Gossip Central

Odessa Young, Olivia Colman, Penelope Cruz at the Hamptons International Film Festival If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother

Australian actress Odessa Young exhibits poise beyond her years. At 23, the star of Mothering Sunday, screened at the recent Hamptons International Film Festival, commanded a leather sofa at the Maidstone Inn in East Hampton, ready to promote her film. With her was her co-star Josh O’Connor, Emmy winner for his role as Prince Charles in The Crown. The two are a hot item in the movie, flirting, making love, unselfconsciously intimate, unclothed, under Eve Husson’s fine direction. The nudity, beside the point, was never mentioned. The actors instead raged on about who had the closer friendship with the elder star each adored, Colin Firth. Young was certain she was the one. O’Connor wisely let that rest.

The “mothering” of the title has to do with a day off, a family time in fact kept for their trysts. Young’s character, an orphan working as the well-to-do family’s housekeeper, has no family obligation, and as the bereaved mother (Olivia Colman in a small but memorable role) tells her; therefore, she would not, she says, experience loss; the opposite is true.

Pedro Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers Closes The New York Film Festival: Penelope Cruz is Spain’s Sophia Loren

Pedro Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers Closes The New York Film Festival: Penelope Cruz is Spain’s Sophia Loren loves women. He also loves actors. He could not have been more passionate introducing the stars of his new movie, Parallel Mothers, closing night of the New York Film Festival: Penelope Cruz and Milena Smit. Beautiful women, one older, the other younger, they play women who bond in a maternity ward, each birthing a daughter, and if you know this Spanish auteur’s oeuvre, the event occasions the usual high stakes emotional melodrama for which he famously directs the women to pull back the tears.

For this film, he folds their stories into a historical memory, a time when Fascists came door to door in the Spanish countryside arresting men, shooting them, their fates tied together with barbed wire in mass graves. Having been told of this horrific event by her grandmother, Cruz’s Janis (named for Janis Joplin) seeks to unearth this site in her village so that the men—fathers, brothers, uncles-- can be properly mourned and remembered.

The First Wave Opens the Hamptons International Film Festival

The opening night film is tough, warned a programmer at the HIFF, the beloved festival in person after the pandemic shutdown last year. It’s Matthew Heineman, I said, knowing that this documentary filmmaker embedded with Mexico’s cartels in his film, Cartel Land; of course it is tough. If you can insinuate yourself with murderous drug traffickers, might the hospital wards overwhelmed by Covid be a good subject. But here’s the unexpected: The First Wave covers a tough subject with enormous heart.

Ahmed, a police officer, overweight, and diabetic oozes pus on a hospital bed. A nurse, Kelly, knows he’s a family guy with young kids; she’s determined to help him make it through. He does not look so good, going in and out of ventilators. Not a good sign. We check in on him as he strains to have face time calls with his wife, Alexis, and their children. Other families come into view: one is a woman who just gave birth now fighting for her life. You know these stories and hundreds like them.

The Power of the Dog: Jane Campion’s Hills are Sexy

Who can forget Harvey Keitel’s full-frontal nudity in The Piano? How daring was Jane Campion’s female gaze in her 1993 feature! Now with her new film, The Power of the Dog, get ready for a well-hung Benedict Cumberbach. Based on Thomas Savage’s novel, The Power of the Dog, the film is shot in New Zealand, a stand in for 1925 Montana; the landscape stars, not that Cumberbach,

Kirsten Dunst, and Jesse Clemons don’t do their part with superb performances, as well as Kodi Smit-McPhee as Peter, a young, lean, fey boy, not yet at ease with his eye for men. Following a New York Film Festival screening, when asked about the prominent, imposing natural setting, Campion admitted, she found hills sexy.

Todd Haynes' The Velvet Underground at the New York Film Festival: Homage to a Bygone Era

Film at Lincoln Center had a grand plan for Todd Haynes’ new film, The Velvet Underground. They would bring extant founding members of the band John Cale, Maureen (Mo) Tucker, for a performance at the movie’s New York Film Festival opening. That, sadly, was not to be. The premiere, though, with a posh party at Jazz at Lincoln Center, celebrated the city’s creative energy from which the New York Film Festival emerged, and the music that influenced generations of artists to come.

A vivid portrait of the band, yes, The Velvet Underground is a deep dive into the historic artistic period of New York in the ‘60’s, especially showcasing the avant-garde filmmakers who shot evocative footage: Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas. The Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh is a treasure trove of this rare material. The great Ed Lachman shot the interviews in 2018: Mekas at 96 was first.

The film is an homage to these underground filmmakers as well as to Lou Reed, whose teen years on Long Island, complicated sexuality and drug use provide the backstory for his artistic development. Studying poetry with Delmore Schwartz, Reed read Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Hubert Selby, Jr., and Arthur Rimbaud. Early on, he proclaimed he would be a rock star.

No Time to Die: The Sublime Seductions of Lea Seydoux

The last James Bond feature to star Daniel Craig, No Time to Die, picks up where the last, Spectre, left off, with James succumbing to love, and a life with Madeleine, the irresistible Lea Seydoux. Off they go on a Rome adventure, carefree in James’ Aston Martin, with “all the time in the world,”—that line alone should send off waves of foreboding. Rome is Vesper Lynd territory, and sentimental as Bond has become, he must visit his former love’s burying place. Boom! Forget retirement! Bond is off and explosive!

In fact, explosions galore! Fancy cars showing off their equipment! We’re off and running through the many Bond tropes: breathtaking vistas and eye popping laboratories of menacing threats to the world. Among the villains, Rami Malek makes a most chilling appearance as a damaged child gone amok on revenge. “Who’s the blond?” asks Bond eyeing a particularly fawning, smiley sidekick to the CIA’s Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) named Logan Ash (Billy Magnussen). But some heavy lifting belongs to the gun-toting women: Lashanna Lynch as Nomi, a new 007 with 007 chops, Ana de Armas as Paloma, amazingly adept at target practice in crowds, party gown unruffled, and finally Madeleine Swann herself, in for the kill. The girl power is through the proverbial roof!

Joel Coen’s Tragedy of Macbeth Opens the NYFF: Let It Come Down

As a tragic hero, a deeply flawed man, Denzel Washington was perfect for the role of Macbeth. He’d done downcast/larger-than-life before, say, in August Wilson’s Fences, and now in Joel Coen’s new film that opened the new season’s New York Film Festival, his Macbeth oozes Shakespeare’s eternal wisdom: It’s not that good to be king.

When Coen was asked whether Washington was his first choice for the role, his producer, Lady Macbeth herself, Frances McDormand said, “There’s no list for Macbeth. You must be born to it.” Seated between Coen and Washington, her two husbands so to speak, in life and in tragedy, on the Walter Reade Theater stage for a post-screening press conference, she professed to have instigated the project, having slept walked in Lady Macbeth’s shoes since she was 14. While there have been many Macbeths through the centuries, this one, in sumptuous and austere black & white most closely follows Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight, and yet Roman Polanski’s was referenced as well. Discussing the age of this murderous couple, the usual idea is to make them young and ambitious. McDormand and Washington make them older, passed over by the king, and wanting to get their due. We can attest to that feeling, Frances and Denzel, revel in a private joke.

Alessandro Nivola’s Breakthrough in The Many Saints of Newark

How was Tony Soprano “made?” That’s the through line for the long-awaited prequel to HBO’s Sopranos series, The Many Saints of Newark. At a stellar premiere this week at the Beacon Theater, Robert DeNiro, who knows a thing or two about mobsters, along with Tribeca Film Festival partner Jane Rosenthal—greeted a packed, masked house of the show’s creators, veteran actors, as well as devotees dressed to kill. As creator David Chase introduced the superb cast, much hooting and shouting, I love you, rang out--well, this was a celebration. With no room for this feature to tank—instead, it radiated excellence intertwining the Soprano’s trademark violence with values of the family kind.

Tony (a wonderful Michael Gandolfini trying on his late, great father’s shoes) is just a kid here, troubled but smart, a born leader, taking notes from a variety of paternal figures, especially his uncle Dickie Moltisanti played with psychotic charm and menace by Alessandro Nivola. You have never seen this actor this good, turning from lover to murderer on a proverbial dime. At the Tavern on the Green afterparty, Vera Farmiga, Tony’s mother Livia in the film, could not stop talking about Sandro, how she could not take her eyes off his every gesture. She, in turn, transformed to play the Soprano matriarch, brings the mob wives’ domineering submissiveness to new levels of humor and delight. John Magaro as Silvio Dante gets a big laugh as we see him walk that walk. Billy Magnusson as Paulie Walnuts frets over the blood stains on a new jacket as he tortures, making a mess using a drill. They almost got Corey Stoll as Uncle Junior to sing. With its sly humor and nod to the popular, game changing series, the movie creates its own universe—this is not Philip Roth’s Newark.

Hitler’s Tasters at Guild Hall: A Fresh Take on the Evil Men Do

After writing a play about German girls tasked with tasting food prepared for Hitler, Michelle Kholos Brooks worried about using der Fuhrer’s name in its title. She asked her father in-law, who just happens to be Mel Brooks, who famously featured Hitler in the title of a musical within the iconic musical The Producers: “Springtime for Hitler,” you may recall—in the attempt to be as offensive as possible. His answer: “You must.” He insisted.

The playwright told this story following a production of her play at Guild Hall this weekend, in a conversation with The Producers’ director/choreographer Susan Stroman. Scheduled for a run at 59 East 59, Hitler’s Tasters, based on a little-known pocket of World War II history, was put on hold, as were so many projects when COVID hit. Of the 15 girls made to risk their lives for the good of Germany, only one, Margot Woelk, survived. The others, murdered as the Allies advanced—well, they were just on the wrong side of history. Woelk was raped, but lived on till her mid-90’s. From this slim account, Michelle Kholos Brooks embroidered the story of five such girls, dancing, dreaming, fantasizing about boys, rejoicing as they lived another meal.

Hamptons Journal: Susan Stroman Weekend at Guild Hall: Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Brad Oscar, and Mel Brooks Zoomed, Little Dancer Preview

Starved for Broadway’s reopening, a happy crowd packed Guild Hall for an evening of clips and anecdotes about The Producers, the winner of the most Tony awards of any musical in history. On a panel introduced by choreographer Susan Stroman, a winner of 5 Tonys herself, the show’s stars Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, and Brad Oscar quipped and reminisced about the play’s Chicago debut, and the run on Broadway, shut down for 3 days in the aftermath of 9/11, but then it was Rudy Guiliani who urged everyone to get back to work. People did not know whether it was appropriate to laugh, said Oscar. And of course, the show offered the audience a way to grieve less for a two-hour period, Stroman remembered. Nathan Lane performed, but scheduled for a vacation he decided to take, he joked, “If I cancel my vacation, the terrorists won.”

And so the evening went with Lane recounting his first encounter with Mel Brooks in a swimming pool at the Ritz in Paris. Anne Bancroft, finished with her swim, went up to her room, and Lane thought, Mel Brooks is in the pool with me instead of with Anne Bancroft. He also remembered that it was Harvey Weinstein, a backer at the time, who read the all-important New York Times review at the opening night party . . . “and then went off to pee in a flower pot” . . . conflating the producer’s crimes with another #Metoo accusee. Matthew Broderick remembered people coming to the door, every performance someone else would show up, Al Gore, for example. Lane said Bill Clinton came, shook hands, but kept his eyes on Cady Huffman, the show’s splendid Ulla. But they were all in awe when Gene Wilder, the original Leopold Bloom, stopped by.