Gossip Central

Alec Baldwin Learns Life Lessons from 9 Year Old Golf Champ

Is Alec Baldwin a good sport? At a pre-screening cocktail party at Mary Jane and Charles Brock’s East Hampton residence, a property complete with croquet and golf courses, Alec Baldwin M.C.’d a competition, kids against adults putting on the green to benefit the Hamptons International Film Festival. Of course one of the kids was Sky Sudberry, a 9-year old from Texas, second place at the World Championship of Junior Golf at Pinehurst, N.C. with poise to kill and a killer grip. As she was planning her swing, Baldwin was hacking a pretend cough. Sky just took it in stride besting him in this lawn competition. She is, after all, one of 8 kid sport stars in a new movie, The Short Game, directed by Josh Greenbaum, to open on September 20. To put it mildly, the documentary is killer cute, and funny, and as Alec Baldwin put it at the Q&A following the Guild Hall screening, he learned a lot.

Hamptons Journal: Hall & Oates Rock Rydell High Evoking Nostalgia for the Mid-Century

Among the many pleasures of the Grease-themed benefit for the Prostate Cancer Foundation this weekend in Wainscott, was seeing Michael Milken in a letter sweater like the reformed Danny Zuko at the end of that 1978 movie set in 1959. At East Hampton Studio, a vintage Chevy parked outside, women channeled either Sandy in bobby socks and saddle shoes or edgy Rizzo in tight black capris and off the shoulder tops with red neckerchiefs. Like many a felt flare skirt, Colin Cowie’s table treatments featured cut out poodles. Formica and steel chairs and gym bleachers went far to keep the ‘fifties fantasy going. Only the white bling of an Elvis impersonator seemed to come out of another era. Many talents went into the production of this special night including those of guest chef David Burke who created a cafeteria style buffet dinner for the occasion: chicken, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, onion rings, chocolate pudding—comfort food. But the entertainment, the band Hall & Oates, perfectly hit that nostalgia mood performing their signature tunes without feeling old: “She’s Gone,” “Man Eater,” “You Make My Dreams Come True,” “Your Kiss (is What I Miss).” In their words, “I Can Go For That.”

The Patience Stone: An Interview with Director Atiq Rahimi

An intimacy with the protagonist of the movie, The Patience Stone, is immediate. We see the young mother, performed by Golshifteh Farahani, at home, revealed in casual dress. In the street, she must cover up so completely, even her eyes are shielded by the cloth grate of her burqa. More remarkable: the intimacy goes further. We hear her voice. The caretaker of her husband who is in a coma, the woman speaks her mind, protecting him from soldiers and other invaders at a difficult political time, but not from her inner world.

Struck by the film’s freedom, I interviewed the story’s writer and film’s director Atiq Rahimi via email.

Hamptons Journal: Laurie Anderson Talks Dirt and Other Riffs

On a field of lights, on a stage bare except for a podium, a big chair, and a neon rectangle that could have been a James Turrell design, Laurie Anderson performed violin, made vocal sound, and mused on many topics at Guild Hall Saturday night. What if we renamed the planet Dirt, she challenged: “Then we could have Dirt Day.”

Much of what this edgy performance artist had to say in this hour and half tour de force evening turned on language, tautologies, syllogisms, puns, and mechanisms of voice such as the pillow speaker Anderson demonstrated in her mouth, distorting her sound so well suited to monologue. The neon rectangle turned into a screen for a home movie featuring her dog Lulabelle, taught to play piano.

Kung Fu Poetics: Wong Kar Wai’s The Grandmaster

The most stunning film of the year, Wong Kar Wai’s The Grandmaster displays a fight genre as ballet, limning a history of Ip Man, Bruce Lee’s martial arts teacher. Introducing the movie at its U.S. premiere last week, with Samuel L. Jackson, Susan Sarandon, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson in attendance, director Wong said, “People think of kung fu as chop suey. It is not chop suey.” Although what looks like the slicing of hands is part of the movement, as designed by Yuen Wo Ping, choreographer of The Matrix, Kill Bill and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the martial arts are less violent, even when blood flows, and more poetry. A courtesan differentiates the styles for Ip Man (Tony Leung) with Ziyi Zhang, who plays Gong Er, learning her father’s tradition of Bagua style, a lethal “64 hands” technique by secretly watching him. Viewers who might avert their eyes at such spectacle will be awed, in particular at a fight scene set against a moving train in the snow. Quite simply, you are watching an exquisite silent movie, independent of dialogue, in thrall to evocative music. In close-up much of the time, the actors’ faces large across the screen, an intimate drama unfolds even as the settings in Southern and Northern China are epic, and meant to show the passing of an era.

A Funny Thing Happened at Bay Street Theater

A revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is always welcome, with its lively music, antic humor, acrobatic sight gags, and Feydeau-like farce. Minus the slamming doors, it’s a carnival with a plot at Bay Street Theater. 

This colorful production in Sag Harbor, the third of Bay Street’s summer offerings, is especially engaging family fun: featuring Peter Scolari as the ingenious slave Pseudolus. Switching happy/sad on the proverbial dime, he has what it takes to be a free man, shrewdly bargaining with his young master Hero (Nick Verina) to win his autonomy if he can help this lad woo the girl next door, a virgin courtesan-in-waiting named Philia (Lora Lee Gayer); a vacuous beauty, she has been sold off to a soldier, a hunky Miles Gloriosus (Nathaniel Hackmann). These three are delicious stock characters: under Marcia Milgrom Dodges’ deft direction, Hero is the equivalent of a Jewish son preparing to become a doctor, Philia puts a new spin on the concept of dumb blond, and Miles Gloriosus is conceit writ large.

Hamptons Journal: Look Who’s Under the Tent on Authors' Night

By the time we got there, the tent at Gardiner’s Farm was chockablock with browsers and book buyers, especially at one table where Gwyneth Paltrow signed copies of her It’s All Good: Delicious, Easy Recipes That Will Make You Look Good and Feel Great. Oglers snapped shots of her and Apple and Moses and Chris Martin. Nearby Robert A. Caro sat behind a pile of his now classic The Power Broker and newer biographies of Lyndon Johnson, Eric Fishl signed his autobiography, Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas, and Clive Davis autographed The Soundtrack of My Life, excited for the book party to follow at Larry Gagosian’s. Kitty Pilgrim and Kitty Kelley had books, as did Philippe Petit and Nile Rodgers, although by the time we got to them, they had sold out. On the far side, Dr. Ruth in orange print had an assortment of her sexual how-to guides. Overheard: a fan said she looked like sherbet. He could eat her with a spoon. Not missing a beat, the pint-sized sex therapist replied: I’d like that.

Chuck Close: Up Close at Guild Hall

“This is our best show ever,” exulted Guild Hall Executive Director Ruth Appelhof, repeating what she says every August, as she greets guests for the late summer exhibition. She may be right this time. Chuck Close’s signature portraits writ large occupy the elegant space like old friends, one gallery devoted to recent work, the other to earlier work, like a graphic self-portrait on a simple grid from 1974, bespectacled with flowing hair. His new self-portrait on tapestry hung alongside Lou (as in Reed), Lucas (Samaras) and Roy (Lichtenstein) is a rich evocation of himself, bald. You can feel every wrinkle. In a colorful dashiki print suit, the artist wheeled in on his customized chair, designed, he once told me at an exhibition at Pace Gallery, so that he can crane up and chat at cocktail parties, eye to eye. Eying the tattooed visitor who asked him to pose for a photo, Close said he wanted a tattoo, the image on signs for handicapped parking.

Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs: “We Get No Apple Residuals"

In the new movie about Apple Computers founder Steve Jobs with Ashton Kutcher in the lead, Jobs drops acid, eh, windowpane, with a woman he has just bed, and takes another tab for his girlfriend. You could call that ‘70’s “rude.” Cut to a blanket spread outdoors, where, between his best friend and girlfriend, he stares at the sky, thinking different. In realizing his window on the world so to speak, he will damage each of them. For every inspirational speech introducing yet a new more inventive product than the last, Jobs, so focused on his vision, loses his connection to those who love him. That is what makes him so compelling a figure, so flawed; in Joshua Michael Stern’s film, he’s in a league with Picasso.

Casting By on HBO Offers a Glimpse of Film History

Famous for casting many of the Woody Allen films, including the most recent Blue Jasmine, Juliet Taylor made her way around the rooftop at the Gramercy Park Hotel, among actors Dana Delany, John Ventimiglia, Sakina Jaffrey, after a screening of a film she did not cast. Finally recognized for their important contribution to films, casting directors take center stage in the documentary Casting By, directed by Tom Donahue whose prior credits include the satiric, Guest of Cindy Sherman. Shining a light on one aspect of the film art so under the radar, casting directors do not have an Oscar category, the film, which also features footage from that great era of filmmaking, the ‘70’s, asks, shouldn’t they? After all, who do you remember from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? Redford and Newman, of course. Juliet Taylor said she had a great time getting Blanchett for Blue Jasmine, as she always does casting Woody Allen’s films, and, like Penelope Cruz and Dianne Wiest, Best Supporting Actresses, Cate Blanchett may achieve Academy recognition.