Gossip Central

Tom Hanks as Captain Phillips: Heroics on the High Seas for Opening Night at the New York Film Festival

The New York Film Festival must have a thing for danger on the high seas. Last year’s opening night featured the fantasy ocean crossing Life of Pi: a boy on a raft with a tiger. This year: it’s the real life adventure of the Maersk Alabama with Captain Richard Phillips at the helm, invaded by pirates off the coast of Somalia. Tom Hanks stars as Captain Phillips in this gripping tale, co-starring with a bunch of lean Somalian actors who hail from Minnesota. Hanks, as always, his excellent Everyman, albeit no nonsense leader, registers fear in just the movement of an eye. And those pirates: You will not see a more menacing looking cast in any movie this year.

Muscle Shoals Makes it Downtown for a New York Premiere

The name Alabama has such beautiful assonance, its flow of “a” makes its own Southern comfort! So the sound of  “Sweet Home Alabama,” one song in a stellar soundtrack for the documentary, Muscle Shoals, is proverbial music to the ears, an anthem to the Southern rock that flourished in this idyllic spot.

A mecca for recording artists from the Allman Brothers to Simon & Garfunkel, Dylan to The Rolling Stones, Muscle Shoals, Alabama occupies a singular space in music history. Yes, there’s Memphis and Nashville, but Muscle Shoals had its own magical vibe. As Mick Jagger and Keith Richards testify, the place was integral to the recording of “Wild Horses” and “Brown Sugar.” With Fame studio founder Rick Hall as impresario, and central focus, this film under the able direction of Greg “Freddy” Camalier, limns a significant chapter of Americana, where Aretha Franklin recorded “I Never Loved a Man,” backed by the white soulful house band, a turning point in her career.

Waiting for Godot in Yiddish?

Oy vey is mir! Everything hurts but, thanks to a carrot and a hug, I’m still here. That kvetch could sum up Beckett’s classic tragicomedy in any language. In Yiddish, as performed in a new superb production, a collaboration of the Yiddish Rep with the Castillo Theater starring Shane Baker, Avi Hoffman, David Mandelbaum, and Rafael Goldwaser, the human condition is pared down as only Beckett’s universal sounds can render its absurdity—well, why not?

Hugh Jackman’s Family Guy in Prisoners

 “I’m a sports nut,” explained Hugh Jackman, joyful that his son decided to join the school soccer team. The actor and song man was making his way around The Monkey Bar at a luncheon celebrating his new movie Prisoners on Thursday. He might just as well have been talking about the thriller’s opening scene, when he, as Keller Dover, praises his fictive son for killing a deer. The falling animal may prefigure deaths to come, or provide the occasion for a proud parent before Keller loses it when the unthinkable happens. His daughter is taken and he, albeit a good man, holds the alleged abductor Alex (Paul Dano) prisoner, torturing him. His wife Grace, played by Maria Bello, loses it too, withdrawing into a drug induced fetal pose. Bello said the film’s nightmare premise expressed the characters’ “shadow side.”

Kevin Spacey’s “Touch of Terrific” and the World Peace Orchestra

Kevin Spacey still talks about the excitement of meeting Jack Lemmon when he was 13, and hearing him say, “You were a touch of terrific.” Now introducing 134 young musicians from 50 countries, at Lincoln Center this week, he recounted that story as a way of explaining the importance of encouraging young talent. The World Peace Orchestra performing on the anniversary of 9/11, with President Obama deciding the efficacy of a military strike against Syria, lent an extra air of authority to the stellar evening. Patricia Clark, a host of the special night remarked, how often do we go to a premiere that even has a concept of world peace, as Darlene Love, Susan Lucci, Kathleen Turner, Jefferson Mays, Celia Weston, Rosanna Scotto, Peter Cincotti, made their way up the escalator to Avery Fisher Hall.

J.D. Salinger: The Ultimate Celebrity

The biggest revelation in the new documentary Salinger is that The Catcher in the Rye author was not a recluse. Rather fame averse and a champion of innocence as his signature books show, he simply removed himself to a New Hampshire retreat and wrote more books without a plan for their publication. The second reveal, and more significant for book lovers: over the forty years he retreated from the public, he wrote books in a woodsy bunker, producing manuscripts that will now be published. Are they any good? No one in Salinger could say, but J.D. Salinger’s literary reputation will change, and contrary to the midcentury notion held by many writers--that we should know an author only through the books he wrote-- the Salinger life story unfolds like a thriller. A literary Garbo, Salinger’s presence in absence remains catnip for celebrity culture.