Gossip Central

Candace Bushnell Dares to Ask: Is There Still Sex in the City?

The night before the HBO series she spawned reincarnated as And Just Like That at MoMA, Candace Bushnell signals, she has moved on. At the Daryl Roth Theater, she struts across a stage fitted with a hot pink couch and shelves lined with Manolos, recounting a stellar career as columnist, coming from Connecticut, modest suitcase in hand, sleeping around. This “having sex like a man” becomes material, and quite explicit. If you are a fan of Sex & the City, you know what I mean. Miraculously, in her tour de force hour and a half one-woman show—with the exception of a cameo by two dogs, the words “penis” and “vagina” are uttered once each, as Bushnell poses the question, Is There Still Sex in the City? Phone in hand, she converses with her Samantha, her Miranda, and her Charlotte, paragons of wisdom, as she navigates her rise as writer, all the while dumped by lovers including her ballet dancer husband. The men she mentions do not fare well—even her supportive father somehow lets her know her flat chest will get her nowhere in love. An exception is Darren Star, the series showrunner who attended the opening. I caught up with him over a gargantuan urn of guacamole at the Rosa Mexicana afterparty where a Covid test was now the new condom: “Yes, she got it right. She’s honest about Sex & the City and how we got it made. She would not have invited me if she was going to trash me.”

Bridget Everett Stars in HBO’s Somebody Somewhere: The Heart of Manhattan, Kansas

First aware of Bridget Everett as a mother in Patti Cake$, an indie hit of 2017, I met her on two occasions: she was a flamboyant speaker at the Nantucket Film Festival that year receiving an award. Trust me, you never want to follow her onstage. Second, at the Athena Film Festival, she attended with her pal Murray Hill, so named for the Manhattan, NYC neighborhood. Both make a big impression, HUGE, and now you can see for yourself as Everett stars in an HBO series, Somebody Somewhere, with Hill in a supporting role, directed by Robert Cohen and Jay Duplass. So full of heart, I would say, the series is a gift for Valentine’s Day.

Rural America is a foreign country to me, but Manhattan, Kansas is both strange and ironic given that you cannot imagine a place more remote from Manhattan, New York, ground zero for misfits seeking personal expression. And guess what, looks like Bridget Everett feels the same way. She’s from there, and as Executive Producer of the series featuring autobiographical details from her life, she’s crafted this location, and at least fictionally, finds a voice there. Manhattan, Kansas is to Bridget Everett as Baltimore is to John Waters.

Drive My Car: An Oscar Game Changer from Japan

Life moves slowly. Loss. Grief. So much happens in Drive My Car, Japan’s entry for the Best International Film Academy Award, it is amazing that the movie is only two and a half hours long. That it has been named Best Film by the venerable NY and LA Film Critics can make you think, Parasite all over again, but that Best Picture Oscar winner from Korea is action-packed, a satiric bloody nightmare romp, while the longeuers of Drive My Car drive home deeper, more difficult truths, and how we process them. An acclaimed theater director (Hidetoshi Nishijima) loses his beautiful wife. Two years into his grief, he takes a job directing Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima. A young woman (Toko Miura) from a remote mountain town Hokkaido, dour, her face expressing oceans of sadness, chauffeurs him around in his red Saab. Producing Chekhov in Japan may represent one aspect of multi-culturalism, but the players speak many languages, including sign. And perhaps most poignantly, it takes more than translation to make inner lives connect.

Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story: Get Ready to Rumble

You will not have to ask, do we need yet another adaptation of this classic? With Leonard Bernstein’s music and Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics firmly implanted in your head, a memory of the 1961 Jerome Robbins’ choreography and Arthur Laurents’ book, prepare to be delightfully shocked at how much this new version of West Side Story feels new. Maybe it’s Tony Kushner’s masterful script that takes us first into an image of urban renewal, the ‘hood, a battleground for the Sharks and Jets, being right here in Hell’s Kitchen cum Lincoln Center (shot on a lot in Paterson, New Jersey), and the wisdom we bring knowing the future: everything must change.

But come back to that era: to the cars and shops declaring poverty, ethnicity, the warehouses, crumbling buildings—the boys styled like mid-century heroes, a bit of Marlon Brando and Jack Kerouac. Enter the sweet-faced Polack Tony for Anton (Ansel Elgort) and the Latina ingenue Maria (newcomer Rachel Zegler). Justin Peck updates the original choreography without upsetting Robbins’ vision. And then there’s Rita Moreno, the Oscar-awarded Anita in 1961, now near 90 and getting ready to be celebrated at the Museum of the Moving Image. A widow, perhaps an oracle to the young, as Valentina, Moreno bridges past and present: Spielberg has her singing “Somewhere,” and your heart aches.

Gotham Awards: The Film Season’s Coolest Kick Off

At the annual New York City event at Cipriani Wall Street, bestowing serious awards and spreading unexpected intimacy, Maggie Gyllenhaal swept the Gotham Awards in her directorial debut for The Lost Daughter. Her adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s short story won Best Screenplay and Best Feature; and, ç1 shared the award for Outstanding Lead Performance with Frankie Faison, star of The Killing of Kenneth. Traditionally the start of the award season for films, the Gothams prides itself on indie selections, and still manages to honor major stars.

Kristen Stewart introduced by Julianne Moore and Pablo Larrain who directed her in Spencer, his take on Diana, managed to keep it real deploying an occasional if authentic “f” word. As Moore, asked, “Who is cooler than Kristen Stewart? Well maybe Ethan Hawke who shared a prize for Outstanding Performance in a New Series for his work on The Good Lord Bird with Thuso Mbedu of The Underground Railroad, and then was right back onstage to introduce Peter Dinklage. “He contains multitudes,” Hawke quoted Walt Whitman, praising Dinklage’s acting chops. Bonding in praise of John Malkovitch, actor to actor, well, they should know.

JR’s Spontaneous Poetics: Paper and Glue

JR, French  graffiti artist and Agnes Varda collaborator on Faces, Places is infectious. His virus, a matchless enthusiasm for the creation of art, is impossible to describe: his energy is a force. Burroughs/Gysin had their Third Mind, Ouevres Croissees in French, a roadmap to artistic creation through collaboration, and JR inherits their spirit along with Varda’s. In his new documentary, Paper and Glue, he takes us to the US/Mexican wall, a California prison, the banlieu of Paris, favela of Rio, places we would never think to want to see. Infusing them with his je ne sais quoi, voila, they become the only places that matter, sites with superstars among the disenfranchised, the movie’s inscription from Varda: “If we opened people up, we’d find landscape.

His pal Bradley Cooper introduced the nomadic JR at the MoMA premiere this week, hosted by MSNBC whose filmmaking arm funded the film. Cooper, a bona fide movie star in awe, seemed happy to just to be in JR’s posse, a growing populace of fans and volunteers helping to build his outrageous installations. At the wall—yes that wall—someone even jokes about who is going to pay for it--JR erected a structure to paste a giant-sized photo of a small Mexican boy, waiting for the authorities to shut him down. Instead, they arrived and shared tacos. That’s just what you want to do with the irresistible JR. “Kevin,” a prison inmate sporting a swastika tattoo on his cheek, calls collect and JR picks up wherever he is. He sends Kevin a signed copy of Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Now, the prison system provides a tattoo removing system.

Last Night in Soho Hits a Nerve

Hard to put a finger on what makes Edgar Wright’s latest movie, Last Night in Soho, so deeply affecting. Is it the fascination with Anya Taylor-Joy’s indelible performance? So good at grabbing the eye in The Queen’s Gambit, Taylor-Joy is mainly a phantom in this coming-of-age horror movie set in a sinister London in the ‘60’s when everyone was swinging until they were not. Called Sandie, she haunts Eloise’s fantasies of a time gone by, when her mother came to the big city from the countryside to some tragic end. At the beginning, Wright lures you in: you think Eloise (the lovely Thomasin McKenzie) is a stand-in for Audrey Hepburn, twirling about in a frilly frock, mirrors galore in her bedroom, focused on fashion. Ingenue comes to London to learn her craft and is instead caught up in the horrors of exploitative men—such as Matt Smith, sporting a devilish seductiveness in a James Dean hair swoosh-- who steal their dreams.

Odessa Young, Olivia Colman, Penelope Cruz at the Hamptons International Film Festival If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother

Australian actress Odessa Young exhibits poise beyond her years. At 23, the star of Mothering Sunday, screened at the recent Hamptons International Film Festival, commanded a leather sofa at the Maidstone Inn in East Hampton, ready to promote her film. With her was her co-star Josh O’Connor, Emmy winner for his role as Prince Charles in The Crown. The two are a hot item in the movie, flirting, making love, unselfconsciously intimate, unclothed, under Eve Husson’s fine direction. The nudity, beside the point, was never mentioned. The actors instead raged on about who had the closer friendship with the elder star each adored, Colin Firth. Young was certain she was the one. O’Connor wisely let that rest.

The “mothering” of the title has to do with a day off, a family time in fact kept for their trysts. Young’s character, an orphan working as the well-to-do family’s housekeeper, has no family obligation, and as the bereaved mother (Olivia Colman in a small but memorable role) tells her; therefore, she would not, she says, experience loss; the opposite is true.

Pedro Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers Closes The New York Film Festival: Penelope Cruz is Spain’s Sophia Loren

Pedro Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers Closes The New York Film Festival: Penelope Cruz is Spain’s Sophia Loren loves women. He also loves actors. He could not have been more passionate introducing the stars of his new movie, Parallel Mothers, closing night of the New York Film Festival: Penelope Cruz and Milena Smit. Beautiful women, one older, the other younger, they play women who bond in a maternity ward, each birthing a daughter, and if you know this Spanish auteur’s oeuvre, the event occasions the usual high stakes emotional melodrama for which he famously directs the women to pull back the tears.

For this film, he folds their stories into a historical memory, a time when Fascists came door to door in the Spanish countryside arresting men, shooting them, their fates tied together with barbed wire in mass graves. Having been told of this horrific event by her grandmother, Cruz’s Janis (named for Janis Joplin) seeks to unearth this site in her village so that the men—fathers, brothers, uncles-- can be properly mourned and remembered.

The First Wave Opens the Hamptons International Film Festival

The opening night film is tough, warned a programmer at the HIFF, the beloved festival in person after the pandemic shutdown last year. It’s Matthew Heineman, I said, knowing that this documentary filmmaker embedded with Mexico’s cartels in his film, Cartel Land; of course it is tough. If you can insinuate yourself with murderous drug traffickers, might the hospital wards overwhelmed by Covid be a good subject. But here’s the unexpected: The First Wave covers a tough subject with enormous heart.

Ahmed, a police officer, overweight, and diabetic oozes pus on a hospital bed. A nurse, Kelly, knows he’s a family guy with young kids; she’s determined to help him make it through. He does not look so good, going in and out of ventilators. Not a good sign. We check in on him as he strains to have face time calls with his wife, Alexis, and their children. Other families come into view: one is a woman who just gave birth now fighting for her life. You know these stories and hundreds like them.

The Power of the Dog: Jane Campion’s Hills are Sexy

Who can forget Harvey Keitel’s full-frontal nudity in The Piano? How daring was Jane Campion’s female gaze in her 1993 feature! Now with her new film, The Power of the Dog, get ready for a well-hung Benedict Cumberbach. Based on Thomas Savage’s novel, The Power of the Dog, the film is shot in New Zealand, a stand in for 1925 Montana; the landscape stars, not that Cumberbach,

Kirsten Dunst, and Jesse Clemons don’t do their part with superb performances, as well as Kodi Smit-McPhee as Peter, a young, lean, fey boy, not yet at ease with his eye for men. Following a New York Film Festival screening, when asked about the prominent, imposing natural setting, Campion admitted, she found hills sexy.