Gossip Central

Farewell, My Queen: A View of Pre-Beheading Versailles

Director Benoit Jacquot’s take on the last days of Marie Antoinette, Farewell, My Queen, is based on a book by Chantal Thomas, looks at history from the perspective of a servant with a talent for embroidery. I don’t know another filmmaker who studies the behavior of women with quite the care and consideration of this director. Introducing a special screening at MoMA in time for Bastille Day, Jacquot said, “I hope you like French films, because this film is very French.”

Men’s Lives at Bay Street Theatre: Attention Must Be Paid

In its current revival at Bay Street Theater, 20 years after it first played to sold out audiences, Joe Pintauro’s Men’s Lives, based upon Peter Matthiessen’s 1986 history of the Baymen on the East End of Long Island seems as weather beaten and vital as ever. Drew Boyce’s set features something of a shipwreck moored on a sandy beach. Around the hull, a fine ensemble: Victor Slezak, Rob Disario, Brian Hutchison, Scott Thomas Hinson, Peter McRobbie, Deborah Hedwall, Myles Stokowski, and Mark Coffin, under the expert direction of Harris Yulin, limns the plight of one family, telling an epic story: man battles nature, learning to survive with its harsh imperatives, and then must face a greater challenge, the onset of the new. Anyone who has lived in these parts witnessing potato fields morph into mini-plantations sees this change with a rueful eye. The real estate is worth more for developing properties than farming. Take that drama to the seas: Men’s Lives is a searing poetic vision of this region’s fishing industry’s demise, and its cost to men’s lives.

Searching for Sugar Man at Guild Hall: Alec Baldwin, Honorary Chairman of the Board

Just days after he married Hilaria Thomas, when he could have been in some exotic place on honeymoon, Alec Baldwin, taking his Hamptons International Film Festival duties very seriously, took the stage at East Hampton’s Guild Hall, to introduce a documentary that’s been garnering buzz at film festivals. A hit at Sundance and Berlin, Searching for Sugar Man is an American Dream story about a ‘70’s singer/songwriter, heavy on social commitment in the manner of Bob Dylan or Phil Ochs who was rumored to have dramatically killed himself at the end of a performance, by gunshot or in a ball of fire. It is not a spoiler to say that Sixto Rodriguez was found alive and well and living in Detroit.