Gossip Central

Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts: Rust and Bone’s Tender Heart

Midway through a luncheon celebrating Rust and Bone, news came that the French film starring Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts was nominated for an Independent Spirit Best International film award. Not even a glass was raised, as if awards for this edgy movie were simply a matter of course.

SONY Pictures Classics’ Michael Barker said he and his partner Tom Bernard backed Rust and Bone even before they read the script, making a deal with director Jacques Audiard after A Prophet’s critical success for his next film, whatever it might be. Then they get a script: A woman loses her legs, befriends a bouncer who also fights and has a son, eh, why not, Barker laughs, throwing up his arms. Like A Prophet with its insider prison view, the film offers a glimpse into a world unto itself: Picture the saturated, happy colors of resorts in travel brochures. Now imagine the opposite, beaches in dour tones in perpetual off-season. That is the look of Rust and Bone.

Independent Film Project’s Gotham Awards: Don’t Hate Me Because I Won

Jared Leto won the audience award at the annual IFP’s Gotham Awards at Cipriani Wall Street for his movie Artifacts; the film was mostly unknown to most at my table of industry insiders, but that sums up the theme of this, the ultimate alternative awards ceremony that even has a category, Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You. That award went to An Oversimplification of her Beauty, by the way. Meantime Leto, chatting at cocktails prior to receiving the award said he had just arrived from LA and left his bag on the plane. Seat of pants, he seemed to think the award should go to Beasts of the Southern Wild, the most edgy and mythic film of the year. Not to worry. Benh Zeitlin, the creator of that film took away many of the evening’s honors, including the Best Breakthrough Director and newly minted Bingham Ray award, after the pioneering champion of independent films who died suddenly in Park City this past January.

Girls’ Night Out: Zero Dark Thirty and the Death of Osama bin Laden

Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s take on the hunt for Osama bin Laden, a thrilling Zero Dark Thirty, begins with torture so brutal I found it an eye averting experience. But not CIA operative Maya (the delicate, fine-boned, redhead Jessica Chastain) on assignment, recruited after high school to work on the war on terrorism. “She’s a killer,” or “The Girl,” as identified by CIA higher ups and we see her refusing to leave the room as “Amar” is water boarded, her pale eyes wide.

Flight Director Robert Zemeckis Flies

On the face of it, Flight is your standard redemption story. Taking you aboard a plane falling apart in heavy winds, Flight is not what it seems. Audiences may be expecting Airplane! without the laughs, or a claustrophobic bumpy drama aboard a doomed vehicle. The film is about character, extending beyond the lead to nuanced supporting roles.

The story of a flawed man enabled by the fact that he rarely loses control, Flight follows pilot Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington), seen drinking heavily before and during this disaster. Fueled by a variety of substances, he maintains his demeanor, landing the plane with less damage than you would imagine. He is a hero, but as a husband, father, lover, he’s the proverbial eh, plane wreck. That a hotel mini-bar can be scarier than a plane flailing in midair is a measure of this classic cautionary tale, one of the best pictures as award season approaches. Expect too a nod to John Gatins for his original screenplay.

Documentaries on the Case: The Central Park Five and Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God

On April 19, 1989, you could not miss the headlines—and the horror of the Central Park jogger case. A white woman in a tracksuit, pummeled, raped, unconscious. Who did this? Packs of wild black boys aprowl in the park. Case closed.

The Central Park Five, the final non-fiction feature in the DOC NYC Fest last week, a deft examination of the most publicized rape case in NY history, questions the handling of this case: the arrest and conviction of 5 black teens seemed to put the unsettling crime at rest. Now, so many years later, the 5 young men attempt to put their lives together after a 2002 exoneration that got little press attention. No one so much as said sorry.

Talking Back at Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

It seemed a delicious idea, seeing Edward Albee’s Tony award winning play, Talking Back at Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf about George and Martha, a university couple whose marriage unravels over cocktails with a younger couple one night --with an audience of couples counselors. This riveting revival, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s production at the Booth Theater for the play’s 50th anniversary, is however, so disarming that even a group of trained professionals, seemed flummoxed by the brilliant banter and blatant betrayal, caustic jabs and casual sex. Questions to the actors following Thursday night’s performance were about whether or not they take the emotion home with them. Answer: a complicated yes, as you would imagine. From the first “What a dump!” till dawn, this scathing examination of what is real, what imagined, what illusions keep us afloat, hits home. There’s not a more harrowing spectacle of marital evisceration on Broadway.

On the Road: The Vehicle Gets a Tune Up

En route to L.A. for its West Coast premiere, Director Walter Salles introduced a private screening of his new film, On the Road, last week, pointing out that as a teen in his native Brazil, he was drawn to the characters in Jack Kerouac’s novel; they represented a freedom foreign to his homeland, where writing was censored. “This book about the creative process, this ode to literature, got to me. The characters became my heroes,” he said noting too his current inspirations: poets Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane Di Prima and Gary Snyder. So charming that Peggy Siegal now calls him her new BFF, Salles took on the making of this film, a project that has eluded Francis Ford Coppola for decades. In 2004, after he saw Salles’ Motorcycle Diaries, Coppola asked him to consider the un-filmable beat classic.

Silver Linings Playbook: Reading the Signs with Jacki Weaver

The winner of audience awards in Toronto, the Hamptons, and other film festivals, David O. Russell’s new movie, Silver Linings Playbook is not only a crowd pleaser, it has the gravitas to make it to the top awards. This movie is to Philadelphia, The Eagles and football what Lowell, Massachusetts and the ring was to The Fighter: all you need is (heart).

Inventing David Geffen on PBS: What Am I Gonna Do With Cher?

David Geffen is so funny, sharing anecdotes featuring a Who’s Who in music and movies for the two-hour PBS documentary, Inventing David Geffen, you would never know that he actually dislikes public speaking. A self-proclaimed dummy in his Brooklyn elementary school, by 1976 he had sold several companies and had amassed a billion dollars. As he says at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame dinner upon receiving an award, “I never thought I would get one of these. I have no talent.” And yet interviews with those who have worked with this mogul in the entertainment industry—Barry Diller, Clive Davis, Ahmet Ertegun, Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Mike Nichols, Jann Wenner, Elton John, Lorne Michaels, among many others—attest otherwise: all seem to agree, the man has chutzpah.

Barack Obama in SEAL Team Six: The Raid on Osama Bin Laden

A force of nature himself, Harvey Weinstein did not let impending Hurricane Sandy deter his plan for a screening of Seal Team Six in Washington, said director John Stockwell at a post-storm screening hosted by Peggy Siegal in New York this week. “Harvey likes to stir things up,” he said. Wanting to insure that key political figures would see the dramatization of the real life hunt for Osama Bin Laden and raid that ended in his death, to air on the National Geographic Channel on Sunday night, his plan is to show the film in time for Tuesday’s election.