Joe's View

With Joe Meyers, entertainment writer

Archive for May, 2011

‘True Blood’: vampires as American as apple pie (& Internet porn)

Tuesday, May 31, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

Aimed at a pop culture sweet spot somewhere between soap opera and porn, the HBO series “True Blood” is too trashy to be taken seriously but so well-executed that it’s hard to turn off.

Season four begins June 26 and HBO Video is releasing the season three DVD today so that you have plenty of time to catch up before the new episodes start unspooling.

Sexy vampires are nothing new, of course.

Baby boomers grew up watching the afternoon TV soap “Dark Shadows” on which Jonathan Frid became an unlikely heartthrob as the undead Barnabus Collins (a movie remake is being filmed in England right now by — you guessed it! — Tim Burton, with Johnny Depp in the Frid role).

20 years ago, the Canadian TV series “Forever, Knight” mixed laughs and chills with the rather preposterous set-up of a sexy vampire working the night shift for the Toronto police. (Somebody must be working on a remake of that one!)

Now we’re in the middle of a new wave of romantic bloodsuckers inspired by the “Twlight” books and movies, and the rather irresistible HBO series.

Alan Ball, who created “Six Feet Under,” has taken novels written by Charlaine Harris and come up with what is reportedly the most watched series in the cable network’s history.

The kick of the show starts with the setting, a backwoods town in Louisiana where a lively roadhouse called Merlotte’s is popular with humans and vampires alike. Harris created an alternative American vampire world where the invention of synthetic blood — “Tru Blood” — has allowed the undead to come out of their crypts and mix with humans.

The heroine, Sookie Stackhouse (Oscar winner Anna Paquin), is a waitress at Merlotte’s who was born with the gift of reading minds. She finds herself in the middle of a bizarre love triangle with two very attractive vampires — Bill (Stephen Moyer, bottom) and Eric (Alexander Skarsgard, below).

Ball and Harris cook up all sorts of supernatural shenanigans to fill out the updated vampire mythology, including shape shifters, werewolves and fairies.

The material gets a lurid, premium-cable charge through copious nudity — female and male — and torrents of blood and gore.

“True Blood” often suffers from anything-for-a-shock syndrome but the casting is terrific from top to bottom, with lots of New York stage talent filling key roles. Sam Trammell is the shape-shfting owner of Merlotte’s and in season three his poor white trash mom is played by off Broadway great J. Smith Cameron.

“Take Me Out” Tony winner Denis O’Hare also turns up as the leader of the Mississippi vampire clan and quickly becomes the most memorable character in the bunch.

I missed seasons one and two, but the season three DVD comes with a helpful synposis of what went on before, bringing us completely up to speed.

“True Blood” is not in the same class as the shows that have defined HBO — “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City,” among them — but it is a guilty pleasure of the highest order.

Memorial Day 2011

Monday, May 30, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

‘Hello, Lonesome’: a juicy movie role for Lynn Cohen

Sunday, May 29, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

Although she is probably best known as Cynthia Nixon’s housekeeper, Magda, on the “Sex & the City” series (and in the two movies that followed) Lynn Cohen has racked up an amazing list of stage credits in regional theater and off Broadway in New York.

She told Playbill.com two years ago that she wouldn’t have been able to score so well in that small HBO role without the decades of stage jobs that preceded it.

“That’s where you learn to act,” she said of working on both classic and new plays for more than 30 years when she was cast in “Sex & the City” (bottom). “You learn to act by acting. You only get so much from acting class. You have to put your act on stage.”

Because of the range of her theater work, Cohen has been able to come in and deliver the goods in a series of small but memorable roles in films ranging from “Manhattan Murder Mystery” — the 1993 Woody Allen picture where she got to die twice! — to “Synecdoche, New York” three years ago.

In 2005, Cohen made an indelible impression as Golda Meir (below) in just a few scenes in the Steven Spielberg drama “Munich.” I thought at the time that if Cohen had had one or two more scenes she could have scored a supporting actress Oscar.

I witnessed Cohen’s ready-to-go talent first hand a few years ago at a small off-Broadway theater where she joined Kate Mulgrew for a one-night-only reading of “Mary Stuart” that had some of the excitement of a fully rehearsed production.

The new indie film “Hello, Lonesome” gives Cohen the chance to stick around for a while on screen and she gives this charming little movie a big boost.

First time director Adam Reid financed the project himself — shooting it in two weeks on a $50,000 budget — and the result is a memorable film about lonely people looking for connections.

Cohen plays a widow in her 70s who is losing her eyesight and with it the independence represented by one of her most cherished possessions, a vintage Thunderbird. With her license revoked, Eleanor is grounded in a suburban community where not having a car is something like losing your legs.

Eleanor asks a 30ish neighbor (played by another New York stage treasure, James Urbaniak) to drive her to the grocery store and before you can say “Harold & Maude” an offbeat (non-sexual) relationship ensues.

This story is woven into two other tales of love and romance in the challenging real social networks of the 21st century — all of them beautifully acted.

Reid juggles comic and poignant elements with great skill and one is left hoping that “Hello, Lonesome” is just the first of many films to come.

The movie opened at Cinema Village in Manhattan on Friday and it isn’t clear yet if it will find its way to a Connecticut art house. If you’re going to be in the city this weekend, it is worth the trip downtown. (“Hello, Lonesome” will be available from Video on Demand services June 1.)

The sexiest couple of 1969 and other French treats

Saturday, May 28, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

Drive-ins might be dead, but the idea of watching movies outside on a warm, summer evening is not only alive and well, it’s growing.

Inspired by the great success HBO has had for more than a decade screening movies in Bryant Park, New York City has been overrun with outdoor series, both in Manhattan and the outer boroughs.

You can see movies in parks and on rooftops and unlike the HBO screenings — which cater to mainstream taste — you can find a staggering array of movies shown outside (and free of charge — yay!) between now and Labor Day.

As a lover of French cinema old and new, let me steer you toward a great series that will begin next Friday at Cedar Hill in Central Park (79th & Fifth Ave.) and then move on to various city parks for the following seven weeks.

The Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the City of New York – Parks & Recreation is sponsoring classic French films, most of which derive their erotic power from being set in the summer when people shed as much clothing as possible and the blood starts to boil.

First up is Jacque Deray’s “La Piscine” (1969) starring two of the sexiest performers ever preserved on celluloid — Alain Delon and Romy Schnieder — in a psychological thriller set in and around the swimming pool at their characters’ summer home.

Think “La Dolce Vita” ten years on, with decadent characters whose real turn on is to turn other people on and you’ve got a rough idea of this hot little drama about vacation sex and sexual infidelity.

The picture remains a strong argument that you don’t need full nudity and porn-style sex sequences to create an erotic thriller. Delon and Schneider were lovers at the time and their chemistry is potent, to say the least.

Both performers were often underrated as actors because they were so beautiful, but there is a lot more than meets the eye in the duplicitous lovers they play here.

Delon is still alive and working in French film and TV, Schneider tragically committed a slow suicide by alcohol and pills (in 1982) in the aftermath of the accidental death of her son.

“La Piscine” is a great picture for couples, so I can’t imagine a better (and cheaper) date for next Friday night if you are anywhere near Manhattan.

The complete schedule of French films is available at www.newyorkinfrench.net

The show (and the awesome Bobby Cannavale) must go on

Thursday, May 26, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

Last night at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, a little more than halfway through “The Motherf—-r with the Hat” the lights failed to come up after what was meant to be a quick scene change.

The house lights were brought up partway, and someone on the public address system said there would be a brief pause before the intermissionless show would go on.

A minute or so later, the voice on the PA asked “Is there a doctor in the house?” and added that the play would take a ten-minute break.

Of course, this set off a lot of buzzing — and my Tweeting — as we wondered who needed a doctor and what was causing the delay.

The show resumed with none of the five actors missing, so we were left to assume that whoever was ill must have been in the audience or the backstage crew.

It turned out that the star, Bobby Cannavale (left), had sustained a cut on his head backstage but you would have never known that he had any physical problems — the actor didn’t miss a beat in his awesome, Tony-nominated performance as the recovering alcoholic and ex-con Jackie.

(The New York Daily News reported today that the actor accidentally hit his head backstage during the scene change and received stitches for the wound following the performance.)

Cannavale gets strong support from Chris Rock, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Annabella Sciorra and Yul Vasquez, but he dominates the Stephen Adly Guirgis play about addiction and recovery.

The actor has been impressive before on film and on stage — he was terrific in the 2005 revival of “Hurly Burly” — but “Hat” moves him up the stage ladder several notches. The energy, the humor and the pathos of Jackie – who learns the limits of AA and “sponsorship” — powers Guirgis’ distinctive mix of comedy and tragedy.

The play is the product of a downtown troupe — LABrinth Theater Company — which is making its Broadway debut and giving a jolt of profane originality to the Great White Way.

And Bobby Cannavale deserves a “show must go on” award for the work he did Wednesday night.

“The Motherf—-r with a Hat” is set to end its limited run July 17 and shouldn’t be missed. Last night, I was able to score two good half-price tickets at the TKTS booth in Duffy Square.

‘Just Cause’: the terrorists who couldn’t shoot straight

Wednesday, May 25, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

Is there still a revolutionary spark in America?

With so many college-age kids here facing the same dismal economic future as the young people of Egypt and Tunisia et al, it’s fascinating to ponder what might ignite a similar uprising in the U.S.

I do wonder what might be going through the minds of recent college graduates who are carrying more than $50,000 in student loan debt and who might not be able to find a job that can pay off the loan and finance their lives over the next decade or so.

The baby boomers came from hardy Depression and World War II era stock who pinched pennies and in many cases passed along a tidy nest-egg when they died.

Today’s college generation will probably face a big fat stack of unpaid bills when their parents go, so it’s unlikely they will find much of an estate when the time comes.

This climate of uncertainty and unfocused rage swirls through a new play “Just Cause” by Zack Russell which has just opened at The Flea Theater in downtown Manhattan.

Borrowing some of its structure from German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1979 film “The Third Generation” — which was inspired by the middle-class college-educated Baader Meinhof terrorist cell — the new play takes a look at a bunch of contemporary young people in New York who are stirred into revolutionary fervor.

Russell has staged his play in the Flea’s wonderful oblong basement space which gives directors a chance for a unique wide-screen cinematic style (the audience is seated in only two rows against a long wall).

As “Just Cause” opens we see some of the cast of characters going through the motions in dead-end jobs for which they are wildly overqualified. Selling appliances and electronic gizmos at Best Buy. Working as personal assistants. Sitting at home trying to cook up “jingles” while still doing creative musical work.

“What is freedom, and how can I get some?,” is the watch cry that brings the group together under the auspices of a shadowy company which may or may not be connected to the U.S. government. The would-be “terrorists” are looking for their own liberation, but they could be the tools of an agency that simply wants to stage small incidents to keep the public scared. Suddenly, we are in the middle of a 1970s-style paranoia thriller such as “The Parallax View.”

Russell keeps his plot loose and elliptical so that we have the freedom to read a lot into what we are seeing.

“Just Cause” keeps shifting between tense dramatic scenes and then the slapstick tragedy of the young terrorists’ ineptness when it comes to carrying out an operation. Russell seems to be saying that while it might be easy to get American youth to come together in support of an idea — thanks to social networks on the Internet — having them transform that idea into successful action is very tough.

The play is being performed by The Flea’s terrific resident acting ensemble — The Bats — who work together so seamlessly that it would be wrong to single out individuals.

The company consists of Brett Aresco, Crystal Arnette, Allison Buck, Tommy Crawford, Greg Engbrecht, Katherine Folk-Sullivan, Eric Folks, Alex Herrald, Raúl Sigmund Julia, Georgia X Lifsher, Betsy Lippitt, Sean McIntyre, Kate Michaud, Briana Pozner, Ian Quinlan, Cynthia Whalen and Wilton Yeung.

“Just Cause” is running through June 6. Tickets are only $20. For more information, visit www.theflea.org

The players change, but Hollywood ‘scandals’ are eternal

Sunday, May 22, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

Last month Hollywood followers were analyzing sex-and-drug addict Charlie Sheen’s adventures (below), last week it was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “baby mama” (above) and how she will impact the ex-governor of California’s intention to resume his movie career.

The names are always changing but the public’s interest in the sexual shenanigans of Hollywood folk never seems to be satisfied.

Whenever the latest “shocking” Hollywood development erupts, bloggers and “experts” on the 24/7 cable news channels spend hours (days? weeks?) trying to analyze these scandals in a way that those of us who aren’t rich and famous can relate to.

Just when we think we have a handle on Tom Cruise’s eccentricities, however, we have to start all over, trying to figure out what makes another celebrity tick.

As if we have anything in common with movie and TV stars!

Christopher Walken put it well once when he told an interviewer that he believes he has spent most of his life on “planet show business” and that things are done differently there.

The show biz lifestyle and its excesses don’t change much as time passes, just the names of the players.

Every two or three years, I like to re-read the late, great Richard Condon’s brilliant Hollywood satire “The Ecstasy Business” because it is so funny and because so little that is essential about celebrities has changed since the book was published in 1967.

Condon (left) is best known for the 1959 novel that launched his career — “The Manchurian Candidate” — but before he became a popular novelist he spent more than 20 years working as a publicist for a number of different Hollywood studios, including Disney.

In “The Ecstacy Business” Condon drew on his PR experience to craft a portrait of an out-of-control movie star named Tynan Bryson who could easily exist in today’s celebrity culture.

Bryson is so popular that he wants 100 percent of the gross of his pictures and the star is so sexually insatiable that he has never been able “to remain faithful for more than seventeen hours.”

Condon writes: “Despite his former wife’s celebrated allegation, ‘Scratch an actor and you’ll find an actress’…Bryson had slept with all but one of his leading ladies, the discard having turned out to be a female impersonator, the best-kept secret in worldwide show biz.”

“Bryson sometimes tried to seize reality, but he had to grasp upward beyond his reach through the quicksand of his existence,” Condon says of his fictional movie star. “(Bryson) wanted to be what he played, not for his art, for he was not a Method actor, but because according to the laws of being a hero in an American motion picture, he must always win.”

“The Ecstasy Business” has been out of print for many years, but Condon’s vision of celebrity madness remains as fresh as today’s TMZ or Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily.

A late report on the funny and scary ‘Squealer’

Saturday, May 21, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

Mixing elements of Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson’s “Balm in Gilead” and those backwoods Southern horror movies (i.e. “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”) Jonathan Blitstein has cooked up a wild and woolly play called “Squealer” that ended a too-brief run last night at the Theater for the New City in the East Village.

The production was the first play of the inaugural season of a new company, Lesser America, and the quality of the writing, staging and acting bodes well for the troupe’s future.

The historic off Broadway venue Theater For the New City has granted Lesser America its first ever residency which will allow the company to produce two more full-scale productions in its inaugural year.

People are always bitching about the high price of theater tickets in New York, but the first Lesser America show only cost $15 ($4 less than a ticket for “Thor” in IMAX!).

“Squealer” is set in the present day in a fictional Heartland hamlet called Wauketawnee Lake where we meet a bunch of desperate characters whose common ground is the local diner.

The spoiler in the group is pig farmer Chet Reichert (Nick Lawson) who uses his status as catnip to the local ladies to divide and (almost) conquer the female characters, especially Chris Schneider (Sarah Lemp) and her daughter Kelly (Jamie Law) who is about to graduate from high school.

Chet and Chris used to date when they were much younger and they get back together in the course of the play. What Chris doesn’t know is that Chet has already met her daughter in the diner and tricked the girl into visiting his farm where he sexually assaulted her.

“Squealer” is genuinely suspenseful as we wonder how violent Chet might be and what Chris will do when she finds out what happened to Kelly.

Blitstein makes all of the characters complicated and surprising so that we can’t guess what they might say or do next. He also introduces the threat of violence early in the story — when and where it erupts still remains shocking, however.

The ensemble is terrific, with director Daniel Talbott wisely borrowing Lemp and Lawson from another downtown theater troupe — The Amoralists.

Lemp is a fabulous actress who has played a very wide gamut of characters for The Amoralists — from a sex-crazed housewife in “Happy in the Poorhouse” to an idealistic downtown restaurant manager who sees all of her hopes dashed in “The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side” — and she was recently cast by playwright-director Adam Rapp in his epic “The Hallway Trilogy.”

The way that Lemp can draw us so close to a morally dubious woman like Chris in “Squealer” is quite amazing — it’s a rare gift she shares with the Jane Fonda of “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” and Gena Rowlands as that sad, crazy wife and mother in “A Woman Under the Influence.”

Sorry I wasn’t able to steer you to “Squealer” earlier, but keep an eye out for Lesser America’s next play at www.lesseramerica.com

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