Gossip Central

Sam Pollard’s MLK/FBI: Reflections on a Complicated Legacy

 “I love America,” filmmaker Sam Pollard asserts, interviewed by The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb, “but it’s a complicated, fucked up place.” The occasion was the opening of his latest documentary, MLK/FBI, released in time for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day; the interview from the fall, predated the events of January 6 that more than anything proves the statement true. As is the case with other films he’s worked on, Eyes on the Prize II and 4 Little Girls among them, Pollard revels in complicated, teaching “Anything in America is layered in complexity.”

Rebranding the The Gotham Awards

Breaking news: the IFP Gotham Awards will now be called The Gothams. Kicking off the awards season, this week’s celebration of “indie” or lower budget films managed to recreate the Gotham experience, seating guests at their packed tables in the cavernous Cipriani Wall Street, virtually, of course. Sipping my wine, I could kibbitz with fellow journalists. Let us say, no one was commenting on the celebrities’ gowns, glitz, or hairdos. For the occasion, I did wear makeup—and a sweater over yoga pants (not pajamas) instead of my usual cocktail dress. I did not work the room, but I enjoyed the experience of seeing Cadillac Escalades occupy the space, along with a few lone well-distanced high-rise tables near a stage with red velvet curtains. Elegance was maintained. I could see that I was not alone feeling out the possibilities. Early on, when the Best Documentary award went to two films, A Thousand Cuts and Time, onlookers heard the winners mutter, “I don’t see anyone. This is weird.” Alone in a room, we were not alone.

Hilary Swank in Fatale: Bridging Two Hollywoods

Two-time Academy Award winning Hilary Swank may be the most famous name attached to the new noir feature, Fatale, but, said director Deon Taylor in a Q&A after a virtual special screening, for black audiences Michael Ealy is a bigger star. Debate this point all you want. These actors are sublime in Fatale, acting out a pas de deux between a police detective and a crime suspect, so nuanced and sexy—Taylor conceived the idea—where race is key to the convolutions of the plot. “There are two Hollywoods,” said Taylor, “white Hollywood and black Hollywood. Hilary Swank did not know who Michael Ealy was.”

Tom Hanks in Paul Greengrass’ News of the World: Does the Right Thing

Back in the early days of the coronavirus, when we heard the news that Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, on location in Australia, tested positive for COVID-19, a cry could be heard round the world. How could Hollywood’s essential decent man, in every role—think Sully or Captain Phillips--, and his image in person, be so vulnerable? Playing Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a Civil War veteran in 1870, in Paul Greengrass’ latest movie, News of the World, Hanks inspires one thought: he’s everything you’ve ever loved about him and more.

Maybe with Joe Biden at the helm, decency has increased cache: Capt. Kidd, coming upon a rogue child, a doubly traumatized blond 10-year old he calls Johanna in the woods at the site of a lynching, takes it upon himself to bring her (the superb German actress Helena Zengel), home. America is still the wild west, and much of this trip through harsh landscapes chased by desperados, is beautiful to look at, yet harrowing.

Christmas at Moran Studio: Peaceful Holiday Cheer

When he wasn’t in a brownstone in Chelsea, the painter Thomas Moran occupied a studio on Main Street in East Hampton. “A shingled two-story boardinghouse with a smoking chimney” facing the pond, described the late Robert Long in his 2005 book, De Kooning’s Bicycle. In the late 1870’s, “Moran thought that this could be his Fountainebleau.” Visible from Montauk Highway, the stately “cottage” was in disrepair for years, and has been restored as an exhibition space for Moran’s etchings, and this year, for a Victorian Christmas.

Denzel Washington’s Vision: The Museum of the Moving Image Honors Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

Blues singer Ma Rainey was plus sized in many ways, most especially her voice. In a new film based on August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Viola Davis gives her Ma a grimace to go with her mega-sound, as large as life for blacks in America. Davis’s Ma is a grand performance balanced by that of one of her horns-men, lithe Levee, played with charm cum mischief and madness by Chadwick Boseman. Ruben Santiago-Hudson adapted Wilson to perfection in this gem, and this week, the movie, to air on Netflix, had its premiere at the Museum of the Moving Image gala. Virtual, this event was a state-of-the-art forum on the movie’s production, starring Viola Davis and cast, costume designer Ann Roth, director George C. Wolfe who accepted an award from producer Denzel Washington.

Washington, a longtime interpreter of August Wilson’s art, vowed to make the playwrights’10- play cycle, one for every decade of the 20^th century, into film. That vision started with his direction of Fences in 2016, an Oscar nominated film in which he starred with Davis. While Fences does not take place in a recording studio, Wilson's dialogue is always rhythmic. Speaking about the musicality of Ma Rainey, the actors talked about filming with rehearsal time as if this were a staged production, and the bond created among the players. The actor Glynn Turman, Toledo in Ma Rainey, recounted Denzel seeing him in a production of the play and saying, “Stay ready. I stayed ready.”

Nomadland: Off the Grid with Frances McDormand

Chloe Chao’s extraordinary film Nomadland is a map of America, seen in Frances McDormand’s face. Unadorned, craggy, her face looms large in every frame—that is, when the camera is not tracking roads along America’s most beautiful open spaces, the deserts of the West. You do not want to take your eyes off McDormand’s Fern, a human embodiment of the American frontier, its resilience and relentless loneliness. We—our culture climbing out of difficult political years-- haven’t focused on those places sufficiently, places in Nature threatened by commodification and industry. But the open road motif is an American tradition, a promise of freedom inherent in the pursuit of happiness, the heart of democracy’s foundation.

Rocks feature as prominent edifices in this landscape, and Zhao juxtaposes their humble majesty with the Amazon fulfillment center where Fern sometimes works when she’s not on the road. The steel grid, hive of busyness, brings to mind last year’s excellent documentary American Factory. Fern, maybe a nickname for Frances, although the actress goes by Frannie, is otherwise an unglamorous shrub close to the earth. The cast, an ensemble of real-life nomads, go by their names including co-star David Strathairn, David, a man Fern connects with in her travels, or stasis in one of the RV stations she parks her tricked up van, “Vanguard,” now her home after her mining town, Empire, shut down. Charlene Swankie is a stand out; with a few months to live, she’s in charge of her destiny. She makes you understand Fern’s choices, including one you wish she’d reconsider: a future with David and his warm family.

The Gotham Awards 2020 Recognizes Five Movies by Women Directors for Best Feature

Kudos to this year’s Gotham Award nominees. Traditionally, the IFP Gotham Awards kicks off the film awards season. As celebrations go, this decidedly downtown dinner brings together New York’s movie making elite while honoring lower budget fare in Oscar-like categories. Ah, longing for Cipriani Wall Street, packed to the gills with the year’s moguls and stars, I will be merely content to celebrate this stellar event pandemic style, perched at my computer in pajamas on Monday January 11, 2021—as I now applaud the choices, some of my favorite nominated movies, that since March, have given me the comfort of knowing the show must go on: To highlight a few in different categories: Time, Beanpole, The Assistant, The Nest.

The documentary Time from director Garrett Bradley, probably this year’s Oscar non-fiction favorite and a hit at the fall film festivals, puts you in the place of what it means to be incarcerated. With its sharp focus on the Rich family, Time takes you inside, as if Ava DuVerney’s 2016 Oscar nominated doc, 13th, about what pervasive prison life is for black families, becomes your reality.

DOC NYC 2020: In THE MEANING OF HITLER, Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker Explore the Cult of Personality

Of the extraordinarily fine offerings at this year’s DOCNYC 2020, The Meaning of Hitler, from directors Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker stands out in illuminating the continued fascination with dictatorial psychopaths epitomized by Adolf Hitler and extending to the Nazis of World War II. Leading off on the topic, novelist Martin Amis,who has grappled with the Holocaust era in several books, wastes no time comparing Donald Trump to Hitler: noting, neither had problems with lying.

Taking off from Sebastian Haffner’s 1978 German bestseller of the same title, the film features interviews with many experts and provocateurs including Deborah Lipstadt, Yehuda Bauer, Saul Friedlander, Sir Richard Evans, Francine Prose, and Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, Nazi hunters who famously brought Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon” to justice. Exploring Hitler’s meaning takes the filmmakers to Hitler’s bunker in Berchtesgaden, to the memorial site that once was the death camp Treblinka, and to the forest at Sobibor where 250,000 were murdered without a trace.

Joy Behar’s Healthy Disrespect Benefits Guild Hall

As I write, Joy Behar asks Kamala Harris tasteful if anxious questions about the election/ COVID/ and Joe Biden’s plans on her daytime show The View. Her respect is through the roof, though you know, after years of experience, she has her doubts about the role of government on the planet. Wearing a blue sweater embroidered with the words, “I’m speaking,” she’s a lot to reckon with; with her, nobody’s going to mess. It’s a leap to think of her as a playwright, and now, we must. In five tidbits she wrote, an entertainment to benefit Guild Hall this week titled, A Totally Disrespectful Evening of Virtual Short Plays, she puts her views to dramatic effect. An A-list of her pals—Lorraine Bracco, Dylan McDermott, Robert Klein, Brenda Vaccaro, Chris Bauer, to name a few-- mouth off in a variety of situations, culminating in a one-woman tour de force: Behar herself as a shoplifter, offers a step by step how-to, explaining the orgasm as you exit the store, and stating, “If Trump gets re-elected in November, who knows what crimes I might commit.”