A mysterious invitation arrived in my press box this afternoon from an “international therapist” who believes that “cell memory—stressful or conflicting events that are stored in the mind and carried down from generation to generation—and emotions are in large part at fault for many afflictions.” The good doctor’s clients include “Sting and Prude [sic]” and “Madonana [sic].” Curiously, Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale also has cell memory at its center: A family, sundered by sibling hatred, cancer and madness, finds tenuous resolution at yuletide. Yet quick resolve was on display at the press conference that immediately followed the screening. Read the rest of this entry »

We love outdoor parties. The trouble is, sometimes the weather doesn’t. This evening was slated to be the opening night for the ultrafun Turntables on the Hudson fiesta’s Water Taxi Beach series of parties—but we just got the below missive from the gang. Phooey!

"Hello everyone—we’re very sorry to have to cancel the party on our first night of the season, but there’s a certain amount of rain & cold that simply forces us to make this decision.  Up until recently, it looked like the rain was going to taper off, but now it’s looking like it’ll be steady through the night and into the morning (over a 1/2 inch and around 50 degrees). Things will be way too cold & wet, so looks like our real opening night will be May 23rd and 25th with a big lineup all weekend!!!  The full info is at turntablesonthehudson.com."

SHE’S LOOKING FOR … MEN.

CATIE, 33
Manhattan, finance

Learn more about her:

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“Blind is the new chic,” a friend and colleague joked at the opening-night party for Blindness, held on the beach across from the Carlton Hotel, a pier extending out into the Mediterranean to hold another table of tiny skewered vegetables, éclairs and meringues. The entrance to the fete—once you got past the butch gendarmes and various besuited security—was meant to evoke the white, milklike light that the characters in the film “see” before losing their vision. If one were charitable, one might liken it to David Bowie’s “Heroes” video. Or one could just call it tacky.

My peepers were sufficiently restored to take in four films today, with a couple more to go. Two—one fiction, one fact—take vastly different approaches to life behind bars (a third, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys, finds its patriarch in prison, but the details of his time in stir never figure into the narrative).

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We know. You’ve been on the edge of your seat from all the "rumors" that just bubbled up about the sequel to Point Break, which is set in Singapore.

Well, here’s a Q&A with the writer Peter Iliff we did last year.

And we’ll go ahead and start another rumor: Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze will not star in the film!

Bonjour, mesdames et messieurs. We’re halfway through the first day of the 61st Cannes Film Festival, which will require the full use of thousands of eyeballs. Curiously, the opening film concerns the very loss of those orbs: Fernando Meireilles’s Blindness, an adaptation that’s looser and lighter than its source material, José Saramago’s 1995 Nobel Prize–winning novel, a somber, starchy allegory on historical horrors. In Blindness, several people in an unnamed city lose their vision and are confined to a mental ward, ravaged by the easy fraying of a makeshift society. Will the same happen to the “community” of journalists and film-industry professionals gathered at this beautiful seaside town? And is this year’s festival aiming for its own allegory? The official poster for this year’s festival, designed from a David Lynch photo, features a woman whose sight is obscured by a black bar. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello…oh, hell, we don’t care what side you’re from,

It’s TONY here with a Gossip Girl reaction that is admittedly superlate. But you know what? We had a great excuse; we were finalizing an amazing package about the upcoming Sex and the City movie that’s going to make you pine for the innocence of 2004, when sex-crazed females were at least old enough to vote. Check with us Thursday when it’s live exclusively at timeoutnewyork.com. What’s included in it? That’s a secret we’ll never tell…

xoxo,
TONY

Kelsey Rahn, online designer: OKAY HI! GOSSIP TIME!!!!
so my favorite person in this episode was lily!

Lindsey Unterberger, TONY Kids Web editor: Me too! let’s actually start there–at the end
when Rufus won’t let Lily leave
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Somewhat drowned out by frothy wave of outraged hubbub about the Tony Award nominations was last night’s announcement of the winners of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards. Every year since 1935, the Circle—which currently includes 22 theater critics from the city’s principal newspapers and magazines (except the Times; long story)—has rewarded the finest work that the theater scene has to offer. I have served as the DCC’s president for the last three years, so this year’s meeting was held once again at our very own humble TONY offices, where, after much bickering, we agreed to give only two prizes this year: for Best Play, to Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County; and for Best Musical, to Stew and Heidi Rodewald’s Passing Strange. Yes, only two: In one of its periodic swings toward stinginess, the Circle rejected several efforts to award special citations for work of extraordinary quality—notably, by an infuriating one-vote margin, to Patti LuPone for her magnificent turn in Gypsy. (The vote was a tie, but a majority is required for a win.) Here’s hoping that the Tony voters, at least, have the good sense to correct our omission…

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We didn’t include chainlet Steven Alan’s legendary bargain fest in our print edition (our bad!). But here’s the scoop on its scads of stylish garb and accessories for both genders—now marked down by up to 80 percent off. Ladies’ private-label cotton button-downs are $55 (originally $148); Relwen men’s polos are chopped from $85 to $32; and Gryson nylon handbags are pared from $595 to $150.

Steven Alan Showroom
87 Franklin St between Broadway and Church St (212-219-3305). Thu 15, 16 8:30am–8pm; Sat 16 noon–7pm; Sun 18 noon–5pm.

 

The 2008 Tony Award nominations were announced this morning, and we’re mad as hell. Sure, sure—congratulations to In the Heights, Passing Strange, Gypsy and South Pacific, and the lock for Best New Play, August: Osage County. But the nominations had us scratching our heads and spitting out our morning coffee (admittedly, not easy to do at the same time). Here are our major beefs.

Just one stinking nomination for Top Girls…and nothing for Elizabeth Marvel?!?
Maybe the Tony nominating committee thinks it’s so very with-it for lavishing noms on Passing Strange and In the Heights. We loved them too. But Tony’s taste in plays is painfully square. Or more specifically, revivals of plays. Manhattan Theatre Club produced an excellent revival of the 1982 Caryl Churchill play Top Girls (see the TONY review here). The play reportedly has grumbling subscribers leaving in droves at intermission ’cause they just can’t understand that durned postmodernism. Martha Plimpton got a nom for Featured Actress and that’s great, but Elizabeth Marvel should be on the list too. And Top Girls wasn’t even nominated for Best Revival of Play. And its superb director, James Macdonald, was snubbed too. Instead, Tony noms the boring, bland Les Liaisons Dangereuses, a stillborn Roundabout production if ever there was one.

Cheyenne Jackson got screwed (not in the good way)
Nobody expects Xanadu to nab much Tony gold on June 15. But it’s a campy good time, and more than half the fun is due to superhunk Cheyenne Jackson as struggling-artist himbo Sonny. With his velvety pop croon and those tight cutoff jeans, how is it possible that Tony overlooked this wonderful performer?

Black Cat means bad Tony luck
Again, Tony committee members are tone-deaf when it comes to play revivals. This black-cast Cat on a Hot Tin Roof may be rough around the edges (sets and lights are weak), but the ensemble work is terrific, and director Debbie Allen does a fine job of keeping the actors on the same page. And yet, Cat was completely shut out. Not even a nod to Anika Noni Rose, whose sultry, soul-baring performance as sex-starved Maggie the Cat is at least worth consideration.

Phooey. See all the details here.

My friend Billy and I attended a discussion between Daniel Joseph Martinez and David Levi-Strauss Wednesday night at the Whitney Museum of American Art. This year Martinez has been included in the Whitney Biennial; his first appearance in the exhibition was in 1993, when Martinez’s somewhat infamous piece consisted of passing out buttons to attendees at the door of the museum; each button bore one word, and visitors found that, arranged properly, their pin-bearing lapels could spell out the sentence "I can’t imagine wanting to be white."

Martinez’s work has ranged from what some might consider incendiary to structurally radical. In this discussion, Martinez, his usual garrulous and revolutionary self, called for moving art beyond the binaries that have motivated artmaking of the past 15 years, particularly those of the market. He traced the conditions in which artists make work today (especially an obsession with either belonging to or defining oneself against the institution of privilege) back to the early ’90s, which witnessed the advent of the art market and the Internet, both of which contribute to highly polarized hierarchies in their reliance on a base of exchange-value for success in operation. The concurrent decline of nonprofits and their support of creative endeavors without commerical concerns removed a crucial buffer zone for experimentation.

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Given its age, Alice Tully Hall was about due a face-lift. But the building is getting much more than that and, if the artist sketches are to be believed, it’s going to look rather spiffy. At the corner of 65^th Street and Broadway, it will reappear from behind the current gray scaffold in all its sleek, gleaming newness on February 22, 2009. One glass corner will be sheered off to a triangular point, and an enormous flat-screen television is to be built into the apex.

The actual Alice Tully, a singer who loved chamber music, was the granddaughter of Amory Houghton, the founder of Corning Glass Works. Tully died in 1993 at the ripe old age of 91. When she gave money to build the hall, which opened in 1963, entry into the common parlance and lore of New York City was hers for the paltry sum of $4.2 million. Today, according to Jane S. Moss, the Lincoln Center’s vice president of programming, the construction costs will ratchet up to about $165 million.

As was Tully’s original intent, the hall will be revamped with chamber music in mind. What’s most important to cinephiles, of course, is not string quartets but the New York Film Festival, which has called the hall home for the past 45 years and, for a couple of weeks a year, finds itself at the center of world cinema.

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One of the perks of working at Time Out (besides the swag) is that you’re surrounded by smart, cultured people who have strong opinions about the most random of topics. A case in point: As we put the finishing touches on our second annual Horny issue, I noticed that Film writer Josh Rothkopf was reliving his admiration for Phoebe Cates in a story titled "Scrotal recall." Which caused me to pose the question, "Hey, Josh, who do you think was the bigger teen sex icon—Phoebe Cates or Shannon Tweed?" At this point he professed unwavering admiration for Cates, I admitted a sweet spot for Tweed (I remember Night Eyes 2 like it was yesterday) and suddenly a debate was raging. It continues below:

Dustin Goot, Web editor: Okay, are you ready to rumble?

Josh Rothkopf, Film writer: Yes, a feud must be settled.
it must be nice playing for Team Tweed. Because there’s also Tracy

Goot: apparently so, though i can honestly say i’d never heard of her before looking shannon up on wiki
shannon was the icon
Read the rest of this entry »

HE’S LOOKING FOR… WOMEN.

ADAM, 23
Brooklyn, graphic designer

Learn more about him:

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Cindy Sherman’s work really turns me on, no joke—even that creepy clown series. Always the subject of her own work, Sherman maintains that her photos aren’t at all about self-portraiture. Using makeup and props, she takes on radically different personae, from characters in Renaissance paintings to archetypal secretaries donning pillbox hats. Sherman turns Method acting on its head; instead of drawing on real-life emotional conditions, she empties herself completely and becomes whomever and whatever she wants. By transforming herself into anyone and everyone, she renders herself completely anonymous. I find that kind of mystery incredibly seductive.—Quinn Marquardt

Or, "Hey, ATP Festival ticket buyers: Screw you!"

Okay, maybe it isn’t all that severe—everyone knew that My Bloody Valentine wouldn’t be dropping in for just September’s ATP New York festival. And I guess ATP did book a few other bands. But still…but anyway. My Bloody Valentine will play Roseland Ballroom September 22 and 23; tickets go on sale tomorrow (Friday May 9) at the unrockly hour of 10am, and you’ll pay $52 plus a lot of bullshitty lack-of-service charges that will buy more planes and houses for the already rich.

Pretty in prep

Has Flight of the Conchords gotten too big for its own good? Though the duo once referred to themselves as "New Zealand’s fourth-most popular folk-parody duo," it is clear that Bret and Jemaine are now the first-most popular musical comedy act in the world. If a well-received HBO series and forthcoming album from Sub Pop weren’t enough evidence of this, there was the crowd last night at the the Town Hall—which, in my unscientific analysis, seemed about 65 percent female and about 95 percent ready to throw their panties onstage.
 
Hightlights after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Housing Works, the city organization that helps people living with HIV and AIDS, opened its Crosby Street bookstore ten years ago. Since then, the store, managed in part by a board of writers, has become not just a great place to buy books but also the site of some of the city’s best and most inventively curated readings. Tonight the store celebrates its birthday with a party and a sale: Fifty signed books by the likes of George Saunders, Mary Gaitskill, Jonathan Safran Foer, Paul Auster and others will be up for silent auction. Where else can you grab a glass of wine and work on enhancing your book collection at the same time? Doors open at 7pm.

Hello again, midtown West Siders,
See, I’m changing the location on you, because that’s actually where we’re located. Not just the West Side, but a decidedly unglam area at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel. S&B wouldn’t be caught dead here (or maybe they will be, given recent plot twists!). But you don’t care about our grubby little lives. Here again is our fab blog from TONY’s resident Gossip Girl obsessives.

Lindsey Unterberger, TONY Kids Web editor: hey!!!
let’s GOSSIP!

Kelsey Rahn, online designer: OMG
i know what serena did last summer!!!!!

Unterberger: you were soooo right!

Rahn: SHE KILLED SOMEONE!
Read the rest of this entry »

As I’ve made my way in and out of Tribeca’s week of screenings, panels, performances and events, I’ve collected a wish list of additions the Tribeca brass might consider for next year, to make the festival even more of a destination for cinephilic audiences. These would help people experience the magic of special films and keep the festival from pigeonholing itself as merely a place to view early-bird films that haven’t been released yet:

1. Tap into the local talent pool: NYC has some of the best film schools in the world. Why not sponsor a batch of TFF film trailers and commercials created by these emerging NYC auteurs?
2. Keep the focus on film: How about expanding the ASCAP Music Lounge to include actual film music? Don’t get me wrong, the music events are inspiring and offer a much-needed alternative to sitting in a dark room, but some interesting collaborations among the musicians, directors, film composers, actors and set designers (to name a few of the many collaborators on a film) would bring the focus back to film without feeling like a plug for an album. Read the rest of this entry »