Gossip Central

Me Too, Megyn Kelly, and Bombshell

The women in the Roger Ailes story are fierce, ambitious blonds, at least those in the forefront of the movie Bombshell, a truthful account of the demise of the Fox News CEO: Truthful, because, at a recent screening of Bombshell, many close to the story of how Gretchen Carlson refused to compromise in her lawsuit against Ailes cheered at the recognition of the scandal depicted just the way they remembered it.

The Cave: What Will Happen to Syria?

The stakes could not be higher in Feras Fayyad’s relentless documentary The Cave. Set in an underground hospital on the outskirts of Damascus, the sounds of classical music juxtaposed with the thunder of bombs give you the yin and yang of experience in Syria under siege, the forces of life competing with those of death. With Dr. Amani Ballour in charge, a young woman with nerves of steel who must face evil as well as the distrust of men in a culture where a mother who cannot feed her children fears the societal norms that prevent her from taking a job more than imminent death, “the cave” becomes a last refuge of humanity. Speaking about his focus on women in this culture, the director becomes tearful thinking about his mother. This week at the movie’s premiere at the Walter Reade theater, he sat between his producers, Sigrid Dyekjaer and Kirstine Barfod from a Copenhagen based production company, and spoke about the horrors faced in his country, worsened in the last week with the American pull out of troops: he admitted for the first time that his mother was a Kurd.

Brian De Palma Receives the Hamptons International Film Festival Lifetime Achievement Award

Putting a new spin on Hitchcock, no one does horror with the class of Brian De Palma. At the Hamptons International Film Festival this weekend, the man who gave us Dressed to Kill, Scarface, and The Untouchables, among other classics of American cinema, sat for a conversation with Alec Baldwin, an actor who has worked with many a director and could add his observations, anecdotes, and impersonations to liven up a discussion with a master about such topics as the choice of D.P. for various films. As a result, Baldwin’s comments come to the fore, and De Palma’s extensive career was elicited in waves. No matter, that was the best way to do it, said Piper De Palma, the director’s daughter, named after the actress Piper Laurie (so sinister as the mother in Carrie) who presented her father with the crystal award for Lifetime Achievement.

It’s Time to End Lyme: Global Lyme Alliance Gala at Cipriani 42nd Street

A glamorous crowd packed Cipriani 42^nd Street for the fifth annual Global Lyme Alliance gala: sparkly gowns and tuxes for a stellar event put together by the incomparable Larry Scott. Hosted by Rosanna Scotto, the benefit, to end the insidious Lyme epidemic, featured speeches from Lyme survivors and performances by a Big Apple Circus juggler who did amazing work with pink umbrellas, and by Tootsie Tony winner Santino Fontana accompanied by newcomer Ashley Kobre, a graduating senior from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, singing “I’m So Pretty” from Cinderella.

Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson in Marriage Story at the New York Film Festival: Breaking Up is Hard to Do

Director Noah Baumbach knows from divorce, and has made films that have illuminated sides of that subject throughout his career. His 2005 Squid and the Whale comes to mind, and the family in The Meyerowitz Stories (2017) is riddled with marital fragility, and resilience. Each hews close to the director’s family background. Baumbach’s new film, Marriage Story, seems most immediately to be informed by his own real-life divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh in that we are looking at a couple of charming, good looking, articulate artists, with the superb actors Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson in the leads, but look again. The writing takes it somewhere else. At a press conference following a New York Film Festival screening this week, Baumbach claimed to want to tell a love story in a different way: “Sometimes you can see it more when it comes apart.”