Joe's View

With Joe Meyers, entertainment writer

‘The Body in the Piazza’: keeping a mystery series fresh

Thursday, May 2, 2013 by:Joe Meyers
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piazza2“The Body in the Piazza” (William Morrow) is Katherine Hall Page’s 21st entry in the Faith Fairchild mystery series that follows a caterer married to a minister in a fictional town about 20 minutes from Boston.

So many crime series run out of gas or go on autopilot that Page’s ability to keep her characters and plots fresh for more than two decades is quite remarkable.

Mystery fans are fickle — wanting more of the same thing that attracted them to a series and yet being among the first to complain if the plots and characters start to feel stale — but Page has yet to disappoint readers.

Making the author’s accomplishment all the more remarkable is the fact that Faith is an amateur sleuth, the trickiest sort of character to sustain in a series. A cop or a private detective is going to face new crimes every day, but what are the odds that a caterer will run into a “body” more than once?piazza

Well, Page has made us forget Faith’s bad luck by varying the crimes and the settings and even the time frame from book to book, so that we never quite know what to expect in the latest novel. A few of the books have taken Fairchild and her family to their summer resort home on an island off the Maine coast and one story set there involved Faith’s best friend, Pix, in her own mystery.

A recent book in the series flashed back to Faith as a young woman in her native Manhattan to show us how she wound up marrying a minister despite her vow to avoid the same fate as her mother. Faith and her sister grew up under the microscope of being minister’s daughters, something she was determined to escape in her own adult life.

The new book, which was published Tuesday, is one of the most entertaining and most sophisticated entries in the series, a story that takes Faith and her husband, Tom, away from Massachusetts and off to Italy where they plan to take a cooking course from an old friend of Faith’s who lives near Florence.

The trip gives the Fairchilds a break from their two children, and a chance to explore Rome and Florence on their own. Page eases into the mystery aspect of “Piazza” after a few delicious chapters detailing the sensual delights of Rome and the fun of finding an unexpected new friend along the way — in this case, a British travel writer who is immediately comfortable with Faith and Tom and adds to the adventure of their trip.

Faith and Tom witness a murder on a Rome street, an event which turns out to be connected with the cooking school they are traveling to the next day. There, in a wonderful Agatha Christie-style situation, each of the guests is a possible suspect, and Faith finds herself forced to deal with another crime.

“The Body in the Piazza” is just about perfect escapism, but Page avoids the weightlessness that can make other traditional mysteries feel instantly disposable. Murder is not treated casually in the series — each death carries a real sting — so there is a strong moral element in Faith’s determination to find out who did it and why.

Categories: General

The uncommon common sense of Anna Quindlen

Wednesday, May 1, 2013 by:Joe Meyers
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anna_quindlen_-c-joyceravid_final1The most recent book by novelist and essayist Anna Quindlen — “Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake” (Random House) — is about the lessons learned by a smart and funny baby boomer, from the turbulence of youth up to the puzzlement of finding yourself in late middle age.

Instead of being locked into a fake “youthful” posture, like so many of her peers, Quindlen deals with the fact that her 50something self would be a stranger to her 20-year-old version.

Quindlen was a professional navel gazer in The New York Times columns she wrote about navigating her 30s, but her ability to make the specifics of a rather privileged life in the fast lanes of Manhattan media strike a universal chord in readers earned her a Pulitzer Prize.

(Quindlen will be talking about “Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake” tonight at the Edgerton Center in Fairfield, but the event sold out last week.)

The writer took the wisdom she gained in column writing and translated it into a series of very quindlen1successful novels, one of which, “One True Thing,” was turned into a devastating 1998 Meryl Streep movie.

The novels are terrific, but there is something very special about the direct-address version of Quindlen that we get in her non-fiction work. Like the late great Nora Ephron, Quindlen is such a strong writer that she pulls us in close even when we might disagree with what she is saying.

“Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake” is largely about a completely new phase of life for a healthy American person — the decade or so between the “middle age” of one’s 40s and 50s and the no-fooling elderly years of the 70s and 80s (should you be so lucky).

“We’ve added a decade to our body clocks,” Quindlen writes of the expansion of average life expectancy from the late 60s to the late 70s (from the time of the writer’s birth 60 years ago).

“…that time comes not at the end, when things are pretty much what they always were — physical degeneration, systematic loss, more of a look back than a look ahead; it comes now in the years between sixty and seventy, years that feel like an encore instead of a coda.”

People in these “coda” years, Quindlen explains, have experienced loss — of friends and family, sexual energy, the notion of a bright, ever-expanding future — but they can also be free of one of the most anxious aspects of youth, that desperate caring about other people’s opinions of you.

Through an interlocking series of essays about family, aging, mortality, and a host of other topics, Quindlen offers reassurance and honesty and her own lessons learned, but little advice.

The writer lets us know some of what has happened to her over six decades in a warmly personal style, but allows us the freedom to reach our conclusions about what she writes. It’s not a disdainful take it or leave it attitude, but a take it and use it if you would like philosophy that is very appealing.

Categories: General

Rent it now: the original, down and dirty ‘Out-of-Towners’

Tuesday, April 30, 2013 by:Joe Meyers
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When I watched the reissued DVD of “The Out-of-Towners” (1970) a while ago I was very happy to see that the movie is as entertaining as ever.

The comic teamwork of Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis — as an Ohio couple on a disastrous job interview trip to Manhattan — is nothing short of fabulous.

Lemmon keeps his character’s hysteria mounting steadily as one disaster after another occurs on the trip while Dennis as his wife tries to maintain her cool. But when the husband becomes completely irrational and then mean, the wife’s calm veneer switches over into sarcasm.

The byplay between Dennis and Lemmon is extraordinary and the surprisingly vicious dialogue between the husband and wife in the second half of the movie is some of Neil Simon’s best writing and Arthur Hiller’s best direction.

What really struck me about “The Out-of-Towners” this time, however, is the amazing camerawork by Andrew Laszlo (right), who shot the whole thing on tricky locations — mostly at night — and who presented one of the first vivid portraits of New York City moving into the dark crime-and-fiscal-crisis age of the 1970s.

“The Out-of-Towners” shows us Grand Central Terminal at its dingiest and Central Park when entering it at night was considered a suicidal impulse.

Six years before the Steadicam came into use — which made it much easier to shoot on location — Laszlo and his crew did a lot of hand-held camerawork that gives the picture an unforgettable documentary feel. It must have been a bitch to light these real places in a natural style without getting in the way of the hundreds of extras in some scenes.

I can’t think of another Hollywood studio comedy that looks this believably down and dirty, but Laszlo’s visual style makes the city come alive in a way that it rarely has in a movie. And the details in the New York City background make the vitriolic dialogue seem completely natural (when Simon agreed to a remake 30 years later, the picture was shot with a gleaming Toronto standing in as New York, and the result was a farce that made no sense).

Laszlo would go on from “The Out-of-Towners” to shoot another 1970 comedy set in a grittier-by-the-minute Manhattan — “The Owl and the Pussycat” — and then spent much of the decade in the city preparing for his greatest challenge and masterpiece, the fabulously stylized 1979 street gang thriller “The Warriors.”

The 87-year-old Laszlo has been retired on Long Island for several years now, but his work in New York City in the 1970s is long overdue for rediscovery. He didn’t shoot the most acclaimed pictures of that time and place — “The French Connection” (1971), “Serpico” (1973), etc. — but he was certainly one of the key players in a great era.

Categories: General

Would Meryl Streep play Pepper Potts if she came along now?

Monday, April 29, 2013 by:Joe Meyers
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gwynethBack in the 1970s and 1980s, an Oscar win for a young actress usually meant a salary upgrade and the ability to land even better roles in A-level productions.

Meryl Streep won the 1979 best supporting actress Oscar and was off and running on an amazing streak of starring parts that would include “Silkwood” (below), “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” “Out of Africa” and “Sophie’s Choice.”

Jessica Lange used the clout she gained from an Oscar win for “Tootsie” in 1982 to leave similar ingenue roles behind for a series of meaty parts in “Sweet Dreams,” “Crimes of the Heart,” “Men Don’t Leave” and “Music Box.” The actress was also able to produce and star in a pet project, “Country,” about the plight of farm families in the early 1980s.

Sissy Spacek went from her Oscar winning role in “Coal Miner’s Daughter” to “Missing,” “Raggedy Man,” “Marie” and “Violets are Blue,” a star vehicle directed by her husband Jack Fisk.

I could go on, but I would get too depressed by the current plight of young-ish actresses after they win Oscars.

gwyneth1Nowadays, the career trajectory of a rising actress is more likely to include an Oscar win for an independent or low budget film and then a series of bum or secondary parts in the big budget movies that get booked into multiplexes.

You could argue that Charlize Theron and Halle Berry got better roles before they won their Oscars for “Monster” in 2003 and “Monster’s Ball” in 2001.

Berry’s post Oscar resume includes a James Bond picture, two “X-Men” movies and the recent flop thriller “The Call” (she was part of the large ensemble of last year’s would-be prestige picture, “Cloud Atlas,” but that film failed to connect, too).

Theron won strong roles in two serious dramas, “North Country” in 2005 and “In the Valley of Elah” two years later, but since they flopped she has supported Will Smith in the awful “Hancock,” played second-fiddle to Kristen Stewart in “Snow White and the Huntsman” and landed a nothing role in last summer’s “Prometheus. Next up for the South African Oscar winner is “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

Gwyneth Paltrow won her Oscar for “Shakespeare in Love” 14 years ago, in the wake of good parts in a wide of array of films including “Emma” and “Sliding Doors.”

Since 1998, Paltrow has played a mixed bag of roles — with good ones in “Sylvia” and “Proof” — but in the past few years, her career and public image seem to be going backwards.

Last week, she was named People’s “World’s Most Beautiful Woman” — a foolish honor for an actress at 21, a desperate PR stunt at 40 — which was obviously cooked up as part of the promotion for next weekend’s “Iron Man 3” (above) in which she plays third fiddle to Robert Downey and the special effects (and is saddled with the dumbest character name in modern movies — Pepper Potts).

The position of Paltrow, Theron and Berry illustrates the depths to which women now have to sink if they are going to be part of the big studio movies that dominate the mainstream marketplace.

If a Meryl Streep or Jessica Lange (or Sissy Spacek or Diane Keaton) came along now, they might find good roles in indie films or on an HBO or Showtime series, but what would they have to play in a big summer movie?

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Categories: General

‘Originals’: only-in-New York shops, cafes celebrated

Sunday, April 28, 2013 by:Joe Meyers
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The beautiful Rizzoli book, “New York Originals” by Jamie McDonald works as a practical guidebook to places in the city you’ve always wanted to visit, and as a mini-coffee table book for those who aren’t lucky enough to live near New York City.

The stylishly designed volume — Willy Wong did the honors — covers all five boroughs and is packed with beautiful color pictures and the history of all the places McDonald celebrated in a public television series with the same title.

“New York Originals” shows you where to go when you are looking for a classic place to have a drink, like the Ear Inn in Soho (above) or a coffee shop with a long and storied history, such as the Caffe Reggio (below, as seen in the 1976 Paul Mazursky film “Next Stop, Greenwich Village”).

In the introduction, the author explains that the idea for the series and book came to him when he was visiting his hometown in Indiana and realized it had been taken over by chain stores and franchises that made it indistinguishable from any other small town in America.

McDonald said the visit made him appreciate the local businesses that still thrive in New York City — now his home — despite the inroads made by Olive Garden and Starbucks.

“New York City is ironically one of the last vestiges of small-town America. Small businesses like butcher shops, ethnic delis, and corner pubs have a better chance of surviving here than anywhere else,” he writes.

“Where else but the Big Apple can someone run into a luncheonette and order an egg cream to go? Or make their own paint from pigment? Or buy a baseball glove at the same small sports shop the Yankees use?,” McDonald asks rhetorically.

Although many of the businesses in the book are more than a hundred years old, “New York Originals” also cites recent additions to the cityscaper like The City Quilter in Chelsea (established in 1997) and the Let There Be Neon shop that opened in Tribeca in 1972.

The book is filled with great bits of commercial history, including an account of how the original P.J. Clarke’s on Third Ave. (est. 1884) was painstakingly preserved when the building housing it needed extensive structural repairs in 2000.

“The (new) owners hatched a plan to take out the building’s entire contents — including the floors and ceiling — pack them up, and put them in storage for months while reinforced steel, plumbing, and other structural elements were put in. The restoration was so unobtrusive that several longtime patrons actually complained — they could not see what the new owners had done to the place and wondered why it took so long to reopen,” McDonald notes.

“New York Originals” is a perfect gift for any New York lover you know, but you’ll want to a copy for for yourself too.

Categories: General

‘Top of the Morning’: happy & unhappy (TV) families

Saturday, April 27, 2013 by:Joe Meyers
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Today - 2012My interest in early morning television is limited — I’m more of a radio guy when getting ready for the day ahead — but Brian Stelter’s “Top of the Morning” (Grand Central Publishing) is a juicy and informative look behind the scenes at “The Today Show,” “Good Morning America” and the other shows on network and cable.

Stelter is a New York Times media reporter who can be accused of some overheated prose in places — the poor guy suffered the indignity of being panned in his own paper on Monday — but he tells a good story about the smiley, happy shows that serve up all of those personalities who pretend to love each other (and us) every weekday morning.

Reading about the adventures of Matt Lauer, Ann Curry, Robin Roberts, Katie Couric and the other morning show personalities is like reading about movies and Hollywood stars — casting and “chemistry” is crucial, and if a formula works, everyone makes huge salaries.

There is an escapist kick in this sort of non-fiction show biz book similar to the fun of reading Jackie Collins. The people are so rich and so far removed from our own lives that we can’t get too upset on their behalf when bad things happen.

Yes, Ann Curry was treated abominably by her bosses at “The Today Show” but she was earning five million dollars a year when she got the ax (of course, that was chicken feed compared to the 25 million dollar annual salary of Matt Lauer, her co-host and eventual enemy).

You would think that by now, most TV viewers would be wised up to the phoniness of the bright-eyed chatter coming at them from studios in New York City at an hour when most people are just getting out of bad. But, as Stelter makes it clear, millions of people still love these vestiges of a kinder, gentler era in America (and TV).topofthemorning2

Fans of the morning chat shows develop extreme loyalty to individual hosts and host pairings that is not unlike the devotion of earlier generations to TV soaps. As Stelter points out in the sections of the book about “The Today Show,” the NBC series rode high in the ratings for many years due to the strong on-screen chemistry of Lauer and Katie Couric, and then Lauer and Meredith Vieira.

Curry was part of the successful broadcast for 15 years but only in a supporting role as news reader and occasional fill-in co-host. Still, because she was such a familiar face on “The Today Show” many fans were outraged when she was treated so shabbily by NBC.

The rise of “Good Morning America,” Stelter notes, was due in large part to the assembling of a warmer “family” of personalities, including entertainment reporter Lara Spencer and weatherman Sam Champion. When star Robin Roberts was stricken with a very serious illness, it was a personal tragedy to be sure, but it also added drama to the broadcast, and an outpouring of sympathy from viewers.

The weird mix of reality and the TV business converges in the book when the first big surge in the ratings for “GMA” coincides with Roberts’ diagnosis (which she kept secret for weeks so as not to dampen the excitement of her bosses and most of her co-workers). Some outside observers might question the taste of ABC in generating so much publicity when its ailing star went public, but the truth is Roberts’ fans wanted to know what was happening, each step of the way.

Stelter had more on-the-record sources at “GMA” but the best parts of the book deal with the Matt Lauer/Ann Curry disaster. The network executives were so fearful of losing either or both of their stars that they refused to deal with the situation until it was too late.

The dislike of Curry within “The Today Show” family was so strong — seemingly, more for the ratings dip she helped to cause than for any personal differences — that her eventual exit was terribly bungled. Instead of the lengthy tributes her predecessors had received on their way out, there was no mention of Curry’s exit until the last minutes of her final show (below).

Curry’s emotionalism and the stony response of Lauer — sitting right next to her on a couch — stripped the phony family veneer off “The Today Show” and revealed the hotbed of office politics, TV ratings, and star egos viewers rarely get to see on the air.

Here’s Stelter’s description of how the moment played to a rival producer:

“The segment was the equivalent of finishing up a pleasant, two-hour family dinner by saying, ‘Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention: Mom and I are getting a divorce. While you were sleeping last night she packed up all of her stuff. There’s a cab waiting outside to take her away right now. Say goodbye, kids…OK, now that we’ve done that who wants dessert?!’”

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Categories: General

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

Friday, April 26, 2013 by:Joe Meyers
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manhattanmurdermysteryWoody 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.manhattanmurdermystery1

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.

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Categories: General

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

Thursday, April 25, 2013 by:Joe Meyers
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hallieWilliam 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).hallie1

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.

Categories: General
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