Gossip Central

Film Society of Lincoln Center Honors Robert DeNiro with 44th Chaplin Award

Robert DeNiro’s career is so prolific on any given day you can find one of his iconic films on television. Random today: Casino, in which he stars with Sharon Stone. On Monday night, many friends came to speak about his work at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual tribute, each noting a personal favorite. For Sean Penn, it was The Deer Hunter, and he went on to call Raging Bull a work of art at the level of DaVinci. Meryl Streep recounted a story of her waiting tables while at Yale Drama School and taking a break to see her friend Michael Moriarty in a baseball movie called Bang the Drum Slowly. She liked Moriarty’s work just fine, but everyone fell in love with another actor in the film, one who everyone assumed to be intellectually challenged, his performance was so authentic. That was DeNiro. Then Taxi Driver came out, and everyone realized who Robert DeNiro was, and he was in fact acting.

Sheila Nevins of HBO: Not Just Another Pretty Face

Anyone who has heard Sheila Nevins introduce her hand picked documentarians at an HBO preview, knows: she is much of the show. Formidable and funny, even when she intros heart-wrenching work like Cries from Syria with a plea to stop the killing of children in that country, her lively personality blazes forth. Now she’s written a book, You Don’t Look Your Age . . . and Other Fairy Tales, a memoir in short pieces of how she got to where she is, head of documentaries at HBO for decades, all while keeping it real. A tell-all, her book is not shy to un-P.C. revelations, like her views on sleeping with the boss, and plastic surgery, her dicey relation with her mom who had a rare disease, Raynaud’s phenomenon (a lack of circulation in your extremities), and balancing a demanding job with the challenges of raising a son with Tourette’s. Add to that, for a celebrity packed audio book, she just called a few of her nearest and dearest.

Oren Moverman’s The Dinner: Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child

Some years back the filmmaker Oren Moverman was taking meetings with Cate Blanchett, one of the Bob Dylan incarnations in I’m Not There, the 2007 movie he scripted with director Todd Haynes. The actress wanted to direct a film and chose Herman Koch’s 2009 novel, The Dinner, asking Moverman to adapt it for the screen. As these things happen, the directing job fell to Moverman. He had been working with Richard Gere on Time Out of Mind, which he directed, and the movie Norman, which he produced. In The Dinner, Richard Gere plays Stan Lohman, a politician, who has his brother Paul (Steve Coogan) and their wives, Rebecca Hall and Laura Linney to dinner at a restaurant so fancy, the waiters parade the food to the table, each precious plate explained by provenance and preparation.

Julian Assange in Risk: The Man Behind “Intelligence Porn”

While FBI Director James Comey refers to WikiLeaks as “intelligence porn,” and attempts to field questions about his role, and the Russians’ role, in swaying the American election, Laura Poitras’ film about Julian Assange, Risk, opens. It is rare to see a film about a subject who is less revealed and still find the experience deeply satisfying, however unsettling. Assange, a slippery figure, is self-incriminating as he allows Poitras to interview him on matters of women and the sexual abuse charges brought against him. Poitras, the Oscar winner for CitizenFour was already working on a film about Assange and WikiLeaks when the Edward Snowden story became news, and so Poitras followed that thread to Hong Kong. Snowden makes a brief appearance in Risk, as does Bradley/Chelsea Manning. This film dares to ask, how much of your own life are you willing to risk? They are all risk takers and at risk, especially the documentary filmmaker.

Dinner with Georgia O’Keeffe at the Brooklyn Museum and Beyond

Exhibitions featuring the life and art of women abound in New York at this time, a happy coincidence. Especially fine is the Brooklyn Museum’s “Living Modern,” devoted to the oeuvre and style of Georgia O’Keeffe. The artist had her first solo exhibition at the museum in 1927, organized by Alfred Stieglitz and featuring 15 paintings. The current show, consisting of paintings, sculpture, and photographs of O’Keeffe by some of the most well known photographers of the twentieth century, Stieglitz, Richard Avedon, Bruce Weber, Ansel Adams, Cecil Beaton to name a few, also displays her clothing. An excellent seamstress, as the accompanying catalogue makes clear, she made her own dresses, blouses, shirtwaists, and coats, and also collected simple, architecturally structured designs from the Japanese. Her Lee overalls and plaid shirts are fashionable today. Maria Chabot’s photo of the artist has her posed on a dusty road at Ghost Ranch, hair pulled back, in a woven checked shirt and loose jeans. In Andy Warhol’s silkscreen of O’Keeffe from 1980, she looks stern, her face naturally wrinkled as would befit a woman of unselfconscious, ageless beauty, at 92.

Oslo at the Vivian Beaumont Theater: Can We Talk?

The great achievement of the Oslo Peace Accords, on which the entertaining drama Oslo is based, was bringing to the table Israelis and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Anyone who has ever been to the Middle East, knows the hostility in the air, with Jews worried about security and the future of the Jewish state, and Arabs enraged at occupation and the loss of autonomy. The eyes and ears of the world have been glued to this unbridgeable divide. For theater, Oslo, now with 7 Tony nominations, defies the expectation that peace talk alone can be highly engrossing rather than morbidly serious and stressful. In fact, J. T. Rogers’ Oslo, directed by Bartlett Sher, is provocative and humorous, because it teases out the personalities of those figures plucked from the news, and finds their humanity and common ground even when the politics don’t match up.

Bandstand’s Untoward Heroics on Broadway

The new musical Bandstand at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater opens with the sounds of war and a pivotal scene that recurs in the story of Donny Novitzki, a returning soldier who forms a band. Longing to return to life as it was, he is tasked to look in on the wife of a friend who did not make it back. Beset by nightmares and dreams alike, Donny (Corey Cott) looks for work in the Cleveland clubs he used to play. No surprises here. If you know the musical genre to which this play belongs, you know instantly that Donny will make it, especially with Julia (Laura Osnes), the Gold Star widow who happens to sing and write poetry, perfect for lyrics that can swing. But this play does have surprises galore: the talented band Donny forms: they sing, dance, act, joke, and man, they can play.