Joe's View

The headline above is “security chief” Sorin Mihalache’s remarkably accurate assessment of a “model house” about halfway through the first episode of the new season of “The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency” debuting on the Oxygen network Aug. 26 at 10 p.m.
Guilty pleasures don’t get much guiltier than this series Dickinson has spun-off from her participation as one of the judges on “America’s Next Top Model” (the long-running Tyra Banks horror show on the CW network).
A DVD of the season launch of the Dickinson epic landed on my desk last week and even by reality show standards this one is a doozy.
Dickinson looks and acts like a villainess in a Jackie Collins novel.
She’s an ex-model — the first “supermodel,” to hear her tell it — and a raging exhibitionist who has upped the ante on the Banks-hosted model show by peddling male flesh as well as female. For the new season, she came up with the brainstorm of living with her beauties as well as managing their careers.
“Of course! A model house. What model agent lives with her models?,” Janice asks, rhetorically, before we follow her camera crew into a garish modern mansion in which the talent from the last three seasons (what Janice calls “the pre-existing models”) has to fight for their jobs against a bunch of “new models.”
As the muscle-bound bodyguard Sorin so wisely notes, the place does look like a location for a Jenna Jameson XXX video, with so many buff and near-naked women and men lounging around the giant swimming pool (which has a full-sized boat floating in it for no good reason).
“Let the games begin!,” Dickinson shrieks at her house-warming party as the old and new crew realize most of them will have to hit the road at the end of the first episode.
Janice’s arrogance and seeming lack of any self-censoring mechanism between her brain and her mouth results in one low-camp moment after another.
Made aware that one of the new male models is deaf, the brassy agency head’s take on the situation is, “I’m a bitch and you can’t hear, so we’re perfect…If you’re blind, if you’re deaf, it’s all good!”
Much of the show’s comic spark is provided by “pre-existing model” Brian Kehoe (above), who calls the newcomers, “a pack of ugly animals…I have no idea who will be living in the house with me and Janice.”
The love-hate between Janice and Brian looks to be a major theme of season four — at the end of the show there is a preview of future episodes in which Kehoe appears to be kicked out of the house.
“The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency” is quintessential reality TV of the ’00s — appalling but impossible to turn off once you’ve turned it on.

Having read the Joyce Carol Oates novella “Zombie” several years ago, I sort of knew what I was getting into last night at the first New York International Fringe Festival performance of an adaptation of the book by actor-writer Bill Connington.
But seeing and hearing the piece in a small and very dark loft space on the third floor of a building in Greenwich Village raised the goose-bump threshold of Oates’s attempt to get inside the head of a sexual predator/serial killer loosely modeled on Jeffrey Dahmer.
“My name is Quentin P. This is my new apartment. In the basement of my grandmother’s old house. Where she doesn’t live anymore,” the play’s narrator and sole character begins.
Connington has made himself appear all too “normal” for the play, wearing a pair of khakis and a Lacoste-type shirt as well as slightly oversized prescription glasses. He looks like the blandly “harmless” people we see around us every day.
Sitting in the tiny space — which was packed and fulfilled that cliché about silence and pins dropping — we are taken into Quentin’s confidence and hear a story of almost unbearable horror. The producers are enforcing a rather unusual live theater policy of not admitting anyone under the age of 18.
Connington has captured the Oates style of not hyping evil or making monsters into “the other.” The actor’s commitment to playing Quentin without stepping back and judging the man’s behavior gives us the illusion of meeting and listening to a psychopath laying all of his cards on the table. We become a surrogate psychiatrist or, God forbid, a best friend Quentin feels he can trust with the unvarnished truth of what he desires and what he has done.
The title derives from Quentin’s failed attempts to make slaves out of his victims via primitive lobotomies (something Dahmer attempted in his crime spree).
“Zombie” is not “entertainment” by any conventional standard, but Connington’s performance is simply extraordinary — so creepy and true that when the 60-minute piece was over, the jammed and chaotic Saturday night scene outside on MacDougal Street seemed like a refuge.
The writer-actor fulfills Oates’s belief that, “The most powerful moral art is not the kind that preaches goodness, but the kind that shows the sickening, corrosive effect of various kinds of evil.”
(The New York International Fringe Festival will present “Zombie” Wednesday at 3:30 p.m., Thursday at 9:30 p.m., Friday at 5:15 p.m., next Sunday at 1 p.m. and August 21 at 7:15 p.m. Tickets are $15 — $10 for seniors over 65 — and may be ordered by calling 1-866-468-7619 or online at www.FringeNYC.org)

Although he is rarely included on the lists of American “independent” filmmakers, Woody Allen has been making movies his own way for almost 40 years.
From “Take the Money and Run” in 1969 through “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” — which opens next Friday — Allen has maintained complete control over his work in a way that has eluded his peers.
Stanley Kubrick had the same sort of control in his day, but worked in a much more expensive manner and therefore was restricted in terms of the number of films he made.
Directors who started out at roughly the same time as Allen — Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn, Milos Forman — have been able to attain “final cut” on some of their projects over the years, but they also have had to bend to the will of studio chiefs.
All three of those directors have also gone through long fallow periods while Allen has created 36 feature films in the past 39 years (during that period he also squeezed in a made-for-TV film of his play “Don’t Drink the Water” and the funniest segment of the 1989 omnibus film, “New York Stories”).
Drugs and other personal problems took a toll on the careers of Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola over the past three decades, but Allen was able to keep his momentum even when he was mired in one of the nastiest sex scandals of the 1990s (the break-up of his long-term relationship with Mia Farrow and his affair and subsequent marriage to Farrow’s adopted daughter).
Say what you will about the consistency of the filmmaker’s work — he has had more than a few duds along the way (the nearly forgotten 2003 flop “Anything Else” is near the top of that list) — but Allen has always managed to come back strong after weak periods.
The 2006 comedy “Scoop” and last year’s thriller “Cassandra’s Dream” were dismissed by most critics and ignored by the mass audience. I have a hunch “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” will put Allen back on his feet with both of those fickle constituencies.
Just as the change of scene represented by the 2005 “Match Point” seemed to recharge Allen’s batteries — it was the first of three pictures he shot in England from 2005 through 2007 — the move to Spain for the new movie has freshened the writer-director’s themes and a younger and hotter cast has resulted in the 72-year-old artist’s sexiest film.
In recent years, Allen has had to go where the money is to maintain his artistic independence. “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” was partially funded by a Spanish film and cable TV consortium. What could have been a restriction on Allen’s creativity has instead proven to be an inspiration — the movie is about the collision between two female American visitors (Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall) and a sexually adventurous Barcelona painter (Javier Bardem) who makes it clear from their first meeting that he wants to sleep with both women.
The painter shares a lot of the sexual and spiritual philosophies Allen has expressed in his Manhattan comedies and dramas — life is short, we are heading toward the void, so why not make hay while the sun shines? — but the new location and the very sexy protagonist freshens up the director’s ideas.
Allen leavens the serious undertones of the story with an inspired fourth character — Bardem’s half-crazy ex-wife, played by Penelope Cruz (above), in great form, who arrives on the scene to make life much harder (and much funnier) for the two American women.
I was cheered by the mention in the press notes for this charming comedy that Allen has already signed up for three more films for the producers of “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.”
Just like one of his gifted but depressed characters, Allen won’t allow his awareness of his own fast-approaching demise to stop him from doing the work he enjoys today.

The 30-year-old actor James Franco went from unknown to potential star when he rose to the challenge of playing the title role in the 2001 TV movie, “James Dean,” but he hasn’t really broken through as a major film personality in spite of the long and interesting resume he has put together over the past seven years.
The well-received performance as screen icon James Dean landed Franco a key role in “Spider-Man” in 2002 and since then he has gone back and forth between obscure indies (such as “The Dead Girl” in 2006) and major studio films (two additional “Spider-Man” pictures as well as the 2006 releases, “Tristan & Isolde” and “Annapolis”).
Franco gave a very impressive but little seen performance as the alienated son of Robert DeNiro in the woefully underrated 2002 drama, “City by the Sea.”
It is to Franco’s credit as an actor that he has tended to completely disappear into the characters he plays, but he hasn’t had that dominating role in a big hit that spells Hollywood star.
Franco’s position in the movie world pecking order should shift with today’s opening of the raucous comedy, “Pineapple Express,” in which the actor gives an indelible performance as an amiable dope dealer named Saul Silver.
The movie is the latest product of the Judd Apatow hit-making factory — which had “Superbad” and “Knocked Up” last summer and “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” last spring — and it contains the mix of raunchy and realistic teen-oriented humor that almost always strikes gold at the box-office.
Saul is a Jewish dealer devoted to his elderly “bubby” — he says he sells dope just to keep her in a nice retirement community — and Franco scores laughs out of almost everything Saul says and does. The performance is of a piece with Franco’s other impressively detailed movie characters, but the fact that the dealer is so appealing (in an off-center way) should result in the teen audience making a cult figure out of Saul and the man who plays him.
Starting this fall, Franco will become the male face of Gucci, a fact that has already given rise to internet satire (above).

Sam Baker has worked for a number of British fashion magazines, so her new novel “Deadly Beautiful” (Ballantine Books) reads like an expose as well as a good mystery.
Baker’s fictional alter ego — journalist Annie Anderson — doesn’t quite qualify as an amateur sleuth because she is given the assignment to find out what might have happened to a young British model who has gone missing in Tokyo.
The novel opens in New York City where Annie is covering Fashion Week for the English magazine, Handbag.
Annie has a cool boss in the Anna Wintour/“Devil Wears Prada” mode and hasn’t quite made the adjustment from newspaper reporting to magazine journalism (Annie was introduced in an earlier Baker novel, “Fashion Victim,” which I haven’t read).
“Deadly Beautiful” has a more serious tone than you might expect from a mystery set in the “frivolous” world of fashion. Annie is a conflicted character — dissatisfied with her own looks and fearful of the commitment involved in a new relationship — and her descent into the world of young models isn’t presented in the frothy manner of a standard chick lit escapist book.
Entering one of the tents in Bryant Park, Annie feels “a familiar rush…Excitement and anticipation, tinged with disbelief and a dash of horror at the sheer extravagance and excess of the entire spectacle.”
“Although Annie still tried to view the whole charade with an outsider’s eyes, she couldn’t deny a macabre fascination with fashion’s excesses. Sure it was big business…but it was also the closest the twenty-first century got to a traveling circus. Fashion was the modern equivalent of the old carnivals with their bearded ladies, fat women, and dwarves. It was like a living hall of mirrors.”
Our heroine travels to Japan to find out what might have happened to Scarlett Ulrich — who is the half-sister of Annie’s best friend — and Baker provides us with a fascinating (and slightly scary) tour of the world inhabited by Western models in Tokyo. Both prized and disdained, these girls face the challenge of fitting into clothing and shoes tailored for Japanese girls and confront cultural barriers that can leave them feeling completely isolated.
“Deadly Beautiful” packs a lot of action and insight into 275 pages. Although the cover suggests a breezy model mystery, the book is much darker than its packaging and should be of interest to readers who never pick up crime books or chick lit.
The official publication date is August 19.

I caught the final performance of the Second Stage revival of “Some Americans Abroad” yesterday in Manhattan.
The play was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company in the late 1980s and had its American premiere at Lincoln Center Theater two decades ago.
It’s a sour piece of work by Richard Nelson — an American writer who has found more success on the other side of the Atlantic — about U.S. academics leading a college English department’s annual trip to see plays in London and Stratford.
The professors and their spouses are the sort of snobs who prefer to be called “travelers” rather than tourists — the types who ape the elitist travel writer Paul Theroux on their globe-trotting. The worst possible horror for this bunch is to encounter another American doing the same thing they are doing.
In the course of “Some Americans Abroad” we learn that the new head of the English department (played by Tom Cavanagh,right) is about to fire a meek un-tenured professor (Anthony Rapp) who has decided to pay his own way for the trip in order to convince his boss he should be kept on for at least another year.
Nelson seems to view all of the characters with contempt, so it’s hard to care what happens to any of them. Watching the play in New York one is left doubly alienated by the feeling that “Some Americans Abroad” was originally designed to pander to London audiences looking for an excuse to feel superior to the Americans visiting their city.
The Second Stage revival was directed by Gordon Edelstein, the artistic director of Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, who is without peer when it comes to staging modern American classics (his production of “The Price” last season at LWT was spectacular and he did one of the best versions of “The Front Page” I’ve ever seen).
Edelstein assembled a strong ensemble for “Some Americans Abroad” — including those great old pros John Cunningham and Pamela Payton-Wright — but the actors fought a losing battle with Nelson’s meandering and nasty play.

Although it was shot on location in Manhattan in high-gloss style two years ago, the offbeat 20th Century Fox romantic comedy, “My Sassy Girl,” went unreleased in this country.
Last night, I watched a screener of the Aug. 26 DVD release and although it was obvious from the start the movie has serious problems — what is first presented as a fizzy romantic comedy turns out to be a very serious drama — the performances by Elisha Cuthbert and Jesse Bradford kept me watching .
The movie is adapted from a huge Korean hit, released in 2001, and perhaps some of the problems in tone can be attributed to screenwriter Victor Levin’s tough assignment — moving an intimate love story from one culture to another.
Jesse Bradford stars as a naïve Midwesterner attending college in New York City who becomes transfixed by an emotionally unstable rich girl played by Cuthbert. Charlie and Jordan don’t “meet cute,” they meet weird, with the young man rescuing the young woman from what appears to be a suicide attempt on a subway platform.
The girl passes out — dead drunk — and Charlie carries her back to his dorm.
What transpires for the next few scenes is a love story in the vein of a 1930s screwball farce — an adventurous woman shaking up the life of a stuffed-shirt young man — but we quickly see that Jordan is deeply disturbed and alcoholic to boot.
It takes almost half the movie for the wobbly tone to straighten out so that we begin to care about Jordan and wonder what might be the cause of her terrible emotional distress.
I’ve never seen the Korean version of “My Sassy Girl,” but the basic plot seems to be an uncredited remake of the powerful 1969 drama “The Sterile Cuckoo” in which a disturbed college girl played by Liza Minnelli became attached to a square student played by Wendell Burton. The boy in that Alan Pakula film almost immediately saw that he was in a terribly mismatched relationship but didn’t know how he could get out of it without destroying his girlfriend.
Bradford and Cuthbert eventually get the chance to play out some very powerful scenes of unbalanced love, but it’s a shame the very shaky opening half hour could not have been reworked. In addition to the appealing leads, the film has an ensemble packed with first-rate New York talent, including Chris Sarandon, Joanna Gleason and Tom Aldredge.

I don’t believe that anyone has been killed doing a reality show yet, but who knows what has happened off-camera to survivors of this cheap — in more than one sense — TV genre that has replaced so many scripted comedies and dramas in recent years.
The shows push people to act out and undertake emotional and physical risks that can’t be healthy.
Case in point: Stephen Gilchrist Glover, better known as “Steve-O,” who has spent much of the past decade doing crazy stunts for several reality series as well as a whole batch of popular DVDs.
Several years ago, I interviewed Glover when his growing fame from the hugely popular MTV series “Jackass” enabled him to produce his own spin-off DVD, “Don’t Try This at Home.”
Glover spent some of his childhood in Darien, so it was a natural “local kid makes good” feature for the paper. I had fun talking to him; he seemed to be having a blast being paid to act foolish. The MTV series was one of the first guilty pleasure reality series, with Steve-O and pals like Johnny Knoxville and Bam Margera gleefully making asses of themselves doing one screwball stunt after another. Glover had studied at the Barnum & Bailey “clown college” in Florida and Knoxville was an aspiring stuntman/actor, so the show’s premise and casting made sense.
MTV parlayed the series into two highly successful feature films that helped to close the ever-dwindling gap between mainstream entertainment and porn. The gang moved from physically challenging stunts to sexually explicit joking that often looked like scenes from underground gay porn.
I lost track of Steve-O for several years, but read reports of drug busts, mental breakdowns, rehab stints and at least one suicide attempt.
Last week, I received a screener copy of the Image Entertainment release, “Steve-O: Out on Bail,” and was appalled to see the “entertainer” encouraged by his fans to set himself on fire, engage in what looked like sexual self-torture and other grotesque stunts that had me fast-forwarding through most of the 2 DVD set.
As “Out on Bail” demonstrates, Steve-O has made a lucrative sideline career for himself touring America and Europe putting on live shows in which huge crowds cheer him on to do increasingly dangerous things to his body (and spirit).
Obviously, Steve-O volunteered for this bizarre gig that has eaten up a decade of his life, but the whole culture surrounding “reality” TV seems designed to suck in and hook disturbed personalities. It’s very unsettling watching audiences at Steve-O shows laugh and hoot as he takes insane risks (while clearly under the influence of who knows what substances).
If fundamentalist religious leaders on the other side of the globe were looking for proof that we have become a “decadent” culture, they couldn’t come up with a better piece of evidence than “Steve-O Out on Bail.”