Joe's View

The Austin filmmaker Richard Linklater has had a devoted cult following for many years, but never the break-out commercial hit he deserves.
Linklater’s 2003 film-for-hire, “School of Rock,” made lots of money, but it wasn’t really in the spirit of the director’s best work.
Back in 1993, many of us thought “Dazed and Confused” would do the trick, because it is one of the best high school comedies ever made — much more realistic than “American Graffiti” (1973) and just as funny.
Set on the last day of school in Austin, Texas, in June 1976, the movie ambles in a very entertaining manner, taking in jocks, nerds and everyone in between as they celebrate the end of classes. Linklater had the guts to present ’70s drug use in a frank and low-key manner that neither condemned nor celebrated Bicentennial potheads.
Sadly, the movie was distributed by a subsidiary of Universal Pictures that decided to dump the movie in multiplexes for a quick and wide release that didn’t give “Dazed and Confused” the time it needed for word-of-mouth to build. In 1993, the names of cast members Matthew McConaughey (above), Ben Affleck and Parker Posey didn’t mean anything to most moviegoers so the picture was sorely lacking in star appeal.
Thanks to video and cable screenings, “Dazed and Confused” has gathered a huge following (and a prestigious Criterion Collection special edition DVD).
But, a movie this lively and funny should be seen with an audience and I am thrilled to be hosting a free “Martini and a Movie” showing next Tuesday night at 7 p.m. at the Fairfield Theatre Company.
I will be joined at the screening by one of the savviest movie minds in the area — Drew Taylor — who writes for The Fairfield Weekly and holds down the fort at Media Wave in Fairfield. Drew also happens to be from Austin and is something of a Linklater scholar, so we should have a terrific discussion after the movie.
(The Fairfield Theatre Company is at 70 Sanford St. For more information, visit www.fairfieldtheatre.org of call 259-1036.)

Is it the production or the play?
That’s what I always wonder when I am underwhelmed by a new staging of a play that I once thought was terrific.
Current case in point — Christopher Hampton’s “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” which knocked me out when it debuted on Broadway in the 1980s, but left me ice-cold at the Roundabout Theatre last Sunday.
The play’s portrait of two French aristocrats who, for social sport, like to seduce and abandon prudes and virgins seemed diabolically evil and sexy as played by Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan in the 1980s.
The 1988 movie version was fun, too, with what might be Glenn Close’s best film performance ever and Michelle Pfeiffer so poignant as the married religious woman destroyed by John Malkovich’s seduction.
On Sunday, however, the antics of Laura Linney and Ben Daniels in the same roles seemed almost silly.
Wouldn’t their friends (and enemies) catch on to the obvious manipulations of this dastardly duo, I thought to myself, as I sat through close to three hours of sexual chess-playing. And who would fall under the spell of such an obviously two-faced woman (as played by Linney)?
It’s hard to base a whole play on the machinations of evil manipulators, but Rickman and Duncan pulled it off all those years ago and Close was a spectacular monster in the movie version.
Laura Linney is a wonderful actress, but I never got caught up in her character’s dangerous games — her heart didn’t seem to be in it, so she wasn’t really scary or funny. Linney’s work reminded me of Meryl Streep’s performance in the remake of “The Manchurian Candidate” — a pale echo of that horrifying woman Angela Lansbury played in the original movie.
Do American actresses try to “understand” evil and then wind up softening it?
Or, is “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” just one of those stories that becomes tiresome when you’ve heard it a few times before?

The 2007-2008 Broadway season ended officially with Sunday night’s Tony Award ceremony, but the unofficial finale will be this Sunday night’s presentation of the 18th annual Broadway Bares show for two performances only at the Roseland Ballroom.
The show started as a 1991 brainstorm by then chorus dancer Jerry Mitchell who had a number as a scantily dressed American Indian in “The Will Rogers Follies.” He decided that the theatre world charity, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, could use a jolt of sexy show dancing to raise dough. The dancer went to the Chelsea nightclub Splash with a few friends on their off-night and hauled in $9,000 for the charity.
The hastily assembled evening of stripping for a cause turned into a full-scale show that has gotten larger and more elaborate with each passing year.
For several weeks prior to the big night, more than 200 Broadway dancers — male and female — rehearse about an hour’s worth of high class erotica. They are joined by some of the biggest stars on Broadway for special comedy material that is presented in between the strip numbers — Harvey Fierstein appeared in last year’s show along with David Hyde Pierce (Nathan Lane is expected to be among the guest stars Sunday night).
The dancers rehearse in between their Broadway performances and then the show is presented on their one night off — Sunday at 9:30 p.m. and midnight.
Mitchell attributes much of his current success as a Tony-winning choreographer on Broadway to the work he did on the early “Broadway Bares” productions.
In addition to the increasingly elaborate and spectacular dance numbers, “Broadway Bares” has pushed the envelope with more provocative sexual elements in recent years, but Mitchell and director Dennis Jones never go over the edge into vulgarity.
Last year, “Broadway Bares 17” raised $743,787 and this year the gross potential has been increased with the introduction of a slick coffee table book charting the entire history of Mitchell’s fantastic brainchild (all of the proceeds from the Rizzoli publication will go to BC/EFA).
It’s a terrific one-of-a-kind show and ticket prices start at only $55.
(For more information, go online to broadwaycares.org.)

Lee Child’s 12th Jack Reacher thriller “Nothing to Lose” (Delacorte Press) debuted in the number one spot on The New York Times bestseller list yesterday.
In a very crowded field, Child’s thrillers stand out for their lean and mean approach to character and story. I’ve talked to more than a few mystery and thriller writers who admire what Child does, but are completely mystified as to how he does it.
Many popular crime novel series present highly detailed settings and protagonists with lots of personal and professional baggage — the more we read Sue Grafton or Patricia Cornwell the more we feel we know about their characters Kinsey Milhone and Kay Scarpetta.
Reacher is a deliberately sketchy man — a retired military policeman who chooses to live a nomadic and largely isolated existence, without a permanent address or a significant other.
Reacher carries an ATM card, a portable toothbrush and little else — we assume there is quite a bit of money in his bank account but our hero lives day-by-day without any of the consumer touchstones of 21st century American society.
The man is neither a hero nor a thug — he simply wants to be on his own living the ultimate in “in the moment” lifestyles.
The stories generally start as simply as possible and then build quickly into complex and thrilling adventures (few of which Reacher enters into deliberately).
“Nothing to Lose” finds Reacher hitching in a leisurely fashion from Maine to California. In the second chapter, the character enters a restaurant in a Colorado town with the unlikely name of Despair simply looking for a good cup of coffee.
Our hero waits patiently at the “Please Wait to Be Seated” sign, but when it becomes clear the waitress will not be seating him anytime soon, he sits himself at a table only to find four goons joining him, who insist that he “get going.”
“Going?,” Reacher asks.
“Out of here.”
“Out of where?”
“Out of this restaurant.”
“You want to tell me why?”
“We don’t like strangers.”
Before we know it — and just eight pages into “Nothing to Lose” — Reacher is off on one of his strangest and scariest adventures (fueled primarily by his escalating annoyance with the weirdly anti-social people in this odd little town in the middle of nowhere).
For the next 400 pages, we join Reacher on a wild ride that becomes crazier — but never unbelievable — with each new chapter. The story expands to include “end of times” religious crazies, a possible military cover-up of dark deeds in Iraq, and a potential terrorist attack on a major city.
Reacher is part James Bond, part hard-bitten Western anti-hero (particularly Clint Eastwood’s “Man with No Name”) and part Charles Kuralt .
Child happens to be one of the funniest deadpan comedy writers in his field. The central joke here is that our whole country might have been plunged into political chaos if Reacher had been served a cup of coffee in that Despair greasy spoon.
One of the marvels of the series — and one of its biggest selling points — is that each book stands alone. You can start with “Nothing to Lose” or in the middle of the 12-book series with no diminishment of the pleasure you will find in the hands of this master entertainer.

William J. Mann’s 2006 book, “Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn” (Henry Holt) is one of the best movie star biographies I’ve ever read. On Sunday at 2 p.m. the writer will be talking about the book at the Stratford Library.
Mann cuts through the fog of “legend” and PR bull that surrounds every Hollywood celebrity — present or past — to try to get at the woman underneath. The 600-page volume reads like a shot and acts as a corrective to almost every other biography of the Connecticut-born movie icon.
As Gore Vidal put it in his pre-publication endorsement, “William Mann has produced a truly significant biography of a woman whose complicated personality has never been fully captured. He has presented not only an intriguing portrait of Hepburn but also an accurate picture of her Hollywood and the difficult business of stardom.”
Most Hollywood bios tend to fall into one of two categories — overly respectful fan puffery or a knives-out assault on a performer’s “secret” life. Mann walks a very fine line that respects Hepburn’s amazing talent and durability while poking holes in much of the mythology the star herself used as a smokescreen.
The author is especially strong in his analysis of the legend surrounding Hepburn’s supposed decades-long affair with her frequent co-star Spencer Tracy. Mann shows how both performers used the legend to disguise their much more complicated private lives that many of their friends and co-workers believed included same sex relationships.
Mann quotes the late, great Hollywood novelist and screenwriter Gavin Lambert on Tracy’s homosexuality: “It was one of those very deep, dark secrets of Hollywood. It always seemed so odd, because I never felt any gay vibe watching Tracy on-screen. But the stories were told by people in George (Cukor’s) circle I trusted. I think it’s really the only way to fully understand why Tracy was so troubled.”
“Everyone at Metro knew the truth about Kate and Spencer,” Mann quotes another member of the Tracy and Hepburn circle. “They knew that they were together but that it wasn’t a sexual thing. I always laugh when I hear people say, ‘Oh, wasn’t it good of Hollywood not to gossip, to be so respectful of their affair.’ But nobody was gossiping because they knew there was nothing to gossip about. Everyone knew they were just good, devoted friends.”
In a paragraph that is characteristic of Mann’s compassionate, thoughtful tone throughout the book, he comments, “Of course, it was difficult for people to understand — then as well as now — that a relationship could be intense and passionate and important without being sexual. The love story of Tracy and Hepburn should not be minimized just because sex (at least for much of the duration) was not a defining characteristic.”
(William J. Mann’s free talk and signing will be at 2 p.m. on Sunday. The Stratford Library is at 2203 Main St.)

With many documentary profiles these days it’s impossible to tell if the filmmakers are mocking or celebrating their subjects.
Last week, a Bridgeport audience packed a benefit preview of a new film, “The Accidental Mayor,” about the short and rather sad reign of John M. Fabrizi who took over the city government after his predecessor was sent to the slammer.
Although it sometimes looks like Fabrizi is being exploited by the moviemaker for buffoonish jokes, the ex-mayor agreed to let the cameras follow him and set himself up for derision, so you can’t really criticize director Larry Locke for letting the camera run and picking up every self-dramatizing excess of the politician.
Another fascinating — and troubling — behind-the scenes documentary, “The Art of Failure: Chuck Connelly Not for Sale,” is being previewed at the Bantam Cinema Saturday at noon before it receives national exposure on HBO July 7.
Director Jeff Stimmel takes the viewer into the life of painter Chuck Connelly who was a peer of Julian Schnabel and the other hot New York artists of the 1980s, but who ceased being trendy and collectible in the early 1990s.
Stimmel shows us footage of Connelly when he was young and handsome — and selling several hundred thousand dollars worth of his work — but then cuts to the painter as he is today, alcoholic and often deranged and living in obscurity in Philadelphia.
The film implies that Connelly’s career took a catastrophic hit after he agreed to act as an adviser to Martin Scorsese on his art-world segment of “New York Stories” (1989) and then had the gall to criticize the movie. Stimmel doesn’t include an interview with Scorsese or anyone else involved with the film, so we are left wondering exactly how a Page Six item in The New York Post could have had such far-reaching consequences on a trendy painter.
Whether through discretion — or lack of access to willing interview subjects — Stimmel never digs into the specifics of Connelly’s descent into continual drunkenness and who-knows-what associated mental illness.
In the present-day scenes in Philadelphia and New York City, the artist embarrasses himself and the friends and family who make the mistake of crossing his path with cameras rolling. Connelly’s French wife is seen in several introductory scenes — where she is treated abominably by her spouse — and then disappears for off-screen divorce negotiations.
There is a strong element of exploitation in the movie’s exposure of a drunken man babbling nonsense in scene after scene. Yes, Connelly is a public figure who invited cameras into his life, but was he in any condition to realize what he was doing?
Still, “The Art of Failure” makes for a compelling hour and those who attend the screening in Bantam will have a chance to question Stimmel and to meet Connelly who says he is attending the Saturday event.
The New Arts Gallery in Litchfield is holding a show of Connelly’s work in conjunction with the unveiling of the HBO film, so perhaps this dark and disturbing movie will help the artist in the long run.
For information on Saturday’s screening, call 860-567-5015.

One of my favorite crime writers — Jonathan Santlofer — will be speaking tonight at 7:30 at the New Canaan Library.
Santlofer is on a national tour for his latest thriller, “The Murder Notebook” (William Morrow), the second novel about New York City police sketch artist Nate Rodriguez who is drawn into a very scary case involving Iraq war veterans suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.
I am a big fan of the first three novels Santlofer wrote after a long and successful career as an artist. The author created a great character, Kate McKinnon, who was a Queens cop before becoming an art historian and public television personality.
Kate’s expertise in art and police work came into play in the three cases covered in “The Death Artist,” “Color Blind” and “The Killing Art.” The novels are all wonderfully atmospheric with Santlofer demonstrating his insider’s knowledge of the downtown art scene as well as life in the outer boroughs.
The McKinnon novels placed Santlofer securely in the company of such other high-level contemporary New York City crime writers as Jim Fusilli, S.J. Rozan and Peter Spiegelman — all of whom seem to relish the unique mix of high life and low life to be found in the city they love.
Santlofer took a break from the well-received series to write the first Nate Rodriguez book last year — “Anatomy of Fear.” I took a break as well until I had the chance to talk with the writer about “The Murder Notebook” for a story that will run in my Sunday “Book Beat” column on July 6.
I was so fond of the McKinnon books that I was a tad reluctant to meet a new character last year. Now that I’ve read the second Nate novel I can see that I should have known that Santlofer would not disappoint with a new series.
Indeed, “The Murder Notebook” has all of the qualities that I enjoyed in the earlier novels — a believably flawed protagonist, a frightening crime that demands a cop-artist’s involvement, and a richly drawn portrait of life in New York City right now.
Nate is representative of the city’s cultural mix — his mother is Jewish and his late father (a cop killed in the line of duty) was Puerto Rican.
The young sketch artist has an almost supernatural ability to coax accurate suspect drawings out of witnesses — he also calls on his Puerto Rican grandmother’s gifts as a seer and practitioner of Santeria.
Santlofer gives “The Murder Notebook” an extra level of interest by including many of Nate’s sketches and eerie drawings of a facial reconstruction project he works on using a skull.
The book has a strong paranoid thriller element as Nate wonders if the FBI is trying to cover up a series of murder-suicides involving mentally unbalanced veterans. Santlofer’s orchestration of the mystery plot and the weaving of Nate’s personal problems into the story are so masterful that you should polish off “The Murder Notebook” in a few sittings.
Now, I can’t wait to get to “Anatomy of Fear.”
(Jonathan Santlofer will be at the New Canaan Library, 151 Main St., tonight at 7:30 p.m.)

When Tina Brown’s book, “The Diana Chronicles,” appeared in hardcover last year I didn’t read it despite the good reviews and the fact that it shot to the top of the best-seller list.
I never really thought much about Princess Diana or her marital problems back in the 1980s and 1990s because it seemed that we had enough gossipy crises to contend with on this side of the Atlantic.
But, last weekend I raced through the recently published Broadway Books paperback edition of Brown’s in-depth account of the disastrous marriage of Diana and Charles — and the rather sad single life of the princess before her car accident death in 1997.
Brown has put the whole story together in a breezy yet analytical style that makes for highly absorbing reading, starting with the end of the tale in a chapter called, “A Tunnel in Paris.”
The author knew Diana casually, and wrote about her in Tatler magazine — at the time of the 1981 fairy tale wedding to Prince Charles — and then continued to follow the quickly collapsing marriage in the pages of Vanity Fair (which Brown turned into a smashing success when she took over the top job there after the magazine’s shaky launch).
“The Diana Chronicles” takes a sympathetic but clear-eyed view of a rather dim young woman who was swept up in the idea of marrying the future King of England, but never thought the idea through (a warning bell should have gone off in the girl’s head when Charles was asked in a pre-wedding interview if he was “in love” with Diana and the royal replied, “Whatever in love means”).
Brown makes it clear that Diana wasn’t exaggerating when she described herself as being “thick as a plank” but she still makes us care about this celebrity-mad, self-dramatizing and doomed woman.
The author also establishes the fact that the conspiracy theories of Dodi Al Fayed’s father just don’t make any sense: “As for the sinister forces organizing the crash of the Mercedes, a conspiracy would have been beyond the capacities of all the intelligence agencies and royal masterminds in the grassy knoll of Al Fayed’s imagination: pre-knowledge that Dodi would make the last-minute decisions he did; that Henri-Paul would be the driver; that Paul would be drunk and drugged; that he would not follow the most obvious route to Dodi’s apartment…that Dodi and Diana would not wear seatbelts — and on and on through an infinity of variables.”