Gossip Central

Brian De Palma Receives the Hamptons International Film Festival Lifetime Achievement Award

Putting a new spin on Hitchcock, no one does horror with the class of Brian De Palma. At the Hamptons International Film Festival this weekend, the man who gave us Dressed to Kill, Scarface, and The Untouchables, among other classics of American cinema, sat for a conversation with Alec Baldwin, an actor who has worked with many a director and could add his observations, anecdotes, and impersonations to liven up a discussion with a master about such topics as the choice of D.P. for various films. As a result, Baldwin’s comments come to the fore, and De Palma’s extensive career was elicited in waves. No matter, that was the best way to do it, said Piper De Palma, the director’s daughter, named after the actress Piper Laurie (so sinister as the mother in Carrie) who presented her father with the crystal award for Lifetime Achievement.

It’s Time to End Lyme: Global Lyme Alliance Gala at Cipriani 42nd Street

A glamorous crowd packed Cipriani 42^nd Street for the fifth annual Global Lyme Alliance gala: sparkly gowns and tuxes for a stellar event put together by the incomparable Larry Scott. Hosted by Rosanna Scotto, the benefit, to end the insidious Lyme epidemic, featured speeches from Lyme survivors and performances by a Big Apple Circus juggler who did amazing work with pink umbrellas, and by Tootsie Tony winner Santino Fontana accompanied by newcomer Ashley Kobre, a graduating senior from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, singing “I’m So Pretty” from Cinderella.

Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson in Marriage Story at the New York Film Festival: Breaking Up is Hard to Do

Director Noah Baumbach knows from divorce, and has made films that have illuminated sides of that subject throughout his career. His 2005 Squid and the Whale comes to mind, and the family in The Meyerowitz Stories (2017) is riddled with marital fragility, and resilience. Each hews close to the director’s family background. Baumbach’s new film, Marriage Story, seems most immediately to be informed by his own real-life divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh in that we are looking at a couple of charming, good looking, articulate artists, with the superb actors Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson in the leads, but look again. The writing takes it somewhere else. At a press conference following a New York Film Festival screening this week, Baumbach claimed to want to tell a love story in a different way: “Sometimes you can see it more when it comes apart.”

The Irishman: Scorsese Epic at the New York Film Festival

Trust Martin Scorsese. If he makes a 3 ½ hour film, he will have you by the throat, riveted and wondering where the time went. Such is The Irishman, his latest masterwork, which opened the New York Film Festival this week. Featuring a trifecta of characters in the personae of Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, adding Harvey Keitel for extra oomph, it’s a dream team tale with great work by Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale, and Anna Paquin, but this is less a girl’s story than a picture of America at a pivotal moment when the historic violence of political assassinations –JFK to name one--echoed the small mayhem of mob vendettas.

Framed on this large canvas by an old man in a wheelchair recounting his life at a nursing home, The Irishman is a confession with no hope for redemption. The Irishman is Frank Sheeran (DeNiro) and he paints houses, code for doing hits. Much has been written about the aging and de-aging techniques used in this film, as the sequences jump time, but old or young, the characters in Frank’s world come live in superb storytelling.

Woody Allen Attends Screening of One Child Nation Screening

The special screening of Nanfu Wang’s One Child Nation, hosted by Oscar winners Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin at Lincoln Center this week, had some special guests among the attending elite of New York documentary filmmakers: Woody Allen and his wife Soon-Yi. The subject of this riveting documentary is the effect of China’s one child policy in that country. Said to help with population control, the rule of law, enforced in China from 1979 to 2015, severely punished families for having more than what was allowed, with forced sterilization and late term abortions. In the general propaganda extolling the virtues of keeping down the country’s birthrate, pop culture musical numbers show festively dressed women singing how wonderful life is with only one. Needless to say, families were devastated.

Downton Abbey: The Movie Gets a Royal Premiere

Just as Lord and Lady Grantham are thinking of downsizing,
the King and Queen decide to visit, setting off the lavish fairy tale
that is Downton Abbey: The Movie. The smartly dressed crowd at Alice
Tully Hall cheered as John Lunn’s symphonic music swelled, a rich
reminder of what was left behind when the last PBS season ended in
Julian Fellowes’ extravagant entertainment, and what now, in the form
of a feature-length film, ushers in two hours of sheer pleasure.

Tom Hiddleston in Betrayal: Star Power on 45th Street

Marital infidelity is that slippery slope, just ask the characters in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal in a superb revival at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater. Coming from a fictional literary elite, meaning they are also verbally gifted, and would have to be for Pinter’s poetry, Jerry (Charlie Cox) and Emma (Zawe Ashton) think they’ve gotten away with a seven -year affair when they meet up two years after their trysts ended. A book agent and a gallerist, they’ve been cheating on Robert, her publisher husband (Tom Hiddleston), who is also his best friend. Got that? Famously for this Pinter play, the events unravel backwards in time, much being made of when and how the betrayed know what. The truth is slippery.

Jules Feiffer at 90: Guild Hall Celebrates with an All-Star Reading of A Bad Friend

Starring Oscar awarded F. Murray Abraham and Mercedes Ruehl, the reading of Jules Feiffer’s 2003 play A Bad Friend at Guild Hall, could not have featured more good friends. Under the expert direction of Harris Yulin who also read, along with the outstanding Tedra Millan, Dave Quay, and Josh Gladstone, one of the East End’s finest character actors, the reading thrilled an audience of Feiffer’s friends (Monte Farber and Amy Zerner, Audrey Flack, Susan Lacy, Celia Weston, among them), his wife Joan Holden, and the author himself.

Hamptons Journal: Jenni Muldaur/ Hearts Aflame at Guild Hall/ Bryan Adams Rocks Out at the Parrish

Singer Jenni Muldaur brought a party to Guild Hall for the holiday weekend, doing duets with performers who she’s assured the stellar crowd,are really truly her friends. What a night: the Wainrights, father and son, Loudon the 3^rd, and Rufus, plus Teddy Thompson, and Isaac Mizrahi who joined in—briefly-- for Leonard Cohen’s “Halleluliah!” We were witnessing music dynasties performing country, rock, iconic American music genres. I loved Jenni on the harmonica, covering Bo Diddley and Dylan, and the opening act, the ukulele stylings of Patty Marx and Roz Chast. This hilarious duet proves: it takes a special kind of chops to make music that off so funny.

Rob Reiner, Visiting the Hamptons, Reads Mr. T at Celebrity Autobiography

Photo: Roger Friedman

Rob Reiner was the surprise guest at Guild Hall for Celebrity Autobiography, a riotous show based on a single conceit. It’s not that the lives of celebrities are merely a hoot, but that read aloud, the unintentional humor is mind-blowing. Case in point, Tiger Woods’ sexual innuendo describing his golf strategies in Tiger Woods: The Making of a Champion. Or Reiner as Arnold Schwartzenegger’s dialogues with himself, emboldening the workings of an already outsized ego, or Joe Namath’s obsession with his hair, in Alan Zweibel’s voice. When performed onstage for an audience by first class actors, the results are laugh out loud good. That is the engine that fuels Celebrity Autobiography, a hit every year on and off Broadway, and at Guild Hall. The brainchild of playwright/actor Eugene Pack, who, upon reading Vanna Speaks, producer Merv Griffith’s miraculously talented letter turner on Wheel of Fortune, discovered that describing in detail what it is that Vanna White brings to the game, is its own game. And so he had Lewis Black reading White.