Joe's View

The Iraq war drama “Stop-Loss” has done very disappointing business over the past two weeks, but it should elevate the Hollywood status of Channing Tatum, who up until now has been stuck in largely forgettable roles in pictures such as “She’s The Man’’ (2006) and “Step Up” (2006) that exploited Tatum’s handsome face and well-defined body rather than his acting chops.
When I interviewed director Kimberly Peirce a few weeks ago, she said that she had no idea who Tatum was when he auditioned for “Stop-Loss” two years ago — and it wasn’t easy to convince Paramount to give the actor the most intense role in the movie — but her hunch paid off with a memorable performance that demonstrates the emotional toll of service in Iraq.
The 28-year-old Tatum has been a teen idol for a few years now.
Tatum’s progress on screen has been closely followed by the very entertaining and well-designed Website, squarehippies.com, which is devoted to the celebration of movie and TV beefcake (“Sexy body, sexy lips, sexy voice, what more could you ask?,” the site asked — rhetorically — in a 2006 lay-out of stills from “She’s The Man”).
I thought about Tatum, and the whole issue of male beauty in movies, when Hollywood icon Charlton Heston died a few days ago.
Heston was something of a pioneer in the realm of male stars showing off their physiques — along with their acting prowess — in key movies such as “Ben-Hur” (1959) and “Planet of the Apes” (1968), where the performer spent long stretches of the pictures wearing very little clothing.
Heston was able to strip down without appearing to be narcissistic, so he was spared the barbs aimed at Victor Mature, who was mocked by some Hollywood peers for his beefcake roles in “Samson and Delilah” (1949) and “Demetrius and the Gladiators” (1954).
Heston was clearly proud of his body at a time when most male stars were reluctant to display much skin — indeed, he was the first Hollywood A-list actor to agree to a (brief) nude scene, in “Planet of the Apes,” a decision Heston writes about in his best-selling published journal, “An Actor’s Life.”
These days — the era of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt — gym time is almost as important as acting class for the young men of Hollywood, so Channing Tatum appears to be perfectly positioned for major stardom over the next few years.

Colin Harrison has delivered another breathless page-turner in his latest New York suspense novel, “The Finder” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) which might be the most skillful combination of reporting and thrills yet from the author of “The Havana Room” and “Manhattan Nocturne.”
Harrison seems to be familiar with every nook and cranny of New York, from multi-zillionaire condos (owned by the rich and trashy) in the Time Warner Center to the farthest (and scariest) reaches of Brooklyn and Queens.
Like Richard Price in “Lush Life,” Harrison starts with a terrible crime — very late in the night — and then shows us how the act of violence ripples out across the city, binding together people you would never imagine have anything in common.
In the novel’s most extreme moments, Harrison’s vision of city life is pitch black, but he miraculously finds a way to take us out the other side of the urban nightmare in the final pages — there is enough hope at the end to leave us with the feeling that the horrifying journey in “The Finder” had an important point.
Harrison starts with the ultimate in reader-grabbing opening chapters — two immigrant girls blowing off steam at a Brooklyn beach, after a long night of cleaning Manhattan offices, are suddenly killed in an almost unimaginably grotesque manner (no details here). Their Chinese co-worker leaves the car to relieve herself in the bushes just moments before the two girls are killed; she very quickly realizes she was the one targeted for death, because of something she might have learned in one of the offices her crew cleaned.
“The Finder” introduces another half-dozen or so major characters, including one of Harrison’s greatest creations, the maniacal billionaire “master of the universe” Bill Martz, whose huge stake in a drug company stock is wired into the novel’s central mystery.
A man with unbridled ego, and lust for power, Martz is the blood brother of such fictional creations as Gordon Gekko (in “Wall Street”) and Max Herschel (in the woefully underrated Sidney Lumet film “Just Tell Me What You Want”). Martz also works as a stand-in for such real life Manhattan titans as Rupert Murdoch.
Harrison’s gift for character is so potent that he includes a terrific (and terrifically smart) minor character in the form of the well-connected female doctor Ann Reilly, who is sucked into the labyrinthine mystery by her businessman husband Tom.
Ann sees almost everyone she meets in terms of their visible symptoms of illness and decay. Harrison gives us a fabulous setpiece in which Tom and Ann attend a party at the Martz “Huge! High in the air!” apartment in one of Manhattan’s best zipcodes.
“She was too tired to be of much use to Tom. So she watched. She’d been introduced to Connie, the youngish wife of someone important there, so Ann studied her. The woman sported a very expensive boob job. How natural and yet grotesque! How impossible yet marvelous! One hardly knew who was responsible for this aesthetic state of affairs, men or women themselves.”
“And yet, equally strange to Ann, was the fact that the fake (boobs) worked. Men who were otherwise among the most sophisticated and brilliant, worldly and perceptive, lawyers, bankers, artists — men who had buried parents, friends, spouses, even children, and who thus knew the essential tragedy of the flesh — were themselves so often rendered helpless before these unnatural yet unarguably beautifully rendered falsies. Smart men! Thoughtful, sensitive men! Doctors!”
“…The response was hardwired in, kicking off testosterone pulses in the endocrine system. Couldn’t help themselves. Helpless. Helpless men. They lost the power of discernment and resistance. They lusted, and in the glare of that lust, women gained power, if for only a moment.”
What is so amazing about “The Finder,” and Harrison’s skill as a writer, is that he can so frequently find the perfect moments for such acute observations without ever stopping the momentum of the thriller plot that surrounds everything in the book.

The new, big-budget adaptation of Scott Smith’s 2006 best-seller, “The Ruins,” debuted nationally with virtually no advance press screenings on Friday.
When I saw the movie on Saturday, it didn’t take long to see why DreamWorks decided to open the picture “cold” — it’s just another dumb American-tourists-in- distress gorefest following in the wake of “Hostel” and “Turistas.” Not what you’d expect from a major studio release adapted from a well-regarded novel.
The combination of the exceptionally dopey tourists and the risible monster — flesh-eating plants that can talk (and mimic cellphones!) — had the crowd I saw it with at Manhattan’s AMC Empire on 42nd Street roaring with derisive laughter.
The movie is a 95-minute accounting error by the DreamWorks studio that delivers more nubile flesh (female and male) and more gross-out violence than the average R-rated horror film, but the lost U.S. college students are simply too dumb to live.
By the halfway point, I wished the plants would get a move on, and finish off the almost entirely unsympathetic quartet stranded in the ancient Mexican ruins, just so that I could get out and enjoy the sunny Manhattan afternoon.
What saved the experience for me was the unusually vocal audience around me — hooting at every misstep by the college students and roaring at such dialogue as “Four American tourists just don’t disappear on vacation!” (Haven’t these kids seen any of the 12,000 TV hours Nancy Grace has devoted to the Natalie Holloway case in Aruba over the past three years?)
The audience at the AMC was a mix of European tourists and black teens who clearly got a kick out of watching the well-heeled white American dopes stepping into traps they should have seen coming from (literally) miles away.
I have friends who loved the Scott Smith novel two years ago, but it must have had much more characterization that made the victims sympathetic and much more explanation of the monstrous vines that overtake the tourists on top of and inside what appears to be a Mayan pyramid.
Even though their Mexican driver says the area is a bad one, as he drops them off in the middle of nowhere — and they don’t seem to have a decent plan to get back to their Cancun hotel after visiting the “dig” — the Americans keep going deeper and deeper into inescapable peril.
Is “The Ruins” meant to be an Iraq war drama in horror-movie drag?

The Lincoln Center Theater revival of “South Pacific” had its official opening last night, receiving the same sort of powerful press endorsement that I gave the show in this space a few weeks ago when I saw an early preview (March 12 item “Back to Bali Ha’i).
LCT announced today that based on the rave reviews (and strong business so far) what was originally set to be a limited run, ending in June, has become an open-ended engagement.
Director Bartlett Sher has now positioned himself as one of the modern masters of musical staging — Sher has conquered the often ungainly thrust-stage space of the Vivian Beaumont Theatre as easily for the 1940s Rodgers & Hammerstein classic as he did for Adam Guettel’s new classic “The Light in the Piazza” in the same theater a few seasons ago.
“South Pacific” leads Kelli O’Hara and Paulo Szot more than live up to the aura of their famous predecessors in the roles of Nellie Forbush and Emile DeBeque, but I was just as impressed by the performance of Matthew Morrison as Lt. Cable, the terribly conflicted Philadelphia naval officer who at first fights his attraction to the island girl played by Li Jun Li.
Morrison played opposite Kelli O’Hara in “Piazza” and has one of the strongest singing voices in the Broadway theatre — his renditions of “Younger Than Springtime” and “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” are flawless. But the young star acts as well as he sings.
Yesterday, a perfectly timed new Simon and Schuster book, “The South Pacific Companion” by Laurence Maslon, landed on my desk.
Maslon traces the history of the show, starting with an account of the South Pacific theater of World War II and how James Michener’s service there led to his Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Tales of the South Pacific” — the source material for the musical.
The oversized “South Pacific Companion” is packed with great pictures from the original 1949 production, as well as stills from the somewhat controversial 1958 film version (Maslon explores the use of color filters that many people believe ruin some scenes in the movie).
Maslon digs into fascinating details of the show’s history, including director/co-writer Joshua Logan’s anger over the huge annuity he did not receive after he was cut out of a writer’s royalty for the show.
The book brings the reader right up to date with an account of the two-years-in-the-making Lincoln Center revival.
(For performance and ticket information on “South Pacific” go to www.LCT.org)

The new Martin Scorsese Rolling Stones concert film, “Shine a Light,” has many high points, but the big surprise for me was the way that guitarist Keith Richards emerges as a showman who is most certainly the equal of the group’s lead singer, Mick Jagger.
Keith has always been a major power in the group, of course, co-writing most of the songs with Mick and providing superb musicianship as lead guitarist for more than 40 years.
But, near the end of “Shine a Light,” Richards gets a solo spot — without his guitar — and does a vocal rendition of “You Got the Silver” that is every bit as galvanizing as any of Mick’s adrenaline-fueled, crowd-stirring song-and-dance antics.
Scorsese drops a black curtain over the huge golden stage setpiece behind the band, gives Richards a simple solo spotlight, and the man is absolutely mesmerizing, both vocally and visually. Without any staging tricks, simply planted at the microphone, Richards makes us hang on every word, every gesture.
Has there ever been a better argument against plastic surgery than Keith’s fantastic, lived-in face?
The musician has earned every line and crevice. Keith’s face is now one of those beautiful ruins in the tradition of W.H. Auden or Lillian Hellman. The artist’s total comfort with the way he looks and moves is one of the best parts of a Rolling Stones show in the 21st century.
(“Shine a Light” opens nationally tomorrow.)

Stamford’s non-profit Avon Theatre Film Center is presenting a special “Critic’s Choice” showing of Philippe Garrel’s “J’Entends Plus La Guitare” tonight at 7:30 p.m. Sadly, this is probably the only theatrical screening that the recently rediscovered 1991 film will be receiving in Connecticut.
Although it is viewed as a masterpiece in France, it took 17 years for “J’Entends…” to find a U.S. distributor and when I saw the movie at Cinema Village in New York during its opening weekend last month I was one of about a half-dozen ticket buyers at a Saturday afternoon showing.
Why the picture took so long to reach these shores is a genuine mystery. Garrel’s study of sexual relationships and drug addiction is, quite simply, a knock-out.
According to the press notes, the film was inspired by Garrel’s own turbulent relationship with the German model/actress/singer Nico (real name, Christa Paffgen), who was one of Andy Warhol’s “superstars” in the 1960s and part of the legendary rock band sponsored by the pop artist, The Velvet Underground.
Nico was a heroin addict for more than 20 years and died in 1988 at the age of 50.
“J’Entends…” is in no sense a biopic about Nico, but Garrel’s realistic and somewhat sympathetic portrait of drug addiction was inspired by the time he spent with Nico.
What is so striking about the Garrel film is the way that he weaves an addiction subplot through a complex portrait of the way people move through different relationships over time.
Benoit Regent is the stand-in for Garrel, a decent but not very strong-willed young man who tends to be molded by whatever woman becomes important in his life. Johanna Ter Steege plays the charismatic girlfriend who pulls the Benoit character into the drug world.
“J’Entends…” is about the tug between settling down with someone nice and “normal” and leading a bohemian life with an electric personality who is probably doomed to burn out.
Garrel moves us into the story slowly. The opening scenes — set in a summer resort — have the buoyant feel of one of those charming and casual Erich Rohmer romantic comedies such as “Pauline at the Beach” or “Boyfriends and Girlfriends.”
Then, we realize that Garrel is going to show us his protagonist over a much longer period of time than Rohmer ever covers in his films, and that we will see a very realistic personal battle between stability and druggy nonconformity.
Tonight’s screening is being hosted by Film Comment editor-at-large, Kent Jones, one of the very best and most knowledgeable reviewers.
(Tickets are $6 for Avon members, $7 for students and seniors and $10 for non-members. The Avon is at 272 Bedford St. in downtown Stamford. For more information, call 967-3660 or go online to www.avontheatre.org.)