Joe's View

The New York Theatre Workshop has scored its biggest hit in many seasons with the production of “Beckett Shorts” that is closing on Sunday.
The collaboration between director Joanne Akalaitis, composer Philip Glass and dancer-turned-actor Mikhail Baryshnikov has proven to be one of those great unexpected theatrical marriages. Last night, the buzz of anticipation before the show was equaled by the excitement in the house at the end of the 70-minute performance.
Akalaitis has put four short Samuel Beckett pieces together in a way that gives the impression of one play — Baryshnikov is the only actor who appears in every piece and he provides a strong unifying force.
Set in what looks like a giant sandbox, the plays take us to that bleak yet oddly comic world of Beckett’s lost souls.
In the first piece — “Act Without Words I” — Baryshnikov plays a man who seems to be trapped in a teasing form of hell. The character keeps being beckoned to the doors on either side of the set, but each time he walks through an unseen character tosses him back into the space.
There the man is tormented by the arrival and departure of a water jug that is always kept just out of his reach.
The magic of Beckett is in the way he finds laughter in the hopelessness of his characters’ existence — the repetition of pointless daily routines, slowly pushing his people one step closer to their extinction becomes a series of sick jokes.
In three of the four short plays at NYTW, Baryshnikov doesn’t say a word but uses his body and face with the same sort of eloquence that the great stars of silent movies displayed (in one of his final performances, Buster Keaton appeared in a 1965 short and silent Beckett film called “Film”).
Underscoring the evening and adding to the unity provided by the star is the haunting original score by Philip Glass.
The virtually abstract non-narrative theater of “Beckett Shorts” becomes mesmerizing in a manner that defies analysis.
Baryshnikov has had problems as an actor in conventional film and TV roles, but working with Akalaitis, he proves to be a great interpreter of one of the modern theater’s most difficult playwrights.

There is a long and honorable tradition of memorably amusing movie psychopaths, going all the way back to Richard Widmark in “Kiss of Death” (1947) and continuing through David Patrick Kelly 30 years later (if you saw Kelly in the 1979 cult classic “The Warriors” you can probably still hear his taunt, “Warriors…come out and plaaaayyyyy!!!”).
Villains who enjoy their own villainy are always fun to watch. A few nights ago, I saw an early press screening of a March release, “Never Back Down,” in which a young actor named Cam Gigandet has a blast chewing up the scenery as the evil rich kid who rules his Orlando, Fla., high school.
Ryan is the reigning champion of an underground no holds barred fight club who terrifies the other boys in the school while turning on many of the girls.
In classic Widmark and Kelly style, Ryan doesn’t waste any time trying to sweet talk his gorgeous girlfriend Baja (Amber Heard) when she suggests that he stop terrorizing the new boy (Sean Faris) in her English class.
“When you moved here you were nothing! You walked the halls like a ghost!,” he says of Baja’s time before Ryan picked her to be his main squeeze.
Gigandet makes Ryan’s narcissism and hair trigger temper so funny that his scenes play like a teenage version of “Road House.”
The actor is new to me but already has an internet fan following from the TV series “The O.C.” and “Jack & Bobby.”
Gigandet has leading man looks but plays against them to great effect in “Never Back Down” — it would be a shame if the actor took conventional movie hero roles after this hilariously crazy performance.

“Cassandra’s Dream” — which opens on Friday — is the third movie the quintessential New Yorker Woody Allen has made in England since he lost the ability to find funding in this country.
When Allen made “Match Point” three years ago, the filmmaker seemed recharged by the experience of working in a new locale, but “Scoop” was a mess and the new film will probably leave most U.S. Allen fans feeling like the little boy at the end of “Shane” — “Come home, Woody!”
After spending more than 20 years making his name and buildng an audience with quite specific New York stories — seemingly drawn from his own experiences — Allen has gotten distressingly generic overseas.
“Cassandra’s Dream” and “Match Point” are both laughless melodramas with slightly far-fetched plots — the sort of Hollywood-style fare that the sophisticated Manhattan characters in “Hannah and Her Sisters” and “Interiors” would have mocked.
The recent overseas movies also show the writer-director to be suffering from the absence of his muse-like relationships with the actresses Diane Keaton, Dianne Wiest and Mia Farrow in the Manhattan-based pictures.
The filmmaker has never quite recovered from the end of the decade-long artistic-personal partnership he forged with Farrow in the 1980s and early 1990s.
The women in such post-Mia movies as “Mighty Aphrodite” (1995), “Celebrity” (1998) and “Deconstructing Harry” (1997) have not had the multi-dimensional quality of the characters he brought to the screen with Farrow and Keaton.
Allen tried to use Scarlett Johansson in a Keaton-like role in “Scoop” and the result was one of the weakest star performances in any of his films.
“Cassandra’s Dream” suffers from the absence of full-bodied female characters. Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor deliver strong performances as brothers who agree to kill someone for their rich uncle but the women in the mens’ lives are ciphers.
In the press notes for the new movie, Allen says in England and Spain (where he made a yet-to-be released film with Penelope Cruz) he has found “the proper artistic atmosphere his work calls for.”
“Their way of working is ideal,” the writer-director says of his overseas financial backers. “They put up the money and I call them when I have a finished film. They don’t read the script; they don’t have anything to say about casting; they don’t have anything to say about anything.”
“Cassandra’s Dream” demonstrates that financial independence is not necessarily the most important factor for a moviemaker.

Los Angeles decorator Lacy Fields is forced to turn detective after her plastic surgeon husband is arrested for murder in “Looks to Die For,” the mystery fiction debut of Parade magazine’s executive editor Janice Kaplan.
Touchstone Books has just released the paperback version of the novel.
“Looks to Die For” does for the lifestyles of the rich and famous on the West Coast what Cosmopolitan editor Kate White has done for similar New York types in her popular Bailey Weggins series.
Kaplan has brought together two different types of mystery fiction — the “cozy” feauring an amateur sleuth working in her own backyard, and the “hard-boiled” thriller sporting higher sex and violence quotients.
The unusual mix of elements might confuse genre fans, but everyday readers looking for a page-turner with insider material on contemporary Hollywood should have a good time.
The tone is similar to that of the TV guilty pleasure “Dirt” on the FX network.
Fields is a strong heroine who is comfortable leading a privileged life in L.A. with her husband and two children. I liked the way that Kaplan refrained from having Lacy apologize to us for her upper income status. The woman’s roots are middle-class humble, but she clearly enjoys her designer wardrobe and gadget-packed home in one of L.A.’s better neighborhoods.
Lacy is well connected in the entertainment industry — her best friend is a casting agent who helps Lacy solve the mystery of who did away with the porn actress her husband is accused of killing — so Kaplan should have no shortage of material for future crimes.
Up next is “A Job to Kill For” which Touchstone Books will publish this summer.

The Fairfield Theatre Company has asked me to continue hosting its popular “Martini and a Movie” series in 2008, but with a twist — this year, we’ll be doing a series of mini-festivals devoted to individual stars and styles of filmmaking.
First up is a three-month look back at the movie heyday of 1960s and ’70s icon Julie Christie, who has scored a huge comeback in recent months with “Away from Her,” the 2007 arthouse hit that has made the 66-year-old actress a front runner in this winter’s Oscar race.
Tuesday night, the film is “Don’t Look Now,” the 1973 suspense classic that paired Christie with Donald Sutherland in a genuinely scary tale of a couple recovering from the death of their daughter. The grieving man and woman may be receiving portents of doom from the girl’s ghost while they spend the off-season in Venice, but the husband doesn’t believe in such things and ignores the signs (with catastrophic results).
Christie was to ’60s movies what The Beatles were to the pop music of that era — she smashed the existing film star mold and played a key role (along with the four boys from Liverpool) in making England the style center of the world.
Christie’s career reflected the revolutionary changes that took place in the movie industry during the mid-‘60s — she had one foot in the hip European filmmaking community and one foot in Hollywood. She launched the new wave of down-to-earth ’60s stars who eventually sent reigning movie queens Doris Day, Audrey Hepburn and Julie Andrews out to pasture.
Only 24 at the time of “Darling” and her other 1965 smash, “Doctor Zhivago,” Christie became a symbol of the new styles in fashion and pop culture that briefly made Britain the hottest place in the media universe. Christie’s long blonde hair and modish way of dressing were endlessly duplicated — the many other actresses who made careers out of playing Christie-type characters included Susannah York, Judy Geeson and Susan George.
The British star was also one of the first movie actresses to make no bones about her then-unconventional private life. In the dozens of feature stories that followed “Darling,” Christie never hid the fact that she was living in unwed bliss with London artist Don Bessant. And, when the actress picked up her “Darling” Oscar on April 18, 1966, the old guard in Hollywood was quite upset with Christie’s decision to wear a miniskirt to the formal occasion.
“She was adored by the masses,” Danny Peary notes in his book “Cult Movie Stars.”
“But from the beginning approving film cultists realized she was different, that she hadn’t forgotten her bohemian roots and her preference for art over commercialism…Stardom wasn’t as important to her as working with directors who were willing to take chances…She never sold out,” Peary adds.
The “Martini and a Movie” series will go on to showcase the star’s 1965 best actress Oscar vehicle “Darling” on Feb. 19, and the 1966 Francois Truffaut adaptation of the Ray Bradbury novel “Fahrenheit 451” on March 18.
Doors for Tuesday night’s free “Martini and a Movie” open at 7 p.m., with a cash bar cocktail hour before the 8 p.m. screening of “Don’t Look Now.”.

Why is it that Diane Lane never gets a great part in a great movie?
One of the most gifted — and appealing — film actresses, Lane works all the time, but generally in second-rate pictures such as “Must Love Dogs” and “Hollywoodland.”
Even Lane’s Oscar-nominated performance in “Unfaithful” (right) was a classic case of an actress being much better than her material — the star’s good work was completely undercut by the soft core porn elements and the lame thriller plotting in the last 20 minutes of that 2002 adultery drama.
These musings are prompted by the press sceening I went to in Manhattan last night of Lane’s next movie, “Untraceable,” set to open Jan. 25.
The star plays a member of the FBI’s cyber crimes unit who is on the trail of a particularly ghastly killer — a man who traps and kills his victims on a website he calls killwithme.com.
Lane is once again wonderful in a movie that isn’t quite up to the level of her talent. The actress makes us care deeply about the woman she plays, but “Untraceable” isn’t likely to move her out of the second tier of Hollywood actresses.
The 44-year-old actress started working in the New York theater before she was 10 and made her movie debut in 1979, so Lane was very lucky to survive that notoriously rocky transition between child star and adult actress. But Lane has never landed the sort of juicy, full-bodied parts that have gone to her peer Jodie Foster.
Working continuously for 29 years is an accomplishment in itself for any performer, of course, but Lane fans keep waiting for her to get a part that matches her beautifully honed abilities.

As I listened to all of the TV and radio pundits spending hours today trying to explain their innaccurate forecasts in the run up to the New Hampshire primary, I couldn’t help but think that somewhere the late great Paddy Chayefsky was smiling.
Everything you need to know about the collapse of TV news into entertainment and continuous punditry is contained in Chayefsky’s scary and hilarious script for “Network,” which was dismissed by TV insiders in 1976 as farcical foolishness.
I watched the picture again on DVD last week and was struck anew by the writer’s vision.
At Chayefsky’s fictional TV network, UBS, the management realizes how much cheaper it is to talk about the news rather than report it, so a psychic known as “Sybil the soothsayer” becomes a nightly feature, predicting what will happen the next day.
How different is this from the New York and D.C. gas bags who make careers out of telling us what is going to happen rather than what is happening?
Following in Chayefsky’s footsteps, the real TV networks gleaned in the 1980s how much money you can save by hiring a few high-priced talking heads rather than the armies of fairly anonymous reporters and producers who used to dig up something called “news.”
Take away the expensive “experts” and the polling results (and analysis) and you wouldn’t have much to watch on CNN or Fox News.

American photographer, filmmaker, actor William Klein has spent much of the past half-century working in France, where he has attained living legend status.
Back home, the 79-year-old native New Yorker is less well known because his films have been so devilishly hard to see.
Striking stills from Klein’s 1966 fashion world satire, “Who are you, Polly Maggoo?” have been turning up in coffee table movie books for decades, but other than a few scattered museum screenings over the years, the comedy qualified as a lost film in this country.
Fortunately, that situation is changing. The Sundance Channel has been screening “Polly Maggoo” and Klein’s 1969 Muhammad Ali documentary “The Greatest” for the past month. According to internet sources, “Polly Maggoo” will make its long delayed U.S. video debut in March in a special set that will include the director’s 1969 American political satire, “Mr. Freedom.”
I finally caught up with “Polly Maggoo” last week, thanks to the Sundance Channel, and got a kick out of its still-timely spoofing of a consumer fashion culture ruled by whimsical magazine editors and presented to the public by waifish young ciphers who are billed as “supermodels.”
Klein’s vision of the fashion world circa 1966 is as strong as the one presented by Michelangelo Antonioni the same year in his fashion photographer drama, “Blow Up.” But “Polly Maggoo” doesn’t have the powerful narrative spine of the Antonioni hit and eventually devolves into a series of skits (many of them with an anti-American slant that might have been the cause of the film’s lack of a major distribution deal in this country).
The movie follows the Twiggy-like American model of the title (played by Dorothy McGowan) who is profiled by a French TV show called “Who are you?”
The loose framework allows Klein to present a series of fashion world moments that are quite hilarious, including an opening sequence in which Polly and other models present a collection of dresses made out of metal.
Everyone breathlessly awaits the verdict of the crackpot American editor Miss Maxwell (a parody of then-Vogue editor Diana Vreeland played with obvious amusement by “Dark Shadows” star Grayson Hall).
The literally painful dresses are shown (“I’ve been wounded,” poor Polly announces backstage when a piece of her “dress” has scratched her chest), and the room falls deathly silent, awaiting Miss Maxwell’s verdict.
“He’s recreated woman!,” the editor barks, triggering applause and ordering hysteria from the assembled buyers.
“Polly Maggoo” goes on to send-up TV documentaries, French moviemaking of the 1960s and media life in general. A tad long at 102 minutes, the stunningly shot and continuously inventive film nevertheless lives up to its reputation.
(The Sundance Channel is showing “Who are you, Polly Maggoo?” tonight at 7 p.m., with a number of repeats throughout the month.)