Joe's View

Sunday’s issue of “T” — The New York Times Style Magazine — had a characteristically smart piece on actors by Lynn Hirschberg.
Called “Screen Test: Can These TV Guys Make the Leap to the Cineplex?” the article looked at a bunch of current stars of the small screen to see if they have what it takes to become “big-time movie stars.”
TV has been a breeding ground for movie stars almost since its invention, with James Dean and Paul Newman making the leap in the 1950s, James Garner and Steve McQueen doing likewise in the 1960s, and John Travolta becoming a multimedia icon in the 1970s.
It used to be said that there was a wall between TV and movies — that the nature of stardom in TV was different from what paying audiences wanted to see at the movies — but that has never really been true. Indeed, the biggest male star of the modern era, Clint Eastwood, was already a household name from “Rawhide” on TV before he made his first major film, “A Fistful of Dollars” in 1964.
Some of candidates in the Hirschberg piece are Taylor Kitsch of “Friday Night Lights” (above), Eric Dane of “Grey’s Anatomy,” and Joshua Jackson of “Fringe.”
The elements that constitute a movie star seem to differ from person to person and sex to sex. (Hirschberg’s choices skew to a female, beefcake view of male stardom — she sees Kitsch as a “sex god”).
There are stars whose power is derived, for the most part, from being sex symbols to the opposite sex — Richard Gere for women, Scarlett Johansson for men. There are bigger stars who are enjoyed by both sexes — Julia Roberts and George Clooney both fall into this very remunerative category.
If you talk to people in the movie industry, however, a real star is someone whose presence above the title of a film is almost guaranteed to sell tickets. These folks are very rare and most often are not the ones whose faces are on the covers of mass-circulation magazines. Clooney has had as many flops as hits, Meryl Streep is a great and remarkably versatile 59-year-old actress who never had a global box-office blockbuster until “Mamma Mia!” opened last summer.
By the Hollywood measure, Adam Sandler is probably the biggest “star” of our time — a critically reviled, press-shy comic actor whose pictures almost always score big at the box-office (and he has been doing this for well over a decade).
From the mid-1960s through the end of the century, Eastwood’s box-office consistency was extraordinary. While the press and the Oscar voters worshipped at the shrines of Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman, Daniel Day-Lewis et al, Eastwood was a sure-fire ticket seller all over the world.
Like Sandler, Eastwood largely eschewed personal press coverage and was viewed in some circles as a one-note actor, but he was money-in-the-bank for the studios that released his films, whether he appeared in westerns, urban cop pictures or one of those zany orangutan comedies. It is because of all the money Eastwood generated for Warner Bros. and Universal for more than 30 years that he was finally given the power (and the financing) to make off-beat “arty” pictures like “Changeling” and “Million Dollar Baby” in recent years.

Right wing revisionists have been tearing away at FDR’s reputation since January in a hilariously misguided attempt to attack Barack Obama’s recovery plans (with their echoes of the Great Depression and the New Deal).
The gist of the conservative spiel has been that FDR didn’t end the Depression with his various social programs 70 years ago, it was World War II that finally bailed out the country.
Perhaps all of this huffing and puffing about Roosevelt is just a way for the right wing pundits to try to keep the rest of us from looking back a mere two decades to ponder the role their hero Ronald Reagan might have played in the mess we are in now.
Reagan has become a secular saint in some quarters — worthy of addition to Mount Rushmore — even though his deregulation mania might have played a major role in the eventual collapse of banking and credit and the financial services industry.
The acolytes also conveniently overlook the Iran-Contra scandal, the savings and loan debacle and such small Reagan embarrassments as his taking part in a Nazi memorial ceremony at the Bitburg cemetery in Germany (above) or having a secret second inauguration ceremony (at midnight) to please his wife’s astrologer.
The bizarre elevation of Reagan to the status of being a “great” president worthy of comparison with Washington and Lincoln is the subject of a long overdue reassessment in Will Bunch’s new book “Tear Down This Myth” (Free Press) which is subtitled “How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future.”
Bunch makes a good case that the Reagan years were a Hollywood-style fantasy that the country shared for eight years.
Since then, the myth has been carefully edited for maximum sentiment and nostalgia. Ronnie’s “performance” as president was so good, Bunch asserts, that the fantasy has endured and even grown over the past two decades.
“Like ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ the story line has (become) more iconic in the frequent rebroadcasts than when it was actually in theaters. The postpresidency Reagan became not just the most revered figure in modern American history but so much more — a kind of homespun public intellectual…,” the author writes.
Few bother to look back at what Reagan actually said and did as president and, before that, as governor of California.
“Politicians — mostly Republicans but even some Democrats — routinely run for office claiming they will be another Reagan, often by promising things that were the exact opposite of what the 1980s president accomplished, or didn’t,” Bunch notes.
“His promise to shrink government was uttered so often that many acolyties believe it really happened, but in fact Reagan expanded the federal payroll, added a new cabinet post, and created a huge debt that ultimately tripped up his handpicked successor, George W. Bush. What he did shrink was government regulation and oversight, which critics have linked to a series of unfortunate events from the savings-and-loan crisis of the late 1980s to the subprime mortgage crisis of the late 2000s.”

Rosemary Harris is part of a new breed of mystery writers who are breaking through the arbitrary barrier that once divided the crime fiction genre — with the tough and grisly “hard-boiled” novels on one side of the fence and the lighter and warmer “cozies” on the other side.
Harris’s new book “The Big Dirt Nap” (Minotaur Books) is the follow-up to last year’s “Pushing Up Daisies” which introduced amateur sleuth Paula Holliday, a Manhattan media pro who decides to give up her life in the city to start a gardening business in Southwestern Connecticut.
Paula is franker and funnier than the traditional cozy mystery heroine. Paula makes it clear that she enjoys sex — even if she hasn’t had much lately — and her speculations about other people’s sexual activities spark some good bawdy asides as she goes about her business.
Like some of the other new writers in the genre, Harris is willing to risk turning off older and more conservative cozy readers with her sophisticated approach to character and comedy. “The Big Dirt Nap” is still what you would call good light entertainment, but you never get the feeling — so prevalent in cozies — that the author is writing down to a presumed mature and rather square readership.
The new book takes Paula to the Eastern reaches of Connecticut where she becomes embroiled in a murder at a hotel near the two Indian casinos. Paula is there at the invitation of her Manhattan TV journalist pal Lucy who is being comped on a press junket.
The Titans Hotel is a slightly seedy joint that depends on the cheapskate gamblers who don’t want to fork over bigger bucks to stay at one of the casinos. Shortly after she arrives, Paula meets Nick Vigoriti who hits on her in the bar and then helps her use a tricky key card to get into her room.
Paula is drawn to the guy — in an on-the-road, one-night-stand sort of way — but decides she’s on “an all girls weekend” and gives Nick the brush off.
Nick soon turns up dead in the Dumpster behind the Titans and Paula is — briefly — a suspect since she was one of the last people seen with him.
The story expands as Paula becomes worried by her no-show friend’s cryptic text messages.
Harris uses the locale for an acerbic look at Indian gaming and life in the towns surrounding the casinos. The suspense builds as Paula starts to wonder if something terrible has happened to Lucy and if it might be connected to the murder at the hotel.
The plotting is as strong as the humor and the characterization so you will probably polish off this highly entertaining novel in a few sittings.

There are so many “points of entry” into writing about last weekend’s number-one movie “Watchmen” that pundits and bloggers could spend the next year trying to get a handle on this very strange film derived from the 1987 trade paperback that helped launch the graphic novel genre.
The book was a collection of DC comics published a year earlier — a collaboration of the writer Alan Moore, the artist Dave Gibbons and the colorist John Higgins.
In the two decades since the successful publication of “Watchmen” in paperback, graphic artists and writers have bypassed comic book serialization and gone directly into book form (the genre now fills many shelves in any chain bookstore).
The movie version’s presentation of costumed superheroes, male and female nudity, bizarre sex scenes and extremely graphic violence plays like a merging of several favorite past-times of the average adolescent male — comic books, porn, kung fu flicks, Mixed Martial Arts — with an added dollop of confused political satire.
Slavishly faithful to the original book, the film takes place in the mid-1980s, when fears of U.S.-Soviet nuclear armageddon reached their biggest peak since the Cuban Missile crisis 20 years earlier.
For reasons that are unclear, the creators of the graphic novel didn’t go after then-sitting president Ronald Reagan and all of his “Star Wars” madness. Instead, they came up with an oddball plot device — Richard Nixon still being in office after removing term limitations on the presidency in 1976.
“Tricky Dick” was a much easier target for ridicule 25 years ago than the much-beloved Reagan, but the device dilutes the impact of “Watchmen” as satire and political commentary.
The movie serves up weird mixed-signal nostalgia as we look back to a mid-1980s “present” that never existed.
The S&M elements and homoeroticism that are deeply buried in traditional comic books — all those tight and rather kinky-looking costumes, the relationship between Batman and Robin — come to the surface in “Watchmen.” Just as heterosexual porn designed for (presumably straight) men has always featured a rather odd fixation on male genitalia, this comic book film includes a giant character named Doctor Manhattan who struts through the film frontally naked (a major reason the picture is rated R). The “doctor” does have the decency to wear a thong when the U.S. government presses him into service to use his super powers to win the Vietnam War (!)
“Watchmen” is so over-the-top and continuously peculiar and packed with so many lurid interludes that it held my attention for the ridiculously padded running time of 157 minutes, but I left the theater with one big question about the movie — What the hell is it?

The new musical at Lincoln Center — “Happiness” — won’t open officially until March 30, but I caught a preview performance on Saturday and am happy to report that the latest Susan Stroman show is in great shape.
Stroman is the celebrated director-choreographer of a string of Broadway hits ranging from “Crazy for You” to “The Producers” to “Contact.”
“Happiness” reunites Stroman with her “Contact” book writer John Weidman and the song score is by the “Grey Gardens” team of Scott Frankel (music) and Michael Korie (lyrics).
It’s a charming and moving and very intimate show about what might await us after death.
A group of type-A contemporary New Yorkers is introduced in the lively opening number “Just Not Right Now.”
Arlene (Joanna Gleason) is a shrill right wing radio talkshow host.
Maurice (Ken Page) is a famous gay interior designer.
Most of the people, however, are anonymous Manhattanites.
The widely varied group finds itself stuck in a stalled subway car where an MTA worker (Hunter Foster, above, in rehearsal) gets the first big laugh in the show delivering one of those completely unintelligible subway PA system announcements.
It only takes a few more minutes for the group to realize they are in some weird limbo between death and the hereafter. The MTA man tells them they each must recall a “perfect moment” in their lives and that remembrance will serve as their entrance into Heaven.
The premise will no doubt be viewed as too New Age-y by some critics, but it is set up quickly and believably and then serves as the introduction to a series of wonderful numbers in which each cast member goes back to a special time and place and we get to share it with them.
The bliss moments start on a high note when an incoherent elderly woman (Phyllis Somerville) takes us back to her World War II era heyday when she danced at the USO with a handsome soldier on leave.
“Happiness” creates considerable suspense and dramatic momentum as we experience each subway rider’s nostalgic exit scene. These sequences also give Stroman a chance to stage some fantastic dance numbers in the tight confines of the small downstairs theater at Lincoln Center (the Mitzi E. Newhouse).
The cast is superb, the songs are varied and tuneful, and the two-hour intermissionless musical was greeted with a tremendous ovation at the end.

Jacqueline Winspear’s distinctive crime fiction series about nurse-turned-investigatve-psychologist Maisie Dobbs continues with “Among the Mad” (Henry Holt) which is perhaps the best of the six novels.
We are in a strong period for historical mysteries with the ongoing Charles Todd novels (about an emotionally shattered World War I veteran) and Lawrence Goldstone’s terrific late 19th century Philadelphia mystery “The Anatomy of Deception” which debuted to great reviews in early 2008 (and has just been reissued in paperback).
Winspear has been gaining ground with each new novel about Maisie Dobbs, a British nurse on the frontlines of World War I who returns to London where she is able to apply her acute understanding of human psychology (and personal exposure to combat) to cases that involve the lingering effects of the “great war” on British society.
“Among the Mad” takes us up to the Christmas season of 1931 when Maisie faces her most challenging — and most potentially dangerous — case.
After she witnesses the suicide of a maimed veteran on the streets of London — Maisie sees the man pull the pin on a hand grenade but is not close enough to the explosion to be harmed — the woman is drawn into a sinister terrorist blackmail plot.
The authorities begin receiving threats that unless veterans are treated better — in terms of pensions and other benfits — there will be a chemical gas attack in London. The would-be terrorist demonstrates that he means business by killing animals with the same weapon that was used in the trenches during the war.
Winspear does a wonderful job of combining historical detail with steadily increasing suspense as we wonder if Maisie will track down the veteran/terrorist before it’s too late.
There are subtle echoes of today in the financial stresses faced by Londoners in the early years of the Great Depression. A powerful subplot focuses on Maisie’s assistant, Billy, a veteran whose wife can’t cope with the death of their daughter and the horrific treatments that were prescribed for the mentally ill 70 years ago.
“Among the Mad” may be lacking in humor — as New York Times critic Marilyn Stasio oddly notes in an otherwise positive review that will appear in this Sunday’s Book Review section — but I love the way Winspear mixes strong human drama and history with the sort of “traditional” mystery that Agatha Christie used to write.

Nine times out of ten, I’m a believer in seeing movies in theaters rather than at home on television, but ever since the introduction of the DVD and its technical improvements in transferring film to video, some classics have become available for home viewing in better versions than were ever seen in theaters.
Case in point, the great Italian director Luchino Visconti’s final film, the 1976 “L’Innocente,” which didn’t arrive in this country until three years after it was finished, missing about ten minutes of the original Italian version.
The 1979 U.S. release was also marred by substandard theatrical prints that did a disservice to the superb color camerawork by Pasqualino De Santis.
Although the 1960s and ’70s were in most ways a golden age for fans of sophisticated European cinema, key films sometimes arrived in drastically cut versions and with highly variable print quality, depending on who the U.S. distributor might be.
Ingmar Bergman was well-served by the Janus and United Artists companies that released many of his most famous pictures here, but other directors were not so lucky.
Visconti had his 1960 classic “Rocco and His Brothers” heavily edited in this country — I didn’t know that the version I saw in the late 1960s was missing 30 minutes until Film Forum in Manhattan showed Visconti’s full 180-minute cut a few years ago.
As Leonard Maltin so wisely says of “Rocco” in his indispensable “2009 Movie Guide”: “beware many shorter, visually inferior prints and video versions.”
In too many cases, the theatrical prints of European pictures exhibited in the U.S. 40 years ago had the look of a copy of a copy — washed-out images, muddy sound, barely legible subtitles (or, worse, bad dubbing). Many of us who grew up in the art houses of that period didn’t know what we were missing until “remastered” DVDs started coming out a decade ago.
Which brings me to the stunning “L’Innocente,” a magnificently designed and acted drama that ranks with Visconti’s best work in the new Koch Lorber DVD version that will be released on Tuesday.
Giancarlo Giannini stars as Tullio, a 19th century aristocrat who is flagrantly cheating on his rather meek wife Giuliana (Laura Antonelli, above) with the rich widow Teresa (Jennifer O’Neill).
When Giuliana turns the tables on her husband — and falls in love with a handsome young writer — Tullio begins to go mad with jealousy.
It’s not the story but the way it is told by Visconti that makes “L’Innocente” such a powerful (and surprisingly erotic) drama. The movie is a masterpiece of wide-screen composition and brilliant costume and set design. Visconti serves up one breathtaking image after another, but the look of the movie complements this period drama about the terrible sexual double standard women faced two centuries ago.
The extras on the DVD include an illuminating interview with longtime Visconti screenwriter Suso Cecchi d’Amico who talks about her own personal efforts to see that Visconti’s final films were restored to their full beauty after his death in March 1976. Without d’Amico and her friends we would not have complete versions of “Ludwig” (1972), “Conversation Piece” (1974) and “L’Innocente.”

British super-chef Gordon Ramsay has been as succcessful on TV as he’s been in restaurants around the world.
Ramsay has 12 Michelin stars to his name for popular restaurants on both sides of the Atlantic, but he has become a multi-media celebrity from a series of TV ventures that includes the current Fox series, “Hell’s Kitchen.”
I’ve never seen any of the U.S. Ramsay reality shows, but I had a great time earlier this week watching the new Acorn Media release of the first season of the U.K. series, “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares,” in which the chef was called in to save four struggling restaurants.
It didn’t take long to see why Ramsay has become a TV star as well as a culinary celebrity — he’s charismatic, funny and seems to have an unfailing B.S. meter.
In my college days, I worked four summers in the kitchen of a hotel restaurant in New Jersey and I have been fascinated by the subject ever since. Almost any restaurant becomes an intersection of personal drama, history, nostalgia, and psychology on both sides of the equation — the customers who eat there and the people who prepare and serve the food.
It is hard to imagine a better video primer on running a restaurant than the eight episodes of “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightamres” that show us how he salvages dining establishments in West Yorkshire, the Lake District, Surrey and Wales.
Ramsay was given a week to work his magic and in all four cases we get to see how significant improvements were made.
The producers of the 2004 season did a great job of picking a wide variety of eateries from a disastrously managed wine bar with delusions of grandeur (Bonaparte’s in Silsden, West Yorkshire) to a once posh Michelin-honored establishment that has slipped under new management (The Walnut Tree in Abergavenny, Wales).
Ramsay’s tough love approach extends from lowly waiters to misguided owners but his F-bomb-laden hectoring is never personal — it’s always about improving the food and the ambiance. He reminds me of a very tough but sharp kitchen boss who whipped me into shape during my first week in restaurant work.
Half of the episopes are devoted to follow-up visits from Ramsay a year after his first visit to the restaurants.
“Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares” should be required viewing for those poor souls who have always fantasized about opening a restaurant.