Joe's View

With Joe Meyers, entertainment writer

Archive for September, 2012

Rent it now: American crime drama with a European flavor

Sunday, September 30, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

We have grown so used to the cliches of Hollywood suspense pictures that when a film like “Daylight” comes along with a fresh approach to the genre, it can prove to be exceptionally startling and upsetting for audiences.

The independently produced drama follows an upper class couple who make the terrible mistake of picking up a hitchhiker after they get lost driving to a family wedding.

The relationship of Daniel (Aidan Redmond) and Irene (Alexandra Meierhans) seems vaguely abrasive in the opening moments — despite the fact that she is hugely pregnant — and some in the audience will be put off by the casual affluence represented by the Maserati they ride in and the couple’s vaguely foreign accents.

Daniel only stops for Renny (Michael Godere) because he’s lost and irritated. After the young man explains how they can get back on track, he guilt trips Daniel into taking him where he’s going.

Moments later, weapon in hand, Renny forces Daniel to pick up his partner in crime, Leo (Ivan Martin), and he directs them to a nearby rambling country home.

Director David Barker and his writing collaborators Godere and Meierhans adopt an observational mode in which very little is explained to us — we have to piece together who these young men are and what their motives might be, just as if we are in the position of the abducted couple.

It takes a while to catch on to the fact that the beautiful house was the scene of a home invasion and that the occupants — whoever they might have been — were killed.

“Daylight” doesn’t become overtly frightening until the chilling scene in which Renny casually prepares to slit Daniel’s throat. The terrified man convinces his abductors that he can get them a pile of money at the family estate he and his wife were driving to.

What makes the movie so frightening is that we never really glean what is driving Renny and Leo — are they simply thrill killers who want to torture and dispatch two more victims or do they have some bigger plan in store for Irene and Daniel?

The way Barker mixes a predominantly cool emotional tone with a feeling of dread reminded me of the films of the Austrian director Michael Haneke, who has divided art house audiences with his deeply unsettling dramas “Funny Games,” “Cache” and “The White Ribbon.”

The absence of thriller and horror movie cliches is reflected in the understated performances of the very fine ensemble. Neither the director nor the actors push us toward or away from the characters, so we find ourselves sometimes sympathetic to the killers and also put off by the “victims.”

The movie’s title becomes ironic as we are taken into an unimaginably dark situation and then left to our own devices — some moviegoers will find the approach liberating (as I did) and others will be angered by Barker’s rigorous refusal to resort to emotional manipulation.

‘Paul on Mazursky’: exploring an underrated filmmaker’s work

Saturday, September 29, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

Film director books presented in a question-and-answer format are often tiresome, and full of obfuscation, but Sam Wasson’s “Paul on Mazursky” (Wesleyan University Press) captures smart talk about the work of the man who gave us “An Unmarried Woman,” “Next Stop, Greenwich Village” (below), “Blume in Love” and many other remarkably realistic comedies.

Paul Mazursky is one of the top writer-directors of the modern era, but he never seems to get his due in critical and historical overviews of the 1970s and 1980s (his peak years). Overshadowed by Woody Allen and Mel Brooks in the comedy department, Mazursky also avoided the personal scandals that add spice to accounts of the excesses of the New Hollywood period that arrived with the opening of “Bonnie & Clyde” in 1967 and then “Midnight Cowboy” and “Easy Rider” two years later.

Mazursky has been married to the same woman for 60 years and avoided the drug-fueled 1970s excesses of peers like Martin Scorsese. He also made modestly-budgeted, realistically-scaled films that didn’t give journalists much juice in terms of behind-the-scenes color (Mazursky was never involved with a super-expensive runaway 1970s production such as Francis Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” or Steven Spielberg’s “1941”.)

After making a big splash with the 1969 sex comedy “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” Mazursky went to work on a series of beautifully detailed comedy-dramas — produced with very little technical razzmatazz — that were modestly successful at the box office, embraced by critics and audiences, but are now overlooked in favor of splashier 1970s pictures like “Nashville” and “Taxi Driver.”

“Paul by Mazursky” takes us through the writer-director’s filmography — picture by picture — and Mazursky levels with Wasson about the ups and downs of his career. Like Woody Allen, Mazursky obtained much of his artistic freedom through his respect for sticking to modest budgets and delivering to executives the movies that his scripts promised.

Mazursky also worked in a time when individual studio bosses like Alan Ladd Jr. at Fox and John Calley at Warner Bros. would simply say “yes” to a script and a production would commence. Studios were still run by risk-taking individual movie lovers in those days, not today’s committees of executives who can wear out a director’s enthusiasm by the time a project is finally approved.

“I made movies cheaply,” Mazursky tells Wasson. “I had no padding, and I was taking low fees. On ‘Unmarried’ I had points so I made a great deal of money (after it was released and became a hit.)”

Mazursky’s streak of well-received small-scale pictures continued through the 1980s with “Moscow on the Hudson” and the terrific “Enemies, A Love Story” (above).

But the director stumbled badly with a big flop “Scenes from a Mall” in 1991 which wound up costing more than the average Mazursky picture when the project shifted from a small-scale picture conceived for Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline to a big-budget production with Bette Midler and Woody Allen.

Mazursky is honest about his own budgetary failings on “Scenes.” He allowed it to escalate from one of his standard $5-$10 million projects to a $20 million picture, largely due to having to shoot the Los Angeles-based story in New York City and Stamford to accommodate a star (Allen) who would not work in L.A.

Wasson gets his subject to talk honestly about how some of his movies failed to click because of casting problems — Michael Ontkean and Ray Sharkey in “Willie and Phil” and the disaster that resulted from using Danny Aiello as the lead in “The Pickle” rather than Michael Caine or Donald Sutherland.

Mazursky also opens up about his nightmarish problems with Cher on “Faithful” after she tried to take the editing of the film away from him and was briefly supported by producer Robert DeNiro (until it became clear that the Directors Guild of America might step in to stop Cher).

“Paul on Mazursky” is as funny and as honest as its subject’s best movies.

‘My Shopping Addiction’: low-end reality TV

Friday, September 28, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

Everyone knows that we are in a new Golden Age of TV when it comes to the best stuff being produced by HBO, Showtime, PBS and even the commercial networks.

Most nights, you’d be better off staying home and watching “Homeland” or “Boardwalk Empire” or “Game of Thrones” than venturing out to a multiplex to see the latest Kevin James comedy or 3D comic book extravaganza.

But with so many channels and hours of programming to fill, the low-end of basic cable is almost unbelievably bad — making the “vast wasteland” of early 1960s network TV (in the much-repeated words of FCC chairman Newton Minnow) look terrific by comparison.

I’d rather watch a 50-year-old episode of “My Mother, The Car” or “It’s About Time” on YouTube than check out the new “Girlfriend Confidential L.A.” or the Honey Boo Boo series on The Learning Channel (!)

The other night, in a moment of weakness, I popped in a screener of the upcoming Oxgen series “My Shopping Addiction” — the launch date of which has been bumped from Oct. 9 to Oct. 15 — and was amazed yet again by all of the time and effort that is being wasted on cheaply produced, mind-numbing reality TV.

Like so many other series in this worn-out genre — a new unscripted form of soap opera with amateurs doing the bad acting — “My Shopping Addiction” is less about “reality” and more about the bad behavior people pick up from reality TV and then recycle when their moment in the spotlight arrives.

The new Oxygen series is about a serious problem — the overspending so many people indulge in — but it sidesteps that issue in favor of people pushing themselves to act like those boorish “housewives” on Bravo or the denizens of “Jersey Shore” (on a bad day).

Episode one contrasts the $30,000-a-month spending habit of a Las Vegas trust fund baby named Heather with the much more modest but equally destructive $300-a-month that Roshanda spends at her local dollar store.

Neither of the women is particularly likeable or relatable (unless you are itching to try-out for a low-end reality show).

“I would rather buy a new Louis Vuitton than have sex,” Heather tells us in her first appearance. Roshanda is shown borrowing money from her best friend to pay the check out woman at the dollar store.

Raging narcissists, the women are given counselors — Dr. Ramani Durvasula (above) and Dr. David Tolin — who seem more interested in being on television than helping either of the women in a substantive way. The way the “scenes” are shot and then commented upon by the participants suggests heavy behind-the-scenes manipulation and coaching by the producers.

The two women behave badly, but they don’t do it with the gaudy flair of the Bravo ladies or the “Jersey Shore” gang before they became famous. The number of recaps within the first episode also demonstrate the producer’s low opinion of the audience they’re courting — it doesn’t take much brain power to keep these two empty stories strauight without so many reminders of what we have just seen.

I have a hunch that when “My Shopping Addiction” finally airs, most viewers will channel surf away from it very quickly — it trivializes an important issue and as entertainment doesn’t succeed at its very low level of ambition. It makes “Hoarders” look like “Mad Men.”

‘Bedlam at the Bijou’: redeeming a misspent youth

Thursday, September 27, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

Although I don’t think “Vault of Horror” blogger Brian Solomon needs any help when it comes to talking about 1950s science-fiction movies, I was flattered when he asked me to join him for the first “Bedlam at the Bijou” event tonight at 7 p.m. at the gorgeous downtown Bridgeport venue.

Brian is screening two key sci-fi hits of the Eisenhower era — the 1956 Japanese import “Godzilla” and a 1954 Warner Bros. release “Them!”

The pictures were part of a massive wave of horror films and science-fiction movies that kept baby boomer kids happily scared from the 1950s well into the 1960s.

Although most of these pictures were shunned by mainstream adult audiences, they planted the seeds for the A-list science-fiction wave that would start in 1968 with “Planet of the Apes” and “2001: A Space Odyssey” and then explode with the release of “Star Wars” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” in 1977.

I couldn’t tell you how many of these movies I caught at the “kiddie matinees” at my neighborhood theaters when I was growing up in Chicago and Philadelphia. I also count myself lucky that my father loved B-movies and would take me and my brother to see things like the original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” before I was old enough to go on my own.

If you missed any of these movies in theaters, you could catch up with a lot of them on local television stations that would often devote their Saturday night “late show” slots to B-horror pictures. Many of the 1950s pictures — like “Body Snatchers” — didn’t really attain “classic” status until the following decade, via late-night TV screenings.

What most of us didn’t realize when “Godzilla” came out here in 1956 was that the original 1954 film had been seriously tampered-with in its journey from Japan to the U.S. Like so many other 1950s science-fiction films, the original “Godzilla” was a scathing attack on the creation of the atomic bomb and its dire environmental consequences, and who knew this more than the Japanese?

The U.S. distributor turned what was an A-picture in Japan — a big-budget film made in the vein of “King Kong” — into a B-movie here. Material that was deemed anti-American was cut and a whole new framing story was quickly shot in Hollywood, featuring Raymond Burr as an American reporter covering the arrival of Godzilla in Tokyo. The new stuff was campy even way back then.

Tonight, Brian Solomon is showing the original Japanese version of the movie and it should be interesting to hear him talk about all of the changes that were made for its U.S. release.

The “Bedlam at the Bijou” series will continue in the fall with more Solomon-hosted double features. I can’t wait!

(For more information, visit www.thebijoutheatre.com)

‘Eye’: the woman who invented (and reinvented) herself

Tuesday, September 25, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

Immortalized as the crazed editor in “Funny Face” and presented as herself in the hit off-Broadway play “Full Gallop,” Diana Vreeland was — up until the emergence of Anna Wintour — the most celebrated woman in the modern history of fashion.

Vreeland was one of those very amusing self-invented women who also had a sense of humor about the larger-than-life persona she had created. She lived life in the same exaggerated style as the legendary American acting teacher Stella Adler who was once asked by a New York shopgirl if she was British, and supposedly replied, “No, just affected.”

The so-called “high priestess of fashion” died in 1989, but the Vreeland legend has expanded over the past 20 years as the public interest in fashion has grown. Sarah Jessica Parker did a magazine spread a few months ago in which she aped Vreeland in a set that was modelled on the editor’s fabled all-red apartment.

Lisa Immordino Vreeland, who is married to Diana’s grandson, Alexander, is keeping the flame burning with two major projects — a documentary film and a book — both of which are called “The Eye Has to Travel.”

The movie just opened in New York City last weekend. In 2011, Abrams published the oversized book which beautifully encapsulates Vreeland’s career as a trend-spotter at two major magazines — Bazaar and Vogue — and then her final work, turning the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum into a major part of the New York social and art scene.

The author of the book never met her husband’s grandmother but reveled in the stories she heard from Vreeland’s two sons, and two grandsons.

“Their stories were peppered with hilarious accounts of their adventures with her, her illustrious career, and her attitude toward life and family,” Immordino Vreeland writes in the introduction.

“Her extroverted personality masked an important characteristic: She was a committed and loyal friend and a great listener. I admire these traits — they have always been important to me — and I found her ability to live such a public life and maintain a private demeanor was something that is often overlooked today.”

The book sketches in Vreeland’s biography in a few introductory essays and then presents page after page of the lay-outs, photographs and features that the editor brought to her two very influential magazine jobs.

Although she was 57 when the 1960s began that’s when Vreeland really hit her stride — shifting from Bazaar to Vogue and coining the term “youthquake” for all of the revolutionary things that were going on in pop culture and on the streets.

Vreeland turned off some older readers with her big spreads devoted to The Beatles and the daring, exploratory photography of her pet Richard Avedon and the great Irving Penn, but she became a leader rather than a follower and proved that — at least in her case — age is just a number.

Vreeland was horrified when Vogue let her go at the end of the 1960s, but she bounced back — big time — when the Met asked her to jazz up the Costume Institute. She brought the super-show concept to that part of the museum, laying the groundwork for last summer’s record-breaking Alexander McQueen exhibit.

She also left current Vogue editor Anna Wintour with one of the great social and media events of the year — the annual Costume Institute fundraising gala.

The book is a feast for the eyes that, read in conjunction with Vreeland’s zany, one of a kind memoir “D.V.” bolsters Truman Capote’s assertion that the editor was one of the “seven or eight truly original women” that America has produced.

The very weird Vanity Fair hatchet job on Tom Cruise

Sunday, September 23, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

A recent vacation put me several weeks’ behind in my magazine reading, so I just caught up with the much talked-about Maureen Orth Vanity Fair October cover story on Tom Cruise and Scientology.

It’s another new low in that terrible journalistic genre — the glossy magazine celebrity cover story.

I have as many qualms about Scientology as the next guy — when I was a young and foolish college student, many years ago, I spent several hours in the New York headquarters, taking one of the organization’s “personality” tests and the experience left me feeling creeped-out for days afterwards.

But, the largely unsubstantiated Orth attack on Cruise and his connection to Scientology struck me as unfair and the presentation seemed dishonest to me.

The cover line “What Katie Didn’t Know: Marriage, Scientology-Style” — and the Mona Lisa Smile shot of the actress — promises an expose of the recently dissolved Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes marriage that the article never delivers.

Remember that famous line of Mary McCarthy’s about Lillian Hellman? — “every word she writes is a lie including and and the.” Well, that was the sentence that came to mind after I compared the magazine cover promises with the story inside.

The piece isn’t really about the Holmes-Cruise marriage at all. It mostly deals with an Iranian woman no one has ever heard of — Nazarin Boniadi — who dated Cruise for a few months, almost a decade ago, and who apparently paid no attention to the confidentiality agreements the article says she was forced to sign by the movie star and his minions.

The piece tells us Cruise is such an oddball that he now needs Scientology to line up dates (and wives) for him.

One of the world’s biggest movie stars for the past 30 years — whose wives and girlfriends have included some of the most glamorous women of our time — can no longer get a date without “church” help!

None of Cruise’s ex-wives, including Holmes, were interviewed for the article, so the implication that they too were solicited by Scientology on the star’s behalf remains unsubstantiated.

The nastier subtext of the article — the real reasons why a movie star might have to resort to arranged dates and marriages — goes completely unexplored.

So, Katie “didn’t know” that Tom went out on dates with a woman he met through his religion, and then quickly broke up with — eight years ago.

So what?

It’s not surprising that Graydon Carter makes no mention of this bizarre “special report” in his “Editor’s Letter” at the front of the magazine.

Cruise — and maybe even Holmes — must feel completely blindsided by a magazine that devoted 22 pages to pictures of them and their child only a few years ago.

Coming: William J. Mann explains Barb(a)ra Streisand

Saturday, September 22, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

Leave it to ace Hollywood biographer/analyst William J. Mann to come up with a completely fresh look at one of the greatest (and most over-exposed) stars of our time — Barbra Streisand – in his new book “Hello, Gorgeous,” which Houghton Mifflin will publish on Oct. 9.

Mann is peerless for his ability to rethink the lives and careers of stars who have already been the subjects of who-knows-how-many books.

“Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn” (2007) and “How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood” (2009) made most other film star bios look like sloppy, thoughtless rubbish because of the way Mann combined scholarship with smart speculation about some of the unsolved mysteries in those two superstars’ lives.

Mann doesn’t rehash what other biographers have done — he finds new angles and new ways into studying icons who might appear to be worn out from many decades’ worth of books and magazine articles (and gossip).

The author cuts through the PR fantasies of stardom that just seems to happen to some people, if you believe the gush in promotional magazine and newspaper interviews and sitdowns with Oprah Winfrey.

For unknown reasons, audiences seem to prefer the notion of a fairly passive road to fame — by someone who pretends to be just like us — rather than the more complex marrriage of talent and hustle that is at the root of most success in Hollywood or New York City.

“Hello Gorgeous” is about the first five years of Streisand’s career — when she went from an unknown 17-year-old Brooklyn girl with dreams of an acting career to a 22-year-old sensation who was starring in “Funny Girl” and was already the subject of cover stories in Life and Time magazine (in the days when being on the cover of Time was a big deal for someone in show business).

Streisand did meet with almost immediate approval when she sang at a new talent night at a Greenwich Village cabaret — she won the weekly event so many times that she finally had to give up her title so others could share it. Word spread quickly about this terrific, emotionally intense young singer — within two years, she had a juicy supporting role in the Broadway musical “I Can Get It for You Wholesale” and a contract with Columbia Records.

But Mann shows how Streisand’s early alignment with powerful management and publicity people eased her rise to fame via the star-making role in “Funny Girl.”

Timing was all-important for Streisand. The 1960s were just bubbling up with new audiences who were ready for new types of entertainers, such as Woody Allen and Dustin Hoffman.

The young actress’ decision to be proud of the Jewish heritage that so many other entertainers hid — Mann reminds us that Lauren Bacall and Piper Laurie are Jewish but not outspoken about it — only became possible because of the new climate in the country.

Just as America was finally ready for a young and Catholic president, it was also prepared to embrace a young, Jewish singing and stage star. Indeed, Streisand addressed the issue of her not having a nose job as part of the charming schtick she served up on early talk show appearances with Mike Wallace and Joe Franklin.

Mann doesn’t just recreate the early years of Streisand, he brings back to life a long-vanished era in New York and show biz when Broadway was still a fast track to national fame and when TV and radio variety shows were still open to iconoclastic new talent.

“Hello Gorgeous” allows the reader to time travel back to a marvelous period when, as Mann writes, “talent still mattered, when the pursuit of greatness, not infamy, was rewarded — a world very different from ours, where Snooki and the Kardashians and drunken ‘real housewives’ grab the lion’s share of media attention.” You don’t have to be a Barbra Streisand fan to relish this smart and compelling look back at the introduction of a truly revolutionary star.

Rent it now: a fresh look at the Hollywood fame game

Friday, September 21, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

Who would imagine that a documentary about celebrity culture — with extensive interview footage involving Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan — would turn out as well as Adrian Grenier’s “Teenage Paparazzo”?

Grenier is one of the stars of my least-favorite HBO series, “Entourage,” which is all about movie people in Los Angeles, so I feared his documentary would be some awful rant about the actor’s problems with being followed by the paparazzi.

But, Grenier proves to be a smart observer of the world in which he lives and the actor-director found a good way into an over-exposed topic. One day, the performer noticed a 13-year-old kid with a camera in the mass of paparazzi photographers and he wondered what was up.

It turned out that Austin Visschedyk was a genuine “papp” who earned thousands of dollars from his shots of celebs like Hilton and Lohan.

Grenier reached out to the kid and started following him around for many months.

We get to know Austin pretty well in the course of the 90-minute film but Grenier uses him as a jumping off point for a much broader view of the way that celebrity stories and images have taken over so much of the print and Internet media in the new century.

Grenier proves to be an adept interviewer of sociologists, magazine editors and major American intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, all of whom contribute fresh takes on why we have become so mesmerized by people like Paris Hilton (or more recently Charlie Sheen).

There are also sharp comments from Paris and Lindsay — believe it or not — as well as a terrific interview with Eva Longoria (who comes off brighter and funnier than I’ve ever seen her in a standard promo interview).

The movie works on so many levels that Grenier probably could have turned it into a mini-series (the 30 minutes of extras on the HBO Video DVD are terrific).

We watch semi-horrified as Austin starts to become a celebrity in his own right — with a reality series offer from the E! Network — and see how his divorced parents cope with a hobby that turns into a lifestyle they have a hard time controlling.

Grenier deserves great credit for deciding to stay with Austin for many months more than he needed to for documentary purposes. The actor-director clearly had reservations about his potential exploitation of a child and helped Austin come out the other side of his obsession.

Page 1 of 412 3 4 Next »