May 2008
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Movie critic and feature writer, Joe Meyers, rambles and keeps us posted about theater, film, book and other cultural stuff that couldn't fit into his Connecticut Post columns.
May 12, 2008
Diary of a mad playwright
 We are all used to the notion of semi-autobiographical movies in which writer-directors act out variations on their own life experience — Woody Allen has spent much of his career doing just that and others who have worked the same genre include Ed Burns and Frenchman Yvan Attal.
But, it isn’t common for a playwright to act on a New York stage in one of his own plays, so David Grimm is exposing himself in “Steve & Idi” — his new comedy-drama at the Rattlestick Theatre in Greenwich Village — in a way that Richard Greenberg and Tony Kushner have not attempted.
Grimm is one of my favorite contemporary theater writers. He received superb productions of “The Great Osram” and “The Learned Ladies of Park Avenue” at Hartford Stage in recent seasons and I’ve enjoyed his off-Broadway shows “Kit Marlowe” and “Measure for Pleasure,” too.
The playwright has a tough, cynical sense of humor that has been restrained a bit in some of his period pieces, but “Steve & Idi” is a angry, confrontational contemporary play about a theater writer on the verge of a nervous breakdown — partially the result of the precarious position of any young and serious American playwright today and partially due to his self-destructive romantic and sexual relationships.
Just as it is probably wrong to assume Woody Allen is all of the characters he’s played in his own films, the Brooklyn writer Steve in Grimm’s play might not be all that much like the “real” writer behind the piece. The writer might be having some fun at the expense of his most tortured artiste friends and acquaintances.
But, with Grimm acting for the first time in 18 years, you can’t help but believe there are strong parallels with Steve that made him feel he should play the part.
To Grimm’s credit, Steve is viewed in a much harsher light than the other characters in the play. He pushes friends and potential lovers away in an often unpleasant manner and the quality of the work Steve is doing is never romanticized either — indeed, we are left with the impression that the play Steve is writing about Idi Amin is probably unproduceable and a symptom of his emotional deterioration.
The device of Idi — or rather the spirit of Idi — marching into Steve’s apartment right after the writer tries to kill himself is used for much sharp humor but the ghost (so well played by Evan Parke) also works as a literal depiction of the writer’s violent imagination.
Director Eleanor Holdridge has assembled a first-rate cast of five for “Steve & Idi” and it is a credit to Grimm that he holds everything together with his witty but harrowing portrait of an artist in melt-down mode.
Some of the reviews of “Steve & Idi” have been savagely negative, so Grimm is working in the face of formidable New York media opposition. Unlike most playwrights who can go off somewhere and lick their wounds, Grimm is up on that stage working out Steve’s demons at every performance. “Steve & Idi” is often as messy and as unstable as the protagonist’s psyche, but it is quite a show.
(“Steve & Idi” is running through May 24 at the Rattlestick Theatre. For more information, call 212-868-4444 or www.rattlestick.org)
Posted by Joe on 2:31 PM
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May 9, 2008
David Mamet gives us a hero
 “Redbelt” is a fascinating new film from one of America’s finest writers and directors — David Mamet — but the quirky, hard-to-define story makes it one of the year’s biggest marketing challenges.
The movie is a mix of standard Mamet hard-bitten world weariness mixed in with an attempt to bring a genuine American hero to the screen.
Set in the world of people who find a complete life philosophy in their interest in martial arts, “Redbelt” follows a Gulf War veteran named Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who runs a Jiu-jitsu academy in Los Angeles.
Mike and his wife, Sondra (Alice Braga), live one small step ahead of their bill collectors, but Mike has a devoted group of students who look to him for spiritual guidance as well as physical training.
Mike tells his students that his immersion in martial arts as a sport and a way of life has taught him, “There is no situation that you cannot escape from. No situation that you can’t turn to your advantage.”
The movie becomes a test of Mike’s philosophy — and his decision not to compete in professional Mixed Martial Arts matches — as he gets sucked into the lies and corruption of a group of Hollywood insiders.
In a bar fight, the teacher rescues a Hollywood action star Chet Frank (Tim Allen). The actor gives Mike an expensive gift and then offers him work as an adviser (and producer) on one of his blockbuster movies.
Before he knows it, Mike’s life is turned upside down, he’s lost almost everything that is important to him, and seemingly has no way out other than competing in a garish TV martial arts competition.
“Redbelt” is tough to describe because it keeps shifting tone and adding oddball new characters all along the way — this is the opposite of formula moviemaking.
The performances are all wonderful, but Mamet was truly fortunate to get the brilliant Ejiofor to play Mike. It isn’t easy putting a man of almost pure goodness at the center of a movie — and keeping him interesting — but Ejiofor allows Mamet’s vision to remain strong and focused from start to finish.
The British actor doesn’t appear to have any casting limitations — he was completely believable as the wild drag queen in “Kinky Boots” and the tough anti-hero of “Dirty Pretty Things.” Last season in London, his Othello opposite Ewan McGregor’s Iago was highly acclaimed (there are tantalizing reports the production might come to New York).
“Redbelt” is drawn from the writer-director’s experiences as a student of Jiu-jitsu master Renato Magno and some of his famous colleagues, of whom Mamet has written, “They, in their demeanor, their generosity, and their understanding of the world, offered to me, and their other students, a vision of the possibility of correct, moral behavior in all circumstances.”
That Mamet can blend this scrupulously moral philosophy with a portrait of modern Hollywood at its most repellant is just another example of the artist’s seemingly limitless gifts.
Posted by Joe on 6:38 PM
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May 7, 2008
What were they thinking/smoking?
 It is hard to figure out what audience “Speed Racer” was made for.
The $120 million production from the writing-directing team of Andy and Larry Wachowski has incomprehensible plotting, nauseating Day Glo colors and strobe-light editing that recall those “head” movies of the 1960s and ’70s that were intended to be seen after smoking a joint or dropping some acid (i.e. the midnight movie favorite “El Topo” or the final 15 minutes of “2001”).
And yet, the PG-rated film is being marketed by Warner Bros. as a family movie.
At the Manhattan screening I attended last night, reviewers were encouraged to bring up to five “family” members along, but after the two-hour-and-10-minute assault on my eyes and ears, my first thought was what kind of family would sit through such an incoherent mess. (If I hadn’t been blocked into the center of a crowded row, I would have headed for the exit doors long before the end).
The frenetic cutting and absence of any recognizeable human behavior on screen made it seem like some sort of sophisticated brain-washing tool designed to sell God-knows-what (very much in the vein of that crazy subliminal “test” the potential assassins are given in the 1974 paranoia classic, “The Parallax View”).
“Speed Racer” hangs several wonderful actors out to dry. In the title role, Emile Hirsch — so good in “Into the Wild” — is so plastic-looking that he could be one of those Disneyland animatronic creations they used to have in the Hall of Presidents. Susan Sarandon looks suitably dazed (and airbrushed) as the neo-1950s suburban mom who keeps encouraging her son to try to kill himself in one of the insane races.
Pity the millions of children — and their squirming parents — who will be subjected to this nightmarish concoction beginning Friday.
Posted by Joe on 4:04 PM
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May 6, 2008
Incest & matricide
 It has taken 23 years for the Natalie Robins and Steven M.L. Aronson book, “Savage Grace,” to reach the screen. The Touchstone division of Simon and Schuster is marking the occasion with a new paperback edition of the disturbing and fascinating account of high society incest and matricide.
The book won the best fact crime award of the Mystery Writers of America in 1985, but I didn’t read it until the new version of the book landed on my desk recently. I can see why E.L. Doctorow and Norman Mailer provided blurbs for the original hardcover edition — it’s the sort of grisly, ghastly true tale of American privilege gone bad that a novelist would have a hard time selling as a credible piece of fiction.
“Savage Grace” traces the disintegration of Barbara Baekeland and her son Tony during the 1960s and early ’70s as they lived a fast life in Manhattan and Europe hobnobbing with such celebrity friends as James Jones, Salvador Dali and various members of the Astor and Vanderbilt families.
Robins and Aronson use the oral history format so we get a multitude of perspectives on the circumstances leading up to and continuing after Tony stabbed his mother to death in their London apartment on Nov. 17, 1972.
Barbara was divorced from Tony’s father, Brooks Baekeland, who was the heir to the Bakelite plastics fortune of his grandfather Leo.
Both Barbara and Tony were swept up in the “la dolce vita” excesses of the 1960s. The addition of drugs and sexual license to their already neurotic personalities paved the way to a disaster that did not surprise people who knew the situation — but who could have stepped in to stop what was probably inevitable?
When it became clear that Tony was gay, Barbara decided to straighten him out (and prepare him for marriage) by having sex with her son — this apparently turned into an ongoing affair that completely unhinged both of them.
Although it is hard to imagine a more sordid story, Robins and Aronson make the pages race by. As the reviewer in The New York Times put it, “(the book) has a mythic quality that echoes Greek tragedy.”
Will this complex personal story work as a movie? Can the brilliant actress Julianne Moore make Barbara someone an audience will want to contemplate for two hours?
We’ll find out when “Savage Grace” opens on May 30.
The story did find a director who seems perfect for the project, Tom Kalin, who handled an equally disturbing tale of high society psychosis and murder in “Swoon,” his impressionistic 1992 account of the Leopold and Loeb case.
Posted by Joe on 1:43 PM
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May 5, 2008
"Last Tango" in Stamford
 Even though hard-core pornography has been widely available in this country for more than three decades — some of us saw “Deep Throat” 36 years ago in theaters, long before the advent of Internet and hotel room porn — we still live in a culture that keeps behaving as if it is “shocked” by nudity and overt sexuality in the media.
The recent madness over the Miley Cyrus photos in Vanity Fair is a sign of either rampant neo-Puritanism (bare shoulders equals porn?) or cynical PR machinery.
So, I don’t know what to expect Wednesday night in Stamford when I host a gathering at the non-profit Avon Theatre Film Center devoted to the issue of sex in cinema that will include a screening of the 1972 Bernardo Bertolucci classic “Last Tango in Paris” along with the striking new black-and-white short film, “Leave You in Me,” by Stamford filmmaker Dutch Doscher.
Doscher’s film is an honest treatment of a young couple in crisis, played out in their bedroom, with both participants nude the whole time.
The film’s premise is that after the intimacy of their lovemaking, the man and woman then have a primal discussion about the man’s infidelity. Doscher believes it would be dishonest to have the characters clutching at sheets and/or towels before they start talking, and that the viewer should accept the nudity as being entirely natural.
Doscher gave me a DVD of the film at another Avon screening a few months ago and told me he was having a hard time getting the picture screened in the area because of the frontal nudity. I suggested to Avon programmer Adam Birnbaum that he show Doscher’s short with a feature that deals with sex in a frank, adult manner.
When Birnbaum learned that prints of “Last Tango in Paris” were again available — in conjunction with the 90th anniversary celebration of United Artists — it seemed like the perfect pairing with “Leave You in Me.”
It will be interesting to see if the 1972 Marlon Brando vehicle has any shock value left and how the audience will respond to Doscher’s striking contemporary vision of romantic and sexual strife.
(The screening of “Leave You in Me” and “Last Tango in Paris” will be Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. The Avon Theatre is at 272 Bedford St. in Stamford. For more information, call 967-3660.)
Posted by Joe on 6:12 PM
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May 2, 2008
The uncelebrated genius of Peter Watkins
 I borrowed a phrase from the film critic Michael Atkinson for my headline, because I agree with his assessment of the current position of the 72-year-old creator of “The War Game,” “Culloden,” “Edvard Munch” and several other modern classics that are known by too few movie buffs.
Peter Watkins first made a name for himself in the 1960s as a director of documentaries for the BBC. Perhaps frustrated by the limits of fact-based films, Watkins began to make dramatized documentaries. The director’s first major effort in this new genre — “Culloden” (1964) — was widely acclaimed for its startling use of documentary film techniques in the presentation of the Jacobite uprising of 1745.
The BBC commissioned Watkins to follow “Culloden” with another pseudo-documentary that would show the impact of a nuclear war on England. The results were so strong that government officials forced the BBC to cancel the airing of the film.
“The War Game” went on to have a long and powerful life as a theatrical film (I saw it on a double-bill with a revival of “Dr. Strangelove” in 1968). In a bizarre but happy event for Watkins, the filmmaker received an Oscar for “best documentary film.”
The publicity for “The War Game” earned Watkins a studio gig, the 1967 Universal production of “Privilege,” about the exploitation of a rock singer by the British government and religious leaders.
Again using a semi-documentary style — and rocker Paul Jones in the lead — the movie was an intriguing social satire that divided critics and audiences and never made back the studio’s investment.
From that point on, Watkins has wandered the world making films where he has been able to secure financing, including several projects in Scandinavia. The 1973 bio-pic "Edvard Munch" is one of the best dramas about the life of an artist that I've ever seen, but it was so poorly distributed that it has no listing in the encyclopedic Leonard Maltin "Movie Guide."
Things may be changing, however. New Yorker Films put out a five DVD Watkins set last fall and tomorrow night, the director’s rarely seen 1970 feature “Punishment Park” is being shown on the Sundance Channel as part of an evening marking the 40th anniversary of the spring 1968 explosion of student radicalism all over the world.
“Punishment Park” is a chilling docudrama about the government and police response to radical Vietnam War protestors. Just as “The War Game” speculated about what post-nuclear war life might be like, Watkins’s 1970 film is set in a post-martial law America in which student protestors are sent to an experimental law enforcement facility known as Punishment Park.
The student radicals are given the choice of extended jail time or a three-day survival odyssey in the desert under pursuit by armed National Guardsmen.
Watkins makes everything look real and the director has said that he often feared during filming that real violence would erupt among his nonprofessional actors.
(“Punishment Park” will be shown by the Sundance Channel Saturday at 7:30 p.m., with a repeat airing set for May 13 at 2:30 a.m.)
Posted by Joe on 4:33 PM
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May 1, 2008
Too good to be noticed
 When you go to a big movie press gathering, it is standard operating procedure for reporters to be offered T-shirts or soundtrack CDs or even backpacks promoting the film in question.
Usually, I say thanks but no thanks.
Last Sunday at the press conference for “Iron Man,” some reporters grumbled about the absence of the usual movie promo booty, but I was thrilled when a publicist handed me an oblong paperback book, “Making Iron Man,” consisting of photos taken on the set by Jeff Bridges who gets third billing under Robert Downey Jr.
Bridges has been one of my favorite actors for more than 30 years, but I also love the gritty, behind-the-scenes photos he has been taking on sets since “Starman” in 1984.
On the movies he’s made since then, the actor has made gift books of his production pictures and given them to the cast and crew.
Five years ago, powerHouse books published a collection of the actor’s photos — “Pictures” — and it has become one of my most treasured Hollywood books because of the way Bridges shows us the nuts and bolts of making movies.
I was surprised by the number of reporters at the Sunday event who didn’t know about this remarkable book. Critic David Thomson has called Bridges “the taker of some of the best on-set still photographs I have ever seen.”
The actor uses a Widelux camera which produces an extraordinarily wide image. In the foreword to “Pictures” director Peter Bogdanovich writes that “Jeff’s choice of…camera is emblematic of his own vision, which generously includes as much as possible of the ragtag world in which he has spent so much of his life.”
The actor’s respect for the crew — and his understanding of the important role they play on any film — is illustrated by shot after shot that includes make-up people, lighting men, costume fitters.
“Jeff is America’s best actor,” director Terry Gilliam told Bogdanovich. “He’s a Zen actor — he knows the frame, the plane of the film he’s acting in — which is very useful and pretty spooky for the crew because he really knows how films are made. It’s rare for an actor to be so incredibly technical yet real at the same time. He never cheats.”
In the book and in his acting, Bridges makes what he does look entirely natural. The actor-photographer includes several shots of his “Texasville” and “The Last Picture Show” co-star Timothy Bottoms in his book and writes in a caption, “I have always felt that Tim’s performance in ‘The Last Picture Show’ should have won him an Academy Award. He disappeared into his character, Sonny, so completely that his acting was invisible, which is probably why he wasn’t nominated. His acting was too good to be noticed.”
What Bridges said about the acting of Timothy Bottoms is the way I feel about “Pictures.”
Posted by Joe on 6:20 PM
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April 30, 2008
The man behind Mapplethorpe
 The role of the collector and museum curator Sam Wagstaff in the life and art of Robert Mapplethorpe is explored in the fine 2007 documentary, “Black White + Gray,” which has just been issued on DVD by Arts Alliance America.
Wagstaff was the product of a privileged upbringing in New York City — the family home was on Central Park South — and after attending Yale, he became a major force in the art world in his role as curator at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum, among other institutions. Wagstaff had the ability to put new artists on the map by including them in his carefully constructed shows.
Writer-director James Crump shows how Wagstaff’s almost unerring taste and talent for finding the next big thing in the art world gave him the power to make careers.
In the 1970s, Wagstaff shifted into private collecting; his fascination with photography helped to elevate what was then viewed as a largely commercial or journalistic tool into a form of high art.
“Black White + Gray” focuses on the 1970s when Wagstaff became Mapplethorpe’s friend and lover. Mapplethorpe was living with poet and musician Patti Smith at the time and the three of them formed a tight bond.
Smith provided Crump with wonderful interview footage in which she talks about the way Wagstaff influenced Mapplethorpe as a budding photographer and Mapplethorpe introduced the older man to Manhattan’s gay sex underground.
The two men explored the S&M clubs that flourished in the pre-gentrification Meatpacking District; what they saw and did there inspired some of Mapplethorpe’s most striking — and most controversial — pictures.
Dominick Dunne contributes a witty and especially informed interview. The Hartford-born writer knew Wagstaff long before he met Mapplethorpe — before the patrician Wadsworth curator developed his taste for drugs and the underground.
Dunne also did a major piece on Mapplethorpe for Vanity Fair just a few months before AIDS claimed the photographer (Wagstaff had died a few years earlier, leaving most of his fortune and vast photo collection to Mapplethorpe).
“Black White + Grey” impresses with its seriousness of intent and the unusually smart comments Crump gathered from a wide array of articulate people who knew Wagstaff.
Writer Joan Juliet Buck gives the film an appropriately wry New York patina with her no-nonsense narration.
Posted by Joe on 5:06 PM
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April 29, 2008
"Dawn of the Dead" meets "A Separate Peace"
 Over the weekend, I caught an early preview of “Good Boys and True,” the new play by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, starring J. Smith-Cameron, at the Second Stage Theatre in Manhattan.
Aguirre-Sacasa is a rising star off-Broadway, where his “The Mystery Plays” and “Based on a Totally True Story,” have intrigued and entertained me in recent seasons.
J. Smith-Cameron is one of the glories of the New York theatre, a stage actress of dazzling versatility and power, whose performance in Douglas Carter Beane's "As Bees in Honey Drown," as a Manhattan fast-lane woman who keeps reinventing herself, was widely admired (if the off-Broadway hit had ever made it to Broadway, Smith-Cameron would have had a lock on the Tony Award).
“Good Boys and True” is a gripping drama about the repercussions of a sex-tape scandal at a Jesuit high school in Washington, D.C. in the late 1980s.
Brandon (Brian J. Smith) is a star football player — and an all-around nice guy — who becomes suspect number one when a tape surfaces of a school athlete having rough sex with a girl. The boy’s face is not visible on the tape, but from the back he looks a lot like Brandon.
Brandon’s mother, Elizabeth (J. Smith-Cameron), is a smart and warm physician who starts off believing there is no way her son could be involved in the incident. But, as more evidence comes to light, and she begins to think about the whole culture of the school — which her husband attended — Elizabeth sees the corruption of the elite class of which she has been a member all her life.
Things get so tense and there is so much anxiety on campus that one of Brandon’s friends sums up the atmosphere as, “‘Dawn of the Dead’ meets ‘A Separate Peace.’”
Aguirre-Sacasa keeps the suspense building with each new revelation, so that the play works both as a mystery and as the story of one woman’s coming to terms with the implications of wealth and social privilege in America.
Smith-Cameron is terrific and I’m sure her performance will get even stronger as she gets more performances under her belt (I saw one of the first public previews). The woman is not unlike the well-heeled character Stockard Channing played in “Six Degrees of Separation” — extremely likeable and so easy to identify with, even as we see how she has spent years pulling the wool over her own eyes.
(“Good Boys and True” is set to run through June 1. Second Stage Theatre is at 307 West 43rd St. For ticket information, call 212-246-4422)
Posted by Joe on 5:15 PM
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April 28, 2008
Making movies
 Everyone seems to be making movies these days — video technology has made possible the cinematic equivalent of the self-published novel — but how do you make something that gets seen in festivals and theaters?
That’s one of the questions on the agenda at a gathering called “So You Want to Make a Movie?” that I am moderating tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the non-profit Fairfield Theatre Company.
Writer Susan Cinoman and director Doug Tenaglia will screen their 40-minute film, “Love and Class in Connecticut” (left), which has been on the festival circuit for the past several months (including several stops on the traveling Connecticut Film Festival).
The process of making the movie has taken three years, and involved several local actors, so there should be a lot to talk about.
The movie is a slice of life about family dysfunction in the suburbs and two sisters who envy each other’s lifestyle — the artsy older sister living a single life in Manhattan and the younger one who is married and going through hell over the naming of her baby.
Funny and lifelike, “Love and Class…” makes you care about each of the diverse characters and wonder where they might be going next.
Whether you are in the process of trying to get a film off the ground or just want to hear the behind-the-scenes struggles of one filmmaking duo, there should be lots of fun and enlightenment at tonight’s event.
(Admission for the session is $5. The Fairfield Theatre Company is at 70 Sanford St.)
Posted by Joe on 1:42 PM
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