Gossip Central

Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson in Marriage Story at the New York Film Festival: Breaking Up is Hard to Do

Director Noah Baumbach knows from divorce, and has made films that have illuminated sides of that subject throughout his career. His 2005 Squid and the Whale comes to mind, and the family in The Meyerowitz Stories (2017) is riddled with marital fragility, and resilience. Each hews close to the director’s family background. Baumbach’s new film, Marriage Story, seems most immediately to be informed by his own real-life divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh in that we are looking at a couple of charming, good looking, articulate artists, with the superb actors Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson in the leads, but look again. The writing takes it somewhere else. At a press conference following a New York Film Festival screening this week, Baumbach claimed to want to tell a love story in a different way: “Sometimes you can see it more when it comes apart.”

The Irishman: Scorsese Epic at the New York Film Festival

Trust Martin Scorsese. If he makes a 3 ½ hour film, he will have you by the throat, riveted and wondering where the time went. Such is The Irishman, his latest masterwork, which opened the New York Film Festival this week. Featuring a trifecta of characters in the personae of Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, adding Harvey Keitel for extra oomph, it’s a dream team tale with great work by Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale, and Anna Paquin, but this is less a girl’s story than a picture of America at a pivotal moment when the historic violence of political assassinations –JFK to name one--echoed the small mayhem of mob vendettas.

Framed on this large canvas by an old man in a wheelchair recounting his life at a nursing home, The Irishman is a confession with no hope for redemption. The Irishman is Frank Sheeran (DeNiro) and he paints houses, code for doing hits. Much has been written about the aging and de-aging techniques used in this film, as the sequences jump time, but old or young, the characters in Frank’s world come live in superb storytelling.

Remembering D. A. Pennebaker: Through a Beat Lens

Back in 2002, the one and only time I attended the Cannes Film Festival, I was at dinner with D. A. Pennebaker, his wife and film partner Chris Hegedus, and my friend Roger Friedman who had made a film with the documentary team called Only the Strong Survive, an important historical exploration of R&B and soul music that was premiering at the festival. I was attending as a journalist, but Pennebaker knew I was a scholar of the beat generation literati, and as he did with every subject you
could mention, he had a story to tell.

On this occasion, he recounted his having talked to Kerouac about doing a film of On the Road, that is, Kerouac asked him to do it, just as he imagined Marlon Brando starring. Penny, as he is known, was going to start the film with the character of Dean, the legendary “son of a Denver wino” stealing cars, maneuvering them around a parking lot. It was Penny who gave me a new window into the subject I thought, after having written several books on Kerouac, I knew very well: how the newly created highway system in America promoted the fantasy of fast car escapes from the restrictions of society: Huck Finn’s raft supplanted by the automobile. The film never left their machinations.

It’s Me, Sylvia: Legendary Actress Sylvia Miles Remembered

 Sylvia Miles passed away today at 94. She always said she would not leave this earth without her academy award but sad, to report, that she did. A two-time nominee for just minutes of screen time in Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Farewell My Lovely (1975), Sylvia was a New York actress who would not relocate to Hollywood for greater fame and fortune, or better roles. Just last month MoMA featured the work of Abel Ferrara: in his Go Go Tales (2007), Sylvia Miles wears a Chanelesque jacket, as she performed opposite Burt Young, landlords to a downtown dance club run by Willem Dafoe. The movie ends with her sweet rendition of “Bed, Bath, and Beyond,” because the big store was going to replace the edgy pole dancing venue. Ah, gentrification. Sylvia made much of that jacket and the way it defined her character. I am so happy that she urged me to the screening, so I could see her in action from a bygone time, even if only in a movie. She wanted me to report any press to her, in the event that attention was paid.

Designing Women in its 20th Year: The Look of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Game of Thrones, 60 Minutes

Photo: Regina Weinreich

The makeup, hair people and costumers behind the scenes rarely get their due attention, but for 20 years, New York Women in Film and Television, has been celebrating them. While women are under represented in media, and often paid less than men doing the same jobs, makeup artists, hair stylists, and costume designers enjoy a distinct parity, even if they are not as publicly visible. As comedian Zainab Johnson, host of last evening’s star-studded event at the Directors Guild Theater pointed out, “Women can do anything.” Everyone in this room could laugh at how banal that sounded.

Piranhas Opens Film at Lincoln Center’s Festival of New Italian Cinema

Open Roads, an annual festival of new Italian cinema, kicked off this week at Film at Lincoln Center with a screening of Piranhas, directed by Claudio Giovannesi. Introducing his film, Giovannesi recalled having begun the script two years ago in New York, when he met with the novelist Roberto Saviano, the famed author of Gomorrah, about Neapolitan mobsters; their script for Piranhas won the Silver Bear in Berlin.

Skin, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, Charlie Says: Bad Boys at the Tribeca Film Festival

Tattoo sporting white supremacists make skin crawl, almost as much as the violence perpetrated in the name of hate. Expanded from an Academy Award winning short, Guy Nattiv’s Skin, a feature at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, stars a scary Jamie Bell, in over his head with a homeland terrorist “family.” Dad is Bill Camp, mom Shareen, a woman so smooth as she recruits new warriors into their hate group, offering sandwiches and hugs to runaways, you can see why Bryon could be so gulled, until he meets a family offering the dream of a “normal” life. Still, with his facial tats, he could never pass. And besides, they’d never let him leave.

Kenneth Branagh’s All is True Premieres: Shakespeare Takes Center Screen

Portraying his beloved Shakespeare at last, Kenneth Branagh, both director and star, imagines the bard’s life in his final years. “He was after all a man,” proclaimed Branagh, introducing his new film, All is True, to a Broadway elite at the SAG-AFTRA Foundation: The Robin Willians Center for an intimate premiere. The film’s idea: after the famous Globe theater burned down, Shakespeare returned to his birth home, Stratford-on-Avon, to his wife Anne Hathaway (Judi Dench), and children. There, he does what any man would do, damage control to redeem himself for his long absence, talk about his legacy with the Earl of Southampton (Ian McKellen), and garden. This is known: both his daughters were engaged in scandals, and his son died mysteriously. Women were unschooled, and any impropriety would lead to a witch-hunt. There is enough drama, and family dysfunction, in other words, to enliven the creative chops of screenwriter Ben Elton for this gorgeously made period piece!

Celebrating 50 with Film at Lincoln Center: What’s in a Name?

Purple over orange is always a good color choice, regal and elegant. The Film Society of Lincoln Center has had a makeover; Film at Lincoln Center reflects a shift in name and logo hue. Celebrating its 50th birthday this week, the yearly gala honored, not one career as in its traditional Chaplin Awards, but rather its decades long life; the former “society’ screened clips of its five decades as a premiere film venue. Feting the art of filmmaking, they introduced the work of such mega talents as Bunuel, Bertolucci, Truffaut, Varda, Denis, Kurasawa, among many other directors. Personal tributes from a film world elite including Tilda Swinton, Pedro Almodovar, Martin Scorsese, Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan, and many others who had shown work there, illustrated how Lincoln Center broke boundaries, crossing geography, gender, and generations. In a backhanded compliment, contrarian John Waters said, at Lincoln Center, if you don’t see the films they anoint into their canon, the films they want you to see, you will go to film Hell. With his signature smirk, he walked off the stage. Funny how breaking barriers can go mainstream.

Rendez-Vous with French Cinema Opens with Pierre Salvadori’s The Trouble with You

The annual fete de films, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, a collaboration between Unifrance and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, opened this week with a comedy, The Trouble with You. Director Pierre Salvadori introduced the film noting that most filmmakers in France are French New Wave influenced, but he is more inspired by Hollywood. “It’s more about my love of stories, of fiction, of Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder,” he explained. “My film is funny and sad. Feel free to laugh and cry.”

And so when the Trouble with You opens with a violent police action, the movie seems a startling homage, until the realization hits: a police procedural is appropriated for farce as only the French can do. Salvadori brought with him his leading man, Pio Marmai, with whom he has worked in the past. In fact, the last time he came to New York to promote a Salvadori film, he—in a drunken state— got a tattoo, the word for fighter misspelled.