Gossip Central

Mel Brooks: Make a Noise: American Master at the 92 Street Y

If this were Dutch Masters instead of American Masters, I’d have a box of cigars, gripes Mel Brooks about the enterprise of including a documentary about him in the prestigious PBS series. On Wednesday night, an audience at the 92 Street Y got a sneak preview of the show, Mel Brooks: Make a Noise, that will air Monday night. The evening also included a conversation with director Robert Trachtenberg, The View co-host and comedian Joy Behar, and director Susan Stroman. The image of Mel Brooks hovered above them, a huge presence on Skype, echoing a moment in the film when Gene Wilder is asked whether it registered as important when he met Mel Brooks: Does Moses think it’s important when God speaks to him?

Old is New Again: Frances Ha and He’s Way More Famous Than You

Noah Baumbach’s new film Frances Ha is cut from the same cloth as Lena Dunham’s Girls. Written with Greta Gerwig, who stars as Frances, shot in black and white, Frances Ha evokes Woody Allen’s Manhattan and Francois Truffaut’s Paris, key locations for the twenty-something Frances to live her dreams. A moveable feast of guys, apartments, and jobs, Frances Ha freshens up the old tropes: cell phones and the internet play comfortably with the actors’ slapstick physicality and sight gags, a throwback to, and nostalgia for early filmmaking. A dancer, Frances runs awkwardly on the street to find a cash machine, falling on her face. Frances Ha’s world is almost entirely populated by a humorous and poignant variation of Generation Me characters, including Frances’ best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner) and young men played by Adam Driver and Michael Zegen.

Carey Mulligan at The Standard: The Great Gatsby’s Many Premieres

A few years ago, the excesses of the new movie version of The Great Gatsby might have inspired cathartic revulsion. The scene outside Avery Fisher Hall for this week’s Gatsby premiere befit the mega wattage of the movie’s stars, particularly Leonardo DiCaprio as he made his way through a screaming crowd. Carey Mulligan, resplendent in red Lanvin, her blond hair swept up, walked the red carpet. In the grand chaos of this opening of a state-of-the-art Baz Luhrmann movie—think Moulin Rouge set in 3D fairy tale America—Baz Luhrmann failed to introduce his stars, but did manage to say in his introduction, as the story takes place in New York, there was no other place for its world premiere, even though this American epic will open the Festival de Cannes next week.

The Iceman: Chilling with Michael Shannon

The movie, The Iceman, is all the chillier because it is based on a true story. A hit man procedural directed by Ariel Vromen, the film opens with a close up of Michael Shannon as contract killer Richard Kuklinski looking haggard and hirsute, being asked if he has any regrets. Moving back in time to the ‘70’s, we see him tender, courting his would be wife, Deborah, and then we see his short fuse, in a back alley pool hall, when he feels dissed. Given its subject matter, a contract killer responsible for offing over 100 men, The Iceman shows remarkable restraint: you see some straight ahead violence, throats are deftly slit, but even more terrifying is the sight of doomed men pleading for their lives, or packed as human ice bricks. The ensemble work is first rate, with Ray Liotta as a mob boss and John Ventimiglia as his knife-happy underling. Chris Evans as Mr. Freezy is both butcher and soft ice cream salesman, with David Schwimmer, Robert Davi and James Franco, heartless losers in smaller roles.

Queen Noor and Gloria Steinem at the Premiere of Wadjda

Gloria Steinem, often considered the face of feminism, attended a film by Saudi Arabian Haifaa al Mansour. Premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival this past weekend, Wadjda was celebrated at an afterparty at D.C. Moore Gallery in Chelsea. Amidst painted photographs by Duane Michals and paintings by Milton Avery, the filmmaker chatted with Queen Noor of Jordan and others, women decidedly international from the Middle East. Regal with her hair in a French twist, the queen wore a long skirt and jean jacket. Waiters passed hors d’oeuvres, including bite sized BLT’s, leading one to ponder, whose idea was it to serve bacon to Saudis?

Haifaa al Mansour said it was not easy for a woman to make films in her country, but this film had government support. When asked what traditions she was following, she said, “There are no traditions.”

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

 

 

In God We Trust: Following Madoff’s Money

On that cataclysmic day when Bernie Madoff was arrested, his loyal personal secretary Eleanor Squillari was convinced they had made a mistake. Life at the “lipstick building,” headquarters of the largest scale Ponzi scheme in financial history was wholesome and nurturing. They were family. But when she phoned Bernie to ask what gives, he was abrupt and perfunctory. And that’s when it hit her: this was for real.

Kon-Tiki at The Explorers Club and in Battery Park City

Thor Heyerdahl’s legendary journey from Peru to Polynesia on a raft was made famous in the Oscar winning documentary made in 1950, Kon-Tiki. In a new film of this voyage, Kon-Tiki, made with a fine cast of Norwegian actors, Thor Heyerdahl (Pal Sverre Hagen) enters The Explorers Club hoping to find support for this mad trip, and last week, in anticipation of the film’s opening and an exhibition of the raft, The Weinstein Company hosted a luncheon for a small group at The Explorers Club.

After welcoming everyone, including Josh Bernstein, Richard Wiese, Lawrence O’Donnell, Chuck Scarborough, and Glenn Close, Harvey Weinstein recounted the importance of Kon-Tiki to him as an elementary schooler. As he exuded about the “show and tell” he did on the amazing story of this Pacific Ocean crossing, you could see the boy in the man.

Breakfast with Screenwriter Paul Laverty: on Ken Loach’s The Angels' Share and Margaret Thatcher

Even at 9 AM, you want a whiskey when you’re talking about Ken Loach’s new movie The Angels' Share, screenplay by Paul Laverty, especially as you want to brace yourself for the political and economic realities of this master storyteller’s work. Meeting Paul Laverty at the Nomad Hotel over a latte and chocolate croissant, I have to tell this lawyer turned writer in no uncertain terms that one of his collaborations with director Ken Loach, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, is on my list for best movie I wish never to see again. It was that powerful, that good, and that disturbing. And so I greeted the new film, about a young man from a difficult, violent background who attempts to rise above his circumstances when everyone around him is pulling him back down, with fear that Loach would do it to me again: that is, have me rooting for The Angels' Share’s protagonist, a young guy named Robbie (Paul Brannigan) who tries to make good and discovers he has a real nose for fine aged whiskey, only to disappoint me with an unremittingly sad end. I was not prepared to be so pleasantly surprised with The Angels' Share’s generous humanity.

Holocaust Remembrance: Three Films of Survival

For Holocaust remembrance 2013, what do we remember? As my mother, a survivor of the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, and liberated from Stutthof used to teach us, life is a gift. And it really does matter, how you survive. 

Stories of survival can read like fairy tales, best case scenarios fueled by heroism, ingenuity, and luck. In the documentary No Place on Earth, guided by a strong-minded matriarch, Esther Stermer, who insisted that rather than follow their town in Ukraine to the ghettos and camps, the younger men should find hiding places. The family hid in caves, large enough in places, and also sufficiently sinewy and muddy to elude anyone trying to look for them.

Barbara Walters in Our Nixon

It was like travelling to the moon, to an alien place, said Barbara Walters about her trip to China with the president during the Nixon administration. If he were here right now, he was so awkward, he wanted so much to be liked, he would tell a dirty joke. Speaking from the stage at the Walter Reade Theater after a screening of Our Nixon, the documentary by Penny Lane and Brian Frye on closing night of the New Directors/ New Films series, she went on about that historic China trip: “Everyone was wearing Mao outfits. You could not tell the men from the woman. I was there to buy gifts for Henry Kissinger’s girlfriends,” she quipped. That was Tricky Dick with Plastic Pat, who finally came into her own as an interesting First Lady, only for Nixon to resign. “We forget how good he was on foreign policy. He deserves to have a better reputation than he has.”