Tag Archives: New York

Hello, My Name is Doris

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Sally Field, Max Greenfield, Hello My Name Is DorisThe capsule assessment of this Michael Showalter film (trailer) starring Sally Field, has it exactly right: see it for Field’s outstanding performance though much of the rest drifts toward the unexceptional.

Its story of an aging woman—a wallflower and a hoarder—who falls for a much younger, hipper man, embraces the standard Hollywoodish dichotomy between hopes and realities. That dynamic isn’t confined to the June-November romance, it also characterizes the play’s more serious side, the family pressure on Doris to clean out the house she and her mother lived in and move somewhere smaller and more manageable.

The young man, John Fremont, is played amiably by Max Greenfield, and Tyne Daly is Doris’s long-time loyal friend Roz. Peter Gallagher is convincingly smarmy as a self-help guru.

Some of the best moments come as Doris struggles to bridge the generation gap. When Roz’s 13-year-old granddaughter (played charmingly by Isabella Acres) introduces her to Facebook, Doris finds the path to inside information about John. She pretends to be a fan of his favorite technopop band—Baby Goya and the Nuclear Winters—and they end up at a concert together. Doris’s interactions with Baby Goya (Jack Antonoff) and his mates are hilarious.

In the situations with twenty-somethings, Doris sticks out not just because of her age, but because she is a true original. She sticks out everywhere. Nevertheless, for a while, anyway, it seems as if the decades between 1975 and 2015 whirled past her and the younger generation has now come back around to where she’s happening again.

In short: Field is great and the rest is harmless—“a simple, delightful little human comedy. You know, like life itself,” said Tulsa World reviewer Michael Smith.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 85%; audiences: 95%.

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Photographic Evidence

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Julius Caesar, bust

Julius Caesar (photo: William Warby, creative commons license)

On view in New York now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Gilman Gallery is “Crime Stories: Photography and Foul Play” for those whose interest in crime stories goes beyond the fictional to the grittily real. Since its earliest days, photography and other arts have been used to document crime and its purported perpetrators.

In this assemblage, crime-related photography from the 1850s to the present has been assembled from photojournalists, including such auteurs as Diane Arbus and Walker Evans, and a great many more dubious and less artistic sources. The resulting exhibition of some 70 works will be on display through July 31, 2016.

Among the highlights of the installation are such early examples of the genre as Alexander Gardner’s documentation of the aftermath of the assassination of President Lincoln, and rare forensic photographs by Alphonse Bertillon. In the Paris of the late 1800s, detectives throughout Europe and the United States were using Bertillon’s methods—called “bertillonage”—to identify criminals. According to the Met’s website, Bertillon’s system of criminal identification paved the way for the modern mug shot. Psychological research over the decades has failed to eradicate the “common-sense” perception that malefactors can be detected by the way they look.

In the current day, Bertillon’s methods have been displaced by much more scientific measurement and identification techniques, such as modern fingerprinting, iris scanning, and other biometric assessments.

Says the Met, in addition to the photographs on display, the exhibition will feature work by artists who have used the criminal underworld as a source of inspiration. These include Richard Avedon, Walker Evans, Andy Warhol, and Weegee. (Weegee was the pseudonym for a New York City press photographer in the 1930s and 1940s, who developed a very stark, black and white, photojournalistic style and found his subjects by trailing city emergency service workers.)

While many of the works on view may suggest an impulse for artistic debridement of the incomprehensible wounds violence inflicts, New York Times critic Ken Johnson found the exhibition “confused and confusing.” Perhaps that’s because the impulses that lead to crime and its aftermath are not necessarily coherent. They are open to interpretation.

That very confusion at the heart of the matter is part of the fascination. But, see the exhibit, and decide for yourself.

****& Sons

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ampersand

(photo: Leo Reynolds, creative commons license)

By David Gilbert – This 2014 novel was named a “best book of the year” by many reviewers, and it’s full of richness on every page. A literary novel in every sense, it’s about an aging Manhattan author and notorious recluse, A.N.Dyer, whose failing faculties compel him to call his sons to him and in other ways try to straighten out the tangle he’s made of his life.

His two older sons are estranged both from him and each other. Jamie is a filmmakers living on the East Coast who’s just completed a dubious project documenting, perhaps too rigorously, life’s final decay. Richard is a struggling Los Angeles-based screenwriter, who has the prospect of long-awaited success dangled in front of him if only he can deliver the impossible-to-get film rights to his father’s first and most important novel, Ampersand.

The third, much younger son, is 17-year-old Andy. (You’ll have noticed A.N.Dyer, Andy, Ampersand, and the book’s title). Andy is ostensibly the product of a liaison between Dyer and a Swedish nanny. The arrival in the household of baby Andy and the story of his conception ended Dyer’s marriage. But the real story of Andy’s origins are more significant than anyone but Dyer knows, and he’s summoned Jamie and Richard to New York to tell it. And to enlist them in ensuring to Andy’s future welfare, should he die.

Throughout, as a sort of shambling Greek chorus is Philip Topping, son of Dyer’s oldest friend, Charlie, whose funeral opens the book. Philip is the same age as the two older sons, and they’ve obviously never had much use for him and still don’t, even though he’s ensconced in Dyer’s East 70th Street apartment, the flotsam washed ashore from a foundering marriage. Topping is a “Mr. Cellophane”; they look right through him and never know he’s there. Or, as Philip himself says, “I’m guilty of easily falling in love, of confusing the abstract with the concrete, hoping those words might cast me as a caring individual and dispel my notions of a sinister center. I believe in love at first sight so that I might be seen.” But the Dyers don’t see him, even when it’s necessary they should.

Dyer’s clean-up of his affairs includes selling his papers to the Morgan Library, and they, like the Hollywood manipulators, are interested in Ampersand. They will sweeten their offer considerably if he includes a draft of it. Alas, he destroyed all the drafts years before, so is pushed into the insupportable position of having to retype the whole manuscript, inserting awkward phrases and misdirected text, which he crosses out to arrive at the version in the published book.

It’s a very New York book, with apt references not just to places and events but to the way the city and its citizens go about their business. All this seems sly and perfectly grounded. Here are a few sentences from the Morgan Library rep’s pitch to Dyer:

In my biased view, we are the intellectual heart of this city. A visitor from another planet would do well to visit here first in order to understand our human narrative. We also have a tremendous gift shop.

Dyer’s agent then suggests they’ve been approached by the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center with a much more generous offer, and receives this response, which manages to insult everyone:

If money’s the bottom line, we can’t possibly compete. Ransom and their ilk will always win. And they are a fine institution and Austin is a fine central Texas town. But if you want to maximize profits, may I suggest breaking up the archive and selling the pieces in lots. But if respect, sensitivity, geo . . .

Philip Topping is everywhere and nowhere in the book, as its part-time narrator. It also includes excerpts (freshly typed!) from Ampersand—a vicious tale indeed—correspondence between Dyer and Topping, senior, from childhood on, and texts between Andy and a young woman he’s hoping to seduce. Full of humor, human foibles, and beautiful writing—“seductive and ripe with both comedy and heartbreak,” as NPR reviewer Mary Pols said—it’s a book that flew under my radar, but which I’m glad I finally found.

Bonus: A History of the 27th Letter! The Ampersand!

****Wishful Thinking

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busy

(photo: Priscilla, creative commons license)

By Kamy Wicoff — On Amazon, this book is categorized as “women’s fiction,” which is probably a more politically correct designation for “chick-lit,” but whatever, it’s a genre I don’t usually read. It turned out to be a lot of fun and a refreshing change from serial killers trading in body parts.

Jennifer Sharpe is a stressed-out, divorced Manhattan career woman with two young sons who struggles to fit everything into her schedule. She’s wracked with guilt that her kids are getting too little of her time. Add an ex-husband who has documented her missed appointments and such and wants to renegotiate their custody agreement to have more time with the kids. Then add a nanny whose school commitments mean she has less time to help out, and a work project that will be Jennifer’s dream come true (plus some much-needed extra $$$), if only she can reach the boss’s ambitious productivity targets.

Of course, her life is impossible—that is, until someone puts an app on her cell phone called “Wishful Thinking” that lets her be in two places at once. There are so many ways this little technological boost (involving wormholes and—don’t ask, you just have to go with it) can go wrong and does.

Wicoff has written a believable Jennifer, plausible friends and work colleagues, a self-absorbed but not totally worthless ex, a dishy new boyfriend, and a sympathetic genius physicist who is behind the whole thing. All in all, an interesting cast of characters. The book is both good-humored and grounded in the frantic reality of many working moms’ lives (minus the wormholes).

Christina Baker Kline (author of the best-selling Orphan Train) calls Wishful Thinking “A thought-provoking, gimlet-eyed satire of contemporary motherhood in the guise of a romantic comedy.” If you’re looking for a fast-paced, mostly light-hearted novel to enjoy on your winter vacation—one that really lives up to its title—this could be just the thing!

Brooklyn

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Saoirse Ronan, Brooklyn

Saoirse Ronan in Brooklyn

Not in the mood for the stunning violence of The Revenant or the bitter racism of The Hateful Eight? Nor the angst of Carol or The Danish Girl? Nor the special effects weaponry of Star Wars: The Force Awakens? Here’s a nice, sweet historical movie about first love, the pains and rewards of immigration, and the choices we make.

Brooklyn (trailer), as directed by John Crowley, with a script by Academy Award nominee Nick Hornby (based on Colm Tóibín’s book of the same name), reminds us that leaving home is a lonely choice, even when it’s the best choice a person has. (And so much harder before email, skype, and budget air fares.)

When clear-eyed Eilis Lacey (played by Academy Award nominee Saoirse Ronan) leaves Ireland to come to America in the early 1950s, she has no confidence that she’ll ever see Ireland again. In a bit of cross-cultural serendipity, she meets Italian plumber Tony (Emory Cohen), and each is charmed with the other and the cultures they come from. Watching her try to learn to eat spaghetti under the tutelage of her bantering roommates is splashily funny. But when tragedy at home calls Eilis back to Ireland, she does go, despite the length, cost, and difficulty of the journey. Once home, the inducements to stay mount.

Brooklyn—which was also an Academy Award nominee for Best Picture—has moments with “a resonance that extends far beyond its immediate circumstances,” says Glenn Kenny for Rogerebert.com. It’s a beautiful, big-hearted movie that will leave you smiling, Irish eyes or no.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 98%; audiences 90%.

Bonus treat: an interview with Colm Tóibín and Alice Walker (The Color Purple) about the translation of their novels into film, including a guide to pronouncing his name.

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Weekend Movie Fare: Carol

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Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Carol

Rooney Mara & Cate Blanchett

Hailed as a top Oscar contender this year in numerous categories—best director, film, actress, and cinematography—Carol (trailer) is the story of a wealthy but unhappily married woman (played by Cate Blanchett) who embarks on a relationship with a shopgirl (Rooney Mara) she meets by chance. Unquestionably, it’s a period piece (nice Packards!), written by author Patricia Highsmith, herself a lesbian, who wrote high-class mysteries like The Talented Mr. Ripley, and it would have had considerably more shock value—and prompted more audience reflection—in its 1952 novel version, The Price of Salt.

In a story set in that era and with the social class differences involved, there are lots of ways for this relationship to go wrong. Worse, with a husband willing to play his ace—custody of his and Carol’s four-year-old daughter Rindy—the stakes are high. Yet, I didn’t find this movie either engaging or revelatory. Of course Blanchett is terrific, as always, though even she may underplay the role of Carol through most of the film. Mara, as the initially childlike Therese Belivet, is so indeterminate that it’s hard to root for her happiness (what would that require, exactly?) and even harder to see what the glamorous, sophisticated Carol sees in her. Perhaps director Todd Haynes and screenwriter Phyllis Nagy hoped that, by making Mara more or less a cipher, viewers would be free to pin their own romantic hopes and dreams on her.

In the New York Times, critic A.O.Scott calls Carol “a study in human magnetism, in the physics and optics of eros . . . (giving) emotional and philosophical weight to what might be a perfectly banal question: What do these women see each in each other.” That was my question, all right. Therese says she is almost will-less, that the complications in her life arise because all she ever does is say “yes,” and the film takes on the challenge of imbuing her most important affirmation with real meaning. In a season where we’ve seen so many excellent high-drama films, this one, to me, did less than I would have liked it to. I’d give it a B-.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 94%; audiences: 79%.

The Big Short

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The Big Short

Ryan Gosling, Steve Carell, Brad Pitt, Christian Bale

Five stars for this comedy-drama (trailer) based on the best-selling Michael Lewis book about the 2008 financial crisis and the lonely voices in the wilderness calling, “Housing bubble,” “Housing bubble,” “This will end baaaadleeee.” The idea that mortgage-backed securities could be anything other than rock solid so went against conventional wisdom that no one listened. But, as we know now, these securities had become more and more vulnerable as riskier loans were bundled into them, and the chaff soon outweighed the wheat.

It takes a bit of understanding about how this financial market operated to grasp the significance of the action. Director Adam McKay, who wrote the screenplay with Lewis and Charles Randolph, cleverly provides the necessary background, having characters break the fourth wall to speak directly to the audience. For example, from her symbolic bubble bath and sipping champagne, actress Margot Robbie tells us what a financial bubble actually means. It’s “ a terrifically enjoyable movie that leaves you in a state of rage, nausea and despair,” says A.O. Scott in his New York Times review, which includes a clip from McKay on some of the clever ways the film explains the financial goings-on.

The cast does an exemplary job of embuing characters with strong personalities. Christian Bale plays Dr. Michael Burry, a loner physician-turned-hedge-fund-manager who figures out the problem early (and whose character confirms my aversion to heavy metal music). He takes the unprecedented step of actually looking at the individual mortgages bundled into the securities being offered and sees that many of them are weak and involve adjustable rate loans. When their interest rates go up, the homeowners will default. This, to him is an investment opportunity; he’ll bet against the mortgage market. The banks are happy to back his scheme (involving credit default swaps), seeing it as a sure-fire winner for them.

One of the banks he approaches has on staff a skeptical analyst, played by Ryan Gosling, who believes the good doctor may just be right. He convinces the unconventional trading firm led by Mark Baum (Steve Carell) to invest in the swaps, too. In one of the movie’s funniest sequences, Baum sends staff to Florida to investigate some of these mortgages. They find unbuilt houses, a forest of “for sale” signs, and two beach-bum mortgage brokers (Max Greenfield and Billy Magnussen) , who don’t hesitate to say they will insure basically anything. “Why are they confessing?” Baum whispers to his staffer. “They’re not confessing. They’re bragging,” he replies. Similarly, Melissa Leo, as an official at an investment rating agency, is badgered into explaining how, if her firm rated investments accurately, the banks would just take their business down the street.

In a Colorado garage, another pair of youthful investors (played by John Magaro and Finn Wittrock) wants to parlay $30 million into a bigger fortune. They set out to New York to figure out how. There they stumble onto the real estate problem and see the credit default swaps as their big chance, but they need connections, and they get help from their neighbor back home, a disenchanted former investment banker (Brad Pitt).

It’s telling that the few people who foresaw and took advantage of the inevitable crisis were all, one way or another, Wall Street outsiders. They weren’t unaware that their gains were made on the backs of everyday Americans who lost billions in housing value, jobs and homes, pension fund value, and savings. Meanwhile, the many individuals and institutions whose carelessness, greed, or criminality created the bubble in the first place have not been called to account. No less an expert than Paul Krugman has written, “I think (the movie) does a terrific job of making Wall Street skullduggery entertaining, of exploiting the inherent black humor of how it went down.” And, even more important, he says it “got the underlying economic, financial, and political story right.” And it’s still a story lots of people don’t want Americans to hear.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 87%; audiences, 91%.

Christmastime In NYC

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New York, Christmas

(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

New York, Christmas

(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

New York, Christmas

(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

 

 

Best Salvation Army Bellringer Team Ever!!

*****Clockers

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The Wire

Larry Gilliard, Jr., as D’Angelo Barksdale, second from right, on his perch, running his game in The Wire

By Richard Price – When I read Richard Price’s new crime novel The Whites earlier this year, I knew I needed to loop around and read his 1992 classic, widely considered his “best.” It really is knock-your-socks-off. In alternating chapters, it adopts the point of view of Strike, a young crack dealer in the housing projects of fictional Dempsey, New Jersey, across the river from Manhattan, and homicide detective Rocco Klein.

Strike is a lower-level dealer who wants to get out of it, but without even a high school education, he can’t see any other path forward. Rocco is a seen-it-all investigator working in the county prosecutor’s office. What brings these two together is the murder confession by Strike’s straight-arrow brother Victor. Strike was supposed to make the hit, and didn’t, but he doesn’t think Victor did it either, and he wants to save his brother whatever way he can. Rocco figures Strike for the shooter, but can’t get Victor to change his story.

It’s a story about poor people, mostly black, and lost fathers, in which a few heroic mothers struggle to maintain family order. Strike’s cocaine- and crack-fueled world (he himself never uses the product) is under constant yet ineffectual harassment by federal, state, and local police, housing police, and narcotics officers. The homicide detectives, who are a little higher on the law enforcement pecking order, are less frequent visitors to this milieu. They have their own agenda and sometimes cooperate with the other authorities, and sometimes not. Strike can never be sure where loyalties lie, even those of his own runners (the “clockers,” because the drug market operates 24/7), who may ally with rival drug lords at any time. He certainly can’t trust Rocco, who is always playing games of his own.

What makes the book so powerful are the deep portraits of the characters. Both the main players are both strong and weak, the reader likes and loathes them in almost equal measure. Supporting characters—Rocco’s partner Mazilli and Strike’s boss Rodney, especially—are fully drawn and absolutely believable. The writing, including the characters’ dialog, is pitch-perfect.

Price was one of the writers for the best-tv-ever series [!!], The Wire, and reading this book after seeing the show, I certainly saw echoes of some of its notable characters: D’Angelo sitting on his perch in the projects, managing a team of young runners; Omar, the invincible hit-man cut down by a child; Officer Thomas Hauc, the violent and racist enforcer. Spike Lee made it into a movie in 1995 starring Mekhi Phifer, Harvey Keitel, John Turturro, and Delroy Lindo.

Even though the narcotics picture has changed in the past 23 years, this remains a riveting book because of the strength of its story and the social dysfunctions it lays bare, which are still, by and large, unresolved.

Learning to Drive

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Ben Kingsley, Patricia Clarkson, Learning to DriveDirector Isabel Coixet has put together an altogether pleasant comedy (trailer) set in Manhattan, although much of the action takes place on the inside—inside Wendy Shields (played by Patricia Clarkson) whose husband has left her for younger woman, forcing her to rethink her life. This leads to the startling decision to learn to drive. It takes place on the inside of her Sikh driving instructor, Darwan (Ben Kingsley), whose life is upended by the arrival of an Indian woman he’s never met who’s expecting to become his wife. And, it takes place on the inside of Jasleen (Sarita Choudhury), who speaks little English and who has entered a much more foreign territory than a stamp on a passport would suggest.

The superb cast conveys all the internal yearning, turmoil, disappointment, and joy experienced by these characters without the burden of a heavy-handed script. Writer Sarah Kernochan based the screenplay on a New Yorker essay and built in plenty of funny and sweet moments, too. Especially appreciated is the opportunity to see the colorful and intriguing interior of a Sikh temple.

The cramped confines of a car make for filming challenges worthy of a team of contortionists, but it’s an intimate setting, too (as the excellent 2008 British movie Happy Go Lucky proved), in which quotidian experiences are spiced with the ever-present possibility of catastrophe (bicyclists! trucks! jaywalkers!). “You can’t always trust people to behave properly,” Darwan advises, and this truism resonates with his pupil. Though she would add the caveat that he actually does.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating 67%; audiences 68%. Hard to understand why the critics dinged this movie for “predictability” and didn’t notice that exact problem in the awful Grandma which they liked! If you’ve had a hard week or are allergic to people screaming their problems at you for two hours, this is the better choice.

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