Joe's View

Lots of women I know — and more than a few men, too — get all dreamy-eyed when you mention the actor Bradley Cooper.

He’s been what you might call a stealth star for the past couple of years — his short-lived Fox TV series “Kitchen Confidential” and supporting appearances on ABC’s “Alias” and the naughty F/X series “Nip/Tuck” generated lots of “when is this guy going to become a movie star?” talk among my friends.

When I attended a press junket for “Failure to Launch” in Manhattan three years ago, friends asked me more questions about the fifth-billed Cooper than they did about the ostensible stars of the movie, Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew McConaughey, so it was easy to see that this charismatic Philadelphia native was on his way.

Well, last weekend Cooper officially became an A-list movie star when his modestly budgeted “The Hangover” became the number one movie in the land — grossing more than twice as much as the very expensive Will Ferrell comedy (“Land of the Lost”) that was a distant number three and which reportedly cost more than $100 million to make (and probably another $30 million to advertise).

There was considerable “buzz” surrounding “The Hangover” in the weeks leading up to its debut — the studio was so high on the test screening scores that it signed the whole cast up for a sequel weeks before the movie opened.

“The Hangover” is the sort of fast and funny (and gross) comedy that made Ferrell a star. Coincidentally, one of the “Saturday Night Live” star’s breakthrough movies — 2003’s “Old School” — was directed by Todd Phillips who also directed “The Hangover.”

Cooper has four more movies coming out this year — including the September romantic comedy “All About Steve” where he plays opposite Sandra Bullock. Next year, he will be billed above Bruce Willis in a big-screen version of “The A-Team.”

 Clearly, the actor’s days as a cult figure are over

When I spent a day at Book Expo America in New York two weeks ago, it seemed that every other booth in the vast Jacob Javits Center — and every other conversation — was devoted to new technological replacements for the book as a physical object.
People were talking about Amazon’s Kindle reading machine of course — and its amazing ability to download and store hundreds of books — but there also were complex discussions of the legal ramifications of these new ways of delivering a “book” to consumers. For instance, I didn’t know that Amazon had an audio component to its Kindle technology that could replace those wonderful actor-recorded audio books.
I don’t consider myself a Luddite, but I do wonder what a world without books would be like. Just one little question that comes to mind is: what the heck will authors “sign” when they go on book tour?
After my return from BEA it was bracing to read “The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet” (The Penguin Press) and then to interview author Reif Larsen about a novel that seems to fly in the face of current book world technology developments (my interview with Larsen will be running in this Sunday’s Pulse section in the newspaper).
The slightly oversized novel combines text with drawings, charts and maps that have made it impossible to “translate” to the Kindle — something that Larsen is quite proud of.
And this wonderfully oddball story of a 12-year-old Montana boy who maps everything around him — and sets off alone on a trip to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. — caused a pre-publication sensation in which most of the major publishing houses fought for the right to produce Larsen’s first novel.
“T.S. Spivet” mixes old and new elements in a delightful manner — the story is set in contemporary America (one of Spivet’s graphs charts the secret of the success of the McDonald’s fast food chain) but the book looks and feels like something that might have been produced 100 years ago. It will take you back to the gorgeously illustrated versions of Mark Twain and Jules Verne that you might have read as a child (and yet it took modern graphic design to put together pages on which some of the drawings are wedged into the margins of the text like visual footnotes).
Larsen has produced something that is a pleasure to look at as well as to read and for that book lovers will revere his unique creation.
(Reif Larsen will be doing a talk and slide show for “The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet” Tuesday at 7 p.m. at Madison’s R.J. Julia Booksellers, 768 Boston Post Road. The event is free but a reservation should be made by calling 203-245-3959.)

Film critics have been dropping like flies lately — yesterday it was announced that the legendary Andrew Sarris was let go from his post at the New York Observer.
Fifty years ago, the 80-year-old Sarris advanced the French “auteur theory” — of the director as the primary creator of a movie — on this side of the Atlantic in The Village Voice where he became a critical titan of the film revolution of the 1960s and ’70s.
In those days, Sarris was part of a very small circle of influential critics that included Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffman and Dwight MacDonald — they held the line against the mostly dopey folks who reviewed films for newspapers and TV in that era.
Sarris and his peers were taken so seriously back then that their reviews were routinely published in book form. Like most other baby boom movie buffs, I still have a few shelves packed with the collected wisdom of Sarris and Kael and others from that long ago era when movies were challenging and capable of starting major debates in print and in theater lobbies.
It is harder to find mainstream films that adults can talk about these days, but there are wonderful young critics and historians who mix a deep knowledge of film history with much broader cultural interests than were evident in the movie reviews of 40 or 50 years ago.
I worry that wonderful writers such as Mark Harris, William J. Mann and Nathan Lee (above) won’t be able to have the same amount of influence that Sarris and Kael did, because so many outlets for film criticism and history are drying up. Will savvy 20something up-and-comers like Drew Taylor of the Fairfield Weekly ever find permanent full-time movie reviewing jobs?
Nathan Lee was the chief critic at The New York Sun, but continues as an essayist with Film Comment and as a back-up reviewer at The New York Times (he also contributes print reviews to the NPR Web site).
Tonight Lee will be at the Avon Theatre Film Center in Stamford as part of the non-profit organization’s monthly “Critic’s Choice” series. He will be hosting a screening of the eccentric and darkly comic 1999 David Cronenberg film, “eXistenZ.” I interviewed Nathan for a “Go” feature last week and can guarantee he will have lots of interesting things to say about the film and its brilliant Canadian director.
(“eXistenZ” will be screened tonight at 7:30 p.m. The Avon is at 272 Bedford St.)

I’ve always liked Alec Baldwin, but boy does he come off badly in the June Vanity Fair where he brings up the rear with the monthly “Proust Questionaire” in the back of the book.
Years ago, I interviewed the actor in Stamford when he appeared in a Hartman Theatre production of David Mamet’s “A Life in the Theatre” with the great Chicago stage actor Mike Nussbaum.
Baldwin gave me a smart, funny interview and he was terrific in the show (later I heard good things about him personally from someone who worked with him on the 1986 Broadway production of Joe Orton’s “Loot”).
“A Life in the Theatre” was staged several years before Baldwin became a movie star with the release of “The Hunt for Red October” in 1990.
The actor then alienated many people in Hollywood by trying to delay the Jack Ryan sequel,“Patriot Games,” (1992) so that he could play Stanley Kowalski on Broadway in “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
People in Los Angeles think you would have to be nuts to rock the boat on a money-in-the-bank action franchise, so the movie community was gleeful when Paramount finessed Baldwin and his management by secretly negotiating with Harrison Ford to step into the Jack Ryan role.
Reportedly, a slightly chastened Baldwin tried to get back into “Patriot Games” but the studio said, No thanks we’ve landed a bigger star than you – GOODBYE!
Ford and his management had a huge payday — and a very successful Ryan franchise follow-up picture “Clear and Present Danger” in 1994 — while Baldwin received the cold comfort of a Tony nomination for an indifferently reviewed Broadway production of the Tennessee Williams classic.
Baldwin re-entered the movie business as something less than an A-list star and took another big PR hit when his relationship with Kim Basinger brought him poisonous press coverage (including a lengthy Premiere article about the two performers’ antics filming the 1991 Neil Simon flop “The Marrying Man”).
It has been good to see Baldwin regain his footing as one of the best character actors in TV and movies — he earned a well-deserved Oscar nomination in 2003 for his wonderfully scary performance as the casino boss in “The Cooler” and he has found a strong TV niche in “30 Rock.”
But, the Q&A in Vanity Fair is bizarre, to say the least.
Asked “What living person do you most despise?” Baldwin replies, “The person who leaked Christian Bale’s audiotape.”
Is that answer code for the person who leaked the notorious phone message Baldwin left his daughter a few years ago, or does the actor really think that the Bale leaker is on a par with a warlord or political despot?
After expressing his love for his daughter in the answers to three of the 20 questions, the actor is asked “What is your greatest regret?”
The reply — “Faking a heart attack on April Fools’ Day 2004, for my daughter and my girlfriend.”

Remember the line in “The Last Tycoon” about a Hollywood mogul’s acute understanding of movies? — “Not half a dozen men have been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.”
Whatever that “equation” might be, I think biographer William J. Mann is one of the few chroniclers of Hollywood who sees the place and its people accurately: without all of the tinsel and sentimentality that shrouds most books about the town and its players.
The truly amazing thing about Mann is that he cuts through the personal bull while still showing a deep appreciation of the lives and work of movie icons.
Mann wrote excellent books about the director John Schlesinger and the silent film star William Haines, but broke through to a large audience with “Kate,” the best biography and most astute analysis of Katharine Hepburn ever published.
Mann dispersed the myths surrounding Hepburn to get at the even more interesting truth of the way the star built her career and sustained her popularity for much of the 20th century.
Last weekend at Book Expo America in New York City I picked up a galley of Mann’s next biographical study — “How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) — and dived into it almost immediately.
The book won’t be in stores until October, but I am happy to report that it is another brilliant combination of history, criticism and biography.
Taylor was a key figure in the transition from Old Hollywood to the revolutionary changes of the 1960s and ’70s — she became a child star as an MGM contract player in the 1940s but opened the door to taboo language and subject matter in the 1966 classic “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Off-screen, Taylor’s ability to maintain her stardom while embroiled in one scandal after another paved the way to today’s PR environment in which flagrantly naughty personal behavior can enhance a star’s appeal.
Mann contrasts Taylor’s rise to power — with an unprecedented degree of personal control over her career — with the decline of gossip columnist Hedda Hopper.
Hedda’s waning influence in the 1950s and ’60s was illustrated by the old scold’s inability to ruin Taylor’s career when she attacked the actress for “stealing” Debbie Reynolds’s husband Eddie Fisher and then having another extramarital affair with “Cleopatra” co-star Richard Burton.
No matter what you might think of Taylor and her career, Mann has found the perfect figure for an exploration of the seismic changes that took place in Hollywood — and in American popular culture — between the 1940s and the 1960s. It’s a terrific read.

The stunning Israeli actress Hiam Abbass won her second Israeli Academy Award last year for “Lemon Tree,” a moving drama (just now going into U.S. release) that personalizes the terrible ongoing conflict between Palestinians and Jews in Israel.
Abbass won her first award from the Israeli Academy for “The Syrian Bride” five years ago. The actress also made a very strong impression in last year’s U.S. indie film “The Visitor,” as the Arab mother who came to this country to help a son victimized by the Homeland Security statutes.
“Lemon Tree” is about a Palestinian widow — tending to the lemon grove she was left by her father — who becomes embroiled in a legal drama after the Israeli Defense Minister moves into the house opposite the grove.
The security people for the politician decide the grove poses a terrorist threat — gunmen and bombers could easily hide there — and orders are issued to have the trees cut down.
Director Eran Riklis and co-writer Suha Arraf are clearly on the side of widow Salma Zidane but they don’t demonize the defense minister (played by Doron Tavory) or his family and associates.
The politician’s wife, Mira (Rona Lipaz-Michael), finds herself in the middle of a charged situation — aware of the dangers faced by her husband but moved by the plight of a neighbor she is not allowed to meet. It is to Riklis’s credit that we don’t get the sentimental resolution between Mira and Salma that would, no doubt, be the centerpiece of a Hollywood version of this story.
“Lemon Tree” expands to show us the unexpected attraction between Salma and the younger lawyer Abu Hassam (Tarik Kopty) who takes her case. Nothing other than a few charged glances and a kiss transpires between the lawyer and client, but the two actors allow us to feel a connection that isn’t made explicit in the dialogue.
“Lemon Tree” provides us with a bracing and thoughtful adult alternative to the summer cotton candy movies crowding the multiplexes at the moment.
(“Lemon Tree” is playing at the Avon Theatre Film Center in Stamford and the Bow Tie Criterion Cinemas in New Haven.)

In an era when too many bestselling writers find a formula and then stick to it forever, Jane Green stands apart for her willingness to shake things up with each new novel.
Green launched her career in 1997 with ”Straight Talking,” a tale of early career dreams and single life drawn from the novelist’s own experiences as an unmarried twentysomething journalist in the fast lane of the London media world.
The book followed a morning talk show producer named Tasha who fantasizes about Mr. Wrong while a very nice but unexciting male friend watches and waits on the sidelines. Yes, that sounds like a million other books and films of the 1990s, but Green produced a piece of young women’s fiction that was way above average.
“Straight Talking” was followed by two more breezy, well-observed London social comedies, “Jemima J” and “Mr. Maybe,” that also reflected Green’s life as a single woman in her 20s.
Then things changed for Green in a very big way.
She married an American man, moved to Westport around the turn of the century and had four children. Green was starting to be read in the United States but was nowhere near as popular here as she was back home.
Instead of repeating her huge U.K. hits, Green did something daring — book by book she shifted her focus from England to Connecticut and began dealing with the personalities and the lifestyles of the woman she was meeting and befriending in Fairfield County.
Green eventually got divorced and then remarried. Those life changes — and Green’s peerless observational skills — have resulted in a wider range of characters and situations in the books, but with no loss of the writer’s realistic humor and page-turning magic.
Last year, the thoroughly American “The Beach House” became the biggest book of Green’s career — riding long and high on the New York Times bestseller list and boosting the previous year’s novel “Second Chance” to a similar run on the paperback list.
“The Beach House” was a wonderful “Tales of the City”-style overview of a group wildly disparate people who rented rooms in a rambling house on Nantucket.
The title of the new Green novel — “Dune Road” (Viking) — might sound like a sequel to last year’s hit, but once again the writer has moved into new territory without losing the essential qualities her many readers have come to love. It’s a terrific summer beach book, too, but blends new elements of mystery and suspense into Green’s look at a group of very different women and men in Fairfield County.
Kit Hargrove has downsized her life after divorcing her Wall Street whiz of a husband. She likes her new smaller house, loves her two kids and is getting along well with her ex. Kit takes a job as an assistant to Robert McClore, a bestselling thriller writer in the vein of James Patterson or Robert Ludlum, whose supermodel wife died under mysterious circumstances a decade earlier.
Although McClore remains on the edges of the narrative, the job changes Kit’s view of her friends and her community in ways she never could have predicted. She is also happily being pursued by a handsome new beau.
Green does a masterful job of hinting that something is off in idyllic Highfield — Kit’s elderly next-door neighbor and surrogate mother Edie is convinced new beau Steve is not what he appears to be; new friend and yoga studio operator Tracy begins acting very oddly; and a young British woman who looks an awful lot like Kit is seen in the neighborhood.
“Dune Road” gains a creepy something-is-rotten-in-Highfield vibe that is augmented by Green’s very astute account of the way that the current financial crisis is terrifying even the richest folk on Connecticut’s Gold Coast.
Green never really deserved to be tagged with the dreaded “chick lit” label — her books have always defied easy labeling — but now she is flying completely free of genre limitations. I can’t wait to see where she might take us in the next few novels.

Every journalist has favorite interview subjects, people who are so interesting and give such good quotes that you look forward to having an excuse to talk with them again and again.
Dominick Dunne is near the top of my list because no one tells a story better than him and few have as many good stories to tell. I’ve always wished that he wrote more books so that I would have more occasions to interview him.
The wonderful new documentary, “After the Party” (Mercury Media), takes us behind-the-scenes of the novelist and Vanity Fair correspondent’s life during his coverage of the first Phil Spector trial in Los Angeles in 2007.
Australian filmmakers Kirsty de Garis and Timothy Jolley got Dunne to agree to be followed while he lived at the Chateau Marmont and went back and forth to the courtrooom. More crucially, however, they convinced the writer to sit for nearly 90 hours of interviews in L.A., New York City and Connecticut (Dunne has a house in Hadlyme).
Dunne was a TV and movie producer before he turned to writing and he knows the essence of dramatic presentation — how to get the most out of juicy anecdotes he has been telling and re-telling for decades.
“After the Party” uses the Spector trial as a contemporary framework for an in-depth exploration of Dunne’s extraordinarily exciting, surprising and tragic life.
de Garis and Jolley gracefully cut from the amusing footage of Dunne weighing in on Spector — we see in the courtroom visits that the writer is a bigger star than the fallen record producer charged with murder — to a full account of Dunne’s miserably unhappy Hartford childhood, his World War II heroism and then his rise from being a stage manager in the early days of television to a film producer of the 1960s and ’70s.
Dunne and his wife Ellen became social stars of Hollywood in the 1960s, throwing parties that attracted everyone from Jane Fonda to Joan Crawford. Dunne now is the first one to admit he was a starstruck social climber during his early Hollywood days, but we are lucky he was — both for the stories he tells and the pictures he took (many of which are displayed in the film and in a marvelous 1999 coffee table book called “The Way We Lived Then”).
Dunne’s handful of movies were more prestigious than popular. He came crashing down while making the 1973 Elizabeth Taylor flop, “Ash Wednesday” — he insulted the most powerful agent in Hollywood at the time, Sue Mengers, and was given that “you’ll never work in this town again” message by Paramount production chief Robert Evans.
Dunne descended into a booze and drug-filled period that cost him his career and his marriage. After hitting rock bottom — he was forced to sell his dog at one point! — Dunne got a gig writing a Hollywood tell-all novel for the columnist Joyce Haber. That led to his own breakthough as a bestselling novelist with “The Two Mrs. Grenvilles” (two million copies in print).
Dunne was no sooner back on his feet than he suffered the worst imaginable tragedy — the murder of his actress daughter, Dominique. The horror of that event changed his life in multiple ways — bringing him closer than ever to ex-wife Lenny and launching his career as a journalist when editor Tina Brown urged him to keep a journal of the murder trial and the result was his first Vanity Fair piece.
In her interview, Brown says that Dunne played a vital role in the revival of Vanity Fair in the 1980s. She praises the reporter’s unique combination of “shoe leather and stardust.”
In the film, it becomes clear early on that Dunne really connected with the two Australian filmmakers — his interviews are so revealing as to verge on embarrassing at some points, but his justly fabled sense of humor comes through again and again (Dunne’s most charming trait is his ability to laugh at his own weaknesses).
“After the Party” will be released on DVD by Indiepix on June 16; this may be the most entertaining and enlightening 85 minutes you will spend this summer.