Joe's View

With Joe Meyers, entertainment writer

Archive for September, 2010

Tony Curtis, R.I.P.

Thursday, September 30, 2010 by:Joe Meyers

I was sorry to hear the news of Tony Curtis’ death earlier today.

Always woefully underrated, the star was only Oscar-nominated once and not for his best work, in the 1957 drama “Sweet Smell of Success.” In typical Hollywood fashion, Curtis was nominated the following year for the earnest Stanley Kramer picture “The Defiant Ones.”

A few years ago, Curtis came through New Haven on the national tour of the musical version of one of his biggest hits, “Some Like It Hot.” He had long since aged himself out of the role he played in the movie — opposite Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe — but had fun in the small part Joe E. Brown took on in the film (the old codger who falls in love with Lemmon in drag and wants to marry “her”).

I had a ball interviewing Curtis who was mellow and funny (and clearly grateful for passing through drug and alcohol addiction in the 1970s and making a good new life for himself in Las Vegas with his sixth wife Jill Vandenberg Curtis).

Curtis was not one of those older people who like to wallow in nostalgia, but I could tell he was happy to talk about playing the press agent Sidney Falco in “Sweet Smell of Success.”

Up until that movie came out, the actor was thought of as a lightweight pretty boy, so he was always grateful to producer-co-star Burt Lancaster for getting the part that opened the door to other serious roles.

“Sweet Smell of Success” was a total box office failure at the time of its release — a shocking development considering the fact that Lancaster and Curtis were hugely popular at the time — but it quickly became one of the first major cult films.

“Sweet Smell of Success” is among the most cynical movies ever made by a Hollywood studio and it came out in 1957, so of course it was among the biggest financial flops of its decade.

The movie is about a horrible New York gossip columnist named J.J. Hunsecker (Lancaster) who has the power to make or break show biz people, and a bottom-feeding press agent named Sidney Falco (Curtis) who lives or dies by placing items about his clients in the Broadway columns.

Hunsecker and Falco are so venal and so nasty that they turn into black comedy anti-heroes with great appeal to people who see the existential glass as being half empty.

No sooner had “Sweet Smell of Success” flopped than a cult of coffee house smarties, nihilistic college students and show biz insiders began to form.

Apparently, by 1959, young hipsters had the juicy Clifford Odets dialogue memorized and made a sport of using it whenever possible (i.e. “The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river,” “I’d hate to take a bite out of you; you’re a cookie full of arsenic”). Barry Levinson made note of this phenomenon in his 1959 period piece “Diner” with a minor character who only spoke dialogue from the Odets script.

More than 50 years after bombing, “Sweet Smell” is now considered the quintessential New York nightlife movie.

One of the major New York press offices devoted to movies — Falco Ink — is named in honor of the character Curtis played so well.

Porno blackmail in harrowing based-on-fact ‘Daniel & Ana’

Thursday, September 30, 2010 by:Joe Meyers

Yesterday’s news included a terrible story out of Rutgers University in which a student committed suicide after other students hid a web cam in his room that caught him having sex.

The invasion of privacy in this sort of case is tantamount to rape.

In a weird coincidence, just before I heard about the New Jersey case I watched a deeply disturbing 2009 Mexican film, “Daniel & Ana,” based on a number of crimes in Central and South America in which young people were kidnapped and forced to have sex on camera.

The sexual crimes are just a subset of the wave of kidnappings that have plagued Mexico in recent years.

In the case of the sex crimes, the results of the video recordings went out on the international underground porn market, leaving the victims wondering when their sexual assaults would become available as “entertainment” to consumers all over the world.

The pornographers use kidnapping to fill orders for all sorts of taboo sex including incest.

“Daniel & Ana” follows a pair of well-adjusted, affluent siblings — the 16-year-old Daniel (Dario Yazbek Bernal, the younger brother of Mexican star Gael Garcia Bernal) and his 20something sister Ana (Marimar Vega) — who are kidnapped, threatened with death, and then forced to have sex on camera.

Ana is in the midst of preparations for her wedding and Daniel is finishing high school and looking forward to the ceremony. Ana and Daniel are best friends as well as siblings.

Writer-director Michel Franco shows admirable restraint in his handling of such volatile material.

Indeed, the low-key, observational style of “Daniel & Ana” might put off some viewers who think the story deserves a more emotional — even melodramtic — approach in keeping with the horror of the crime perpetrated against Daniel and Ana.

Franco’s decision to keep a lid on the material makes the final third of the film even more distressing and heartbreaking as Daniel and Ana suffer in silence — too ashamed to tell anyone but an anonymous therapist what happened to them — fearing that the video could appear on the internet at any time.

The bottling up of the crime sends both victims into depression — with Daniel feeling particularly confused and distraught (we see him cutting school day after day, and sitting in a multiplex staring at films without registering what’s on the screen).

A few days ago, I wrote about the much-hyped horror film “The Human Centipede” which is like a Disney movie compared with the real life horror on view in “Daniel & Ana.”

Michel Franco’s film was an official selection at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, but it received very limited theatrical distribution in this country. “Daniel & Ana” will be available on DVD from Strand Releasing on Oct. 12.

Arthur Penn, R.I.P.

Wednesday, September 29, 2010 by:Joe Meyers

Stage and screen director Arthur Penn died yesterday at the age of 88 — his birthday was Tuesday — leaving behind the landmark 1967 film “Bonnie & Clyde.”

Penn was already a veteran of Broadway and Hollywood when producer Warren Beatty hired him to direct an offbeat, French New Wave-influenced gangster drama that would go on to become one of the most influential American films of the 1960s.

Beatty and Penn had teamed up two years earlier for another eccentric film, “Mickey One,” that also showed Penn’s attempt to bring the fresh new visual and performance style of French directors Jean-Luc Godard andd Francois Truffaut to American filmmaking.

“Mickey One” was a box-office disaster — and only admired by a handful of critics — but it set the stage for “Bonnie & Clyde.”

Penn came to film with a long and distinguised career in theater that included Tony Award nominations for three back-to-back hits — “Two for the Seesaw,” “The Miracle Worker” and “All the Way Home.”

In 1960, Penn launched the careers of two of the most important figures in American comedy (and film) when he staged the Broadway hit, “An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May.”

Penn never managed to “top” “Bonnie & Clyde” but he made a wonderful neo-noir thriller “Night Moves” in 1975 (above).

Five years ago, Penn came to the non-profit Avon Theatre Film Center in Stamford to reminisce about the Gene Hackman film on the occasion of its 30th anniversary.

The Philadelphia native’s older brother, Irving, was the legendary photographer. He died last October at the age of 91.

‘Human Centipede’: the horror movie that made Eli Roth sick

Tuesday, September 28, 2010 by:Joe Meyers

Envelope-pushing has been part of the lure of horror movies for many decades.

In the 1950s and ’60s there were would-be shockers that were hyped as being so scary that audience members were insured in the event that they should die of fright (no one did).

By the end of the 1960s, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” had upped the violence ante to the point where graphically depicted cannibalism was one of the (underground) selling points of George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” in 1968.

The Romero flick made most of its money on the midnight movie circuit in the early 1970s when it was more than a tad scary to be in an urban movie house at that hour no matter what was on the screen.

Underlying the tension at those screenings of “Night of the Living Dead” was the fact that we knew that when the movie was over, we’d have to make our way home at 2 in the morning from a dumpy theater in a marginal neighborhood.

“Texas Chainsaw Massacre” quickly followed “Living Dead” on the midnight/exploitation circuit — with the immortal adline “Who Will Survive and What Will Be Left of Them?” — and then in 1974 “The Exorcist” became the first major studio film whose gross-out factor was part of the sensational word of mouth.

It was said during early engagements of the William Friedkin film that people were fainting and becoming ill, prompting one of the funniest quotes ever published in the trade paper Variety — a female moviegoer who told a reporter that she was waiting on a long line, “To see what everybody is throwing up about.”

“The Exorcist” now looks quaint compared with the slasher flicks of the 1980s and the wave of “Saw” and “Hostel” torture horror flicks over the past decade.

It takes a lot to generate “buzz” for a horror movie these days, but that’s exactly what “The Human Centipede” has done this year based on midnight showings at arthouses around the country and release as a video-on-demand title via IFC.

When Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth mentioned in passing on her Twitter feed in early summer that she had downloaded the movie, some speculated that watching “The Human Centipede” was what caused the star to miss a few performances of “Promises, Promises” over the next few days.

On Tuesday, the movie debuts on DVD complete with a cover quote from “Hostel” director (and “Inglorious Basterds” actor) Eli Roth saying that the movie had made him sick (and that he considered that a high compliment!).

Torture horror flicks are not my thing (I only made it through the first “Saw”) but when an advance DVD of “The Human Centipede” arrived in the mail, my prurient curiosity got the best of me, and I sat through the 90-minute flick ready to shut it off if things got too out of hand (one of the blessings of home video).

The movie definitely has a few disgusting moments — involving its villain, an insane German surgeon (Dieter Laser, above and below) who is determined to create “Siamese triplets” — but the nightmarish elements in the bizarre premise are quickly overtaken by writer-director Tom Six’s poor plotting and the absence of any suspense.

Once again, a modern horror movie is set in motion by dumb Americans on vacation in Europe. Two college age girls visiting Germany want to attend a hot party and inexplicably get lost in the woods with a flat tire as a violent storm begins (no GPS? no Mapquest?).

Soon they are knocking on the door of the only house they come across during an hour’s wander in the woods and it is their bad luck that the owner is the mad Dr. Heiter who has been looking for the second and third parts of his “human centipede” lab experiment.

The girls accept drinks from their very creepy-looking host and are soon unconscious and trapped in Dr. Heiter’s basement laboratory/operating theater.

All suspense ends at this point and Six substitutes disgusting suggestion for suspense or horror. Fortunately, the movie never feels “real” so the “centipede” situation the two women find themselves in is not very convincing (the critic in The Boston Globe wrote that “the final product looks like a scatological yoga parody”).

Almost the last third of the movie is devoted to the visit of two German cops who have noticed the abandoned cars on a nearby road and who have received reports of “screaming Americans” in the neighborhood (I’m not making this up). The cops turn out to be as dumb as the tourists, however, accepting drinks from a man who might as well have the words “Homicidal maniac” tattooed on his forehead.

IFC Films deserves some sort of marketing prize for stirring up so much chatter — and theatrical business — for a “shocker” that doesn’t have a single real scare in it. Disgust is not a substitute for suspense in a horror film.

Rent it now: The still fresh ‘An Unmarried Woman’

Monday, September 27, 2010 by:Joe Meyers

After I saw “Eat Pray Love” in August, I kept thinking that the movie touched on a lot of the same material that writer-director Paul Mazursky had dealt with in “An Unmarried Woman” 32 years ago.

Except that the Mazursky film dug much deeper into the story of a woman trying to find meaning in her life.

And, Mazursky did this without having his heroine run off with a new Mr. Right in the final reel (Julia Roberts almost literally sails off into the sunset with Javier Bardem at the end of “Eat Pray Love”).

“An Unmarried Woman” has been a favorite of mine since it came out in 1978 and when I watched it again last week I was happy to see that the picture has lost none of its luster.

Few movies have ever done a better job of showing a person struggling through a major life crisis and emerging — tentatively — at the other end. It’s hard to think of a meatier role that’s ever been given to an American film actress and Jill Clayburgh plays it to the hilt.

Like the heroine in “Eat Pray Love,” Erica (Clayburgh) is living a life of financial privilege in Manhattan when we meet her, but she is brought down to earth with a sudden revelation by her husband — after they’ve had a casual lunch together — that he is having an affair.

Erica walks down the SoHo street alone, throws up into a trash can, and tries to begin a new life.

Mazursky had seen lots of his women friends going through the same experience and decided to explore divorce and its aftermath in the wake of the feminist revolution (which had erupted only a few years earlier).

We see Erica going through therapy and assessing her relationships with men for the first time in two decades. There is a doozy of a scene early on with Erica’s doctor where she angrily takes his offer of a friendly drink as a sexual pass (and it probably is). Without the safe harbor of a husband and marriage, Erica suddenly feels like totally unprotected prey in a city full of male predators.

The magic of “An Unmarried Woman” is in the way that Erica’s complex emotional journey is made so lucid and so entertaining through the collaboration of Mazursky and Clayburgh.

Erica’s therapy is funny as well as traumatic and the movie is particularly acute on the woman’s first bad dates after she decides to give a few men a go.

Mazursky finally delivers a good guy to Erica, played by an actor who was as dreamy to female moviegoers in 1978 as Bardem is now — Alan Bates (below) — but the writer-director avoids the suggestion that another relationship is the “solution” to Erica’s problem.

The finale of “An Unmarried Woman” definitely has a strong feminist feeling to it — Erica tells the painter played by Bates that she doesn’t want to run off to Vermont with him for the summer, she wants to get her own house in order first.

But then Mazursky tweaks Erica’s decision just a bit in a memorable closing shot that has the woman barely managing to carry a gift the painter leaves her with — an oversized piece of art that keeps Erica spinning in a SoHo breeze as she makes her way down the street.

The sheer authority of Michael Douglas in “Money Never Sleeps”

Sunday, September 26, 2010 by:Joe Meyers

What a blast it is to watch Michael Douglas reconnect with the role of Gordon Gekko in the new “Wall Street” sequel “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.”

The movie is flawed in terms of plotting and tone — so was the first one — but the authority that Douglas brings to his performance blotted out any of my small objections to writer-director Oliver Stone’s return to the financial action in downtown Manhattan.

The wit and the emotional power and the charisma Michael Douglas brings to his great morally conflicted (and Oscar-winning) character is quite awesome.

In the first “Wall Street” movie Gekko was a man you loved to hate.

In “Money Never Sleeps” Gekko is simply a character you love despite all of his obvious flaws. Things have gotten so sleazy and so dangerous in the financial markets since Gordon went to jail that he seems almost innocent in comparison with the hedge fund folks and the insiders who made money on the near collapse of the United States economy two years ago.

Without ever dimming the financial tycoon’s darker impulses, Douglas adds new emotional shadings to Gekko, especially in scenes where we see that he has become aware of the family life he discarded on his way to the top and then during his years in the slammer.

The wicked humor of Gekko was the thing I most enjoyed about the character in 1987. In the new movie, it’s the mix of sly wit and sudden surges of warmer emotions that make the performance so wonderful (I don’t think Douglas has ever been better than he is in the scene on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum where he explains what he did to try to save his drug addict son’s life).

Between you and me, I think Michael Douglas has long since surpassed his beloved actor dad Kirk in terms of the range and quality of the performances he has given since he became a full-fledged movie star in “Romancing the Stone” 26 years ago.

Michael Douglas has the emotional ferocity that made his father so thrilling to watch in movies like “Spartacus” and “Ace in the Hole” but Kirk tended to go a bit too far — the grin got too sinister, the voice too loud — for us to be able to see all of the humanity in the characters he played.

Michael Douglas stands virtually alone in contemporary Hollywood for his continuing interest in playing deeply flawed men — can you imagine Harrison Ford in “Basic Instinct” or “Disclosure”? The actor makes his “villains” as human as his heroes, which is one of the reasons his performances remain so alive and so unpredictably witty years after he commits them to celluloid.

‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’: who poisoned the sugar?

Saturday, September 25, 2010 by:Joe Meyers

One of the most exciting developments in the theater in recent years has been the way that serious playwrights have begun to expand our notions of musical theater.

Tony (“Angels in America”) Kushner worked on the magnificent “Caroline, or Change.”

Doug Wright followed his Pulitzer Prize-winning play “I Am My Own Wife” with the book for the extraordinary 2006 musical “Grey Gardens.”

The wonderful new show that opened the Yale Repertory Theatre season Thrusday night, “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” continues this trend with Adam Bock (below) — the author of the terrific “The Drunken City,” among others plays — making his first foray into musical theater.

Taking a macabre 1962 novel by Shirley Jackson as his source material, Bock and composer Todd Almond and director Anne Kauffman have fashioned a haunting, funny and moving musical that is worthy of comparison with the Kushner and Wright shows.

“Castle” is about two grown sisters Constance Blackwood (Jenn Gambatese, below left) and Mary Katherine Blackwood (Alexandra Socha, below right) who have been living in seclusion in a Vermont mansion for six years when we meet them at the ages of 28 and 18.

Constance was acquited of murder charges when her parents and her young brother died after being poisoned at dinner one night — there was arsenic in the sugar they put on their dessert — but she and her sister were both viewed with suspicion by the folks in the nearby village (who have always resented the wealth of the Blackwoods).

The sisters live with their elderly uncle, Julian (Bill Buell), who seems to take perverse delight in talking about the poisoning incident whenever strangers turn up — he survived the night along with Connie and Mary Katherine.

Things begin to change when a handsome cousin — Charles (Sean Palmer, above with Gambatese) — arrives for a visit that turns into an extended stay. When Charles begins showing romantic interest in Connie, the younger sister fears that their tight relationship will end.

“We Have Always Lived in the Castle” functions as a mystery, as an examination of family bonds, and as a study of how a too-close relationship can turn into something that is mysteriously destructive to both parties (what the French call a folie a deux).

The musical moments blend seamlessly with the drama so that we are never conscious of the action stopping for a song or a bit of late 1950s era dancing. Bock and Almond appear to be on the same wavelength in a way that is not always the case in musical theater collaborations.

The casting is superb, with Gambatese and Socha capturing the divided personalities of young women who still have the time (and appealing personalities) necessary to escape the emotionally crippling effects of living in isolation with their nearest neighbors being decidedly unsympathetic.

“We Have Always Lived in the Castle” has the same creepy undertones that are in almost all of Shirley Jackson’s stories — the Blackwood house has an unsettling personality and physical presence similar to the ghostly mansion in Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House” — but the show draws us in to the enveloping eccentricity of the survivors of a terrible crime that has never been solved.

How wonderful for us that the Yale Center for New Theatre — designed to support the development of new American plays and musicals — has given Connecticut theatergoers the world premiere of a fresh new musical that is now ready to live on in other cities and other theaters.

“We Have Always Lived in the Castle” is not to be missed.

More baggage for Liza Minnelli to carry

Friday, September 24, 2010 by:Joe Meyers

Although there has been confusion about the release date — some say it was last Tuesday, the record label’s press release says it will “drop” Sept. 28 — the new Liza Minnelli CD “Confessions” wouldn’t be likely to find much favor with fans or non-fans whenever it appeared.

Presented without the sort of production “protection” she desperately needs — the only back-up comes from pianist Billy Stritch — Minnelli is at best mediocre, at worst cringe-inducing, as she makes her way through a collection of standards (“All the Way,” “At Last”) and less well known tunes from old-timers like Cy Coleman and Arthur Schwartz.

Although Minnelli conquered Broadway at the age of 19 — winning a Tony for “Flora the Red Menace” — and had Hollywood at her feet seven years later — when she won the Oscar for “Cabaret” — the star has never made much impact as a recording artist.

Unlike such peers as Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler, Minnelli was never able to find the right tunes or the right producers to translate her stage and screen success into hit pop records. (Minnelli released a single of “New York, New York” in 1977 but the song didn’t score with the public until Frank Sinatra recorded it several years later).

Most of Minnelli’s recordings have been made during live performances rather than in the studio, with brassy arrangements and hysterical crowds bolstering her often shaky vocalising.

She was always one of those stars you had to see as well as listen to — in concert 40 years ago, the dancing and the youthful spirit of good humor and naked emotion more than made up for her vocal deficits.

I haven’t seen Minnelli live since the 1970s, but I’m told she has summoned up a lot of the old performance magic in her most recent New York engagements.

On “Confessions,” all we get is a semi-ravaged voice, stripped of the star’s visual razzle dazzle, and it just isn’t enough to warrant a commercial CD release.

Minnelli has presented herself as a strangely needy performer — even though she was born into show business royalty and was a star before she turned 20, she has always seemed to demand unrestrained audience adoration as one of her primary sources of energy and inspiration.

Because of the passionate fans who have followed her for nearly 50 years, Minnelli has risen above personal scandals, endless health crises, and a bad track record when it comes to fulfilling her performance obligations (the star’s many absences during the runs of two Broadway shows in the late 1970s and early 1980s — “The Act” and “The Rink” — turned off producers to the point where she has not appeared in a new eight-show-a-week, book musical for almost 30 years).

The crazed fans seem to relish the endless cycle of disaster and comeback almost as much as they admire the star’s talent, so “Confessions” is just the latest setback in a long series of roadblocks Minnelli followers have overcome.

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