Joe's View

Tonight the Bow Tie Criterion in New Haven will be cult horror fan central as B-movie legend Bruce Campbell arrives in the Elm City to appear at the 7:30 and 10 p.m. screenings of his latest opus, “My Name is Bruce.”
In case you are out of the loop, Campbell is the star of several key cult films going all the way back to “The Evil Dead” (1981) and “Evil Dead II” (1987) and “Army of Darkness” (1993) – right – all of which were directed by Sam Raimi (who would go on to a huge mainstream career with the “Spider-Man” series).
Campbell has 95 actor credits on the imdb Website as I write this and another 35 film and TV credits under the category “self” (various cult items in which he breaks the “fourth wall” by appearing as “Bruce Campbell”).
The actor’s cult renown and connections with rising star directors has resulted in cameo work for the Coen brothers and voice work for major animated films (“The Ant Bully” in 2008).
The film opening in New Haven tonight was directed by Campbell and is a mock love/hate letter to himself.
Borrowing heavily from the 1985 horror hit “Fright Night” — in which Roddy McDowall played a TV horror host who is pressed into service as a real vampire hunter — “My Name is Bruce” follows a teen fan of Campbell’s who decides that the actor is the only one capable of vanquishing a Chinese demon in the boy’s remote Western town.
We meet Campbell in the middle of the filming of his latest B-movie, “Cave Alien 2,” another cheap and silly picture the actor can walk through with few regrets (the mock B-movie is indistinguishable from “real” Campbell films like “Man With the Screaming Brain” and the forthcoming ““Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”).
“My Name is Bruce” is so self-deprecating that it’s critic proof, but I can’t imagine a non-Campbell acolyte making it through more than ten or fifteen minutes of this broad send-up of cheap horror films and their fans.
Still, Campbell is a hilarious storyteller — he has a best-selling memoir to his credit — and it should be fun to hear what he has to say for himself tonight. He has become the Vincent Price of the current horror era.
(The Bow Tie Criterion is at 86 Temple St. in New Haven. For more information call 498-2500.)

Joshua Scher’s new play “The Footage” is being given an excellent production at the Flea Theater in Manhattan — it’s a provocative look at Internet networking, video gaming, YouTube, porn, Facebook and a bunch of other modern conveniences so many people are using to replace real connections.
The Flea is the wonderful two-theater space on White St. in Tribeca run by artistic director Jim Simpson for the past 12 years.
One of Simpson’s best ideas is to have a resident company of young actors — called The Bats — who are selected each year from over a thousand candidates coming out of NYU and other acting programs in the region and around the country.
The Bats are used in supporting roles in mainstage productions, but form the ensembles of the more experimental fare that is produced in the small basement space (an unusual oblong playing area that seems to push writers and directors to come up with bold cinematic staging concepts).
The players change each season but the work of The Bats has been consistently strong in every Flea production I’ve seen over the past few years.
Scher wrote “The Footage” with The Bats and the downstage space in mind. And director Claudia Zelevansky (a Yale Drama School grad) has used the space and guided the young actors with great skill.
The play is about a troubled group of teens and 20somethings who are linked by an online role-playing game and a YouTube sensation consisting of nightly uploads of a young woman who has been kidnapped and is being slowly tortured by her captors. Scher and Zelevansky use multi-media very creatively with a half-dozen monitors showing us what is going in in the alternate universe of the role-playing game, as well as chilling glimpses of the YouTube torture clips.
We learn near the beginning of the piece that the YouTube videos are a stunt produced by some ambitious would-be actors and dramatists who haven’t quite figured out how they can use the premise for career and financial gain (the “hits” keep going up every night but no money is coming in).
“The Footage” cuts back and forth between the country house where the YouTube hoax is being created and a group of intense male gamers who shift between the role-playing scenarios and the borderline porn of the abduction videos.
The Bats form such a tight ensemble that it would be wrong to single out one performer. Let’s just say that it was a pleasure to watch Jamie Effros, Michael Micalizzi, Nicolas Flower, Michael Guagno, Caroline Hurley, Elizabeth Alderfer, Blair Baker and Rachel McFee bring this gripping (and troubling) piece of theater to life.
“The Footage” is playing at The Flea Theater through Nov. 30 and tickets are a steal at only $20. For more information go to www.theflea.org

Last month, on the Amtrak ride back from the Bouchercon mystery writer’s gathering in Baltimore, I found myself in a car filled with crime writers and I had a chance to catch up with the wonderful New Haven mystery writer Karen E. Olson.
For the past several years, Karen has been writing novels about a New Haven journalist named Annie Seymour in a series that began with “Sacred Cows” and went on to include “Secondhand Smoke” and “Dead of the Day.”
The writer told me that she has moved on to a new mystery series — set to begin next year — about a Las Vegas tattoo artist.
So, the just-published “Shot Girl” (Obsidian) could be the last Annie novel for a while. I am very happy to report that Olson is going out on a high — the book features the same clever plotting, great local color and terrific personal touches that have been a hallmark of the series since it began.
Olson will be talking about the novel tonight at 7 p.m. at R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison.
The stakes are higher than ever for Annie in “Shot Girl.” Her job future is, of course, as uncertain as ever due to the precarious nature of the newspaper business. One of the strongest aspects of the Annie books is the way that they have charted the changes in media over the last several years — Olson is a 20-year veteran of the business and she knows what she is writing about. There is a slightly melancholy air to the newspaper scenes in the four books because everyone working for Olson’s fictional New Haven Herald wonders if the next decade will mean the end of their profession.
“Shot Girl” tightens the screws on Annie in her always turbulent personal life, by opening with the death of her ex-husband Ralph in front of a New Haven nightclub.
Ralph was a mistake of Annie’s youth — a fellow journ student and aspiring news star who got lost along the way by fudging his reporting and falling into various addictions. Annie has found a new love in the last few novels but she is still haunted by her early and short-lived passion for Ralph.
Making matters worse is her own possible involvement in the death and the fact that it is tied into all sorts of other New Haven area corruption.
“Shot Girl” takes Annie into the nightworld of male strippers who work bachelorette parties and the “shot girls” of the title — gorgeous young women who make deals with bar owners to become a form of sexy entertainment by moving around the clubs selling marked-up liquor to bedazzled young men.
There is added fun for local readers in the way that “Shot Girl” mixes real places like Louis Lunch and the Anchor Bar with Olson’s fictional nightspots. The city of New Haven has become a major character in the Annie Seymour novels and Olson knows the place inside out.
The new Las Vegas series sounds very promising, but I hope that someday Olson is able to return to Annie — she will be missed.

The new Nelson DeMille book, “The Gate House” (Grand Central Publishing), hit bookstores last week and should be at the top of the New York Times best-seller list on Sunday — one of popular fiction’s master entertainers has delivered another big and juicy page-turner about a man caught between the Mob and his ex-wife on the Gold Coast of Long Island.
The 674-page book is a sequel to “The Gold Coast,” but you don’t need to have read that one to enjoy this funny and suspenseful tale of DeMille hero John Sutter who has returned to the north shore of Long Island a decade after a cataclysmic scandal — John’s wife, Susan Stanhope, shooting and killing her Mob lover, Frank Bellarosa.
After the divorce, John went on a three-year round the world sail and then resumed his career as a lawyer in London. Susan retreated to South Carolina where her super-wealthy parents have a second home in Hilton Head.
At the start of the sequel, John and Susan return to their old stomping ground for the funeral of a servant who had been with the Stanhope family for decades.
John hasn’t been back in town for long when he is approached by Anthony Bellarosa, Frank’s son, who has taken over the family business and wants John to be one of his lawyers and advisers (Anthony’s dad had John in a similar position before Susan shot him).
John still carries a torch for Susan — who didn’t have to serve any jail time for killing the mobster — and he fears that Anthony has a ten-years-in-the-making revenge planned for the woman who killed his father.
Although DeMille eventually generates great suspense — as Anthony’s plan goes into gear — most of “The Gate House” is a social comedy about wildly dysfunctional families rather than the traditional thriller that the author has delivered on more than one occasion.
One thing that separates DeMille from peers who also ride atop the best-seller lists is his versatility. Over the past decade he has delivered old-fashioned police procedurals as well as provocative topical thrillers such as the recent “Night Fall” and “Wild Fire.”
“The Gate House” is a more leisurely story, but DeMille keeps us going with his wonderful observations of the changing Long Island scene, the jittery post 9/11 atmosphere in Manhattan, and a spirit of sardonic fun that results in a laugh on almost every page. John Sutter is a wise guy — not in the Mob sense but in the way that he takes very few things seriously — and he is terrific character to lead us through the many twists and turns of this immensely satisfying novel.

The obituaries for Michael Crichton — who died yesterday at the age of 66 — stressed his position as one of the most popular novelists of our time. That he was, with an unbroken string of highly entertaining and often very provocative thrillers.
But, I happen to be equally fond of two movies Crichton directed in quick succession four decades ago that seem to have fallen off most people’s radar: the brisk and very scary medical thriller, “Coma” (1978) and the magnificently designed and photographed historical caper film, “The Great Train Robbery” (1979).
In the handful of films he directed, Crichton proved himself to be as good with actors as he was with the mechanics of plotting. The marvelous French Canadian actress Genevieve Bujold gave a terrific performance as the imperiled heroine in “Coma” and Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland make for a delightful pair of crooks in “The Great Train Robbery.”
Crichton also eased Michael Douglas’s way from TV stardom in the 1970s to big screen stardom in the following decade. The actor’s performance as Bujold’s boyfriend in “Coma” (above) displayed the slightly offbeat mix of charisma and moral ambiguity that would power most of the actor’s subsequent star vehicles.
“Coma” was adapted from a Robin Cook novel about a diabolical conspiracy within a Boston hospital involving the murder of healthy patients in order to harvest their organs for sale to wealthy international clients.
The movie was part of a wave of 1970s paranoid thrillers, but Crichton brought humanity and humor to an otherwise grim genre.
“Coma” was one of the rare 1970s thrillers centered on a female character and Crichton seemed unusually sensitive to the character’s position within a male-dominated hospital (the writer-director earned his medical degree from Harvard before he turned to fiction with the 1970 best-seller “The Andromeda Strain”).
If there had been more Hollywood opportunities for actresses in the late 1970s — the decade was largely dominated by male star vehicles and “buddy” dramas and comedies — Bujold could have become a major star rather than a fine character actress.
Crichton continued to direct the occasional film in the 1980s, but he gave up that sideline in 1989 after directing the disastrous “Physical Evidence.” A project that was intended to be a sequel to the 1985 hit “Jagged Edge” — with Glenn Close and Robert Loggia reprising their roles as a San Francisco defense attorney and her crusty investigator — wound up as a barely released Burt Reynolds-Theresa Russell bomb.

Tom Santopietro is a film critic and biographer who seems to have a good handle on both the art and commerce that must be juggled by anyone who works in movies.
Santopietro carved out his own new turf in books he wrote about the film careers of two great pop singers who became accomplished actresses — Doris Day (“Considering Doris Day”) and Barbra Streisand (“The Importance of Being Barbra”).
The critical biographies are unusually smart career assessments by a writer who understands the strengths and weaknesses of his subjects — Santopietro also reminded readers how remarkable it was for the frequently underrated Day and Streisand to maintain careers at the highest levels of the pop music business and the Hollywood moviemaking machine.
The new Santopietro book — “Sinatra in Hollywood” (Thomas Dunne Books) — seems like an inevitable outgrowth of the two earlier volumes. Frank Sinatra’s film and recording careers were strikingly similar to those of Day and Streisand but his pop cultural reach was even greater — Sinatra remained a superstar for a half-century and maintained nightclub and concert careers that the two female stars more or less let go of after they conquered Hollywood.
“Sinatra in Hollywood” tries to counter-balance the major criticism of the star’s work as a film actor — that Sinatra didn’t approach acting with the same level of concentration and seriousness that he brought to his singing.
The big knock against Sinatra in Hollywood was that he didn’t work hard enough on his film performances — he preferred to do as few takes of a scene as possible and insisted on a relaxed shooting schedule that allowed him to continue the nightowl lifestyle he lived as a big band and club singer.
Santopietro points out that Sinatra’s greatest film successes were not in musicals, but in dramas where he delivered devastating performances — “From Here to Eternity,” “The Man With the Golden Arm” and “The Manchurian Candidate.”
When the performer really connected with a part he was as good a film actor as any of his peers. He also displayed good taste as a producer — hand-picking screenwriter George Axelrod and director John Frankenheimer for “The Manchurian Candidate” and then agreeing to Frankenheimer’s crucial choice of Angela Lansbury for the key role that Sinatra originally wanted to offer to Lucille Ball.
“Contrary to popular legend, Sinatra didn’t just wing it in Hollywood,” Santopietro writes. “At the start of his film career, he visited sets, observed directors, and studied the actors.”
“Sinatra in Hollywood” takes us through the making of each film and includes Santopietro’s clear-eyed dismissal of unfortunate dogs such as “Assault on a Queen” and “Dirty Dingus Magee.” In some of the most illuminating sections of the book, the writer makes strong cases for a few of Sinatra’s least seen performances, including such late work as “The First Deadly Sin.”

The new Stewart O’Nan book, “Songs for the Missing” (Viking), sounds like it could be a standard mystery novel — a popular Ohio teen girl disappears in the first chapter and then we follow her frantic parents and friends as they wonder if Kim Larsen could have run away or was abducted by a stranger.
The premise is the same basic story that has dominated so many hours of cable TV news over the past decade — a pretty white girl vanishes with little or no trace and weeks (months?) are spent searching to no avail.
What’s really interesting about O’Nan’s novel, however, is that Kim’s disappearance is just the starting point for a much larger mystery that applies to all of us eventually — how do we cope with the loss of any loved one and how many aspects of their private lives were closed to us?
“Songs for the Missing” turns out to be about the various ways that family and friends go can go “missing” as life separates us and we find new lives in this huge and ever-mobile country of ours.
Fran and Ed Larsen spend the early chapters of the novel dealing with the police and mounting their own private search for Kim. The girl had just graduated from high school and was looking forward to going away to college in the fall when she failed to come home from her job (at a gas station/convenience store) one night.
Kim had a casual boyfriend nicknamed J.P. but both of them knew their relationship would probably end when they took off for different colleges in the fall.
In the search for clues, it becomes clear that Kim had a semi-secret life involving some drug use and a casual sexual relationship with a “dangerous” guy her parents and most of her friends wouldn’t have approved of. This affair would probably not have amounted to anything if Kim had lived and started a new life at college.
The revelation leaves the survivors wondering what else they didn’t know about Kim and what that might say about their relationships with people they are still “close” to.
The unsettling plot is similar to that of the grossly underrated 1984 James Bridges movie “Mike’s Murder” in which a bank teller (played by Debra Winger) finds out much more than she wants to know when a casual lover is the victim of a drug enforcement killing.
O’Nan tells his powerful story of separation and loss in a very tight 287-pages. It’s another wonderful book in an extraordinary body of work that includes “Last Night at the Lobster,” “A Prayer for the Dying” and “The Circus Fire.”

Equal parts troubled and brilliant, the French actor Guillaume Depardieu died three weeks ago in Paris at the age of 37.
The performer had suffered from a series of health problems after barely surviving a motorcycle accident in 1995.
Depardieu had to undergo 17 operations on his leg, one of which left him with a serious viral infection that resulted in amputation in 2003.
Depardieu was on the comeback trail this year when he fell ill with the pneumonia that would kill him in the middle of shooting “The Childhood of Icarus” in Romania.
The actor worked in the large shadow cast by his father — the great French star Gerard Depardieu — but managed to establish his own identity (and formidable talent) in films such as “Pola X” (1999) and last year’s Jacque Rivette film, “Don’t Touch the Axe.”
It was “Pola X” that made me a fan and caused me to seek out Depardieu’s other work. The 1999 Leos Carax film is a harrowing study of a starving poet played to the hilt by Depardieu.
Rarely has a healthy and charismatic young artist’s decline into poverty and illness been conveyed more realistically. Depardieu’s willingness to explore the artist’s intensely self-destructive relationships with women also resulted in some of the most graphic but non-gratuitous sex scenes of the modern era.
Guillaume went through youthful rebellions similar to those of Hollywood children — he served two jail sentences for theft and drug offences by the time he was 17.
It was the 1995 film, “The Apprentices” that got the young actor back on track, winning him the French equivalent of the Oscar (the Cesar) for best newcomer of the year. But this was the same year that the 24-year-old had to contend with the motorcyle accident that would have him going in and out of hospitals for the rest of his tragically abbreviated life.
Perhaps it was the combination of terrible life experience and new confidence as an actor that made it possible for Depardieu to achieve his triumphant “Pola X” performance four years after the accident.
“He’s a real poet who touches me enormously, but who is very difficult, incorrigible,” Gerard Depardieu said of his son in a 2003 interview.
Guillaume made a bad situation worse when he attacked his father in a quickie autobiography — “Tout Donner (Giving Everything)”: “I love him and detest him for the same reasons…(He) is obsessed with the desire to be loved and the need for money.”
In his moving obituary in The Guardian on Oct. 14, Ronald Bergan wrote that the two turbulent actors had reconciled over the past three years.