Joe's View

The 1964 Stanley Kubrick film “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” is in my all-time top-ten movie list — or maybe even my top-five, depending on the mood I’m in.

The film remains the funniest and most sophisticated satire ever produced by a Hollywood studio. And, “Dr. Strangelove” earned big bonus points for addressing/mocking the greatest fear of the populace at the time it was made — i.e. an Earth-destroying nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

It’s very hard to imagine today’s Columbia Pictures — or any other major studio — releasing a comedy about al Qaeda or the collapse of the global financial markets.

Anyhow, over the past five decades, I thought I had seen every production still connected with “Dr. Strangelove” but my pal Drew Taylor — of The Fairfield Weekly and the Media Wave video store in Fairfield — recently emailed me this rare color photo taken during the making of the black-and-white feature.

Director Stanley Kubrick is in the wheel chair occupied in the film by the diabolical Dr. Strangelove and Peter Sellers is standing in his guise as the crazed and heavily accented military strategist said to be based in part on Henry Kissinger (years before he joined forces with President Richard Nixon).

In this particular case, it is sadly true that they don’t make them like they used to.

In an age in which pollsters and media pundits seem to demand snap judgements on even the thorniest issues — are you for or against the mosque at Ground Zero? — the new Laura Lippman novel, “I’d Know You Anywhere” (William Morrrow), revels in complexity and doubt.

Lippman first made a name for herself with a wonderful series of mystery novels featuring Baltimore journalist Tess Monaghan. The books quickly became popular with readers and widely admired by critics in a very crowded field.

Lippman wrote her first seven books while she still held down her day job as a reporter, soaking up the color and controversies in her beloved Baltimore.

Without showing any signs of tiring of Tess and more traditional genre fiction, Lippman left daily journalism behind and began making forays into what the publishing industry calls “stand-alones,” crafting non-Tess stories that were even richer — and, yes, more troubling — than the mystery novels.

“I’d Know You Anywhere” is as engrossing as any page-turning thriller, but in the course of telling her story, the novelist allows a reader the freedom to hash out one of the most troubling contemporary issues — whether or not America should continue to endorse capital punishment.

The book starts by introducing us to a happily married woman, with two children, living in a Washington, D.C. suburb (of course, this being a Laura Lippman novel, the protagonist has deep ties to Baltimore).

Eliza Benedict would appear to have everything going for her, but by the end of chapter one we learn that Eliza went through a living nightmare in her teen years — she was abducted by a serial rapist/killer with whom she was forced to travel for several months. She escaped death for reasons that were not clear to the girl or the authorities.

In the present-day scenes, the perp, Walter Bowman, has long since been captured and convicted and is awaiting the carrying out of his death sentence.

But the man writes to Eliza, hoping to communicate with her again before he is executed.

The novel begins shifting perspective — giving us Walter’s “side” of the story and taking us into the life of an eccentric woman who is desperately trying to re-open communication between the man on death row and Eliza.

Lippman also begins to take us back to the months in 1985 when Eliza was Walter’s captive and he was nearing the end of his crime spree.

“I’d Know You Anywhere” becomes a scary psychological drama as we travel in and out of the minds of the victim and the perpetrator and some of the people around them.

There is a very strong thread of suspense running through the novel — we don’t really find out what Walter and his ally are looking for from Eliza until the final pages. But, Lippman gives us something much bigger than a whodunit or even a “whydunit” like Ruth Rendell’s icy “A Judgement in Stone,” in which the British novelist tells us who the victims and the murderer are in the first sentence.

“I’d Know You Anywhere” is a brilliant, multi-faceted portrait of a culture that can’t make up its mind about the present or the past — and, perhaps, with very good reason.

The advance rave reviews and, especially, the Time magazine cover story on Jonathan Franzen have prompted an interesting backlash from other novelists.

Instead of being happy that a novel has been deemed worthy of the sort of press treatment accorded to movies or TV shows in 2010, Twitter and Facebook have been filled with barely supressed writer jealousy over the way that the mainstream media have been gushing over a novel that isn’t even in bookstores yet (“Freedom” goes on sale Tuesday).

Bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult (below) seems to be the one who is most upset about the situation. She is especially annoyed by the fact that The New York Times has already published two rave reviews of “Freedom.”

“It is my personal opinion that yes, the Times favors white male authors,” Picoult told the The NYTPicker blog.

“That isn’t to say someone else might get a good review — only that if you are white and male and living in Brooklyn you have better odds, or so it seems.”

Novelist and agent Jason Pinter wrote a wonderful piece for the Huffington Post earlier this week in which Picoult and another hugely popular novelist, Jennifer Weiner, vented their frustration over the way that commercial novelists — and commercial women novelists, in particular — are treated by the media.

Weiner is a terrific writer — and produces one of the best feeds on Twitter — and she wisely steers around attacking “white male authors” in favor of talking about the “double standard” faced by novelists such as herself.

“I think it’s a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it’s literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it’s romance, or a beach book — in short, it’s something unworthy of a serious critic’s attention.”

Compounding the irony of this situation — when it comes to The New York Times, specifically — is the fact that the paper’s top reviewer (Michiko Kakutani) and major back-up reviewer (Janet Maslin) are both women.

Weiner: “The only mention my books have ever gotten from The Times have been occasional single sentence and, if I’m lucky, dependent clause in a Janet Maslin flyover piece: ‘Look! Here’s a bunch of books that have nothing in common but spring release dates and lady authors!’ I don’t write literary fiction — I write books that are entertaining, but are also, I hope well-constructed and thoughtful and funny and have things to say about…life in America today. Do I think I should be getting all of the attention that Jonathan ‘Genius’ Franzen gets? Nope. Would I like to be taken at least as seriously as a Jonathan Tropper or a Nick Hornby? Absolutely.”

Perhaps the rising tension within the publishing industry — is the book dying? will devices like the Kindle and the nook really take off? what happens to the traditional business model when bookstores disappear? — is starting to get to even the most commercially successful novelists.

The writers are fighting among themselves rather than banding together to face the looming challenges.

Last week, one publishing industry executive speculated that a total switch to books-on-devices such as the Kindle would mean the end of the highly remunerative sales figures represented by the average reader who buys five or six paperbacks a year. Would those people, the exec asked, purchase a device that they would only use a few times a year?

Tomorrow, the ace programmer Bruce Goldstein at Manhattan’s Film Forum is neatly shifting from a two-week tribute to the 3D movies of the 1950s to a 10-day series devoted to the B-movies made during the late 1950s and early 1960s by producer-director William Castle.

If you are not a baby boomer, the name will probably mean nothing to you unless you happen to notice Castle’s producer credit on Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968).

50 years ago, however, Castle’s name meant fun and (mild) scares to the kids who loved horror movies.

A master of selling sizzle rather than steak, Castle thought up a new gimmick for each of his pictures, from $1,000 life insurance policies on anyone who died of fright during “Macabre” (1958) to a cheapo screen innovation for “The Tingler” (1959) that Castle called “Percepto” (it turned out to be a vibrating device placed under select theater seats that would go off during especially intense scenes).

Movie-mad kids were almost always suckered into seeing the latest Castle epic by the producer’s prodigious hype, but I can still remember talking with my very young friends about how ripped-off we felt by the cheap sub-3D gimmick Castle used for a few scenes in “13 Ghosts” (1960). Castle made me feel jaded at the age of 9!

I find the Castle movies unwatchable now, but understand why some of my friends in their 20s and 30s get a kick out of the primitive foolishness of the storytelling and acting. Also, they are obviously amazed by the old-time movie marketing gimmicks that disappeared with the arrival of mass releasing of movies in multiplexes.

As I got older and watched some of the pictures on television, Castle’s hubris became less amusing in the introductions he filmed for each of his movies — he clearly believed he was in the same ballpark as Alfred Hitchcock. And yet, his 1961 “Homicidal” is a shameless quickie rip-off of the previous year’s Hitchcock smash “Psycho.”

Castle made a pile of money from his trashy flicks but faced a rather embarrasing episode in the late 1960s after he snagged the movie rights to the Ira Levin bestseller, “Rosemary’s Baby.” Paramount wouldn’t dream of letting him direct the major film they envisioned. After studio chief Robert Evans (below right on the set with Mia Farrow and Castle) brought Polanski on board, the Polish director would have nothing to do with Castle, who became the producer in name only.

Castle did push for a cameo in the hit horror movie — he pops up outside the phone booth where Farrow has one of her strongest scenes.  

Two years before he died in 1977, Castle had an even more notable cameo as the sleazy Hollywood operator who is sitting next to Julie Christie at the Election Night party in “Shampoo.” He’s the one whose grubby come-on prompts Christie to utter one of the most notorious movie lines of the 1970s (i.e. what she would like to do to her ex-boyfriend played by Warren Beatty).

Somewhere, Castle must be smiling in reaction to the idea of Manhattan’s most prestigious non-profit art house honoring him with a retrospective.

HBO announced recently that the cable network’s rancid Hollywood insider sitcom “Entourage” will be coming back for a seventh season — the show’s final season, thank God! — but there has been no word on whether or not we will ever see a third season of the hilarious “Flight of the Conchords.”

HBO Home Video teased and/or depressed fans on Tuesday with the release of a new boxed set they are calling “The Complete Collection” (implying that the show is over).

The new release packages the first two seasons — 12 half-hour episodes from season one and the 10 episodes that made up season two — along with the 2005 HBO special that launched the Conchords (aka Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie) in this country after a sizeable cult following had formed in the musicians’ home country of New Zealand.

The two artists managed to turn their hilariously whimsical folks songs into a narrative series about their adventures trying to make it in downtown Manhattan (the mix of reality and fiction is something like the Larry David series “Curb Your Enthusiasm”).

Clement (above, left) and McKenzie had been performing a comic musical act they call “Flight of the Conchords” for more than a decade.

It was the buzz from U.S. comedy festivals and TV appearances by Jemaine and Bret that led HBO to produce a first batch of episodes three years ago.

Although much of the musical material was written in New Zealand a decade ago, it’s a tribute to Clement and McKenzie’s skills as comedy writers that the tunes fit so seamlessly into stories that take place in New York City and seem so true to the lives of struggling young artists there.

Each episode contains a musical number in which the “Conchords” escape into a fantasy world of endless romantic opportunities and commercial success.

The HBO series benefits almost as much as “Sex and the City” did from on-location filming that captures the spirit of the city. In the case of “Conchords, however, no one is buying Manolo Blahniks or spending weekends in the Hamptons — the show takes us into a much lower-rung New York City of shared dumpy apartments, crappy jobs taken to support artistic work, and a life lived so close to the financial edge that using a debit card to make a purchase for $2.79 can trigger an economic disaster.

“Conchords” gently satirizes the Manhattan music scene, with the two singer-songwriters landing gigs in the tiniest and most far-flung clubs and finding themselves the object of a female stalker who is their only real fan (comedienne Kristen Schaal who is brilliant the role of Mel). Their manager is a fellow New Zealander, Murray Hewitt (Rhys Darby), who works in the tiny N.Z. consulate and who appears to know nothing about the music business.

One of the show’s running jokes — in seasons one and two — is the way that these folks from New Zealand come in at the very bottom of the vast New York City immigrant community (most people think they’re from Australia or England).

“Flight of the Conchords” is the sort of quirky comedy that sneaks up on a viewer — with some gags as broad as the side of a barn and others virtually subliminal (only to be be picked up in a second viewing). The mix of slapstick and sophistication — and the oddball musical numbers — sometimes recalls the Monty Python troupe. You definitely have to watch more than one episode to get on the show’s wavelength.

Season two was aired two years ago. There has been no official word on a third season — HBO said last year it would like one, Bret and Jemaine say they doubt they can come up with enough new musical material.

The two seasons are classic TV comedy but it would be a shame if such a terrific show died after only 22 episodes.

I suppose that any play with as many laughs in it as Leslye Headland’s “Bachelorette” could be called a comedy, but the same thing could be said of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross.”

The uninhibited viciousness of Headland’s presentation of the antics of three female “frenemies” on the night before an acquaintance of theirs gets married is breathtaking.

The non-profit Second Stage Uptown production of “Bachelorette” has received some of the strongest stage reviews of 2010 and has had its limited run extended twice. The show is set to close Saturday but it’s hard to believe that it won’t re-open commercially in the fall.

The three young women who dominate the action are surface-obsessed Manhattanites who basically see the about-to-be married Becky as one thing above all else — unattractively heavy — so they don’t understand how she has landed one of the richest young men in New York City.

Their frustration quickly turns to self-destructive anger.

The most wicked of the women we meet — Regan (played by Tracee Chimo. above) — is, inexplicably, Becky’s maid of honor.

Regan invites two of Becky’s ex-friends — Katie (Celia Keenan-Bolger, below right) and Gena (Katherine Waterston, below left) — to romp in the bridal suite of a five-star Manhattan hotel on the night before the wedding. The bride-to-be is supposed to be spending the night elsewhere.

Katie is a beautiful but self-pitying alcoholic — who says she is happiest when taking the final drink that causes her to pass out — and Gena is Katie’s loyal but drug-addled friend who has been cleaning up the young woman’s messes since their college days together.

In the second of the play’s three scenes, two young men — Jeff (Eddie Kaye Thomas, above) and Joe (Fran Kranz) — who have been picked up by Regan and Katie arrive for some sexual action but get a lot more than they bargained for.

In the final scene, Becky (Carmen M. Herlihy), makes a surprise appearance that drives “Bachelorette” to a finale that turns the whole play inside out.

Headland and director Trip Cullman have been blessed with one of the tightest acting ensembles to be seen in New York at the moment, with Tracee Chimo dominating the action as the alluringly self-possessed but scarily angry Regan who is so forceful that she can control almost any situation she finds herself in.

The sheer unbridled nastiness of the girls’ chatter in the first scene is very funny — for a time — but then we see that they are racing out of control and will probably go too far this time to be able to pretend they are “friends.”

The play runs only 90 minutes without an intermission but is packed with so many surprises and so much escalating drama that it would probably fly apart if it ran even a few minutes longer.

Tonight’s Lifetime movie, “Bond of Silence,” is a better than average production for that network because it sidesteps most of its soap opera potential in favor of looking at tricky legal/moral issues.

The film also gets a boost from a good performance by Kim Raver as a woman who lives in a small California resort town that starts turning against her when she tries to find out who killed her husband at a raucous teen New Year’s Eve party.

Raver has been on several TV series over the past few years — including “24” and her current stint on “Grey’s Anatomy” — but she was new to me when a friend told me I should check out the two DVDs of the short-lived 2008-2009 series, “Lipstick Jungle.”

The show was based on a novel with the same title by “Sex and the City” creator Candace Bushnell, but was dismissed by most critics as warmed-over “SATC.”

My Manhattan friend was taken with the way the show dealt with issues facing 40ish women like herself and the fact that the New York City-based series used a lot of Broadway actors such as Cheyenne Jackson, Ann Harada and Christine Ebersole.

Much to my surprise, I got hooked on the borrowed DVDs and especially enjoyed Raver’s storyline as the high-powered editor of a Vanity Fair-style magazine.

The character of Nico Reilly had a much more interesting arc than that of top-billed Brooke Shields (below, with Raver and co-star Lindsay Price)  as a movie company executive who was simply too nice to be believable.

Raver went through serious job crises, the sudden death of her husband, an affair with a much younger man, and then having the baby of her dead husband’s mistress thrust on her.

Raver turned the soap opera shenanigans into real drama with her strong acting — she was entirely believable both as a woman at the top of the New York media circus and as a middle-class Queens native who once worked in her dad’s diner.

The mix of intelligently understated acting and down-to-earth good looks serve Raver well in “Bond of Silence.”

The character of Katy McIntosh is put through the Lifetime wringer — juggling grief, the need to care for two young kids, and neighbors who turn cool to her just when she needs them most — but Raver keeps it all real.

(“Bond of Silence” debuts tonight at 8 p.m. on Lifetime.)

Say what you will about Sylvester Stallone, but he is one of the great Hollywood survivors.

A star since he wrote and appeared in “Rocky” 34 years ago, Stallone’s career has probably had more downs than ups — his filmography is littered with unwatchable (and long forgotten) flops such as “Rhinestone” and “Judge Dredd” — but the man has a way of bouncing back every time he is counted out.

Stallone’s latest star vehicle “The Expendables” — which he directed and wrote — came in at number one in the box office derby last weekend and according to today’s industry projections it will hold down the same spot for this weekend. The movie is cruising toward a $100 million gross in this country (and probably a lot more than that overseas).

The promotion for the movie has been clever, maximizing Stallone’s amusing, weirdly self-deprecating persona. He still acts as if his whole career has been an accident and brushes aside suggestions that he could have parlayed his “Rocky” Oscar nomination for best actor into the sorts of roles that Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino were playing around that time.

Stallone is usually more fun out of character than he is in one of his action movies, so it’s not surprising that the feature length documentary “Inferno: The Making of The Expendables” is sharper than the B-movie it documents.

The doc debuted on the video-on-demand service EPIX last weekend and is a lively and funny view behind the scenes showing us Stallone orchestrating his latest comeback.

If you haven’t seen “The Expendables” yet you will get the gist from the VOD documentary — the action picture is totally predictable and yet canny in the way it teams Stallone with several of today’s reigning B-movie stars (Jason Statham, Jet Li), as well as a co-star from yesteryear (Dolph Lundgren, the Soviet boxer in “Rocky IV,” below) and a double-cameo appearance by two of the star’s peers (Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, above).

While “Inferno” has the carefully tailored look of one of those authorized DVD extra “making of” films, Stallone is such a character offscreen that it is fun to watch him working on the script in his office (where his patient secretary has to collate piles of messy, scribbled-on sheets of paper into something readable by others) and whipping up his actors on the set.

“Inferno” is a nice companion piece to the excellent interview Stallone gives GQ in the current (September) issue.

From my point of view, it’s sad that the star was never able to get out of the “Rocky” and “Rambo” traps — his reviews and Oscar nomination for the first “Rocky” could have set him on a much different course as an actor — but there is no denying his continuing energy and good humor.