Gossip Central

Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig Mix It Up at the Gotham Awards

 Traditionally, the IFP Gotham Awards kicks off the film awards season. As celebrations go, this decidedly downtown dinner, sponsored by Robert Hall Winery, brings together New York’s movie making elite while honoring lower budget fare in Oscar-like categories. This year, I wanted to coin a category of my own, Best Speech, to be given to Olivia Wilde for her encomium to her "Richard Jewell" co-star Sam Rockwell, awarded one of Gotham’s four Lifetime Tributes. Wilde referred to the Academy Award winner for last year’s “Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri” as “Sammy.” Yes, he’s definitely a Sammy she said later, lifting the train of her flowing white gown to prevent tripping as guests exited Cipriani Wall Street for the night.

The Edge of Democracy: Contenders at MoMA/ DOCNYC

Amidst the shit storm of impeachment inquiry of the president Spike Lee calls “Agent Orange,” noting heavy toxins, the documentary The Edge of Democracy tells a political history set in Brazil, juxtaposed with the personal story of the director Petra Costa’s family. This relentless political drama can be seen as a cautionary tale, or just a grim look at what our world endures today as lies gain stature, dignity falls away, and everywhere, the people lose. At a special screening at MoMA, part of the current Contenders series auguring awards ahead, Lee introduced the film to a packed crowd. Most chilling in Brazil’s case, deposed officials refused to step down claiming corruption, the equivalent of “fake news.”

Dark Waters: Todd Haynes’ Drama of Dirty Industry

Out of the blue comes Dark Waters, Todd Haynes’ new film based on his star, Mark Ruffalo’s environmental passions. Fear of the water depicted in this legal procedural is not because of sharks, but because of industry, specifically the story of Dupont’s deliberate poisoning of landfill resulting in the death of animals and cancer in humans. The film did not take the conventional festival circuit, and, unlike the saturated colors of  movies Carol or Mildred Pierce, takes director Haynes into a dark mood and commercial genre; he handles it well crafting drama from a ripped from-the-headlines scandal, focusing on the tireless efforts of a corporate lawyer, Rob Bilott, whose firm sides with industry.

Meeting up with Bilett at the Lincoln Restaurant this week, at the movie’s premiere, we learned how the story is not yet over, with lawsuits accruing beyond the film’s final frame. But, as the film suggests, is it too late? The lethal chemical was also an ingredient of Teflon, a household brand, and everyone alive has ingested some amount.

Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards: Let the Prize Season Begin!

Longtime documentarian Frederick Wiseman was on a roll. First celebrated this week as a NYPL Literary Lion, he was then honored with the Critics’ Choice Documentary Lifetime Achievement Award redubbed for the late D. A. Pennebaker. With this renaming, Chris Hegedus, Pennebaker’s film and life partner for 43 years presented the statue to Frederick Wiseman noting his achievement in avoiding the usual devices such as voiceovers and talking heads, just turning his lens on a subject. And Wiseman especially admired Pennebaker: “He had fun making movies, and so do I.”

No one seemed to be having more fun at BRIC than pint-sized sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the subject of this year’s documentary, Ask Dr. Ruth. “I’m presenting shorts,” she announced proudly. “Even if that is because I’m short, just remember, size does not matter.”

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.

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.”

The Irishman: Scorsese Epic at the New York Film Festival

Trust Martin Scorsese. If he makes a 3 ½ hour film, he will have you by the throat, riveted and wondering where the time went. Such is The Irishman, his latest masterwork, which opened the New York Film Festival this week. Featuring a trifecta of characters in the personae of Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, adding Harvey Keitel for extra oomph, it’s a dream team tale with great work by Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale, and Anna Paquin, but this is less a girl’s story than a picture of America at a pivotal moment when the historic violence of political assassinations –JFK to name one--echoed the small mayhem of mob vendettas.

Framed on this large canvas by an old man in a wheelchair recounting his life at a nursing home, The Irishman is a confession with no hope for redemption. The Irishman is Frank Sheeran (DeNiro) and he paints houses, code for doing hits. Much has been written about the aging and de-aging techniques used in this film, as the sequences jump time, but old or young, the characters in Frank’s world come live in superb storytelling.

Woody Allen Attends Screening of One Child Nation

The special screening of Nanfu Wang’s One Child Nation, hosted by Oscar winners Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin at Lincoln Center this week, had some special guests among the attending elite of New York documentary filmmakers: Woody Allen and his wife Soon-Yi. The subject of this riveting documentary is the effect of China’s one child policy in that country. Said to help with population control, the rule of law, enforced in China from 1979 to 2015, severely punished families for having more than what was allowed, with forced sterilization and late term abortions. In the general propaganda extolling the virtues of keeping down the country’s birthrate, pop culture musical numbers show festively dressed women singing how wonderful life is with only one. Needless to say, families were devastated.