Gossip Central

Opening night NYFF: Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying

Richard Linklater follows his Everybody Wants Some!!, an affable college boy sports romp, with Last Flag Flying, a buddy movie with older guys, featuring Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, and Laurence Fishburne, who played a soldier in Vietnam in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, back in the day, good preparation for this role. Three Vietnam vets on the road, what a set up for wild ride with bad boy shades of Last Vegas! Opening the New York Film Festival, the film touches on war, but stays closer to its aftereffects on survivors and their loved ones. Carell’s Larry sets the events in motion, traveling to find Cranston’s Sal, an alcoholic bartender, and Fishburne’s Mueller, a pious reverend. Gathering them together for a road trip, Larry wants these men, who behaved badly together in Southeast Asia, to help him bury his son, just killed in Iraq.

Some Enchanted Evening: Laura Osnes at Café Carlyle

Laura Osnes is the consummate performer for large Broadway musicals, and at the Café Carlyle this week, she scales back her American sweetheart persona to the intimate stage, accompanied by Ted Sperling’s piano and extensive lore, and scene partner Ryan Silverman, amping up her considerable charm. The program entitled “Cockeyed Optimists: The World of Rodgers and Hammerstein” pays homage to these masters of musical story telling with selections from Cinderella, South Pacific, Carousel, The Sound of Music, and Allegra, all songs wonderfully familiar, but at times strategically mashed up, so there is always an element of surprise, a great pleasure of this show.

Emma Stone as Billie Jean King in The Battle of the Sexes

Those of us who remember the events of 1973, including the tennis match between feminist Billie Jean King and chauvinist pig Bobby Riggs, see King’s triumph in the larger context of Roe v. Wade, and other advances for women. In the thoroughly enjoyable new movie, The Battle of the Sexes, filmmakers Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, the directors of the hit, Little Miss Sunshine, score big again with a delightful cast that includes Elisabeth Shue as Riggs’ icy wife and Bill Pullman as tennis promoter Jack Kramer, and a spare telling from Simon Beaufoy’s screenplay that mostly avoids historic clutter, and culminates in the match itself. Even though you know the outcome, the tennis is thrilling.

The American Theater Wing @ 100

You know what they say about show business! At Cipriani 42 Street this week the American Theater Wing celebrated its first 100 years with a great show. Tony Bennett took the stage, to speak the Wing's praises. Broadway stars Brian Stokes Mitchell, Norm Lewis, Rebecca Luker, Beth Malone, Natalie Cortez, Howard McGillin, and Santino Fontana performed favorites from Phantom of the Opera, Fun Home, Company, and other Broadway hit musicals. Laura Osnes who will begin a residency at the Café Carlyle this week sang from South Pacific. Taylor Trensch sang from Rent; currently starring in Hello, Dolly!, he will take over the title role in Dear Evan Hansen. Heather Headley brought the house down with her rendition of “What I Did for Love” from A Chorus Line. Who could possibly follow that act? School of Rock’s bass guitarist Evie Dolan just seized the moment singing “Aquarius” from Hair, and leading the entire group in “Let the Sunshine In.”

Judi Dench Speaks Urdu: Victoria and Abdul

No one does queen better than Judi Dench! And director Stephen Frears has some experience with queens too, having directed The Queen with Helen Mirren as Elizabeth. In his new film, Victoria and Abdul, Dench plays Queen Victoria as both bored old lady and lonely royal, fatigued by outliving everyone she has ever loved. Into this privileged deprivation comes a lowly, handsome servant (Ali Fazal) from India who gives the queen another chapter, conversing with her on many subjects including exotic fruit, such as mango, and teaching her Urdu, much to the horror of her court, and to the heir to her throne, “Bertie” (the divine Eddie Izzard). Based on a cache of letters and other writings unearthed in 2010 from Abdul Karim, a real-life personage whose existence was entirely unknown until the recent find, Victoria and Abdul tells a new story in the well-mined history of the British monarchy.

Extraordinary Ordinary People Premieres

Guinean dancer Sidiki Conde walks on his hands as a result of a childhood accident, but that doesn’t stop him from performing traditional dance, and drumming, dedicated to his mother, and motherland. This weekend he and Sheila Kay Adams, a banjo playing balladeer from North Carolina entertained at Cinema Village, following the premiere of Alan Govenar’s new film Extraordinary Ordinary People. A smorgasbord of unique artists making exceptional art, the film focuses on winners of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Heritage Award, endangered in our anti-arts political climate along with the NEA itself. This exuberant film makes each art sampled, from oud playing to basket weaving to bobbin lace making, feel indispensible.

Angelina Jolie’s First They Killed My Father: A Family Story

Angelina Jolie’s latest directorial –and humanitarian--effort, First They Killed My Father, the film version of Loung Ung’s well-received book from 2000, adds to this gifted director’s body of work illuminating injustice. A personal history of the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia seen through the eyes of a 5 year old little girl, the movie softens what we know, while revealing hard hitting and harrowing details of indoctrination, starvation, torture. Driven from her comfortable city apartment in Phnom Penh with her family, Loung’s survival through the loss of both parents, and two siblings, is the film’s riveting journey. And as she showed in her earlier films, Jolie’s tough storytelling on difficult subjects has a higher purpose, a mission to teach compassion. This is an important film, yes, and Jolie deserves accolades for her fine work as director.

Breathe! Salpeter Father and Daughter Create a Book for Teaching Yoga to Kids

You are never too old to practice yoga—or too young. Nina Salpeter teamed up with her father, award-winning graphic designer Bob Salpeter to create a book Teach Your Child Yoga, to help parents teach yoga to children from one to six years old. Taking known positions, such as “downward facing dog” and “lotus,” to name just two, Nina Salpeter has teased out the family-friendly ingredients, animals, and comfort food—(she calls the familiar cross legged seating, “criss cross apple sauce,”)-- in order to capture the essence of each pose, providing a visual prompt that brings the images close to a child’s experience.

Top of the Lake: China Girl’s Matrilineage

A fetus is found in a sex worker’s womb, her dead body encased in a valise washed up on shore in Sydney. Crime detective Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss) is on the case, and meets up with her biological daughter, the product of a gang rape when she was 16. Mary (Alice Englert), now 17, has issues with her adoptive mother Julia (Nicole Kidman), and wants to marry a dubious much older type. These mother-daughter themes swirl around the two episodes of Top of the Lake: China Girl, premiering this week on SundanceTV. Jane Campion is the show’s creator, and these two “chapters,” as she calls them, indicate this director’s ease with the long form of television series, as she told me at a Thursday’s Film Society of Lincoln Center preview. That Alice Englert is her daughter adds a layer of maternity to this series.

Rebel in the Rye: Explaining the Reclusive J. D. Salinger

It is not easy to capture a writer’s creative process in a movie, especially when the artist was determined to stay out of the public eye. Danny Strong took on that task in his Rebel in the Rye, the story of J. D. Salinger’s coming of age as a writer, culminating in the publication of Catcher in the Rye, and the protagonist Holden Caulfield’s curious effect on readers. As the film illustrates, fans stalked Salinger, wearing Caulfield’s red hunting hat and proclaiming in so many words, Holden Caulfield, c’est moi.

A first time director, Danny Strong, well known as an actor and screenwriter (The Butler, The Hunger Games, among his many credits), based the work on Kenneth Slawenski’s critical biography, and was challenged to complete shooting in 26 days, he told me at the movie’s premiere at Metrograph this week.