Gossip Central

Mission Impossible: Fallout

Mission Impossible: Fallout was #1 at the box office this week –no surprise to me. Of all the movie mega franchises, I love Mission Impossible the best. Lalo Schifrin’s score is an aphrodisiac to me. And the rest may have something to do with the hero Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, a man of super capabilities who gets the job done. Whatever crazies animate him, he is willing and able to rescue a detonator from the edge of a rock cliff, hang from helicopters, and mess with equally crazy women. The blond “widow” in this one makes Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa the picture of propriety, even when she, leather clad, races around Paris on a motorcycle in hot pursuit of Cruise and his posse, Ving Rhames’ Luther and Simon Pegg’s Benji and the nut job of a villain/ social anarchist (Sean Harris) that must lead them to the prize, three globelike balls of Plutonium. We are saving the world here from crazies who believe, the more suffering, the greater the peace. Now I totally understand why chemical warfare on civilians is so necessary!

Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind to Air on HBO

Comedian/ actor Robin Williams was so beloved, his suicide four years ago at age 63 came as a shock to almost all who knew him. In a new HBO documentary, Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, close friend, Billy Crystal recounts the last time he saw Williams he was in tears, and when Crystal asked why, is everything all right, Williams just said it was because he loved him so much; Crystal did not know this was a poignant moment close to the end. Marina Zenovich’s film, which had a special screening this week at SAG-AFTRA Foundation Robin Williams Center, weighs in on the side of a Parkinson’s disease diagnosis as the cause. Still, she makes good points for other contributing factors as she limns the changing times and his alienation. Much as you wish you could, you do not, in the end of this entertaining and insightful film, come inside his mind.

Carey Mulligan in Girls & Boys

Riveting and poised as she recounts the most horrendous story, Carey Mulligan is the one-woman center of Dennis Kelly’s Girls & Boys at the Minetta Lane Theater, a superb Audible production and Royal Court Theater transplant. Minetta Lane must be ground zero for one-actor tours de force. Witness Billy Crudup’s brilliant turn as Harry Clarke. Dimpled Mulligan in maroon trousers and burnt sienna shirt, against a bare stage, or ghostly living space that colors up as needed, for an hour and three quarters: you can’t take your eyes off her, as she asserts herself shifting from leg to leg under Lyndsey Turner’s fine direction. You hear only about the sensational tales of domestic violence, she says preparing you, as she, dry eyed and wise comes to the play’s climax. You already know it, and it’s shocking nonetheless, the play’s final sentence, a chilling line that could work broadly in our #MeToo moment, roughly: civilization was created to stop men.

Frost/ Nixon at Bay Street Theater: The Power and the Media

Imagine longing for Richard Nixon. Anything that smacks of “presidential” sparks pangs of pity for us in our current regime. As portrayed by Harris Yulin, with dignity and a yen for Italian style, in the Frost/Nixon revival at Bay Street Theater, Nixon seems human: he even detests golf. When he says he betrayed the American people, you also believe him, that he was doing what he thought best, even while breaking the law. For him it was clearly complicated. David Frost (Daniel Gerroll), as the play reveals, put everything on the line to get good television out of a four-part interview with the former president, the only one to ever resign rather than face the indignities of impeachment, and what that would mean to the office of president: “Resignation is a noble act! America first!” Nixon was held accountable. And, he could think and speak in complete paragraphs! Oh for the simplicity of the bygone era!

Sandra Bernhard Brings “Sandemonium” to Guild Hall

Photo: Showbiz411

Topical and terrific, Sandra Bernhard brought her no-holds- barred mouth to Guild Hall this week for a one-night only tour de force performance. Reaching out to Melania in the wings, “You are in a safe space here,” she consoled her. And, “Ooh, I like your jacket.” Calling out to a college student in the front row, she was both confrontational about her choice to quit Sarah Lawrence and go out west to study fashion, and supportive, sort of. “I could have talked to Marc Jacob for you.” She gave with one hand and took back with the other. And it was funny as hell. As she told me in a phone chat earlier this year: “I do not disappoint.” And she didn’t, giving one of the most spontaneous performances yet.