Joe's View

Perhaps taking People magazine to heart — they once called her a “Jewish Jane Austen” — Cathleen Schine has used the plot of “Sense and Sensibility” as the starting point for her charming new novel “The Three Weissmanns of Westport” (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

The trigger for Schine’s story is Manhattan patriarch Joseph Weissmann’s announcement that he wants a divorce from Betty, his wife of more than 50 years.

Joseph was Betty’s second husband, but he became a real father to her daughters, Miranda and Annie, who are left reeling by the news. (When the “girls” find out Joseph has taken up with a young woman they know, the anger of the Weissmann sisters escalates).

The divorce news catches Annie and Miranda at crisis points in their own middle-aged lives — the younger sister Miranda is a literary agent mired in a  James Frey-like scandal with one of her memoir authors and Annie has started to accept the fact that her latest romantic hope is probably a pipe dream.

In the dispute over the divorce, Betty temporarily loses the plush Central Park West apartment she and Joseph shared and the 70ish woman takes shelter in the Westport beach cottage of a wealthy cousin. The two “girls” decide to save their pennies by moving in with mom.

“The Three Weissmanns of Westport” is less than 300 pages but Schine delivers more interesting characters — and more amusing and poignant plot developments — than you will find in most contemporary novels that are 100 pages longer.

Connecticut readers will get a special kick out of Schine’s satiric portrait of the changes Westport has undergone in recent years (the author, like Betty, lived there years ago when it was a kinder, gentler place).

In the final chapters, the writer shifts effortlessly from social comedy to tragic elements that seem so inevitable that they don’t take away from the book’s tremendous entertainment value.

When we think about the Australian movies of the 1970s and 1980s most of us recall art house hits such as “Picnic at Hanging Rock” and “Breaker Morant,” but as the new DVD documentary “Not Quite Hollywood” demonstrates, we were only seeing the tip of the iceberg on this side of the Pacific.

Mark Hartley’s delirious and rather shocking movie traces the history of “Ozploitation,” the low-budget horror flicks and nudie comedies that revived the Australian film industry after decades of virtually no production.

The theater business Down Under was dominated by American and British product in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, but the rise of drive-ins and the emergence of some very adventuruous directors led to a wave of crazy but highly profitable B-movies.

Those films in turn helped push directors such as Peter Weir — who got his start with a surreal action flick called “The Cars That Ate Paris” — in the direction of higher toned fare such as “Gallipoli” and “The Last Wave.”

The Aussie Bs also provided work for young actors like Jack Thompson and Nicole Kidman (above) and Mel Gibson who would dominate A-list productions in the country as the film industry began to boom.

“Not Quite Hollywood” is raunchy and at a few points disgusting as we see clips from sex/horror pictures like “Alvin Purple” (right) and “Dead Kids.” But Hartley has edited the clips with great flair and includes excellent interviews with filmmakers and actors, most of whom had no delusions of grandeur about what they were working on. There is also terrific interview footage with B-movie connoisseur Quentin Tarantino who saw many of the pictures on cheap videocassettes that were retitled — and sometimes dubbed into “American English” — for the U.S. market.

Few of us (other than Tarantino) would want to sit through any of these pictures in their entirety, but the clips (and the copious extras on the DVD) are lots of fun.

The Hollywood Reporter and BBC World News reported earlier today that Tinto Brass — director of the notorious 1979 pornographic-historical drama, “Caligula” — will begin shooting the first 3D porn flick in May.

James Cameron set new global box-office records this week with his 3D science-fiction movie, “Avatar,” which has made the theatergoing experience feel crucial again (until large home 3D systems are available, the highest-grossing movie in history will make no sense on DVD).

But, where will Tinto Brass go with his XXX variation on Cameron’s blockbuster?

The urban smut houses that gave us the “porno chic” fad of the 1970s are long since closed and no one has dared to mass release an NC-17 movie in the nation’s multiplexes since “Showgirls” bombed in 1995.

Brass did not announce a title for his porn picture but rather coyly said he plans “to “revisit an abandoned project about a Roman emperor that was ruined by Americans,” obviously referencing “Caligula.”

The Italian filmmaker did leave his name on the 1979 hit, something the original screenwriter Gore Vidal did not, when producer Bob Guccione (of Penthouse infamy) spliced in XXX inserts after the film’s stars Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren (below), Peter O’Toole and John Gielgud had done their (non-pornographic) scenes.

(The DVD of “Caligula” is almost worth renting for Dame Helen’s hilarious commentary track.)

Whatever Brass comes up with in May, it will be the first 3D movie (of any kind) produced in Italy.

Stay tuned.

If the pay-off in the last 15 minutes of “The House of the Devil” was as strong as the build-up in the first 80, the movie could have been a horror classic.

Writer-director Ti West has taken the satanic cult hysteria of the 1980s and fashioned it into a very well-made mood piece about a Connecticut college girl (Jocelin Donahue) who lives to regret what looks like an easy “babysitting” job involving an elderly woman in a remote country house.

West clearly knows how to invest an everyday setting with creepy undertones and to keep an audience tense without resorting to cheap shock effects. The atmosphere of mounting dread is reminiscent of Roman Polanksi’s work in “Rosemary’s Baby” — we know something is off but we don’t really know the half of it.

It is refreshing to see a contemporary horror movie with so little violence in it that nevertheless manages to keep a viewer on edge for almost the entire running time.

West is not only good at atmosphere, he is also good with actors. Jocelin Donahue is very appealing as Samantha — she gets drawn into the horror plot so slowly that we never look at her as another of those slasher movie dopes who should know better. The financial underpinings of the story play a major part in the girl’s believability — she needs the $400 she is offered for one night’s work just as much as Marion Crane thought she needed that $40,000 she embezzled in “Psycho.”

West keeps the tension building as Samantha meets the odd son (Tom Noonan) and even odder daughter-in-law (Mary Woronov) of the old woman she is hired to watch. The house itself becomes a character with West investing it with non-cliche creepiness — there is nothing blatantly sinister about the place but it just doesn’t feel right.

“The House of the Devil” is being released on video Tuesday and is well worth a rental for the good performances and the above average craftsmanship (in this age of slapped-together horror schlock). But I wish it had a more satisfying conclusion.

It comes as no surprise that Tom Ford’s first movie “A Single Man” is stunning to look at — after all, he is the genius designer who got Gucci back on its feet and then launched his own label with some of the most stylish advertising ever to be seen in glossy magazines.

What’s really interesting about the film, however, is the way this man of fashion digs beneath the beautiful surface of life in Southern California in the early 1960s to tell a story of a middle-aged college professor (Colin Firth) struggling with the loss of his companion (Matthew Goode) of 16 years in a car accident.

“A Single Man” probes what is perhaps the most difficult emotion to dramatize in a film or play — grief.

As Joan Didion wrote in “The Year of Magical Thinking,” those who grieve run the risk of having other people think in terms of self-pity.

Our whole culture is designed around a “Get on with it!” philosophy — yes, take the time to recognize your loss with a funeral and a few days off work, but two weeks later, few outsiders really want to hear about that terrible internal trauma.

Working with Colin Firth, Tom Ford has managed the trick of making us care about the profound sadness of the professor. The director with such an acute feel for the surface of things uses the man’s rather plush life in a gorgeous home — and more than one potential suitor waiting in the wings — to heighten the tragedy of loss.

Ford is clearly as masterful with actors as he is with designers and cameramen — Firth’s performance is a marvel of hiding and displaying primal feelings without going over the top into self-indulgence.

“A Single Man” is not doing well at the box-office — you can’t hide the fact that despite the film’s many accomplishments, it’s a downer. The night I saw the picture recently, there were no more than ten people in the theater.

Perhaps the movie will get a bump from Firth’s likely Oscar nomination next Tuesday morning, but whatever happens in terms of the picture’s bottom line, it most definitely marks Ford as a new director to watch. It’s the most exciting film to come out of the fashion world since Bruce Weber’s “Let’s Get Lost” in 1989.

Hartford Stage artistic director Michael Wilson got some great news earlier today — his staging of the nine-hour Horton Foote epic “The Orphans’ Home Cycle” has had its run extended for another six weeks at the Signature Theatre in Manhattan.

The show was already a close-to-sold-out hot ticket before Part 3 opened to the press Tuesday night — the rave reviews and the tremendous demand for tickets led to an immediate extension and more buzz that the show will transfer to Broadway in the fall.

The Foote epic began at Hartford Stage last fall — it’s a co-production with the Signature Theatre — and has turned into one of the genuine theatrical triumphs of the current New York season.

You can see “Orphans’ Home” in three, three-hour parts or attend a marathon in which all three parts are performed in one day. I’ve been seeing the show part-by-part — with part three on my schedule two weeks from now — but I wish I had signed up for one of the marathons.

The original marathon performances are sold out, but with the extension two new ones have been added on April 3 and May 8.

For information go to www.signaturetheatre.org

While the rest of the world was watching — and love/hating — the MTV reality show “Jersey Shore,” I have been struck dumb by my first encounter with ABC’s “The Bachelor.”

Although it is on one of the four major broadcast networks — and has been a hit for a decade — “The Bachelor” seems much cheesier and much sleazier than the antics of Snooki (below left) and “The Situation” in Seaside Heights, N.J.

The reality shows on the former music networks — MTV and sister channel VH1 — are upfront about peddling young flesh and the antics of twentysomethings after they’ve had a few too many drinks.

“Jersey Shore” is just a wilder version of “The Real World” combined with a tamer version of “Girls Gone Wild” — spring break shenanigans stretched out to fill a summer at the beach.

The “concerned” adults and the chambers of commerce that have been attacking the MTV hit must not have ever spent a summer living in group housing at the Shore (You should have seen what went on in the hotel attic I shared with a bunch of waiters and waitresses in Ocean City, N.J., for three summers in the early 1970s. And, O.C. is known as the squarest beach town in New Jersey!)

What bothers me about “The Bachelor” is the way the show wraps sexual titillation in “romance,” with the title character toting roses around with the claim he is searching for a wife during the weeks he spends in a house that looks like the Playboy Mansion (with hot and cold running Bunnys).

In the first episode, bachelor Jake met the two-dozen or so women contestants after we met them separately. The disconnect was unintentionally hilarious. Jake kept telling us he was looking for love and commitment - and a great marriage like the one his parents have back home in Texas – but the women kept talking about Jake’s body.

In subsequent episodes, Jake interviews his possible brides-to-be wearing as little clothing as possible (below) and it is heavily implied that he is taking the contestants for marital test drives.

The sleaze factor is much stronger in “The Bachelor” than in “Jersey Shore” because of Jake’s sanctimonious talk about love and marriage in what looks like the longest porn movie in history.

At least with Snooki, what you see is what you get.

Bill Maher put on a terrific show at the Shubert Theater in New Haven Saturday night, surprising those who only know him as a TV host with a powerhouse stand-up act.

The theater was packed and I only noticed a few walk-outs — during a longish section on religion.

Maher has been traveling the country honing a comedy special that will be broadcast live on HBO next month — his talk-show “Real Time” will also return in February.

Although he started in stand-up, Maher’s three talk-shows — on Comedy Central, ABC and HBO — have overshadowed his comedy career.

It was great to see the smart and funny man unencumbered by guests (and the need to be semi-civil to those with whom he disagrees). Maher was also able to get into sexual issues that would no doubt embarrass and or enrage most TV watchers.

Like a latter day Mort Sahl, Maher had some notes on a music stand that kept the show focused, but it was clear he was working up new material on the spot.

Maher was still able to score laughs at the expense of the last president (he spoke of the global shame Americans felt from 2001 to 2009 with “the star of Toy Story 1 & 2 in the White House”).

He also made a good offer to Lou Dobbs and the other  “birthers” who want to see Barack Obama’s U.S. birth certificate — “You show us Sarah Palin’s high school diploma and we’ll show you his birth certificate!”

Maher is a very gutsy comic, displaying his clear anti-religious stance in a potent section of the show where he equated the Xenu origin story from Scientology with the virgin birth of Christianity. You could feel the nervousness  in the house when Maher dared to make blasphemy so funny.

Judging by the Shubert show Saturday night, the HBO special next month will be must-see-TV for cable subscribers.