Joe's View

With Joe Meyers, entertainment writer

Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Rent it now: Woody Allen’s underrated ‘Manhattan Murder Mystery’

Friday, April 26, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

Woody Allen has made so many movies over the past five decades that some of them don’t receive as much attention as they deserve.

Everyone knows about the masterpieces — “Annie Hall,” “Manhattan,” “Hannah and Her Sisters” and a few others — but I’m often surprised by the blank looks I get when I mention the 1993 comedy, “Manhattan Murder Mystery.”

The truth is I wasn’t crazy about the picture when it first came out — it seemed like a lateral move for the writer-director after his amazing 1992 drama, “Husbands & Wives.”

Allen reunited with his 1970s co-star Diane Keaton (above) for this contemporary comedy mystery about a Manhattan couple who come to believe that a neighbor who apparently died of a heart attack was actually murdered by her husband.

Allen and Keaton play the comfortable Upper East Side couple who have their routine shaken up by this unexpected sleuthing adventure.

Alan Alda has a strong supporting role as a divorced writer friend — with a long-standing crush on the Keaton character — who is eager to get involved in nailing a killer. Anjelica Huston (below) is wonderful, too, as a novelist — Allen plays her editor at HarperCollins — who knows exactly how to trap the killer.

“Manhattan Murder Mystery” seemed slight 21 years ago, but subsequent viewings on video have bumped it up on my list of favorite Allen pictures.

It’s consistently funny and the mystery plot is clever.

One of the problems faced by the film in 1993 was the fact that Allen was still embroiled in his scandalous break-up with Mia Farrow (indeed, Keaton stepped into a role written for Farrow).

It was hard to be objective about an Allen comedy in the wake of such a nasty scandal.

One of the things that amazes me about the movie now is that Allen and his cast and crew could produce such a charming piece of froth in the middle of the tabloid hell of the Farrow split.

The comic teamwork between Keaton and Allen is so sharp — and so reminiscent of the work they did together in the 1970s — that it seems impossible the script was only weeks away from being filmed with Farrow as the would-be detective wife.

I watched the movie again a few weeks back and found it to be as delightful as ever. A trifle, to be sure, but a very well-crafted one.

‘Old Woman’: paranoia & possible murder in The Bronx

Thursday, April 25, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

William Morrow calls the new Hallie Ephron book “There Was an Old Woman” a “novel of suspense” and that it is — the author sets up characters so real and situations so harrowing that I kept reading it, way too late into the night, because I knew I couldn’t rest until the story was played out.

Ephron has produced a book that doesn’t fit snugly into any of the mystery or thriller genre subdivisions.

On one level, it’s a quintessential New York story about the lengths people will go to for a prime piece of real estate in that city.

On other levels, the book is about how elderly people cope with declining physical and mental powers when they live alone, and what the adult children of alcoholics have to deal with as drinking starts to take a terrible toll on a parent.

Ephron eases us into the lives of Mina Yetner and Evie Ferrante, who renew their acquaintance on a quiet block in the Bronx, after Evie’s alcoholic mother is hospitalized.

Mina is in her 90s but still spry and living on her own in the same tidy house where she and her deceased sister grew up. Evie returns to the block to deal with the squalor her mother left behind in her house across the street from Mina’s home.

Ephron takes us deep into the lives of these two women. Evie is horrified by the visual evidence of her mother’s decline — a trash-filled home, a weed and refuse-filled yard. The place is so rundown that the historical researcher, who lives in Brooklyn, isn’t sure if she can stay there while she attempts to get the place in some semblance of order.

Meanwhile, across the street, Mina is coping with tiny but scary indications that she might be starting the same decline into dementia that claimed her sister a few years earlier.

Misplaced papers.

Losing her purse and then finding it in the refrigerator.

Almost causing fires with an over-heated tea kettle and then a slow-cooking dinner (Mina is sure she had the burner knob on low rather than a higher setting).

We connect with these smart and kind women before Ephron starts making it clear that there might be sinister explanations for what’s going on. Evie can’t understand why her mom let the place go so far into “Hoarders”-style squalor and yet just had an expensive wall-screen HD TV installed and also has envelopes full of hundred bills lying around the house.

Mina and the reader start to wonder if someone is trying to mess with the old woman’s mind in order to get her our of the house and locked-up in an assisted living facility.

Ephron does a great job of keeping us caught up in the reality of the situations of the two women and yet also allowing hints of diabolical mischief and impending violence to filter into the narrative.

“There Was an Old Woman” is the best book yet by the author of “Never Tell a Lie” and “Come and Find Me.” Ephron is fast becoming one of contemporary fiction’s masters of suspense.

Tom & Reese: the impact of off-screen movie star antics

Wednesday, April 24, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

Within the space of a few minutes Monday morning, I heard a New York radio station teaser for an upcoming show biz-related story — “Oscar winner arrested” — and a business report on the weekend movie grosses in which the reporter called the star of the number one movie in the United States “a wingnut.”

The teaser turned out to be a promo for a report on Reese Witherspoon’s arrest in Georgia for disorderly conduct (after her husband was accused of driving under the influence). The “wingnut” was Tom Cruise, whose sci-fi drama “Oblivion” scored big at the box-office last weekend.

On the Witherspoon matter, the Internet was already blasting “America’s Sweetheart” for taking a snippy, entitled tone with a cop, asking him a variation of “Don’t you know who I am?” and then vaguely threatening him that his name could be mud after the fracas.

Once she was thrown in the clink, Reese quickly saw the light, issuing an apology, and adopting the most angelic pose I have ever seen in a police mugshot (below).

As an actress pushing 40 — with a few recent flops behind her — Witherspoon and her people obviously wanted to nip this affair in the bud, and get the star back on track.

Nobody in Hollywood wants to have the continuing image problems that have plagued Tom Cruise since his public meltdown during the 2005 summer of “War of the Worlds” (the Oprah couch-jumping; the confrontation with Matt Lauer on “The Today Show”; the dust-up with Brooke Shields).

What is almost forgotten about that period by the public — but not within Hollywood — is the fact that Cruise’s image problems all arose after he fired veteran publicist Pat Kingsley and replaced her with his own sister.

In Hollywood as well as everywhere else, you get what you pay for.

Cruise has made several highly successful films since that fateful summer, but the tone of his personal press coverage is almost always negative now.

Bad press off-screen can bleed into reviews as well as news coverage. An actor who got a pass on more than a few duds in his prime — “Legend,” “Cocktail” etc. — has been viciously attacked for light entertainments such as “Knight and Day” and better-than-average fare like “Valkyrie.”

A lot of the reporting on the strong “Oblivion” grosses was presented in a bizarrely negative manner.

The Los Angeles Times stressed the fact that this was Cruise’s “first No. 1 film opening in seven years.” Buried in that story was the fact that a Cruise movie released less than two years ago, “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” opened at No. 3 because it debuted in only a few hundred IMAX theaters, but “later climbed two positions when it expanded to cinemas nationwide.” (Couldn’t they say “climbed to No. 1”?)

“Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol” wasn’t just a mammoth hit, it was the most successful entry in the four movie franchise — grossing $692,497,903 globally.

But, the fact that Cruise demonstrated his continuing popularity just 16 months ago doesn’t jibe with industry perception that he is “fading,” so “Ghost Protocol” is simply ignored by those who like to bash the star.

‘Seduced’: the man who understood Hollywood sex & money

Tuesday, April 23, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

At one point in the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel about Hollywood, “The Last Tycoon,” the producer’s daughter, Celia Brady, says, “Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.”

She is talking about the genius mogul Monroe Stahr (modeled on MGM production chief Irving Thalberg), but one of those other “half a dozen men” might have been the powerful and sexually charged lawyer Greg Bautzer.

Bautzer was legendary as the lover of a “Who’s Who” of Golden Age stars, ranging from Lana Turner to Joan Crawford to Ginger Rogers to Jane Wyman. And on and on.

The man was equally seductive in his legal work, gaining the trust and highly remunerative fees of such studio heads as Joseph Schenck, Darryl Zanuck, and Charles Bludhorn, and countless stars, including Robert Mitchum, Laurence Olivier, Sophia Loren and Natalie Wood.

Hollywood lawyer James Gladstone — executive VP of business and legal affairs for Lionsgate Entertainment — tells Bautzer’s personal and public stories in a highly readable new biography, “The Man Who Seduced Hollywood,” just published by Chicago Review Press.

As an insider himself, Gladstone understands the achievement of Bautzer as a lawyer who snagged one of the greatest Hollywood figures of all time, industrialist turned moviemaker Howard Hughes. It was that “get,” in particular, that made other powerful men want to be part of Bautzer’s client list.

The book takes us through one of the lawyer’s highest profile cases, the divorce of Ingrid Bergman from Petter Lindstrom so that she could legalize her adulterous relationship with the Italian director Roberto Rossellini.

Bergman was a much admired figure in Hollywood, both for her unbroken string of box office hits and her down-to-earth good looks (she had a “natural” make-up free style that was revolutionary for Hollywood in the 1940s).

The affair and pregnancy turned her into a scandalous figure — denounced on the floor of Congress and virtually banned from Hollywood for the better part of a decade — and kept Bautzer’s name in the papers for weeks.

Gladstone interviewed the child at the center of the case — Bergman and Lindstrom’s daughter Pia — and gives us a fresh view of this often written about scandal.

“The Man Who Seduced Hollywood” deals with the links between the legitimate businessmen of Hollywood and the shady underworld figures like Bugsy Siegel and Sam Giancana who made their way to the center of the action. The glamour of gangsters in Hollywood is amusingly illustrated in the story of producer and studio head Robert Evans, who preferred telling people that he got his Paramount job through his friendship with a mob-conneccted lawyer rather than Bautzer suggesting to Charles Bludhorn that he take a chance on the young go-getter.

Gladstone covers Bautzer’s incredibly active sex life without ever becoming tawdry. The endless supply of star girlfriends was awesome but the book leaves what went on in those boudoirs to our imagination. Apparently, Bautzer had such a charismatic personality that his exes remained friends with him for decades afterward.

A major source for the book was the late actress Dana Wynter (the lovely star of the original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” who died two years ago) who was the third of Bautzer’s four wives. Although she gave Gladstone a full accounting of the problems she had with Bautzer she also remained close to him until he died in 1987.

“The Man Who Seduced Hollywood” is the rare movie industry tome that combines juicy gossip with a look at the real business machinations of the dream factories in their prime.

Rent them now: from Woodstock to Altamont in 1969

Monday, April 22, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

taking

Despite all of the hoopla surrounding the 40th anniversary of Woodstock in 2009, Ang Lee’s charming film about the run-up to the 1969 music festival — “Taking Woodstock” (above) — was one of that year’s notable box-office failures.

When I saw with the picture at a local multiplex, I was part of an audience of five. Perhaps the (very long) string on baby boomer nostalgia finally ran out.

I have to admit that I can’t blame people in their 20s and 30s who are sick and tired of 50- and 60-something media folk dredging up the greatest hits of their long ago youth.

Can you imagine how members of the counterculture would have reacted in 1969 if everywhere you turned there were TV and magazine and newspaper features devoted to the pop culture of 1929?

(I love the music of The Beatles, but do you believe all of the coverage that was given to the release of that Fab Four video game and CD boxed in 2009? Enough already!)

The flip side of “Woodstock” and the counterculture happened within months of the New York music festival and can be seen in “Gimme Shelter” (below), a classic documentary that shows the dark side of the 1969 pop music scene and the boomer youth culture.

The movie follows the 1969 tour of the The Rolling Stones, with a special emphasis on the free concert that ended the tour — the nightmarish music festival at the Altamont Raceway near San Francisco that resulted in four deaths (including a murder right in front of the stage as Mick and the boys played “Sympathy for the Devil”).

Less than six months after the “peace and love” of Woodstock, the Altamont gathering displayed the dark side of the rampant drug taking that was destroying the counterculture from within.

The emphasis in the Woodstock documentary was on the music and the idyllic upstate New York setting. In “Gimme Shelter” the filmmakers decided to focus their cameras on the audience while The Stones performed and the result is an appalling vision of the ultimate bad trip — young people too wasted to react to the atmosphere of imminent violence (and the absurdity of the festival organizers hiring The Hells Angels motorcyle gang to provide “security”).

The Rolling Stones at Altamont

‘Remember Sunday’: starting from scratch every day

Sunday, April 21, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

The Hallmark Hall of Fame romantic comedy-drama “Remember Sunday,” premiering tonight at 9 p.m. on ABC, has an unsettling premise that could have been used for a horror film with equal success.

The hero Gus (Zachary Levi) suffers from a brain condition that makes it impossible for him to hold on to any short term memory after a night’s sleep. So, he starts each day with a clean slate, and an apartment plastered with Post-Its that are designed to re-orient him.

We learn that Gus had a brain aneurysm three years earlier when he was a successful astronomer in Los Angeles. Due to his condition, he is only able to hold down a much simpler job in a New Orleans jewelry store. He moved to Louisiana so that his old friends and family could look after him.

At this point viewers might wonder if they’re watching a romance or a more realistic variation on “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (without the pods).

Three years of romantic isolation end for Gus when pretty waitress Molly (the charming Alexis Bledel) is drawn to him for his gentle personality, his kindness and his good looks. She is annoyed and even angered, however, by what at first appears to be his extreme absent-mindedness.

It is to the credit of writer Barry Morrow and director Jeff Bleckner (in his long ago theater days, he won a Tony for David Rabe’s “Sticks and Bones”) that “Remember Sunday” doesn’t minimize Gus’ nightmarish condition.

We all talk about trying to “live in the moment” but Gus has been stuck in the same spot for three years by his inability to gain any ground with each new day. He gets by projecting unwavering niceness in almost everyone’s direction, but his situation makes it almost impossible to make new friends (if we don’t share memories with people, how can they become close friends?)

The two leads are very good and Bleckner keeps the saccharine quotient in check. The result is an unusually thought-provoking tale of romance. “Remember Sunday” also benefits from the realistic but beautiful New Orleans setting.

‘Un Flic’: crime classic explores fine line between cops, crooks

Saturday, April 20, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

New York’s Film Forum has just unveiled a new print of a terrific 1972 French film noir, “Un Flic,” starring Alain Delon and Catherine Denueve, that will be screened through next Thursday.

The movie was the final effort of writer-director Jean-Pierre Melville, one of the modern masters of crime stories, who loved the hard-boiled American thrillers of the 1940s and 1950s, but who put his own cynical spin on the genre.

The fact that there is generally not an ounce of sentiment in Melville movies, and the stories are told with such a cool, sleek visual style, has made them perennial arthouse favorites. Pessimism never goes out of fashion.

Pictures like “Le Samourai” and “Les Doulos” were overshadowed in this country at the time of their original releases by the more prestigious fare of U.S. arthouse favorites such as Francois Truffaut and Federico Fellini. But starting 15 or 20 years ago, Melville’s popularity has steadily grown, and a “rediscovered” 1969 World War II thriller “Army of Shadows” became a major arthouse hit here a few years ago.

“Un Flic” translates as “a cop” but the film is pretty evenly balanced between the jaded Paris policeman played by Delon and the big score heist specialist played by American actor Richard Crenna. One of the henchmen is another familiar face, Michael Conrad, who went on to star in “Hill Street Blues.”

The cool blonde who is of equal interest to both men is played by a very young and very beautiful Catherine Denueve who creates a character as morally bankrupt as any of the women in 1940s Hollywood noir.

“Un Flic” opens with a beautifully staged bank heist in a French resort town during the off-season. Crenna and his three accomplices almost pull it off without a hitch until one of the tellers sets off an alarm and shoots one of the robbers.

The crooks get away but face the challenge of finding medical treatment for the wounded man (a problem that is solved by the ice-cold Deneuve).

When Melville starts intercutting between the thieves and the cop played by Delon, the behavior on both sides is so brutal that it is hard to distinguish the police from their prey.

Delon’s chilling performance was part of his successful attempt in the 1970s to get away from the romantic/pretty boy roles that established him as an international star a decade earlier.

The actor was so attractive in his youth that he fell into a romantic leading man niche in films such as “The Leopard” and “Eclipse” or playing the scheming seducer in pictures such as “Purple Noon.”

Thanks to Melville, who cast him in several of his bleak thrillers, Delon broke out of the stereotype, and was able to make a smooth transition to mature roles. He is just about perfect in “Un Flic.”

(For information on the Film Forum screenings of “Un Flic” visit www.filmforum.com. Also, a good print of the film is also available for free screening to members of the Amazon Prime service.)

Rent it now: regaining lost youth in ‘Seconds’

Friday, April 19, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

Director John Frankenheimer suffered a major career setback in 1966 when “Seconds” opened to wildly mixed reviews and then bombed at the box-office.

The dark and experimental movie was just a tad ahead of its time — the following year would bring “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Graduate” and a whole new wave of challenging Hollywood films.

“Seconds” is a horror fantasy about the ruthless American pursuit of eternal youth and endless “lifestyle” options.

A burned-out middle-aged Scarsdale businessman (John Randolph, below) is offered a chance for a second life through a mysterious New York company that guarantees a new face (and body) through plastic surgery and then a relocation into a new home and career.

The catch is that there is no going back — a cadaver is used to provide the cover of an accidental death and estate money is secretly transferred to the new “you.”

So, the overweight and balding businessman Randolph goes into surgery and comes out the much younger and trimmer Rock Hudson (above), who is relocated to an artist’s colony in Malibu (where he falls for Salome Jens).

Hudson gives a very powerful and poignant performance, but his casting probably worked against the picture in 1966. The audience for his light 1960s comedies was appalled by the horror of “Seconds” and the “serious” film audience had no interest in a “Rock Hudson movie.”

Frankenheimer wanted to have Laurence Olivier play both halves of the role, but Paramount said the Brit wasn’t a big enough star (!) After both Glenn Ford and Kirk Douglas turned the movie down, Frankenheimer heard Hudson was interested, but only if his participation was limited to the “after” scenes.

“Seconds” has slowly gathered a cult following and critics have come to regard it as one of Frankenheimer’s career high points, just under the peerless “The Manchurian Candidate.”

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