Joe's View

You can’t really blame Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart for the unvaryingly annoying magazine and newspaper feature stories (tied in to today’s opening of “New Moon”) that have been burying all of us the past few weeks.

The gist of every story I scanned — from Harper’s Bazaar to The New York Times to Vanity Fair (I didn’t see anything in the current AARP Magazine) — was the exquisite agony suffered by these two young actors in the wake of last fall’s debut of “Twilight.”

One might think that Pattinson and Stewart knew what they were getting into after the who-knows-how-long-and-grueling audition process for the two leads in a series of movies based on some of the most popular novels of our time, but they and their journalistic profilers act as if the teen girl hysteria was a surprise.

Pattinson and Stewart (or their handlers) agreed to a tour of Middle American malls last fall designed specifically to whip the fans into a pre-release frenzy (and generate photos that would be printed all over the world).

Signing on to “Twilight” was not like agreeing to be in a new Gus Van Sant film or joining the ensemble of a Paul Thomas Anderson epic. It was a lead pipe cinch move to become love objects to every teen girl (and everyone with the sensibility of a teen girl) in the nation.

This time last year, the stories about Pattinson and Stewart were much more upbeat – stars-are-born charm pieces about these two winning and natural young actors achieving fame in a profession where 90 percent of the practitioners are out of work at any given time.

What a difference 12 months makes! To hear Pattinson and Stewart tell it, fame is, at best, a drag (you can’t frequent that old grocery store anymore) and, at worst,  a personal violation (strangers want to know who you’re sleeping with).

As a result of post-“Twilight” traumas, most of the interviews for “New Moon” were conducted in bunker-like, high-floor, hotel rooms — in New York and Vancouver (where the third film in the vampire series is being shot) — because of the dangers the actors (and their chroniclers) might face if they ventured out into a lobby or city street.

“I’m trying not to drown…I guess I’m not cut out to do a franchise…I’m not a crowd person,” Pattinson tells Vanity Fair scribe Evgenia Peretz in the December cover story that comes with more than a dozen glamour shots of the actor lounging in Montauk with the photographer Bruce Weber (several dozen more of the pictures from the shoot are available on the VF.com Website).

It might have been instructive for Pattinson to have visited the Vanity Fair archives and looked up the July, 1992, cover story on Luke Perry before he sat down with Peretz. 

Most magazines and journals have highs and lows, but n + 1 can always be counted on for substantive and provocative reading. The eight issues so far have been keepers.

Twice a year, from their offices in Brooklyn, the editors and writers of n + 1 put together a dozen or so essays, reviews and interviews that are hard to beat for clarity and originality.

Editors Keith Gessen (left) and Mark Greif and their associates, who include the novelist and essayist — and journal co-founder — Benjamin Kunkel, take nothing on the pop cultural or political scenes for granted.

The writers have an uncanny way of printing pieces that make you rethink Marx, gay marriage, the “Neuronovel,” and “Sex and the City.” You can’t guess what you might see in the next issue, but you can be pretty sure it will be well worth reading.

I’ve mined a few nuggets from the latest issue, a couple of graphs from “Gentrify, Gentrify” (or “Whose fault was Park Slope?”) on the way that the work of urban renewal icon Jane Jacobs has been misunderstood:

“The bible of gentrification was a book that would come to be assigned in every urban history course in the country: Jane Jacobs’s brilliant ‘The Death and Life of American Cities.’ But in the new urban context, it seemed lost on everyone that Jacobs was writing about the lingeringly industrial, racially mixed (if not exactly integrated) city of 1961…She had not imagined white collars replacing blue ones, and white people driving out black neighbors…Jacobs’s vision of self-regulated communities and small neighborhoods (has given) ideological cover to a vision of city life she had explicitly rejected: white-collar, service-economy cities oriented almost entirely toward consumption.”

“…Everywhere, skilled manual work had vanished, and the old factories and warehouses were turned into yet more condos. But now the ‘back to the city’ movement buckled under a terrible irony: the children of the pioneer gentrifiers could not afford to live in the neighborhoods their parents had ‘cleaned up.’”

“…But the mailrooms of the white-collar cities could employ only so many recent college graduates; and not even the metropolis dreamed of by the most Panglossian of gentrifiers could consist exclusively of bike-riding, cupcake-eating financial analysts. Gentrification had no jobs to offer — only Jane Jacobs-style ‘neighborhoods.’”

The n + 1 people are accessible as well as smart and hold public forums on a fairly regular basis. Tomorrow at 7 p.m., Gessen, Greif and other contributors will be talking about Issue 8 in a free gathering at lower Manhattan’s McNally Jackson Bookstore, 52 Prince St.

For more details go to www.nplusonemag.com/n-1-events

Whenever I read something as entertaining — and as insightful — as “Set Up in Soho” (St. Martin’s Griffin) by Dee Davis, I’m left wondering how many other good books I’ve missed just because they fall into the much maligned “chick lit” genre.

The label is condescending and too broad to be of much value.
Just about any contemporary story told by a woman — particularly one set in New York City — will be slapped with the label (unless she is published by Knopf with a Chip Kidd cover).

I’ve read forgettable trash in the genre and terrific stuff that is more like the novels of Anne Tyler or Laurie Colwin than the work of Candace Bushnell (I sometimes wonder if Tyler came along now with her warm and zany tales of family life if she might end up with a pink cover in the chick lit section of bookstores).

“Set Up in Soho” does touch on the relationship and career concerns of all the “Sex and the City” spin-offs, but Davis seems more interested in family life and basic trust issues between men and women than in the idea of taking us on vicarious shopping sprees in the more gilded sections of Manhattan.

The book’s heroine, Andrea Sevalas, is not a naive striver new to the city. She’s a native who comes from money and is already a minor celebrity due to her cable food show, “What’s Cooking in the City.”

The show mixes cooking segments with foodie news about celebrity chefs and the latest restaurant openings (Andrea describes it as “Martha Stewart meets ‘Entertainment Tonight’”).

Andrea’s playgirl mother ran off when she was young, leaving much of her day-to-day upbringing to a grandmother with a busy social schedule of her own and Aunt Althea (whose matchmaking business is an embarrassment to her niece).

“Set Up in Soho” introduces us to Andi at a crucial moment in her life and career — she’s dumped by her longtime beau in chapter one, injures herself falling into one of those double door openings you see on almost every New York sidewalk, and is given a make-or-break assignment at work to land a cooking segment with a reclusive chef who is about to open a much-anticipated new eatery.

Andi is not a chick lit sweetie pie. She’s opinionated, knows what she wants and has survived in the shark tank of cable television. If you were her enemy, you could see many reasons to dislike this woman. But Davis shows us Andi’s hidden soft spots; her troubled relationship with Aunt Althea makes her appealingly vulnerable.

Davis also knows Manhattan like the back of her hand, so that there is nothing generic about the book’s backdrop. On an early date with a new romantic possibility, Andi meets the guy in Madison Square Park for a burger at the Shake Shack and later in the book we find out that the TV host is a fan of Norbert Leo Butz.

Davis doesn’t write down to her readers (or her characters) and the result is what you might call a serious romantic comedy.

Writer-director Lars von Trier clearly likes to push emotional buttons almost as much as he loves to make films.

For more than a decade now, he has managed to keep “shocking” movie critics and arthouse audiences in a pop cultural scene where you would think everyone has long since been shocked-out.

Hard core porn is popping up everywhere you look. Do a Google image search for almost any famous personality — with the “safe” function off, of course — and the chances are pretty good that you will see something XXX-rated or, as the Internet kids would say, NSFW (Not Safe For Work).

If you go to see an R-rated horror picture, the chances are pretty good that you will see extended torture sequences with limbs being lopped off right and left and gallons of blood spilling all over the place.

So, how is it that so many seasoned reviewers and New York Film Festival-goers professed shock at the sexual and violent material in von Trier’s latest provocation, “Antichrist”?

Yes, a sheltered, computer-less, elderly person living in Middle America would probably have a coronary if he or she accidentally wandered into a theater showing this explicitly sexual and violent tale of a couple tearing each other apart (figuratively and literally) in the wake of their only child’s accidental death.

The movie has stirred up tremendous controversy and the explicit content has caused a severely curtailed U.S. release. (In Southern Connecticut, the sole theatrical booking so far has been at the Bow Tie Criterion in New Haven.)

It must be the eccentric mixing of genres that has provoked so much outrage — the fact that von Trier starts the movie in a fairly realistic manner and then escalates into gruesome violence and frank sexual content (the director used doubles for his stars Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe for the most graphic sexual moments).

Von Trier clearly wanted to experiment with the idea of modern horror film special effects grafted onto intimate psychological drama (the same way he blended elements of Hollywood musical comedy into the grim tale told in his “Dancer in the Dark”)

My problem with “Antichrist” was not in the blunt visual material, but in the way the movie drifts from the tragic drama of a woman who isn’t getting the psychiatric treatment she needs into a finale that is straight out of “Saw VI” or “Hostel 2.”

It is so easy to empathize with the Gainsbourg figure in the first half of the movie — she is ailing and her therapist husband is foolishly trying to treat her himself without any medication — that the sudden shift to the woman being portrayed as a bloody avenging angel is too jarring to make sense.

Von Trier falls into the same trap that ruined the final scenes in “Fatal Attraction” — portraying a sick woman as a monster who must be destroyed.

I don’t think I can quite agree with the young man sitting near me at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Saturday night who enthused to his companion, “She’s even better on stage than she is on screen!”

After all, the “she” in question was Isabelle Huppert — perhaps the most daring and most cinematically skilled actress of our time — on her closing night in Robert Wilson’s staging of “Quartett,” an adaptation by German playwright Heiner Muller of the same material that inspired “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.”

On screen, Huppert has the sort of near-mystical rapport with the camera that you only see every so often, in actors as diverse as Dirk Bogarde and Monica Vitti. This is a gift that transcends acting technique and conventional standards of “beauty” — it’s the uncanny sense of knowing how to project thought and emotions to a movie camera.

Huppert is not a marvel of versatility in terms of playing a huge range of different people (ala Meryl Streep) — she simply has the ability to convey with her face almost everything we need to know about the women she plays in movies.

Over the past decade, Huppert has pushed herself by showing a willingness to explore the dark side of human behavior with seemingly no inhibitions or fears of what moviegoers might think of her playing such deeply disturbed characters as the title role in “The Piano Teacher” (2001).

In “Quartett” Huppert showed that she has the more grandiose acting gifts that are needed to push a character across the footlights in a live performance. Although, “character” is a tricky term when it comes to the work of avant garde pillar Robert Wilson, who uses performers as figures in his striking stage pictures.

Huppert was listed in the program as Merteuil — the part Glenn Close played in the Stephen Frears film “Dangerous Liaisons” and Jeanne Moreau tackled in Roger Vadim’s “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” — but in Wilson’s eccentric and mesmerizing interpretation the actors keep switching roles.

At moments, Huppert was possessed by the spirit of Valmont, her erotic ally/enemy with whom she plots the sexual conquest of virgins. The actors were also called upon to briefly revert to non-human behavior (Huppert as a lewd frog was quite a sight to behold, let me tell you!)

Huppert received fabulous support from Ariel Garcia Valdes as Valmont and the strikingly attractive and very precise Rachel Eberhart and Benoit Marechal as the objects of the older couple’s twisted sexual game playing.

“Quartett” was only Huppert’s second stage production in New York City (she made her debut four years ago in another challenging BAM production, the 90-minute suicide note “4.48 Psychose”).

It would be the easiest thing in the world for Huppert to visit New York City in a charming comedy or traditional drama in which she could conquer critics and audiences alike with very little heavy lifting. How wonderful that the star decided we were up for something far more interesting, something in the spirit of the most demanding work she has done on screen, but conceived purely for the stage.

The best Robert Altman movies are packed with contradictory emotions and unusually large collections of wildly diverse characters bouncing off each other.

Altman classics like “Nashville” (1975) – above – and “The Long Goodbye” (1973) are not about linear storytelling or easily resolved conflicts, so Mitchell Zuckoff’s rambling new “oral biography” — “Robert Altman” (Knopf) — seems like the perfect format to tell the story of the life and work of one of the most iconoclastic filmmakers in the history of Hollywood.

Zuckoff — a professor of journalism at Boston University — was working with Altman on a more conventional biography when the director died three years ago this month.

“Our work was unfinished. But, a new idea emerged,” the biographer writes in his introduction. “Our talks, Robert Altman’s final sustained interviews, would form the backbone of a book about his work and his life, rough edges and all…Bob told me that he and his cowriters created forty-eight characters in ‘A Wedding’ only because that was double the number in ‘Nashville.’ It was a conceit, a caprice; he wanted to see how many individual voices he could establish in a celluloid choir without drowning the audience in cacophony. It took nearly four times as many characters to survey his life.”

The cast of characters who talked to Zuckoff include huge stars such as Warren Beatty, Julie Christie (below) and Meryl Streep, along with the lesser known character actors who were closest to Altman’s heart, including Henry Gibson, John Considine and Bud Cort.

The book reminds us that Altman was a slow starter in Hollywood terms — his breakthrough project, “MASH” (1970), came along when the director was already 45 years old. That was considered an ancient age in the counterculture ere when filmmakers 10 or 20 years younger than Altman (the Steven Spielberg-Martin Scorsese generation) were becoming star directors.

Altman’s career was an example of what folks in the horse-racing world call “late foot.”

The book paints a rather unflattering portrait of Altman as a husband and father after “MASH” made him famous and powerful, but the man was clearly trying to make up for all of that lost time spent working on B-movies and mediocre TV series in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1970s, Altman rushed to create as many films as he could while the studios were willing to finance them — in the course of that single decade, the director made 12 feature films!

Altman made movies so quickly that even his masterpieces are marred by sloppy details. Every time I watch “Nashville” — which is one of my favorite movies — I’m brought up short by the patent falseness of the early scene in which a group of country stars are shown gabbing away in front of an audience as the National Anthem is being performed (behavior that would have been seen as scandalously un-American in Nashville 34 years ago). How could a man who loved to create a rich texture of realistic behavior on screen allow that sequence to play out as it does?

Altman was clearly an artist whose work was meant to be loved in spite of its messy flaws. Judging by some of the angry personal comments made by Altman’s old friends in the book, the same thing was true of the man, too.

AMC has stolen a lot of PR thunder from HBO with its original series, “Mad Men” — probably the most talked-about made-for-cable show since “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City” galvanized everyone a decade ago.

Indeed, one of the reasons “Mad Men” scored so big so fast is that HBO has  been struggling to find new series with the same clout as its first two big hits. High-quality HBO shows as diverse as “Deadwood,” “Six Feet Under” and “Big Love” have received strong critical support and attracted devoted followings but they haven’t turned into pop cultural blockbusters on the scale of “SATC” and “The Sopranos.”

“Mad Men” has gotten fabulous reviews, many Emmy Awards and as much glossy magazine coverage as most major Hollywood movies receive these days. AMC’s second original series, “Breaking Bad,” has been embraced by critics and awards groups, too,  but it doesn’t have the fashion and pop history angles that pushed “Mad Men” into the media stratosphere.

Sunday night, AMC is launching a remake of the late 1960s cult TV show, “The Prisoner,” that the cable company is pushing as a major event ala “Mad Men,” but I have a hunch this three-night, six-hour miniseries will come and go without much lasting impact.

The show isn’t bad. Indeed, it has better production values than most contemporary movies — the music, the cinematography, and the design are terrific. And, Ian McKellen is wonderful as the villain of the piece — “Number Two,” who rules over the strangely attractive and placid “prison” where the show’s protagonist, “Number Six” (Jim Caviezel), finds himself stranded with no understanding of where he is or why he’s there.

“The Prisoner” is a trippy, hallucinatory piece of work that I fear will point up one of the big problems with AMC vs. HBO — the commercial interruptions.

I wonder if some of the critics who adore “Mad Men” would like it as much if they saw it with all of those irritating commercial breaks rather than on advance DVDs.

I watched a screener copy of “The Prisoner” last weekend with no commercials and often had a hard time holding the story together in my head — there are flashbacks, flash forwards, dreams, visions. Stylistically, the piece is more like the “Matrix” movies than the original 1968 TV show (which told the story in more than a dozen episodes that could be watched individually and that had an action-thriller flavor that suited star Patrick McGoohan, who was just coming off another popular series, “Secret Agent”).

The remake is so surreal and so non-linear that it gets away with a crazy, retrograde gay subplot that would probably have gay activists up in arms if the story was told in a more lucid manner.

Broken up into pieces over three nights, and then shattered with commercial breaks, “The Prisoner” will probably lose most of the curious viewing public the very first night.

Matteo Pericoli hit on a terrific (and terrifically simple) idea for his new book, “The City Out My Window: 63 Views on New York” (Simon & Schuster).

For those of us who live in cities, a major part of daily life is the view outside our windows. Whether we live in squalor or luxury, looking out an apartment or office window can be beautiful, ugly, relaxing, troubling.

Pericoli who lives in — and loves — New York City decided to ask a large group of people if he could visit their living and work spaces to photograph and then sketch what they see see through their windows.

The New York characters include celebrities such as Nora Ephron and Tom Wolfe — whose views reflect their wealth and taste — as well as people on lower rungs whose windows reveal a much grottier city.

Pericoli got the idea when he and his wife were in the process of moving and he suddenly realized how much he would miss the views from his Upper West Side apartment:

“One day, when our boxes were almost all packed, I remember looking once again at the view and was struck by a bewildering feeling of loss. ‘I can’t leave this behind!’ I told myself. Trying to understand my own sudden fear of separation, I estimated in those seven years (of living in the apartment) I must have spent roughly 640 hours…staring at the view. I thought, ‘How great it would be if I could capture the view simply by peeling off an imaginary thin film from the glass, rolling it up, and then taking it to our new place.’”

Pericoli’s realization of his own love of that view caused him to think about how “every view from every window in the city — with its own arrangement of other buildings, rooftops, skyscrapers, water towers, etc. — was the only one in the world! And to think, each of those views might have affected its ‘owner’ the way mine had affected me.”

The artist began visiting a hundred apartments, offices and studios “out of whose windows I looked and photographed.”

The project was boiled down to 63 views and brief comments from the viewers that reveal the things they love about New York (many of them say how much they adore those old wooden rooftop water towers) and what they hate (more than a few mention newish Trump towers that have permanently scarred their cityscape).

Nora Ephron writes of the view she has of the Chrysler Building from her office window: “It’s my favorite building in all the world, the absolute epitome of every glittery dream I have ever had about New York. Fortunately, when I write, I face away from it, or I would never get anything done.”

In his marvelous introduction, the architecture critic Paul Goldberger notes, “A view is like a mate: you must be sure you want to live with it, because you cannot really change it. And you have to be prepared for the fact that it may change of its own accord.”

There is a lot of beauty — and more than a little wisdom — in “The City Out My Window.”