Gossip Central

Boy Overboard with Tiger: Life of Pi Opens The New York Film Festival

To mark the 50^th anniversary of the prestigious New York Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center premiered Ang Lee’s new movie, Life of Pi, based on Yann Martel’s popular novel. Introducing this spectacular 3D adventure tale about a boy shipwrecked on the high seas, sharing a lifeboat and survival strategies with a Bengal tiger, the modest director said he defied some moviemaking wisdom, Never film kids, animals, and water, or shoot in 3D. He smiled slyly. Then Life of Pi began: beautiful birds seemed to fly through the cavernous Alice Tully Hall, with menacing creatures to come. At movie’s end, many viewers like Carol Kane said they watched in tears.

Not 83 Anymore: Vampire Daughter in Hotel Transylvania

You know the 3D animated feature Hotel Transylvania is for kids because it starts with diaper changing, fart, and piss jokes aplenty. Fortunately, it moves on to be a father-daughter tale about tolerance.

Mavis is turning 118 and her doting dad Count Dracula wants to throw her the party of the year. The venue is the castle/ hotel he’s built to shut her in. The guests are the ghouls she’s grown to love. The cuisine may involve a 21 year old red-headed human named Jonathan, unwittingly crashing, with backpack and hopes for adventure. Appearing to be related to Frankenstein, he helps plan the party. One “zing” leads to another.

Revisiting Death Row: The Exonerated and The American Theater Wing Honors the Redgraves

To know that the American justice system is flawed, just say OJ. That name is invoked in the theater piece The Exonerated, now revived for its 10^th anniversary at the Culture Project with its script by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, woven from court transcripts, interviews and testimonies of those jailed and sentenced to die for crimes they did not commit. At Sunday’s matinee, a rotating cast of actors: Stockard Channing, Brian Dennehy, Chris Sarandon, Delroy Lindo-- joined in with Jim Bracchitta, Amelia Campbell, Bruce Kronenberg, Curtis McClarin, April Yvette Thompson, JD Williams-- to tell horrific tales of incarceration.

Penny Marshall’s My Mother Was Nuts at The Monkey Bar

If Penny Marshall’s honking nasalese leaps off the pages of her memoir, My Mother was Nuts, it’s not because she wrote the book. Rather, this is the work of a ghost writer, the best in the business, Todd Gold, said Marshall’s literary agent Daniel Strone of this well known secret. If he is writing Ann-Margret, he revealed, he’s playing the piano. If it’s Penny, he’s smoking and sipping martinis. He’s a chameleon. He’s Zelig.

This reporter is not spilling beans, simply separating the literary from the likes of celebrity memoirs, which have to be coaxed, cajoled, and bought into being. If I feared the demise of “the book” for the more ephemeral cyber publishing, Dan Strone assures me, there will always be a demand for celebrity memoirs, and none of their sort will spill their story for free. Whew! At least one book genre is here to stay.

The Master: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Naturalist Fable and Francine

You cannot take your eyes off The Master, neither Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film nor Philip Seymour Hoffman in the role of Lancaster Dodd. Whether the fascination is a result of the film’s having been shot in rich 65 mm film stock, a visual treat evocative of the way films used to look, or because Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix in the role of Freddie Quell, a World War II navy veteran who literally washes up on the beach display behavior that is perplexing, a pas de deux of power and subservience.

Hamptons Journal: The History of Art and The Big Apple Circus

Audrey Flack and the History of Art String Band offers a crash course in such giant art figures as Caravaggio, Camille Claudel, Lee Krasner, Van Gogh, Picasso, Mary Cassat, and Jackson Pollock. “Oh, oh, action Jackson,” sings Flack, an early photorealist painter, sculptor of goddesses, and resident of East Hampton, strumming her banjo and accompanied by stellar musicians: Johnny (Jackpot) Coughlin, Walter Us, David Roger Grossman, Adam Grimshaw and his wife Deborah Grimshaw, who blows everyone away on violin. Last weekend, the band performed at Guild Hall to benefit individuals with autism and their families. Caroline Doctorow and Evan Frankel opened the set. The evening also featured rare footage by Hans Namuth of Pollock working his drip technique at his home in Springs. Dick Cavett M.C.’d. Filling in the pauses left while Flack adjusted banjo strings, Cavett regaled the crowd with stories about Groucho Marx and Gore Vidal, such as, when asked if he was having a good time, Groucho replied, Yes, but not tonight. Au contraire, this was a very good night indeed.

Ethel: A Daughter’s Tale, Summerdocs Finale

In Ethel, a new HBO documentary that premiered at Sundance and was screened in East Hampton as the finale of the Hamptons International Film Festival Summerdocs series at Guild Hall, the fascination with all things Kennedy shifts to the legacy of Robert, murdered in 1968 while campaigning for president of the United States. The filmmaker Rory Kennedy, his 11th child, was born a few months later, and while her quest to mine the material of her father’s life might have been her mission, she focuses instead on the role of her mother in their remarkable marriage, and in the aftermath of his death.