Joe's View

With Joe Meyers, entertainment writer

Archive for August, 2011

Watching ‘In a Better World’ after Hurricane Irene

Tuesday, August 30, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

After losing electricity on Sunday — along with a few million of my East Coast neighbors — I had enough battery power stored in my portable DVD player to watch one movie.

Should it be a fun escapist flick from my collection — “Road House” anyone? — or something important that I hadn’t seen yet?

I opted for the latter, pulling out an advance screener of “In a Better World” (Sony Pictures Classics) which won the Oscar for best foreign language film last winter and will be released on home video today.

It was a good choice — a very fine domestic drama from Denmark about two troubled families that are brought together by their disturbed adolescent boys.

Writer-director Susanne Bier gives the story a broader view of the world by making one of her characters — Anton (Mikael Persbrandt, above) — a doctor who flies to Africa on a regular basis to help out in the most dire political and social environments.

Anton’s work has caused his marriage to Marianne (Trine Dyrholm) to collapse, leaving their son Elias (Markus Rygaard) feeling like he’s on his own much of the time.

Elias is picked on by his schoolmates because of his prominent teeth — they call him “Rat Face” — and is befriended by new student Christian (William Johnk Nielsen, below left) who is a seething cauldron of anger and retribution in the aftermath of his mother’s cancer death.

Christian helps Elias plot revenge against his tormenters — a pact which begins to have increasingly violent repercussions.

The darkness of the movie’s portrait of adolescent anger is what separates it from the standard Hollywood treatment of this kind of material. The way that the two boys fuel each other’s resentments is reminiscent of that disturbring folie a deux relationship between Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire in the Ruth Rendell adaptation “La Ceremonie.” Alone the boys probably wouldn’t act out so much — together they are a potentially deadly combination.

The contrast between the domestic events in Denmark and the horrors we see in Africa is handled more subtly that you might imagine. In her director’s statement, Bier wrote that her goal was “to explore the limitations we encounter in trying to control our society as well as our personal lives.”

The film is designed to ask “whether our own ‘advanced’ culture is the model for a better world, or whether the same disarray found in (Africa) is lurking beneath the surface of our civilization. Are we immune to chaos, or obliviously teetering on the verge of disorder?”

The movie and its questions put the relatively minor Irene disruptions I faced into perspective.

‘Gatsby’: the perfect end-of-the-summer beach book

Monday, August 29, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

Danielle Ganek writes sophisticated romantic comedy that doesn’t seem to fit neatly into the “chick lit” niche of the book publishing industry.

The New Yorker made a splashy debut in 2007 with the novel “Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him” which took us deep into the Chelsea gallery scene in New York City.

Ganek’s lightly satirical tone zeroed in on the excesses and, yes, the foolishness in the contemporary art world but the story was built on a solid foundation of respect for the people who try to create art and the sales support staff that is necessary to make a living as an artist.

The writer’s second novel “The Summer We Read Gatsby” (which Plume published in paperback two months ago) has a few characters and background color derived from “Lulu” but is set in Southampton in the summer of 2008.

The social comedy in the novel has a slightly astringent tone because we know many of the characters will face a financial comeuppance just a few months after their summer in one of the toniest towns on Long Island.

Just as Ganek gave us an ordinary gallery worker as someone to identify with in “Lulu,” the protagonists in the Southampton romp are two half-sisters who have just inherited a run-down beach house from their unmarried and childless bohemian aunt.

Cassie and Peck are fish out of water in the Hamptons — although you would never guess that from the amusing affectations of Peck, who is a New York City actress — so we share their outsiders’ point of view.

Cassie lives in Europe and wants to follow her aunt’s wish that “the girls” sell the house and split the proceeds. Peck wants to keep it — even though the taxes and upkeep are prohibitively expensive — so that she can continue to enjoy the annual summer getaways she shared with her beloved relative.

Ganek stocks the book with wonderful supporting characters including the young man the aunt let live in the house rent free and who wants to stay on. He claims the old woman was supporting his work as an artist (something she had done for other eccentrics over the years). Cassie thinks the stunningly attractive guy is more likely an Abercrombie & Fitch model (below) than a real artist.

The title derives from the Fitzgerald novel, of course, which captured Long Island society life of a century ago and which still fascinates the characters in Ganek’s story.

The affectionate friction between the two half-sisters is delightfully rendered by Ganek and we quickly come to care for both of them. The author also builds a neat mystery into her tale when one of the aunt’s paintings goes missing and it starts to seem entirely possible that the “J.P.” on the back of the canvas refers to Jackson Pollock, who might have been an old beach town pal of Aunt Lydia’s.

It’s hard to think of a better book to put in your Labor Day beach bag than this one.

‘Olive’: turning New York City bile into hilarity

Saturday, August 27, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

In “Olive and the Bitter Herbs,” downtown cult playwright Charles Busch seems to be channeling the New York City Jewish angst that powered Neil Simon in his peak years (the late 1960s and 1970s).

Simon was a master of turning sarcasm and hostility into uproarious comedy — he knew how to turn Manhattan Jewish humor at its most aggressive into a series of mainstream hits.

There was always a very fine line between the interests and the attitudes of the audiences at a Neil Simon hit and what was going on in the plays. Some said Simon flattered and reassured his core audience — middle-aged and middle-class theatregoers — but that doesn’t account for the nastiness just under the surface of shows like “The Prisoner of Second Avenue” and films such as “The Out-of-Towners.”

Simon had an edge that some fans simply ignored and others relished (I always thought the writer was at his best in tough-minded pieces like the script for the 1972 Elaine May film “The Heartbreak Kid”).

Charles Busch first made his name with zany transgender off-off Broadway comedies like “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom” and “Red Scare on Sunset” — in all of which he starred — but he tapped into the mainstream Broadway market a decade ago with the very popular “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife” which was about the sexual and family problems of Upper West Side Jews.

“Olive and the Bitter Herbs” is in the same vein as “Allergist’s Wife” but is set in another part of town — Kips Bay, where we are introduced to an elderly actress named Olive (Marcia Jean Kurtz) who pushes most people away with her acidic view of the world.

Olive starred in one of the most successful TV commercials of the 1980s and has worked fairly steadily in theater, but without her rent stabilized apartment she probably would not be able to hang on in Manhattan.

The plot is fairly thin — Olive is helped by the long-suffering Wendy (Julie Halston) a nice theatrical manager who feels sorry for the old woman; fights with her two gay neighbors Robert and Trey (David Garrison and Dan Butler); and is befriended by the widower Sylvan (Richard Masur).

Busch displays his roots in screwball comedy by giving the play a supernatural twist — Olive’s apartment appears to be haunted — but most of the action is devoted to the high energy New York vitriol of the title character.

Olive is so hateful that she’s funny. Many of her barbs are warranted by her valiant attempt to hang on in a city that doesn’t have much room left for middle class single women, but she also picks ridiculous fights with the people who cross her path (there is a lulu of an exchange that starts with the woman acting offended when another character assumes she is Jewish because of her “mannerisms”).

As an actor-writer, Busch always provides juicy material for his ensembles, and it’s fun to see Kurtz and Halston and the other company members relish the beautifully constructed jokes and the warm character moments under the brittle surface.

(“Olive and the Bitter Herbs” is set to run through Sept. 3 at Primary Stages. For performance and ticket information go to www.primarystages.org.)

Is this the end of the road for ‘Final Destination’?

Wednesday, August 24, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

“Final Destination 5″ has been fizzling at the box office since it opened a-week-and-a-half ago, so we have probably reached the end of one of the most unusual and most interesting horror film series.

Unlike most of the shocker franchises, “Final Destination” has no serial killers or monsters or even “villains” in the conventional sense.

They’re films about people’s appointments with death and how the end can arrive through a series of innocuous occurrences that add up to you slipping into a path of destruction at the precisely wrong moment.

The movies give us a God’s eye view of the machinations that are grinding along to claim another victim — we see the whole sequence of events that leads to a fatality. How, for instance, simply putting your cell phone next to a candle in a spa will result in your death 15 or 20 minutes later.

The effect of the scenes is both eerie and funny in a slapstick Rube Goldberg manner — one thing leads to another and all of those things add up to an “accidental” death.

The movies combine explorations of fate with black comedy setpieces about both the unexpected and the not so surprising dangers that are all around us in modern America.

“Final Destination 5” opens with a very sick joke involving the aging infrastructure of this super-cheap country we are living in at the moment.

The major characters are on a bus heading to a corporate retreat and they get stuck in traffic on a suspension bridge that begins to collapse due to the half-baked repair job that is underway. We all know too many examples of this sort of thing happening in real life — see below — to not get caught up in the mounting horror of the situation.

The “Final Destination” series began in 2000 but didn’t really take off until after 9/11 when we all became well versed in the mechanics of fate — i.e. story after story of how a chain of banal events led to someone stepping into an elevator at the World Trade Center moments before the catastrophe started. Or conversely, how a cluster of small delays meant that a WTC worker was still in a cab on the street rather than at their desk when chaos erupted.

The “Final Destination” movies are seriously flawed — most are poorly acted and some of the setpieces are way too gruesome (the eye surgery bit in the new movie, for instance).

My hope has been that a really talented — and perversely funny — director would come along who viewed the pictures merely as rough drafts for his or her horror masterpiece using this devilishly gripping set-up.

The Brian DePalma of the “Carrie” and “The Fury” period would have had a field day with this material.

‘Unsaid’: grief, ghosts and the rights of animals

Tuesday, August 23, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

Animal rights issues are percolating in two of the best summer movies — the science-fiction documentary “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” and the horse trainer documentary “Buck.”

“Rise” puts us on the side of the apes as they revolt and begin to take over the planet. “Buck” shows us a remarkably humane man who helps to solve the problems — practical and emotional — that arise between horses and their owners.

The new novel “Unsaid” seems torn from the same page in its tale of a stressed-out lawyer, grieving for his veterinarian wife who wonders if he is up to taking care of the animals she left behind (one of whom is a distressed horse reminiscent of the one that proves to be the most heart-breaking challenge in “Buck”).

Abramson weaves together enough different plot strands — and themes — for three or four novels as the lawyer David is drawn into a legal battle waged by an old associate of his wife’s: a research scientist who is trying to save the life of a chimpanzee she used in one of her projects.

The chimp was taught to communicate in American Sign Language. In a battle between the scientist and her superiors, the chimp Cindy is taken away from her human friend and is to be relegated to the sort of routine experimentation that will kill her after drug testing or surgical procedure testing.

A trial battle is waged between David and the federal government over the question of whether or not an animal is a piece of property – like a chair — that can be disposed of whenever its owner gets tired of it.

Abramson is married to a veterinarian and is a past board member of the Animal Legal Defense Fund, so he brings to the novel a passionate belief in the rights of animals of all kinds.

Unlike the dystopian “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (below) which suggests that the earth is too small to be shared by man and the creatures he has abused, “Unsaid” suggests that cooperation and respect between species will benefit everyone.

It’s a very moving book that cries out for film adaptation.

‘Completeness’: romantic comedy is alive & well on 42nd St.

Monday, August 22, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

Playwrights Horizons on West 42nd St. is starting its new season with a fresh, youthful romantic comedy, “Completeness” by Itamar Moses.

I caught the second preview performance Saturday night and am happy to report the show is already in great shape; it should find favor with audiences who are weary of the tired formulas that are still being used in most Hollywood takes on love and sex.

Moses introduces us to a group of brainy academics who are frustrated by their inability to put their brilliant biological and computer training to practical use in finding a relationship that lasts more than a few weeks or months.

The central couple consists of Ellott (Karl Miller) and Molly (Aubrey Dollar) who are both graduate students at a nameless university. Elliott is in computer science and Molly is studying molecular biology.

Both are coming off busted relationships when they meet each other in a computer lab where Elliott agrees to contribute his computer genius to Molly’s biology project involving yeast growth.

Moses proves to be a wiz at mixing the highly technical jargon of brilliant young students with down-to-earth courtship talk. One of the reasons why “Completeness” hooks us and keeps us hoping Elliott and Molly will make it together is that the world in which they live is so vividly drawn by the playwright.

Elliott wishes romance and sexual chemistry would be as quantifiable as one of his computer exercises, and Molly seems to hope that her lab experiments might help her understand the mysteries of human interaction.

“Completeness” mixes cynicism and hope as easily as it blends science and love. The romantic/sexual experiences Elliott and Molly have had in their young lives have left them half-hopeful/half-jaded. They know that every new relationship is energizing and exciting in its early stages, but they don’t know how to sustain that interest for extended periods (especially in a campus environment filled with sexual possibilities).

The show was a hit in its first production last spring at South Coast Rep in California where the remarkably funny and charismatic Karl Miller originated the role of Elliott. As Molly, Aubrey Dollar is as convincingly brainy as she is warm and attractive.

(Note: Production photos aren’t yet available for the Playwrights Horizons staging; the shot above is from the Cosa Mesa production where Miller starred opposite Mandy Siegfried.)

Brian Avers and Meredith Forlenza excel in mutliple roles as the two leads’ past and possibly future partners. A device that could have been heavy-handed works like a charm to reinforce Elliott and Molly’s fears that they are doomed to an almost endless series of only slightly different new lovers.

For performance and ticket information, visit www.playwrightshorizons.org.

‘Life 2.0’: a big step beyond pornography and phone sex

Sunday, August 21, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

The Oprah Winfrey Network will unveil a new documentary Thursday at 9 p.m. — “Life 2.0” — that explores the world of people who start substituting life online for “real world” encounters.

Director Jason Spingarn-Koff zeroes in on customers of the Second Life virtual reality website, but the sensitive and engrossing 90-minutes could apply to any of the intense fantasy relationships that are possible on the Internet.

Spingarn-Koff clearly has remarkable gifts as an interviewer — all of the subjects in the film reveal very intimate aspects of their lives and in a few cases they allowed the director to track their behavior for months (or years?).

Second Life provides customers with the ability to create an alternate personality that can then interact with other anonymous “avatars” on the site. Some of the people we meet live on Second Life use avatars that are only slight variations of their actual personalities. Others role play to an extraordinary degree.

A lively and funny African-American woman in Detriot lives as a slimmer and slightly sexier fashion and lifestyle merchant on Second Life where she has actually created a business for herself selling upscale clothing and home furnishings to the avatars.

The small purchases people make to liven up their virtual lives adds up to a six-figure income for the Detroit woman who spends about 12 hours a day in the basement of her family home desiging and selling.

The business runs into trouble when someone steals her ideas and starts giving away the goods. A lawsuit is filed which might have lasting implications on Internet sites.

The most time in “Life 2.0” is devoted a Westchester, N.Y. woman and a Canadian man whose avatars meet and fall in love in Second Life (below). They eventually divorce their spouses and try for a “First Life” romance that demonstrates the huge gulf between fantasy and reality.

Spingarn-Koff is refreshingly even-handed in his treatment of sensitive material. He never mocks his subjects even when their behavior is at its most bizarre. The filmmaker seems to understand that while most of us might not spend 12 hours a day on Second Life, we are all sorting through the pluses and minuses of the time we spend online.

Set your DVR for OWN this Thursday at 9 p.m. I don’t think you’ll be sorry you did.

Coming: riveting Wall Street expose ‘Confidence Game’

Saturday, August 20, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

The financial disasters of recent years have some produced excellent documentaries including the Oscar-winning “Inside Job” and “Client 9.”

The other night I watched an advance screener of another gripping Wall Street doc in the pipeline — “Confidence Game” — which zeroes in on the final week in the life of Bear Stearns which was one of the top five investment banks in the country before it imploded in the spring of 2008.

The collapse and fire sale of the firm was the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” for the larger disasters of that fall, which resulted in the federal government agreeing to the biggest corporate welfare program in the history of the United States.

The collapse was triggered by the subprime mortgage quagmire — and housing bust — that Bear Stearns played a huge role in. The firm helped to create the crazy formulas that made giving mortgages to totally unqualified home buyers a hugely profitable Wall Street “product” — for a while.

“Confidence Game” takes us through a day-by-day chronology of the final week, with many detours into the back story of the disaster.

Norwalk filmmaker Nick Verbitsky makes complicated financial transactions lucid thanks to a way above average collection of talking heads that includes Bryan Burrough of Vanity Fair and Adam Sorkin of The New York Times.

“Confidence Game” includes a devastating critique of the financial ratings agencies that feels up-to-the-minute in light of the Standard & Poors downgrading of the U.S. credit rating a few weeks ago (the trigger for the current stock market roller coaster ride). Verbitsky shows us how Moody’s and S&P were in bed with the firms whose products they were rating — giving high scores to some of the investment concoctions at the heart of the housing market disaster.

(It seems clear now that the recent S&P report is at least partially the company’s revenge on its government critics.)

Verbitsky and his contributors are also scathing on CNBC’s coverage of Bear Stearns. According to the film, the cable network went from puffery that contributed to the disaster to a last-minute turnaround in which their reporting of rumors sped the firm’s demise.

The film is much more than an account of events of three years ago because of the way that “Confidence Game” makes it clear that Wall Street has ADD when it comes to past disasters and is always looking for a new quick score (no matter how many of its small potato “clients” might suffer).

Near the end one of the experts boils the Street’s philosophy down to “Tails they win, heads you lose.”

Verbitsky tells me he will be touring business and law schools with the film this fall and hopes to find a distributor by year’s end. ”Confidence Game” deserves to be widely seen.

You can find more material on the movie and updates on its screening schedule on the “Confidence Game The Movie” Facebook page.

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