Shoulder to shoulder like Homeric heroes, Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper descended the long stairs at the Landmark Theater on Thursday night, joining Eva Mendes, Ray Liotta,Dane DeHaan and others of the cast and crew onstage for the premiere of Derek Cianfrance’s new movie, The Place Beyond the Pines. The two actors, perhaps the best of their generation, deliver deft performances as their fictive lives twine, one a carny, the other a cop, in this triptych about fathers and sons on the American landscape, making this the most thrilling two and a half hours of storytelling in the cinemas right now.
On the eve of this year’s New Directors / New Films Festival, a collaboration between The Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, the Titus I theater was abuzz with downtown indie elite: Sofia Coppola, Alex Karpovsky, Elizabeth Olsen, John Cameron Mitchell, Mark Birbiglia, Julia Garner, and photographer Bob Gruen. Gimme the Loot, Adam Leon’s film about two graffiti artists attempting to raise money by any means for the ultimate NYC art project, had its premiere. Featured in the 2012 ND/NF, Gimme the Loot was introduced with the kind of praise reserved for films by Almodovar, whose name was invoked in the introduction, films that will be discussed forever for moving the medium forward. In this film’s case, the language is fresh, that is, bold, bawdy, and brimming with life. The scammers, actors Tashiana Washington and Ty Hickson, and a rich girl played by Zoe Lescaze remain memorable.
As the manager of a girl band looking, Dave Lovelace (Chris O’Dowd) teaches the four Aboriginal singers the distinction between country western and soul music: both are about loss, but in country western, they just resign themselves to it and whine. In soul, they yearn to get back what they had. In 1968 Australia, this useful information helps to catalyze these young women; they switch to soul, come of age, break some ethnic barriers, leaving behind family, including a child for opportunities in Viet Nam singing for American troops. That child, Tony Briggs, wrote a stage play based on the adventures of his brave mom and her pals, and now a movie—in fact, the feel good movie of the year-- The Sapphires has dazzled audiences, making its rounds through various festivals including last year’s Cannes.
The documentary Girl Rising—the title evokes uprising-- mixes urgency with great storytelling appeal. The latest moment of the feminist revolution is not about debating issues of women’s equality in the workplace. It is about changing the world one girl at a time through education.
Coming just after the recent PBS series, MAKERS, a history of the recent phase of the Women’s Movement in America in all its diversity, Girl Rising asks the question, how do we nurture girls to become “makers” of their own destiny? Taking its agenda global, Girl Rising addresses the dire subjects of girls’ vulnerability --to poverty, human trafficking, bonding which is a form of slavery, child marriage, and assassination for the simple desire to go to school.
Director Regis Roinsard was particularly excited when his film, Populaire, opened the annual Rendez-vous with French Cinema at the Paris Theater. He exulted introducing his stars Romain Duris and Deborah Francois. Evoking Doris Day and Audrey Hepburn movies, Populaire follows this festival’s first night traditions as a frothy comedy with old-fashioned sexist overtones, charming as only the French can make them! Populaire turns out to be a pink typewriter Francois’s character uses to win a ‘50’s era typing competition and land the man of her dreams played with fetching allure by Duris. What surprises, as Roinsard explained at the French Cultural Services afterparty, is that this was a first feature, based on a historic typing competition. Influenced by American movies, he wanted to make it into a love story. Of course, at the end, as the tap tap tap accelerates, the industrial types imagine the word machine’s future: the ball, with all the letters of the alphabet contained in a golfball-sized metal sphere, rotating as it makes its marks.
“This is a competition disguised as a film festival,” said First Time Film Festival co-founder Johanna Bennett, before introducing a panel featuring Harry Belafonte on Saturday morning at The Players Club. Twelve first films are screening and a winner will get distribution. Just when you thought the world had enough film festivals! But in addition to discovering new talent, the festival celebrates the old in a unique way. Successful filmmakers love their first films, and so, as a unique feature of this festival, Darren Aronofsky, Barbara Kopple, Philip Seymour Hoffman,Nancy Savoca,Hal Hartley,Christine Vachon,Melvin van Peeples, and Todd Solonz will show their debut work. On Friday night, Sofia Coppola screened The Virgin Suicides, with a Q&A that lasted twice the allotted time, illustrating that passion, First Fest co-founder Mandy Ward pointed out, surprised at how well this venture is going—after only one day. (The festival ends with an awards ceremony on Monday night at the Players Club, with Johanna Bennett’s father Tony, Ellen Burstyn, Martin Scorsese, and others.)
Sounds like a joke, but Hunger Games composer T Bone Burnett, took a break to record his own original music for the documentary, A Place at the Table, a film illuminating the problem of hunger in America. This subject is no joke. Directed by Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson, this film follows a few emblematic young citizens, a Colorado fifth grader named Rosie, a Mississippi second grader with severe health problems named Tremonica, a Philadelphia mom named Barbie, determined, hard working good people, who happen to live outside the food eh, network. Food insecure, they don’t know where their next meal is coming from. Literally. Barbie has to travel by bus to find a market that sells fruits and vegetables. Local stores are stocked with processed items providing minimally nutritious calories for her children. And she is lucky she can feed them. Rosie in a ramshackle rural community in a gorgeous mountainous landscape, relies on donations. On a panel this week at The Crosby Hotel, spokesmen Jeff Bridges and the Silverbush’s husband Tom Colicchio, star of television’s “Top Chef” made a key point: here is one problem that is fixable.
In New York on Oscar Sunday, the red carpet will be more than a runway for hopefuls in borrowed gowns and glitter. Chef Daniel Boulud will host a special dinner and viewing of the awards show for the east coast Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at his Restaurant Daniel. The signature drink, a moired pomegranate colored cocktail with an ice cube ball featuring a mini gold statue of that hunk of an award, is called Red Carpet: pear infused vodka, Saint Germain, an elderflower liqueur, topped with champagne.
With the ultimate in Gallic grace, Boulud explained his party raison d’etre: I envy Wolfgang in Los Angeles, so we are celebrating here in New York. He and the Daniel staff worked hard to create canapes that correspond with the films:
You could say that the chemistry between Katie (Julianne Hough) and Alex (Josh Duhamel) is incendiary in the psychological thriller cum romance Safe Haven. This film by Lasse Hallstrom based upon a Nicholas Sparks novel may be on trend in some unforeseen ways. Without spoiling the inflammatory (pun intended) end for its assured volume of fans, no one you fall in love with dies. But there’s some serious damage to property. That detail may resonate for recent hurricane, tornado, and blizzard victims.
Back in the day, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was all the rage. Paperbacks of A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) could be seen stuffed in jean pockets on college campuses, on subways. Even mainstream readers who were not particularly into poetry loved the surreal imagery of this verse. A decade later, books by Allen Ginsberg were not as popular, and those of Jack Kerouac were mainly out of print. Present at the historic Six Gallery reading where Ginsberg’s reading of Howl galvanized a poetry movement, and Kerouac passed a bottle of tokay, Ferlinghetti took action suggesting he put Ginsberg’s beat epic into print. This was the official dawning of a particularly American avant-garde literary movement: especially as founder of City Lights Books, publishing house and iconic San Francisco store, Ferlinghetti was at the center of The Beat Generation.
