find them down the street from where they were filming. The actual printer was hired as an extra and taught the actors how to use the vintage machinery. It is safe to predict that this fine film will follow last year's German language “The Lives of Others” to Oscar glory. But even if it doesn't, do not miss it.

Regina Weinreich             

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Celebrating Juno

If you were going to celebrate the movie Juno's multi-Oscar nominations, what would you serve? Duh, hamburger, of course. And for an A-plus burger, served with gravy boats of French fries and ketchup, dolled up and elegant as if they were truffle encrusted foie gras, where would you go? Well, try 21, the classic eatery of old New York that made Holly Golightly swoon. There on Friday, “A Diamond is Forever” sponsored a luncheon for well-wishers. Five signature hamburger phones were raffled. One winner, Sigourney Weaver, whose new movie “Vantage Point” opens next week, quipped, Peggy Siegal had the whole thing rigged, “knowing I have a teenager.” Among the happy diners, disappointed only in that they too had not been so lucky to walk away with this plastic souvenir rumored to be worth thousands on Ebay, was Halley Feiffer, so smart in Noah Baumbach's films, accompanied by her father Jules. You could say with Ivan Reitman introducing his son, the director Jason, the event had a familial theme: Jason publicly gave the teary-eyed old man a bear hug. Ivan Reitman, of “Ghostbuster” glory, famously has never been nominated for an Oscar and, as he did on CBS Sunday Morning's show yesterday, he loves to recount the story of how his young son asked him, would he attend the ceremony if Jason were nominated? “I should have known then,” said Ivan without a hint of Freudian angst. So now, teary-eyed and shepping nachas, he'll go. Ivan Reitman also introduced the movie's star Ellen Page to the luncheon crowd, saying he thought she was 13 when they met on the set. Turning 21 on February 21, Page has a precocious look that makes “Juno” what it is. Now, in a dreamy doze, she graces the cover of “The New York Times Magazine.” Page's demur demeanor has many facets: her standout performance in “Hard Candy” as a seductive girl who, wielding a knife, turns the tables on a pedophile, had people talking at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. Speaking about the award attention she's getting as Juno, she repeated the word “Surreal” several times. She may know more about that word than meets the eye, as a fan of the book "2012" The Return of Quetzalcoatl,” Daniel Pinchbeck's account of the transformation of global consciousness. When I asked about her literary bent she said she was also into Pinchbeck's previous “Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism,” suggesting there's a whole lot more going on inside that pretty head than the mere contemplation of herself as “Best Actress.”

Regina Weinreich             

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

No End in Sight

“There are some laughs in my film,” said Charles Ferguson introducing “No End in Sight” at a special screening on Saturday night showcasing this contender for the best documentary Oscar, “but they are unintentional and dark.” OK, “Sicko” is definitely funnier. The humor in “No End” comes in hearing Rumsfeld repeat the word “quagmire” or “victory.” In seeing W's dumb look as the film, through interviews and Baghdad footage, deconstructs the half-baked,
ill-conceived, thoughtless, self-serving policies put in place after Saddam's regime was toppled in Iraq. Careful not to take on the raison d'etre of the “war,” Ferguson examines the dismantling of an ancient country with a rich history, the looting of a library wherein irreplaceable documents dating from antiquity were burnt and destroyed. As one Iraqi put it, We have lost our identity. How can this have happened? That, of course, is the least of what everyday Iraqis experience under our on-going occupation. (Four million Iraqis remain homeless.) But you feel his pain. From the perspective of a military action, the dismantling of the Iraqi army was a turning point in fomenting a situation whereby an insurgency could thrive alongside a corrupt interim governing body. As Ferguson makes clear in the film and in a new book, our commander in chief paid little to no attention to highly detailed documents, allowed incompetent, inexperienced individuals with no knowledge of the language or culture to take charge, and could have cared less. Is the U.S.administration just a bunch of bunglers and boobs? Are the key players playing war: the video game? Do Rumsfeld and Cheney form their own axis of evil? These were some of the questions raised by a room full of movers and shakers at an after-screening dinner at the Plaza Athenee: two-time Oscar winning Barbara Kopple, newsman Gabe Pressman, and others attended to an impassioned Q&A conducted by Arianna Huffington. Jane Fonda, Amy Goodman, Erica Jong, were among the most ardent speakers.  Huffington with her hugely successful blog, Huffington Post.com was especially concerned with the media's role in the continued American malaise. While everyone agrees that a draft would have galvanized dissent, still the news failed to deliver the information that might have had people storming Washington. Amy Goodman, of Pacifica radio's “Democracy Now” suggested the media is seduced by access. Erica Jong quoted Noam Chomsky's prediction that we would not have an investigative media as independent outlets become absorbed into conglomerates. That woeful time has come. Jane Fonda's presence itself evoked her dramatic protest of the Vietnam War. Huffington took a need-I-say-more stance, invoking Dante who imagined the hottest spot in "The Inferno" reserved for those who know better and do nothing. So, what can we do? Ferguson says, “We can start by telling the truth.”
            Now Ferguson vies for an Academy Award with Michael Moore's “Sicko” and Alex Gibney's “Taxi to the Dark Side.” Moore did his Iraq film, “Fahrenheit 9/11” and won the Oscar for “Bowling for Columbine.” All three beg for responsible leadership and all should win in a three-way tie, but to choose, I say “No End in Sight” is the most profoundly resonant as a statement of this country's current historic moment. Alex Gibney served as Executive Producer on this film. I asked Ferguson how he felt competing with Gibney. “We both win if I win,” he said, “I told Alex this morning, he comes onstage to accept the award with me.”

Regina Weinreich             

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

No End in Sight (trailer)

Oscar Docs

The announcement of the Academy Awards nominees marks an anniversary for Gossip Central. Just one year ago, I was writing about Salma Hayek and her spontaneous yelp upon saying her friend Penelope Cruz's name as a Best Actress nominee for Pedro Almodovar's “Volver.” That was a fun moment in an otherwise serious event, the reading off of names, even more somber this award season with ceremonies, the stars, the gowns, the hair, and so on, threatened by cancellation. For the Oscars, however, the show will go on. Ronald Harwood, named for Best Adapted Screenplay for the excellent “Diving Bell and the Butterfly” script (he won this category in 2002, for “The Pianist”), is working on the highly anticipated film version of “Suite Francaise.” That is, he was working on it. He is, of course, on strike. Let's hope all will be resolved so we can see Harwood in his tux on the red carpet once again. As for Cruz, we are mainly hearing about her as main squeeze for Javier Bardem, the frontrunner for Best Supporting Actor in “No Country for Old Men.” When he was seeing Spanish star Belen Rueda, he refused to be photographed with the beautiful, talented mother in “The Orphanage,” but with Penelope, well, that's another story. While the real gossips can mull that one over, and the Oscar commentators can busily deconstruct the meaning behind the current nominations, I will turn to one of my pet categories, the documentaries. Last year several non-fiction filmmakers turned their cameras on Iraq and what the occupation means for civilians and soldiers in that country. The results, without naming names, were award-worthy in their content, not so in artistry. This year, with nods to Charles Ferguson's “No End in Sight” and Alex Gibney's “Taxi to the Dark Side,” the art has caught up to the content. Drawing on interviews with high-level government officials, Ferguson's film is an insider look at the decision-making up to and after the toppling of Saddam's regime. Despite intelligence predicting the drawn-out consequences of this pursuit, Bush's regime launched the invasion with only 60 days of preparation. The administration may contend we are “winning,” or that hindsight is 50-50, but Ferguson shows irrefutably the manipulations that went into selling this “war.” By the time of a special screening and dinner in honor of the film in December, it had come to the attention of key White House personnel, and had made the documentary Academy Award short list. The Executive Producer of “No End in Sight” is Alex Gibney, whose “Taxi to the Dark Side” is also nominated. Through the story of Dilawar, a taxi driver from a farming community who was arrested, taken to a prison in Bagram, and tortured to death within 5 days of arriving, Gibney tells the larger story of government sanctioned brutality that makes the scandal at Abu Ghraib seem like official policy, not the anomaly we are told to believe. Accountability goes all the way to the top, and yet, as Gibney makes clear, our administration has spent most of this period tweaking legislation so that the only ones prosecuted are the lowest level military who found themselves in the bind of having no training in interrogation and the pressure to produce “results.” Most poignant in Gibney's pursuit of justice is the indignation of his father who had been an interrogator in World War II and could see the erosion of American values in current inept practices. That these extraordinary films are nominated is intensely satisfying to those of us who are looking for responsible leadership in America

Regina Weinreich             

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Reading Faces at the Oscars

Turning the spotlight on the nominees seated at the Kodak Theater, the Academy Awards was a display of reaction shots—to good effect but making me wonder, what’s with Jack Nicholson’s head?

In a season where almost all winners were predicted—even Best Film for The Departed and Best Director for Scorsese, -- it was certainly more fun to take our eyes off the stage to see Ellen Degeneres handing a script to Marty and mugging for a photo with Clint taken by Steven Spielberg, who perfectionist that he is, had to stand to get it just right.  Ellen said her role as host was to make everyone comfortable and she did, even me at home in my pajamas wishing I had gone to one of those parties where I had gambled on the winners. Of course one friend did call to say she had lost a $1000 bet on Eddie Murphy based on my forecast. Does etiquette demand that I pay her for her loss? The cameras fortunately did not dwell on Eddie’s losing to Alan Arkin. In a pre-show interview with Barbara Walters, he seemed much as Jennifer Hudson observed about him when asked how he was to work with: kind of quiet and shy, vulnerable, until performance time when . . . well, we are aware of his antic wide-grinning self. His Jimmy Early in Dreamgirls was stellar, outsized and, in my opinion, the more Oscar worthy.

As we know, Oscar has a logic all his own. Let’s take for example Guillermo del Toro and his magnificent, magical Pan’s Labyrinth. From the time that the film picked up awards for cinematography, art direction, and makeup, with each speech declaring the director’s genius, his genial face registered uneasy pleasure, as if he knew that these early wins might be indicators, consolation prizes in lieu of Best Foreign Language Film. In the past weeks the scales had tipped toward The Lives of Others and so this win was no surprise. In my interview with the young Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, the German director, imagining the worst for his film, said he didn’t mind losing to Guillermo: he is so nice. He also pointed out that the last time a German film won, its cast was rudderless in Hollywood. When Nowhere in Africa took the prize in 2002, the director Caroline Link was home in Munich nursing a sick child. Talk about priorities! As Florian returned to his row of actors, a beaming Sebastian Koch among them, I wondered, would this heartthrob, a star of another film, the Dutch Holocaust era epic, Black Book, opening in April, make it back to New York today in time for a private screening tonight? Is he partying hearty as I write? And Al Gore, is he dancing on clean air? How good is it to see him grounded and confident? You could have staked your life on an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth. Best Documentary contenders are always high-minded principle-oriented films. Still, I keep griping: Shut Up and Sing should have been nominated in this category. The film, co-produced by Barbara Kopple, about the Dixie Chicks and the fire storm following an off the cuff swipe at Bush made by lead singer Natalie Maines, addressed first amendment issues and was simply an excellent non-fiction feature. Oh well, the Dixie Chicks were vindicated, reigning at the Grammys.

Speaking of rulers, the movie about the ill-fated queen, Marie Antionette, nevertheless was recognized for Best Costume Design. Milena Canonero thanked Francis Ford Coppola for introducing her to his daughter, director Sofia when she was just a little girl. Meantime Sofia Coppola was spotted in New York shopping for art at the Armory Show on the Pier pushing her new daughter in a stroller. Could it be that she like me was home watching in her pajamas?

 

And the regal Helen Mirren in Christian LaCroix, how gorgeous was that golden gown? Portraying the dowdy queen did not dampen Mirren’s natural fashion sense. At the New York Film Festival where The Queen premiered on opening night, Mirren wore the most spectacular Stella McCartney, and from there it’s been one frock more fabulous than the one before. Paraphrasing Mel Brooks, it’s good to be queen.

                                                                                                                  Regina Weinreich 

Salma’s Yelp

If you were glued to the set yesterday morning as I was, listening for this year’s Oscars nominees, you could not help but hear announcer Salma Hayak’s joyful yelp for her pal Penelope’s Best Actress nod. Not presidential hopeful Howard Dean’s “barbaric yawp,” heard ‘round the world, the soft, friendly petard broke up the rather formal proceedings. Too bad the academy did not acknowledge Cruz’s film, the crowd-pleasing Volver, a comic,
magic realist tour de force by Pedro Almodovar, in which the ghosts of the past do not rest until the sins of the fathers are redeemed. Cruz famously has a padded rump in the manner of full-bodied movie legends Sophia Loren or Anna Magnani. And let me assure you, that bottom did not look as good on Ellen Degeneris. Of course Almodovar had already won an Oscar, for All About My Mother in 2000. When I asked the Spanish auteur then how it felt, he said winning an Oscar was like having a baby and introducing it to all your relatives. Everyone wants to hold it, touch it, and tell you who it resembles. So this year he will not be birthing its twin in neither category of Best Foreign Language Film nor Best Picture, as many Oscar watchers predicted. Oh well, this director is infinitely imaginative. If he makes his movie Tarantula, based on Mygale, a gender-bending French noir by Thierry Jonquet (City Lights), he’ll be up to his old kinky, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! tricks. Maybe Antonio Banderas, an actor he made famous, will star. You know, says Almodovar, he’s very big now. He may be too hard to get.

The Foreign Language list is always odd. I don’t always agree with the choices but this year The Lives of Others (Germany) and Pan’s Labyrinth (Mexico) vie for my vote. You can see Guillermo del Toro’s layered masterpiece, a political parable cum fairy tale, in theaters right now. You will have to wait until early February for the pre-Glasnost film by young director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, about East Germany’s Stasi, the Communist era secret police who spied on citizens they deemed suspicious. Do not miss either one.

Nobody I know thought David Lynch’s Inland Empire starring Laura Dern would be nominated; depending on your taste you either love his weaving of bizarre non-narratives, or hate it. For the record, I sit on the love side, finding his extravagant subjectivity mesmerizing. Surprise surprise, the man is capable of a linear story. His book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (Tarcher/Penguin), influenced by such classics as The Upanishads and Bhagavad-Gita is his take on the relationship between meditation and creativity, a kind of how-to manual. Positing that “Ideas are like fish,” he basically says that if you want to get them, you have to dip into deep water. Before you say, “DUH,” read this quote from the chapter called, “Light of the Self:” “Negativity is like darkness. So what is darkness? You look at darkness, and you see that it’s really nothing: It’s the absence of something. You turn on the light, and darkness goes.” Simple, right? But guess what? It works. I’m writing this blog after all.

(Photo: People's Daily Online)

Regina Weinreich

Academy Awards, Oscar Nominations, Oscars