Thomas F. Cook

The premise of this play is that in Tehran, or somewhere near it, in the late 90s I think, a woman at a school is teaching English to a group of students whose skills vary from struggling to almost perfect. The cleverest thing about it is that when they are speaking Farsi, they speak quickly and with American accents, but when they are speaking English they have thick accents and often struggle to find the right words.

The class is supposed to be conducted in English only, but they students often slip back into Farsi to make communication easier. Their teacher gives them tick marks each time they use Farsi and they are allowed 5 before they are sent home as punishment.

This reminded me of a terrible French teacher I had who deducted half or a quarter grade off your final grade point every time she heard you speak English. So in the end of my senior year, I walked away with a D in a class that I had loved. But it didn’t matter at that point. I was already accepted at University and would never need my high school transcript again. I just remember the hurt and viciousness of it.

What these students are actually trying to achieve is a good or greater than good score on the TOEFL which stands for Test of English as a Foreign Language. It’s the equivalent of the SAT and it tests non-native speakers for their ability to speak English if they want to enter a university or college. The fact that it’s set in Iran is of no consequence. But I got the sense that the author is probably one of those people who is in love with language (Farsi, based on what is said in the play), and attributes to language much more than is actually there. I know someone who is the same way about Yiddish. Most French people love their language. The Scottish have done amazing things with English. And in America, according to John McWhorter, we more or less hate our language, even though racists all over the country use English to discriminate against people like those in this play, who are struggling to sound more and more American. I don’t know if the nature of language is such that a society or a person can be changed by it, or that their personality is molded by it. Because while watching one of the characters wax rhapsodic about the beauty of Farsi and the balance of it, I kept thinking about all those war mongering men who also speak Farsi. Does Scottish slang make the Scots happier and funnier? This idea was explored very satisfyingly in Denis Villeneuve’s (Ted Chiang’s) Arrival, where Amy Adams mind was actually changed once she started writing and speaking in Heptapod or whatever it was called, which was more of a visual language like cuniform.

The play is an hour and 40 minutes with no intermission, and it moves somewhat slowly due to a classroom “cube” that rotates to a different side depending on the scene. But sometimes this movement takes longer than it should and there is a lot of classical music to go with it. In the end, it was satisfying.

I don’t feel qualified to review this Robert Eggers movie because unlike the others, I kept falling asleep. I didn’t see anything up until the titles because I was snoring away. Many points of the movie were lost (and not really “lost” exactly, because they weren’t that important).

There are just far too many movie directors and writers that overwrite and overexplain what point they are trying to make.

Basically, this horny young girl awakens the demon Nosferatu because she is so very horny, and during some unnatural dream, which is basically a sex and passion fear dream — she agrees to the demon that she will be his wife.

Cut to, the end, when the city is falling victim to the plague, we’ve already met umpteen characters who are going to be dead, and the sorcerer who knows how to read a book of codexes in a book he magically finds in a nearby closet or floor (I couldn’t tell which because the lighting is so bad), which claims the only way for the plague to end is for the woman to sacrifice herself sexually to Nosferatu (a vampire) who of course, eats her heart and drinks her blood instead of fucking her. But in line with most misogyny down through the ages, as soon as the vampire fucks her, he dies.

The End.

What the fuck was the point? I’d rather see Wicked, and Wicked is an absolute non starter for me.

Next, Nickel Boys, titled, “The Nickel Boys,” in Colson Whiteheads novel.

I didn’t really feel like searching for an image to go with this “take” on this movie. I didn’t even look up the writers. Reasons: 1) I have always hated his voice; 2) I have always disliked his face; 3) I never liked his songs.

They say Dylan’s an enigma. BUT, Daniel Plainview, in There Will Be Blood by P.T. Anderson and Daniel Day Lewis, was also an enigmatic person. But if you think and get ever closer to the main character, you’ll understand some of his behavior. One of many examples: in There Will Be Blood, at some point in a restaurant when he is sitting with his (now deaf) son, he throws a napkin over his face and says some things. It is so completely bizarre that you don’t even know what he’s doing, but when you think about it a little more, you realize he is making sure his son isn’t able to read his lips. Because his next act is to threaten to kill the men at the next table.

In this, I don’t think the writers allowed us to get “closer” as it were, to Dylan, even though I dislike him and probably wouldn’t have wanted to. What I did like about the movie were the small corners that were rebuilt of MacDougal and Minetta Lane, MacDougal and Bleeker Street, and various other spots and nightclubs. But it didn’t explain the legendary hatred between him and Joan Baez. His girlfriend and ultimate wife was relegated to a composite character and is mostly used to chastise him. It wasn’t even clear why he “went guitar” at a folk festival. They’ve written a movie about someone for whom they cannot answer the most critical question asked of any screenwriter, and to a lesser extent, novelist. “What does he want?”

You could sort of say that he loved folk music and wanted to make it in the city, like millions of other people, including yours truly. And instead of facing an avalanche of negativity, just got in. He made it, without doing much but singing his lyrics on an acoustic guitar. But at the end of this journey, after having destroyed his folk music career by going electric, someone says, “You’re free.” But is that what he wanted? And what the hell does that mean?

I think Timothee Chalomet probably deserves a lot of praise for portraying a character who doesn’t really seem to express his wants, his ambition, his drive, his passion. The most memorable line in the movie, for me, when talking about Joan Baez: “She’s pretty.”

Anyway, disclaimer, I knew Dylan’s business manager or catalogue manager for a number of years in the 80s. Naomi Satlzman was her name. She died a couple of years ago. She called him the great poet of the 21st century. She also raised most of his kids. Kept them out of trouble. I think I’d like to see her life and career more than Dylan’s.

It is so interesting when someone who just seems like a throw-away actor — an actor who will probably work but not get many great roles, turns out to be a brilliant writer or director.

But, the thing is, to contradict my calling him a throw-away actor, I did notice Brady Corbet in Melancholia, the Lars Von Trier movie about a very depressed woman’s wedding and her sister’s subsequent nervous breakdown. He had a very small part but it stuck out, sort of like Meryl Streep did in Julia when she only had about 5 seconds of screen time but used it so well it launched her career.

I had no idea what this movie was about. The trailer didn’t give much away but was unusual in that the title moved sideways. And the title is why I went because I’ve always found Brutalism architecture sort of fascinating. Most people are repulsed by it, and it can often resemble those horrible Soviet Union buildings that are cold and intimidating. But Gothic architecture is widely misunderstood too. It’s a matter of seeing, and maybe helping someone else to see.

When it began I was so worried that it was going to be one of those handheld nausea movies where the cinematographer or director are trying to capture the feeling of looking around or being distracted, because it began in almost complete darkness with only flashes of light here and there, and a lot of noise and a lot of people, and then suddenly a breaking into the light and the main character Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody), sees the Statue of Liberty but from upside down, just as the poster shows. Laszlo was formerly an architect before the Nazis separated him from his wife (Felicity Jones) in the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. He studied under the Bauhaus. We learn from a letter that his wife has been able to take their niece, who has stopped speaking, to Russia — until then he didn’t know if she had survived.

He makes his way to Philadelphia to stay with a cousin who has Americanized himself: changed his name to Miller, destroyed his accent as thoroughly as he could, and married a Shiksa. He also converted to Catholicism. He sells furniture, but it’s of the old world style and Laszlo calls it ugly. Although it doesn’t get mentioned explicitly, his wife says she knows a man who can fix Laszlo’s nose and he says something about how he broke it in an accident. None of that’s true. She’s simply trying to make him hide his Jewishness. Eventually accuses him of making a pass and she has him kicked out.

In the meantime he has met an extremely wealthy industrialist Van Buren, whose children asked Laszlo to redesign their father’s library. He did, but in his modern way, and initially Harrison Lee Van Buren, Jr. (Guy Pierce) throws him out in a rage. Laszlo has to go shovel coal on a construction site and live in what looks like a homeless shelter run by nuns. When Van Buren’s new library gets a spread in Look Magazine, he tracks him down, brings him to his mansion, helps him get his wife and niece out of Russia, and commissions him to build a cultural center on the top of this pretty magnificent hill on his property.

There are highs and lows and plenty of arguments because what he is building is a massive Brutalist piece of architecture that no one really understands. It’s all concrete. There are no windows (except there are, but just not where you’d expect). And then a catastrophe which forces Laszlo and his wife to find a new way of living in New York City.

That isn’t the ending of course and the movie is long enough that it actually has an intermission, something I had thought I’d never see again since Titanic. There was something really great about an intermission — everybody running to the bathroom or getting more popcorn and food, quietly chatting, while on the screen there is a clock counting down the 15 minutes. Broadway theatre (not musicals) have mostly given up on the intermission, preferring to cut plays like “Our Town” down to 90 minutes or less. I’ll have to think on it some more because I found the feeling of waiting for the second half really interesting.

So on the way home I was in a cab and I thought, “let me look him up and see whatever became of that building.” Many Brutalist buildings have been torn down.

This is one in Orange County, New York which was partially torn down and replaced with this:

basically so that people don’t have to see it.

Anyway, I couldn’t understand why there was no entry for “The Van Buren Cultural Center,” so I finally just looked up the movie and there were no links to any bio for Laszlo Toth. And then as I read, I realized that I wasn’t watching a bio pic like Elvis or Elton John, where the details are fudged but the gist of his life proceeds basically from start to finish. This was an entire work of fiction. But it so well done I actually left there believing that Laszlo Toth was one of the great architects of the Brutalist movement. The last time something like that happened was with “Possession,” by A.S. Byatt, whose depiction of Randolph Henry Ash and Christabelle LaMotte was so full and humanistic, I had to look them up to see if they were actual historical poets. They weren’t. Like this they were entirely the invention of the writer. That’s when I realized that Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold, Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce made an absolutely monumental work, as they are saying all over the place. This is well worth seeing in the theatre and in 70mm if they have it. It doesn’t open until January but it’s open in Manhattan, probably to qualify for the Oscars.

I see a lot of theatre but not as much that’s out there, and a lot less than I used to when I worked for a theatrical law firm that represented many of the major Broadway musicals.

I’ve thought a lot about this production and although it got good reviews, I think it misses on several levels.

It chooses to be multi-cultural as you can clearly see from the program, but it’s confusing in the way it’s chosen to be multi-cultural. There is a white family and a black family, but I couldn’t tell (and it’s not in Wilder’s script anyway) whether this was meant to be non-traditional casting or whether they were actually white and black families.

Opera, oddly enough, doesn’t have this problem of non-traditional casting because singing is basically color blind. So with opera, you can have, for example, Leontyne Price singing Madama Butterfly — and no one blinks an eye.

But in this piece — and I read the director’s note carefully — he decided that it shouldn’t be “our town,” but “our universe,” or “our world.” Cast in a way that reflects the audience of today. I don’t object, but it created confusion — primarily because the Gibb family was all black actors and the Webb family were all white. So then I was thinking that the relationship between George and Emily was an interracial one rather than simply non-traditional casting. That, in itself, creates another tension that I don’t think really reflects the play’s theme — which leads to my other problem with this production.

The huge wall at the back. Our Town, though it’s like about 100 years old, is considered avant garde because it’s usually produced on either a bare stage or a blackened stage — with almost no props at all. The opening monologue by The Stage Manager (Jim Parsons) goes on and on about what props and sets you would be looking at if this were a traditional play. But Wilder was a genius, perhaps, and he knew that if he put anything on that stage for the actor to play with or for the audience to look at — other than the actors themselves — you would completely misunderstand the powerful 3rd Act where Emily tries to “relive,” like Scrooge, a moment from her past life. And that’s exactly what happened. Your eye kept being drawn to the massive back wall, which was painted to look like a barn wall. And in one of the most critical scenes — I believe it’s the end of Act I — where Emily says she wrote or received an envelope addressed to, so and so, on such and such street, in the town, in the United States, on Earth, in the Galaxy, in the Milky Way and the Eye of God — this hugely important speech was spoken through a whole in this wall, like the tv show Laugh-In. It’s one of the reasons, in fact, that the production has “partial view” seats, because the side seats, where I was almost sitting, can’t see that far back.

That scene, which establishes the relationship and love between George and Emily, needs to be tender and full blooded and right up front — as close to the front of the stage as possible. They are ostensibly talking to each other from the upper floor windows of their homes, which are next to each other. But there was no chemistry in this production between those two. And they are, ultimately, the main characters — at least the ones we are prone to follow.

The other (probably not the final or only) problem, was the choir master who is meant to be a stand-in for Thorton Wilder himself: an outsider and a homosexual who has probably never acted on his feelings, like Henry James. It’s there in the script, when (I think) Mr. Webb (Richard Thomas) says, “A small town is no place for a man like Mr. Stimson.” He is talking about the reason that almost every young gay man heads to a city. But in this production, the Stimson character is just enraged that his church choir can’t sing. At least that’s all I was able to pick up.

I’ll have to look through all my old Playbill programs — (I have every single one except “Scapin” by Moliere) — to see which of the revivals I saw before. I’ve seen “Our Town” at least 4 times, including my high school production. I won’t say this was the worst, but in my opinion, it was the least coherent and one that completely lost sight of Wilder’s insight: that human beings are too alive to know what life is; that we spend every moment taking it for granted; and that we can only understand life through death; and even after, that we must spend eternity trying to forget it.

First, I want to note that many gay men will laugh in sympathy at things that straight people may not ever understand. I think the first time it happens in this movie is when Lee (Daniel Craig) sees Allerton (Drew Starkey) in the corner of a cafe and makes an incredibly awkward and probably inebriated bow to him. The camera turns to Allerton and Allerton just slowly moves his head to look through the window. All the men in the audience laughed but it’s because we know what it’s like to be rejected and in such a cold manner.

In fact, that awkward bow and the cold as ice rejection is probably the central theme of this movie. Even though Eugene Allerton has a number of sexual experiences with William Lee, and accompanies him on trips to South America with a kind of “well why not,” he never gives into the intimacy that Lee is seeking, rather desperately.

Addicts stories are often utterly boring, though they can be funny. They are almost always stories of redemption and recovery and they are alike in as many ways as you can think of. William Burroughs wrote about addiction in a completely different and interesting way. He often wrote about the joy of finding unfettered access to his drug of choice, which was heroin. There are several nods to that in this movie, including a scene where he gets prescribed 3 ccs of liquid opioids, which is enough to keep him from withdrawal, and an extended journey into the Ecuadorean jungle to find a woman who is experimenting with Ayahuasca. In fact, this last sex scene that Lee and Allerton have while high (it’s not really a “high” per se, but it is a hallucinogen), is where the writer makes it clear to the reader that being on drugs can open one’s heart and mind. I never quite saw anything like it, but while they’re having sex, you basically realize they are melting into each other. You sometimes see their hands stroking each other underneath their skin. You sometimes see their heads merge into each other’s flesh. It’s an incredible feat of film making and (i took efforts to notice) they were clearly completely naked. After the hallucination ends, they are both shirtless but wearing jeans. And the reality of distance and distrust returns. Leslee Manville, who is an utter beauty, plays the botanist and is made up to look almost like a witch. After their night of intimacy she says to Allerton, “the door is now open, why would you look away?”

But he does. Their relationship, such as it was, is over. The intimacy was experienced once and is gone, and in a series of somewhat hallucinatory scenes, Lee ages and eventually dies, still thinking about the man he loved.

I’m going to see it again. I do not understand what happened to Jason Schwartzman, who played a character named Joe, who was fat and sloppy and quite funny, always picking up men who robbed him. It’s just hard to recognize him anymore because of the weight gain.

I think I’ll just have this one as a pinned one, because so often in New York, you’ll spot a celebrity in just about anywhere. Sometimes I remember them.

Upper East Side, probably north of Bloomingdale’s, my mom and I were looking in a window of these old watches and clocks and suddenly, behind me, looking in the same window was Yoko Ono. My mom pretended to push me into her. I think that was in the 80s.

University Place and 8th Street. Lucas Hedges was walking across the crosswalk with a friend and he said, “That’s fantastic,” or something like that to his friend. He seemed genuinely excited.

Once at The Lincoln Center Theatre Bathroom and later in a theatre. Christopher Reeve. He was coming out of the bathroom as I was going in and boy was he tall. Like other actors, he stared and had an intense stare. The occasion was the famous production of Waiting For Godot starring Steve Martin, Robin Williams and F. Murray Abraham. Plus Bill Irwin and Lucas Haas. That was in 1988 at the Mitzi E. Newhous Theater which was a tiny tiny theatre and the run sold out immediately. But the audience was especially populated with the famous and probably half the seats in the theatre were house seats. Katherine Hepburn made her way down the steps with the help of her lover. The other time I saw Christopher Reeve was when he was also in the audience of a play. This was after his accident and he was in the wheelchair at the end of the row. When I went to the back to get a drink or something, he again stared. It was as if he remembered me. The other time I saw him was when he was onstage in Fifth of July. It was ironic that he played a character who had lost his legs and had prosthetic ones which were pretty useless. He was also a gay veteran in that play and I think he publicly stated that after a kiss between he and his lover, it took like 5 to 10 minutes to get the audience back. When I saw it, there were verbalized groans and yucks and one woman near me said, “Oh my God.” Later at the end of that performance I realized Lanford Wilson was sitting behind me. He had, for a while, been my hero.

But I don’t really like to talk to celebrities or go up to them for an autograph or anything. I get too flustered and act like an idiot.

I’ve written about Tammy Faye before, specifically “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” starring Jessica Chastain.

This musical failed in NYC, while it was a smash hit in London, and there’s a big question of Why?

I think in part, and this is without having seen it, it’s because they are elevating her to almost a gay rights activist, for the very simple reason that she dared to speak to a gay man with AIDS on her television hour. She wasn’t in the room with him. He was in his apartment or some studio in California. Her sympathy for the guy was thousands of miles apart.

She was a stupid and greed-filled religious televangelist. The real story behind her and her husband’s rise and fall is the damn television show and the station they built. It was PTL (Praise The Lord) network — and it was far more successful than CBN (Christian Broadcast Network), Pat Robertson’s network, which only had a few thousand viewers. There were a whole lot of transactions that went on between the Bakers and others, but when they became hosts on CBN of a show called The 700 Club, it ended up becoming the flagship program on CBN. When they left that network, they started their own network and it left other televangelists in the gutter. Everyone was jealous of them: craved their ratings, their world satellite network, and so on. So when scandal hit because of Jim Baker and a woman named Jessica Hahn, Jerry Falwell stepped in to become the chairman of the network and Jim and Tammy left or were tossed out. Not unsurprisingly, the donations to the station completely dried up and Falwell had to contribute 20 million to keep it afloat. He had lied to Jim Baker that Jim would get control back and instead called him “the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history.” Of course that just shows what an idiot Falwell was too. Christianity didn’t begin the day Christ died. In fact it wasn’t until 400 some years had passed that the four main gospels were codified, the apocrypha created, and Rome turned away from paganism. So 1600 years to be more precise. And of course there was Judas who you could accuse of being a stain on Christianity if he and Jesus weren’t, in fact, Jewish.

But never mind that. Falwell is dead and we are all better off for it. Tammy Faye died but Jim Baker still lives on, has repurchased the PTL name and logo and is trying again. But why did this show fail? Not sure. But I have a feeling it really gets the story of these two totally wrong. Jessica Chastain’s portrayal was probably closer. It might also be a much more amusing show in England, whose people, I sometimes think, are continually perplexed at the United States as a nation.

I sometimes watched the Jim and Tammy show for laughs and one time, to the very apparent annoyance of her husband, Tammy told a story about shopping in the middle of Indiana in this mall that must have been 500 years old. That is how stupid she was.

He has said the inspiration for this WWII movie was a picture of a little light skinned black child walking by himself during the Evacuation of the children of London. He wanted to remind everyone that the German’s attack on London was not solely an attack on pasty people, but that there was a lively and vibrant black community living there, including interracial couples.

This is true I think. But the really good thing about this movie is that it accepts the interracial aspect and doesn’t pound it over our heads. The little boy experiences prejudice, hatred, because of his color, but the main story is about the gallery of rogues he meets when he decides to jump the train and run home.

Getting home is far more difficult than he realizes, and he’s got almost nothing but a sandwich and a tiny bit of pocket change. Eventually, the authorities realize that he hasn’t arrived at his destination family, and have to tell Siorsese Ronan, his mother, that he is missing. This is unfortunate as far as the script goes because she then goes out to “find him,” but London is a sprawling town and there isn’t that much she can do. This sort of gives her character a kind of pointlessness, where earlier in the movie she had an urgency that was more palpable.

I think the jury is still out on Steve McQueen. I sometimes can’t understand what his movies are really about. The first one that I saw was Hunger, where Michael Fassbender played Bobbie Sands, the hunger striker who died during the Thatcher era. Even though it was a grueling depiction of what the British did to the Irish political prisoners in Maze Prison in Northern Ireland, I sometimes felt he just wanted to see Fassbender be as naked as possible. Then Shame, the next one I saw, didn’t seem to me to depict shame at all and Fassbender, again, was walking around naked with his huge floppy cock. 12 Years A Slave won for best movie that year but it did catch some criticism, especially the movie critic Armand White, who called it torture porn and got himself kicked out of The New York Film Critics Circle for heckling Steve McQueen for this very reason. I always thought White was perhaps one of the worst critics out there, back when he wrote for the New York Press, but there was, indeed, a kind of over the top quality about 12 Years A Slave, especially the whipping scene, which I assume was the scene White was referring to as torture porn. And then this one, where some real ghoulish grave robbers play with dead bodies and laugh about them as they steal their valuables. He might go too far, but in spite of that I don’t think I really know what his movies are about or who they’re for. But hell, he’s had a full career already and he gets great actors.

I wasn’t eager to see this because of Kieran Culkin and the really reprehensible character he played on Succession. They were all disgusting people but his character was so dismissive and awful, I just knew going in that a lot of that energy would be in this character as well. And I guess I just didn’t want to be reminded of it.

But I like Jesse Eisenberg and once saw him when crossing the street — he coming in the opposite direction. He stared at me and he has a very intense stare and he is also as thin as a rail.

In this they play cousins whose mutual grandmother, a holocaust survivor from Poland, has died and left them money with the request that the visit her homeland. Benji (Culkin) lives in Binghamton and David (Eisenberg) lives in Brooklyn. But they are vastly different personalities and I think the poster shows that pretty well. They are basically sharing a room on a holocaust tour guided by a British man (Will Sharpe) with a life long interest in Eastern Europe and that area of the world. Sharpe does a great job distancing himself from his recent character on The White Lotus (the one married to Aubrey Plaza) and you don’t feel that anything is exploitive about the movie, even the visit to the nearby Majdanek Concentration Camp which is just a few miles from Lublin. They intent to visit their grandmother’s home, parting ways with the others in the group.

But the conflict comes because Benji is, basically, a depressed and out of control nut while Eisenberg is a comfortable Brooklynite with a small family. And much of the very moving parts of the movie aren’t the holocaust related visits, it is Benji and David’s different ways of relating to being third generation jewish people. (3rd generation from the initial holocaust survivors, that is.) This whole notion of 3rd generation is repeated in various forms and I think it frequently comes up because it isn’t possible for the 3rd generation of any group to understand what the 1st generation went through. You can try. You can empathize. You can read books and wikipedia articles, or letters from that generation. But to really get at that core, (the real pain of the title), is not really possible.

Anyway it’s a wonderful movie and well worth the time to see it.