Gossip Central

Patti Smith’s Benediction for Graduates: What to Say at Commencement

Advice for graduating seniors is de rigueur at commencement. Rocker/ poet/ memoirist Patti Smith had much to advise the School of Visual Arts graduating class last week, having composed her speech the day before in a dentist’s chair. Resist the temptation toward materialism, was one thought, as were words from William S. Burroughs: Keep your name clean, when she asked the Naked Lunch author for his wisdom. Mainly she said, follow your vision without compromise.

When They See Us: Black Lives Interrupted on Netflix

Selma director Ava Duverney’s epic mini-series, When They See Us, to stream on Netflix, about a sensational case of racism and ill-justice reaching back to the late 1980’s, premiered at the Apollo Theater this week. Remember “wilding,” and five black teenagers convicted of a brutal rape of a jogger in Central Park, and their later exoneration? This is that story. Back in the day, the focus was on the hideous violence of the crime, and the young white woman, the victim, left to die. The media went berserk over “wilding,” teens looking to rob and beat innocent people, just for fun. Behind all of this was a seriously beaten woman who became a cause celebre, and some police officials trying to make their name. Today, in the #metoo era, and a time when a glaring light shines on the plight of blacks murdered by authorities, the case plays very differently. And that could be reason enough to tune in to this four-part series, but that’s not all. Especially when you know where it’s going, When They See Us is riveting, a must-see event.

Ladies Who Lunch: Designs by Dennis Basso to Benefit Cancer Research

Luxury bags are thrown onto plush couches in Susan Gutfreund’s sitting room overlooking Central Park: mostly Chanels and a random Hermes. They reserve seats for the fashion show marking the annual “Collaborating for a Cure Ladies Lunch” to benefit the Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation. This year designer Dennis Basso, who surely dressed many women in the room over the years with his sable coats, mink shrugs, and three quarter length ermine jackets, attended to oversee his models. On a cold May midday, a fur would have been nice, and unobjectionable in these environs, even if politically incorrect everywhere else. A ban on trading in fur may even be made law with heavy penalties. But that was not the point. The point is cancer, and it is still killing us

Skin, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, Charlie Says: Bad Boys at the Tribeca Film Festival

Tattoo sporting white supremacists make skin crawl, almost as much as the violence perpetrated in the name of hate. Expanded from an Academy Award winning short, Guy Nattiv’s Skin, a feature at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, stars a scary Jamie Bell, in over his head with a homeland terrorist “family.” Dad is Bill Camp, mom Shareen, a woman so smooth as she recruits new warriors into their hate group, offering sandwiches and hugs to runaways, you can see why Bryon could be so gulled, until he meets a family offering the dream of a “normal” life. Still, with his facial tats, he could never pass. And besides, they’d never let him leave.

Kenneth Branagh’s All is True Premieres: Shakespeare Takes Center Screen

Portraying his beloved Shakespeare at last, Kenneth Branagh, both director and star, imagines the bard’s life in his final years. “He was after all a man,” proclaimed Branagh, introducing his new film, All is True, to a Broadway elite at the SAG-AFTRA Foundation: The Robin Willians Center for an intimate premiere. The film’s idea: after the famous Globe theater burned down, Shakespeare returned to his birth home, Stratford-on-Avon, to his wife Anne Hathaway (Judi Dench), and children. There, he does what any man would do, damage control to redeem himself for his long absence, talk about his legacy with the Earl of Southampton (Ian McKellen), and garden. This is known: both his daughters were engaged in scandals, and his son died mysteriously. Women were unschooled, and any impropriety would lead to a witch-hunt. There is enough drama, and family dysfunction, in other words, to enliven the creative chops of screenwriter Ben Elton for this gorgeously made period piece!

“Camp” at the Metropolitan Museum: Susan Sontag as Metaphor

The sound of typewriter clicks permeates “Camp: Notes on Fashion” the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute’s extravaganza exhibition, relieved only by a recording of Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow,” from The Wizard of Oz. The MET gala, its yearly benefit this week, may only exist as a distraction from all that the “Camp” show shows, with un-wearable art on celebrities devised to do and outdo the “camp” theme, dressing up itself as camp. But the exhibition, taken from Susan Sontag, the twentieth century diva of cultural dialogues, is a cerebral tour de force.

Abel Ferrara Rocks Out at MoMA

Photo: Regina Weinreich

Celebrating a retrospective at MoMA, cult filmmaker Abel Ferrara showed his music chops. The museum lobby, its platform facing the garden became a stage for Ferrara’s long time friends and collaborators Paul Hipp and Joe Delia, and some surprise vocalists Willem Dafoe, Gretchen Mol among them. Mol’s duet with Ferrara on guitar for “Bebopalula” and “Walk on the Wild Side,” homage to the late great Lou Reed, sent chills through the downtown art crowd including Debbie Harry, Julian Schnabel and Louise Kugelberg, Marla Hanson; many have worked with Ferrara. This wild party, hosted by producers Annie and Ed Pressman, was most certainly a throwback to headier times.

Celebrating 50 with Film at Lincoln Center: What’s in a Name?

Purple over orange is always a good color choice, regal and elegant. The Film Society of Lincoln Center has had a makeover; Film at Lincoln Center reflects a shift in name and logo hue. Celebrating its 50th birthday this week, the yearly gala honored, not one career as in its traditional Chaplin Awards, but rather its decades long life; the former “society’ screened clips of its five decades as a premiere film venue. Feting the art of filmmaking, they introduced the work of such mega talents as Bunuel, Bertolucci, Truffaut, Varda, Denis, Kurasawa, among many other directors. Personal tributes from a film world elite including Tilda Swinton, Pedro Almodovar, Martin Scorsese, Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan, and many others who had shown work there, illustrated how Lincoln Center broke boundaries, crossing geography, gender, and generations. In a backhanded compliment, contrarian John Waters said, at Lincoln Center, if you don’t see the films they anoint into their canon, the films they want you to see, you will go to film Hell. With his signature smirk, he walked off the stage. Funny how breaking barriers can go mainstream.

Tony Nominations: A Reflection

Wow! No Glenda Jackson for being Lear, nor Mockingbird for Best Play! What are they thinking? Frankly, the list is good and thoughtful, and pleasing for a critic who studies the scene, and wonders from some reviews, did they see the same play as I did?

First, Annette Bening in All My Sons, brilliant! And the play, nominated for Best Revival, is explosive. What makes it so great is her characterization as a woman who willfully pretends a truth about the death of her son in war. Arthur Miller’s play questions the high-minded motives for putting young men and women in harm’s way when governments wage war. The truth: industrialists win. For her to acknowledge this reality splits her in two. And it takes an actress at the level of Bening to get both sides of that personality. As director Jack O’Brien said, “There was no word for bipolar in the 1950’s.” That said, Janet McTeer deserves her Tony nod too, Sarah Bernhardt playing Hamlet.

Joel Grey Takes the Stage at Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish

Oy! The Cossacks are coming! In the essential viewing Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish at Stage 42, as we know, the Jews in the fictional town of Anatekva are threatened by pogroms. Eventually the lives of Tevye and Golde, their five daughters, and all town-folk are disrupted; they are forced to take refuge elsewhere. Could the creators of this marvelous 1964 play, Joseph Stein’s book, Jerry Bock’s music, Sheldon Harnick’s lyrics, have realized the extraordinary resonance of this story? Director Joel Grey’s genius, rendering it in the dying language of Yiddish, -- (even the actors don’t know it)-- is to make audiences consider this a blueprint of exile: perhaps, a “heimish” combination of old world sound in sepia tones against a threatening, violent outside world, one’s own family history. And no matter where you were born, it is.