Gossip Central

Jake Gyllenhaal’s Eyes in Nightcrawler

Jake Gyllenhaal’s Leo Bloom in Nightcrawler is as creepy as the movie’s title suggests. A bug-eyed loner who preys on the misfortunes of others, Bloom’s very language appropriates television-speak with information garnered on the Internet to make him reptilian. Negotiating his way through interactions, he acquires a camera and means to follow disasters, and finds a career as a videographer filming beyond the scope of decency: a man with gaping wounds after a car crash, a family shot in their mansion, their plush white carpets soaked in blood. Racing around in a beautifully shot L.A. in a red car, he doesn’t just follow crime scenes, he creates them.

Helena Rubinstein at the Jewish Museum: Mascara for the Masses

In a week when talk focused on the revamping of Renee Zellweger’s face, whether or not the Oscar winning actress went generic with plastic surgery, a voice from history affirmed choice for women of all ages and economics when it comes to feminine enhancement: “Beauty is power,” said Helena Rubinstein at a time when makeup was only associated with showgirls and prostitutes. A canny businesswoman, as a splendid new exhibition at the Jewish Museum establishes, the four foot ten inch Polish-born Rubinstein led the cosmetics field in face creams, and reinvented mascara wands; a rival to Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubinstein surprisingly kept her Jewish name.

Sting’s The Last Ship: The Prodigal Son Returns

If you’ve attended any of the packed previews of The Last Ship at the Neil Simon Theater, you may have noticed its originator and composer Sting lurking about. At your surprise to see him, he exclaims, “It’s my baby!” Indeed, this musical, with book by John Logan and Brian Yorkey, under Joe Mantello’s direction and with choreography by Steven Hoggett, is an absolute must-see about a young man who leaves home and family to travel the world, only to return after fifteen years to a place altered by modernity, what the British metaphysical poets called mutability. This change is most dramatically felt by a community losing its traditions of shipbuilding, and the work that sustained them literally and spiritually for generations.

Old New York in On the Town

The sights and sounds of old New York are just a few of the marvels of the musical On the Town, newly revived at the Lyric Theater. If you see a subway sign marked IRT, you know you are in the right place. Three sailors on an overnight pass get to see the sights, “from Yonkers on down to the bay, in just one day.” Naturally, and so the guidebook says, the Museum of Natural History is a must, and everywhere there are girls, girls, girls in this ribald and rollicking classic with Leonard Bernstein’s music and book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, based on the idea by Jerome Robbins. Director John Rando, with Joshua Bergasse’s choreography and James Moore’s music direction, has subtly reworked the original to great effect.

Lunch with Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones: The Theory of Everything

Stephen Hawking, ALS and all, is such a “character,” he’s perfect as the charismatic center of a movie. That’s partly because of his brilliance in physics and cosmology, partly because his bold yet childlike persona, and partly because of the woman who kept his brain alive, his wife Jane. A new movie based on her account of their courtship, marriage, and ultimate friendship, The Theory of Everything, stars Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones as this exceptional couple. Last week at lunch at the Lotos Club, in a Q&A led by the charming Stephen Daldry, the stars and screenwriter Anthony McCarten discussed their movie relationship in what many are calling performances that top the lists for this year’s acting awards; the film should be nominated for Best Picture.

Doctor’s Dilemma: Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole

Famed and multi-awarded neurologist Dr. Allan Ropper, author of the definitive textbook on clinical neurology, with the help of Brian David Burrell, has turned his prodigious medical knowledge to us, the people, with an entertaining and eminently readable book, Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole. Demystifying the art and practice of healing neurological disorders, he turns a keen eye on his patients, interviewing them and recounting stories straight from the hospital front. As the doctor told me in a recent interview, almost all of the many anecdotes contained in the book are taken from his owned taped interviews, and are 70% verbatim.

Buster Poindexter Returns to the Café Carlyle

How cool is Buster Poindexter? The alter ego of David Johansen of New York Dolls fame, Poindexter is VERY cool. A seasoned lounge singer, he sports a pompadour, a wavecrest that may stand erect using a formula once shared by Bello the Clown: a mix of Rogaine and Viagra. A pencil thin mustache grazes his upper lip a la John Waters, but he makes it his own as he shimmies, sashays, and rhumbas his way around the Carlyle stage, his pelvis moving to Presley precision. His show—only five nights-- is a tongue-in-cheek medley of genres: doowop, country, rock, his wit evident throughout, opening with “Viper” (“I had a dream about a reefer five feet long”), and “Bad Boy” (“I’ve taken the trouble to turn my night into day.”). After four songs, he predicted his own review: “Did you see Poindexter the other night?” “How was it?” “Good. But he was crazy.”

James Brown on HBO: Deconstructing Mr. Dynamite’s Moves

Alex Gibney’s documentary, Mr. Dynamite, limns the extraordinary rise of James Brown’s career, and more: interviews with his sidemen give a history of rhythm and blues, and race. Mick Jagger talks about coming to the Apollo to see James Brown and trying to simulate, and surpass, the legendary performer’s signature moves. Jazz musicians Fred Wesley and Christian McBride reveal the many ways that Brown’s unique talent and professional ethics transformed the music, how the theatrics of putting on a cape near the end of the act—borrowing from the world of boxing-- would lead to an encore, and how subbing for Little Richard on tour, styling himself with that makeup and adapting from his sound, led to Brown’s scream. Many who appear in the film were on hand for a premiere at the Time Warner Center on Monday night, including Mr. Wesley, Mr. McBride, Martha High who tells how James Brown changed her name, and the Reverend Al Sharpton.

Jason Reitman’s Lonely Planet: Men, Women, and Children

Every computer-age gadget is deployed to bad effect in Jason Reitman’s satiric new movie, Men, Women, and Children, and that’s the least of the targets of his scrutiny: how about sex, ambition, and most of all, power, particularly of the parental kind. Let me say, there was not one adult I could admire in this film. In that way, the movie is a fantasy of teen disaffection in perhaps the mode of J. D. Salinger. Forget social media, which as Reitman so aptly put it in the post-screening Q&A with a panel of psychologists and experts including Psychology Today editor-at-large Hara Estroff Marano, is mere “geography.” As in the case of all of Reitman’s movies, especially Juno, Thank You for Smoking, and Up in the Air, this movie is smart and edgy; its themes will generate much debate.

Julianne Moore in Still Alice Closes the Hamptons International Film Festival

Radiant in black taffeta on Guild Hall’s stage after the movie Still Alice screened, Julianne Moore said the way you play a woman with degenerating early Alzheimer’s is to reach for normality, for what she can remember. Even buffeted by family, a supportive Alec Baldwin, and daughters Kate Bosworth and Kristen Stewart, son Hunter Parrish, not to mention a house in the Hamptons, Dr. Alice Howland, a prominent professor of linguistics at Columbia, makes a wrenching journey toward not recognizing those closest to her. And she’s only 50. The movie struck a chord big time in the Hamptons community.