Joe's View

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.)

The documentary, “The Art of the Steal,” seems poised to be one of the big art house hits of the spring.

The movie played both the Toronto and New York film festivals to great reviews last fall and the limited theatrical bookings that started late last month have been doing solid business.

Still, I was disappointed when I caught up with Don Argott’s film over the weekend at the IFC Center in Manhattan, where every seat was filled at a late afternoon showing.

Argott’s work isn’t a documentary in the traditional sense of someone going out to research a topic thoroughly and then coming back with a balanced view. It’s a Michael Moore-esque filmed essay in which all of the evidence is designed to bolster Argott’s pre-conceived thesis.

“The Art of the Steal” follows the legal wrangling over the extraordinary collection of Impressionist, post-Impressionist and Modern art held by the Barnes Foundation outside Philadelphia for most of the 20th century.

Albert Barnes was a cranky and extremely wealthy industrialist who loved art — especially the cutting edge work of the first half of the last century. In Merion, outside Philly, he built a home for a body of work that became one of the most important collections held outside a major museum.

Barnes set up his Foundation primarily as an educational institution, with only limited opportunities for the general public to view the collection. This situation was fine while Barnes lived, but in the decades after his death in 1951, America saw the rise of the museum as a major cultural/entertainment center in every major city in the country, with limited-run super-shows drawing in vast crowds (and generating lots of money for the institutions that sponsored them as well as significant ancillary tourism revenues).

Barnes hated the art establishment and museums and ran his Foundation in a happily elitist manner. After his death, the place continued for another few decades under one of his proteges.When she and then Barnes’s wife died, the dead man’s trust kicked in. He had no children to take over the estate, so a rather perverse section of his will came into play — a black college in the Philly suburbs, Lincoln University, inherited the Foundation.

Barnes did this to spite his enemies in Philadelphia, who included everyone connected with the great art museum there as well as Walter Annenberg, the right-wing owner and publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer and a major art collector.

Annenberg was a terrible publisher – and a Nixon and Reagan crony - but the movie makes it look like his was the only game in town (during most of the period covered in the film there was a very strong daily newspaper rival to the Inquirer, the late great Philadelphia Bulletin.)  

The big problem with the documentary is the way it glosses over Barnes’s will and his bequeathing of the collection to an institution that didn’t really know how to handle the bequest.

“Steal” takes easy shots at the politicians and other Philadelphia brahmins for their rather vulgar efforts to move the collection out of its suburban enclave and into the city. Argott seems a bit of a brahmin himself, however, in the way that he uses “tourist” as a dirty word and implies that allowing the public easier access to a world-class collection is a crime against humanity.

I agree that a man has the right to do whatever he wishes with his property while he is alive, but if he doesn’t do airtight estate planning all of those wishes can go up in smoke. Barnes apparently didn’t leave enough money in the trust for decades’ worth of upkeep of his property and when the place began to decline physically, the arguments for moving the work elsewhere escalated.

It’s hard to see the collection staying together and being made available to more people as the travesty that Argott and his carefully selected panel of “experts” suggest. If Barnes had had children and they successfully broke the poorly constructed will, the collection would have been sold off long ago.

The history on view in the movie is fascinating, but the moral seems wrong. If Barnes had done a better job with his estate — and put a panel of qualified people in charge of his bequest rather than Lincoln University — the art would have stayed in the suburban enclave where he wanted it.

Bob Fosse didn’t have the chance to direct many movies, but his batting average was awfully good — the director-choreographer received Oscar nominations for three of the five films he completed before he died in 1987 at the age of 60.

Fosse started working in movies in the late 1960s after establishing himself on Broadway with a series of hit musicals including “Damn Yankees” and “Sweet Charity.”

The stage director tried a little too hard to be “cinematic” in his first Hollywood outing, “Sweet Charity,” in 1969. The Shirley MacLaine vehicle suffers now from dated 1960s camera and editing gimmicks that keep throwing us out of the story.

The movie bombed at the box office, so it took Fosse another three years to get a film assignment.

“Cabaret” was shot on a tight budget in Germany, but the financial restrictions worked to the movie’s advantage. Audiences used to glossy, over-produced Hollywood musicals loved Fosse’s grittier approach and the fact that he cut all of the Broadway show’s numbers that took place outside of the decadent Berlin cabaret. The movie felt more “realistic” than any musical that had come before it.

Fosse grew up in show biz — he was a strip club hoofer and Hollywood dancer before he began working behind the scenes — but he always harbored deep reservations about his profession. As much as he loved to razzle-dazzle audiences, Fosse hated the weird mix of sentimentality and vulgarity in show business.

“Cabaret” was a smash that won a bunch of Oscars (including Fosse’s upset win over Francis Coppola for “The Godfather”). The movie gave Fosse the clout to make three blistering show biz dramas — “Lenny,” “All That Jazz” and “Star 80” — that moved song and dance to the sidelines in favor of exposing the crud behind the scenes in Hollywood and on Broadway.

No one has ever bit the hand that fed him with more style and more punch than Fosse. His final three films were bitter pills that went down semi-easy because they were so extraordinarily well made.

“Star 80” (above) is one of the toughest show biz movies, an unsparing look at the Playboy mystique and the pursuit of stardom that uses the sad life and death of playmate/actress Dorothy Stratten as its jumping off point.

Although the film was sold as Stratten’s story (and Mariel Hemingway got top billing in the role), “Star 80” spends more time on the murder victim’s hustler/pimp husband Paul Snider (Eric Roberts) who thought the blonde bombshell was his ticket to fame and fortune.

When Snider lost his wife to Playboy czar Hugh Hefner and film director Peter Bogdanovich (who starred Dorothy in “They All Laughed”), the man had an emotional meltdown and wound up blasting Stratten with a shotgun and then turning the weapon on himself.

“Star 80” was an assault on the culture that continues to pump out “American Idol” and Lindsay Lohan et al, and audiences were sickened by Fosse’s refusal to candycoat the show biz dream.

I talked to Fosse about “Star 80” a few years before he died — when he was working on a touring show that came to Connecticut — and he seemed genuinely shocked by my admiration of the uncompromising movie. He said the backlash was so strong that he wasn’t sure if he would ever be able to put together the financing for another film.

“Star 80″ deserves to be rediscovered as one of the few tough-minded studio financed dramas from an era that was dominated by the kiddie fantasies of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.

Over the past decade, Linda Fairstein has come up with one of the most winning formulas in crime fiction — mixing present and past in New York, with novels centered on historic sites in the city.

The former head of the D.A.’s Sex Crimes Unit has taken us inside the main branch of the New York Public Library, backstage at the Metropolitan Opera House and off to the strangely isolated Roosevelt Island.

Fairstein’s novels have all focused on a protagonist who fits her like a glove — assistant D.A. Alex Cooper — but the writer has deepened the 12 novels with stories that tie into the city’s history.

When you visit a place that Fairstein has written about extensively — such as Bryant Park behind the library — you see it in an entirely new way.

Book number 12, “Hell Gate,” is being published by Dutton on Tuesday and it is another winner.

Fairstein juggles a few seemingly unrelated plotlines — starting with a shipwreck off Rockaway that strands dozens of illegal immigrants and a DUI incident on the FDR involving a rising politician — that come together in the final chapters.

The book explores the current wave of political sex scandals with a brilliant new twist — an escort service that not only provides the companion but a historic place in which to make whoopee.

“Hell Gate” zeroes in on the official home of the New York City mayor — Gracie Mansion — which in recent years has not been the actual place where the mayors have resided.

A body is found in the well on the grounds of Gracie Mansion — the victim is tied to the congressman involved in the car accident — and we are off on one of Fairstein’s juiciest storylines. (Hell Gate is the area of the East River adjacent to Gracie Mansion which is believed to be one of the most treacherous waterways in the region.)

New York is such an endlessly fascinating metropolis — with so many historic sites — that it is unlikely that Fairstein will ever run out of good material.

The amazingly talented and versatile Fairfield actor David Pittu opened in a new off-Broadway play Tuesday night, “Equivocation,” at the Manhattan Theatre Club.

Bill Cain’s drama mixes history and fiction in a tale of William Shakespeare being commissioned to write a play about the “Gunpowder Plot,” an attempt by Catholic terrorists to blow up Parliament and King James I (the same bit of history that inspired the graphic novel and film, “V is for Vendetta”).

The show follows Will’s attempt to write the play with the help of some of his actors, including Pittu in the role of Nate (this is just one of several parts Pittu plays).

In the words of one critic, the writer “learns that the key to survival is equivocation, a way to speak the truth in difficult times.”

Reviews for the play were mixed, but everyone admired Pittu’s work, with Christopher Isherwood writing in The New York Times, “Mr. Pittu plays the sinister Cecil with a savory, ripe sense of cool malice.”

The 42-year-old actor is perfect for any show that calls for its cast members to play more than one part; over the past few years, Pittu has demonstrated the ability to excel in a wide array of comic and dramatic roles. He’s also done musicals with great success — earning a well-deserved Tony nomination for his performance as Bertolt Brecht (opposite Donna Murphy as Lotte Lenya) in the underrated 2007 show, “Lovemusik.”

He’s the New York theater’s man of a thousand faces and always a good reason to see a new play.

“Equivocation” is set to run through March 28 at MTC, 131 W. 55th St. For ticket info, go to www.playbill.com - use code BBX2 to get a 40 percent discount.