A New York Estate of Mind

Walking and talking: Teenager Abby (Sarah Steele) and her mother, Kate (Catherine Keener).

Please Give
Written and directed by Nicole Holofcener
Starring Catherine Keener, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Rebecca Hall, Ann Guilbert, and Sarah Steele

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

As I have a bit of a skin problem myself at the moment, I can sympathize with Abby (Sarah Steele), the 15-year-old character in Nicole Holofcener’s new film, Please Give. Abby is dealing not only with a mother melting down from liberal guilt, but, worse, with acne (“Oh, that’s bad,” says another character, who gives facials, “it looks cystic”)—which is both on her face and in ours. Can’t she cover it up a little? I couldn’t help wondering. But such is the way of Holofcener, whose movies (Walking and Talking, Lovely & Amazing, Friends with Money) are much more like real life than most of what you’ll see on the big screen. (Her one “lapse” may have been the use of the glamorous Jennifer Aniston in Friends with Money, except that Aniston fared much better in that movie and in Miguel Arteta’s The Good Girl than she has in more air-brushed, so to speak, films.) During Friends with Money, when Holofcener’s muse Catherine Keener, as half of a screenwriter couple, berates her husband for not properly sympathizing when she gets hurt, my own husband whispered to me, “Sounds like arguments we’ve had.” Indeed.

In the director’s new film, Keener plays Kate, a woman uncomfortable with her own upper-middle-class comfort, which is, oddly, enhanced by the dead and almost dead: She buys furniture from the estates of the newly deceased for her upscale antique store, and she and her husband, Alex (the “real”-looking Oliver Platt), have already bought the apartment next door from the elderly woman, Andra (Ann Guilbert, once a neighbor on The Dick Van Dyke Show), who lives in it; when she dies, they’ll be able to smash right through and have an even bigger place in their stately East Village building.

Andra’s granddaughters—Mary (Amanda Peet), who is almost unbelievably blunt (see acne remark above), and Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), the sweet to Mary’s sour, who does most of the caretaking for their grandmother (also sour)—only serve to exacerbate Kate’s guilt about Andra, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. Yet they affect Kate’s family—Abby and Alex—in ways that Kate cannot. Somewhat distracted by her desire to make the world a better place, Kate tries to volunteer for work with both the very old and children with Down syndrome but finds herself overcome by their situations (in a reversal, one of the children attempts to help Kate when she ends up a blubbering heap in a restroom stall). Instead, Kate hands out money and leftovers indiscriminately to anyone who even appears to be homeless.

This is kind of Wallace Shawn Lite, yet Kate truly is struggling and she truly does love her family. (In an unusual and touching development, Abby and Alex indirectly share a secret they keep from Kate, demonstrating the sometimes delicate interweaving of family dynamics.)

Holofcener does not concern herself too much with plot. In her movies a person can have an affair without any eventual explosions or can suffer a depression that shows itself, rather than in hitting the bottle, in not hitting the shampoo. This can make her work seem more natural than contrived—a more leisurely and less intellectual Woody Allen, whom Holofcener once worked for.

In the character-driven Please Give, there is only one off note that I can perceive (well, apart from nearly every New Yorker going bonkers over getting to the country to watch the fall leaves “peak”): Those two young women never give a hint of being resentful at not inheriting their grandmother’s great apartment. Really?

Exploding Girls

Where it begins: Teenagers Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) and Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning) meet—where else?—in an L.A. club.

The Runaways
Written and directed by Floria Sigismondi
Starring Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning, and Michael Shannon

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

“Hello, Daddy / Hello, Mom / I’m your ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb!” With those words—half-talked, half-sung—the 16-year-old, bottle-blonde Cherie Currie introduced to the world a revolutionary kind of girl group, the Runaways. Her partner in grime and grit, Joan Jett, had started the band in 1975 with drummer Sandy West, under the demented aegis of Kim Fowley, a record producer whose idea of rock ’n’ roll was blood, guts, and sex. To Jett (who’d changed her name of Larkin) it was more—“It is my life,” she says to a disillusioned Currie after the Runaways have wowed the teens of Japan (a “Hello Sex Kitten” to rival the recently launched “Hello Kitty”).

The Runaways, executive-produced by Jett, starts off a little slowly setting things up—though the opening image is appropriately primal—but then gets nearly everything right: the clubs, the clothes, the songwriting, the drugs, the sex (especially a hallucinatory scene involving Currie and Jett). And the music. Both Kristen Stewart, as Jett, and Dakota Fanning (wasn’t she just yesterday a little girl?), as Currie, look and sound authentic when they hit the stage. Fanning even learned Currie’s signature wrapping-the-mic-around-the-leg move, as she demonstrated for Jimmy Fallon last night, though, judging from the video below, the real Currie was a bit more like a jaded kid you’d pass in the mall than the fresh-faced Fanning. Stewart, in black leather, brings to the role of Jett the right body type and the right attitude: a tough and slightly disinterested exterior that belies the fire inside that will turn Jett into one of rock’s greats.

With the Blackhearts, Jett, of course, went on to make such hard-driving hits as “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll”; Lita Ford—the Runaways’ lead guitarist, who gets short shrift in the film (perhaps because it’s based on Currie’s memoir, Neon Angel)—spent years raising kids on a Caribbean island before barreling back last year with Wicked Wonderland; and Cherie Currie, whose career was derailed by addiction, is today a ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-chainsaw artist! Just keep setting off those bombs, girls.

Ivy League

On the rooftop: Best friends Al (Mark Rendall) and Ivy (Zoe Kazan) watch a flock of pigeons take flight.

The Exploding Girl
Written and directed by Bradley Rust Gray
Starring Zoe Kazan and Mark Rendall

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

This is not a movie that explodes—which is fine, since we have more than enough of those. The titular “exploding girl” of the film, Ivy (Zoe Kazan), who has epilepsy, wanders the downtown streets of New York with cell phone always in hand. On vacation from college, both she and her best friend, Al (Mark Rendall), are staying with her mother (Maryann Urbano). Although both her mom and Al care for her almost to the point of coddling, Ivy seems to need to talk to her boyfriend, Greg, who’s apparently in another town, almost constantly. It’s clear from the beginning, however, that Greg does not feel the same involvement. Why Ivy needs to hide this from those who love her is not so clear, but watch Kazan’s face as she sits with Al, not telling him—the most active and mesmerizing silence I think I’ve ever seen; I felt as though I were being pulled into the screen. (The lack of music only intensifies the scene.) Kazan’s Everygirl looks, with chipmunk cheeks (“She’s so cute!” a woman behind me at the screening kept squealing), only add to the film’s naturalism.

This is a movie that takes its time. When Ivy cries as Al holds her, we, as he, simply have to wait for her. And because it’s Kazan, we do. Kazan, is, by the way, the granddaughter of legendary director Elia Kazan, and writer-director Bradley Rust Gray includes a lovely homage to On the Waterfront, when Al—whose interest in Ivy goes beyond their friendship—takes Ivy to see pigeons being kept on a rooftop.

Aside from the pigeons and a couple of parties, not a lot happens in this film, and I’m not sure it could have been a film without Zoe Kazan—Gray has said that as soon as he imagined the character of Ivy, he thought of Kazan—but perhaps that’s irrelevant: It’s a delicate work, restrained and rewarding, as long as you, like Al, have some patience.

Hedging Her Bets

Former small-town Gilmore girl Alexis Bledel, as Beth Vest, falls for the big-city charms of Tommy Fielding (Scott Porter).

The Good Guy
Written and directed by Julio DiPietro
Starring Alexis Bledel, Scott Porter, Bryan Greenberg, and Andrew McCarthy

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

Alexis Bledel is so sweetly pretty that you might allow her anything, and perhaps that’s what the director of this movie, Julio DePietro, did. Placidity—even interrupted by a few tears and some unconvincing pseudo-Sex-and-the-City girlfriending (a communal-Brazilian-wax scene? Really?)—does not a compelling character make. (I found this also with the ingénue in the 2007 movie Life in Flight, which I recently caught on one of the movie channels. Calling Amanda Seyfried!)

Bledel’s Beth Vest has an important job—urban conservationist—but it doesn’t get much play in the film, and it doesn’t help that Beth’s friends are shallow, despite having a book club, as well as annoying. The men fare better, with Scott Porter (Friday Night Lights) playing a hotshot Wall Streeter named Tommy, who’s seeing Beth, and Bryan Greenberg his unsophisticated protégé, Daniel, who wishes he were seeing Beth (I told you she’s pretty). Tommy, by the way, has his own even shallower and more annoying work gaggle—they’re not just irritating, they’re boors (undoubtedly with bonuses). So which one—Tommy or Daniel—gives the movie its title? It takes Beth a while to figure it out, and it may you too. The director could have surprised us more than he does with this tale, but it just might do until Wall Street 2’s Michael Douglas re-emerges as, according to Vanity Fair, a—huh?—good guy.

Top Ten Events of 2000-2009 (And Quite a Decade It Was)

Cover of the first Spanish-language edition of Nowhere Man, 2003

By Robert Rosen

This is my very personal list of the ten events, good and bad, of the past decade that have had the greatest impact upon my life.

1. August 2000: Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon is published. I wrote the bulk of the book in 1982, and for 18 years the “experts” told me it was unpublishable. It becomes a bestseller in five countries and three languages. My life changes and the book’s impact continues to be felt to this day.

2. September 11, 2001: Mary Lyn Maiscott and I live a mile from Ground Zero. The first plane flies directly over our house. We hear it crash into the North Tower but can’t see anything and have no idea what happened. We go back to work. Twenty minutes later I call my brother. “Aren’t you watching TV?” he asks. We go outside to watch the towers burn. Our building is evacuated because of a bomb threat. It’s a false alarm, but the terror is real. Twelve firemen from the firehouse across the street die at the World Trade Center. It’s a cosmically bad day.

3. October 19, 2001: I marry Mary Lyn in a civil ceremony at the Municipal Building in downtown Manhattan. The ceremony is broadcast live on The Louie Free Radio Show. Mary Lyn and I had been together for 11 years. What were we waiting for, a terrorist attack? In the midst of ongoing horror, it’s a very good day.

4. May-June 2002: Delayed honeymoon in Mallorca. We spend five of the most idyllic weeks of our lives in an 800-year-old stone house in the tiny mountain village of Fornalutx. Thank you, Terry Bisbee.

5. September 2002: Just as the paperback edition of Nowhere Man is published by Quick American Archives, I’m subpoenaed to testify as a witness for Yoko Ono in the copyright infringement suit she’s brought against my former writing partner Fred Seaman. After having been called a liar, and worse, by a variety of critics, journalists, and anonymous Internet posters, the trial gives me the opportunity to testify under oath, before the world media, that the story I told in Nowhere Man is true.

6. March 2003: Nowhere Man is published in Spanish in Mexico, and the articles and excerpts that appear over the next six months in virtually every major newspaper and magazine in the country are unlike anything that’s ever happened before. I am, in short, flabbergasted on an almost daily basis.

7. October-November 2003: On the eve of the publication of the second Spanish-language edition of Nowhere Man, I go to Mexico City to meet the press. I feel as if I’ve entered an alternate universe where everything I’ve been working for, for the past 25 years, has come to pass in a language I don’t understand. Thank you for being my voice, Ramón De La Cruz of Random House Mondadori.

8. May 25, 2005: My father dies. I thought he was indestructible. He was not.

9. October 2005: On the occasion of John Lennon’s 65th birthday, I’m invited to Mexico and Chile to talk about Nowhere Man. It is, more or less, a replay of the 2003 trip, with an additional country added. And again, I’m bowled over by the interest in the book, and the warmth and hospitality of the people. This time, however, I can speak a few words of Spanish, and I’m able to say things like “Yo soy la morsa” y “Sí, fumo mota.” Gracias a Roberto Ponce de Proceso y Javier Foxon de Paniko.

10. Late 2008-Early 2009: The economy collapses. Like everybody who had a 401K in the ’90’s, I swallowed the propaganda hook, line, and sinker: “If you want to have enough money to retire, you have to invest in mutual funds.” I come to the painful realization that if I’d have been better off if I’d stuffed my money in a mattress.

Tori Amos Puts Her Own Spin on the Season

As part of the music magazine’s SpinHouse Live series, Tori Amos gives an intimate concert at the Spin offices in Lower Manhattan. Photo by Ben Rowland.

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

Under black chandeliers, Tori Amos, her long hair nearly as red as her multi-gathered minidress—which, along with her gold stretch leggings, made her look like an exotic Christmas present—started her set at the Spin magazine loft Tuesday night with her song “Ophelia,” whispering at one point “I feel you.”

We felt her too. While not exactly going all Jerry Lee Lewis on us, the dramatic Amos would not be contained by anything so prim as a piano bench. She stretched out a glimmering leg, stomped a metallic stiletto, and at the end of “Wednesday,” her arms flying out behind her, appeared to be the eagle of her lyrics, about to land.

In a set of only six songs, the other four were from her new, seasonal CD, Midwinter Graces. Unlike Bob Dylan, who sings—rasps?—such holiday standards as “Here Comes Santa Claus” seemingly straight for his recently released Christmas in the Heart, Amos, a minister’s daughter, has delved into carols such as “Silent Night” and “Star of Wonder” to create her own rich works. Thus, “Silent Night” becomes “A Silent Night with You” (in which the singer at times sounds surprisingly like Madonna on a very good day).

My favorite from the album, however, is wholly original, the feel-good—you can almost see the confetti falling—“Pink and Glitter,” written, Amos explained while introducing the song, because in this time of celebrating the birth of a baby boy, she wanted to honor little girls (but nevertheless gave a smiling thumbs-up to the guys while singing the line “Little boys are getting an honorable mention from me”).

Her last song was the atmospheric “Snow Angel,” whose most memorable moment came when Amos briefly stopped, after making an undetectable mistake on the piano, and exclaimed “Fuck!” This only made her audience more delighted than they had been a second before—and I wouldn’t have thought that was possible.

Connubial War, Not Much Peace

Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) enjoys a rare light moment with his wife, Sofya (Helen Mirren).

The Last Station
Written and directed by Michael Hoffman
Starring Christopher Plummer, Helen Mirren, James McAvoy, and Paul Giamatti

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

Some movies appear to have all the elements for success and yet don’t work. Is it the script? The editing? With Michael Hoffman’s The Last Station, the problem would not appear to be the acting: Christopher Plummer plays the great Russian writer Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy; Helen Mirren is his wife—and literary assistant—of 48 years, Countess Sofya; Paul Giamatti plays his disciple Chertkov; and James McAvoy, acting as a stand-in for the audience, is Tolstoy’s new secretary, Valentin.

Valentin has arrived at a crucial point: Chertkov has nearly convinced the writer, whose Tolstoyan movement advocates the end of private property, to leave his wealth, and his copyrights, to the Russian people rather than his family. This causes Sofya—who has not only copied out War and Peace six times for her husband but has borne 12 children, 5 of whom have died—to nearly lose her wits. In one Lucy Ricardo‒esque scene, she, believing Tolstoy, in the company of Chertkov and Valentin, is about to sign a new will, climbs to a window in her nightdress and falls into the room, nearly taking the drapes with her. “Will somebody help me up?” she asks, and, remarkably—for god’s sake, she’s Tolstoy’s wife, a countess, and in her 60s!—no one does. Although we (capitalists that we are) and Valentin (sympathetic creature that he is) believe that Sofya has a good case—not to mention that Chertkov fairly oozes unctuousness and villainy—she comes across less passionate than hysterical. And despite her love for Tolstoy, she doesn’t seem to realize that in constantly bringing up the will she is reminding him of his perhaps imminent death.

Valentin, in the meantime, has fallen for a pretty young woman who works in the Tolstoyan commune, yet with a pronounced take-it-or-leave-it attitude. Although celibacy is apparently part of Tolstoy’s “ideal love” philosophy (one prim devotee blurts out to Valentin that he doesn’t court women because he’s “vegetarian”), Masha (Kerry Condon) thinks nothing of walking uninvited into Valentin’s tiny commune room and climbing onto him as he’s lying in bed. A harbinger of the modern, independent woman, she eventually takes off for Moscow (in contrast to Chekhov’s nearly contemporaneous, so to speak, three sisters, who only talk of going there).

The title of the movie, which is based on the novel by Jay Parini, who studied the diaries of Tolstoy’s associates, refers to the train station where the writer, gravely ill, alights and spends his final days. (Calling to mind events involving more recent international icons, such as Michael Jackson, camped-out reporters await every detail.) Here everyone’s true character comes into focus. Unfortunately—except perhaps in regard to Valentin (and Germany playing Russia in cinematic splendor)—for the audience the train has already left the station.