Gossip Central

Woman’s Day Red Dress Awards: Seeing Red on Heart Disease

“I see a sea of red,” became the cliché of the night at Lincoln Center’s Appel Room for the Woman’s Day Red Dress Awards. Indeed, red was encouraged for stars on the red carpet, Angela Bassett, Susan Lucci, and everyone else, and it seemed a giant homage to Valentine’s Day and the Chinese Lunar New Year celebration all wrapped in one. But the unifying image was the heart, meaning heart health for women. Lucci, the queen of soap operas, told a story of being the picture of health and suddenly feeling pressure in her chest in October, averting a heart attack. Bassett, the queenly Ramonda in Black Panther, lost her mother in 2014 to heart disease. She wanted to create awareness for the link between Type 2 Diabetes and heart disease. Each speaker, and including doctors Dr. Sharon Hays and Mary N. Walsh, had a message: these episodes are preventable.

Song of Parkland: Surviving the Valentine’s Day Massacre

When we ran into Melody Herzfeld at the Tony Awards, she seemed stunned at the place history had taken her. This week at a special screening of Song of Parkland, an HBO documentary directed by Amy Schatz, she had her Tony Award by her side, still stunned, and feeling guilty. She would have preferred a prize for merit, she said. Instead she was honored for her heroism in a tragedy, coolly ushering 65 students into a back storeroom closet for two hours as a gunman murdered 17 at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida where she taught drama. At HBO, dozens of her former students attested to her epic qualities as a teacher. While she was not falsely modest, part of her charm is a self-effacing humor worthy of Joan Rivers. Then again, as she told us at the Tony’s, she was from these parts, from New Jersey.

Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists on HBO: Virile Prose and the Value of Truth

There aren’t any more Breslins or Hamills, exemplars of a masculine New York postwar street journalism. Now these superstars of newsroom culture star in a state of the art documentary, Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists, to air this week on HBO. At a star-studded premiere at the Time Warner Center with dinner at Porterhouse, they were celebrated in high style—Jimmy Breslin died in 2017, and a frail Pete Hamill could not attend-- even as the world they brought to life feels like a near forgotten memory of a bygone era.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Never Look Away Gets an Oscar Nomination

Now that the Academy Award nominations are out, with Roma, Capernaum, The Shoplifters, Cold War and Never Look Away the academy’s picks for Best Foreign film, the winner in this category will be hard to predict. Opening in theaters this week, Germany’s Oscar entry, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Never Look Away, provides a glimpse into an artist’s life against the backdrop of the Nazi’s declining power in Europe, and the advent of the Communism in Germany. Based loosely on Gerhard Richter’s career, his coming of age in Dresden, escape to the West, painting studies in Dusseldorf, and phenomenal professional and personal success, this epic length movie moves briskly through its three hours plus: it’s a love story with a potent villain played by Germany’s uber romantic hero, Sebastian Koch, with young lovers Tom Schilling and Paula Beer. Schilling’s Kurt makes his breakthrough discovery of collaging gauzy images of photos from the past. In a traditional movie narrative, this filmmaker depicts Europe’s destruction by the Nazis, euthanasia of mental patients, political loyalties and injustices and its aftermath. As in his Oscar winning The Lives of Others (2006), a potent message comes forward: Yes, Germans suffered too.

Cinema Eye Honors: Are These Awards Predictors of Best Documentary Oscars?

Non-fiction films take center stage at the Cinema Eye Honors, awards for the art of documentary filmmaking. At the Museum of the Moving Image this week, pioneers and newcomers to the field, gathered to recognize achievement in editing, directing, graphic design or animation, cinematography and other aspects of story-telling craft. Oscar voters have their own list; the Cinema Eye nominees, and winners, coming from theatrical, television, and streaming venues, may not be your most familiar movies, such as this year’s Free Solo, Three Identical Strangers, and Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, but they are the ones most admired by industry insiders. Academy Award winner Morgan Neville said he was attending: because his documentary about Mister Rogers was nominated, and because he loves the documentary community.

Love Fest for Green Book at Patsy’s Restaurant

The road movie Green Book, winner of numerous awards this week, is also shadowed by controversy. Are recent discoveries of racist tweets an attempt to bring down what is for many the Oscar film of the year?

At a celebration for Green Book at Patsy’s Restaurant this week, friends and family of both jazz pianist Dr. Don Shirley and his driver Tony Lip gathered to remember the real life characters of this crowd-pleasing road story. Daniel Craig hosted, and stuck around just long enough for the movie’s star, Viggo Mortensen, to arrive. As he left, a waiter requested a selfie with him, and the Bond actor obliged.

Golden Globes to New York Film Critics Circle Awards: How to Travel Light During the Award Season

With this year’s Golden Globes in Hollywood preceding the New York Film Critics Circle’s annual award dinner by a night, the big question was how did directors like Alfonso Cuaron (Roma) or actors like Regina King (If Beale Street Could Talk), winners at both events, traverse the country with such speed, looking fresh as can be? Imagining private jets, I was briskly informed by an insider, they were on a 7 A. M. flight out of L. A. this morning, arriving in New York in the afternoon. At Tao Downtown, Roma was honored: while our president looks to make a wall, Roma gives us a window. Roma won not only for Best Film and Best Director, but Best Cinematographer: that would be Alfonso Cuaron himself, so for sure, he’d make every effort. The transition West to East may have looked seamless, but the Golden Globes, so green in everyone’s memory, made a lingering impression.

Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie Rule in Mary Queen of Scots

Celebrating her new movie Mary Queen of Scots this week at the Monkey Bar, the actress Saoirse Ronan, now 24, said she’s has wanted to play the role of this ill-fated queen since she was 18. “Mary is a big deal where I come from, an icon,” she noted, and though many notable actresses have played her, there was enough new in the source material, a copiously researched book by Tudor scholar John Guy, to warrant another look. Director Josie Rourke was attracted to the period material through the book, which reads like a “forensic thriller”—“I’m just a nerd,” she joked. That, and Ronan’s enthusiasm: “My path to this film was through Saoirse.”

Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War: Cool Women and Hot Jazz

For Oscars, the Best Foreign Language Film category is often a fierce race with some of the year’s best offerings. When The New York Film Critics Circle anointed Alfonso Cuaron’s Mexican-language Roma best film, the move acknowledged a “darling” that’s been on many critics’ “best” and “favorite” lists beating out American or English language hits such as Green Book, A Star is Born, and The Favourite, among many others hotly debated. That selection also made room for Cold War as Best Foreign Language Film. At this year’s New York Film Festival, where I first saw it, this black & white gem, the Polish Academy Award entry, resonated deeply for me, a reaction confirmed at a more recent second viewing following a Q&A at the Brasserie Ruhlmann between the actress Rachel Weisz and Cold War director Pawel Pawlikowski.

John C. Reilly and Steve Coogan in Stan & Ollie: Do You Like My Hat?

Reviving the classic antics of the premiere comedy duo of the 1930’s is no joke. A new movie, Stan & Ollie, features performances by John C. Reilly and Steve Coogan, based on the final tour of the very lean Stan Laurel and the very large Oliver Hardy, as their fame declined. With a script by Jeff Pope and under the fine direction of Jon S. Baird, the comic team comes live, a testament to the talents of this cast. New audiences will be introduced to a historic moment in entertainment, the visual gags and simplicity of the time. Audiences for whom Laurel & Hardy were childhood staples will delight at the laughs, and will be moved by the underside of their hilarity, the resilience of their friendship, the challenges of maintaining celebrity.