Joe's View

With Joe Meyers, entertainment writer

Archive for January, 2013

‘Smash’ season two: still a high gloss soap opera

Thursday, January 31, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

The NBC Broadway backstage drama “Smash” returns Tuesday night after a much-publicized end-of-season-one shake-up last year.

Show creator and executive producer Theresa Rebeck was let go, but judging by the first new episode, it’s hard to see many changes in the series’ engaging mix of soap opera and good New York City color.

As is usually the case with a movie or TV show dealing with a specific profession, the insiders (i.e. lots of Broadway folks and the show queens who follow them) spent last winter complaining about the many factual inaccuracies on view — things like actors exiting a theater without changing into their street clothes and the salary figures an actor might be paid for a workshop production.

I thought most of those criticisms were silly, when it was apparent from the beginning that “Smash” was designed as a soap/serial with the usual cheating boyfriends (and wives), bitchy backstabbings between the leading ladies, and lovers who enter and exit without much rhyme or reason.

The naysayers dealt in the same sort of criticism New York-based TV shows and movies face when struggling characters have nicer apartments than they could afford in “real life” and seem to live and work in a world populated almost exclusively by very attractive, very sexy people who look like actors (!)

I don’t think Rebeck or Steven Spielberg (the power behind the throne) ever intended “Smash” to be the “Breaking Bad” of Broadway.

Although many week-by-week viewers of the first season complained of a decline in quality, I watched the whole series in a marathon viewing and found the episodes to be all of a piece — escapist fun with a more realistic than usual backdrop (the producers asked actual theater world players like Jordan Roth and Michael Riedel to appear in cameos and most of the show was shot on well-chosen locations in the city).

The only real sign of changes on “Smash” in the first episode of the new season is the really clunky way the producers and writers get rid of two of the major male characters — the aspiring actress played by Katharine McPhee is left a kiss-off note from her Indian boyfriend Dev and the writer played by Debra Messing splits from her husband in a very poorly directed, and ludicrously rushed, scene set at a big party (I felt embarrassed for what the show puts exiting actor Brian D’Arcy James through).

The pluses in the new “Smash” include Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson (above) as a nice multiple Tony-winning musical diva (i.e. Audra McDonald) and recent “Newsies” star Jeremy Jordan as a bartender/composer who is working on a Jonathan Larson-style downtown musical. Jordan is set up as McPhee’s new beau (and artistic collaborator) and they make a very attractive couple (below).

And as for Theresa Rebeck, her name is still listed prominently in the opening credits as “creator” and “executive producer.” If NBC and Universal had kept the shake-up secret, no one would have suspected that she wasn’t working on the show anymore.

Getting lost in the world of a (bad) movie

Wednesday, January 30, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

Three years ago, Soft Skull Press launched a wonderful series, Deep Focus, in which acclaimed writers deal concisely with a favorite — or obsessed-about — movie in a small book format.

The idea and the size of the books is similar to a long-running series sponsored by the British Film Institute but those volumes are devoted to classics such as “The Manchurian Candidate” or “The Searchers” rather than B-movies.

The first book in the Soft Skull series was a 163-page assessment of the 1988 John Carpenter picture “They Live,” a mostly terrible but interesting satirical science-fiction film in which it is revealed that Reagan’s America is a construct set up by space aliens who have the rest of us under their secret control.

Jonathan Lethem, the brilliant Brooklyn-based novelist whose work includes “The Fortress of Solitude,” writes with wit and style about a film that he knows is indefensible as “art” but which has intrigued and entertained him through multiple viewings over the last 22 years.

Lethem knows the movie backwards and forwards and knows its strengths (the very gripping long scene in which the hidden aliens and their propaganda messages are first revealed with special sunglasses worn by the movie’s hero) and its weaknesses (low-budget production values, primitive writing and acting).

Lethem is a science-fiction fan, so in some ways the book is an education on the sources that writer-director John Carpenter drew on when he created this paranoid thriller that owed a debt to such writers as Philip K. Dick and Robert Heinlein.

The real fun in the book is the movie buff obsessiveness it reveals in a major novelist.

Like the rest of us, Lethem has comfort-food movies that he knows are not necessarily good for him, but that still give him a kick after repeat viewings. Who among us doesn’t have a picture like “They Live” in our DVD collection? A Hollywood product that came and went without winning any prizes or box-office records but proves over time to be more enjoyable than more prestigious fare. (My favorite in this category is “Road House.”)

The book celebrates a form of movie obsession that only became possible in the video era. Lethem tweaks the late critic Pauline Kael for having said on many occasions that she only watched films once, but she came of age in the pre-video era when most people only had the time — and the money — to see a film a single time when it popped up in a local theater.

Even in the 1960s and 1970s, favorite movies would only appear occasionally on broadcast TV and if you weren’t around when they were aired, you were out of luck.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that buffs could rent or own a movie and watch it over and over again. We can now spend as much time as we want to escaping into the world of a movie we love.

Lethem acknowledges the slight madness of his repeat viewings of “They Live” — the chapters that take us through the entire film begin with the exact video playback time of the scene in question (“26:26,” 55:23,” etc.).

Lethem is a very amusing guide, pointing out some of the sexual undertones in the film that a first-time viewer might not see. In the chapter “Porn Again: 54:56” he writes, “This is the first time we’ve seen (the movie’s star) Roddy Piper cross the threshold of a middle-class interior. It (triggers) alarms. Everybody knows what happens when the actors dressed as construction workers come indoors in Southern California…So does John Carpenter, who in his early seventies apprenticeship dashed off several porn-film scripts.”

Lethem writes so interestingly about this semi-forgotten film that he almost made this reader want to dig it up and watch it again. Almost.

‘Limelight’: the collapse of a New York nightlife empire

Tuesday, January 29, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

Billy Corben’s 2011 documentary, “Limelight,” is available on DVD via Magnolia Home Entertainment, and it proves to be as gripping as any fictional film.

Corben traces the history of Canadian nightclub operator Peter Gatien who came to New York City in the 1980s and quickly became one of the most important figures in the post-Studio 54 scene.

Gatien ran the Tunnel, the Paladium, Club USA and one of the dominant clubs of the era, The Limelight, which was in a deconsecrated church on Sixth Avenue.

The entrepreneur lost an eye when he was young and for many years sported an eyepatch that gave him either a stylish or sinister appearance, depending on your attitude toward nightclub owners.

During his rise, Gatien’s looks were probably an asset — he seemed to represent the slight danger people have always looked for in New York after dark. But when the club operator became the target of city and federal drug investigations in his places of business, the eyepatch made the man’s alleged connections to the drug underworld seem likely to the readers of the tabloid newspapers that covered the endless investigations and trials.

To Billy Corben’s credit, “Limelight” isn’t just Gatien’s story. The movie is about the changing pop culture scene of the last 30 years — particularly, the shift in club music from disco to electronica to hip hop — and the drug culture that went along with the transitions.

Cocaine was the dominant drug of the disco era, with the cost of the drug limiting its use to glitzier people with money to burn.

Ecstacy became much more widespread in clubs in the 1980s because it was a legal psychiatric drug (at first) and much cheaper and easier to use than cocaine. As one of the interview subjects says in the film, when you pop Ecstacy in your mouth, no one knows if you’re taking an aspirin or about to suck on a Tic Tac.

The use of the drug became so widespread and the side effects so serious that, like LSD, it was eventually added to the list of illegal drugs like coke and pot.

Ambitious, publicity-seeking DAs in New York City knew that they could get much more press by going after a celebrity nightclub owner than the low level dealers who operated in his clubs. As more than one person notes in “Limelight,” Gatien was making so much money on entrance fees and booze at his clubs that he had no need to mess with illegal pills.

Things got worse for Gatien and his peers with the rise of Rudy Giuliani and the crusading-DA-turned-mayor’s crackdown on “vice” of all sorts in New York City.

When Gatien was found not guilty on drug charges, the angry feds moved on to the tax evasion charges that are always easy to level against restauranteurs and club owners who work and live in a world filled with lots of cash that might or might not be accurately reported to the IRS. Gatien eventually was forced out of business not by criminal charges but by the huge legal fees he spent defending himself year after year — he ran out of cash and was then deported back to Canada.

‘The Vandal’: good play, great showcase for Deirdre O’Connell

Monday, January 28, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

Two strangers meet at a bus stop on a very cold winter’s night in Kingston, New York, and slowly start to open up to each other, in the funny and creepy play “The Vandal” that just opened at The Flea Theater in downtown Manhattan.

The actor Hamish Linklater is making his playwriting debut and it’s an impressive piece of work in terms of both structure and content — objections you might have in the first half of the play about the story logic are explained in an audacious twist at the end (the shift from realism to supernatural elements is handled with great skill).

As you might expect from a play written by an actor, Linklater has written wonderfully juicy parts for his cast of three, with the role of “Woman” providing virtuouso opportunities for the great New York stage actress Deirdre O’Connell and her director Jim Simpson.

O’Connell has done her share of film and TV work — I can still remember her brief but devastating appearance in the Peter Weir movie “Fearless” — but she is especially revered in the New York theater community for her consistently excellent performances at non-profit venues such as The Public Theater, New York Theatre Workshop and the Rattlestick Theatre.

In 2010 she won both the Obie and Drama Desk awards for her work in the Playwrights Horizons hit “Circle Mirror Transformation.”

O’Connell doesn’t seem to have much interest in Broadway fare (although she did turn up last season in the short-lived “Magic/Bird”), preferring the risky plays and even riskier roles available off and off off Broadway.

“The Vandal” was announced last year as a vehicle for Holly Hunter, but when she exited the project O’Connell stepped in, and it is now hard to imagine anyone else playing this endlessly surprising woman, who starts off rationing her words as if they are a precious commodity and then unleashes a torrent of pent-up grief and anger.

Noah Robbins plays the chatterbox teen who tries to barrel his way through the woman’s silence, and Zach Grenier is the owner of a nearby liquor store who figures prominently in the second half of the play. Both men deliver strong performances that bolster the O’Connell character’s startling journey through the night.

The less you know about “The Vandal” the better, but I can tell you that you won’t see a finer performance on a New York stage at the moment than Deirdre O’Connell’s haunting work in this fresh new play.

(For more information on “The Vandal” visit, www.theflea.org)

‘Pioneers of Thirteen’: a flashback to the heyday of public TV

Sunday, January 27, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

Although the technology was still a little shaky you could make a strong argument for the 1970s being the peak years of public television in this country.

A template for high-class, serialized drama was created by “Masterpiece Theatre” that no one other TV network emulated until the arrival of cable and HBO’s launch of late 1990s series such as “The Sopranos” and “Sex & the City.”

Programs such as “Theater in America” and “Dance in America” helped to fuel the regional theater explosion and the dance boom of the 1970s.

Much of the best 1970s public television work emanated from Channel 13/WNET in New York City and the era is celebrated in a wonderful special,
“Pioneers of Thirteen: The ’70s — Bold and Fearless” that will be aired on Channel 13 on Thursday at 9 p.m.

The show is both deeply nostalgic and slightly depressing because it points up the changes in public television since its halcyon era five decades ago.

Public TV was still so new 40 years ago that it received tremendous grant funding from the foundations that had helped set it up a decade earlier. Back in those days, audiences didn’t have to sit through ghastly pledge drive programming pandering to baby boomer music taste or the wishy washy public affairs programming that results from being in bed with so many major corporations (public television now carries many “enhanced” funding acknowledgements that are nothing more than commercials).

We learn in the “Pioneers of Thirteen” special that the landmark 1973 multi-part documentary “An American Family” (above) — which helped to put PBS and Channel 13 on the broadcasting map with 10 million weekly viewers — was basically funded by the Ford Foundation which asked for no controls over the way the series was shot or edited.

The special also delves into the creation of “The Great American Dream Machine,”
“The Electric Company,” the Bicentennial miniseries “The Adams Chronicles,” as well as the “Dance in America” and “Theater in America” series — none of which would be possible in today’s era of budgetary belt-tightening and having to compete with so many other channels and cable programming.

Meryl Streep narrates the 90-minute special which includes clips from “Uncommon Women and Others,” the Wendy Wasserstein play that was broadcast by “Theater in America,” and which introduced many TV viewers to the brilliant young Yale Drama School graduate who would go on to dominate American film for the next 40 years.

Set your DVR for Thursday at 9 p.m. This is one “special” that lives up to its TV terminology.

‘The Cloud’: a techno-thriller with heart

Saturday, January 26, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

Matt Richtel, the Pulitzer prize-winning technology reporter for The New York Times, has a provocative and thrilling new novel set for publication on Tuesday — “The Cloud” (Harper).

The book raises troubling questions about the impact of our ever-multiplying electronic gizmos on the brain development of children in a tale set in the Bay Area with a memorable protagonist, freelance journalist Nat Idle (who is anything but like his name).

In the early pages of the novel, Nat nearly meets his maker on a subway platform when someone tries to push him over the edge.

A beautiful woman named Faith comes to Nat’s aid, but her motivation is questionable right from the start, as our hero finds himself in the center of a labyrinthine plot involving a former reality TV show star, a mysterious super-rich tech entrepreneur, and a new device designed to make it easier for kids to keep all of their electronic data streams organized.

Nat is also recovering from his separation from a high-powered, super-organized businesswoman who dumped him just as she was about to give birth to their son.

The journalist’s personal problems turn out to be much more complex than we can imagine in the early chapters — as he deals with a concussion caused by the subway attack — and his issues of control vs. chaos and modern child-rearing challenges are mirrored in the thriller plot.

Nat lives in a world in which old notions of security and privacy have collapsed: “While she’s gone, I call up my email. I type in my password, and while my messages load, wonder who else might be reading over my shoulder. This idea doesn’t particularly startle me; on some level, I long ago accepted our Internet habits are a fishbowl being scrutinized by ne’er-do-wells — on a continuum from advertiser to nosy kid to blackmailer. There are creepy implications, no doubt, but most of what they’d discover is how mundane is our humanity.”

The ease with which our lives can be invaded by distant outsiders presents a challenge to modern thriller writers — eluding your enemies is harder than ever — but Richtel knows this world inside-out and turns it to his advantage. The result is a scary but wonderful paranoid thriller that often plays like an update of one of those marvelously chilly 70s thrillers such as “The Parallax View” or “Three Days of the Condor.” The second half of a sentence about a third of the way into “The Cloud” neatly boils down Nat’s world view — “assume someone is monitoring you and act accordingly.”

Academy does the right thing by Michael Haneke’s ‘Amour’

Friday, January 25, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

Michael Haneke has made some of the most audience-dividing pictures of the modern era — “The Piano Teacher” and “The White Ribbon,” among them — but love him or hate him, you’ve got to respect a filmmaker who goes his own way in the current crushingly commercial movie marketplace.

I’m a big fan of Haneke’s, but I’ve learned over the years that he doesn’t believe in making things easy for an audience. The Austrian director crafts austere, troubling stories that can create a feeling of claustrophobia in a moviegoer. Haneke omits almost all of the elements that Hollywood ladles on its movies — sentimentality, happy endings, comic relief, music that guides us emotionally.

When I heard that Haneke’s latest movie was called “Amour” and that it involved a couple in their 80s, played by two French cinema legends, coping with illness, my first thought was — Has the modern cinema’s reigning master of despair gone all “On Golden Pond” on us?

I should have known better.

“Amour,” which has been nominated for five Academy Awards, including a rare best picture and best foreign langauge film double act, and it is one of the most devastating tales of the ravages of old age that has even been presented in a film.

Unlike “On Golden Pond” which scared us — and Katharine Hepburn — with Henry Fonda’s “spell” and then reassured us it was nothing, “Amour” is about the sudden and steep physical decline that can hit old people.

French cinema icons Jean Louis-Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva play a fairly well-heeled Paris couple who, in the opening scene, we see attending a concert by one of her former music students. They are greeted warmly backstage by the pupil-turned-star and happily ride a bus home.

The next morning, the wife seems to be suddenly struck dumb at the breakfast table, but by the time the husband gets his coat and is ready to take her to a doctor, she seems alright again.

It’s just the calm before the storm, however, as the poor woman is battered by a series of small strokes that restrict her to a wheelchair at first and then leave her bedridden. The woman spends one or two nights in a hospital, but asks her husband to promise her she will never have to go back.

Nurses are hired. One competent and warm, the other a secret sadist the husband is forced to fire in a scene of such barely controlled viciousness — on the part of the nurse — that it’s hard to watch.

Nearly all of “Amour” is played out in the couple’s Paris apartment which becomes a setting every bit as horrifying as the London apartment Catherine Deneuve occupied in the Roman Polanski classic “Repulsion” — except that old movie was a melodramatic shocker and what Haneke gives us is the terror of hopeless decline.

Trintignant and Riva give extraordinary performances that operate on two levels — the simple power of what they do as these characters and the echoes they carry with them of such great films of the 1950s and 1960s as “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” and “A Man and a Woman.” One of the reasons older arthouse audiences will stay with this depressing and harrowing film is our connection of many years with the two stars.

Another French icon — Isabelle Huppert — turns up in a supporting role as the couple’s daughter who lives in London. Like the two stars, Huppert gives a raw performance powered by the anger and the frustration her character feels watching her mother slipping away. She also knows that she cannot interrupt her own busy life to lend her father a hand. It’s the polar opposite of the performance Jane Fonda gave in the equivalent role in “On Golden Pond.”

“Amour” is another brilliant film by Michael Haneke, but I hope that the people who will be drawn in by the Oscar nominations will be ready for its unflinching vision of old age.

(“Amour” opens today at the Avon Theatre Film Center in Stamford and the Garden Cinemas in Norwalk.)

‘The Woman Who Wasn’t There’: shades of Manti Te’o?

Thursday, January 24, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

The ease with which a good sob story generally will go unquestioned was demonstrated for the zillionth time last week with that bizarre tale out of South Bend, Indiana, about the football player and the imaginary (dead) girlfriend.

Who would make up a story about his grandmother and his “girlfriend” dying within hours of each other and a big football game?

It’s too good not to be true, and besides, who among us would want to fact check the story with “grieving” friends and relatives?

My first exposure to this sort of mad, self-pitying fantasy came many years ago, when I was working at a (long-closed) hotel in Ocean City, N.J., and one of the friends of the owners made up a story that he had terminal cancer just so he could spend the whole season there free.

I kid you not.

The gambit annoyed the hell out of me — a lowly desk clerk/waiter — because a guy who was obnoxious before the “illness” became downright unbearable after he went into his Camille act.

I’ve been a tad suspicious of self-promoting tragedies ever since.

Perhaps it’s part of that old journalism school joke about the reporter who writes “My mother loves me” and is told to get a second source.

In a weird coincidence, the Manti Te’o story broke the night before I watched a riveting documentary, “The Woman Who Wasn’t There,” about a Spanish woman who made up the name “Tania Head” and then presented herself as a double-victim in the wake of 9/11 — she claimed to have nearly died in her Morgan Stanley office in one of the WTC towers as her husband/fiance (the story kept changing) died in the other tower.

Tania became one of the most powerful figures in the WTC survivors’ groups and hobnobbed with the biggest politicians in New York. The deception went on for years, until someone tipped off a New York Times reporter and Tania’s story began to fall apart.

The way this woman took advantage of other survivors and used her story for maximum publicity and clout is truly appalling. The film by Angelo J. Gugliemo, Jr. was made simultaneously with the creation of a book with the same title that he co-authored with Robin Gaby Fisher.

Tania disappeared as her fake identity unraveled so we never get to hear her “side” but the film and the book tell one of the most bizarre stories of deception you will ever experience.

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