Joe's View

After reading Mariana Pasternak’s just-published “The Best of Friends: Martha and Me” (Harper), it is easy to understand why celebrities hand out confidentiality agreements to almost everyone they meet.

If an ex-“best friend” could write a book like this, what might a business associate or social acquaintance cook up?

The memoir is Pasternak’s attempt to describe her friendship of more than two decades with Martha Stewart and to explain her way out of giving trial testimony — as a prosectution witness — that sent her friend to the slammer for six months (tarnishing the carefully tended reputation of one of the most famous women in the country).

The author boils down her role in Stewart’s life in the first chapter: “She needed someone whose opinion she trusted, someone who loved her enough to tell her when she was making a mistake. Because by then (August 1997), with all the fame and power she had accumulated, only the few who really loved Martha still dared to be frank.”

Pasternak goes back and forth from embracing to trashing Stewart so often in the book that it is almost impossible to keep up with the writer’s thought processes. (I had visions of a frazzled editor desperately trying to keep this 395-page train on the track.)

Here’s the writer in her characteristic love/hate mode: “Perpetual publicity and fame piled on her the uneasiness that Martha handled with a masterful show of composure. However, in private, Martha didn’t cope as well with the strain of rampant consumerism and increased pressures. It was often quite awkward to be around her, but I never lost the sympathy that she had inspired in me the first time we met. I didn’t think her unpleasantness was a principal characteristic, so all I could do was guess as the reasons for it, like perhaps, Martha’s insatiable desire for power…”

The book will have a certain degree of interest for Connecticut readers because much of the narrative takes place around Westport — with scenes at such unlikely locales as the Sherwood Diner. Pasternak met Stewart and then-husband Andy before Martha’s career took off so we get an insider’s view of an American superstar being born right in our own backyard.

But, the mix of affection and spiteful revelations about Stewart’s romantic attachments (and dreams of a second marriage) make for a very unpleasant glimpse into a bizarre — to say the least — friendship.

And, how are we to trust a narrator who told prosecutors that she thought Martha might have confessed to insider stock trading with the sentence, “Isn’t it nice to have brokers who tell you those things?,” but later admitted that comment might have been in her own head — i.e. something she expected Stewart to say.

If Pasternak isn’t sure what took place during such a crucial conversation in 2001, how can we trust her accounts of Stewart’s behavior and comments two decades earlier?

If John Cassavetes had been hired to do a movie remake of “The Honeymooners,” the results might have been something like the very funny (and very poignant) new play “Happy in the Poorhouse,” by Derek Ahonen, that opened over the weekend at Theatre 80 St. Marks.

“Poorhouse” is the follow-up to Ahonen’s “The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side,” a hit last year for The Amoralists, the company the writer-director formed four years ago with his actor pals James Kautz and Matthew Pilieci.

The Amoralists have built on their success last year with a season of three plays that they will be producing between now and the end of the year.

Like a latter day Group Theater, The Amoralists are determined to present rough and angry plays that deal with life in America right now. The company doesn’t deal in tidy morals or a sanitized view of life among people who are struggling to make the rent each month.

“Happy in the Poorhouse” is set in present day Brooklyn, where the life of would-be Mixed Martial Arts star Paulie “The Pug” (James Kautz, below right) appears to be in free fall.

Paulie is hitting a wall in his amateur bouts — he’s a bit too small and a bit too old — and fears his dreams of fame and fortune are vanishing. Still, he doesn’t want to accept the reality of his job as a bouncer in a local bar.

Paulie has married the girl of his dreams — Mary (Sarah Lemp, below left) — who happens to be the ex of his best friend Petie (William Apps). After many months of marriage, however, Paulie has not been able to have sex with his wife and it’s driving both of them crazy.

In the first scene, Mary is stressed out about her sexless relationship and her decision to throw a welcome-back-from-Afghanistan party for Petie, who is now confined to a wheelchair.

Kautz and Lemp make a terrific pair of battling spouses — with Paulie pounding holes in the wall out of sexual frustration and Mary failing in every attempt to ravish her husband. Their comic/romantic friction forms a strong foundation for the rich and exuberant cast of characters who soon begin pouring into the Coney Island apartment.

Ahonen views working class life with the same absence of condescension that was a hallmark of Cassavetes in films such as “A Woman Under the Influence.” The writer’s characters are just like you and me — except they don’t hide their frustrations with polite chit chat.

The magic of “Happy in the Poorhouse” is the way that the writer keeps introducing wonderful new characters — each with their own problems — who add to the chaos of Paulie and Mary’s lives in a believably funny way.

First there is Mary’s mailman brother, Joey (Matthew Pilieci), who lives with them — or, rather, they live with him, since he pays the rent.

Paulie’s sister Penny (Rochelle Mikulich) returns from Nashville for the party, with two big suprrises — she’s abandoning her dream of country music stardom and she arrives with her new German lesbian lover, Olga (Selene Beretta).

Two brothers who are would-be MMA agents, Sonny (Morton Matthews) and Sally (Mark Riccadonna), show up — to sign Paulie and to attack Joey for taking up with a 16-year-old relative, Flossie (Meghan Ritchie).

Act One ends with the arrival of wounded vet Petie and his male nurse Stevie (Nick Lawson) and the second half includes a visit by everyone’s muscle-bound pal Larry (Patrick McDaniel), who turns out to have a sinister secret agenda.

Ahonen keeps these people bouncing off each other in constantly surprising ways — and with crazy jokes that seem to bubble up from out of nowhere, just like they would at a disastrous party.

The writer-director’s love of actors is evident in every scene — from the fact that he created 11 juicy characters (no “supporting roles” here) to the way he has meshed their chaotic emotions into a coherent and deeply involving slice-of-life comedy.

(“Happy in the Poorhouse” is running through April 4 at Theatre 80 St. Marks. For more information, visit www.theamoralists.com.)

TheaterWorks Hartford is officially announcing today that its 25th anniversary season will begin in July with a world premiere production starring Kathleen Turner.

“High” by Matthew Lombardo will open July 9 and run through Aug. 22.

Lombardo is the author of “Tea at Five,” a Katharine Hepburn bio-drama that served as a spectacular vehicle for Kate Mulgrew at Hartford Stage in 2002. The actress took the show to New York and then toured in it extensively.

In the new drama, Turner will play Sister Jamison Connelly, a rehab counselor who begins to question her vocation after working with a 19-year-old addict.

Following the Hartford run, the play will move on to two other major regional theaters — the Cincinnati Playhouse, and Repertory Theatre of St. Louis.

Turner started her career in the theater — she did plays in New York while working on the daytime drama “The Doctors” in the late 1970s — but her film debut in the 1981 hit “Body Heat” (below) launched her as one of the top female stars of the 1980s.

The actress solidified her appeal to critics and audiences with the 1984 blockbuster “Romancing the Stone” and then a series of hits that included “Prizzi’s Honor” and “The War of the Roses.”

Perhaps sensing the ephemeral nature of film stardom, Turner made regular returns to the theater – including an appearance at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre in “Camille” in 1986 (the same year she received an Oscar nomination for “Peggy Sue Got Married”) and then a Tony-nominated performance in the 1990 Broadway revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

The star’s movie career seemed to end as quickly as it began — Turner never really recovered from the disaster of “V.I. Warshawski” in 1991.

Illness and alcoholism did a job on Turner’s appearance that shocked fans who viewed her as a sex symbol only a few years earlier — the changes also seemed to put her out of the running for film roles in major productions and she just didn’t have the knack for finding good roles in independent films where she might play “character” parts.

The problems faced by actresses in a youth obsessed culture were magnified in Turner’s case.

Fortunately, Turner developed serious stage chops in her returns to the theater and now has found her true home. The actress triumphed in a Broadway revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” a few seasons ago (above) and repeated that success when the show moved to London.

Turner seems to be as busy on stage now as she was in film 20 years ago. She is about to open in Philadelphia in a new one-woman play about the feisty Texas newspaper columnist Molly Ivins and the actress will move right from that show to Hartford for rehearsals for “High.”

For complete ticket information visit TheaterWorks at www.theaterworkshartford.org.

Sam Rockwell hasn’t yet achieved A-list movie stardom, but he is one of the finest actors in this country, with outstanding film and stage performances going back more than two decades.

At the moment, Rockwell is supporting Christopher Walken on Broadway in the new Martin McDonagh play, “A Behanding in Spokane.”

Years ago, before he broke out in movies, I saw Rockwell deliver an astounding performance in a Mike Leigh play at a tiny off-Broadway theater.

The piece was about a group of volatile, struggling young Brits and until I read my program I assumed the charismatic lead was a newcomer from across the Atlantic.

Since then, Rockwell has been in many major films, but has usually played supporting roles (he is especially good in the grossly underrated 2007 Brad Pitt picture “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” – left).

George Clooney was an early Rockwell fan and gave him one of his rare starring film roles in the 2002 flop “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.”

Art house movieogers became aware of Rockwell’s talent in a wonderful 1997 film by Tom DiCillo, “Box of Moonlight.” The picture got good reviews at the Sundance Film Festival that year but, sadly, was picked up by a second-rate distributor that mishandled it.

Despite the much-hyped American independent film movement of the late 1980s and 1990s, lots of very good low-budget films fell through the cracks during that fervent period.

Miramax Films, under the dynamic leadership of two genuine movie lovers, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, had a genius for selling tricky little movies to the press and public, making hits out of such offbeat pictures as “Like Water for Chocolate” and “The Crying Game.”

A few other companies, such as Sony Classics, also had the ability to market indies successfully, but dozens of worthy 1990s releases were picked up by inept (and under-financed) distributors and barely saw the light of day.

And, when a movie is badly distributed in theaters, the chances are pretty good that the home video release will be mangled as well.

This is why you may not have ever heard of “Box of Moonlight.”

Written and directed by DiCillo, the film takes the road movie formula and embroiders it with fresh characters, hilariously off-kilter social commentary, and a real love of roadside Americana at its kitschiest.

John Turturro stars as a Chicago corporate drone — assigned to an engineering project in Tennessee — who is shocked when the project is suddenly cancelled and all of the workers are told they can go home early.

The man has been upset by gleaning that his workers think he is an uptight, ruthlessly regimented machine disguised as a human.

Remembering a happy childhood vacation spent at a Tennessee lake, the engineer spontaneously decides to take off in a rental car to see if the resort is still there. When the man meets a wacky young off-the-grid free-thinker — Rockwell in what should have been a star-making performance — who lives on his own in the woods, the engineer’s life as he knows it is changed forever.

What is so charming and smart about DiCillo’s approach is his respect for both of the major characters — we get to see the downside of each man’s approach to life, but we also get to see how the unlikely friendship changes both men for the better.

DiCillo fills the background with great screwball Middle American characters who are never condescended to by the filmmaker. Catherine Keener got one of her best early movie roles in “Box of Moonlight” as a daffy phone sex operator who crosses Turturro’s path.

The politically conservative and religiously rigid people Turturro meets along the way are satirized by DiCillo but in a very gentle manner. The director also clearly has a deep affection for the rural areas around Knoxville where he shot the picture — it’s one of the most beautiful indie films of the 1990s.

Writer-director Jacques Audiard didn’t take home the Oscar for best foreign language film last Sunday night, but his gangster epic, “A Prophet (Un Prophete),” is a formidable piece of work.

Through the story of one 19-year-old petty criminal, Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), who is sent to prison for six years, Audiard shows us how an unformed youth becomes a potent force in the underworld through what he learns in jail.

Malik begins as a terrified victim of all sorts of abuse, but after he forms an alliance with the Corsican gangster, Cesar Luciani (played by the awesome Niels Arestrup, above left), everything starts to change for him.

Cesar puts a big quid pro quo in front of Malik — in order to receive the gangster’s protection, the younger man will have to kill one of Cesar’s enemies.

Audiard takes us through Malik’s education step-by-step; acting newcomer Tahar Rahim makes us believe we are seeing a major league criminal manufactured right in front of us.

The movie doesn’t appear to have a political agenda, but it is a very powerful critique of prisons as a dumping ground for criminals of different backgrounds. If Malik was kept among his own kind — young first-time offenders — we would not see a prodigious crime lord-in-the-making in the closing scene.

The director’s dazzling mix of realism and fantasy elements keeps “A Prophet” from being the unwatchable horror story it could have been. Scenes in which a dead man returns to haunt Malik and moments of oddly primitive camerawork take the film way out of the realm of docudrama.

In the movie’s strongest setpiece, Malik is given a contract hit to pull off in Paris while he is on a work release program. Through amazingly deft editing and sound design, we are put into the head of the young criminal at what is probably the key moment in his “education” — there’s no going back from this point on.

Like last year’s Italian crime epic, “Gomorra,” this film acts as a corrective to Hollywood treatments of the same material – where, all too often, violence is used to excite the audience and the “gangster” lifestyle is glamorized.

(“A Prophet” opens today at the Garden Cinemas in Norwalk and the Criterion in New Haven.)

Although a blond-haired, green-eyed American suburbanite named Colleen LaRose was arrested Tuesday as part of an alleged international terrorist plot — she calls herself “JihadJane” on social networking sites — we live in an age when we have been conditioned to think of terrorists as Middle Easterners with a homicidal grudge.

(LaRose was reportedly recruited precisely because she would not be picked out of a crowd that was being racially profiled for jihadists.)

The German film, “The Baader Meinhof Complex,” takes us back to an era when middle-class kids all over the globe started to have the same violent, revolutionary thoughts as Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda followers.

The movie is a gripping/disturbing look back at a group of political activists who went over the edge in response to the Vietnam War and the other upheavals of the late 1960s.

Set for release on DVD later this month, the Uli Edel-directed film is an expensive-looking, grand-scale affair that treats the counterculture uprising of the 1960s in the style of a traditional war movie. The approach fits the material because what was going on in cities and college campuses around the world ran parallel to the military action in Southeast Asia (started by the French and inherited by the U.S.)

“Baader Meinhof” shows how a group of college professors and students in Germany became so incensed by the war — and the U.S. military presence in their country — that they tipped over into terrorism.

Opposition to the war became just one of a number of anti-Establishment causes that made a violent push-back seem justified — the authorities made matters worse through the use of indiscriminate police actions against large groups of demonstrators.

Just as the police riot at the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968 mobilized many appalled American young people, German youth came together in the aftermath of a demonstration against a visit of the Shah of Iran — a gathering that ended with leftist young people being beaten and killed in the streets.

Martina Gedeck — who you might remember as the female lead in “The Lives of Others” — plays Ulrike Meinhof, the academic who went from criticizing the government and the war in Vietnam as a TV talking-head to joining younger radicals willing to kill to make their point.

Moritz Bleibtreu — one of the stars of “Run, Lola, Run” — plays Andreas Baader who is ready for violent resistance before most of his friends.

Watching “The Baader Meinhof Complex” it is impossible not to see the similarities with the Symbionese Liberation Army in this country — both groups robbed banks to raise funds and attracted unlikely recruits from college campuses and the streets.

The politics and lifestyles on view in the film look as archaic as a story set during World War II. A viewer is left wondering what issue — or set of issues — could ignite such rebellion from middle-class college students today.

Last night in Manhattan, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS announced the title and theme for their 20th anniversary “Broadway Bares” show June 20 — “Strip-opoly.”

The two shows at the Roseland Ballroom on that night will mark the official end of the current Broadway season and charity organizers are hoping for a $1 million haul this year.

Last year, the event raised slightly less than it did in 2008 — to be expected only a few months after the recession blew through New York City — but founder Jerry Mitchell is determined to set a new record this year.

In addition to the one-night, two-show evening in June, BC/EFA already had one mini-”Broadway Bares” at a downtown club last month and it was announced yesterday that there will be three “Solo Strips” shows in the weeks before the June extravaganza — on April 11, May 16 and June 6 at Splash (50 West 17th Street).

Splash is the dance club where Mitchell invented “Broadway Bares” two decades ago when he was a chorus dancer in “The Will Rogers Follies.” One night, while doing a near-naked American Indian dance atop a giant drum, he was hit with the brainstorm of a strip-tease charity event for BC/EFA.

Mitchell and a few of his friends went to Splash on their night off — raising $8,000 — and “Broadway Bares” has gotten bigger and better each year. Everyone involved volunteers their time – with the performers fitting rehearsals in between their work on Broadway shows. The event is always held on Sunday at 9:30 p.m. and midnight because that’s the only night all of the dancers have off from the jobs.

More than 200 Broadway dancers are expected to take part in the June show which is being directed by Josh Rhodes of “The Drowsy Chaperone” and “Fosse.”

“Broadway Bares” always features vaudeville-style comic sketches involving some of the top performers appearing on Broadway at that moment — everyone from Sutton Foster to Nathan Lane have brought down the house in past years.

BC/EFA offers a variety of VIP packages for the show, ranging from $250 to $650, but the cheap seats — $55 general admission — are fine. Make that the “cheap floor space” — there are no seats in the club space (but the show only runs about 70 minutes).

“Broadway Bares” is always terrific — with dance numbers as good as anything you’ll see in the musicals the performers work on six nights a week — and the strip routines never quite go all the way. (It’s R-rated rather than NC-17.)

For more information, ticket sales, and a great archive of material from past benefits, visit www.broadwaybares.com.

If you want to see why it took so long for Jeff Bridges to win an Oscar, come to the “Critics Choice” screening of “Winter Kills” that I’m hosting at the Avon Theatre in Stamford tomorrow night.

The actor is terrific in the movie — as usual — but the 1979 political satire is a quintessential Jeff Bridges starring vehicle. Daring, eccentric, and with little or no chance of appealing to a large mainstream audience.

Bridges launched his film career with a critical and audience hit in 1971 — “The Last Picture Show” which earned the actor the first of his five Oscar nominations — but since then his resume has leaned toward low-grossing cult films such as “Fat City” (1972), “Rancho Deluxe” (1975), and “Cutter’s Way” (1981).

Bridges got his second nomination for “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” (1974), one of the strangest (and least financially profitable) of all Clint Eastwood films and the directorial debut of Michael Cimino (the actor would go on to play a major role in the director’s notorious 1980 film, “Heaven’s Gate”).

Bridges has always been an actor who has put the film first and his role in it second. “I want to be in movies that I would like to see,” has been his press interview mantra for many years.

“Winter Kills” is perhaps the most outrageous Hollywood-produced movie from a decade that is now prized for oddball pictures.

Drawing from a brilliant, darkly comic novel by Richard (“The Manchurian Candidate”) Condon, first time director William Richert fashioned one of the nastiest (but funniest) satires in the history of Hollywood; a feature-length assault on the mystique of the Kennedy clan and the labyrinthine conspiracies surrounding the assassination of JFK.

In the novel, Condon took everything we knew about the Kennedys and gave it a slight twist to come up with his fictional Kegan clan. “Pa” (John Huston) is an old monster who parlayed his gangster empire into a political dynasty by installing his oldest son in the White House (only to see him assassinated in Philadelphia in 1960).

Pa’s sensitive, alienated younger son Nick (Bridges) hears about a break in the case and goes off on a wild goose chase that takes us through every major conspiracy plot associated with what happened in Dallas in 1963.

Condon was one of the most cynical popular novelists of the second half of the 20th century, but he knew where all of the bodies were buried in Washington, D.C. and in Hollywood. His contempt for the Kennedys was only exceeded by his hatred for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. He thought they were all crooks who went to D.C, simply because that’s where you can steal the most money for yourself and your friends.

But underlying Condon’s jaundiced view of politics was a master storyteller and “Winter Kills” works as a slam-bang thriller as well as one of the darkest of black comedies. He (and his proxy, filmmaker Richert) mine the same vein that Stanley Kubrick tapped in “Dr. Strangelove” — a portrait of American politics so horrifying that the only way to respond to it is to laugh.

The movie gave Bridges one of his finest early roles and John Huston delivers a phenomenal performance as Pa (he is to “Winter Kills” what Angela Lansbury is to “The Manchurian Candidate”).

If you have a taste for vicious satire, you’ll probably enjoy “Winter Kills.” It’s a one-of-a-kind movie.

(“Winter Kills” will be shown Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Stamford’s Avon Theatre, 272 Bedford St. Tickets are $10, $6 for students and seniors.)