Joe's View

Movie release dates for big movies are usually locked in place a year or more before a picture opens.

One of the reasons director Sam Raimi reportedly bowed out of the forthcoming “Spider-Man 4” movie was that he felt he could not make the summer 2012 opening demanded by Sony.

Long lead times allow theaters to be booked, advertising tie-ins to be finalized and — most importantly — publicity campaigns to be planned.

Studios look for the perfect month — and weekend — to open a picture. If you have a sci-fi extravaganza with strong appeal to teen boys, you don’t want to open it on the same summer weekend as a similar picture.

It seems likely that Fox decided to open “Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps” next month because it would give the movie at least a month of playing time before the summer blockbusters started opening.

The studio publicists went to work many months ago and lined up two prestigious cover stories in the April glossies — Michael Douglas on the cover of Vanity Fair and his co-star Shia LaBeouf on the cover of GQ.

Many times magazines have to make big concessions with these cover stories — agreeing to writers the interview subjects like and using the stars’ favorite (and very expensive) photographers.

The editors know they only have 12 covers a year so choosing the right personality is crucial.

Well, a few weeks ago — after the April issues were already set in type — Vanity Fair and GQ learned that Fox had pulled a last-minute switcheroo on them, moving the “Wall Street” sequel to a late September release date.

No one knows precisely why this change was made. Does the studio think “Wall Street 2” has Oscar potential and deserves a fall slot rather than a spring berth? Or, was late September a better time to unload a turkey-in-the-making?

Whatever the reasoning, the switch will make things a lot harder for Fox the next time they want to pitch cover stories for a movie. And Douglas and LaBeouf will probably feel a little silly — and perhaps annoyed — to see their mugs staring out at them from newstands all over the country during the month that their movie isn’t opening.

There are so many reality shows on TV now that few of them break out and become a pop cultural phenomenon the way that “Survivor” and “Big Brother” and “The Real World” did in their early seasons.

We’ve all become hip to the not-so-hidden manipulations used to jack up the drama on the popular Bravo “Housewives” shows and all of those fallen-celebrity programs on VH1. Too many of the series are just cheaply-produced soap operas with very bad “acting.”

Then, earlier this winter, came “Jersey Shore,” the first of the new breed to get tons of press — including lots of criticism — to the point where non-viewers became aware of the show.

I only saw bits and pieces of the series when it aired on MTV — and immediately sensed the real chemistry between the roommates at a beach house in Seaside Heights last summer. But, I didn’t understand why the show was such a hit until I watched the new “uncensored” season one DVD last week.

Unlike MTV’s “The Real World” which has always assembled a hand-picked group of very different people — obviously designed to strike sparks due to their conflicts — the young people in “Jersey Shore” come from very similar backgrounds.

Snooki and Mike (“The Situation”) and Jenni (“JWOW”) and the others could have easily wound up together in a share house at any beach resort in the country — on their own. They all signed on to the Seaside Heights beach house with the same goals in mind — a terrific summer vacation (on MTV’s dime) with an easy job selling T-shirts at a nearby boardwalk shop.

I’m sure there were a lot of backstage shenanigans — by the producers and crew — designed to amp up the drama. But the nine-episode series feels more like an actual documentary than the other reality shows because the 20somethings are achingly “real” working class kids we follow in bars and clubs and in the rambling beach house as they look for good times.

Yes, the “Jersey Shore” group speaks bluntly about sex — and the young men often appear to be looking for trouble when they get loaded — but I doubt that the show is the gross distortion of life at the beach that the Chamber of Commerce and other civic groups claimed it was. For one thing, the Seaside Heights bars we get to know fairly intimately — Karma and The Beachcomber, among them — are packed with kids who look and act just like Snooki et al.

“Jersey Shore” is fun to watch — especially after the nightmarishly screechy Angelina takes off after a few episodes — and we see genuine friendships forming among like-minded people. It’s a much less guilty pleasure than “My Super Sweet 16” or the other reality programming on MTV.

The DVD has an extra disc with a “reunion” special that ran on MTV after the series aired, about 25 minutes of deleted scenes (nothing too juicy), and a very amusing mini-doc in which actor Michael Cera (above, left) gets a “Jersey Shore” makeover.

It seems unlikely that a second season of the show could be anywhere near as entertaining as season one — the cast is too knowing now — but with this vulgar and amusing (and, yes, sometimes touching) crew you never know.

(The “uncensored” DVD of “Jersey Shore” is being released exclusively through the CreateSpace division of Amazon.com, both on disc and online via CreateSpace’s DVD on Demand technology. Visit www.createspace.com for more info.)

You might call Larry Keigwin’s choreographic style modern dance with an extra jolt.

Just as Michael Bennett got his start as a back-up dancer on the 1960s show, “Hullaballoo,” Keigwin’s first professional gig was on “Downtown” Julie Brown’s “Club MTV.”

Since then, he has pursued high art jobs with The Martha Graham Dance Company and pop work with the innovative band Fischerspooner and The Radio City Rockettes.

He was one of the many extraordinary dancers in Julie Taymor’s underrated Beatles movie, “Across the Universe,” in 2007.

In the work he does for his own troupe, Keigwin + Company, the dancer-choreographer believes that “fun” and “entertainment” should not be dirty words in the world of modern dance.

Keigwin told The Brooklyn Rail blog earlier this week, “I’m attracted to dancers who are interested in social dance, not just contemporary concert dance.”

Keigwin and his terrific performers are at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Ave., through Sunday with a program that includes two old favorites, “Mattress Suite” and “Caffeinated,” as well as the first public performances of “Bird Watching.”

The price is right — $10 to $49 — but some of the performances are already close to sold out.

Go to www.joyce.org for more info.

Yale Rep announced its 2010-2011 season today and it’s packed with goodies, foremost among them a stage version of the superb 1978 Ingmar Bergman film “Autumn Sonata” (above).

The U.S. premiere of the Bergman piece will be directed by Robert Woodruff, whose “Notes from Underground” was a highlight at Yale Rep last season (Woodruff’s staging of “Battle of Black and Dogs” opens at the Rep next month).

Bergman moved back and forth between screen and stage throughout his long and brilliant career. Many of his movies are chamber dramas that you can easily imagine being done on the stage (I would love to see a company somewhere do a stage version of “Scenes from a Marriage”).

“Autumn Sonata” is about a great female concert pianist who has neglected her relationship with her daughter to achieve artistic success. A reunion between the two women starts well but quickly turns into a powerful debate on career vs. family.

Although the movie focuses on the world of classical music, the theme applies to anyone who has put their work ahead of their private life and family responsibilities. Ingrid Bergman plays the mother in the film and it is one of her finest performances. Late in her life, the actress often spoke of her regrets about leaving her children behind for long periods to pursue her film career, so the material clearly struck a deep chord.

Liv Ullmann delivered one of her fiercest film performances as the angry daughter.

The physically confined material should work well on the stage; I can’t wait to see what Woodruff will do with it.

“Autumn Sonata” will start performances April 15, 2011 and run through May 7.

Yale Rep opened this season with the first full production of the vivid Andy Warhol musical “Pop!” and the fall season will start with another world premiere musical, “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” based on the chilling novel by Shirley Jackson (who also wrote the classic supernatural novel, “The Haunting of Hill House”).

Adam Bock is providing the book and co-writing the lyrics with composer Todd Almond. Bock wrote “Drunken City,” one of the funniest and smartest off-Broadway comedies of recent vintage. “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” will launch the new Yale Rep season on Sept. 17.

The Rep’s artistic director James Bundy will be staging one of my favorite Edward Albee plays, “A Delciate Balance,” Oct. 22 to Nov. 13.

Although the play won the Pulitzer Prize in the mid-1960s, most critics were underwhelmed by the drama back then and believed the award was given to make up for Albee not receiving the honor for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” a few years earlier (the Pulitzer people thought the George and Martha play was a tad too racy).

The reputation of “A Delicate Balance” went into decline until Lincoln Center Theater put on a sensational mid-1990s revival that won a batch of Tonys, including one for the late great Litchfield actor George Grizzard.

Bundy should be able to assemble a fantastic cast for this ensemble piece in which every role is juicy.

Subscriptions for the new season went on sale today. For a full rundown on the shows and ticket packages go to www.yalerep.org.

After reading Mariana Pasternak’s just-published “The Best of Friends: Martha and Me” (Harper), it is easy to understand why celebrities hand out confidentiality agreements to almost everyone they meet.

If an ex-“best friend” could write a book like this, what might a business associate or social acquaintance cook up?

The memoir is Pasternak’s attempt to describe her friendship of more than two decades with Martha Stewart and to explain her way out of giving trial testimony — as a prosectution witness — that sent her friend to the slammer for six months (tarnishing the carefully tended reputation of one of the most famous women in the country).

The author boils down her role in Stewart’s life in the first chapter: “She needed someone whose opinion she trusted, someone who loved her enough to tell her when she was making a mistake. Because by then (August 1997), with all the fame and power she had accumulated, only the few who really loved Martha still dared to be frank.”

Pasternak goes back and forth from embracing to trashing Stewart so often in the book that it is almost impossible to keep up with the writer’s thought processes. (I had visions of a frazzled editor desperately trying to keep this 395-page train on the track.)

Here’s the writer in her characteristic love/hate mode: “Perpetual publicity and fame piled on her the uneasiness that Martha handled with a masterful show of composure. However, in private, Martha didn’t cope as well with the strain of rampant consumerism and increased pressures. It was often quite awkward to be around her, but I never lost the sympathy that she had inspired in me the first time we met. I didn’t think her unpleasantness was a principal characteristic, so all I could do was guess as the reasons for it, like perhaps, Martha’s insatiable desire for power…”

The book will have a certain degree of interest for Connecticut readers because much of the narrative takes place around Westport — with scenes at such unlikely locales as the Sherwood Diner. Pasternak met Stewart and then-husband Andy before Martha’s career took off so we get an insider’s view of an American superstar being born right in our own backyard.

But, the mix of affection and spiteful revelations about Stewart’s romantic attachments (and dreams of a second marriage) make for a very unpleasant glimpse into a bizarre — to say the least — friendship.

And, how are we to trust a narrator who told prosecutors that she thought Martha might have confessed to insider stock trading with the sentence, “Isn’t it nice to have brokers who tell you those things?,” but later admitted that comment might have been in her own head — i.e. something she expected Stewart to say.

If Pasternak isn’t sure what took place during such a crucial conversation in 2001, how can we trust her accounts of Stewart’s behavior and comments two decades earlier?

If John Cassavetes had been hired to do a movie remake of “The Honeymooners,” the results might have been something like the very funny (and very poignant) new play “Happy in the Poorhouse,” by Derek Ahonen, that opened over the weekend at Theatre 80 St. Marks.

“Poorhouse” is the follow-up to Ahonen’s “The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side,” a hit last year for The Amoralists, the company the writer-director formed four years ago with his actor pals James Kautz and Matthew Pilieci.

The Amoralists have built on their success last year with a season of three plays that they will be producing between now and the end of the year.

Like a latter day Group Theater, The Amoralists are determined to present rough and angry plays that deal with life in America right now. The company doesn’t deal in tidy morals or a sanitized view of life among people who are struggling to make the rent each month.

“Happy in the Poorhouse” is set in present day Brooklyn, where the life of would-be Mixed Martial Arts star Paulie “The Pug” (James Kautz, below right) appears to be in free fall.

Paulie is hitting a wall in his amateur bouts — he’s a bit too small and a bit too old — and fears his dreams of fame and fortune are vanishing. Still, he doesn’t want to accept the reality of his job as a bouncer in a local bar.

Paulie has married the girl of his dreams — Mary (Sarah Lemp, below left) — who happens to be the ex of his best friend Petie (William Apps). After many months of marriage, however, Paulie has not been able to have sex with his wife and it’s driving both of them crazy.

In the first scene, Mary is stressed out about her sexless relationship and her decision to throw a welcome-back-from-Afghanistan party for Petie, who is now confined to a wheelchair.

Kautz and Lemp make a terrific pair of battling spouses — with Paulie pounding holes in the wall out of sexual frustration and Mary failing in every attempt to ravish her husband. Their comic/romantic friction forms a strong foundation for the rich and exuberant cast of characters who soon begin pouring into the Coney Island apartment.

Ahonen views working class life with the same absence of condescension that was a hallmark of Cassavetes in films such as “A Woman Under the Influence.” The writer’s characters are just like you and me — except they don’t hide their frustrations with polite chit chat.

The magic of “Happy in the Poorhouse” is the way that the writer keeps introducing wonderful new characters — each with their own problems — who add to the chaos of Paulie and Mary’s lives in a believably funny way.

First there is Mary’s mailman brother, Joey (Matthew Pilieci), who lives with them — or, rather, they live with him, since he pays the rent.

Paulie’s sister Penny (Rochelle Mikulich) returns from Nashville for the party, with two big suprrises — she’s abandoning her dream of country music stardom and she arrives with her new German lesbian lover, Olga (Selene Beretta).

Two brothers who are would-be MMA agents, Sonny (Morton Matthews) and Sally (Mark Riccadonna), show up — to sign Paulie and to attack Joey for taking up with a 16-year-old relative, Flossie (Meghan Ritchie).

Act One ends with the arrival of wounded vet Petie and his male nurse Stevie (Nick Lawson) and the second half includes a visit by everyone’s muscle-bound pal Larry (Patrick McDaniel), who turns out to have a sinister secret agenda.

Ahonen keeps these people bouncing off each other in constantly surprising ways — and with crazy jokes that seem to bubble up from out of nowhere, just like they would at a disastrous party.

The writer-director’s love of actors is evident in every scene — from the fact that he created 11 juicy characters (no “supporting roles” here) to the way he has meshed their chaotic emotions into a coherent and deeply involving slice-of-life comedy.

(“Happy in the Poorhouse” is running through April 4 at Theatre 80 St. Marks. For more information, visit www.theamoralists.com.)

TheaterWorks Hartford is officially announcing today that its 25th anniversary season will begin in July with a world premiere production starring Kathleen Turner.

“High” by Matthew Lombardo will open July 9 and run through Aug. 22.

Lombardo is the author of “Tea at Five,” a Katharine Hepburn bio-drama that served as a spectacular vehicle for Kate Mulgrew at Hartford Stage in 2002. The actress took the show to New York and then toured in it extensively.

In the new drama, Turner will play Sister Jamison Connelly, a rehab counselor who begins to question her vocation after working with a 19-year-old addict.

Following the Hartford run, the play will move on to two other major regional theaters — the Cincinnati Playhouse, and Repertory Theatre of St. Louis.

Turner started her career in the theater — she did plays in New York while working on the daytime drama “The Doctors” in the late 1970s — but her film debut in the 1981 hit “Body Heat” (below) launched her as one of the top female stars of the 1980s.

The actress solidified her appeal to critics and audiences with the 1984 blockbuster “Romancing the Stone” and then a series of hits that included “Prizzi’s Honor” and “The War of the Roses.”

Perhaps sensing the ephemeral nature of film stardom, Turner made regular returns to the theater – including an appearance at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre in “Camille” in 1986 (the same year she received an Oscar nomination for “Peggy Sue Got Married”) and then a Tony-nominated performance in the 1990 Broadway revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

The star’s movie career seemed to end as quickly as it began — Turner never really recovered from the disaster of “V.I. Warshawski” in 1991.

Illness and alcoholism did a job on Turner’s appearance that shocked fans who viewed her as a sex symbol only a few years earlier — the changes also seemed to put her out of the running for film roles in major productions and she just didn’t have the knack for finding good roles in independent films where she might play “character” parts.

The problems faced by actresses in a youth obsessed culture were magnified in Turner’s case.

Fortunately, Turner developed serious stage chops in her returns to the theater and now has found her true home. The actress triumphed in a Broadway revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” a few seasons ago (above) and repeated that success when the show moved to London.

Turner seems to be as busy on stage now as she was in film 20 years ago. She is about to open in Philadelphia in a new one-woman play about the feisty Texas newspaper columnist Molly Ivins and the actress will move right from that show to Hartford for rehearsals for “High.”

For complete ticket information visit TheaterWorks at www.theaterworkshartford.org.

Sam Rockwell hasn’t yet achieved A-list movie stardom, but he is one of the finest actors in this country, with outstanding film and stage performances going back more than two decades.

At the moment, Rockwell is supporting Christopher Walken on Broadway in the new Martin McDonagh play, “A Behanding in Spokane.”

Years ago, before he broke out in movies, I saw Rockwell deliver an astounding performance in a Mike Leigh play at a tiny off-Broadway theater.

The piece was about a group of volatile, struggling young Brits and until I read my program I assumed the charismatic lead was a newcomer from across the Atlantic.

Since then, Rockwell has been in many major films, but has usually played supporting roles (he is especially good in the grossly underrated 2007 Brad Pitt picture “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” – left).

George Clooney was an early Rockwell fan and gave him one of his rare starring film roles in the 2002 flop “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.”

Art house movieogers became aware of Rockwell’s talent in a wonderful 1997 film by Tom DiCillo, “Box of Moonlight.” The picture got good reviews at the Sundance Film Festival that year but, sadly, was picked up by a second-rate distributor that mishandled it.

Despite the much-hyped American independent film movement of the late 1980s and 1990s, lots of very good low-budget films fell through the cracks during that fervent period.

Miramax Films, under the dynamic leadership of two genuine movie lovers, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, had a genius for selling tricky little movies to the press and public, making hits out of such offbeat pictures as “Like Water for Chocolate” and “The Crying Game.”

A few other companies, such as Sony Classics, also had the ability to market indies successfully, but dozens of worthy 1990s releases were picked up by inept (and under-financed) distributors and barely saw the light of day.

And, when a movie is badly distributed in theaters, the chances are pretty good that the home video release will be mangled as well.

This is why you may not have ever heard of “Box of Moonlight.”

Written and directed by DiCillo, the film takes the road movie formula and embroiders it with fresh characters, hilariously off-kilter social commentary, and a real love of roadside Americana at its kitschiest.

John Turturro stars as a Chicago corporate drone — assigned to an engineering project in Tennessee — who is shocked when the project is suddenly cancelled and all of the workers are told they can go home early.

The man has been upset by gleaning that his workers think he is an uptight, ruthlessly regimented machine disguised as a human.

Remembering a happy childhood vacation spent at a Tennessee lake, the engineer spontaneously decides to take off in a rental car to see if the resort is still there. When the man meets a wacky young off-the-grid free-thinker — Rockwell in what should have been a star-making performance — who lives on his own in the woods, the engineer’s life as he knows it is changed forever.

What is so charming and smart about DiCillo’s approach is his respect for both of the major characters — we get to see the downside of each man’s approach to life, but we also get to see how the unlikely friendship changes both men for the better.

DiCillo fills the background with great screwball Middle American characters who are never condescended to by the filmmaker. Catherine Keener got one of her best early movie roles in “Box of Moonlight” as a daffy phone sex operator who crosses Turturro’s path.

The politically conservative and religiously rigid people Turturro meets along the way are satirized by DiCillo but in a very gentle manner. The director also clearly has a deep affection for the rural areas around Knoxville where he shot the picture — it’s one of the most beautiful indie films of the 1990s.