Joe's View

I love crime novels, so the current wave of terrific writers and wonderful books in that genre suits me fine — you have to believe we’re in a golden age when such folks as S.J. Rozan, Andrew Gross, Lee Child, Lisa Scottoline, Sandra Brown (and lots of others) are delivering first-class books on a regular basis.

But, one element that is missing from most of today’s thrillers is sex (with the notable exception of Ms. Brown who has a real flair for mixing constantly surprising erotic moments into her novels).

Perhaps to keep their crime stories moving at a fantastic clip — forcing readers to stay up (happily) late into the night — the masters of the genre fear bedroom interludes might bog their stories down.

Sex and romance leave even the toughest guys (and gals) vulnerable and that’s a tricky position for a thriller hero (or heroine) to be in.

The new Lori Armstong novel, “No Mercy” (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster) – which is being published tomorrow – breaks some new ground with an offbeat female protagonist, Mercy Gunderson: an Army sniper who is running her family’s South Dakota ranch while on military leave. Mercy is never too threatened or too focused on action to lose her frank appreciation for any good-looking guy who might cross her path.

We’re only a few chapters into the novel when Mercy tells us “God save me. I’ve had it bad for cowboys my whole life. Since the first time I’d seen Clint Eastwood. Since my first rodeo, watching bareback and saddle bronc riders getting tossed on their asses in the dirt and then climbing right back up into the saddle and doing it again…Tight jeans. The faded circle on the back pocket of those jeans from the ever-present can of chew…Oh, and don’t get me started on their big…belt buckles and pickup trucks.”

We learn that Mercy is definitely not an all-talk-and-no-action woman when in more than one scene she enjoys — or anticipates — carnal bliss with cowboys who may or may not be a danger to her.

I don’t want to suggest that the sex in “No Mercy” overshadows Armstrong’s tough murder mystery — involving an Indian boy who is found dead on Mercy’s land in the first chapter — and the marvelous sense of place conveyed in the writer’s beautiful prose. But the sexual undertones are strong and crucial to an understanding of Mercy Gunderson.

Woody Allen has made so many movies over the past 40 years that some of them don’t receive as much attention as they deserve.

Everyone knows about the masterpieces — “Annie Hall,” “Manhattan,” “Hannah and Her Sisters” and a few others — but I’m often surprised by the blank looks I get when I mention the 1993 comedy, “Manhattan Murder Mystery.”

The truth is I wasn’t crazy about the picture when it first came out — it seemed like a lateral move for the writer-director after his amazing 1992 drama, “Husbands & Wives.”

Allen reunited with his 1970s co-star Diane Keaton (above) for this contemporary comedy mystery about a Manhattan couple who come to believe that a neighbor who apparently died of a heart attack was actually murdered by her husband.

Allen and Keaton play the comfortable Upper East Side couple who have their routine shaken up by this unexpected sleuthing adventure.

Alan Alda has a strong supporting role as a divorced writer friend — with a long-standing crush on the Keaton character — who is eager to get involved in nailing a killer. Anjelica Huston (below) is wonderful, too, as a novelist — Allen plays her editor at HarperCollins — who knows exactly how to trap the killer.

“Manhattan Murder Mystery” seemed slight 16 years ago, but subsequent viewings on video have bumped it up on my list of favorite Allen pictures.

It’s consistently funny and the mystery plot is clever.

One of the problems faced by the film in 1993 was the fact that Allen was still embroiled in his scandalous break-up with Mia Farrow (indeed, Keaton stepped into a role written for Farrow).

It was hard to be objective about an Allen comedy in the wake of such a nasty scandal.

One of the things that amazes me about the movie now is that Allen and his cast and crew could produce such a charming piece of froth in the middle of the tabloid hell of the Farrow split.

The comic teamwork between Keaton and Allen is so sharp — and so reminiscent of the work they did together in the 1970s — that it seems impossible the script was only weeks away from being filmed with Farrow as the would-be detective wife.

I watched the movie again a few weeks back and found it to be as delightful as ever. A trifle, to be sure, but a very well-crafted one.

Last week, Sam Mendes (of “Revolutionary Road” and “American Beauty”) was reported to be in final negotiations to direct the next James Bond film with Daniel Craig.

In the meantime, however, the Oscar and Tony-winning stage and film director (below) is leading one of the most exciting theater events of the current New York season, The Bridge Project, in which a cast made up of American and British actors will do two Shakespeare plays in rep on both sides of the Atlantic.

Performances of “As You Like It” and “The Tempest” begin this week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

The company includes the terrific Connecticut-born actor Thomas Sadoski who was Tony nominated last season for his scalding performance in the Broadway production of the Neil LaBute play, “reasons to be pretty.”

Another excellent American actor in the company is Christian Camargo, who played the title role in the hot-ticket off-Broadway production of “Hamlet” last winter (The New York Times critic wrote that Camargo was one of the finest Hamlets he had ever seen).

The producers of the play have launched a multi-media Website with the complete video, audio and text rundown on this much-anticipated project: http://www.boneaubryanbrown.com/TheBridgeProject.htm

Mark Griffin has written a smart new biography of the film director Vincente Minnelli, “A Hundred or More Hidden Things,” that Da Capo Press is publishing March 1.

The Oscar-winning director of “Gigi” and “An American in Paris” has already been the subject of a few not-so-great biographies and monographs — and the director wrote a notoriously sketchy 1974 autobiography, “I Remember It Well” — but Griffin puts the life and the films together in a fresh manner.

Minnelli had a long and successful run in Hollywood, working on musicals, dramas and comedies, but as Griffin points out, he has never been accorded the respect and fan worship of such peers as William Wyler, George Cukor and George Stevens.

The Minnelli non-musical filmography runs a very wide gamut from “Tea & Sympathy” to “Some Came Running” to “The Sandpiper.”

Minnelli worked at MGM most of his career and was happy to take studio assignments as well as instigate projects. Along the way, the (apparently) gay man marrried Judy Garland (below) and fathered Liza Minnelli.

Griffin makes a pretty good case that the deeply closeted artist was able to express many “hidden things” in his films (even in the Vincent Van Gogh bio-pic “Lust for Life”).

Unlike many biographers who take a scholarly and/or detached approach to their subjects, Griffin shares with us the personal link between Minnelli and his own life in a fascinating introduction in which the biographer writes of his intense response to the 1970 Barbra Streisand-Minnelli collaboration, “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever” (above).

“I found it healing and empowering,” the author recalls of his first encounter with the musical about reincarnation when he was only 16-years-old (in the summer of 1984).

“My friends thought I had lost it. They began to look at me funny. In an era dominated by ‘Return of the Jedi’ and ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’ was I actually claiming to have achieved some sort of cosmic consciousness through repeated viewings of…a Barbra Streisand movie? It was suggested that I should try getting out more often or maybe join a rugby team…before it was too late,” he writes.

Griffin found a respected ally in critic Andrew Sarris who referred to “On a Clear Day” as “an underrated masterpiece” in The Village Voice.

Over the years, Griffin grew attached to other movies Minnelli made and he became more and more fascinated by the director’s “elusive” off-screen life.

After Griffin became a journalist and interviewed the screenwriter Gavin Lambert — who encouraged the would-be biographer — he was off and running on the three year “odyssey” of tracking down as many of the late filmmaker’s co-workers and friends as he could.

“In some ways this project is a thank-you note that’s been twenty-five years in the making,” the biographer concludes.

The book is a fine combination of scholarship and film criticism. We are all lucky Griffin happened upon “On a Clear Day” all those years ago.

In one of my favorite political satires — William Richert’s vicious 1979 send-up of the Kennedy family, “Winter Kills” — the patriarch of the clan isn’t surprised by his president son’s sexual promiscuity.

Indeed, Tom Kegan — played with scary comic brio by John Huston — is proud of his “boy.”

“You know how many times your brother got laid when he was in office?,” Tom asks his other son, Nick (played by Jeff Bridges).

“1,072…and with a schedule like his!”

I couldn’t help but think of that unusually frank (and funny) movie scene in the wake all of the hoopla earlier this week over the sex lives of movie star Warren Beatty and golfer Tiger Woods.

A forthcoming biography of Beatty set off shock waves online and in the print media after The New York Post printed an excerpt that included the assertion that the actor has had sex with 12,775 women (the real surprise here is that Beatty didn’t aim for an even number and hasn’t broken the Wilt Chamberlain record of 20,000 women).

Seemingly within moments of the Beatty revelations, Vanity Fair released the text of a very thin February Tiger Woods cover story in which the fine journalist Buzz Bissinger was clearly rushed into analysis rather than reporting — with the writer expressing his own personal distress over the revelation that the golfer has cheated on his wife with more than one woman.

Bissinger didn’t get an interview with Woods, so he instead resorts to a combination of sob sister moralizing and amateur psychology.

The writer states “with the number of alleged paramours reaching 14 as of mid-December (a figure bound to multiply) it is safe to say that behind the non-accessible accessibility and seemingly perfect marriage to a beautiful woman was a sex addict who could not get enough.”

If carnal relations with 14 women makes Tiger a sex addict what in the world do we call Warren Beatty?

It never ceases to amaze me how frequently we can get bogged down in analysis of the sex lives of celebrities, with TV commentators and journalists and members of the public judging these global show biz and sports idols as if they were “normal” people.

Have Tiger and Warren done anything that wasn’t already done by Joe Namath and Burt Reynolds and all of the other famous and rich show biz and sports titans of the past century? And how do we know what we might do if we were in their extraordinarily privileged position?

Rising star Aaron Tveit checked out of the Broadway musical “Next to Normal” on Sunday.

The “Gossip Girl” regular – who is featured in the big “Youthquake” spread in the January issue of Vogue – is expected to star in the new Broadway musical version of the Steven Spielberg-Leonardo DiCaprio film,  ”Catch Me If You Can,” that tried out in Seattle last summer to positive response.

Meanwhile, Kyle Dean Massey (above), went into the show last night in the role of Tony winner Alice Ripley’s troubled teen son. The performer is documenting his work in a new video blog just launched on Broadway.com. It’s a very entertaining and illuminating glimpse into the hard work of doing eight shows a week on Broadway. Massey says he will be filing regular updates.

You can check out Massey’s video blog at: http://www.broadway.com/buzz/kyle-dean-massey-premieres-next-normal-video-blog/

Meryl Streep has been riding a huge wave of mainstream popularity over the past few years, with an unbroken line of crowd-pleasing, box-office hits that has included “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Mamma Mia!,” “Julie & Julia” and now the Nancy Meyers romantic comedy “It’s Complicated.”

The totally justified pleasure Streep has been taking in this unexpected development is wonderful.

In the January Vanity Fair she tells Leslie Bennetts: “It’s incredible — I’m 60 and playing the romantic lead in romantic comedies! Bette Davis is rolling over in her grave. She was 42 when she did ‘All About Eve’ and she was 54 when she did ‘What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?’”

Although I think Bennetts is wrong to write that Streep has only emerged as a comedienne in recent years — she is very funny in the underrated 1986 Mike Nichols-Nora Ephron picture “Heartburn” — you can’t deny the fact that the actress did not become an audience favorite until after the turn of the century.

Streep has been the most admired film actress of her generation since 1979 — when the movie newcomer blew audiences away in three amazingly different performances in “Manhattan,” “The Seduction of Joe Tynan” and then her first Oscar role “Kramer vs. Kramer.” But a lot of mainstream moviegoers didn’t warm up to Streep in the 1980s and 1990s when she tended to star in dramas such as “Silkwood” and “A Cry in the Dark.”

Some critics got hung up on the actress’ ability to play a wide variety of nationalities accurately — she was labeled, somewhat derisively, as “the queen of accents.”

The great New Yorker critic Pauline Kael (who died in 2001) had a weird blind spot when it came to Streep, dismissing her most of the time as a highly skilled technician rather than a genuine movie star (in her review of “Postcards from the Edge” Kael called the actress “an android”).

Kael didn’t even like the star’s phenomenal work in “Sophie’s Choice,” the 1982 drama that earned Streep her second Oscar.

The anti-Streep contingent was acknowledged in Leonard Maltin’s 1994 “Movie Encyclopedia” entry on the actress: “this brilliant performer (who) has mastered to an almost uncanny degree the skill of transforming herself into whatever character she portrays. She has accomplished this at the expense of establishing a clearly defined star persona…”

Perhaps the fact that Streep avoided a “clearly defined star persona” (and trading on her looks) is one of the reasons she has remained at the top of her profession many years longer than contemporaries such as Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange, Susan Sarandon and Goldie Hawn.

Streep never wore out her welcome by repeating an earlier success and she is sticking to the same program in her current run of hits. Moviegoers might like her more now than they did 20 years ago, but you would be hard-pressed to find much common ground between Streep’s Julia Child in “Julie & Julia” and her perplexed divorced mother in “It’s Complicated” (other than a shared love of cooking).

There is no reason to doubt that the actress will still be surprising and delighting us 10 years from now — she is one of the very few female performers over the age of 50 that Hollywood has not been able to dismiss.

(Tomorrow: Warren & Tiger: How much is too much?)

Friends have been telling me I had to watch Joss Whedon’s Internet musical “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” starring Neil Patrick Harris (above) and Nathan Fillion (below), since it debuted online 18 months ago.

I’ve never been in the Whedon loop because I don’t get to watch much television (until it turns up on DVD) — he has a tremendous cult following from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Firefly,” among other shows — but I know lots of people who have followed his career avidly.

I didn’t get around to seeing Whedon’s 42-minute mini-movie, created for the Internet during the writer’s strike of 2008, until a friend lent me his DVD a few weeks back — I was knocked out by the talent on view in this witty, Broadway-style musical about two would-be superheroes fighting for a sweet young woman’s affection.

Whedon and his brother Jed created a song score that can stand comparison with any new show currently running in New York. The combination of witty lyrics and instantly catchy music reminded me of the off-Broadway cult hit, “(title of show).”

And, of course, the Whedons were blessed to have Harris and Fillion agree to work on “Dr. Horrible” for free (the actors and the production personnel didn’t start to get paid for the three-part, free Internet series until the commercial DVD was released in 2009).

In one of the making-of documentaries on the DVD, Harris talks about wanting to be involved with a project that could demonstrate what artists can do on their own, free of commercial production companies and network television “standards & practices” censors.

“Dr. Horrible” went directly to the public in the summer of 2008 and was an immediate smash hit (in the first second that the first episode was online, “Dr. Horrrible” received 1,000 hits!). Within a few weeks of the musical’s debut, fans showed up at the annual ComicCon convention in San Diego dressed up as their favorite characters — ala “Rocky Horror” — and there have been very well attended public sing-along screenings all over the country.

Whedon gave major added value to the commercial DVD by having his cast assemble for “Commentary: The Musical,” a commentary track that is entirely sung and features more terrific music (including the cast dissing their star with “I’m Better Than Neil”).

Harris’s commentary contribution includes a hilarious spoof of the final number in “Gypsy” (“Rose’s Turn”) in which the performer gets his say about the movie and his work in it (including a mock-egotistical line that is actually true: “I got so much talent it’s almost scary.”)

The DVD also includes three above-average documentaries about the creation of this unique musical. If you’ve only seen “Dr. Horrible” online, you should definitely check out the DVD for the extras.