Joe's View

A charming documentary that mixes art history, travelogue and French cuisine — “Monet’s Palate” — will debut on PBS Arts Channel 13 Sunday at 2:30 p.m.
Created, produced and written by Aileen Bordman, the film takes us to the home of Claude Monet (1840-1926) in the small Normandy village of Giverny — now a museum — and examines the role that food and dining played in the life of the great Impressionist painter.
Shot and edited in a deceptively simple style, the film explores the links between food and art in Monet’s life in a journey that takes us into some of the finest kitchens in the world and that introduces us to some seemingly unlikely admirers of the painter, including Las Vegas casino developer Steve Wynn.
The film should appeal equally to armchair travelers and foodies. Bordman rounded up a very impressive collection of chefs and restaurateurs to talk about the cuisine of Normandy and the connection between feeding one’s body and soul.
Daniel Boulud, Alice Waters (above) and Michel Richard are just three of the fine dining legends who discuss their love of Normandy and the style of cooking and the dishes that grew out of the fruit, vegetables and fish available there.
Waters is, of course, famous in this country for her belief in fresh ingredients, grown and selected as close as possible to her legendary Berkeley, California, restaurant Chez Panisse. She talks about the way that fine food is just one element in a dining experience that can be greatly expanded by the setting and the company one keeps.
Monet loved London and staying at the elegant Savoy Hotel there. Bordman includes an interview with the hotel historian who talks about the Monet paintings inspired by his lodgings and the English dishes he enjoyed eating in the Savoy restaurant.
Savoy chef Anton Edelmann prepares one of Monet’s favorite meals of Yorkshire pudding, rare beef and vegetables.
Bordman makes the kitchen scenes as beautiful to look at as the location work done in the gardens of Giverny.
Monet worked hard all of his life, but never stinted on his time spent at table, enjoying food and the company of his friends.
“I want the unobtainable,” the artist said of his quest to capture the most sensual elements of life on his canvasses. “Other artists paint a bridge, a house, the boat and that is the end. They are finished. I want to paint the air which surrounds the bridge, the house, the boat, the beauty of the air in which these objects are located and that is nothing short of impossible.”
In the scenes showing exquisite dishes being prepared, in the Normandy style, Bordman manages to tap into — and capture — the fleeting pleasures of Monet’s day-to-day life in his beautiful country home.
(For more information on the film and Monet, visit the Website maintained by the filmmakers at www.monetspalate.com. The film is set to be aired by 300 PBS outlets around the country.)

Writer-director Jonah Markowitz makes an impressive debut with “Shelter,” a drama about two Southern California surfers who fall in love, that is being shown on the here! cable network Friday at 9 p.m. (less than a month after its theatrical release in New York, Los Angeles and 10 other urban markets and a month before the picture is available on DVD from Genius Products).
The movie is the first project of the cable network’s Independent Film Initiative, which is designed to fund and distribute gay-themed indie films. “Shelter” has already won many awards on the indie film fest circuit, reinforcing the network’s decision to fund the project.
“Shelter” explores new movie territory on a number of levels — it takes us into the middle and lower-middle class surfing culture of San Pedro and its nearby beaches, and shows how a college-age young man named Zach (Trevor Wright) begins to suspect he is gay and fears it will leave him with no place in the rather macho culture of the sport and lifestyle he has loved since he was a kid.
Markowitz gives us a strong sense of place, with the San Pedro homes and hang-outs of Zach and his acquaintances presented in a refreshingly non-condescending manner. We can see the appeal of a laid-back life of work planned around maximum beach time and nights filled with partying and many opportunities for guys and gals to hook up.
Zach is already a bit of an odd man out with his surfing buds because of his interest in art. He leaves stenciled “tags” of his work on walls all over the area; he harbors a secret wish to study painting at CalArts.
Zach is a thoroughly decent guy who acts as babysitter and surrogate dad to his older sister’s young son, Cody (Jackson Wurth), while mom looks for Mr. Right. One of the major factors keeping Zach locked in place is his awareness that unmarried Sis is completely ill-suited to parenthood: If he doesn’t take care of Cody, who will?
The young man’s life begins to change when his best friend’s older brother Shaun (Brad Rowe) comes home from Los Angeles to hang out while he tries to restart his writing career. Like all of the other young men in the area, Shaun surfs whenever he gets the chance, but unlike his peers has no romantic/sexual interest in women.
Soon, Zach and Shaun are having an affair that puts them in opposition to many of their friends and family.
“Shelter” has an appealingly naïve quality that sometimes makes it look like a slightly more adult version of one of those old “ABC Afterschool Specials” about social issues. Serious roadblocks come up for Zach and Shaun, but we can sense a positive resolution as the story nears its end.
Markowitz was very fortunate in casting the low-budget film. Trevor Wright is terrific as the confused Zach who doesn’t know if he wants to face the challenges of the happiness Shaun brings him. Wright has been working in episodic television for several years — including “Scrubs,” “CSI: NY” and “The George Lopez Show” — and demonstrates he has genuine leading man potential.
Brad Rowe has been given a deceptively tough acting assignment — making the genuine niceness of Shaun interesting and believable. Shaun is there to guide Zach out of his paralyzing sense of responsbility and conformity, and Rowe couldn’t be much better in the part.
“Shelter” might be more of a wish fulfilment fantasy than a tough-minded drama about facing a difficult life passage, but it makes for a very moving (and entertaining) 90 minutes.
(The DVD version of “Shelter” will be released on May 27 and the film also is available as an on-demand movie from many cable companies.)

Many high-voltage thrillers revolve around men of action who are larger than life — Lee Child’s Jack Reacher immediately comes to mind — but Harlan Coben has carved out his own niche in the genre with a series of best-selling suspense novels set in the New Jersey suburbs where the writer has lived for years.
Although rooted in a quintessential American locale, the books have struck a chord all over the world, with Coben’s work translated into 38 languages.
Two years ago, a French film adaptation of “Tell No One,” starring Nathalie Baye, was a critical and box-office smash in that country (we’ll get to see the film here later in 2008).
Although he has been working on a punishing book-a-year pace, Coben’s new novel, “Hold Tight” (Dutton), might be his best thriller yet.
Publisher’s Weekly has praised the writer’s “this could be me factor” and that is certainly true of the immediately recognizeable situation that triggers the thriller plot of “Hold Tight.”
Suburban professionals Mike and Tia Baye fear their 16-year-old son Adam might be drifting into drugs and delinquency — and is using cell phones, email and the Internet to cover his tracks — so they decide to install spyware on the boy’s personal computer.
Mike and Tia have no idea that they are about to plunge into a nightmare situation that is vastly larger than they can begin to imagine.
Coben crosscuts between Mike and Tia’s crisis and several seemingly unrelated plot threads — a pair of killers targeting women in the community, a teacher whose thoughtless personal criticism of a student has caused the girl great trauma, a neighbor whose medical crisis uncovers apparent marital infidelity, and a grieving mother trying to understand why her teen son killed himself.
One of the amazements of “Hold Tight” is the way that Coben handles so many plot threads in his upper middle class suburban setting without losing focus on Mike and Tia and their son. Then, as we get closer to the end of the book, he brings everything together in a seamless — and completely believable — manner.
I read the 416-page novel in a few sittings, marveling at Coben’s ability to keep the thriller rushing forward in the context of such a mundane setting. And the whole thing is constructed around characters we grow to care deeply about, despite the fact that they are such “ordinary people.”
“Hold Tight” was published yesterday and deserves the tremendous success it is about to enjoy.

Turner Classic Movies is unveiling an excellent special on the great comic actor — and Stamford resident — Gene Wilder tonight at 8 p.m.
“Role Model: Gene Wilder” consists of a long conversation between the actor and Alec Baldwin — taped in Connecticut last year — that covers the career and life of the star of “The Producers” (right) and “Young Frankenstein.”
Although Wilder has given some of the most intense, over-the-top comic performances in movie history, the star is a low-key and thoughtful interview subject who always seems willing to answer questions with an honesty and directness that is unusual in his profession (I was lucky enough to host a screening of “The Producers” at the Avon Theatre in Stamford three years ago and to conduct a public Q&A session with the star after the movie).
TCM is following tonight’s special with showings of “The Producers” (at 9:15 p.m.), “Blazing Saddles” (at 11 p.m.) and “Start the Revolution Without Me” (at 2:15 a.m.)
Wilder tells Baldwin how his movie career was launched by a chance encounter — while he was acting with Anne Bancroft in a 1963 stage production of “Mother Courage,” he met Bancroft’s husband, Mel Brooks, and they hit it off right away.
Brooks invited Wilder to read an unfinished screenplay he then called “Springtime for Hitler” and promised the young actor the plum role of Leo Bloom whenever he could get the financing together.
Three years later, Brooks kept his promise and Wilder’s sensational performance in “The Producers” earned him an Oscar nomination and sent the actor on his way to a series of great comic parts (the title “Springtime for Hitler” was changed because producer Joseph E. Levine thought it would offend Jews).
A lot of ground is covered in the hour’s conversation, including Wilder’s work with Lee J. Cobb on a CBS production of “Death of a Salesman,” the actor’s small but very flashy role in “Bonnie & Clyde,” and how he came to play the doctor who falls in love with a sheep in Woody Allen’s “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex.”
The actor speaks honestly of the challenges of working with Richard Pryor on several films. Wilder adored Pryor but had to cope with the problems caused by his co-star’s drug addiction.
Now happily in retirement from the screen — but pursuing a new career writing books — Wilder tells Baldwin he would return to the screen if offered “something wonderful…But I don’t want to do junk.”
(“Role Model: Gene Wilder” will be shown by TCM at 8 p.m., with a repeat airing at 1 a.m.)

Hollywood got very nervous about movie violence 40 years ago as a result of the terrible events of 1968.
The year before, “Bonnie and Clyde” was condemned in some quarters for glamorizing violence, so when Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were both killed in the spring of 1968 — and riots erupted in cities all over the country — the studios backed away from pictures that explored gun violence, in particular.
Peter Bogdanovich’s debut film, “Targets,” was picked up by Paramount Pictures for distribution in the summer of 1968 and then had most of its bookings cancelled because the film studied a mild-mannered young man who kills his family and then starts shooting at cars on a Los Angeles freeway.
In the early fall of 1968, 20th Century Fox had a similar case of nerves about the low-budget thriller, “Pretty Poison,” based on Stephen Geller’s novel “She Let Him Continue” about a relationship between a high school cheerleader and a seemingly harmless drifter that ends in a murderous crime spree.
Fox dumped the Tuesday Weld-Anthony Perkins vehicle into drive-ins and B-level theaters, but a group of New York film critics wrote enthusiastically about the movie (despite the absence of any press screenings), shamed the studio into giving the movie a re-release, and in the following months it became an art-house and college film society favorite.
The picture remains an unsettling mix of comedy and drama with what are probably the best film performances of Weld and Perkins, two quirky talents who never got the attention they deserved but have sizeable cult followings. Writer Lorenzo Semple won the New York Film Critics Circle award for best screenplay, and would go on to such key 1970s films as “The Parallax View” (1974), but director Noel Black faded into obscurity.
Tomorrow night, I’m hosting a free screening of “Pretty Poison” as part of the Fairfield Theatre Company’s monthly “Martini & a Movie” series. It will be fun to see if the film still has the power to disturb and delight an audience.
(Doors will open for the Tuesday screening at 7 p.m. For more information, visit the non-profit organization’s Website at www.fairfieldtheatre.org)

What began many months ago as a possible new adaptation of John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera” has become “Sidewalk Opera,” a new Yale Cabaret theatre piece by Jana Hoglund, Patricia McGregor and Brian MacQueen that takes the audience into the lives of people living on the streets of New Haven.
The show opened last night and will continue through Saturday in one of the area’s most adventurous — and comfortable — venues.
When I talked with Hoglund and McGregor the other day they said the show is in the journalistic theatre tradition of Anna Deavere Smith, who brought her latest piece “Let Me Down Easy” to Long Wharf a few months back.
“I worked with Anna and my concept of theater was revolutionized,” director McGregor said of Smith’s process of doing interviews with real people whose stories are then shaped into a theatrical narrative.
The director and her two collaborators decided to do a modern-day street opera — in the spirit of “The Beggar’s Opera” — but drawn from what is actually happening in the lives of people in New Haven.
The show that has emerged deals with themes of class and race narrated by a woman named Annette who is well known by the Yale and New Haven communities for selling carnations on Broadway.
“We just kept meeting every month (while doing the interviews) to see what was emerging,” the director reported of a process that extended for over a year.
Hoglund and McGregor have invited all of the people they interviewed to attend this weekend’s performances.
“We got some money from the New Haven Office of Cultural Affairs to open the show up to the public a bit — we’re inviting people from one of the soup kitchens. We hope there will be a real cross-pollination between the theater and the community,” McGregor said.
“There has been such a strong sense of responsibility in the room,” Hoglund said of the rehearsals leading up to last night’s first public performance. “There is a certain amount of nervousness…we are working from caring and consideration…We want to give voice to each person’s story.”
“Sidewalk Opera” begins with the conductor handing the Cabaret actors their scripts — a gesture designed to make it clear to the audience that the actors, in McGregor’s words, “can never make a complete transition to being these people…But we hope we’re taking a step that tries to understand the lives of the people.”
(“Street Opera” is being present tonight and Saturday night at 8 and 10:30 p.m. at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St. Tickets are $15, with a $3 discount for seniors and a $5 discount for students. Food and drink service is available before each show. To make reservations, call 432-1566 or go online to www.yalecabaret.org.)

There was a time — 20 or 30 years ago — when a highly acclaimed Italian movie like Daniele Luchetti’s “My Brother is an Only Child” would have had a long and happy life on the U.S. art-house circuit.
In the 1970s, Italian director Lina Wertmuller became famous on this side of the Atlantic due to the wide acceptance here of her breakthrough films, “Swept Away” (1975) and “Seven Beauties” (1976). The latter film earned Wertmuller a glowing New York magazine cover story and a rare Oscar nomination for a female director.
No one thought twice about the fact that both Wertmuller pictures were in Italian with English subtitles.
These days, the market for serious foreign language films is so rough in this country that one of the most astute distributors of overseas productions — IFC Films — routinely releases its new titles on cable movies-on-demand services at the same time that it unveils films in New York and Los Angeles theaters.
Because the films are available for home viewing immediately, art house operators outside New York and Los Angeles often avoid IFC titles because they can’t really expect to do much theatrical business. This is why the great Romanian film, “Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days” — which took the top prize at Cannes last year — had only one booking in this area, at the Cine 1-4 in New Haven, and never turned up at the two primary art-houses in Fairfield County: the Garden in Norwalk and the Avon Theatre in Stamford.
Yes, it is marvelous that a foreign film can be seen by cable subscribers all over the country at the same time as the New York and Los Angeles theater openings, but without slowly building national word of mouth and generating regional press support, the films don’t filter into the national consciousness the way a picture like “Seven Beauties” did in 1976.
So, if you love to see good pictures from abroad in a theater with an audience, make haste to Stamford starting tomorrow to support Avon Theatre manager and film programmer Adam Birnbaum’s belief that “My Brother is an Only Child” merits the same attention as an American or British independent film. It’s one of the best movies you’ll see this year, opening a door into Italian family life and politics, but in a thoroughly engaging and accessible manner.

Much of the moviegoing world fell in love with the French actress Audrey Tautou when she played the title role in “Amelie” seven years ago.
Tautou reminded a lot of people of the young Audrey Hepburn, with her combination of girlish good looks, winsome charm, and a smile that could light up the screen.
Since “Amelie,” however, Tautou has had a hard time finding a suitable follow-up role. She’s been in a lot of French films, but mostly forgettable fluff.
Although Tautou landed the female lead in Ron Howard’s movie version of “The Da Vinci Code” two years ago — and the film was an international hit — the success of the picture was more a matter of good marketing (and a pre-sold title) than widespread fondness for the movie itself. So far, the show biz wheels have not been put in motion to make Tautou a trans-Atlantic star in the tradition of Catherine Deneuve or Sophia Loren.
The latest Tautou vehicle, “Priceless,” has just opened in U.S. art-houses and it’s a weird misfire. Clearly meant to be a frothy charmer (the opening credits and music have a neo-1950s Hepburn/Doris Day feel), the movie presents its star as one of the least appealing comic prostitutes in the long history of movie hookers with hearts of gold.
When I was waiting to see the movie last weekend, I leard more than one person in the crowd leaving the previous screening complaining about how unlikeable Tautou was in the movie.
A mainstream hit in France, “Priceless” seems to have lost something in translation. Tautou comes off as one of the toughest and most venal golddiggers I’ve ever seen in a movie. As a result, the way that the sad sack hotel bartender (played by Gad Elmaleh) falls for her — and throws away his life savings to keep her in designer clothes and four star hotels — isn’t remotely credible.
The disconnect between the Tautou character and the frothy visual style and the sprightly soundtrack music is jarring, to say the least. The movie is clearly aping “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” but Hepburn managed to make us overlook Holly Golightly’s $50 “tips” from her many “boyfriends.” We could see right from the start why the George Peppard character fell for Holly.
In “Priceless,” the bartender’s determination to win Tautou seems like a form of madness, as the young woman blithely maxes out his credit cards and has him calling the bank to use some of his retirement funds to pay for her deluxe dinner and lodgings.
The movie goes even more haywire when the bartender is hired as a male prostitute by a rich woman visiting his hotel, and then he and Tautou gleefully exchange advice on keeping their clients hooked.
“Priceless” might have worked as a “American Gigolo”-style drama of mutual exploitation that finally ends in redemption, but as it now stands, the movie is one of the most bizarre bits of froth I’ve ever seen, and you don’t leave the the theater wanting to see more of Tautou (or her co-star).