Gossip Central

Rory Kennedy Premieres her NASA Documentary for Sarasota Film Festival’s Awesome Closing Night

Planet Earth was the star of the Sarasota Film Festival’s closing night film, Rory Kennedy’s Above and Beyond: NASA’s Journey to Tomorrow, just in time for Earth Day. Following up on an aspirational speech given by her uncle, President John F. Kennedy, about going to the moon at Rice University, Kennedy’s documentary tells the history of NASA from the ‘60’s to the present, how space, the planets, and the universe, have been explored and what scientists have learned about the Earth. David Bowie may sing his query, Is there life on Mars? And the answer is still looking for signs. For sure, the Earth is vulnerable. Global warming is irrefutable. Following the screening, a panel featuring Kennedy, Mark Bailey, her husband and the film’s producer, and scientist Dr. Ellen Stofan answered questions about the possibilities of life beyond our planet, and the excitement of continued exploration. What about space tourism?

Sarasota Film Festival Celebrates 20

“In our 20^th year, we have more films than ever,” Mark Famiglio, Chairman and President of the Sarasota Film Festival said in a phone interview about the two-week event now underway until April 22. While many beautiful locations world over can boast of a film festival, SFF is often noted as a well-kept secret for its intimacy, and inspired audiences, reflecting the community’s commitment to the arts. This year Sarasota is especially popular for the new boutique hotels gracing the city’s downtown, and a new building space designated for the festival. “We were at the epicenter of financial collapse in 2008,” Famiglio exclaimed. “We recovered. Today we are well programmed, well conceived and FUN. Maybe we will last another 20 years.”

Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, and Mathieu Amalric

Hollywood can learn a thing or two from the French, its film industry and joie de vivre. Mathieu Amalric, attending this year’s Rendez-vous with French Cinema, the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual popular series in collaboration with Unifrance, presented his film Barbara, homage to a chanteuse, not so famous anywhere but France. Best known to American film lovers for his acting in such films as Julian Schnabel’s Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and for Steven Spielberg’s Munich, and most recently Arnaud Desplechin’s Ismael’s Ghosts, featured in this year’s New York Film Festival, here Amalric directs. On hand with the film’s star, Jeanne Balibar, incidentally the mother of his two sons, Amalric apologized for Barbara’s lack of plot to an opening night audience that included John Waters and James Ivory, just back from L.A. after winning his Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Call Me by Your Name.

Athena Honors J. J. Abrams, Bridget Everett, Amma Asante, and Barbara Kopple

Dedicated to celebrating courageous and audacious women leaders, the Athena Film Festival captures the Zeitgeist. Under the auspices of Barnard College, Athena honored J. J. Abrams, presenting him an Athena Leading Man award, among its stellar women in film honorees this year, Amma Asante, Athena Breakthrough awardee Bridget Everett, and Barbara Kopple its Laura Ziskin Lifetime Achievement Award. In accepting, awardees are asked to speak about a woman influence, excluding mother. Introduced by Lena Dunham, Abrams spoke about his wife, Katie McGrath. You’ve gotta love a man who honors his wife. She and Abrams run his Bad Robot production company. She is also one of the forces in the Time’s Up movement; many at Athena wore the pin, the much talked about accessory at the Golden Globes. And then, defying the rules, he did thank his mother. What a mensch!

Oscar Nods: Sharing and Sparing the Love

When the category of Best Picture swells to nine, you can be sure that your favorites will be covered. Throughout “the season,” prognosticators haggled --with one another and themselves-- over the supremacy of The Shape of Water over Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, Lady Bird over Get Out, Dunkirk over The Darkest Hour. An excellent solution is to award every one of them, and with the lineup announced today, every one of them gets the prize for showing up. But, it is safe to say, as one Academy member has reminded me year after year, this award is like no other. And so, I would like to think there is still mystery afoot for the winner, even though I am pretty sure of which are the real contenders on this awesome list, and which one will get the prize.

Lance Armstrong on Doping: Icarus

The evening was not unusual. Just a screening of a documentary, Icarus, for a roomful of leading documentarians: Academy Award winning ones like Alex Gibney and Barbara Kopple among many others, for purposes of Oscar nominations. The unusual part was having Lance Armstrong participate in the post-screening panel at 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge. The movie, Netflix’s powerful expose of doping among Olympian athletes, directed by Bryan Fogel and produced by Dan Cogan shines a light on Lance Armstrong’s scandalous use of drugs during his stellar award-laden cycling career. You would think he would shy away, ashamed. But the film’s main protagonist, a Russian scientist named Grigory Rodchenkov, now in hiding as the Russians have called for his execution, was the real focus of attention. A whistleblower, Rodchenkov created the testing for steroids, as well as a method to defy the testing for them. He was willing to talk to Bryan Fogel about state sponsored doping.

From Saoirse Ronan to Tiffany Haddish: Girl Power at the New York Film Critics Circle Award

No one had to complain about anyone’s misconduct, not sexual anyway, at last night’s New York Film Critics Circle Awards dinner at Tao in the meatpacking. Every honoree, including the great Molly Haskell who picked up the group’s Special Career Achievement Award for her lifetime of serious reviewing, actresses Saoirse Ronan and Tiffany Haddish, and the men, as in Willem Dafoe who was awarded Best Supporting Actor for his motel landlord role in The Florida Project or Timothee Chalamet who got his Best Actor for his star turn in Call Me By Your Name exuded the confidence of a job well done. At 22, Chalamet has three significant roles this season: aside from starring with Armie Hammer in CMBYN, he’s killed off early in Hostiles, and he thanked Greta Gerwig, winner for Best Picture last night, recounting a scene in a bar where someone noticed him, “Hey, isn’t that the douchebag from Lady Bird?” He loved the recognition.

Tina Fey and Don Katz Honored at the New York Stage and Film Winter Gala

Comedian Tina Fey and Don Katz founder and CEO of Audible, Inc. were honored by New York Stage and Film at their winter gala this week. Attending the dinner at Pier Sixty with the hope of scoring some tickets to Hamilton—yes, still—I was soon apprised that the bidding for them started at $4,000. I could dream on. This was a night for funny with Tina Fey feted, introduced by Andrea Martin, and with Dana Delany introducing Don Katz. Tina Fey’s posse included some funny women Carol Kane and Ellie Kemper. But first an incredible line up of actors including John Slattery and Jayne Houdyshell read vignettes to illustrate the magic of Audible.

Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird: A Triumph of Mothers and Daughter

It was lovely to see Saoirse Ronan win the Best Actress Gotham Award for her role as “Lady Bird”/ Christine in Greta Gerwig’s debut film as a director. Especially so, because her mother, who lives in Ireland, was present at Cipriani Wall Street, and Gerwig initially titled the film, “Mothers and Daughters.” I saw the film for a second time at a recent screening at the Crosby Hotel hosted by Candice Bergen and Chloe Malle, mother and daughter. While Gerwig will admit the film hews close to some biographical detail, for example, that it is set in Sacramento, California, and she did in fact attend Catholic school, she veers off in many ways from her own story. Women of her age will surely identify with Ronan’s Lady Bird, her wrongheaded choices in boys, friends, habits like smoking, just about everything.

Call Me By Your Name: On Peaches and Paternity

Just announced, the movie Call Me By Your Name garnered six Independent Spirit Award nominations, more than any other film. On the same day, Andre Aciman and Luca Guadagnino, just back from Italy, spoke about the film at the New York Public Library at 42^nd Street.

“I hate the word adaptation,” said Andre Aciman, about, eh, the adaptation of his 2007 novel Call Me By Your Name by James Ivory for the new movie of that title, directed by Luca Guadagnino. Aciman addressed a crowded auditorium of fans at the Library: “They cut this and add that,” he explained, so authors complain, “but I could see that film can do things that cannot be done in a book.”