Joe's View

With Joe Meyers, entertainment writer

Archive for June, 2012

A surprisingly bleak ’50s adventure film from Warner Archive

Saturday, June 30, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

In the years before she became an iconic figure in Federico Fellini’s 1960 blockbuster “La Dolce Vita,” Anita Ekberg had a brief flirtation with Hollywood stardom.

The stunning blonde was named Miss Sweden in 1950. She didn’t win the Miss Universe pageant that year, but Ekberg did land a modeling contract that resulted in a series of Hollywood film roles, including the final Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin picture “Hollywood or Bust” in 1956.

Howard Hughes apparently had a thing for her, signing Ekberg to a contract at his RKO studio and giving her a big publicity build-up in which he compared the newcomer to those two other Swedish imports Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman.

Ekberg wasn’t really an actress at that point, but she had a stunning physical presence that is evident in the best movie Hughes put her in, “Back from Eternity” (1956), which has just been released on DVD by Warner Archive.

The movie is a remake of “Five Came Back” (1939). Both films were directed by John Farrow — Mia’s dad — and tell an aviation disaster story that is much tougher than “The High and the Mighty” (1954), “Airport” (1970) and other films in the genre.

Ekberg is one of the passengers on a commercial flight that crashes in a remote part of Brazil during the rainy season. The pilot (Robert Ryan) knows from the start that there is no hope of rescue — the weather pushed the plane way off course and continuous cloud cover makes it impossible for rescue planes to spot the survivors.

The plane’s engines are repaired, but will only have enough power to lift five people back to civilization. Adding to the anxiety of who will be picked for the flight out is the fact that a headhunting tribe is moving ever closer to the crash site.

“Back from Eternity” was clearly shot on a B-picture budget.

The movie is in black-and-white, the special effects are subpar, and the “jungle” was obviously contructed on a soundstage.

The story is gripping enough to overcome those technical obstacles, however, and the cast is a great mix of veteran character actors (Beulah Bondi), appealing young performers who never quite made it in movies (Phyllis Kirk) and at least one rising star (Rod Steiger).

And Anita Ekberg at 25 was so luscious as to justify her appearance in movies on purely physical terms. It’s no wonder that Fellini would pick her four years later to represent the essence of 1950s Hollywood in “La Dolce Vita” — ensuring the former beauty queen a place in movie history.

Nora Ephron’s underrated comedy about the end of romance

Friday, June 29, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

Like almost everyone else, I was shocked by the news of the death of Nora Ephron a few days ago.

She was a culture hero to me going all the way back to the 1970s when I devoured her newspaper and magazine column collections “Crazy Salad” and “Scribble Scribble.”

Saner and funnier than most of the so-called “new” journalists of that era, Ephron was more in the vein of Pauline Kael or Mary McCarthy than Tom Wolfe or Gay Talese — she was a smart and independent woman who defied labels and genres.

Ephron also seemed to possess huge amounts of that rarest of writers’ resources — common sense. Even though few of us shared her privileged background and life in the fastest lanes of New York and Hollywood, Ephron always wrote about people and ideas in a very relatable manner.

I enjoyed almost all of the movies she wrote and directed, but the one that I keep going back to — and the one that best reflects her early days as a columnist and commentator — is “Heartburn.”

Unlike the airy, happily-ever-after romantic comedies Ephron would go on to create — “Sleepless in Seattle,” “You’ve Got Mail” — the 1986 film directed by Mike Nichols is about finding and then losing romance when a partner proves to be a serial cheater.

“Heartburn” is a very funny and well-observed social comedy with a big bitter pill buried in it — the fact that men don’t seem to be programmed to be sexually faithful to one person.

New York magazine food writer Rachel (Meryl Streep) goes through hell in the movie because she has already had one bad marriage and mistakenly believes she can change Washington political columnist Mark (Jack Nicholson) who is “famous” for his sexual adventures.

Most of the people who happily curl up on the couch with “When Harry Met Sally” and “Sleepless in Seattle” again and again, hated “Heartburn” because it doesn’t conform to romantic comedy expectations.

Not only is Rachel cheated upon by Mark, she learns of his affair in the final stages of her second pregnancy. At the end of the movie we see her boarding the Eastern shuttle back to New York City with a babe in arms and a toddler walking beside her. We know that Rachel will survive and thrive — just as Ephron did under similar circumstances with second husband Carl Bernstein — but it’s not the sort of ending moviegoers expect at a Hollywood romantic comedy with two major stars in the leads.

What makes “Heartburn” so irresistible to me is the tartness of the humor all the way through the film and Mike Nichols’ direction of an astounding cast that also includes Stockard Channing, Jeff Daniels, Catherine O’Hara, Maureen Stapleton, Joanna Gleason and many more (even the tiny role of the mugger who steals Rachel’s wedding ring is played by Kevin Spacey!).

Streep does some of her best acting in this movie — the worse things get for Rachel the funnier she is.

Toward the end of the movie, the star pulls off a tour de force scene in a Georgetown beauty parlor where the chatter of the girls around Rachel (about their no-good boyfriends) makes her finally realize what Mark has been up to. Nichols does the whole sequence in one long take so we can study Rachel’s face as the awful truth starts to sink in.

‘The Bad and the Better’: an orgy for theater lovers

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

With their new show “The Bad and the Better,” The Amoralists have moved a bit closer to New York City’s mainstream — from the Lower East Side to 42nd Street — but they haven’t given an inch in terms of challenging, confrontational theater.

The Amoralists’ resident playwright Derek Ahonen is peerless when it comes to getting ideas that are percolating in the culture on stage while they still matter. Play by play, he is creating a body of work that has captured the madness and the hilarity of living in America at the turn of the Millennium.

Ahonen is part journalist, part philosopher and part saloon poet — he somehow manages to write plays that are both true to life and larger than life. How Ahonen can bring together so many jagged pieces and then make them fit together seamlessly is a mystery that I hope he never solves.

The playwright is also a connoisseur of pop culture who knows how to borrow and reshape ideas and material from other artists who have mattered to him — the rawness of John Cassavetes, the wild mix of comedy and tragedy in the best movies of Brian DePalma, and the everything-happening-at-once film tapestries created by Robert Altman.

“The Bad and the Better” has complex political corruption plot threads running through it that are pure film noir, but the stage also regularly erupts in raucous sex comedy, and send-ups of modern theater (including scenes that poke fun at Ahonen himself).

The Peter Jay Sharp Theater in the Playwrights Horizons complex is a snug venue, but set designer Alfred Schatz has created a wide, layered environment that makes the play look as big as the places and the ideas that are knocking around in it.

Director Daniel Aukin keeps things flowing like a movie and despite a cast of 26 and more locations than you could count, you will never feel lost in Ahonen’s scary and funny world.

The Amoralists’ smashing resident company of actors has been augmented by more than a dozen newcomers who fit right in, but special mention must be made of company star Sarah Lemp (below, right) as Miss Hollis, the secretary whose failed attempts to keep her mind on her work power the play’s wildest moments.

Lemp has pulled off many of the most difficult scenes that Ahonen has written in previous Amoralist productions such as “The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side” and “Happy in the Poorhouse” but the actress has an aggressive sex scene here that might be the funniest thing of its type since Julie Christie’s Election Night maneuver in “Shampoo.”

(“The Bad and the Better” is set to run through July 21. For tickets go to www.theamoralists.com)

Another naughty, record-breaking ‘Broadway Bares’

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

The guest stars at the annual “Broadway Bares” benefit last week might not have been as impressive as the turn-out at previous years’ shows — it will be hard to top the opening number with Vanessa Williams and Kristin Chenoweth in 2010 — but the dance numbers were some of the best ever.

The theme of the 23rd annual Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS benefit was “Happy Endings” with most of the numbers taking off from fairy tale characters such as Rapunzel and the Pied Piper.

Director Lee Wilkins pulled together one showstopper after another, with an especially spectacular Bollywood-style Aladdin number choreographed by Dontee Kiehn.

I started going to “Broadway Bares” ten years ago and the way that the one-night-only show has grown each year is mind-boggling.

The numbers are put together in a few weeks’ time, with more than 200 Broadway dancers taking part. The results are as polished and as exciting as anything you might see in a major musical.

The show has served as a launching pad for several top choreographers, starting with Jerry Mitchell, who created “Broadway Bares” and went on to stage everything from “Hairspray” to “Legally Blonde,” and Christoper Gattelli who won the Tony last month for his work on “Newsies.”

It is hard to imagine the logistics of putting “Broadway Bares” together while most of the performers are doing eight shows a week in musicals — the pressure to exceed people’s expectations from the previous year’s show must also be considerable.

It’s sad that “Broadway Bares” is only performed for one night at Roseland but there is literally no way it could be expanded because of the dancers’ commitments to the musicals that pay their rent.

Despite the constraint of a one-night stand, BC/EFA somehow manages to beat the previous show’s fundraising total every year.

The 2012 total was $1,254,176 and funds will keep coming in via the many souvenir items that BC/EFA sells online all year long — including a very sexy 2013 “Happy Endings” calendar.

You can find the merchandise at www.broadwaycares.org and many more photos from the show at www.broadwayworld.com

Rent it now: Eytan Fox’s ‘The Bubble’

Monday, June 25, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

From April 23, 2011 — A musician acquaintance of mine who played a gig in Tel Aviv a few years ago was shocked by the stable and rather apolitical atmosphere he encountered in the city’s bohemian quarter: “I felt as safe there as I do in New York.”

That comment is reinforced by the controversial 2007 Israeli film, “The Bubble,” which opened and closed in U.S. art houses without receiving much attention.

The film by writer-director Eytan Fox (who had a 2004 limited release hit here with the fine “Walk on Water”) is set in the artsiest areas of Tel Aviv and takes us into the lives of three young hipsters who are self-proclaimed leftists opposed to their government’s handling of the Palestinian situation.

“The Bubble” is eye-opening on several levels.

We get to see that there is a sizeable and open faction of Israeli Jews who are calling for an end to the occupation of the Palestinian territories.

We hang out with these young people who share an apartment — two gay men and one straight woman — and who are virtually indistinguishable in terms of lifestyle from people in the same demographic now living in the gentrified areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Politics seep into the movie through Noam (Ohad Knoller) who works as a clerk in a music store, but on weekends serves in the National Guard processing the IDs of Palestinians going through checkpoints.

Noam encounters a handsome Palestinian named Ashraf (Yousef Sweid) who later turns up in Tel Aviv and becomes Noam’s boyfriend.

Ashraf enjoys the stimulating artistic atmosphere of Tel Aviv’s bohemian “bubble” — and its non-judgmental approach to gay relationships — but every time he returns home he becomes more aware of the oppression of Palestinians as well as the harsh, conservative stance toward homosexuality among his family and friends.

“The Bubble” is about the way that politics and the outside world can intrude on comfortable middle-class young people who think they are above all of that. The movie’s shift to rather unbelievable melodrama in the final is jarring — and will encourage some audience members to reject the whole film — but Fox’s drama is honestly provocative.

When John Lennon moved to New York City

Sunday, June 24, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

From Dec. 5, 2010 — If you missed the airing of “LENNONYC” on the PBS series “American Masters” you can catch up with it on DVD via A&E Home Entertainment.

As usual with Susan Lacy’s long-running series, the Lennon documentary is way above average, examining one specific period in the musician’s life rather than trying to cover his whole career. And, of course, the “American Masters” label wouldn’t apply to Lennon’s years back home in England with The Beatles.

The film shows us how the artist and his controversial wife, Yoko Ono, escaped the madness of Beatlemania in England — and the press obsession with Ono as the destroyer of The Beatles — to make a new life in New York City in the early 1970s.

Although Lennon remained a high profile figure wherever he went, New York in the turbulent 1970s provided him with the ability to lead a fairly “normal” day to day life away from the intense tabloid press coverage in his native land. The documentary shows Lennon as another of the millions of talented foreigners who have helped to make New York City the center of American cultural life.

“LENNONYC” mixes strong interview segments with archival footage of Lennon in New York, including large samples of the political/musical events he took part in.

Yoko Ono “supported” the film but doesn’t appear to have tried to whitewash her late husband. We get a full accounting of Lennon’s famous “lost weekend” period, when he ran off to Los Angeles for a hedonistic escape from his marriage (with May Pang).

Ono tells us that she wanted Pang to go to L.A. with her husband so that he wouldn’t become completely unhinged there. Apparently, the brilliant musician always needed a strong woman to guide him through day to day responsibilities.

Lennon came back to the city for one of the most productive periods of his career. Of course, there is an unintentional pall cast over the second half of the two-hour film because we know that the tight creative and personal bond between Lennon and Ono will be destroyed at the end of 1980.

Giving ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’ another look

Saturday, June 23, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

From March 29, 2011 — Warner Home Video is releasing “Tracy and Hepburn: The Definitive Collection” on April 12 and I began working my way through the nine movies the two stars did together over the weekend.

I decided to start with the final Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy picture — the 1967 “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” — because I hadn’t seen it in many years and wondered how this comedy-drama about mixed marriage would hold up in the Obama era.

Although it was fashionable in 1967 to knock the picture for being an old-fashioned approach to social issues — the Stanley Kramer picture had the misfortune of arriving at the end of the same year that brought us the barrier-breaking “Bonnie & Clyde” and “The Graduate” — the depiction of a relationship between a young white woman and an older black man was controversial in many places.

People on the two coasts might have scoffed at the notion of Tracy and Hepburn playing glossy Hollywood-style liberal parents who had to come to grips with interracial marriage, but when the film opened there were still states in this country that outlawed the practice.

Watching the movie for the first time in more than 30 years, I was struck by the strange mix of the old Hollywood production style and director Stanley Kramer’s ham-handed treatment of the pop culture of the late 1960s.

An early scene in which a white delivery man and one of the liberal couple’s young black maids proceed to dance their way out to his truck is now excruciatingly unwatchable. As is the sequence in which Tracy and Hepburn go out for ice cream to a San Francisco drive-in (!) which looks like a leftover from the 1950s.

But the core of the film is still very powerful — a liberal couple having their own values tested when their daughter lives out a philosophy they have espoused their whole lives.

Tracy plays a San Francisco newspaper publisher and Hepburn runs an art gallery. Although we are told early on that they are not religious — surprising for a mainstream Hollywood film then and now — one of their best friends is a charming Catholic priest played by Cecil Kellaway. He is shocked when the publisher expresses reservations about the planned marriage.

The picture certainly stacks the deck against anyone who might be opposed to the black-white engagement — the daughter’s intended is a handsome globe-trotting doctor who does vital work for the World Health Organization.

Critics have always raised the question of what the 37-year-old Sidney Poitier character sees in the rather callow recent college graduate played by Katharine Houghton (Hepburn’s niece) but we have to accept the fact that these two opposites attracted each other during a Hawaii vacation.

What really carried the movie then and continues to make it gripping now are the performances by Tracy and Hepburn and Poitier (and a sensational bit of supporting work by Beah Richards as Poitier’s mother).

Hepburn is saddled with a semi-mod outfit in her first few scenes that is distracting — to say the least — but her emotional power is awesome as we see her character quickly accept the happiness her daughter has found and then watch the woman’s anixiety mount as she fears her husband won’t give the couple his blessing.

Tracy is the audience surrogate in the movie. A voice of reason who sees the hatred that will be directed against the couple (and any children they might have) and who isn’t sure he wants his daughter to be involved in the social upheavals that were then swirling in the country.

The Poitier character lays back during the first half of the movie — deferring to Tracy and Hepburn — but then he gets a scene near the end of the movie with his father that is still explosive in terms of what it shows us about the parent-child relationship. Poitier was the biggest star in movies in 1967 and you can see why during this almost overpowering scene.

We might like to think that the “issue” in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” is long-settled but the shocking return of public racism after the election of Barack Obama makes much of the movie seem all too relevant 44 years after it was made.

‘The Other Woman’: a not-so-wicked stepmother

Friday, June 22, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

From Feb. 13, 2011 — The Don Roos film “The Other Woman,” starring Natalie Portman, was ready for release two years ago, but has just debuted in New York City at the IFC Center and as an On Demand choice of Sundance Selects, but don’t let this slight aura of damaged goods put you off.

It’s a powerful film — mixing drama and comedy with little strain — about a New York woman coping with a new marriage and her rocky performance as stepmother to her husband’s precocious eight-year-old son.

Emilia Greenleaf (Natalie Portman) is also coping with the death of her infant daughter right after she married an attorney at her firm — Jack (Scott Cohen, below) — who left his first wife, Carolyne (Lisa Kudrow), for the younger woman.

Online you can find some pretty vile chat room assessments of this movie that say Emilia is a character beneath contempt — for “stealing” someone else’s husband — but the fresh thing about “The Other Woman” is the way that it doesn’t sugarcoat the challenge of juggling romantic relationships with family responsibilities.

Emilia is still so frozen by her grief that she can’t deal with her husband’s son, William (played by the amazing Charlie Tahan, above), in a clear-headed manner, and the boy is so angry about what his father did that he pushes Emilia’s buttons in a very nasty way (in one scene, the kid suggests his stepmother sell her dead baby’s unused stroller and crib on eBay).

Jack’s ex is so furious about what happened to her marriage that she plants poisonous ideas in her son’s head (i.e. that under Jewish tradition, Emilia’s baby didn’t live long enough to count as a “real person”).

The abrasive relationships are depicted so unflinchingly that it is easy to understand why some reviewers have been put off by the movie, but I admire the way Roos captures a messy, painful situation and then shows us how the characters muddle through it.

Portman gives another remarkable performance — on a par with her work in “Black Swan” — as an angry woman who only earns our sympathy after long scenes in which she seems to be sabotaging herself and her marriage.

“The Other Woman” shows us how tragedies don’t arrive singly — and on schedule — in life.

You don’t necessarily have a chance to process one trauma before another erupts — in fact, in my experience, family crises explode in shocking clusters (with those who are closest to you not always behaving the way you expect them to in the face of disaster).

Roos deserves kudos for producing a mainstream film about contemporary family life that has genuine emotional complexity.

(“The Other Woman” is currently available as an On Demand selection from Sundance Selects.)

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