The East, a thriller co-written by Brit Marling, who stars, and Zal Batmanglu, who directs, features a Svengali type character played to mesmerizing perfection by Alexander Skarsgard. At the film's New York premiere party at Hotel Chantelle’s Rooftop on Monday, the actor who has no doubt honed his skills at fixing you in his gaze in the HBO series True Blood, seemed far from the low key cool he exuded so well in the recent What Maisie Knew, and had more of his Disconnect intensity. As Benji, leader of an anarchist group called The East, determined to make corporations pay for the damage they do to the environment, and to anyone in their path to profits, Skarsgard knows how to charm. To get back at an oil company known to have polluted waters endangering and killing wildlife, the group that also includes Ellen Page as “Isabella Duncan,” pumps oil into its CEO’s country mansion, coating it with slime. An eye for an eye. You may have had these revenge fantasies yourself.
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?
It’s always Howdy Doody time in music producer Hal Willner’s workspace at the Film Center building in Manhattan. Best known for producing music for Saturday Night Live, Willner shares his lair with many antique puppets, Jackie Gleason memorabilia including a Ralph Cramden bus driver’s suit, as well as DVD’s of Shoah and other Holocaust films. He jokes, “My work sounds like a Warner Brothers cartoon or the soundtrack to a movie about Dachau.”
Heads roll, as do other body parts. Literally. In “Killer Kids of the Taliban,” little boys tell you that the imam assured them, the bomb strapped to their bodies explodes outward, murdering everyone in its path but not them. And in case you were wondering which border is the world’s most dangerous (Pakistan-India) or how to make a gun out of scrap metal, Vice on HBO is the show for you. Showrunners, Shane Smith and Ryan Duffy, the most affable hosts you will see on a news program, started posting their videos of trips to challenged areas on YouTube, and now HBO has picked them up big time. Committed to exposing the most absurd, mind-bending stories on the rapidly morphing human condition, the show, airing on Friday, is executive produced by Smith, Eddy Moretti and Bill Maher, with Fareed Zakaria as consulting producer. Curious and fun,Ryan Duffy, a riot of tattoos, rides in a car with arguably the world’s most endangered species, a man running for election in the Philippines. Don’t worry, says the targeted would-be official, the car is bullet proof. Duffy’s deadpan is worth watching all on its own.
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.”
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.
At B. B. King’s on Sunday night, at the Writers Guild of America Award ceremony, amidst a lot of foul-mouthed laughs and sober minded speeches, writer/ director Nora Ephron was remembered. As a young novelist, Meg Wolitzer attested, she received a most important recognition when Nora Ephron called to say she wanted to adapt her book, This is Your Life (1988), for film. Ephron, who died last summer of cancer, was a champion of young talent. When Lena Dunham got up to receive her prize for new series, she too spoke about Ephron seeking her out. The Girls originator and star also told a story when at 15 her mom took her to Caroline’s Comedy Club to hear Lisa Lampanelli.
Brrrrr! On this chilly weekend, the new FX television series The Americans premiered at the DGA Theater: a young couple played by Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell enter a Maryland motel room circa 1960’s. Russian spies, they are finding the U.S. summer brutal. Spying an air conditioner, they are relieved to bask in the frigid air. Talk about the Cold War!
David Geffen is so funny, sharing anecdotes featuring a Who’s Who in music and movies for the two-hour PBS documentary, Inventing David Geffen, you would never know that he actually dislikes public speaking. A self-proclaimed dummy in his Brooklyn elementary school, by 1976 he had sold several companies and had amassed a billion dollars. As he says at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame dinner upon receiving an award, “I never thought I would get one of these. I have no talent.” And yet interviews with those who have worked with this mogul in the entertainment industry—Barry Diller, Clive Davis, Ahmet Ertegun, Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Mike Nichols, Jann Wenner, Elton John, Lorne Michaels, among many others—attest otherwise: all seem to agree, the man has chutzpah.
In Ethel, a new HBO documentary that premiered at Sundance and was screened in East Hampton as the finale of the Hamptons International Film Festival Summerdocs series at Guild Hall, the fascination with all things Kennedy shifts to the legacy of Robert, murdered in 1968 while campaigning for president of the United States. The filmmaker Rory Kennedy, his 11th child, was born a few months later, and while her quest to mine the material of her father’s life might have been her mission, she focuses instead on the role of her mother in their remarkable marriage, and in the aftermath of his death.
