With virtually everyone weighing in on Ol’ Blue Eyes 100th birthday Saturday, Dec. 12, I thought I’d put in my two cents since I covered him live and from a distance for Gannett.
Any discussion of Frank Sinatra begins and ends with talent. His was deep, varied and wrapped in a complex personality. Begin with the Voice – distinctive, limpid and punctuated by the impeccable phrasing and superb breath control he learned from bandleader Tommy Dorsey’s trombone playing. Throw in his dancing – a talent people don’t generally associate with Sinatra. But his was fluid and fleet. (See “Anchors Aweigh” or “On the Town.”) ...
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Read MoreI wasn’t planning to see the movie “Trumbo,” but I’m glad I did as it truly is a movie for our time.
It’s the story of Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) – a brilliant Oscar-winning screenwriter, born 110 years ago on Dec. 9 – who as one of the Hollywood Ten was blacklisted for refusing to testify in 1947 before the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating communism in the motion picture industry. (Trumbo was a member of the Communist Party from 1943 to ’48.) The film’s real subject, however, is fear and how it divides us – from others and from our better natures. ...
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Read MoreOne of the themes to emerge from the Nov. 13 Paris bombings has been why the world – and particularly journalists – has paid more attention to the terrorist acts in Paris than it has to the double suicide bombing in Beirut a day earlier.
There are any number of reasons for this: Bombings in the Middle East, sadly, seem commonplace; the Paris attack is more of an anomaly; more people were killed in Paris (129 to Beirut’s 43), although you can’t really quantify death, of course, each death being a tragedy to someone; the West and particularly the United States have close ties to France, etc. ...
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Read MoreThere is a moment in “Casablanca” in which Resistance leader Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) – having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp – confronts a group of German officers in Rick’s Café Américain through music. The Germans are loudly, arrogantly singing “Die Wacht am Rhein,” an anthem that has its roots in French-German antagonism, when Victor orders the house band to strike up “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem, to which club owner Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) acquiesces. One by one the club patrons rise and join in, all but Victor’s wife – and Rick’s former lover – Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman). As the others sing lustily, she sits thinking and marveling at all that has been lost and yet still remains.
It is one of the most moving moments in the history of cinema, one I couldn’t help but flashing on as the City of Light was plunged into the heart of darkness. The fans leaving the Stade de France – where one in a series of coordinated ISIS attacks took place on Friday the 13th – burst into “La Marseillaise.” The exchange students in Manhattan’s Union Square held hands as they sang it that night. And Placido Domingo led The Metropolitan Opera Chorus in it at Lincoln Center Saturday afternoon. It, too, is a symbol of all that has been lost and yet still remains. ...
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Read MoreWhenever I was asked about my “walls of inspiration” – which have followed me to each new job, albeit with a changing cast of characters – I always responded that they were a feminist gesture, that I would remove them the day Playboy magazine folded.
Well, Hell has frozen over and I’ll have to remove my men. (Yeah, right. More on that in a bit.) ...
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Read MorePope Francis’ celebration of Mass at Madison Square Garden tonight prompted my friend, sports publicist and blogger John Cirillo, to email me a post on his favorite Garden moments, which got me thinking about my own.
But first, a little history. The Garden, named for President James Madison, really was once a garden – a rooftop garden that was part of an elaborate Moorish-style complex designed by architect Stanford White, who was shot there in 1906 by a crazed Harry Thaw over Thaw’s wife (and White’s former mistress) chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit. (She figures in both E.L. Doctorow’s novel “Ragtime” and the movie “The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing.”) ...
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Read MoreThe new film of “Far From the Madding Crowd,” based on the evocative Thomas Hardy novel, has gotten mixed reviews – which is too bad. Directed by Thomas Vinterberg and adapted by David Nicholls, it is a movie of great feeling and equally great subtlety, not an easy combination to come by, with cinematography by Charlotte Bruus Christensen that captures the bucolic moodiness of England’s “Hardy country” and a haunting score by Craig Armstrong that makes excellent use of both the folk and symphonic traditions.
“Madding” is also superbly acted by a cast that conveys the emotional complexity of an independent young woman navigating a man’s world. Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan) is the woman in question. Poor and orphaned but nonetheless well-educated, she has no inclination to marry. A turn of good fortune (her late uncle leaves her his farm) ensures she won’t have to. But if it’s true, as Jane Austen said ironically, that a single man of good fortune must be in want of a wife, then it’s equally true, as Hardy implies, that a single woman of great beauty must be in need of a husband. Before you can say “The Bachelorette,” Bathsheba’s suitors are lining up. Rising farmer-turned-down-on-his-luck shepherd Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts) is first up, with his offer of a pet lamb and a piano. He’s kind, intelligent, spirited and hard-working – a woman’s idea of a man’s man – and since he’s played by sex symbol du jour Schoenaerts, the obvious match for Bathsheba. (Indeed, you don’t have to read past the first chapter of the novel to know this.) But Bathsheba is too young and willful to see it. She’d be happy enough to be a bride, the center of attention, as long as she didn’t have the responsibilities of a wife. That never works. ...
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