Gossip Central

Yoshiki at Carnegie Hall: The Unexpected Pleasures of Loss

The international superstar, Yoshiki, celebrated a 10^th anniversary “World Tour with Orchestra 2023 ‘Requiem,’” its final leg at Carnegie Hall this week. Displaying awesome musical chops at piano and drums in the separate genres of classical and rock, Yoshiki, clad in red lame coat, dedicated the tour to the passing of his beloved mother who raised him after his father’s suicide when he was 10. The drums, he explained to his many fans—some clad in full kimono and obi bearing flowers to throw onstage--, allowed him to express the extremes of his despair. Even after he performed for Japan’s emperor, his mother would ask whether or not he had slept the night before, had he eaten breakfast. He missed these nurturing flourishes even when his hands were imprinted in cement at L. A.’s Chinese Theater. Launching a clothing line in Paris and a new champagne with Pommery, he misses her mothering more.

He also dedicated some songs to two bandmates who committed suicide, and for much of the concert he admonished the audience to cherish every day. “We are here,” he kept saying, also acknowledging the pain and suffering in our world. Conductor Ward Stare led the full orchestra featuring many strings, underscoring a sorrowful tone even when the sounds soared. Singers Beverly and Ai Ichihara added to the emotional experience. After Intermission, Yoshiki, now in silver lame, performed Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake accompanied by dancers from the American Ballet Theater. Three screens projected family photos and clips from his film debut as director, YOSHIKI: Under the Sky. The next day the film, to be released this month, was screened in full at the Roxy Hotel, followed by a performance at Django.

The Gilded Age: Season 2 on HBO: The Opera Wars

Nothing says high hauteur like new money. In season 2 of HBO’s grand series, The Gilded Age, “the new” hits its stride. Forget Stanford White’s magnificent design for the newly completed Russell mansion on-turn-of-the-century Fifth Avenue, its façade built in Newport, its queen of decadent display, Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon) has empires to build ascending the social strata. Snobbery, of course, does not work. Readers of Henry James and Edith Wharton fiction know how the hierarchies among the rich work, their laws finite. Christine Baranski as Agnes van Rhijn looks her chiseled nose down on her neighbors, nailing the divide between Old New York and New. But Bertha surprises us; aided by her husband George (Morgan Spector) and his fortune, she shows what does the trick: research, preparation, the drive to roll up satin sleeves, and grit to get the job done. For this season, we learn the “true” origins of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Metropolitan Opera House. There will be blood.

Fellowes was brilliant with the splendors and spectacle of Downton Abbey, both upstairs and down. Add to that the lives of Blacks, North and South. As we know from season one, Peggy Scott (Denee Benton), an aspiring young black writer works at the van Rhijn house as her career rises at The Globe. Turns out she has a backstory, explored tenderly in Season 2 as is the plight of our heroine, Marion Brook (Louisa Jacobson, a daughter of Meryl Streep), Agnes van Rhijn’s niece, an innocent, who has been jilted. Disgraced? Never. This season takes a more positive view: she’s merely rescued from marriage to the wrong man.

Satisfying a (guilty) itch for gossip, who’s marrying who, The Gilded Age features a dazzling cast of American stage actors: Audra McDonald and Kelli O’Hara head the long list that also includes Laura Benanti, Kristine Nielsen, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Donna Murphy, a wildly over the top Nathan Lane, to name a few. Robert Sean Leonard is a particularly cool choice for the clergyman Luke Forte, having performed in Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of The Age of Innocence.

Mourning in Lod at the Hamptons International Film Festival: When Terror Hits Home

Introducing her documentary, Mourning in Lod at HIFF, Israel-based filmmaker Hilla Medalia announced that a crew member had been murdered—one among thousands-- in the Hamas attacks from Gaza on Jews during the Shabbat/Simchat Torah holiday. Mourning in Lod plays out a story of connection and communication after terror comes to a community at peace. What might have been a silver lining moment illustrating that from acts of barbarism generosity of spirit can come, the takeaway was a microcosm of what was raging front page news: cycles of retribution demanding justice, but in the end, civilians pay for the age-old Middle East enmity.

The backstory: producer Sheila Nevins had asked Medalia to make a short film when she heard about the family of a Jewish man in Lod, stoned by Palestinians, donating his organs to a Palestinian woman in need of a kidney. Investigating the story, Medalia found out that the man had been murdered in revenge for a Palestinian man who had been randomly shot by zealous Jewish settlers, outside agitators as it were. The three families involved were intertwined, neighbors who had done business together prior to the tragic events.

East Hampton’s Patti Kenner served a pizza and salad dinner for a post-film gathering that now reflected upon news so much larger than the violent/bittersweet events at Lod—as the reality unfolded. Guests were able to find out more about this story from the filmmaker; in the end though, with news of Israel making its own movie in our minds, feelings were raw. Everyone understood: more deaths would be announced, although the actual brutality had not yet registered: Israel was at war.

Michael Mann’s Ferrari Closes the New York Film Festival: The Triumph and Disaster of Fast Cars and Men

The roar of engines and strain of race cars careening around a sharp curve make for the panache of the New York Film Festival’s final picture, but the real drama of Ferrari takes place within walls. As Enzo Ferrari, a brooding charismatic silver-haired Adam Driver is haunted by loss—of father, brother, son, friends--, he speaks of creating walls so as not to feel the continuity of pain that is part of his present, Italy 1957, years into his marriage to Laura Ferrari, a dark, grieving Penelope Cruz, who is also his partner in Ferrari, the race car company they built. But when we first see him, after a prologue of black & white footage of his own fierce driving—what he calls “a deadly passion,” he’s in bed with Lina Lardi, a lighter Shailene Woodley, a mistress with few demands. Before sneaking off for home, he tucks in a boy, their son. Home, in Modena, is where Laura with her black piercing eyes, stays secluded within rooms of maddening deep tones and swirly wallpaper, and Enzo’s mother.

The actors, permitted to be present because the film is not attached to a studio in contention, were interviewed along with director Michael Mann following the packed screening at Alice Tully Hall. Troy Kennedy Martin wrote the script based on Brock Yates’ book, Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, embellished farther than Mann’s original concept collaborating with Sydney Pollack. Locations are key: In one scene, shot in the actual Ferrari mausoleum, Driver as Enzo cries over the dead.

Most eloquent about her preparation, Cruz spoke about that wallpaper, a window into Laura’s psyche. Mann introduced her to a doctor in Modena who showed her love letters between Enzo and Laura dating into the 1970’s, just before she died, his partner till the end. A principal investor, having sold her wedding gifts to create their first Ferrari, Laura is a formidable, surprising character, the movie’s pulse. While Enzo’s lovemaking with Lina is tender, he takes Laura on a dining room table, in a wild frenzy of shared grief over their dead son, mutual sacrifice in business, and lust for a lost world. Let’s just say, if you see a gun, it must go off. Cruz dedicated her performance to all invisible women behind powerful men everywhere.

Paul Simon Comes Home to the Hamptons International Film Festival

Interviewed for Purist Magazine, the Oscar winning documentarian Alex Gibney was asked, how significant was it that his epic film on Paul Simon, IN RESTLESS DREAMS: THE MUSIC OF PAUL SIMON, would screen at this year’s HIFF. “Very, he’s coming home.” At a “Conversation With Paul Simon,” Simon spoke about his inspirations in music—doo wop and folk—his breakup with Art Garfunkel, Aretha Franklin’s cover of Bridge , his dislike of the song “Feeling Groovy,” Mike Nichols, Hugh Masekela, and strummed a bit on acoustic guitar. While he now lives outside of Austin, Texas with his wife Edie Brickell, the erstwhile resident of Montauk who had helped save the lighthouse in the late 1990’s inaugurating a series of yearly benefit concerts featuring such legendary stars as James Brown, Don Henley, the Allman Brothers, and Carly Simon, at 80, with a new album, he seems unstoppable, and though he had a plane to catch, did not want to leave the stage.

Seems like the Hamptons was a homecoming for many: Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi brought their film about champion swimmer Diana Nyad for the festival’s opening night. A first feature for the Oscar winning documentarians who specialize in harrowing true life adventure stories, NYAD, starring Annette Bening and Jodie Foster was particularly challenging, keeping its star in water eight hours a day.

Local film notables came to screenings: Julianne Moore, Bruce Weber, Bob Balaban and others supported by attending, despite strikes. Alec Baldwin with Hilaria and seven kids in tow attended the yearly party. Others such as Griffin Dunne and Celia Weston were present with their latest films, EX-HUSBANDS and A LITTLE PRAYER respectively. The funniest line in any movie comes from the hugely entertaining AMERICAN FICTION, when a character talks about the kind of literature—ghetto-- white folks in the Hamptons would love.

Bradley Cooper Shows Up for Maestro: A Historic Premiere at David Geffen Hall

Director/ Producer/ Co-writer/ Star Bradley Cooper gladhanded and hugged his wildly happy audience at the newly refurbished Geffen Hall, having been given permission by SAG to attend his passion project premiere of Maestro, centerpiece of the New York Film Festival. That his subject Leonard Bernstein had begun his career in this very place, conducting the Philharmonic, gave the evening extra resonance. Fervidly researching, Cooper was said to have attended many a performance in the past five years, seated in the conductor’s box hanging dangerously over the rail, rapt to the sound and feverish body movements of the job. His devotion extended to every aspect of the film, and it shows.

After an initial craggy faced vision of Bernstein in his last years—Cooper’s makeup is extraordinary, beyond the discussion of his nose—Bernstein is seen in five ages of his stellar career, ending every concert, gladhanding and hugging. Clearly Cooper meant to morph into his Maestro, taking hours in makeup time, insisting on being fully made up by the time cast and crew arrived at 5AM.

Glimpses of Bernstein’s musical genius pervade the film and are especially beautiful in a scene when a balletic dance of sailors in Wonderful Town cuts to Bradley Cooper in sailor dress, joining in, making his dips and turns. The Requiem in St. John the Divine is the longest musical interlude, showing Cooper completely following in Bernstein’s conductor chops. As noted later in the Q&A, performers who had worked with Bernstein actually imagined him back in action. That’s how authentic Bradley Cooper seemed to them.

At the Q&A, Cooper’s insistence upon authenticity was lauded over and over. Bernstein’s daughter Jamie Bernstein, who had written a memoir, Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein, talked about the genesis, how it started fifteen years ago and gained traction once Cooper took the film on. Josh Singer, co-writer with Cooper, said that not a word from his original script remained. Cooper chose to focus on the love affair of his marriage, giving Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre  top billing. She is truly divine in this Oscar worthy role, devoted to her husband, and devastated by his dalliances with other men, even though, as she says repeatedly, she knew what she was getting into.

Todd Haynes’ May December Opens The New York Film Festival

A young actress is to star in a biopic as a woman whose claim to fame is sexual deviance. That’s the premise of Todd Haynes’ latest film, May December, opening the esteemed New York Film Festival this week. Gracie (Julianne Moore), a baker and housewife in Savannah, now married to her much younger lover with whom she has college aged twins, is so reviled she receives a box of shit at the start and spends much of the movie managing the pain of being ostracized. The film offers an exceptional view of shifting perspectives on an “icky” subject.

When Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) arrives to take notes for her role, the two women dance a pas de deux of cautious friendliness, with Gracie demonstrating her cake-making skills, her beauty tips, her hold over her family. Edgy music keeps the viewer alert: who is playing whom? Or, how much does an actor really need to research to play a role? Joe, now 36 wasn’t yet a teen when he and Gracie first had sex. Deep into a guilt driven relationship, he becomes the movie’s center.

Introducing the film at Alice Tully Hall, director Todd Haynes signaled as much in stressing Charles Melton’s outstanding performance. With a nod toward his composer, Marcelo Zarvos, he spoke about the music leading events, a technique taken from a classic movie he saw on TMC, The Go-Between.

In the end, though, we don’t much like Gracie either. Haynes says of Moore: “Julianne loves to enter into these places of inscrutability in her depictions of women, and in stories in general, she does not want to put the viewer at ease.”