Joe's View

When it comes to the Golden Globes, it has always been tough to figure out who in the equation is more cynical — the overseas “journalists” who give them or the Hollywood folk who receive them.

The group was at one time viewed as so corrupt that the TV show was dropped by a broadcast network — fearing FCC or FTC intervention — and left to basic cable. This was back in the very bad old days when Pia Zadora won the “best newcomer” award for “Butterfly” over nominees Kathleen Turner, Howard Rollins and Elizabeth McGovern because of the blatant wining and dining of the foreign press by Pia’s sugar daddy husband.

TV networks are so desperate for cheap, celebrity-filled programming these days that all sorts of awards shows have come out of the woodwork — something called the Broadcast Critics Association had their shindig on VH1 Friday night.

TV’s need for cheap programming neatly dovetails with the lead-up to the Oscars in Hollywood. Even the classiest performers (i.e. Meryl Streep) feel the need to work the award show circuit to lock up their Academy Award nominations (which bolster careers and the DVD rentals and cable licensing fees of cited films).

The Golden Globes are now the beneficiaries of being viewed as the last campaign stop during Oscar primary season — the ballots for the Academy Award nominations were still in the voters hands Sunday night.

The starry turn-out for the awards dinner has become so impressive that NBC has been holding its nose and devoting three hours of prime to the awards show for the past decade.

It’s a weird event, even by Hollywood standards: one where the hosts are openly mocked by the guests.

Sandra Bullock was not alone in making a reference, in her acceptance speech, to the people who “bought” her award for “The Blind Side,” a reference to years past when the producers of movies such as “Scent of a Woman” have spent small fortunes on the members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

In 1992 Universal gave HFPA a free weekend in Paris where they were given access to the press- shy Al Pacino, who went on to win the best actor in a drama prize (setting the stage for his Oscar win a month later).

Another of the glittering stars at Sunday night’s award telecast called the HFPA “a strange bunch.”

The HFPA gave its Cecil B, DeMille Award to Martin Scorsese, knowing that his film “Shutter Island” would be in desperate need of a PR boost for its new dead-of-winter opening date in early February (after Paramount killed the film’s Oscar chances by canceling the original October release date).

The HFPA and NBC could also be pretty sure that one or two of Scorsese’s friends/collaborators would show up to give him the prize on television (Robert DeNiro and Leonardo DiCaprio did the honors Sunday night).

Ace Hollywood reporter Nikki Finke summed up the problems with the Golden Globes in a Sunday night posting on her peerless “Deadline Hollywood Daily” blog:

“…a completely meaningless awards show by a scandalous organization…they have zero integrity. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: studios and networks who lavishly lobby the HFPA usually score nominations. Stars win in direct correlation to their glamour quotient. Everything about the awards is geared towards hyping the media’s interest and the telecast’s ratings. Even the small motley group of freelancers who belong to the HFPA won’t grant membership to the real foreign journalists at the prestige newspapers across the world. NBC and Dick Clark Productions could clean up the Globes but choose not to. Instead, the entire entertainment industry props up this pathetic show because it’s seen as a night-long marketing tool.”

Playbill.com had some great news for theater fans over the weekend — Brian Dennehy definitely will be bringing his acclaimed double-bill of one-act plays by Eugene O’Neill and Samuel Beckett to Broadway between now and Tony time in the spring.

The Connecticut native got some of the best reviews of his career for a 2008 staging of “Hughie” and “Krapp’s Last Tape” as one evening’s entertainment at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada.

Dennehy opened the Long Wharf Theatre season in New Haven that fall in “Hughie” as a solo piece. The actor joked in an interview with me at LWT that doing the two plays together was such a physical and emotional challenge that he would only do it again at “Broadway prices.”

A few months later, when I was interviewing Dennehy’s “Inherit the Wind” co-star Christopher Plummer for a story about his memoir, the actor told me he saw his friend’s performance in “Krapp’s Last Tape” at Stratford and thought it was one of the strongest he had ever seen.

Dennehy is getting back into the two-play groove with a pre-Broadway run at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre that started preview performances Saturday — opening night is Jan. 25. The show will run in Chicago through Feb. 21.

Goodman artistic director Robert Falls is staging “Hughie,” just as he did at Long Wharf. Jennifer Tarver is directing the Beckett play.

“The coupling of ‘Hughie’ and ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ creates a resonant, eloquent showcase of the finest work by three master artists of the theatre: Eugene O’Neill, Samuel Beckett and Brian Dennehy, my longtime collaborator and friend,” Falls said in a statement last week.

“These plays are mini-masterpieces; both are leavened by the black Irish humor that was the heritage of each author, and both offer incomparable challenges to an actor — which Brian negotiates with thrilling artistry.”

I can’t wait to see Dennehy back on Broadway for what looks like another triumph in the tradition of his “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and “Death of a Salesman.”

If you happen to be traveling to Chicago over the next month, tickets for the Goodman run can be ordered at www.GoodmanTheatre.org

The label “eclectic” doesn’t begin to describe the work of director Diane Paulus, who has staged operas, nightclub shows and Broadway musicals with equal success.

Paulus appears to have a real knack for creating pieces for specific spaces. Two years ago, she managed to dust off the counterculture relic “Hair” for a terrific new staging in Central Park as part of the free summer theater series.

When the time came to “transfer” the show to a Broadway house — the Al Hirschfield Theatre — Paulus didn’t just move the show, she reconceived it for indoor presentation and the tighter space of an old-fashioned theater.

Instead of being diminished by a more “formal” presentation, the show gained in power and focus. Last spring, Paulus won a very deserved Tony for best direction of a revival on Broadway.

The director’s resume also includes a wild re-thinking of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” as a 1970s disco revue — “The Donkey Show” — that ran for six years in a New York club and was also successfully restaged in Europe. (At the moment, Paulus is said to be re-working the piece as a more traditional theater presentation, starting with a revival at the American Repertory Theatre in Boston).

Tomorrow night, Paulus is heading in an exciting new direction with an opera by Joseph Haydn that is being presented at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City through Jan. 28.

“Il Mondo Della Luna (The World on the Moon)” is an opera written in 1777 about a powerful man who refuses to let his daughters marry for love instead of increasing his clout. The women use a phony astronomer and a sleeping potion to trick the nobleman into thinking he has been transported to the moon, where women are allowed to marry the men they love.

Paulus has transformed the planetarium at the American Musuem of Natural History into an intimate opera house where the combination of live singers and musicians with the Seiss Mark IX Star Projector will result in a show designed to delight opera fans and science buffs equally.

“Il Mondo Della Luna” is just the latest boundary-breaking production from Gotham Chamber Opera which last year scored a triumph when it commissioned modern dance giant Mark Morris to stage another Haydn opera, “L’isola diasbitata.” The Gotham company is partnering with ART and the museum on this extraordinarily adventurous show. For ticket information, go to www.ticketcentral.com

You could go a little crazy trying to describe — or categorize — Ilan Duran Cohen’s 2008 “The Joy of Singing (Le plaisir de chanter)” that debuted Wednesday on the video-on-demand platform of IFC Films.

The best thing to do is just sit back and enjoy the very entertaining mix of comedy, eroticism and thrills in Cohen’s tale of a group of wildly diverse people who get together at an operatic singing class in Paris.

It turns out that nearly everyone in the class is there because of Constance (Jeanne Balibar), the widow of a murdered German industrialist who left behind a key that is vital to the transport of bomb-grade uranium to a terrorist cell.

Cohen appears to be sending up many of the conventions of international espionage thrillers (in the vein of the Jason Bourne pictures) where we often don’t care that the plot is a mess because the movies deliver so many thrills.

In the case of “The Joy of Singing,” the characters keep getting hung up on their very dysfunctional romantic and sexual relationships to the point that they seem to lose track of the spy work they are supposed to be doing.

Cohen delivers sex scenes that go way beyond anything that would be allowed in a Hollywood film — if the Motion Picture Association of America had rated the movie it would be an automatic NC-17 — but most of the time the director uses sex as one of the film’s biggest sources of humor.

Much of “The Joy of Singing” centers on Muriel (Marina Fois), a 30ish undercover agent (presumably for the French government, although the movie doesn’t devote much time to the mechanics of the intelligence group).

Muriel has drifted into a sexual relationship with her younger partner, Philipe (Lorant Deutsch) — he still calls her “Boss,” however — that makes her seriously uptight about aging and her ticking biological clock.

Fois plays Muriel in a delicious deadpan style that makes the woman both believable as a spy and hilariously funny as a neurotic lover. After Philipe breaks off with her, Muriel takes up with another young lover from her singing class — Julien (Julien Baumgartner, above).

After having some kinky — but satisfying — sex with Julien, the spy gets two shocks. The young man turns out to be a prostitute who has given her one “date” as an introductory offer but expects her to pay for his services thereafter. And Julien is also part of the uranium smuggling group (he is used by his cell as a contemporary Mata Hari with both women and men).

The whole cast is wonderful in a story made up of nothing but tricky characters. Everyone has a secret identity or is in the dark about the true identity of their partners. And most of the major characters get hooked on the singing they are expected to do in the class. It’s a terrific movie.

(“The Joy of Singing” will be available on-demand for the next three months from the following cable services — Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner, Cox and Brighthouse.)

It has been a long time since a book about a presidential election campaign has generated as much interest as “Game Change” (Harper) by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin.

The age of 24/7 coverage of politics on cable television and gossip blogs on the Internet seemed to have made books like Theodore H. White’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Making of the President 1960” obsolete.

Back in those days, the public didn’t have much access to the day-to-day campaign trail, so White’s in-depth coverage of the nuts and bolts of the Kennedy-Nixon race was eye-opening.

White’s book was a huge bestseller and the journalist went on to write book-length accounts of the 1964, 1968 and 1972 races. The last two books didn’t do so well because by then we were in the age of “new journalism” and a younger reading public had moved on to the more colorful campaign coverage of Norman Mailer and Hunter Thompson.

Heilemann and Halperin have put the zing back into book-length campaign coverage through old-fashioned digging and through the sheer drama of the last presidential election cycle.

The co-authors have already been widely criticized for taking a more “personal” approach to the candidates — Tim Rutten of The Los Angeles Times called the book “poli-porn” — but in this post-Clinton era you have to consider facets of a candidate’s life that were off-limits in 1960.

Some of the most gripping material in “Game Change” involves John and Elizabeth Edwards and their crazed decision to keep pursuing the 2008 presidential nomination even after they knew John’s extramarital affair would inevitably become public.

On The Daily Beast blog this week, commentator Lee Siegel attacked the two authors for what he considers their attempt to smear the reputations of the Edwards: “They didn’t hurt anyone but themselves. Why do we hate them?”

Whether or not we “hate” the Edwards for their behavior, I think Heilemann and Halperin have added vital historical material to the 2008 race by exposing a couple who were willing to destroy their party’s chances to take the White House — and, indeed, were willing to risk the future of the country — because of their own hubris.

The personal material in “Game Change” isn’t just riveting, it’s important.

Elizabeth knew about the cheating but continued to campaign for her husband — an act that was not just self-destructive but dangerous to the rest of us. Suppose Barack Obama had chosen Edwards as his running mate and the tawdry affair came out after the convention? Where would we be now?

Rutten and Siegel seem to be mired in nostalgia for a past American media and political landscape — a time before the sexcapades of a sitting president resulted in his impeachment.

In the 2008 election, John Edwards’s sex life, Sarah Palin’s intelligence, and the personal peccadillos of Hillary Clinton’s husband were all germane to what happened behind the scenes. They also could have played a role in the future of our nation’s government.

Eric Rohmer emerged in the 1960s as part of the French New Wave of critics-turned-directors that included Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol.

Rohmer, who died Monday at the age of 89, was never as popular with U.S. art house audiences as his peers, but he kept making films long after Truffaut died and Godard fell by wayside.

Part of Rohmer’s “problem” in the 1970s was that he made dialogue-heavy, character-driven movies during a period when critics and fans believed “cinema” was more about what you saw on a screen than what you heard.

Movies like “My Night at Maud’s” and “Claire’s Knee” seemed tame compared with “Breathless” and “Jules and Jim.”

As Dave Kehr wrote in his New York Times obit yesterday, “(Rohmer) emphasized the spoken and written word in his films at a time when tastes — thanks in no small part to his own pioneering writing on Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks — had begun to shift from literary adaptations to genre films grounded in strong visual styles.”

Rohmer’s contemporary romances found more favor in the 1980s when the wit and intelligence of films like “Pauline at the Beach” (above) and “Full Moon in Paris” became  prized by sophisticated American moviegoers who wanted an escape from the Hollywood blockbusters of that era.

The French director’s belief that the social interactions between smart and sexy urbanites could be as entertaining as any “action” sequence in a movie eventually influenced such U.S. directors as Robert Benton, Woody Allen and Robert Redford in films like “Kramer vs. Kramer,” “Ordinary People” and “Manhattan.”

The emotional shifts in Rohmer’s films are subtle and the fact that they are so dialogue-driven make the heavy load of subtitles a chore for some U.S. moviegoers. Kehr quoted the famous knock against the director in the 1975 Arthur Penn film “Night Moves” where the character played by Gene Hackman says, “I saw a Rohmer movie once…It was kind of like watching paint dry.”

But the rewards of Rohmer’s elegant comedy-dramas are considerable and some of his movies are quite erotic as well (even though the director rarely included nude scenes in his films). Few moments in modern film are as highly charged as the scene in which the hero of “Claire’s Knee” finally puts his hand on the body part he is obsessed with throughout the whole movie.

We are long overdue for a post-9/11 “Dr. Strangelove”-style satire about our “war on terror.”

I had hoped that when Jonathan Demme remade and updated “The Manchurian Candidate” a few years back (below right) that he would have turned novelist Richard Condon’s brainwashed Korean War soldier into an al Qaeda operative (rather than the Communist assassin of the 1962 original).

It would have been very risky territory, but Demme could have worked from the notion that al Qaeda must have been on cloud nine as a result of President George W. Bush’s response to 9/11 — instead of going after the criminals behind the attack, he inflamed anti-American sentiment globally with a military action in the wrong country. Creating more potential terrorists!

The heads of the CIA and the FBI kept their jobs in the wake of an attack on American soil that was deadlier than Pearl Harbor.

Why didn’t we have better intelligence on al Qaeda?, some of us asked.

“Oh, we don’t have agents who speak the language or understand the culture the way we understood Russia during the Cold War,” was the answer.

These intelligence guys never explained how an eccentric kid from California (the notorious John Walker Lindh) came to be within firing range of 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden when the young American was apprehended by our allies (with bin Laden getting away, of course).

Nine years later, the perp (who we are told has a bum kidney that requires dialysis treatment) and his minions remain alive and well in a cave somewhere and capable of fostering  the underwear bombing of a U.S. commercial jet on Christmas Day.

Now, the country is embroiled in another long and pointless debate over what to do after the cows have already exited the barn — i.e. who to “blame” in the Obama administration and/or the military/intelligence/aviation communities for an attack that didn’t happen.

Meanwhile, over the weekend I took a two-day trip to Philadelphia (to see a good production of “Oliver!” at the Walnut Street Theater, by the way) that involved riding on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, both ways. And I am here to tell you that the barn door is wide open on our nation’s subsidized rail service and I’m hoping we figure out a way to close it soon.

The jabbering over the Christmas-bombing-that-wasn’t doesn’t appear to have raised anxieties in the minds of the folks at Amtrak.

All along the route from Stamford to Philadelphia, passengers were getting on and off with bags that no one had looked at (not to mention their shoes and what might have been in their underwear!) You wouldn’t even have to be a suicide bomber - you could get on in Bridgeport or Stamford and get off in New Rochelle leaving behind a bomb with a timing device. 

My only conclusion from casual, think-like-a-terrorist observations was that al Qaeda has never had post-9/11 plans for Amtrak (or Metro North) or just hasn’t gotten around to them yet.

Where are Stanley Kubrick and Richard Condon now that we really need them?

Have you seen the new Steven Klein ad shots featuring Eva Mendes and Jamie Dornan that were released today?

Calvin Klein seems to be pushing the advertising envelope once again. You  barely notice the jeans that the designer is (ostensibly) trying to sell us.

The image above is about to be unveiled as a giant billboard in two Manhattan locations, at the corner of Houston and Lafayette streets and at the High Line.