Joe's View

With Joe Meyers, entertainment writer

Archive for September, 2011

‘How to Make It in America’ — another HBO zeitgeist winner

Tuesday, September 27, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

HBO scored long-running hits with a girls vs. boys series (“Sex and the City”) and then a boys against the girls sitcom (“Entourage’), so it would be nice if the cable network found another cash cow in a more sexually balanced comedy series, “How to Make It in America.”

The series written by Ian Edelman is set in contemporary New York where we follow a bunch of ambitious twentysomethings who are trying to succeed in the sort of “creative” fields that draw new dreamers into the city every year.

The title is something of a misnomer — it’s more about making it in Manhattan than in “America.”

Ben Epstein (Bryan Greenberg, above left) is trying to get into the street fashion business with a new line of jeans that he is creating with his pal Cam Calderon (Victor Rasuk, above right).

The two major female characters are Rachel Chapman (the delicious Lake Bell, below) who is working in interior design and Gingy Wu (Shannyn Sossaman), a young beauty hustling to get some attention for her little gallery on the Lower East Side.

“How to Make It in America” had an eight episode first season run last year — which has just been released on DVD — and it will start a second season on Oct. 2.

The only criticism I had of the season one DVD is that there are too few episodes — I wanted to spend more time with these funny and sexy and smart characters.

Like so many other shows that have been filmed in New York City over the past decade, “How to Make It in America” is stocked with fabulous character actors in supporting roles including Luis Guzman as Cam’s shady cousin who is trying to go legit with a new caffeine-spiked energy drink called “Rasta Monster.”

Martha Plimpton turns up in several episodes as Edie Weitz, Rachel’s ditsy boss. Plimpton brings an Eve Arden-like zest to this second banana role, scoring laughs every time she appears (sadly, the actress won’t be in season two because of a commitment to another series).

The show focuses as much on the characters’ career ambitions as it does on their romantic pursuits. Ben and Rachel are ex-es and he still carries a torch, but the sexual tension is kept under wraps for most of season one.

The combination of a very gifted cast with well-chosen New York locations makes the series very easy on the eyes, but it is the sharp and eccentric writing by Ian Edelman that keeps a viewer happily wondering if these starry-eyed hopefuls might make it in their chosen fields.

“How to Make It in America” mixes the downtown funkiness of “The Flight of the Conchords” with the high-energy pacing of “Bored to Death” — it’s another zeitgeist-capturing winner from HBO.

New York City + movies + booze = fun in Fairfield

Monday, September 26, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

I thought my days of hosting the “Martini & a Movie” series at the Fairfield Theatre Company were behind me.

The screenings that ended more than a year ago were lots of fun, but the idea seemed played out after a few years and the projection system left something to be desired — even with a free admision!

But the nice folks at the FTC found a sponsor who was interested in re-launching the monthly movie get together, and they promised a spiffy new projector, so how could I refuse?

The series kicks off tomorrow night at 7 with one of my favorite 1930s screwball comedies, “Easy Living,” with a script by the great Preston Sturges and a starring performance by one of the most charming comediennes in Hollywood history, Jean Arthur.

Rather than just program films willy nilly, we came up with the idea of a 10-month series that will honor New York City’s role in the history of movies — both as a place where countless classics have been shot and as a state of mind in great old films that were made in Hollywood but took place in Manhattan.

The tenth anniversary of 9/11 got me thinking about how much the city has been revered worldwide because of the wonderful films made about New York — from frothy romances like “Easy Living” to more serious fare such as “Taxi Driver” and “Sweet Smell of Success.”

New York City has been a setting and subject matter for movies since the art form began more than 100 years ago. The FTC series will be attempt to show the city in all of its glory — and grit — through films that brought to life memorable characters who could only exist there.

Inspired in part by the wonderful James Sanders book “Celluloid Skyline,” the 10 films will also show the great physical changes in the city over the past half century or so in films that were shot almost entirely on location (after Mayor John Lindsay’s new film office made it a lot easier to get street shooting permits).

“Easy Living” was made in Hollywood in 1937 but it’s about gossip and wealth in New York during the Great Depression.

Office worker Jean Arthur is minding her own business on Park Avenue when a mink coat tossed out of an apartment window lands on her head, turning her into an instant celebrity.

The legendary screenwriter Preston Sturges — who would go on to make such great comedies as “The Lady Eve” and “The Palm Beach Story” — shows us how even at the height of financial crises, New York City always remains a place where dreamers gather.

The movie launched Arthur as one of the greatest romantic comediennes of her time and made Sturges a very hot property in Hollywood.

In the months to come the FTC series will include such well-known pictures as “A Thousand Clowns” and a few more obscure titles like the grossly underrated Sidney Lumet comedy “Just Tell Me What You Want.”

If you’re in the area, I hope you can stop by on Tuesday at 7 p.m. for a cocktail or two and our first screening.

For more information and directions to the venue in Fairfield Center, go to www.fairfieldtheatre.org.

Snooping in other people’s homes with ‘The Selby’

Sunday, September 25, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

Photographer, painter and writer Todd Selby (below) produced one of 2010′s most entertaining books, “The Selby Is in Your Place” (Abrams), a compilation of the “home environment” lay-outs Todd does on his popular blog, The Selby.

The book allows us the voyeuristic fun of exploring the homes and lives of some very creative people who live in a down-to-earth fashion that probably would not interest the editors of Architectual Digest, but is a true expression of their personalities and their work.

Selby takes us from the home of Australian surfer Ozzie Wright and his wife Mylee Fitzgerald to the funky Los Angeles house of musician Guy Blakeslee and his artist partner Maximilla Lukacs.

The photographs and the spaces are very beautiful but not in the sense of being elaborately designed. Most of the rooms are filled with objects that are important to the people who live there — in the majority of cases the “art” on the walls consists of collages of photos, paintings and thrift shop finds that give us much more to look at than we would see in the rather sterile interior photography in glossy magazines.

Many of the subjects are friends of Selby’s who clearly trust that his photos will bring out the best in spaces that are sometimes very cluttered (none of the rooms look like they were gone over by a cleaning crew before Selby shot his pictures — they all appear to be comfortably lived in).

Selby asks each of his subjects to fill out a questionaire that includes requests for them to draw some of the answers. The author also includes his own charming sketches of the people whose spaces he invaded.

“The Selby Is in Your Place” humanizes everyone Selby shoots, including the often frosty German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld whose rooms on view here are filled almost from top to bottom with the books he loves. It’s the sort of wonderful clutter that any book lover will appreciate (and understand). My only question for Karl would be the same one I often ask myself — How do you find the books you need in what appears to be a jumble?

One of the most interesting sections in the book is devoted to former model Nicolas Malleville and his gorgeous partner Francesca Bonato (top) who used their earnings in New York City to build a little hotel on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.

“The Selby Is in Your Place” combines travelogue, sociology, fashion, and just about every other aspect of pop culture in one of the most diverting books I’ve picked up in a very long time.

To keep up with the latest work by Todd Selby, visit www.TheSelby.com

‘Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.’ — when Audrey played a hooker

Saturday, September 24, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

If you look at the 1961 Audrey Hepburn romantic comedy “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” now, it hardly appears to be a cutting-edge movie.

Hepburn is terrific and the Henry Mancini score delicious, but the film only hints at Holly Golightly’s occupation — she’s a prostitute.

If you know the original Truman Capote novella, it’s disconcerting to see the writer’s stand-in figure played by George Peppard as a heterosexual with designs on Holly.

And Blake Edwards’ crazy decision to cast Mickey Rooney as Holly’s Japanese upstairs neighbor casts a blight on every scene that features “Mr. Yunioshi.”

Back in 1960, however, everyone was nervous about making a movie of Captote’s little book — including Hepburn and her people, who feared it would ruin her nice girl image.

Sam Wasson takes us back to the creation of the movie in a fine 2010 book, “Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.” that was recently republished in paperback.

Wasson shows us how “Tiffany’s” played as key a role in the maturing of American movies in 1961 as Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” did a year earlier.

The very notion of making a romantic comedy in which the heroine was paid for sex by a number of older men, and the hero (of the movie) was kept by a rich older woman (Patricia Neal), was shocking 49 years ago.

It isn’t so much that the finished movie emphasizes the paid sex angle, but in the lead up to filming everyone in the industry was aware of the Capote story and wondered how it could be transformed into a movie under the existing Motion Picture Code. And the keepers of the Code watched the adaptation process more closely than usual because it feared how much of the book Paramount would try to put on the screen.

Wasson takes us back to the late 1950s to show us what a departure from the cultural norms “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” represented and what a different sort of star Hepburn was when compared with the reigning screen goddesses of the period:

“For women in the movies, there existed an extreme dialectic. On the one end. there was Doris Day, and on the other, Marilyn Monroe.”

Hepburn was more reserved than Day and much less overtly sexual than Monroe, but her offbeat beauty, her natural charm, and her delightfully fey voice quickly made her one of the top actresses in Hollywood.

Capote wanted Monroe to play Holly, but producer Marty Jurow and screenwriter George Axelrod knew they needed all the subtlety they could muster in getting the character past the censors, so Hepburn was really their first and only choice.

The actress’ husband, Mel Ferrer, urged his wife not to play a hooker, but the euphemisms of Axelrod’s witty script and the addition of a happy ending the book avoided, cinched the deal.

Wasson takes us through the entire shoot. The first scene filmed — at 5 a.m. on Fifth Ave. — was that spectacular opening in which Holly arrives in a cab at Tiffany’s at dawn to have her coffee and danish while eyeing the jewels in the shop window.

The book details the important role Audrey’s favorite designer, Givenchy, played in giving Holly a simple and sophisticated look that resonated with women all over the world (Holly’s “little black dress’ has never gone out of style).

Wasson also restores Axelrod’s reputation and important position in the Hollywood of the 1950s and 1960s. After scoring a huge hit on Broadway with “The Seven Year Itch” the writer was distressed that in the movie version he and director Billy Wilder had to omit the extramarital sex at the center of the play.

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” allowed Axelrod to get more of his sophisticated style on the screen and no doubt encouraged him to make the giant leap he took the next year with his wild script for the movie version of the Richard Condon novel “The Manchurian Candidate.”

“Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.’ combines sociology, criticism and a bit of gossip in a book that fills in a major gap in modern Hollywood history.

The street fashion photography of Tommy Ton

Friday, September 23, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

If the venerable Bill Cunningham of The New York Times took his wonderful man on the street fashion lay-outs global, the result might look something like the work of the fantastic Tommy Ton.

Ton (below) runs the Jak and Jil blog which gives an insider’s view of the international fashion business — both on the runways and what’s happening on the street outside.

Ton hits all the fashion hot spots — from Milan to New York — and posts beautiful pictures of his travels every day.

The photographer highlights some of the things that are left out of the mainstream fashion press — like the shots he posted of the models coming out of a Dolce & Gabbana show in Milan in 2010 (above).

Ton has a great eye and a journalist’s sense of finding subject matter worth preserving and sharing.

Check out his blog at www.jakandjil.com

The B-movie studio that baby boomer kids loved 50 years ago

Wednesday, September 21, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s, I didn’t really know one movie studio from another, with the single exception of Hammer Films.

The Hammer label always meant horror movies that went a little further than standard Hollywood fare. The British company specialized in re-tellings of classic horror stories such as “Dracula” and “Frankenstein” featuring their stable of entertaining hams, including Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Oliver Reed.

The films were almost always more violent than their Hollywood equivalents — still tame by today’s standards, or course — with the fake blood and gore made vivid by the garish color processes that were used.

It was always a big deal in my neighborhood in Philly when a new Hammer film opened because they usually delivered the goods. The movies also received extensive advance coverage in a pulpy movie magazine called “Famous Monsters of Filmland” so me and my friends would spend weeks anticipating the opening of movies such as “The Brides of Dracula” (1960) or “The Curse of the Werewolf” (1961).

So, you can imagine my surprise when a DVD collection, “The Icons of Suspense — Hammer Films” (Sony Home Video) landed on my desk and I was unfamiliar with all six of the movies.

None of the movies deals with monsters or horror per se, and they are all in black and white.

I never knew that Hammer put out a whole line of more “adult” thrillers in the Alfred Hitchock vein — these films were released in the U.S. through Columbia Pictures without emphasizing the Hammer connection, perhaps because they were deemed more serious and of interest to older audiences. Most of them deal with psychological violence rather than graphic displays and sex plays a role in a couple of the movies.

“Stop Me Before I Kill!” (1961), “Maniac” (1962), “Cash on Demand” (1961) “Never Take Candy from a Stranger” (1960), “The Snorkel” (1958) and “These Are the Damned” (1963) will be amusing time capsule movies for those who were around in the early 1960s. They are reminders of those pre-rating system days when all movies had to be suitable for all audiences — the sex is strictly euphemistic which means some of the illicit relationships remain downright baffling. “Maniac” (above) is about a French cougar played by Nadia Gray who seduces a younger American tourist — Kerwin Matthews of the “Sinbad” movies — but the relationship takes place almost exclusively off-screen so it remains unconvincing.

The most interesting film in the set — by far — is “These Are the Damned” which was made by the expatriate American director Joseph Losey — who had been branded a Communist in this country — just before his European career took off with the art house classic, “The Servant” (1963).

“These Are the Damned” is about an American tourist (Macdonald Carey, before he went to work on the long-running NBC soap, “Days of Our Lives”) who stumbles on a weird British government experiment in an isolated coastal village.

Losey used the location to give the film a distinctively lonely atmosphere and he creeps us out with the suggestion that innocent children are being used for evil purposes.

Oliver Reed contributes a good performance as a village thug who gets more than he bargained for when he crashes the government compound and that wonderfully eccentric Swedish actress Viveca Lindfors livens things up with her performance as an oddball sculptor who lives near the experimental facility.

Sadly, Carey’s performance is as dull as dishwater and his romantic pairing with a very young looking Shirley Anne Field has “dirty old man” written all over it.

I enjoyed this six-movie set as a look back at the kind of low-budget commercial filmmaking that would be replaced by television in the late 1960s and 1970s, but these B-grade thrillers are not nearly as much fun as the Hammer monster pictures.

In Like (Errol) Flynn — the Mel Gibson of the 1940s?

Tuesday, September 20, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

Last year, Warner Home Video put out a wonderful five disc DVD set, “Errol Flynn Adventures,” that focuses on the war movies the star made during the 1940s.

It’s not that “Desperate Journey” (1942, above), “Edge of Darkness” (1943), “Northern Pursuit” (1943), “Uncertain Glory” (1944) and “Objective Burma!” (1945) are such great movies, but they are true time capsules of Hollywood 70 years ago and a dramatic demonstration of the jingoistic (some would say propagandistic) films that were designed to keep home front morale high during World War II.

And Warner Home Video has outdone itself when it comes to the extras on each of the five discs, what the company calls “Warner Night at the Movies,” a sampling of the trailers, cartoons, short subjects and newsreels that moviegoers sat through before a feature film in the 1940s.

I enjoyed watching the attractive and personable Flynn fighting the Nazis and the Japanese in five of his films, but the short subjects are positively mind-blowing.

Those older folks who went to the movies in the early 1940s — or baby boomers like myself who tend to fetishize the so-called “Golden Age” of Hollywood — will get a good stiff dose of what might be called anti-nostalgia in the soppy little 20-minute soap opera, “Across the Wall,” in which a kindly priest helps his favorite prisoner (!) sneak back into jail after he escapes.

If you think popular music reached its peak in the pre-rock era, I would strongly advise you to watch the short devoted to “Borrah Minnevich and His Harmonica School,” a nightmarish series of numbers played by an army of harmonica players.

Another ghastly but fascinating short, “The Tail Gunner,” features future president of the United States Ronald Reagan as an officer who inspires a very short enlistee (Burgess Meredith) to go after his dream of being a bomber tail-gunner.

This is the sort of misguided ode to the military — enacted by men who sat out the war in Hollywood — that reportedly provoked catcalls when shown to actual soldiers overseas rather than homefront moviegoers (in more than one case, soldiers expressed their displeasure by shooting up the screens).

Errol Flynn was a huge star of the 1930s and World War II era who was never taken that seriously as an actor and whose career collapsed in the 1950s after a number of sex scandals (hence the immortal catchphrase, “In Like Flynn”).

Like our own era’s Mel Gibson, Flynn managed the mean feat of being a heartthrob for female moviegoers and a rugged man’s man type with males. But just like Gibson, Flynn’s looks deteriorated prematurely due to his chronic alcoholism (in the shot below, the fallen star is seen with a very young Brigitte Bardot in Cannes).

Flynn suffered from an image problem during World War II when the Australian-born star claimed he wanted to serve in the military but was classified 4-F. The Warner Bros. PR department failed to address the criticism because of fears that the declining state of Flynn’s health (including the effects of a number of venereal diseases) would become public knowledge.

The star died at the age of 50 shortly before the publication of one of the first big Hollywood self-tell-alls, “My Wicked, Wicked Ways.”

Catch up with the amazing Charlotte Gainsbourg

Sunday, September 18, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

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Charlotte Gainsbourg won the best actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010, but she wasn’t among the actresses nominated for an Academy Award that year.

Gainsbourg won her Cannes prize for “Anti-Christ,” a very difficult film that was something of a scandal in this country in limited art house release in the fall of 2010.

Uncompromising and even slighly mad, the movie was meant to provoke audiences and it has, but most critics agreed that Gainsbourg deserved high marks for giving a strong human element to Lars von Trier’s chilly horror film.

Gainsbourg is a truly fearless performer who has interests that extend beyond movies. A fashion icon in France, she has inspired (and helped to develop) a new perfume being released by Balenciaga with an ad campaign featuring the actress in photos shot by Steven Meisel.

Gainsbourg has found success as a singer as well (her last album was a collaboration with Beck).

Although she is only 29, Gainsbourg has been making movies for more than half her life and has already created an estimable body of film work. She was the subject of a mini-retrospective at the French Institute/Alliance Francaise in Manhattan.

The FI/AF screened the charming 2006 surreal comedy “The Science of Sleep” that paired Gainsbourg with Gael Garcia Bernal (below) and the wonderful 2001 romantic comedy, “My Wife is an Actress” that she did with persecution-affiche her triple-threat husband Yvan Attal (who wrote, directed and co-starred in the movie about a man driven almost mad with jealousy by his wife’s work).

The FI/AF also presented the U.S. premiere of the Gainsbourg movie, “Persecution.”

It’s a characteristic Gainsbourg vehicle in which the actress serves the director (Patrice Chereau) and the story rather than her own vanity.

One of the really special things about Gainsbourg’s screen presence is the way that her characters can shift from looking strikingly beautiful to being almost repellantly haggard in the blink of an eye.

She can look “real” in a way that eludes most Hollywood actresses — who are rarely willing to present their faces as nakedly as Gainsbourg has in film after film — and is in the tradition of such beautiful/ugly French stars as Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo.

“Persecution” also demonstrates the star’s willingness to work in support of other actors. The movie focuses on an angry young man named Daniel (Romain Duris in a tremendous performance) who seems to resent the way his good looks and basically decent nature attract other people to him.

Daniel works odd jobs and is living in one of his half-finished apartment construction sites when “Persecution” begins. He is maintaining an on again/off again relationship with a businesswoman (Gainsbourg) who spends much of her time traveling the globe.

Although Daniel tends to push people away, he is driven half mad by Sonia’s busy schedule. She knows the young man is all wrong for her, but appreciates the fact that he takes her for what she is (Gainsbourg has a remarkable scene in which Sonia talks about the various social masks she wears with the other people in her life).

Gainsbourg makes Sonia into such a distinctive character that her presence lingers over the scenes in which she is absent (the actress gets a memorable voice-only scene in which Sonia calls Daniel on the phone from a Pennsylvania hotel that both fascinates and repels her).

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