Joe's View

With the rise of Internet porn and escort services over the past decade or so, we are overdue for a remake of “American Gigolo” (1980).

So, when “Spread” opened last summer with ads suggesting that Ashton Kutcher was playing a 21st Century Los Angeles gigolo — “It’s a business doing pleasure” was the poster tagline — it looked like one of the more promising of the warm weather pictures.

Sexy fun with a perfectly cast star.

The movie arrived bearing clues that something was off, however — the top-billed producer was the video and cable company, Anchor Bay Entertainment, and “Spread” debuted in a couple of second-tier New York theaters that seem to specialize in bookings financed by distributors who want to avoid a “direct-to-DVD” label.

“Spread” closed quickly after mostly bad reviews and I never had a chance to get to it in a theater.

Last night, I watched an advance copy of the DVD that will be released Nov. 10 and my worst suspicions were confirmed — it’s a dog only partially redeemed by slick production values and racy sex scenes that are a tad more explicit than what we have come to expect from Hollywood.

Kutcher has demonstrated strong comic abilities elsewhere, but there isn’t much that’s funny about the guy he plays in “Spread” — the poorly drawn Nikki, who behaves like a prostitute but who doesn’t appear to know much about the trade he’s plying.

Nikki addresses us directly in frequent voiceover narration filled with tips on how attractive young men can get rich older woman to take care of them. In the opening scene, we watch him reel in the fortysomething Samantha (Anne Heche) who takes Nikki home and sets him up there.

Screenwriter Jason Dean Hall can’t seem to decide if Nikki is a prostitute or just a scrounger — no money changes hands.

Whatever he is, Nikki is a dope who doesn’t give a thought to squirreling a few bucks away for a rainy day. When he and Samantha split, the guy doesn’t even have walking-around money. He’s flat broke, reduced to instant homelessness and selling some of the expensive clothes that were bought for him.

What kind of an L.A. leech — prostitute or not — wouldn’t ask his Sugar Mama for some spending money in addition to his room and board?

“Spread” seems designed to make us dislike Nikki — he presents himself to us as a dumb parasite — so when he “falls in love” with sweet waitress Heather (Margaret Levieva) and then is crushed to find out she is living off a rich guy, it is very hard to care about his heartbreak.

Director David Mackenzie shot “Spread” in a very glossy, wide-screen format that looks sensational, but within a few minutes the sleek style just emphasizes the total emptiness of the storytelling and the characterization.

Kutcher has no one but himself to blame for this fiasco — he produced it, too. The mystery here is why he would rather play a cruddy, short-sighted leech than a real escort with some financial smarts.

The movie and music press appears divided on the new Michael Jackson documentary, “This Is It,” with at least one major writer blasting it as a desecration of a great artist’s memory and others viewing it as a spectacular behind-the-scenes look at the creation of a Jackson arena show.

The harshest review I saw was in yesterday’s Washington Post where Chris Richards concluded, “For a man who so desperately wanted to show us perfection — or at least project the illusion of it — Jackson would never, ever want us to see this film.”

“Must the show really go on?,” the writer asked, rhetorically. “At best, ‘This Is It’ is a mere sketch of what Jackson seemed capable of delivering in London, with the King of Pop only half-singing, half-dancing through his most rousing hits. Stiff and frail, he paces the stage, during ‘Wanna Be Starting Something,’ as if mulling things over in his mind. At times, he appears almost lost inside himself.”

I don’t think Richards is seeing the movie for what it is — a carefully edited souvenir of the rehearsal work that was done for a show that never happened.

Rehearsals are “sketches” that are made on the way to that first performance in front of a paying audience. The carefully controlled energy that we see Jackson maintaining in the movie is probably not all that different from what we might have observed at a rehearsal for the most recent U2 stadium extravaganza or Bette Midler’s current Las Vegas spectacle, “The Showgirl Must Go On.”

Jackson wasn’t working for “us,” he was trying to get himself ready for a grueling 50-show run in London last summer.

The movie does have a sad and creepy undertone. We watch armies of technicians, brilliant musicians and phenomenal dancers who don’t realize they are on the edge of an abyss — “MJ,” as he is called throughout the film, has only days to live and all of these people will never see their efforts come to fruition.

The movie wisely stays inside the Los Angeles arena where the show was being put together. We get no glimpses of Jackson’s private life. Indeed, the few times the star speaks it is in such a whisper that subtitles appear on screen to let us know what he is saying.

People who go to “This Is It” expecting a traditional concert film will probably be disappointed by the way that the numbers have been cobbled together from various rehearsals. But, the movie stands alone as a behind-the-scenes look at how giant arena shows are put together and as a poignant glimpse of a very troubled star working toward a comeback that would elude him.

Although the show has more than three weeks of previews before opening on Nov. 23, the off-Broadway hit “Fela!” has Broadway folks buzzing about whether or not the Bill T. Jones dance show will succeed in its move to the Eugene O’Neill Theatre.

I saw the Monday night preview and thought the show’s high points were thrilling, but if I was an investor I would be a little nervous about the commercial prospects for a three-hour musical about Nigerian pop culture and politics.

The wonderfully bitchy New York theater chat room — All That Chat (on my Bookmark list below) — has been buzzing pro and con about “Fela!” since it was announced last spring that the show would be moving to Broadway.

The loosely plotted story of the late Nigerian Afrobeat music star Fela Anikulapo-Kuti is packed with exciting dance numbers and it has one of the best bands I’ve ever heard in a Broadway theater, but it might be too dance-y and too “foreign” for the folks who come to town looking for mindless fun.

Choreographer-director Jones has been a modern dance star for decades and won a Tony for his “Spring Awakening” choreography two years ago (“Fela!” is playing the same theater where that best musical Tony winner opened and closed a lot faster than it should have).

The dances Jones has put together for “Fela!” are terrific — and they are powered by the really hot on-stage band conducted by Aaron Johnson. Sahr Ngaujah (right) has genuine star quality in the title role, too — acting and singing and dancing himself into a continual emotional frenzy.

What is problematic about “Fela!” is the shapeless book by Jones and Jim Lewis that starts from the premise that we are seeing the final performance of Fela in a Nigerian nightclub and then begins wandering around through biographical and political material that keeps causing the energy level to drop.

Act 2 isn’t as strong as Act 1, so the show loses lots of steam after intermission, except for one spectacular song, “Rain,” by Lillias White in the role of Fela’s political activist mother.

“Fela!” might have become a sensational limited-run hit at Lincoln Center or BAM, but it’s easy to imagine the show at the O’Neill ending up on the Broadway noble failure list with “Passing Strange” and “Caroline, or Change.”

I find it enormously pleasing that the gore-free, low-tech, $12,000 horror movie, “Paranormal Activity,” trounced the latest picture in the “Saw” franchise (“Saw VI”!) at the U.S. box-office over the weekend.

Say what you will about “Paranormal Activity” — for me it wasn’t very scary or anywhere near as clever as “The Blair Witch Project” — but the success of the movie is a triumph of old-fashioned showmanship, combined with Internet-fueled anticipation and word-of-mouth.

Not since the sleeper success of “Blair Witch” a decade ago has there been such a phenomenal dark horse hit that flies in the face of everything that mainstream Hollywood holds dear — i.e. expensive stars, elaborate technology and blast-in-the-face national TV advertising.

Paramount decided to make the movie an “event” by leaking word many months ago of early screenings that reportedly terrified audiences. (Entertainment Weekly ran one of the first national stories on the brewing phenomenon.)

The studio then let moviegoers do most of the marketing work by setting up a Website that would clock requests for a full-scale national release of a movie that Paramount had been sitting on for more than a year (rumor has it that the studio was pondering remaking the film as a major release with real stars but then decided — accurately, as it turns out — that the crude look of the cheaply-made film played a major role in the story’s power with young audiences).

Paramount heightened the anticipation by doing a small-scale opening in a handful of college towns in early October that produced staggering grosses. Two weeks ago, the studio added more theaters but in many areas limited the film to midnight showings.

So, it wasn’t easy to see “Paranormal Activity” until last weekend. By then the teen and 20something tribal drums were beating so loudly that the movie debuted in the number one slot.

Younger movie industry people forget that the wide release of new films was largely an invention of the 1980s and the explosion in multiplex cinemas. Before that, new movies would roll out across the country very slowly — opening first in New York and Los Angeles to garner national media attention, then widening out to exclusive runs in the top 20 or 30 markets, and finally going into a second-run release at small neighborhood and rural theaters. In the old days, off-beat films, such as “Bonnie & Clyde” (1967) or “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962), had months to create buzz while they slowly traveled around the country.

Now that the marketing divisions of the film companies have been set up primarily for the mass international releases of $200 million films such as the latest Harry Potter film or a new “Spider-Man,” it isn’t easy to hand tool campaigns for odd little movies, but “Paranormal Activity” shows that if you take the time to release a picture carefully (and slowly), you can make a lot of money without spending much.

The scope and quality of contemporary crime fiction never ceases to amaze me. And the field seems to keep expanding in terms of talent and subject matter.

James R. Benn has been writing one of the best historical mystery series — set during World War II — that follows a young Boston cop named Billy Boyle who becomes a troubleshooting assistant to Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. Ike calls on Billy to tackle behind-the-scenes cases that need the smarts and the brawn of a cop rather than a standard-issue soldier.

In the course of the first four books, Benn has done a fine job of juggling the pleasures of a whodunit with the much deeper drama of what it was like for young American men to be exposed to the butchery of war.

Billy has grown with each story and the new book “Evil for Evil” (Soho Press) puts him to an intriguing moral test as he is sent to Northern Ireland to investigate the theft of a cache of American weapons. Some of the locals believe the IRA took the guns as part of a German-sponsored uprising against British rule.

Billy feels torn by the case. As a Boston Irish Catholic, his loyalties lie with those who want total freedom from British rule — his family back home has raised money for the IRA without, perhaps, knowing the full complexity of the split between the Catholics and the Protestants in Northern Ireland. In this age of heightened U.S. sensitivity to terrorism “Evil for Evil” reminds us that Americans were for many years one of the major funding sources for terrorism in Ireland.

Benn gives the reader a you-are-there feeling that brings World War II alive. As Billy has spent more time in Europe and seen more battlefield action, the stories have gained in power.

The author shows us the existential hell of the average soldier’s experience waiting to see if he will survive his next exposure to combat.

Billy meets a soldier who talks about the “geometry” and the “intersecting lines” that produce death on the battlefield: “Right now, this very minute, there’s a bullet in a case of ammo somewhere, maybe in a factory in Germany, maybe stockpiled in Rome. It’s moving, slow or fast, but it’s moving, and so are you…all the while you’re moving, just like that bullet, on a path to an unknown place…And…the only place that matters (is) where the lines intersect. Don’t matter which country, because once they do, once you and that bullet finally meet up, you’re nowhere.”

(On Sunday, I’ll be leading a free discussion with Benn and another modern master of crime fiction, Peter Lovesey, at the Westport Library, 20 Jesup Road, at 2 p.m.)

Over the past few months, the Universe division of Rizzoli has published several books focusing on New York City that I’ve reviewed here, so it wasn’t surprising to have the beautiful and informative, “New York’s Unique & Unexpected Places” land on my desk recently.

The collaboration between writer Judith Stonehill and photographer Alexandra Stonehill takes us to more than 50 places in the city that don’t always make it into guidebooks, from tiny institutions such as the Italian American Museum on Mulberry St. to the fabulous Japan Society on 47th St., around the corner from the United Nations.

The book also includes offbeat commercial estalishments such as the historic Campbell Apartment bar atop Grand Central Terminal to Economy Candy on the Lower East Side.

In his well-written foreword, Ethan Hawke endorses the book as a way of rediscovering the authentic New York City still to be found under a surface that is starting to look like that of too many other cities — chain stores, franchise restaurants, mall-like plazas replacing sidewalks.

“It’s all still here — it’s just hiding,” Hawke writes.

“We are made to feel comfortable at all moments,” he adds of the growing homogenization of parts of the metropolis. “If I’m not lost how can I be found? Without fear how will I be courageous?”

I was happy to see one of my favorite “only in New York” places cited in the book — the three-screen non-profit movie theater, Film Forum, on West Houston St.

With the death of most commercial art houses in New York, Film Forum has become indispensable for its mix of repertory programming of classics and brand new films of all types.

Friday’s debut of a recently struck Cinemascope print of Elia Kazan’s 1959 drama “Wild River” is a quintessential Film Forum booking — this underappreciated film by the great American director will get a week-long booking that is the climax of the venue’s Kazan festival. The filmmaker’s widow, Frances Kazan, will speak at the 7:40 p.m. show on Friday.

As Stonehill writes in her appreciation, “this much-loved movie house is described by film buffs as a city treasure, a hipster’s paradise, a model for cinemas worldwide.”

“One avid admirer has even declared an ambition to be buried there someday: ‘Up close. Near the screen.’”

The fantastic stage and screen actor Joseph Wiseman would no doubt have been tickled by the headlines on his obituaries yesterday — he died in Manhattan Monday at the age of 91 — all of which referenced his role as the first James Bond movie villain, Dr. No.

Wiseman made his stage debut in 1939 in the original production of “Abe Lincoln in Illinois” and continued working in the theatre into his 80s — I saw him in the 2001 Broadway revival of “Judgment at Nuremberg” and in a memorable performance a decade earlier in the Lincoln Center revival of Paddy Chayefsky’s “The Tenth Man.”

As Ronald Bergan pointed out in his fine tribute in The Guardian yesterday, Wiseman was only on screen for about 20 minutes in the 1962 film “Dr. No” but he had made every one of those minutes count.

What the New York actor could not have known at the time, of course, was that he was in on the ground floor of the greatest franchise in movie history and that his icy villainy would serve as the template for many of the Bond baddies to come (when the time came for Mike Myers to play “Doctor Evil” in the “Austin Powers” comedies, he borrowed Dr. No’s Nehru jacket).

Wiseman was amused by the ever-growing hype that surrounded the Bond movies: “I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. I had no idea it would achieve the success it did. I know nothing about mysteries. I don’t take to them. As far as I was concerned, I thought it might be just another grade-B Charlie Chan mystery.”

“Dr. No” was one of the dozens of bread-and-butter TV and film acting jobs that financed Wiseman’s New York stage career. By the time he did the Bond film, Wiseman was already a familiar face to TV viewers from his guest shots on everything from “The Untouchables” to “Adventures in Paradise.”

The actor owed much of his popularity as a peerlessly scary villain to his huge success in the 1949 Broadway hit “Detective Story.”

When the time came to make the movie version two years later, the Hollywood producers made the smart decision to use Wiseman in the role of the hood Charley Gennini (below, center).

Wiseman quickly became known as a scene stealer when he worked in movies, momentarily shifting the focus away from big stars like Paul Newman and Rex Harrison. He was most often a tad frightening in films, but the actor could also be slyly amusing, as he is in the underrated 1968 comedy “The Night They Raided Minsky’s” as the appalled owner of the theater that — accidentally — becomes the scene of America’s first striptease act.

I’m pleased to report that the Fairfield Library is relaunching the monthly “Fringe & Foreign” film festival tomorrow night at 7 p.m. with a free screening of “The Innocents,” the great 1961 film version of the Henry James novella, “The Turn of the Screw.”

I co-hosted the monthly gathering last year with my pal, Drew Taylor of The Weekly, The Playlist and Media Wave in Fairfield. He picks the fringe titles and I do the foreign.

This season we are focusing on movies made from classic novels, so I thought “The Innocents” would be a perfect pre-Halloween treat — the British production is one of the very best supernatural dramas and Deborah Kerr’s performance as the terrified governess Miss Giddens earned the actress a well-deserved Oscar nomination.

What makes “The Turn of the Screw” — and the movie adaptation — so unsettling is that it allows us to decide for ourselves if the secluded mansion where Miss Giddens goes to work is haunted or if she might be a religious hysteric who is projecting her own twisted fantasies on the two children who are her responsibility.

Something terrible happened at the country home a few months before Miss Giddens arrived — a murder that grew out of the sexual relationship between the previous governess and a brutish gamekeeper. The new governess begins to suspect that her two young charges — Miles (Martin Stephens) and Flora (Pamela Franklin) — were witnesses to all sorts of unspecified sexual “evil” before the violence erupted.

The adaptation for “The Innocents” was a collaboration between Truman Capote and John Mortimer (the latter would go on to write the wonderful “Rumpole of the Bailey” mysteries). The script and the direction by Jack Clayton are full of very subtle suggestions of the possible corruption of innocence. We are drawn so deep into Miss Giddens’s terror and hysteria that the scares in the movie are much stronger than the shocks in a standard horror potboiler.

It’s a movie that leaves lots of room for discussion afterwards, so it should be a perfect picture to launch this fall-to-spring series. Please join me if you are free tomorrow night.

(The Fairfield Library is 1080 Old Post Road in Fairfield Center.)