Joe's View

“Died Young, Stayed Pretty” is one of those offbeat indie documentaries that might never get out of New York City and Los Angeles, so if you are interested in the world of contemporary rock poster designers you might want to head into Manhattan to catch the movie at the IFC Center, where it opened today. Director Eileen Yaghoobian traveled the country, from one hipster enclave to another, interviewing young bohemians who design posters for rock shows and album art.

Yaghoobian is an Iranian-born Canadian filmmaker who devoted four years to shooting this debut effort. She’s got a great eye for graphics and clearly knew how to get a very diverse and eccentric bunch of people to open up about their passion for rock poster art.

The film makes it clear that despite all of the inroads made by the Internet, print is still alive and well, when it comes to promotional pieces for musicians around the country. The volume and variety and quality of the art on view in the film is quite arresting.

Yaghoobian shows us the links between post-punk music aficianados, sci-fi geeks, skateboarders, pornographers and cutting-edge graphic artists. The film takes us from coast to coast, so it works as a travelogue as well as an underground art tour.

“Culture is that thing you shovel out of your window in the evening…otherwise it will drown you,” one artist tells the filmmaker.

Another poster maker says he “uses art to destroy other art…we’re a culture designed to destroy the culture around us – the punks did that (too).”

We get a little history of modern rock poster art as we move from St. Louis to Chicago and from Austin to Minneapolis. There is lots of humor in the work, albeit of a very sick sort (i.e. the poster that was made right after Kurt Cobain’s suicide, showing Barney the dinosaur holding a shotgun to his head with the tagline, “Until Eddie Vedder pulls the trigger, he’s a p—y!”)

Of course, despite their outsiders stance, all of the artists we see are part of a culture designed to sell and consume entertainment — they just happen to be documenting and promoting young musicians who are still on the fringes of society. The same thing was true of R. Crumb and Big Brother and the Holding Company 40 years ago. Now old posters and album covers from that era are collectible art.

The most effective advertising influences a specific target audience — the “products” might be wildly different but the envelope-pushing poster art we see in “Died Young, Stayed Pretty” isn’t all that different from the new Dolce & Gabbana campaign (below). All of these artist-created ads are meant to get attention and to establish a brand image for a commercial endeavor that isn’t much different from dozens of other products in the same category.

“Died Young, Stayed Pretty” is fun and illuminating.

(The IFC Center is at 323 Sixth Ave in Manhattan. For information, go to www.ifccenter.com)

Cosmopolitan editor Kate White has taken us behind the scenes of the New York magazine world in a series of smart and funny mysteries featuring her alter ego Bailey Weggins.

Hank Phillippi Ryan (left) gives readers a similar insider’s view of the cutthroat world of TV news in “Prime Time” (Mira), a wonderful mystery that follows a 46-year-old Boston television journalist named Charlotte McNally who is beginning to wonder how much time she has left in a business where youthful good looks often seem to be more important than experience and intelligence.

“Charlie” has won a shelf full of Emmys for her investigative pieces, but feels the TV charisma clock ticking: Will there be a place for her on the air in five or ten years?

Early in “Prime Time” just after Charlie’s had another annoying confrontation with one of her superiors, the reporter fantasizes about quitting and going to another Boston station. Then, Charlie plummets “back to reality. Ten years ago, maybe. Five. But now, it would probably be the same over there. A management calculation, then a respectful but definite rejection. ‘She’s good, of course, and she used to be pretty hot,’ some exec would say to the other. ‘But she’s not what we need now when we’re trying to young up.’”

Ryan’s fascinating glimpses into TV news don’t get in the way of her clever mystery, however. If you’ve ever wondered what might lie behind those crazy, weirdly worded spam emails — that so often seem designed to sneak past spam filters — you’ll get a big kick out of the plot here. Charlie learns of a complex insider trader scheme that hinges on specially coded spam.

The author juggles plot and character very deftly with Charlie emerging as one of the wittiest and brightest protagonists in current crime fiction. The personal side of “Prime Time” bolsters the mystery and suspense elements that build to a very satisfying conclusion.

Readers will be happy to learn that they won’t have to wait long for their next Charlie McNally fixes — “Face Time” will be published in August and “Air Time” is set to appear in September.

When I saw the Potomac Theatre Project production of Howard Barker’s “The Europeans” in New York over the weekend, I couldn’t tell if it was the play or the production that was so off-putting.

The drama is set in Vienna in 1684 just after the Turks have been forced out of Europe and the Emperor and his court have been restored to power. The city is still in shambles and the decadence of the victors is presented in repulsive detail.

The military “hero” Starhemberg (Robert Emmet Lunney) is an enigma who refuses the honors the Emperor wants to press on him. He is alienated from everyone with the exception of Katrin (Aidan Sullivan) who was raped and maimed by the Turks and is pregnant as a result.

Despite her terrible situation, Katrin still manages to push the audience away with her constant rhetorical self-analysis and her insistence that everyone around her should examine her wounds in detail. The woman is in love with her own babble and Barker seems to share Katrin’s opinion.

The playwright anticipates critics of his in-your-face approach with a scene in which two characters discuss the way that the great unwashed always seem to prefer pretty, comforting art over confrontational violent realism. It’s pretty clear that the heavy-handed writer is addressing those of us in the audience who are not responding to his bloody, surreal historical/political pageant.

Perhaps if this didactic play was given a spectacular physical production with a company of great stars it might go down easier. But in the cramped confines of Atlantic Stage 2 we aren’t given much to look at and it isn’t pleasant to see the young company struggling to bring Barker’s walking position-papers to life.

A good portion of the audience took off at intermission and there were more than a few times during the long second act when I wished I had joined them.

(“The Europeans” is running in repertory with “Therese Raquin” by Neal Bell through July 26 at Atlantic Stage 2, 330 West 16th St. For more information, visit www.potomactheatreproject.org)

I saw a terrific new band at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan last night — Daniel Zaitchik’s Blue Bottle Collection.

Less than two weeks after workshopping his musical “Picnic at Hanging Rock” at the O’Neill Theater Center — see blog posting below — this gifted and eclectic singer-songwriter made a smashing debut at one of the best venues in New York.

The house wasn’t quite full — it will be next time — but the crowd went wild for the tunes and a band not quite like any I’ve seen recently.

Zaitchik had four female singers (Whitney Bashor, Carey Anderson, Jody Flader and Emily Walton) who did superb harmonizing as his back-up vocalists, but they were also given lead vocal duties on a few tunes — what a quartet!

The five musicians — Jeremy Bass, Nathan Tysen, Kate Cassella, Lauren Riley Rigby, and Chris ‘shockwave’ Sullivan — played a collection of Zaitchik’s funny and poignant and lush summer-themed tunes that were just right for the night and the house.

On such a perfect New York evening, it was easy to relate to the tune about never really being “ready for fall” and to appreciate odes to the soothing powers of cool beverages and cool summer people.

The tunes and the sound are hard to describe — the friend who came along with me heard echoes of Dave Matthews, but the skill with which Zaitchik writes for female voices reminded me at times of Burt Bacharach.

But why bother to categorize? The performer says his brother has termed the new band’s elusive musical style “madrigal soul” and that works for me.

Kathryn Bigelow must be sick and tired of the people who make a big deal out of the fact that she directs action sequences with as much skill as any of her male peers.

For more than 20 years, Bigelow has proven again and again that she is second to no man in her ability to get our pulses racing in setpieces filled with anxiety, action and violence. Going all the way back to “Near Dark” in 1987 — perhaps the best vampire movie of the modern era — Bigelow has refused to conform to sexual stereotypes.

But the recent release of Bigelow’s brilliant Iraq war docudrama, “The Hurt Locker,” has been greeted with too many reviews and feature stories that have been filled with shock and awe over a woman being behind the movie’s extraordinary suspense and you-are-there-in-Iraq feeling.

(In a perverse bit of reverse discrimination, novelist Bret Easton Ellis suggested in a “tweet” on Twitter last week that “The Hurt Locker” might not have received across the board rave reviews if it had been directed by a man.)

Fortunately, the continual fascination with Bigelow’s gender and her interest in “male” subject matter can’t obscure the filmmaker’s achievement in “The Hurt Locker,” which merits comparison with the 1952 Henri Georges Clouzot suspense classic “The Wages of Fear.”

Clouzot followed a group of desperate men whose job was to deliver the highly explosive nitroglycerine used to put out oil well fires in an unnamed South American country.

Yves Montand plays one of the drivers who truck the delicate explosive over treacherous mountain roads. Once the director establishes the situation — and the existential quality of the men’s jobs — the movie attains an almost unbearable suspense.

Bigelow has found a similar suspense story in a real-life situation — the brave men whose job it is to defuse unexploded bombs in contemporary, war-torn Iraq.

The movie’s protagonist, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), is brave to be sure but he also feels an adrenaline rush from work that puts his life on the line every day. The man runs into understandable conflict with other soldiers who would just as soon serve out their time in Iraq with as few risks as possible.

It is to Bigelow’s credit that she never tries to “explain” William’s apparent addiction to danger. The bottom line is that he is devoted to an important job that few of us would want.

Just like Clouzot, Bigelow orchestrates the tension so masterfully that you might walk out of the theater thinking that you didn’t blink your eyes for two hours. And yet, you never get the feeling that she is exploiting the material for cheap Hollywood-style thrills.

The infuriating story of Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff is well-told in “Madoff and the Scamming of America,” a recent History Channel special that has been released on DVD by A&E Home Entertainment.

The hour-hour documentary was produced by a CBS subsidiary — CBS Eye Too Productions — under the supervision of executive producers Margery Baker-Riker and Susan Werbe.

A&E has wisely packaged the program with an excellent “bonus feature”: another world of finance program, “Crash: The Next Great Depression?”

Together the two films serve up a well-researched account of the financial madness of the last year. We get to see how the global banking and credit meltdown pulled the trigger on Madoff’s brilliant criminal enterprise. Madoff had been happily stealing from his customers for decades — and paying handsome profits to those who would cash out over the years — but last year many charities and rich individuals who were previously in a “play it as it lays” mindset suddenly needed money. When they started trying to cash out in large numbers, the jig was up for Bernie.

Baker-Riker and Werbe explore the parallels between Madoff and Charles Ponzi, the Italian immigrant whose “scheme” involving complicated transfers of foreign postage sucked in and bilked many of his fellow Italian immigrants in Boston a century ago. The film shows how this sort of grand larceny is only possible with a charismatic crook with particularly astute social radar when it comes to his own ethnic and social classes.

Madoff gained the trust of many of his fellow Jews through the charities he helped them with. What they didn’t know was that Bernie targeted endowments and other non-profit cash cows because he knew that charities and civic organizations generally let their vast holdings sit in stock and bond funds with very few changes over the years. Without the financial crisis of last year, these victims could have remained blissfully ignorant for years to come.

The bonus documentary compares what happened in the markets last year with the circumstances surrounding the crash that produced the Great Depression of the 1930s. Baker-Riker and Werbe and their interview subjects make a pretty good case for the government intervention — and financial assistance — in 2008-2009. The last time around — in the late 1920s — Herbert Hoover and his advisers decided to let the market take care of itself and the Wall Street disaster trickled down to the national banking industry and the general business community.

Both films show how the deregulation mania of the past three decades — starting with Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s — eventually put the country in a spot similar to the 1920s when the absence of any regulation of the markets proved to be disastrous.

It’s probably hard for younger people to believe, but there was a time — not all all that long ago — when it was novel to see a film or TV documentary in which real narcissists showed off in front of cameras.

Now TV is full of “reality” programming in which everyone from “housewives” in New Jersey to washed-up celebrities cavort for our (supposed) entertainment.

Low-cost video production and an endless supply of people who are willing to participate in reality projects for almost no money, makes this genre incredibly cheap to produce in comparison with traditional scripted and acted entertainment. (And all of those basic cable channels have hours and hours of programming time they need to fill with something inexpensive and easy to produce).

Back in the 1970s, you only had three major networks and they would only show documentaries their own news divisions produced, so “reality” TV in those days would almost always be something very serious and newsworthy.

So, when the documentary “Grey Gardens” opened in 1976, it was a true novelty — a film in which two distant relatives of Jackie Kennedy Onassis were shown to be living in squalor in their falling-down mansion in East Hampton. The slightly demented mother-and-daughter pair were more than willing to share their bickering and to display their bizarre lifestyle with the filmmaking team of brothers Albert and David Maysles.

The film was much discussed in the urban areas around the country where art houses showed the picture — documentaries never played mainstream theaters during that era — but no one could have guessed that this sort of gruesome self-exposure would become a programming staple on television 30 years later. 

With the advent of cable movie channels and VCRs and DVD players, “Grey Gardens” became a cult film in the 1980s and 1990s (even inspiring a surprisingly good Broadway musical a few seasons ago).

With the Maysles documentary so widely available now — and the airwaves and Internet full of opportunities for sordid voyeurism — it beats me why HBO Films decided to fund a dramatized version of the documentary starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange. The movie debuted on cable in April and is about to be released on DVD. I watched a screener last night and thought it was one of the most peculiar movie ideas of recent vintage — two very accomplished actresses trying to ape the behavior of eccentric women in a documentary from 33 years ago.

We are constantly aware of the foolish strain in the performances by Barrymore and Lange — the more they try to become “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” Bouvier, the more pointless the result. Since we can look at a DVD of the original 1976 documentary any time we’d like, why would anyone want to see this glossy and protracted bit of fakery?

There is an odd semi-documentary element in the HBO production that is almost as ghoulish as the Maysles movie — the sad decline of Jessica Lange from one of the most brilliant movie actresses of the 1980s and 1990s into a highly mannered TV and theater performer. Lange used to disappear into roles in movies like “Men Don’t Leave” (1990) and “Sweet Dreams” (1985) but lately — in an unbroken line of second-rate projects — the actress has been all affectation.

Do you talk about the work or the life?

That’s the question that seems to come up every time a major show biz figure dies.

I heard the Rev. Al Sharpton on the radio this morning complaining that the press has been dredging up all of the gossip about Michael Jackson since he died two weeks ago, at the expense of appreciating Jackson’s contributions as a singer and dancer and songwriter.

Sharpton implied there was a racial slant to the the press coverage and that white celebrities are handled with kid gloves when they die. Apparently, he didn’t read what was written in the wake of the passing of Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley.

I would also refer the reverend to the August issue of Vanity Fair — hitting national newsstands today — which contains a patented Peter Biskind piece on Heath Ledger that ends up a muddle of speculation about the actor’s relationship with “Brokeback Mountain” co-star Michelle Williams, his “emotional struggles” and “the mad scramble to complete his last film.”

Biskind styles himself a movie historian and biographer but is best known for two books — “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” and “Down and Dirty Pictures” — which appeared to be designed for the maximum exposure of nasty stories about film celebrities.

“Easy Riders” was billed as an account of the revolutionary changes in Hollywood from the 1960s through the 1970s, but the author distorted the period in order to focus on directors and actors with the most turbulent private lives.

Woody Allen and Paul Mazursky were key figures of the era but were barely mentioned in the book because, unlike Martin Scorsese and Dennis Hopper, they managed to avoid the drug and sexual excesses of the era. (Allen wouldn’t make for good gossip press coverage until the early 1990s when the end of his relationship with Mia Farrow and his subsequent marriage to her adopted daughter became page one news).