Gossip Central

Gotham Awards Celebrating the Best of the Indies

“Ooh, what’s that?” Adam Sandler ogled my pasta as he breezed by our table at Cipriani Wall Street for the Gotham Awards. “I’ll eat that,” the funny man made a bee-line to his table. Later on, well fed, he brought the cavernous house down accepting the Performer Tribute Award from the Safdie brothers, his Uncut Gems directors, a thank-you monologue created, he said, by his Youtube and Lululemon loving teen daughters, delivered in a strange Southern accent. Just what you’d expect at the Gotham Awards!

Jennifer Lawrence—here to present Best Feature-- called this special night a bellwether for the film award season! This annual celebration of Indie films honors non-Hollywood fare; then again, every year the lines blur, as this gorgeous filet mignon dinner becomes more and more elegant, hmm, upscale—i.e. with sponsors including Variety and Cadillac (yes, a sedan was parked outside the restrooms), the program now printed on gloss, it is always a wonder that the downtown vibe remains: it’s industry insiders just happy to be clinking glasses, be they of Fuji water and Blue Moon beer, catching up.

Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan in She Said: Naming Predators’ Names

As Harvey Weinstein sits in court in California on charges of rape and the former president Donald Trump, an alleged abuser, announces he will run again, the new movie, She Said, is a ripped-off-the-headlines thriller, telling the story of two investigative journalists who exposed the practice of abuse in the workplace. Of course, for Weinstein, co-founder of Miramax, that would be the movie business. You could say that New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor are the Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on this issue, as She Said shows their dedication to hearing victims’ accounts, and the exhausting, exhilarating process of getting them to go on record. No, this is not Watergate, but a system far more insidious in its established acceptance worldwide, undermining women and their dreams.

The She Said casting is exceptional: two of the women hurt by Weinstein are played by Samantha Morton and Jennifer Ehle. Great actresses, their characters meet with the reporters. Their careers broken, they have moved on, haunted by their anguished past. They go public at great risk. For many who have never experienced assault by a boss, it may be easy to dismiss their sensitivity, to say, get over it. But the movie makes it clear that powerful predators are enabled by others. After Rose McGowan and others came forward, 86 women finally accused Harvey Weinstein, enough to make you wonder how this family man and astute film professional with an amazing success story had any time for luring young, naïve women to his hotel room for work related meetings, where he insisted upon sexual favors while clad in a bathrobe or naked. An army of helpful assistants and lawyers, eyes wide shut, covered up the tracks, leading women
on, or paying them off for their silence, forcing them to sign impenetrable non-disclosure agreements.

Jennifer Connelly’s Good Hair and Tight Sails in Top Gun: Maverick

One of the highest grossing films in the history of movies, Top Gun: Maverick, a sequel decades after the first 1986 Top Gun film, exemplifies why old-fashioned story-telling wins. As producer Jerry Bruckheimer said following a special screening at the Whitby Hotel this week, it’s an action movie wrapped around a love story. You cannot beat the aerial sequences, sleek planes on a mission to destroy an enemy arsenal. But the Top Gun team, led by “Maverick,” Tom Cruise at his best, heroic and sensitive, features pilots you can love. Particularly fine are “Rooster,” a son-surrogate played by Miles Teller, “Ice,” a touching Val Kilmer, his character, a rival to Cruise in the original, so debilitated by terminal throat cancer he communicates by texting, and “Hangman,” a fresh, snide Glen Powell. And, who knew Maverick had a woman in the wings? And what a woman! Jennifer Connelly is stunning as Penny who tends her own bar.

Director Joseph Kosinski said it’s her intelligence that made him want her for the movie, and that unbelievably, Jennifer had never worked with Tom Cruise before. Their chemistry is visceral as she flips her auburn mane, bringing out something in Cruise we’ve never seen before, and it’s thrilling. Jennifer Connelly said it was all in the wig.

Tangled Up in Tulsa: Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song

Bob Dylan’s massive archive is now on view in Tulsa, at the Bob Dylan Center right next door to the Woody Guthrie Museum. Artifacts of these two music giants make a must-see stop on any American culture tour. But Tulsa? Why there, everyone asks. For his stuff to be situated next to his hero’s, Dylan would have agreed to any place. Tulsa is not particularly relevant to his biography, but, as his new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, illustrates with great gusto, his sources and inspirations can be far-ranging, and belong to one place in particular—here, the place where democracy lives. They belong where, in a Whitmanesque sense, people of all stations in life can sit side by side—at least theoretically. An homage to a highly idiosyncratic American songbook, Dylan revels in behind-the-scenes stories of the famous as he honors the work of less well known artists.

Yes, he goes deep into how Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” had its lyrics adjusted. Referring to The Who’s “My Generation,” he proclaims, “Every generation gets to pick and choose what they want from the generations before with the same arrogance and ego-driven self-importance that the previous generations had when they picked the bones of the ones before them.” Yes, he calls Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” “an update of the iconic beat generation masterpiece by Jack Kerouac.” Maybe taking a cue from Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues which in other places he calls an important influence on his writing, each entry reads like a satori, a nugget of supreme wisdom. Short and to the point, each might follow a Kerouacean writerly strategy to simply fill up the page, like a jazz riff, stopping “where the page stops.” But Dylan doesn’t let his ideas spill one to the next.

Michelle Williams in The Fabelmans: Steven Spielberg’s Bildungsroman

Taking liberally from his own biography, Steven Spielberg creates a portrait of the artist as a young man in his latest film, The Fabelmans. It is no accident that the word fable echoes within this title, nor that the child to adolescent to teen and adult depicted is on a journey to discover his unique voice—through a moving picture camera lens. But the real star of this fictive tale is his mother called Mitzi, tremendously appealing with Michelle Williams in the role. An elfin creature with talents beyond her burnt eggs and salami, Mitzi is a soak-up-all-the-oxygen-in-the-room sort, and the epicenter of Sam’s consciousness. Flirting, even with Sam, Mitzi sings and plays the piano for her family and remains an unfailing support to her son’s filmmaking ambitions. Michelle finesses Mitzi even at her most wacky. Yes, his father (Paul Dano, excellent) plays an important part too--as does his best friend Ben (Seth Rogen, wonderful) who, by the way, makes off with his mother; that story underpins much of Sam’s emotional energy without undermining his gifts as a visual artist.

Some other characters along the way need mention: Judd Hirsch as Uncle Boris, Jeanne Berlin as Hadassah Fabelman, and David Lynch as John Ford. The film engages in numerous ways, especially as it references many of Spielberg’s greatest hits: E. T., Jaws, among others. Serious matters: his parents’ divorce, the anti-Semitism he experienced in school, the beatings he endures facing the school’s jocks, and Jesus as a romantic rival—All are part of the journey as Sam makes movies featuring train crashes, blood spurting war battles, and teen beach parties.