Gossip Central

Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper: The Place Beyond the Pines

Shoulder to shoulder like Homeric heroes, Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper descended the long stairs at the Landmark Theater on Thursday night, joining Eva Mendes, Ray Liotta, Dane DeHaan and others of the cast and crew onstage for the premiere of Derek Cianfrance’s new movie, The Place Beyond the Pines. The two actors, perhaps the best of their generation, deliver deft performances as their fictive lives twine, one a carny, the other a cop, in this triptych about fathers and sons on the American landscape, making this the most thrilling two and a half hours of storytelling in the cinemas right now.

Gimme the Loot / New Director New Films 2013

On the eve of this year’s New Directors / New Films Festival, a collaboration between The Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, the Titus I theater was abuzz with downtown indie elite: Sofia Coppola, Alex Karpovsky, Elizabeth Olsen, John Cameron Mitchell, Mark Birbiglia, Julia Garner, and photographer Bob Gruen. Gimme the Loot, Adam Leon’s film about two graffiti artists attempting to raise money by any means for the ultimate NYC art project, had its premiere. Featured in the 2012 ND/NF, Gimme the Loot was introduced with the kind of praise reserved for films by Almodovar, whose name was invoked in the introduction, films that will be discussed forever for moving the medium forward. In this film’s case, the language is fresh, that is, bold, bawdy, and brimming with life. The scammers, actors Tashiana Washington and Ty Hickson, and a rich girl played by Zoe Lescaze remain memorable.

Debbie Harry Hosts a Party for Breakfast at Tiffany’s: Thanks for the Memories

Truman Capote’s glory days as a celebrated writer were revisited at the opening of Richard Greenberg’s, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, on Wednesday night at the Cort Theater, and a black & white ball—eh bash at the Edison Ballroom. The play starts with a narrator called Fred reminiscing about a New York brownstone where he once lived, and a particularly spectacular neighbor, Holly Golightly with whom he partied and took baths. The tall and lanky, handsome “Fred” (Cory Michael Smith) may be the epitome of everything that the “bulldog” Capote was not, but the self-invented Holly (Emilia Clarke), one of his greatest creations, hews close to the author’s bone.

Chris O’Dowd Rocks Out in The Sapphires

As the manager of a girl band looking, Dave Lovelace (Chris O’Dowd) teaches the four Aboriginal singers the distinction between country western and soul music: both are about loss, but in country western, they just resign themselves to it and whine. In soul, they yearn to get back what they had. In 1968 Australia, this useful information helps to catalyze these young women; they switch to soul, come of age, break some ethnic barriers, leaving behind family, including a child for opportunities in Viet Nam singing for American troops. That child, Tony Briggs, wrote a stage play based on the adventures of his brave mom and her pals, and now a movie—in fact, the feel good movie of the year-- The Sapphires has dazzled audiences, making its rounds through various festivals including last year’s Cannes.

Sigourney Weaver in Christopher Durang’s Whimsical Take on Chekhov

Whenever I am blue, I can snap out of it conjuring Sigourney Weaver’s image as Snow White. That was the take away when I saw Christopher Durang’s Chekhovian mash up, Masha, Sonia, Vanya and Spike at Lincoln Center in December. Now the enterprise has moved to Broadway, its Sturm und Drang at a Bucks County country house on a pond successfully transported to The Golden Theater. Act I is a sendup of Chekhovian tropes with prescient views on real estate and familiar philosophical exclamations like “I’m in mourning for my life!” In Durang’s whimsical mix master, as directed by Nicholas Martin, the tragic—and neurotic-- circumstance of everyday life turns to high hilarity.

Mayor Bloomberg and the A-List Celebrate The Observer @ 25

If you want to get attention at a swank party at The Four Seasons, do not walk the carpet behind Katie Holmes. In a dark lacy shirtwaist, the star had the photographers snapping steady and at least one observer noted, she could play another Kate—Middleton in a biopic about the British royal couple. Yes, The Observer fete had everything, including a British contingent: author Amanda Foreman served on the 2012 judging panel for the esteemed literary award, Man Booker Prize for Fiction, with Dan Stevens. Yes, Dan Stevens, or Matthew Crawley to you, offed in a car crash at the end of Season Three, leaving viewers beyond anxious about the future of Downton Abbey. It took three beats to register exactly who he was, standing there, handsomely familiar, blond hair darkened and spiky for a new movie, A Walk Among Tombstones, he is shooting with co-star Liam Neeson. But what was Dan Stevens doing HERE? Turns out he is not just another pretty face but commands the online quarterly, The Junket, and writes a column for the Daily Telegraph, having read English literature at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Did he really, really want to leave Downton Abbey, this reporter asked gamely. Yes, but not that way.

Passion Play: Hit the Wall at the Barrow Street Theater

The summer of 1969, with Stonewall in June and Woodstock in August, represents a shift in the American ethos. These events meet in a new play Hit the Wall at the Barrow Street Theater. Woodstock may evoke the peace and love generation, and to a lesser degree, the look and sound is represented in Hit the Wall by a trio of musicians, a girl guitarist in headband and slovenly dress with her bra showing in the back recalls that bygone era. Hey, at least she wears one! But Stonewall is another thing unto itself: a routine raid on a gay bar in Greenwich Village, a stone’s throw from this theater, turns into a full scale riot, inaugurating change that still resonates. Hit the Wall is a reminder of early violence, a turning point. Today, same sex couples still arouse volatile passions for some.

Ode to Girls: Girl Rising

The documentary Girl Rising—the title evokes uprising-- mixes urgency with great storytelling appeal. The latest moment of the feminist revolution is not about debating issues of women’s equality in the workplace. It is about changing the world one girl at a time through education.

Coming just after the recent PBS series, MAKERS, a history of the recent phase of the Women’s Movement in America in all its diversity, Girl Rising asks the question, how do we nurture girls to become “makers” of their own destiny? Taking its agenda global, Girl Rising addresses the dire subjects of girls’ vulnerability --to poverty, human trafficking, bonding which is a form of slavery, child marriage, and assassination for the simple desire to go to school.

Audrey Tautou and Populaire at the Paris: Rendez-vous with French Cinema

Director Regis Roinsard was particularly excited when his film, Populaire, opened the annual Rendez-vous with French Cinema at the Paris Theater. He exulted introducing his stars Romain Duris and Deborah Francois. Evoking Doris Day and Audrey Hepburn movies, Populaire follows this festival’s first night traditions as a frothy comedy with old-fashioned sexist overtones, charming as only the French can make them! Populaire turns out to be a pink typewriter Francois’s character uses to win a ‘50’s era typing competition and land the man of her dreams played with fetching allure by Duris. What surprises, as Roinsard explained at the French Cultural Services afterparty, is that this was a first feature, based on a historic typing competition. Influenced by American movies, he wanted to make it into a love story. Of course, at the end, as the tap tap tap accelerates, the industrial types imagine the word machine’s future: the ball, with all the letters of the alphabet contained in a golfball-sized metal sphere, rotating as it makes its marks.

Herb Alpert’s Déjà-Vu at the Café Carlyle

If “This Guy’s in Love with You” means anything, Herb Alpert and Lani Hall’s show at the Café Carlyle offers, in Alpert’s words, “music that is very déjà-vu.” Performing several decades worth of their hits and American songbook classics like “Close to You,” “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” this couple of 39 years, go through their signature repertoire sprinkled with anecdotes and backstory, backed by a first-rate band: Bill Cantos on piano, Hussain Jiffry on bass, and Michael Shapiro on drums. And because the Carlyle is such an intimate room –(I enjoyed seeing it on this week’s episode of Girls)--Alpert likes to kibitz with the audience, asking for questions—this is the ultimate in interactive, with one caveat, no requests. But that didn’t stop first-nighters, including Regis and Joy Philbin and producer Tommy LiPuma and a fan all the way from Korea among them, from shouting out favorites anyway. “Rise,” yelled one enthusiast, and they did.