Gossip Central

Boyhood Opens BAMCinemaFest and Other Summer Movies: Third Person and Begin Again

Wisdom has it, summer is for action thrillers, rom-coms, and other popcorn movies, but this season is particularly rich. Last week’s opening night for the BAM CinemaFest set the tone of excellence with Richard Linklater’s epic masterpiece Boyhood. With stellar performances by Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke as divorced parents, the film, shot in a dozen years, follows the growth and maturation of their two kids, played by Ellar Coltrane and the director’s daughter Lorelei Linklater. But this is “boyhood,” and therefore Ellar Coltrane’s film. A family saga unfolding in 2 hours and 45 minutes, the film is so deeply satisfying, the way a great novel takes you into a fully realized world. Perhaps it is a bit early to predict the award season picks, but this film has the vision, scope, Oscar dimension. At the BAM after party, directors Julie Taymor, who just completed filming her extraordinary Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bennett Miller,  just back from the success of Foxcatcher in Cannes, and Oren Moverman, now editing his new film in which Richard Gere plays a homeless man, all agreed about Linklater’s achievement.

Emmanuelle Seigner in Venus in Fur: The Interview

Most theater does not translate well into film. The film genre invites expansion and theater can feel claustrophobic. Unless claustrophobic is what you want as in the case of Roman Polanski’s adaptation of David Ives’ stage play inspired by Sacher-Masoch’s novel, Venus in Fur, a kinky two hander involving a theater director at the end of a brutal day of auditions, and an actress who barges in at the last minute demanding attention. In the recent Broadway production Nina Arianda and Hugh Dancy faced off in these roles, but now on film, Roman Polanski cast his wife, the voluptuous Emmanuelle Seigner in a tour de force performance with Mathieu Amalric, whose Thomas could double for the director Polanski. The casting is adventurous in another way as Seigner brings a mature sexuality to Vanda: she is goddess, earth mother, a sex kitten to rival Bardot, a muse, tease or threat. Turning on a dime, her character sizzles. In an interview last month at the Soho Grand Hotel, Seigner spoke about her performance in this movie, working with her husband, and why this was such a good role for her.

Vaneese Thomas: Launching “Blues for my Father” at the Cutting Room

Just after the Father’s Day weekend, when Vaneese Thomas sang backup for Aretha Franklin at sold out shows at Radio City Music Hall, the singer had a launch for her new album, “Blues for my Father.” Her father was Rufus Thomas, a great singer who worked as a d.j. at a local radio station in Memphis, and who introduced Elvis Presley back in the day. Vaneese Thomas, the sister of Carla Thomas and Marvell Thomas, told the crowd at The Cutting Room that their dad was never inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an injustice, given that he helped found the ideals by which many others who followed him were inducted. Segueing into tunes she wrote for this album and others, songs like “When My Baby Gets Home,” “Southern Girl,” and “I Got the Blues,” she brought down the house with a first rate band, some very cool backup singers including her pal Berneta Miles, and violinist Katie Jacoby, behind her for “Blue Ridge Blues.” A good time was had by all.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

 

Kino! Festival of German Film Opens with Christian Schwochow’s West

A pretty, blue-eyed blond and a young boy say a tearful goodbye to one man, and in the next scene, leave by car with another. Border patrol, strip searches, humiliating intrusive interrogations lead to a refugee camp with more of the same. According to filmmaker Christian Schwochow after a screening of his nail-biting drama West, a film he co-wrote with his mother, Heide Schwochow based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Julia Frank, this was not an unusual situation for citizens leaving East Berlin for the West. In fact, this story, involving trust in the time of the Stasi, hews close to his family experience, and others’ he and his mother knew. As opening night of the Kino! Festival of German Films, this past Thursday at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, West is of a particularly German narrative, as is another fine movie, Hanna’s Journey, directed by Julia von Heinz, about a Berlin-based student who goes to Israel to complete credits in community service, needless to say, a transformative adventure.

Sandra Bernhard: Provocateur at Guild Hall

Sandra Bernhard makes me laugh. Her brassy, wild mouthed persona has always seemed an exaggeration of femininity, her humor bold, her image could be menacing as in her role in The King of Comedy, Martin Scorsese’s 1983 movie starring Jerry Lewis, out there as in a 1992 nude spread for Playboy, or mock kitten as in her stand-up routine, “Without You I’m Nothing, and With You I’m Not Much Better,” wearing little under a mink. When I heard she would be performing at Guild Hall on June 20, I wanted to know what she would bring to the East Hampton vacation community, after her sold out performances at Joe’s Pub. Recently, I had the opportunity to speak to this funny woman, and found her dead serious about her work. 

Charlie Rose and Richard Plepler Honored at the Museum of the Moving Image Benefit at the St. Regis

You’ve got to love a guy whose ex-wife speaks well of him, and so, in crafting a speech to honor Charlie Rose, Gayle King, called her to get some anecdotes. King was not the only one at the podium. It takes three women to toast him, and so his co-anchors on CBS This Morning, King and Norah O’Donnell presented along with Yvette Vega. Even the gracious Richard Plepler in receiving his award, managed to contribute two impersonations in gathering information on Charlie Rose: Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton. Wanting to keep “shalom bayit,” Plepler thanked his wife. That and the hilarious John Oliver --deploying tee shirt cannon jokes--made for an unusually warm and entertaining benefit for the Museum of the Moving Image. As John Oliver made clear, “It’s worth going to Queens. It’s not just an airport!” Fareed Zakaria complained about following John Oliver, and nicely held his own. 

Greta Gerwig: Riding The Village Bike

Greta Gerwig is a big girl: she’s tall, and gangly in an appealing way, and like the “Girls” on the HBO series, she’s emblematic of the new woman finding her way through life’s challenges. That was her appeal in Frances Ha, directed by Noah Baumbach, and that’s what she embodies as Becky in a new play, The Village Bike, by the British playwright Penelope Skinner now making its American premiere in the MCC production at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Gerwig is even big in a video projected over the stage, riding a used bicycle, a pregnant woman with a big libido.

Sarah Paulson in Conviction at Bay Street Theater

“Did you have sex with that woman?” This is not a question from a bygone era’s congressional hearing, although the echo is unmistakable. Rather it comes from a wife, Leigh (Sarah Paulson) whose husband Tom (Garret Dillahunt), a dynamic theater teacher has been convicted of inappropriate behavior with a female student, and is just back home after having served three years in prison. Leigh is 99% sure he’s innocent, but Carey Crim’s Conviction, now in its world premiere at Bay Street Theater, is concerned about that 1%, and the effect of that margin of doubt not only on her, but their son Nicholas (Daniel Burns), and their best friends Bruce (Brian Hutchison) and Jayne (Elizabeth Reaser).

Robert De Niro’s Anxiety of Influence: Remembering the Artist Premieres

Back in the 1970’s when Robert De Niro was breaking out in films—Bang the Drum Slowly, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver—his dad Robert De Niro, Sr. was a painter of note, influenced by the European modernists Manet, Matisse, and Picasso, but never to equal the fame of his actor son. By the time De Niro, Sr. died in 1993 of prostate cancer, he left behind a significant body of work, journals and other writings revealing pride in his actor son, homosexuality, and depression. Now De Niro, the son, encouraged by his Tribeca Films producing partner Jane Rosenthal put together a documentary about his father, Remembering the Artist, directed by Perri Peltz and Geeta Gandbhir that will air on HBO on Monday night.

Glenn Close Drops to her Knees at the Sundance Institute Celebration

A plastic faced Glenn Close swivels her hips mechanically in The Stepford Wives or cackles maniacally as Cruella DeVille from 101 Dalmations, just two memorable images from a startlingly versatile film career. Last night at Stage 37, she was not celebrating the commercial moments, but rather her work in smaller, independent films like Robert Altman’s Cookie’s Fortune. Presenting the Vanguard Leadership Award to her at a gathering of filmmakers, actors, and distributors at the Sundance Institutes’ Celebration, Jeremy Irons who made three films with her and traveled from England to be there, said, when he heard he would co-star with “Glenny” in The Real Thing in 1982, he thought she was a man, an idea that was almost prescient given her passion project where she, as Albert Nobbs, plays a woman who passes as one.