Gossip Central

Ric Burns on Making Oliver Sacks: His Own Life: Narrative is Therapy

Waxing euphoric, documentarian Ric Burns, exclaimed, “The story in 14,233 lines was an attempt to get to the bottom, to heal the world.” He was not speaking of Doctor Oliver Sacks and his biopic, Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, of the noted neurologist and writer of Awakenings (1972) and The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (1985), the subject that brought us together on the phone this week, but of a current project on Dante, the Italian Renaissance author of The Divine Comedy: “Now in 2020,” said Burns, “Everything needs healing.”

The theme of healing unites these films for Ric, the younger brother of Ken Burns, to whom he apprenticed himself for the mini-series The Civil War and other projects, before striking out on his own. Oliver Sacks: His Own Life was featured in last year’s New York Film Festival—he says of the prestigious festival: “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” but as he’s made the rounds, including the 2019 Hamptons International Film Festival, he’s found, “People really gravitate toward Oliver Sacks.”

John Waters on Fire: New York Film Festival Poster Boy

Speaking of bad boy artists such as himself, writer William S. Burroughs proclaimed that “You become respectable if you stick around long enough.” John Waters, the creator of the nastiest images in movie satires, would gag at the implication of respectability, and if you check out the irreverence of his poster for the 58^th NYFF, you can see his level of impropriety at work. No boundaries. Nothing sacred. Some of our finest directors—Scorsese, Almodovar, Godard, Varda, Jenkins-- trashed. How very John Waters!

And yet, the bad boy in brocade jackets is on a roll! This past May, when he received an honorary degree from The School of Visual Arts, Waters wore a traditional gown, cap, and latex gloves, all in black, his signature pencil thin ‘stache under an artsy mask. Pulling it off, he consoled the graduates who’d been robbed of a “normal” graduation: “If you do die tomorrow, at least you’ll have a college degree.” As SVA’s President David Rhodes conferred upon him a Doctor of Fine Arts, Waters thanked everyone for their support of a lunatic: “Just call me Doctor Dirt.”

Chiara Mastroianni in On a Magical Night/ Rendez-vous with French Cinema

As of the beginning of March, Film at Lincoln Center was abuzz with plans for the annual Rendez-vous with French Cinema, with On a Magical Night to screen, and filmmaker Christophe Honore, and his star Chiara Mastroianni to attend. The festival kaboshed, like much of everything, the film is now available: strandreleasing.com. The director and star, distanced in Paris apartments with their respective cats, talked about their film on Zoom.

The French do have a way of making infidelity, especially a beautiful, feisty older woman with younger men, seem a rite of passage. Mastroainni plays Maria, married to Richard (Benjamin Biolay) who catches on by reading her student’s sexually charged texts on her phone. She leaves for a hotel across the street and the apparition of Richard’s younger self (Vincent Lacoste) comes calling. That’s the movie’s set up, and even when it is charming and funny, disloyalty carries its own weight.

Oscars 2020: Parasite Upset

Okay, we did see it coming. Parasite certainly made a big impression. A stylish hoot, the feature was the edgiest, artiest of the lot. Director Bong Joon Ho needed a drink after his writing win; maybe he thought his run would end after that, but the academy shed its love for him over top honors. Much like our current political scene, where the line-up of democrats does not seem to yield any one clear candidate, the Oscars, with 1917 looking like a Best Picture winner, had stellar contenders. The mood had shifted over the course of the award season. I, for one, wished more love could have been shared with The Irishman, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, or Little Women, that Parasite would beat Pain and Glory for Best International Film, and that would be that. Still, in the end, the Oscars 2020 show proved to be more entertaining than expected. As the dear departed two-time nominee Sylvia Miles used to say every year, the voting algorithm for Academy Awards is reliably unpredictable. Expect an upset.

The Times of Bill Cunningham: “We all get dressed for Bill”

Mark Bozek’s documentary, The Times of Bill Cunningham, features a fresh look at his subject from a 1994 taped interview: Hard working and uniquely talented, Bill Cunningham eschewed the limelight yet pursued and promoted style, at celebrity functions and on the street, often perched on his bike on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 59^th Street where Bergdorf Goodman sits majestically. Ah, the department store. It’s a dying breed, just like the self-effacing Cunningham himself. Anna Wintour famously quipped, “We all get dressed for Bill,” extolling the special fame of fashion and street photographer Bill Cunningham. When he died in 2016, Wintour wondered if there’d ever be another like him.

Incitement: New York Jewish Film Festival on a Roll

Where is Quentin Tarantino when we need him? As we know, his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, now nominated for a Best Picture Oscar among many other awards, turns on the conceit of what if, the fantasy that the Manson murders on August 9, 1969 had a different outcome. Yaron Zilberman’s Incitement, a powerful recreation of the events leading to November 4, 1995, climaxes in the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in Tel Aviv following his triumph with the Oslo Accords. The fiction film opens in New York this month, after screening in the current New York Jewish Film Festive, and at East Hampton’s Guild Hall this weekend, presented by HamptonsFilm. You watch, knowing the end, wishing history could be averted, hoping somehow that the murder of peace-loving Prime Minister Rabin would have stalled, and peace would prevail. Alas, instead Zilberman leads us through the “incitement” to the cataclysmic moment, exploring the mindset of Yigal Amir, an aspiring law student and orthodox Jew of Yemeni descent, whose violent act has led us to Bibi Netanyahu’s election, to a regime that remains strongly right wing, taking the region closer to chaos and war, and keeping peace an illusion.

Quentin Tarantino’s “Iambic Quintameter” and other Rhythms at the 85th Annual New York Film Critics Circle Awards Dinner

Back in 2012, when Brad Pitt received a Best Supporting Actor Award from the NYFCC, he proclaimed that he loved this award evening best of all because these awards will not be televised. Does that explain why this awards night breathes relaxation, friends awarding friends despite a gripe (from Adam Sandler) about mean reviewers? Not to mention Quentin Tarantino’s whine about critics, ones he loved and ones he hated, even though Pitt was presenting him with a Best Screenplay honor at this year’s NYFCC ceremony at Tao Downtown. Cued in to critics as scribes, Pitt emphasized Tarantino’s process: “Quentin writes his scripts by hand; he writes novelistic chapters of backstory for his characters, he loves them so much. I call his rhythms iambic quintameter.”

Cinema Eye Honors Docs: The Great Hack, American Factory, and More

Is Cinema Eye Honors a prelude to The Academy Award category for Best Documentary? The fifteen features shortlisted for an Oscar affirm the artistry of the nonfiction film. A champion of the art of doc, Netflix has distributed several of this year’s best, including The Great Hack and American Factory. The films have been available to stream for a while, but I saw them on the big screen this weekend, at The Roxy Hotel and at the Crosby Street Hotel, with filmmakers on hand to discuss their art.

Steve Bognar talked about the complexities of American Factory, how our perspective on the global economy shifts as foreign countries come to us for cheap labor and opportunities. Focusing on a Chinese owned factory in Dayton, Ohio, the film, co-directed by Julia Reichart who could not attend, shows what happened when General Motors left the city, and their factory, eliminating jobs. One woman said she earned $29/hour working for the car industry, but now when the Chinese-owned Fuyao glass factory offered her a much-needed job, she had to accept $12/hour. We also see a shift in culture and labor ethics, the urgency of union affiliation, and resistance to it. With no easy answer, the film tells a compelling and resonant story. This award-winning film has won numerous awards, most recently Cinema Eye’s Honors for Outstanding Nonfiction Feature and Outstanding Direction.

Why The Song of Names Matters

On the eve of the Golden Globes, consider The Song of Names, a film of merit in a tough, competitive film season. An epic post-Holocaust drama of two men who grow up as brothers, one a Jewish child prodigy, the other a Christian, the son of a classical music producer, The Song of Names focuses on its title song. Coming at a pivotal point in the film, “Song of Names,” composed by Oscar-winner Howard Shore, defies clichés about the Jewish dead, in simply naming names—in this case, the murdered at Treblinka; miraculously, the Canadian filmmakers, producer Robert Lantos (Sunshine, Barney’s Version) and director Francois Girard (The Red Violin, Thirty-two Short Films about Glenn Gould) were permitted to film there, a memorial site with an unforgettable field of boulders, each representing a town evacuated to this death camp. Based on the novel by Norman Lebrecht, he movie was a standout at the recent Hamptons International Film Festival, where I sat down with the filmmakers to talk about music, the Holocaust, and the stars Clive Owen and Tim Roth.

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.