Gossip Central

Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan in She Said: Naming Predators’ Names

As Harvey Weinstein sits in court in California on charges of rape and the former president Donald Trump, an alleged abuser, announces he will run again, the new movie, She Said, is a ripped-off-the-headlines thriller, telling the story of two investigative journalists who exposed the practice of abuse in the workplace. Of course, for Weinstein, co-founder of Miramax, that would be the movie business. You could say that New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor are the Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on this issue, as She Said shows their dedication to hearing victims’ accounts, and the exhausting, exhilarating process of getting them to go on record. No, this is not Watergate, but a system far more insidious in its established acceptance worldwide, undermining women and their dreams.

The She Said casting is exceptional: two of the women hurt by Weinstein are played by Samantha Morton and Jennifer Ehle. Great actresses, their characters meet with the reporters. Their careers broken, they have moved on, haunted by their anguished past. They go public at great risk. For many who have never experienced assault by a boss, it may be easy to dismiss their sensitivity, to say, get over it. But the movie makes it clear that powerful predators are enabled by others. After Rose McGowan and others came forward, 86 women finally accused Harvey Weinstein, enough to make you wonder how this family man and astute film professional with an amazing success story had any time for luring young, naïve women to his hotel room for work related meetings, where he insisted upon sexual favors while clad in a bathrobe or naked. An army of helpful assistants and lawyers, eyes wide shut, covered up the tracks, leading women
on, or paying them off for their silence, forcing them to sign impenetrable non-disclosure agreements.

Jennifer Connelly’s Good Hair and Tight Sails in Top Gun: Maverick

One of the highest grossing films in the history of movies, Top Gun: Maverick, a sequel decades after the first 1986 Top Gun film, exemplifies why old-fashioned story-telling wins. As producer Jerry Bruckheimer said following a special screening at the Whitby Hotel this week, it’s an action movie wrapped around a love story. You cannot beat the aerial sequences, sleek planes on a mission to destroy an enemy arsenal. But the Top Gun team, led by “Maverick,” Tom Cruise at his best, heroic and sensitive, features pilots you can love. Particularly fine are “Rooster,” a son-surrogate played by Miles Teller, “Ice,” a touching Val Kilmer, his character, a rival to Cruise in the original, so debilitated by terminal throat cancer he communicates by texting, and “Hangman,” a fresh, snide Glen Powell. And, who knew Maverick had a woman in the wings? And what a woman! Jennifer Connelly is stunning as Penny who tends her own bar.

Director Joseph Kosinski said it’s her intelligence that made him want her for the movie, and that unbelievably, Jennifer had never worked with Tom Cruise before. Their chemistry is visceral as she flips her auburn mane, bringing out something in Cruise we’ve never seen before, and it’s thrilling. Jennifer Connelly said it was all in the wig.

Tangled Up in Tulsa: Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song

Bob Dylan’s massive archive is now on view in Tulsa, at the Bob Dylan Center right next door to the Woody Guthrie Museum. Artifacts of these two music giants make a must-see stop on any American culture tour. But Tulsa? Why there, everyone asks. For his stuff to be situated next to his hero’s, Dylan would have agreed to any place. Tulsa is not particularly relevant to his biography, but, as his new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, illustrates with great gusto, his sources and inspirations can be far-ranging, and belong to one place in particular—here, the place where democracy lives. They belong where, in a Whitmanesque sense, people of all stations in life can sit side by side—at least theoretically. An homage to a highly idiosyncratic American songbook, Dylan revels in behind-the-scenes stories of the famous as he honors the work of less well known artists.

Yes, he goes deep into how Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” had its lyrics adjusted. Referring to The Who’s “My Generation,” he proclaims, “Every generation gets to pick and choose what they want from the generations before with the same arrogance and ego-driven self-importance that the previous generations had when they picked the bones of the ones before them.” Yes, he calls Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” “an update of the iconic beat generation masterpiece by Jack Kerouac.” Maybe taking a cue from Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues which in other places he calls an important influence on his writing, each entry reads like a satori, a nugget of supreme wisdom. Short and to the point, each might follow a Kerouacean writerly strategy to simply fill up the page, like a jazz riff, stopping “where the page stops.” But Dylan doesn’t let his ideas spill one to the next.

Michelle Williams in The Fabelmans: Steven Spielberg’s Bildungsroman

Taking liberally from his own biography, Steven Spielberg creates a portrait of the artist as a young man in his latest film, The Fabelmans. It is no accident that the word fable echoes within this title, nor that the child to adolescent to teen and adult depicted is on a journey to discover his unique voice—through a moving picture camera lens. But the real star of this fictive tale is his mother called Mitzi, tremendously appealing with Michelle Williams in the role. An elfin creature with talents beyond her burnt eggs and salami, Mitzi is a soak-up-all-the-oxygen-in-the-room sort, and the epicenter of Sam’s consciousness. Flirting, even with Sam, Mitzi sings and plays the piano for her family and remains an unfailing support to her son’s filmmaking ambitions. Michelle finesses Mitzi even at her most wacky. Yes, his father (Paul Dano, excellent) plays an important part too--as does his best friend Ben (Seth Rogen, wonderful) who, by the way, makes off with his mother; that story underpins much of Sam’s emotional energy without undermining his gifts as a visual artist.

Some other characters along the way need mention: Judd Hirsch as Uncle Boris, Jeanne Berlin as Hadassah Fabelman, and David Lynch as John Ford. The film engages in numerous ways, especially as it references many of Spielberg’s greatest hits: E. T., Jaws, among others. Serious matters: his parents’ divorce, the anti-Semitism he experienced in school, the beatings he endures facing the school’s jocks, and Jesus as a romantic rival—All are part of the journey as Sam makes movies featuring train crashes, blood spurting war battles, and teen beach parties.

Hugh Jackman in Florian Zeller’s The Son: Dance Man in a Drama

It’s a far cry from The Music Man’s River City, Iowa to the swell NYC apartments and boardrooms of Florian Zeller’s The Son. The film is the latest in a trilogy that began with The Father, based on a stage play, with The Mother to follow. In The Father, you may recall, Anthony Hopkins won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance as a lovably demented dad to Olivia Coleman. You never quite know when he’s seeing/ hearing/ telling the truth. It’s a tour de force of the man’s inner mind, and it was riveting. 

In The Son, Hopkins appears again in a pivotal scene, stone cold as a father to Hugh Jackman, a father who is facing some parenting challenges. Jackman sang and danced his way into Marion the librarian (Sutton Foster’s) heart in the recent Music Man revival on Broadway. And in The Son, as Peter, he does a funky hip slide that looks like it will bond him to his teen son Nicholas (Zen McGrath) who is having mental issues related to his dad’s divorce from his mom, Kate (Laura Dern in a moving role). Until Beth (a superb and sexy Vanessa Kirby), his father’s new wife, gets into the act, and all sours.

Topdog/Underdog Revival at the Golden: History Does Repeat

The stakes are huge for two brothers named Lincoln and Booth who live in a one-room fleabag joint with no running water. Carrying history itself, these brothers—well, living conditions are the least of their problems. Sibling rivalry aside, Topdog/ Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize winning play now in a superb revival at the Golden Theater, feels essential, as a game of one-upmanship, as “civil” war re-enactment, or a reckoning of what it means when members of the same family vie for dominance.

Opening with Booth (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) honing his three card monte skills, this play is hilarious. Soon, Linc (Corey Hawkins) interrupts, a black man in white face. His hat and waistcoat give him away—his job is portraying President Abraham Lincoln, shot constantly in an arcade show. That’s his day job. The doubling and tripling in this conceit are enough to give you dread as Linc practices his skills at dying. Skilled at shoplifting, Booth wears a big coat the better to bring home purloined goods, neatly padding him every which way. Clothes do make the man, and don’t forget the matching ties, the belt. Snip the label. The actors are particularly wonderful – however different—showing a comic physicality, without ever becoming slapstick. Director Kenny Leon milks these moments, dressing and undressing his actors, unpeeling memories of an untoward childhood. Abandoned by their parents as teens, at least Booth had older brother Linc.

Body Language: The Whale and Triangle of Sadness in the Hamptons

At this year’s Hamptons International Film Festival, blame it on the vagaries of programming, but on one day two films featured such egregious abuse of the body, as if to highlight human excesses of all kinds. I speak of copious consumption of junk food, fine champagne to wash down, and then up projectile vomit, and consequent brown spewing toilets. A coincidence?

In Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, Brendan Fraser plays Charlie, a dying obese man. That’s too bad because he also appreciates his estranged daughter (Sadie Sink), and poetry, the true meaning of self in Whitman’s Song of Myself and the rhythmic cadences of Melville’s Moby Dick, about an obsessed sea captain on a death wish. In case you ever wondered how people can eat themselves to oblivion, you may find the answer here, but a whole lot more. As the classic literature suggests a spiritual component to the sins of the flesh, Charlie consumes pizza, meatball heroes with extra cheese, you name it. As a visual experience, it is painful to see him move around his drab, depressing apartment—until he achieves the transcendence he seeks.

HIFF: Brunch with 3 Directors: Oliver Hermanus, Peter Hedges, and Volker Schlondorff

You cannot take your eyes off Bill Nighy in his superb performance in Living, Oliver Hermanus’ film, the Hamptons International Film Festival opening night feature. A remake of Akira Kurasawa’s Ikiru with a script by Kazuo Ishigura, Living follows a man played by Nighy, a higher up in a bureaucracy that specializes—as is the nature of bureaucracies—in getting nothing done. At a desk piled high with folders of delayed projects, Nighy is overwhelmed by the pyramid of inaction until a younger man joins the firm, the wonderful Alex Sharp, and Nighy learns he has but a short time to live. A young, perky woman (Aimee Lou Wood) shows him how to “live,” providing an education far from the scandal his family thinks. From South Africa, Oliver Hermanus moved to London to make this feature, and moreover, moved to our table at Nick & Toni’s restaurant for the annual filmmakers’ brunch. The hardest part of making the film, he said, was casting on Zoom, exulting now in casting a series he’s been hired to direct in person. 

Director Peter Hedges joined the brunch table too. His The Same Storm utilizes laptops and cell phones to get into the lives of 24 characters during the Covid lockdown.

Nan Goldin at the New York Film Festival in Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

At the NYFF press conference following a screening of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, photographer Nan Goldin seemed as surprised as anyone that Laura Poitras included footage of her family story, weaving together decades of her artistic risk-taking. From the time that she left her childhood home in the suburbs for a life documenting a demimonde of friends, like herself, on a cultural fringe, she has harbored the memory of her sister, a rebel who taught Nan how to rebel. That rebellion led to activism. 

Poitras came on board to help complete a film project that began with some footage of Goldin and P.A.I.N. demonstrating. The group which she helped to found continues to challenge the opioid industry Nan Goldin barely survived, and now she wants to give voice to the thousands who died as a result of addiction: in particular, P.A.I.N targets the Sackler family who put their name on arts institutions in New York, Paris, London, etc., from the vast amounts of money they made through Purdue Pharma promoting drugs like oxycontin, and other pain killers they pushed as non-addictive.

White Noise Opens the New York Film Festival with a Bang

The 60^th New York Film Festival opens with a lot of noise, White Noise, that is. Noah Baumbach’s movie, adapted from Don DeLillo’s classic American 1985 novel, features the kind of ambient sound that barely registers, punctuated by the boom of train/freighter collisions in combustible flames exuding plumes of smoke. It’s a canvas of the senses, in grays and vivid crayon color—all the distractible elements necessary for survival in the face of definite death. In Samuel Beckett’s hands, this dilemma is sparely etched. But guided by DeLillo’s images of American detritus, Noah Baumbach succeeds in answering the question of how can anyone make a movie out of the satiric cacophony/ harmony of White Noise? Or, perhaps even more relatable, how would you respond to a “toxic airborne event?”

He succeeds well, utilizing station wagons and the A&P supermarket to full luster. Not since Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California” have the aisles popped with shoppers and products strategically placed in happy familiarity. Mountains of everything a consumer would want to hoard.

His first adaptation, Baumbach claims to have been thinking about this project ever since as a teen his father put the novel in his hands. It helps that his father, novelist Jonathan Baumbach, was a professor at Brooklyn College and a writer wracked with his own existential dread, all familiar territory for the young Baumbach to mine. On a college campus setting, Jack Gladney (the excellent Adam Driver) is a celebrity academic, a specialist in Hitler studies. His colleague, Murray Suskind, (wonderful Don Cheadle) teaches Elvis. A beautifully choreographed lecture shows how enthusiasm for each of these idolized “superstars” flattens any moral, ethical consideration. Jack’s wife Babette (Greta Gerwig with big hair reminiscent of Melanie Griffith’s in Working Girl--no doubt costume designer Ann Roth’s touch), tries to cure her affliction: fear of death, much to the alarm of their three eldest children who chatter from beginning to end. Baumbach directed them to do that, as if they were an ongoing radio--back-sound being the point—punctuated by Danny Elfman’s music and a surprise joyful ending from LCD Soundsystem: to “new body rhumba.”