Joe's View

For the past few days, I’ve been listening to an advance pressing of a wonderful CD that will be released by Harbinger Records on Nov. 3 — “The Power of Two” featuring rising Broadway star Cheyenne Jackson (above) and cabaret favorite Michael Feinstein.

The recording (which will be available online the same day the CD appears) is a spin-off of a sold-out engagement the duo enjoyed at Feinstein’s Manhattan club — Feinstein’s at Loews Regency — earlier this year.

The timing is perfect for Jackson, who is now in previews for a new Broadway production of “Finian’s Rainbow” set to open at the St. James Theater on Oct. 29. The CD features Jackson singing one of the best tunes from the show, “Old Devil Moon,” by Burton Lane and E.Y. Harburg.

Feinstein has long been revered for both his singing and his musical scholarship — no performer knows more about the Great American Songbook (he is working on a PBS series on that very topic set to air next year). You could argue that Feinstein’s voice isn’t as strong as Jackson’s, but few singers can put across a vintage tune with more style and honest emotion.

“The Power of One” gives each artist a chance to shine in solo performance. Feinstein does a great version of the Fred Ahlert/Joe Young song, “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter.” Jackson’s solos include two George and Ira Gershwin masterpieces, “A Foggy Day” and “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

The CD features a very tight sextet of musicians led by arranger and pianist John Oddo. Tony Kadleck plays drums and flugelhorn; David Mann is featured on tenor sax, flute and clarinet; David Finck plays acoustic and electric bass; Bob Mann is on guitar; and David Ratajczak plays drums and percussion. 

Feinstein and Jackson — who are both gay — add a new level to the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II love song, “We Kiss in a Shadow,” from “The King and I,” by presenting it as a male duet. The lines, “Alone in our secret/together we sigh/for one smiling day to be free,” sound newly minted, as sung so simply, but so powerfully by Feinstein and Jackson.

I can’t think of a much better match of actor and character than David Suchet in the role of Agatha Christie’s master sleuth Hercule Poirot.

Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov played the role well on the big screen, but Suchet has had the chance to go much deeper into the character in the course of dozens of British TV dramatizations spread out over 20 years (Suchet debuted in the role in 1989 and there are two TV films in the pipeline).

I’ve been slowly making my way through a new A&E boxed DVD set of some of the later “Poirot” films produced for British television. Last night I was knocked out by the 2003 adaptation of a Christie novel I haven’t read, “Five Little Pigs.”

The story is much darker in tone than some of the more famous Poirot stories. It begins with the 20ish Lucy Crale (Aimee Mullins, above, with Suchet) hiring the Belgian detective to clear her mother’s name more than a decade after the woman was convicted and hanged for poisoning her husband — Lucy’s father.

Poirot begins looking into what happened on the beautiful summer afternoon more than a decade earlier when the womanizing painter Amyas Crale (Aidan Gillen, left) was poisoned with a cold beer he was given while in the middle of painting one of his mistresses, Elsa Greer (Julie Cox).

“Five Little Pigs” is about looking at a past tragedy from multiple perspectives and trying to figure out who is telling the truth. Although the story features a great Christie puzzle plot, the exploration of the past reminded me of the work of the modern British mystery master Ruth Rendell who is more interested in examining abnormal psychology than serving up a traditional whodunit.

The casting of the supporting roles is superb, with Gillen (a regular on the HBO series, “The Wire”) perfect as the philandering husband and Rachael Stirling giving a genuinely enigmatic performance as the mistreated wife who seemingly had the best reason for wanting Amyas dead.

Suchet gives one of his most subtle Poirot performances, remaining in the background and on the fringes of scenes as those who were there when the painter died try to remember what happened on that long ago summer afternoon.

From the script by Kevin Elyot to the cinematography by Martin Fuhrer to the haunting score by Christopher Gunning, this is about as good as TV drama gets.

The most recent film by British director Stephen (“The Queen”) Frears — “Cheri” — died quickly on the limited release circuit in early summer, and it seems doubtful the DVD set for release Tuesday will do much better.

It’s a beautiful film with interesting performances by Michelle Pfeiffer and Rupert Friend, but I don’t think many people will connect with the subject matter — what happens when an aging Paris prostitute falls in love for the first time.

Based on two short novels by Colette, the story follows Lea de Lonval (Pfeiffer) who has earned enough from prostitution to retire comfortably in the early years of the last century.

She has known young Fred Peloux (Friend) — nicknamed “Cheri” — since he was born to a friend in her line of work, the vulgar Charlotte Peloux (Kathy Bates).

What starts as a purely sexual dalliance between the 49-year-old Lea and the 19-year-old Cheri turns into a long-term relationship, with the woman supporting the indolent young man for six years. Lea thinks she is only “keeping” Cheri as a sort of sexual house pet and companion until Charlotte announces she has arranged a marriage between her son and Edmee (Felicity Jones).

Lea wakes up to the fact that Cheri is the only man she has ever loved, and panic sets in.

The story raises provocative questions about aging and the balance of power between older and younger lovers, but we don’t have enough time to get to know the characters (the film is a too brisk 93 minutes). The story jumps past the six years Lea and Cheri spend together, so the connection between them during that long time together remains mysterious.

Frears has reassembled many of the design and sound artists he worked with on “The Queen” and “Dangerous Liaisons” so the surface of the film is quite gorgeous. Composer Alexandre Desplat has delivered another beautiful score and the cinematography by Darius Khondji is stunning (the look and sound of the film almost compensate for the absence of excitement in the storytelling).

Pfeiffer gets a terrific scene near the end of the movie — where Lea finally realizes the folly of her dalliance with Cheri — and Friend is perfect as a shallow, petulant love object, but “Cheri” remains a collection of pretty pictures and pretty people that don’t add up to compelling drama.

Did you wonder how the dreary Vince Vaughn comedy “Couples Retreat” managed to land in the number one slot last weekend with a $35.3 million gross?

Granted there wasn’t much new competition at the multiplexes, but the movie did considerably better than the top film of the previous weekend (the well-reviewed “Zombieland” which grossed less than $25 million in its opening weekend).

So, what caused so many moviegoers to shell out so many hard-earned dollars for a formula comedy?

Ben Fritz of The Los Angeles Times provided the answer in a short and sweet story on Monday about the use of that dying marketing tool, the press junket in which entertainment reporters are flown at studio expense to exotic locales.

I remember going to a movie press conference in New York a few years back where some of the older reporters — who had been flown into the city at studio expense and put up in a fancy hotel — complained about what they viewed as movie industry belt-tightening.

One elderly gent had a beatific expression on his face as he recalled the all-expenses-paid junket in Hamburg, Germany, that he attended for “Rollerball” in 1975.

The recent “Couples Retreat” junket in Bora Bora was a throwback to the glory days of the movie press feeding at the studio trough.

The Times reported, “Universal flew dozens of journalists to Bora Bora for interviews with the cast in the same tropical setting where the film took place. As described by writer James Rocchi on MSN, the all-expenses-paid trip included activities such as watching sharks and feeding stingrays.”

Fritz noted in his piece that “costly junkets used to be common in Hollywood as a way to generate publicity. One of the most lavish examples was a $5 million-plus bash that Disney held for ‘Pearl Harbor’ (in Hawaii) in 2001. Such events are far less common in Hollywood today, as cost-conscious studios not only are cutting back on expenses but also are trying to avoid ostentatious signs of overspending. Modern-day junkets are usually in hotels, with plastic backdrops built for on-camera interviews.”

According to Fritz, “One source close to the film said the studio spent twice as much as it normally did these days on the ‘Couples Retreat’ junket. The extra money was taken from spending that would have gone to other advertising and publicity. The source felt confident that the investment was worth it, noting that the… junket generated around 10 times as much media coverage as (press gatherings in New York and Los Angeles) typically do.”

Back in the early 1990s, I was among the many readers who enjoyed Patricia Cornwell’s prize-winning and best-selling novels about Richmond. Va., medical examiner Kay Scarpetta.

The series was launched with “Postmortem” which won virtually every honor that is given to crime fiction in this country. The prizes were fully earned because Cornwell broke new ground while telling a thrilling story.

Taking the female detective novel — which had been opened up as a new genre by Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky in the previous decade — Cornwell added what was then the new turf of forensics.

The first few novels were exciting, creepy and enlightening.

Scarpetta was a smart, compassionate heroine with interesting characters around her — a troubled young niece who was becoming a computer whiz; a bigshot at the FBI who drew closer to Scarpetta in each book; and a funky Richmond cop who was the polar opposite of the FBI agent but who became a close friend and ally of Scarpetta’s.

Then, five or six books in, Cornwell began to lose her way, indulging in dreary soap opera antics involving her regular cast of characters and failing to come up with mysteries as strong as the ones in the first few novels (a couple of the early plots were fictionalizations of notorious Virginia crimes).

Like so many other readers of crime series fiction, it was hard for me to shake my Cornwell habit even as the books deteriorated — Scarpetta was like an old friend and who abandons their old friends during hard times?

Then, Cornwell did something so misguided that it killed my interest in the books — she had Kay’s FBI lover murdered, put our heroine through an emotional wringer, and then revealed in a later novel that the guy wasn’t really dead (and that people close to Kay were in on the hoax).

Yes, Cornwell later tried to work her way out of the corner she had backed herself into, by explaining that the hoax was for Kay’s own good because it might have saved her life, etc. etc.

To me, the death reversal seemed like a case of a novelist who knew she had made a terrible mistake then trying to foist a shoddy daytime TV drama device on her loyal readers. (It’s called anything-for-a-shock and making-it-up-as-I-go-along).

Ironically, as the books declined in quality, their sales figures soared thanks to good marketing, die-hard fans, and the sudden explosion in interest in DNA and forensics thanks to the O.J. trial and the CBS “C.S.I” franchise.

Last week, the forthcoming Cornwell novel, “The Scarpetta Factor” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons), landed on my desk and I decided to give a once-favorite writer another read.

Lots of water had gone under the bridge — Scarpetta has relocated to New York City and married her once-dead FBI lover — so why not give the popular series another shot on an Amtrak ride to Philly over the weekend?

It is sad to report that “The Scarpetta Factor” is a dud — nothing in the book is as horrifying as Cornwell’s flat prose or the fact that she has produced a 492-page novel with about 100 pages’ worth of plot.

Cornwell is still stuck in the worst soap opera aspects of the series — neurotic niece Lucy’s paranoia and her inability to sustain romantic relationships; Kay’s husband Benton Wesley is still mired in regret over the fake-death stunt he pulled on his beloved; and the scuzzy cop Marino (transferred to the NYPD) is still carrying a torch for Kay.

The most distressing part of the novel is the characterization of Kay, who seems to have been replaced by one of the pod people from “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” — there is something eerily inhuman about her behavior and her dialogue now.

Here’s Kay talking during a stunningly dull sequence that comes in the final 70 pages of the story (when, theoretically, a thriller should be heating up rather than cooling down):

“‘I don’t see how that’s possible,’ Scarpetta said. ‘Where’s the sensor? You can’t measure pulse oximetry, the oxygen saturation of blood, without a sensor of some type. Usually on a fingertip, sometimes a toe, sometimes an earlobe. Has to be a thin part of the person’s anatomy so a light can pass through the tissue. A light comprised of both red and infrared wavelengths that determines the oxygenation, the percentage of oxygen saturation, in your blood.’”

Two pages later, in a separate meeting about the two murders that trigger the plot, here’s Kay’s husband talking about suspect number one: “It’s possible the gene Jean-Baptiste inherited traces back to a man in the mid-fifteen hundreds who was born covered with hair and as an infant was presented to King Henri the Second in Paris and raised in the royal palace as a curiosity, an amusement, a pet of sorts. This man married a French woman, and several of their children inherited the disorder. In the late eighteen hundreds, one of their descendants is believed to have married a Chandonne, and a hundred years later the recessive gene became dominant in the form of Jean-Baptiste.”

Who talks like this?

The HAL 9000 computer in “2001” had more warmth and humanity.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been poring over a gorgeous oversized Universe book, “New York Line By Line: From Broadway to the Battery.”

It’s a collection of stunning line drawings of the city done during the 1950s and 1960s by a German artist who called himself “Robinson.” The drawings are so large that you can really lose yourself in them. And the fact that they were made more than 40 years ago makes them doubly fascinating — one page is filled with a detail-packed view of a teeming Mott Street in Chinatown, a double-spread of Grand Central Terminal shows us a great building that has always overshadowed the stores and signs and people who have passed through it.

Werner Kruse (1910-1993) was a Berlin-born illustrator who took his pen name from the children’s book that inspired him to draw, “Robinson Crusoe.”

Kruse developed a style he called the “X-ray view” in his drawings of cityscapes that showed details that could not be captured in photographs. In his foreword, author and illustrator Matteo Pericoli notes, “As a writer selects each word he will use, Robinson’s lines are not randomly placed; the one at the center of the composition, right where the eye falls first, has gone through the same decision-making process as the one that lies at the edge, where — most probably — one’s eye might rarely land.”

“New York is the most generous of any artistic subject: it gives itself wholly without hesitation, and is ultimately morbidly curious about your opinion. Robinson’s work is a most courageous act of love. He gives the city back to us, line by line, after an obsessively successful and exhilirating journey of discovery,” Pericoli adds.

Robinson also “gives back to us” buildings that no longer exist, such as a “Bohemian restaurant in Greenwich Village” where the people dominate the drawing as they do in no other image in the book and a full-page drawing of the old Metropolitan Opera House (at Broadway and 39th St.) which was demolished shortly after the artist made his drawing.

Some of the views of vanished places are terribly tantalizing, including the long-closed “Penthouse Club” restaurant on the 15th floor of 30 Central Park South and a vast interior drawing of a packed antique shop on Third Ave.

“New York Line By Line” is a wonderful gift from the Universe division of Rizzoli.

Sisu Home Entertainment has taken a 40-year-old documentary out of the vaults — “The Golden Age of Second Avenue” — and just released it on DVD.

The movie written and directed by Morton Silverstein is packed with fascinating interviews and clips from the glory days of the Yiddish Theater on the Lower East Side of Manhattan — roughly the first 30 or 40 years of the 20th Century.

While more sophisticated audiences were attending Broadway shows uptown, the recent Eastern European immigrants were catered to — and delighted by — comedies, dramas and musicals performed in Yiddish by such stars as Molly Picon (the bride above), Jacob Adler and a young actor who would go on to become a huge Hollywood star, Paul Muni.

What gives the documentary a slightly eerie feeling is the way it takes us back to a changing part of Manhattan in 1968 — host and narrator Herschel Bernardi points out that the immigrant community that patronized Yiddish Theater is being replaced by the young counterculture kids moving into the neighborhood’s tenements.

We see shots of the “hippies” who were about to turn parts of the Lower East Side into the “East Village.”

Of course, seen from the vantage point of 2009, the youth movement of the 1960s now seems as long gone as the days of the Yiddish Theater. “The Golden Age of Second Avenue” has a charming hokiness in Bernardi’s hosting — he was starring on Broadway at the time in “Fiddler on the Roof” and about to play the title role in “Zorba” — and in the exuberant interviews of Picon and the other elderly Yiddish stars we meet.

They are — you should pardon the expression — show business hams of a sort we no longer have and it’s wonderful to see them recalling their glory days.

People in the movie industry can go from forecasting that a movie will be a huge hit — before it opens — to explaining why it bombed with incredible speed and dexterity.

In the days prior to an opening, they will present you with studio-financed “tracking” studies that indicate intense chatter about a new release.

(Years ago, over lunch with a group of excited filmmakers, I was told that more than 90 percent of all potential moviegoers were “aware” of their forthcoming movie thanks to an aggressive public relations/advertising campaign. When I innocently wondered aloud if those who were surveyed had been asked if they intended to see the movie in question, a stony silence descended on the table: a few days later, the picture proved to be an instant flop.)

Movie people are buzzing at the moment about the box-office failure of last month’s “Jennifer’s Body,” a horror-comedy that attracted a lot of advance attention thanks to a trailer that had been in heavy rotation most of the summer, as well as the fame of its screenwriter Diablo Cody (an Oscar winner for “Juno”) and a Hollywood perception that leading lady Megan Fox is a rising star.

Fox rode to fame on the basis of her appearances in the two “Transformers” movies and a series of racy interviews and photos spreads she has done for men’s magazines such as Maxim and GQ.

The actress seemed wooden and lacking in personality as Shia La Beouf’s girlfriend in the Michael Bay robot extravaganzas, but the material was so bad that it was hard to judge Fox’s potential (after all, a young and unknown model named Jessica Lange made a much-derided screen debut in the 1976 remake of “King Kong”).

“Jennifer’s Body” reveals Fox to be an almost completely inept actress — Jenna Jameson has given better “performances” in her XXX hits — but she has another major studio film in the release pipeline (“Jonah Hex” due next summer) so a story in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly avoids that obvious conclusion.

According to the piece “Megan Fox’s Scary Box Office Problem” by Christine Spines, “Jennifer’s Body” flopped because Fox did too much press for it!

“…what may have really pushed ‘Jennifer’ into a box-office dead-zone was, ironically, Fox’s love affair with the media,” Spines writes.

“The audience was satiated,” one marketing executive told EW. “Everything was about her fame as opposed to being about the fact that she made a cool scary movie.”

The magazine that employs Diablo Cody as a columnist waltzes around the real bottom line: “Jennifer’s Body” was a dud with withering word-of-mouth and Fox is a “star” mostly in the eyes of magazine editors looking for Hollywood cheesecake cover stories.