Gossip Central

Secrets of the Whales Premieres in Time for Earth Day

Introducing the National Geographic series at a virtual premiere, to stream on Disney +, part of a weeklong celebration of Earth Day, the actress Sigourney Weaver, found the secrets of whales “astonishing.” What is truly astonishing is how intimate National Geographic photographer Brian Skerry becomes with the whales, learning their “secrets.” It is no spoiler to reveal them: Whales have culture. Using the tag line: they play, they mourn, they are just like us, National Geographic promotes the idea of empathy for another species—big time!

The filming of this epic adventure took three years. Amazing how much humans can bond with their fellow mammals in that time, in many locations: Norway, Antarctica, Dominica, St. Lawrence, New Zealand, the South Pacific, to name a few of the spectacular locations. We were rapt for two hours: one Orca attempted to feed fin and wet suit clad Skerry, undersea camera in hand, who quipped, perhaps she was thinking he was undernourished. She’d picked up a stingray, and knew to turn it upside down to a sleep mode to better serve him for dinner. Yes, survival is key, and that wisdom is handed down through elder females.

Joel Coen’s Tragedy of Macbeth Opens the NYFF: Let It Come Down

As a tragic hero, a deeply flawed man, Denzel Washington was perfect for the role of Macbeth. He’d done downcast/larger-than-life before, say, in August Wilson’s Fences, and now in Joel Coen’s new film that opened the new season’s New York Film Festival, his Macbeth oozes Shakespeare’s eternal wisdom: It’s not that good to be king.

When Coen was asked whether Washington was his first choice for the role, his producer, Lady Macbeth herself, Frances McDormand said, “There’s no list for Macbeth. You must be born to it.” Seated between Coen and Washington, her two husbands so to speak, in life and in tragedy, on the Walter Reade Theater stage for a post-screening press conference, she professed to have instigated the project, having slept walked in Lady Macbeth’s shoes since she was 14. While there have been many Macbeths through the centuries, this one, in sumptuous and austere black & white most closely follows Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight, and yet Roman Polanski’s was referenced as well. Discussing the age of this murderous couple, the usual idea is to make them young and ambitious. McDormand and Washington make them older, passed over by the king, and wanting to get their due. We can attest to that feeling, Frances and Denzel, revel in a private joke.

Alessandro Nivola’s Breakthrough in The Many Saints of Newark

How was Tony Soprano “made?” That’s the through line for the long-awaited prequel to HBO’s Sopranos series, The Many Saints of Newark. At a stellar premiere this week at the Beacon Theater, Robert DeNiro, who knows a thing or two about mobsters, along with Tribeca Film Festival partner Jane Rosenthal—greeted a packed, masked house of the show’s creators, veteran actors, as well as devotees dressed to kill. As creator David Chase introduced the superb cast, much hooting and shouting, I love you, rang out--well, this was a celebration. With no room for this feature to tank—instead, it radiated excellence intertwining the Soprano’s trademark violence with values of the family kind.

Tony (a wonderful Michael Gandolfini trying on his late, great father’s shoes) is just a kid here, troubled but smart, a born leader, taking notes from a variety of paternal figures, especially his uncle Dickie Moltisanti played with psychotic charm and menace by Alessandro Nivola. You have never seen this actor this good, turning from lover to murderer on a proverbial dime. At the Tavern on the Green afterparty, Vera Farmiga, Tony’s mother Livia in the film, could not stop talking about Sandro, how she could not take her eyes off his every gesture. She, in turn, transformed to play the Soprano matriarch, brings the mob wives’ domineering submissiveness to new levels of humor and delight. John Magaro as Silvio Dante gets a big laugh as we see him walk that walk. Billy Magnusson as Paulie Walnuts frets over the blood stains on a new jacket as he tortures, making a mess using a drill. They almost got Corey Stoll as Uncle Junior to sing. With its sly humor and nod to the popular, game changing series, the movie creates its own universe—this is not Philip Roth’s Newark.

Allen v. Farrow on HBO: Hearing Dylan Farrow

Perhaps you are wondering, is there anything more to say about this decades-old very public scandal? To recap, Woody Allen’s adult daughter Dylan has accused him of molestation when she was seven. Even in his most recent 2020 memoir, Apropos of Nothing, Allen proclaims innocence, affirmed in the courts and in a lie detector test. Allen writes that the charges against him were instigated by Mia Farrow, a woman scorned as Allen dumped her and married her daughter Soon-Yi, adopted with her husband Andre Previn. On the Allen side, many believe him. Yes, that story is now revived in a riveting 4-part documentary, Allen v. Farrow, to air on HBO. The filmmakers, Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, with Amy Herdy, contend that key voices were not heard, mainly Dylan’s. To agree with them, the assertion that the abused must be heard alone makes this documentary a compelling, must-see testament. In this era of reckoning: by revisiting allegations of abuse, the film shines a light on the psychological damage, the fragility of parenting, the processes of healing, and the tiresome nature of celebrity scandal--even if, especially if, you come away with the central issue of the abuse unresolved.

Denzel Washington’s Vision: The Museum of the Moving Image Honors Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

Blues singer Ma Rainey was plus sized in many ways, most especially her voice. In a new film based on August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Viola Davis gives her Ma a grimace to go with her mega-sound, as large as life for blacks in America. Davis’s Ma is a grand performance balanced by that of one of her horns-men, lithe Levee, played with charm cum mischief and madness by Chadwick Boseman. Ruben Santiago-Hudson adapted Wilson to perfection in this gem, and this week, the movie, to air on Netflix, had its premiere at the Museum of the Moving Image gala. Virtual, this event was a state-of-the-art forum on the movie’s production, starring Viola Davis and cast, costume designer Ann Roth, director George C. Wolfe who accepted an award from producer Denzel Washington.

Washington, a longtime interpreter of August Wilson’s art, vowed to make the playwrights’10- play cycle, one for every decade of the 20^th century, into film. That vision started with his direction of Fences in 2016, an Oscar nominated film in which he starred with Davis. While Fences does not take place in a recording studio, Wilson's dialogue is always rhythmic. Speaking about the musicality of Ma Rainey, the actors talked about filming with rehearsal time as if this were a staged production, and the bond created among the players. The actor Glynn Turman, Toledo in Ma Rainey, recounted Denzel seeing him in a production of the play and saying, “Stay ready. I stayed ready.”

Nomadland: Off the Grid with Frances McDormand

Chloe Chao’s extraordinary film Nomadland is a map of America, seen in Frances McDormand’s face. Unadorned, craggy, her face looms large in every frame—that is, when the camera is not tracking roads along America’s most beautiful open spaces, the deserts of the West. You do not want to take your eyes off McDormand’s Fern, a human embodiment of the American frontier, its resilience and relentless loneliness. We—our culture climbing out of difficult political years-- haven’t focused on those places sufficiently, places in Nature threatened by commodification and industry. But the open road motif is an American tradition, a promise of freedom inherent in the pursuit of happiness, the heart of democracy’s foundation.

Rocks feature as prominent edifices in this landscape, and Zhao juxtaposes their humble majesty with the Amazon fulfillment center where Fern sometimes works when she’s not on the road. The steel grid, hive of busyness, brings to mind last year’s excellent documentary American Factory. Fern, maybe a nickname for Frances, although the actress goes by Frannie, is otherwise an unglamorous shrub close to the earth. The cast, an ensemble of real-life nomads, go by their names including co-star David Strathairn, David, a man Fern connects with in her travels, or stasis in one of the RV stations she parks her tricked up van, “Vanguard,” now her home after her mining town, Empire, shut down. Charlene Swankie is a stand out; with a few months to live, she’s in charge of her destiny. She makes you understand Fern’s choices, including one you wish she’d reconsider: a future with David and his warm family.

Joy Behar’s Healthy Disrespect Benefits Guild Hall

As I write, Joy Behar asks Kamala Harris tasteful if anxious questions about the election/ COVID/ and Joe Biden’s plans on her daytime show The View. Her respect is through the roof, though you know, after years of experience, she has her doubts about the role of government on the planet. Wearing a blue sweater embroidered with the words, “I’m speaking,” she’s a lot to reckon with; with her, nobody’s going to mess. It’s a leap to think of her as a playwright, and now, we must. In five tidbits she wrote, an entertainment to benefit Guild Hall this week titled, A Totally Disrespectful Evening of Virtual Short Plays, she puts her views to dramatic effect. An A-list of her pals—Lorraine Bracco, Dylan McDermott, Robert Klein, Brenda Vaccaro, Chris Bauer, to name a few-- mouth off in a variety of situations, culminating in a one-woman tour de force: Behar herself as a shoplifter, offers a step by step how-to, explaining the orgasm as you exit the store, and stating, “If Trump gets re-elected in November, who knows what crimes I might commit.”

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.”

David Byrne’s American Utopia: Spike Lee’s Documentary Brings Us to Our Senses

Back before the pandemic made everything stop making sense, David Byrne opened his American Utopia at Broadway’s Hudson Theater, the most entertaining show in town. Everybody knew it, and tickets sold like hot cakes. Of course, so much in America had stopped making sense prior to the unanticipated lockdown; as upbeat as American Utopia was, a sly critique marked every song in this unique musical, immigration, leadership, and Black Lives Matter. Now that Spike Lee has made a film of the staged performance, with the great Ellen Kuras’ cinematography, and now that the film has opened the Toronto Film Festival last week, and will be featured in the upcoming New York Film Festival before it airs on HBO in October, a new audience can have a close up view of the most exuberant, life affirming, and topical musical, just before our elections.

Poetry in a Pandemic: Bukowski, Towle, Giorno, La Prade

For Charles Bukowski’s 100^th birthday, coronavirus or not, attention must be paid. Famous in movies portrayed by Mickey Rourke (Barfly) and Matt Dillon (Factotum), the subject of a 1973 documentary by Taylor Hackford, Bukowski was a one-of-a-kind, sexy despite huge facial crevices left by acne, crude: he once described writing a poem was like taking a big bear shit. Now there’s a new documentary assembled from a rare, rediscovered 1981 interview by Silvia Bizio, an Italian journalist, You Never Had It-An Evening with Bukowski, directed by Matteo Borgardt, and whether or not you agree with Bukowski’s view of poetry composition, it is a must-see for a glimpse of this boozing, chain-smoker who fascinates with every word.

Blair Underwood’s Ecstatic Face in The Pack, a Virtual Premiere at Guild Hall

The season would not be eh, the season without all-star comedy from Eugene Pack. He was back virtually on Sunday premiering a program of 3 short works to benefit Guild Hall, starring Matthew Broderick and John Leguizamo performing together for the first time, Blair Underwood and Sherri Shepherd, and Rachel Dratch, Cecily Strong, Andrea Martin, Santino Fontana and Maulik Pancholy. The talented Dayle Reyfel, Pack’s partner and frequent ensemble player, appeared in an unusual way. The playlets inaugurated the final leg of a series that will include some live, distanced, performances in the Guild Hall garden, all sold out. Reached by phone in LA, playwright/ performer, Eugene Pack said he is busy bringing actors together, but he wants everyone to know The Pack owes more to film, although it sounds more like an innovative hybrid, reflecting our current states of creativity.