Gossip Central

Matthew Modine, Treat Williams, Rosie Perez, Olympia Dukakis Talk Politics at the Sarasota Film Festival

A political theme ran through this year’s Sarasota Film Festival extending to its yearly event Cinema Tropicale redubbed Cinema Politicale. At the huge bash at Michael’s on East, a near naked man wore stars and stripes body paint in red, white, and blue. Guests included Matthew Modine, represented at the festival with a screening of Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 war movie that registers anti-war. At a resonant panel, three shorts Modine conceived screened, all revealing his deeply felt philosophy. One was made after 9/11. He interviewed people in Washington Square Park to show what America looks like in all its diversity. He’s also a producer and narrator of the documentary The Brainwashing of my Dad. Director Jen Senko traces the transformation of America through talk radio and the advent of meanness through her father who was, in her youth, a devoted John F. Kennedy democrat. Noting his profound change, the documentary features Rush Limbaugh stoking fear and racism through calculated mistruths. The movie goes far to show how we got to where we are.

Rumer Willis Debuts at the Café Carlyle

Rumer Willis, eldest daughter of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis may have her own take on love. At 28, she’s a headliner at the famed Café Carlyle with a jazzy, pop show that looks at love from many angles. Covering Doris Day’s “Perhaps,” she imagines a new honesty in the cha-cha beat. For Buddy Johnson’s “Since I Fell for You,” she croons, and goes softer where Liza Minelli belts Kander & Ebb’s “Maybe This Time.” Bringing her life partner and music director Tye Blue to the stage—“We have a lot in common. We both like boys”—she sings “Class” from Chicago; this number made me wish I had seen her as Roxie last year.

Anderson Cooper’s Anxiety of Influence: Gloria Vanderbilt

Depending on what era formed you, you can relate to a piece of Gloria Vanderbilt. If you are old enough, it’s the “Poor Little Rich Girl” headlines, or maybe it’s her dating Frank Sinatra, or the designer jeans with the swan logo. Women wore her name across their derrieres. She’s lived every era fully, and as her son Anderson Cooper maintains, she’s still looking for the next great love, just around the corner. Anything can happen, of course, but at 92 no one is taking chances: Mother and son have co-authored a book, The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son on Life, Love, and Loss. Vanderbilt will have a show of her art, paintings, drawings and dream boxes, and Cooper and Vanderbilt star in a documentary by Liz Garbus called Nothing Left Unsaid, which brings her complicated story line into a coherent narrative. To air this weekend on HBO, Nothing Left Unsaid is a portrait of an American original. Introducing at the Time Warner Center, HBO’s Sheila Nevins said, “It’s beautiful. And if I haven’t called all my films beautiful, it’s too bad. This one really is.”

Steven Soderbergh’s Film to Television: The Girlfriend Experience on Starz

The woman to my left at the Paris Theater premiere of The Girlfriend Experience pulled a lipstick out of her Prada bag and applied the nude Bobbi Brown in one swift motion without a mirror. I do that with my way more risky Russian red MAC, I thought, feeling competitive, and contemplating the series sample I was about to see. Is close female scrutiny what “the girlfriend experience” is all about? Is it a series in spiritual kinship to Claudia Weill’s “Girlfriends” from 1978? Or maybe HBO’s “Girls”? Well no, in the two episodes screened, we saw a smart young law firm intern, played by Riley Keough, Elvis Presley’s granddaughter, turn predator at a bar, have random sex (as in Erica Jong’s famed “zipless fuck”), become a high-priced call girl, and couple with her woman friend. This sexy drama will play out on Starz starting on April 10, for old school viewing, and will also be available for binge watching. So this is what Steven Soderbergh has been doing since he renounced filmmaking!

Robert Mapplethorpe: His Perfect Moment on HBO

The subtitle of the unflinching documentary, Robert Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, comes from Senator Jesse Helms, enemy of free expression, hallmark of our democracy. Bookending the movie about the photographer who came of age in the ‘60’s and died at age 42 of AIDS in 1989, the senator’s words are meant to denigrate the art of one of the era’s most gifted photographers, and to usher in a new era of conservative repression. In fact, if you look at the pictures as instructed—and they are amply provided in this rich film to air on April 4 on HBO, you will see classic harmonies of shapes, genitals posed as objects of design, pistils and lilies so idealized, flowers exude an austere eroticism. Original and emblematic of the bygone moment from which the demimonde portraits emerged, Mapplethorpe’s work is simply beautiful.