Joe's View

At one particularly apt point in the new Grant James Varjas play, “Accidentally, Like a Martyr,” a character looks over at the few other people seated at an East Village bar and asks the “Eleanor Rigby” question, “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?”

It’s Christmas season and while many other people have friends and family to visit with, the men in the play have nowhere else to go but this slightly rundown New York bar (modeled on The Boiler Room, which is only a few blocks from the Paradise Factory Theatre, where the play is running through Jan. 8).

Varjas’s tightly written and well-acted character study is about a group of gay men but sexuality is secondary to their feeling that life has passed them by.

The men once came to the bar looking for erotic connections, but they have become real barflies — i.e. borderline alcoholics — who come for the cheap drinks during happy hour and are long gone by the time the younger, hornier patrons show up.

The play is about a changing social scene in Manhattan where young gay men are tired of being ghetto-ized in dreary “historic” bars filled with older men waxing nostalgic about earlier eras (what novelist Brad Gooch called “The Golden Age of Promiscuity” — the years between the Stonewall riot in 1969 and the emergence of AIDS in the early 1980s).

The bar has been losing customers to a new place down the street where young straights and gays can mingle in a much more fashionable space.

And, of course, much of the real sexual action has moved out of the bars entirely and onto the Internet where faster and cheaper hook-ups are readily available without any liquor-fueled mating rituals.

“Accidentally, Like a Martyr” takes shape slowly but the characters are engagingly irritable before we get to know them, and then very moving after their hidden agendas are revealed.

Younger guys stumble in, but they are usually in the bar for brief, non-social purposes. The playwright/director gives a very vivid performance as a strung-out drug addict who owes money to nearly everyone in his life and who causes the arrival of a very scary enforcer demanding to be taken to an ATM for immediate payment.

Clifton Chadick created the quite authentic set — the small audience is seated on the other side of the mirror behind the bar, where we get a perfect view of all the action, and can study the tiniest inflections of the excellent seven-actor ensemble consisting of Varjas, Keith McDermott, Kevin Boseman, Brett Douglas, Ken Forman, Cameron Pow and Chuck Blasius.

The sexual revolution of the late 1960s put an end to one of my favorite Hollywood genres — the lurid potboilers adapted from the naughty novels of hugely popular (and now forgotten) writers such as Harold Robbins and Grace Metalious.

The filmmakers of the 1950s and 1960s couldn’t get away with the smut to be found in books like “The Carpetbaggers” and “Peyton Place” so they resorted to innuendo and any suggestive material they could sneak past the censors.

With the passage of time, and hard core pornography popping up almost everywhere on the Internet, Hollywood’s handling of sex 50 years ago looks so silly now that the “shockers” from those days have become hilarious unintentional comedies.

A prime example of this long lost school of moviemaking has just arrived via the Warner Archive label — “Youngblood Hawke,” the 1964 dramatization of a Herman Wouk best-seller from two years earlier.

Wouk is still alive and still remembered for such World War II classics as “The Caine Mutiny” and “The Winds of War.” Most people have forgotten, however, that he also wrote some steamy contemporary stuff like “Marjorie Morningstar” and “Youngblood Hawke” in between his historical hits.

“Youngblood Hawke” is about a would-be Ernest Hemingway or Thomas Wolfe from the hills of Kentucky who becomes the sex object of many sophisticated New York City women after he arrives in the big city to make his name as a novelist.

The movie poster featured an enormous ad tagline, “A Woman Could Feel Him Across a Room” and in smaller print, “All the Blister-Heat of the Best Seller is on the Screen.”

Even bowdlerized by Hollywood, the movie still delivers a lot of sexy foolishness — Youngblood (James Franciscus) is caught in bed with a “tramp” by his visiting mother; a married socialite (Genevieve Page) seduces the writer while he is doing research on Christmas Eve (!); and a fabled Manhattan hostess (played by Eva Gabor) makes a smutty reference to Youngblood’s prowess at a Broadway opening night.

The casting is bizarre, to say the least, with the rather wholesome and clean-cut Franciscus (fresh from his hit TV series “Mr. Novak” about a nice-guy teacher) in the title role, and the stunning Suzanne Pleshette playing his long-suffering editor who wears over-sized glasses in some scenes to indicate that she is in danger of becoming an old maid unless Youngblood gives up the big city floozies for her.

By any rational standard, “Youngblood Hawke” is a terrible movie, but I enjoyed every overheated moment.

Jean-Luc Godard has been enjoying a huge renaissance of his 1960s films in recent years.

“Band of Outsiders” (1964) and “Contempt” (1963) and “Masculine-Feminine” (1966) have all had hit art-house revivals — especially at Godard Central, the Film Forum in Manhattan — and received deluxe DVD reissues from The Criterion Collection.

If you haven’t seen the audacious and very entertaining 1965 Godard picture “Pierrot le Fou,” check out the fantastic Criterion DVD (which I watched again the other night).

Unlike many important old films, there is nothing musty about this wild romp that subverts the whole notion of Hollywood melodrama.

Godard was a leader of the French “New Wave” of the 1960s that abandoned movie studio filming in favor of real locations — directors like Godard and Francois Truffaut took to the streets and countryside and came back with pictures that didn’t have the processed look of Hollywood.

The French filmmakers also changed notions of what constituted a movie star by using actors who overturned traditional notions of screen beauty. Jean-Paul Belmondo became a star overnight in Godard’s “Breathless” (1959) — skinny and far from movie star handsome, Belmondo nevertheless oozed athletic vigor and sex appeal, and dominated French filmmaking for the next decade.

In “Pierrot le Fou,” Belmondo has one of his best roles as Ferdinand, a wealthy, married Paris businessman who runs off with the babysitter, Marianne (Anna Karina).

The story turns into a road movie in which our charming anti-heroes kill people, perform impromptu street theater critiques of U.S. Vietnam policy, and break into brief song interludes.

Shot in wide-screen by the great cameraman Raoul Coutard, “Pierrot le Fou” is a feast for the eyes even when it is not quite clear where Godard might be going with this oddball study of adultery and escape from responsibility.

Godard keeps reminding us we’re watching a movie by repeating scenes, throwing literary quotations on the screen, and suddenly turning off the lushly romantic musical score.

Along the way, there is a much-quoted-by-film-historians cameo by veteran Hollywood B-movie director Sam Fuller in which he faces the camera and shares his hard-boiled cinema philosophy.

It is not surprising that after Robert Benton and David Newman finished the screenplay for “Bonnie & Clyde” their first choice to direct the 1967 classic was Godard.

“Pierrot le Fou” is a still-fresh intellectual romp that leaves room for almost limitless post-screening discussion. You can find the DVD on Netflix or at my favorite local video store, Media Wave in Fairfield.

Years before he won an Oscar for the “Gods and Monsters” screenplay, Bill Condon worked on one of the most entertaining, and least-seen, horror movies of the 1980s, “Strange Behavior.”

The picture opened in 1981 to surprisingly strong reviews for a low-budget shocker, but suffered from being distributed by a small company (World Northal) that was about to go out of business.

Most of the movie’s miniscule cult following was the result of late-night cable showings of a butchered video transfer in which half of the carefully composed wide-screen images were cropped (in that pre-letterbox era).

The film was restored to all of its wide-screen glory on the DVD released a few years ago, but “Strange Behavior” is still awaiting a major rediscovery by fans of offbeat horror.

Condon and co-writer (and director) Michael Laughlin made their film in the middle of the slasher craze powered by “Halloween” and “Friday the 13th” (and all of their sequels and copies) but poked fun at the genre in a story that mixed scares and laughs.

“Strange Behavior” is set in a small downstate Illinois college town where a mad professor’s experiments are resulting in a wave of inexplicable teen killings. A new drug pioneered by the old loon (played by the great Australian actor Arthur Dignam) causes normal teens to become programmable killing machines with no memory of their heinous acts (ala “The Manchurian Candidate”).

Michael Murphy plays the sheriff of the town who has always blamed his wife’s death on something fishy that happened when she worked as an assistant to the professor. His college student son (Dan Shor) doesn’t realize the trouble he is about to get into when he signs up to be a test subject — he thinks it’s just an easy way to earn some extra money.

Condon and Laughlin keep us off-balance by telling the story in the style of a slightly campy 1950s B-horror movie — but with terrific performances by Murphy, Shor, Louise Fletcher as the sheriff’s girlfriend, and Fiona Lewis (above) as the professor’s icy assistant (who for no good reason, wears her hair in a 1940s style).

Laughlin uses the wide-screen brilliantly in long setpieces in which the shocks arrive from unexpected sources and the horror is deepened by the humor and warmth of the characters in peril.

“Strange Behavior” also contains goofy scenes that don’t advance the plot but are enormous fun to watch, especially a long teen party sequence that includes a rather elaborately choreographed dance to the tune of Lou Christie’s “Lightnin’ Strikes” (a foreshadowing of Condon’s work on “Chicago” and “Dreamgirls”?)

Laughlin and Condon demonstrate how far sheer talent can go on a bare-bones budget — they even talked the German group Tangerine Dream into supplying a very eerie and very beautiful score — but their movie deserves a lot more attention from horror movie cultists.

Reviewers have been quibbling about what label to give to Hugh Jackman’s return to the New York theater — is it a real “Broadway” show or just a jazzed-up nightclub act? — but whatever it is, the star’s current appearance at the Broadhurst Theatre is the hottest ticket in town.

While two bona fide Broadway legends — Mandy Patinkin and Patti LuPone — together haven’t been enough to fill the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on a nightly basis, the entire run of the Jackman show was sold out weeks ago and scalpers are said to be getting record-breaking prices for seats down front.

I caught the show Friday night and while parts of it seemed like Las Vegas hokum, I was dazzled by Jackman’s talent and charisma (and an obvious love of performing that puts him in the class of such Broadway greats as Robert Preston and John Raitt).

“Back on Broadway” isn’t a theatrical piece in the tradition of such one person hits as “Elaine Stritch At Large” and the show that Chita Rivera did on Broadway a few seasons ago, but Jackman’s hodge podge of personal reminiscence, Aussie pride, and highlights from shows he’s done like “The Boy from Oz” and “Oklahoma,” couldn’t be much more appealing (or seem much more heart felt).

The star begins singing off-stage — “Oh What a Beautiful Morning!” — and enters to a huge response from the audience that never lets up through medleys in tribute to Broadway and New York City (where Jackman now makes his home) and witty byplay with the packed house that never feels forced.

Few performers would be capable of pulling off this sort of simple, old-fashioned mixture of TV variety show and nightclub act at Broadway prices. Jackman is aided throughout by six stunning dancers and a terrific on-stage orchestra led by Patrick Vaccariello.

The star’s warmth and seeming lack of guile carried him over a sentimental, photo projection tribute to his wife Deborra-Lee Furness, who was in the audience Friday and danced with her husband in the aisle (“Is she here every night?,” I heard someone ask after the show).

In an age when genuine Broadway stars are few and far between, it was fun to watch Hugh Jackman keep an audience thrilled for more than two hours (not to mention raise $20,000 for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS after his encore, simply by auctioning off two of the shirts he wore during the show).

The 2010 “inspired by actual events” independent film “Holy Rollers” tells a story that sounds too good to be true — how a group of young Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn started moonlighting as “mules” smuggling ecstasy from Europe to New York.

The picture offers us a glimpse into a famous closed community and shows us how discontented young people within that cloister opted for the money and other perks of the criminal underworld.

“Holy Rollers” takes place in the late 1990s, when it was still semi-possible for an urban enclave to stay sequestered.

The arrival of iPhones and other hand-held keyholes to the outside world — and its virtues and vices — was still a few years off.

Now, with the rise of social networking and other Internet advances, it’s easy to imagine Hasidic teens (or Amish kids, for that matter) escaping the lifestyle without the drastic criminal intrigue of Sam Gold, the unhappy 20-year-old Brooklynite in “Holy Rollers.”

“Holy Rollers” was part of Jesse Eisenberg’s (right) rapid ascent as one of the finest young film actors. He was Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network” and you might remember his extraordinary early performance in “The Squid and the Whale.”

Eisenberg anchors the film as Sam, who works for his dad in a downtown Manhattan fabric store where he wants to take on more responsibility but is kept in a strictly subservient role.

On the personal front, he is supposed to enter into an arranged marriage (to a young woman who tells him she expects to have eight children) but that falls through when the girl’s parents fear he won’t earn enough money to keep their daughter happy.

Sam is at a perfect moment to fall under the spell of a hell-raising, slightly older Hasid neighbor, Yosef Zimmerman (Justin Bartha, above left), who convinces him to become part of his drug shipping plan.

At first, Yosef makes the set-up sound legit — transporting “medicine” rather than recreational drugs — but soon Sam is sucked into his friend’s hedonistic lifestyle.

“Holy Rollers” takes us back to the electronica/rave scene of the turn of the century where the music-entranced crowds were under the spell of the relatively cheap and freely sold psychiatric drug ecstasy as well as the music of such club remix stars as Paul Oakenfold.

Eisenberg and Bartha make a terrific team and they draw us into one of the oddest but most original coming-of-age tales of recent vintage.

You would have to be a major league Grinch not to be charmed by the 2010 holiday show produced by The Flea Theater, “Looking at Christmas,” which will be telecast several times by Channel 13 over the next week.

Directed by the Tribeca theater’s artistic director Jim Simpson, the Steven Banks show is a terrific vehicle for the venue’s resident company of young actors, The Bats.

Every year, Simpson hires a new group of just-graduated actors to work on some of the shows and to help out around the theater. (It’s fun to be served a drink by a nice person in the lobby and then find out he or she is one of the leads in that night’s show.)

The Flea uses stars in its major productions, but some of the best shows I’ve seen at the theater have been played by The Bats.

“Looking at Christmas” is a sharp contemporary New York holiday story, set on the streets of the city, where just-fired would-be novelist John (Michael Micalizzi) runs into an exuberant young waitress/actress from the Midwest — Charmian (Allison Buck) — who has only been in town for a few months but is determined to be “the next Meryl Streep.”

It’s Christmas Eve, and Charmian is out to see all of the department store windows — she talks John into joining her.

As these strangers get to know each other, we follow them to Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s and Barneys, where they see depictions of Christmas stories running the gamut from “A Christmas Carol” to “The Little Match Girl.”

In each case, after John and Charmian leave, the window figures come to life and comment sardonically on their role in holiday mythology. The result is a delightful mix of sentimentality and cynicism that is the perfect representation of Christmas in Manhattan.

Buck and Micalizzi are wonderful company for 90 minutes and the support they get from their fellow Bats is phenomenal with each of the actors playing multiple parts with tremendous zest and humor. The supporting ensemble consists of Brett Aresco, Crystal Arnette, Holly Chou, Jack Corcoran, Christian Adam Jacobs, Raul Sigmund Julia, Betsy Lippett, Turna Mete, Briana Pozner and John Russo, all of whom are a joy to watch.

If you’re looking for a holiday show with a slight edge, you will love “Looking at Christmas.” It has the feel of a new Christmas perennial.

(“Looking at Christmas” will be  broadcast on Thirteen WNET Dec.21 at 10 p.m. Dec. 23 at 3 a.m. and Dec. 25 at 11 p.m.)