Gossip Central

White Noise Opens the New York Film Festival with a Bang

The 60^th New York Film Festival opens with a lot of noise, White Noise, that is. Noah Baumbach’s movie, adapted from Don DeLillo’s classic American 1985 novel, features the kind of ambient sound that barely registers, punctuated by the boom of train/freighter collisions in combustible flames exuding plumes of smoke. It’s a canvas of the senses, in grays and vivid crayon color—all the distractible elements necessary for survival in the face of definite death. In Samuel Beckett’s hands, this dilemma is sparely etched. But guided by DeLillo’s images of American detritus, Noah Baumbach succeeds in answering the question of how can anyone make a movie out of the satiric cacophony/ harmony of White Noise? Or, perhaps even more relatable, how would you respond to a “toxic airborne event?”

He succeeds well, utilizing station wagons and the A&P supermarket to full luster. Not since Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California” have the aisles popped with shoppers and products strategically placed in happy familiarity. Mountains of everything a consumer would want to hoard.

His first adaptation, Baumbach claims to have been thinking about this project ever since as a teen his father put the novel in his hands. It helps that his father, novelist Jonathan Baumbach, was a professor at Brooklyn College and a writer wracked with his own existential dread, all familiar territory for the young Baumbach to mine. On a college campus setting, Jack Gladney (the excellent Adam Driver) is a celebrity academic, a specialist in Hitler studies. His colleague, Murray Suskind, (wonderful Don Cheadle) teaches Elvis. A beautifully choreographed lecture shows how enthusiasm for each of these idolized “superstars” flattens any moral, ethical consideration. Jack’s wife Babette (Greta Gerwig with big hair reminiscent of Melanie Griffith’s in Working Girl--no doubt costume designer Ann Roth’s touch), tries to cure her affliction: fear of death, much to the alarm of their three eldest children who chatter from beginning to end. Baumbach directed them to do that, as if they were an ongoing radio--back-sound being the point—punctuated by Danny Elfman’s music and a surprise joyful ending from LCD Soundsystem: to “new body rhumba.”

Lady Gaga’s Passion at the New York Film Critics Circle Dinner at Tao

Brought to tears in telling the tale of her immigrant ancestry, Lady Gaga thanked the New York Film Critics Circle for recognizing her for Best Actress for her performance in House of Gucci. Big on heart, she was grateful to everyone from director Ridley Scott to her hairdresser and makeup artist, but mainly, she cited her matrilineage of strong Italian women who taught her to be bold and fearless, in a family that featured lots of shouting. Sorry, mom, she shouted out to her platinum haired mother seated at her table at Tao, the meatpacking Asian-themed restaurant and longtime venue for this annual—except for the Covid years--event. 

She was not the only awardee crying with emotion. Jane Campion, the NYFCC’s pick for Best Director, her citation given by Martin Scorsese, spoke of an early turn around in her career when the movie Sweetie, which many critics did not like, got a second wind after the New York Times critic Vincent Canby wrote favorably about it and changed the “trajectory of my career.” Back in the day, Susan Sontag took her to tea. Nothing if not edgy, Campion’s Power of the Dog is frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar, but Drive My Car, from Japan, got that honor with the New York critics.

Oscar Picks 2022

Fair is fair. Choosing among the pleasures of this year’s best movies could not have been easy. Awards, particularly the Oscar voters’ choices announced this morning, reflect a nuanced vision: I am especially heartened by the nods to two of my favorite actresses, Jessica Chastain and Penelope Cruz in two outstanding of this year’s films: The Eyes of Tammy Faye and Parallel Mothers respectively. Will they win, over the work of Oscar winners Olivia Colman and Nicole Kidman? They can. And Kristen Stewart for Spencer, a movie that many people simply did not love—her fine performance as Diana deserves a category all its own.

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.

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.

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.

Todd Haynes' The Velvet Underground at the New York Film Festival: Homage to a Bygone Era

Film at Lincoln Center had a grand plan for Todd Haynes’ new film, The Velvet Underground. They would bring extant founding members of the band John Cale, Maureen (Mo) Tucker, for a performance at the movie’s New York Film Festival opening. That, sadly, was not to be. The premiere, though, with a posh party at Jazz at Lincoln Center, celebrated the city’s creative energy from which the New York Film Festival emerged, and the music that influenced generations of artists to come.

A vivid portrait of the band, yes, The Velvet Underground is a deep dive into the historic artistic period of New York in the ‘60’s, especially showcasing the avant-garde filmmakers who shot evocative footage: Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas. The Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh is a treasure trove of this rare material. The great Ed Lachman shot the interviews in 2018: Mekas at 96 was first.

The film is an homage to these underground filmmakers as well as to Lou Reed, whose teen years on Long Island, complicated sexuality and drug use provide the backstory for his artistic development. Studying poetry with Delmore Schwartz, Reed read Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Hubert Selby, Jr., and Arthur Rimbaud. Early on, he proclaimed he would be a rock star.