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Rex Reed

By Rex Reed 2/08 10:17am

movies

Cardellini and Slattery can't quite make themselves at home.

Return Won’t Have Audiences Doing the Same

Return is a bargain-budget bore by writer-director Liza Johnson about a female soldier back from a tour of active duty in Iraq who cannot adjust to life at home. Better movies have been made about the subject of veterans trying to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives on a home front that has changed in their absence and moved on without them. I am thinking of the classic The Best Years of Our Lives, of course, but that was another kind of war, and the last one that made any universal sense. Recently, channeling Afghanistan and Iraq, there has been Neil Burger’s The Lucky Ones and Oren Moverman’s The Messenger. Indifferent audiences stayed away in droves. They are almost certain to avoid Return as well. People just do not seem to be able to summon the proper compassion for people who fought in what many consider to be pointless wars created by the whims of politicians and the military without knowing why they went there in the first place. Read More

By Rex Reed 2/08 10:11am

movies

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Private Romeo?

Private Romeo: Every Soldier is a Lover

From a World War II Macbeth in an Alan Ladd trench coat to a drug-dealing Shylock in an all-black Merchant of Venice set in Harlem, Shakespeare has been boldly “opened up” before. (A rock ’n’ roll Hamlet, anyone?) But a gay Romeo and Juliet, both played by military school cadets on their way to West Point, is a new one on me. It’s Private Romeo, a brave, controversial, not always successful, but hugely adventurous and highly liberated movie that offers a fresh take on the Bard in the age of same-sex marriage. Like it or not, you will not go away yawning. Read More

6 By Rex Reed 2/08 10:03am

movies

Radcliffe sans lightening bolt scar, recently introduced to hair product.

The Woman in Black is Frighteningly Mediocre

Harry Potter is six feet under and Daniel Radcliffe is understandably looking for ways to move his career in new directions. Full frontal nudity all over the Internet and singing and dancing his way through a recent Broadway revival of the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying broadened his fan base beyond the teenybopper rut. Now he’s trying something else: a creepy haunted-house thriller crawling with ghosts from the spirit world called The Woman in Black. It’s not exactly a setback, but it won’t break new ground, either. I’ve had bigger scares from a fish tank. Boring and sedentary, not to mention only occasionally coherent, this creaking-door mystery is not much of a vehicle to display young Mr. Radcliffe’s range and charm. Read More

By Rex Reed 2/08 9:48am

cabaret

Former 'Weekend Update' anchor Ebersole.

Christine Ebersole Sings the Apocalypse

There’s a ripe adjective to describe every flavored, favored aspect of Christine Ebersole’s versatility, and before she throws in the towel and does something besides entertain, like run for president, the critics will probably get around to using them all. For now, I can think of only one—sensational!

In her elegant, witty and intelligent new show at Café Carlyle, she serves up a thoughtful, incisive master class in how to enhance cabaret and keep it alive with fresh new insights that should be required viewing by aspiring performers everywhere. She calls it “The End of the World as We Know It.” I call it “Christine Ebersole Sings the Apocalypse.” She does it with such panache that the swinging Matt Dennis evergreen “Show Me the Way to Get Out of This World” has never been more relevant. When she shakes her saffron yellow curls and smiles her survival grin in Technicolor, she makes the end of the old world, the beginning of a new one, and everything in between seem as rare and giddy as a Disney cow. Read More

1 By Rex Reed 2/08 9:43am

theater

Goldberg and Adam Driver not all that sure what they're talking about. (Roundabout Theatre Company)

Look Back in Anger: Rebels Without a Cause

The arrival of Look Back in Anger, John Osborne’s revolutionary play about anger, decay and the rage simmering beneath the surface of British losers in the 1950s, revolutionized play writing and marked the beginning of a new decade of torn T-shirts and kitchen-sink misery on the London stage and the end of the well-written, elegantly staged works of Terence Rattigan, Enid Bagnold and Noël Coward. It was hailed as an important work when it opened in 1956 at the small, experimental Royal Court Theatre off Sloane Square, an alternative to the glossy productions in the West End. It was filled with hell and fury and shouted obscenities, a “protest” play unlike any slice of realism ever witnessed by refined London audiences weaned on Ibsen and Shaw. The excitement faded fast. By the time it was turned into a film of sweat, grief and brimstone in 1958 starring a young, virile Richard Burton, its time had passed. The movie was a flop and Look Back in Anger was toothless history. Mr. Osborne was credited (and cursed) with shuttering the complacency of well-ordered British dramaturgy. Time has now born witness to a desperate need to bring back Rattigan, Coward and the others. And not a moment to soon. Read More

2 By Rex Reed 1/31 8:08pm

cabaret

Clark in Paris before she returned to the warm embrace of our dear city's nightclubs. (Eric Ryan/Getty Images)

For Petula Clark, Well…You Can Always Go, to Feinstein’s

Rhythm and bounce, tempo and pounce. Petula Clark has lost none of her fizz. Her warm, engaging new act at Feinstein’s at Loew’s Regency is the first time she’s appeared in a New York nightclub since the dear, departed and much-lamented days of the Waldorf-Astoria’s Empire Room. That was 1975, after she had already moved to Switzerland to get away from the punishing rigors of show business and escape the taxes, but she hasn’t been sitting around her home in Geneva knitting mittens. Read More

3 By Rex Reed 1/31 8:01pm

movies

Ms. Channing: All smiles, all the time.

Hello, Carol! Larger Than Life Ms. Channing’s Happy-Go-Lucky Lookbook of Photo Ops

I’ve always regarded Carol Channing as a walking alarm clock—tall, cherry-lipped and dinner-plate-eyed with a head as big and yellow as a sunflower—tick tock, tick tock. But according to director Dori Berinstein’s new documentary, Carol Channing: Larger Than Life, the frazzled dodo captured best in legendary caricatures by her friend Al Hirschfeld was a superficial image she cultivated for the entirety of her professional life, aided enormously in the effort by the only two famous and important roles of her career—gold digger Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and meddling matchmaker Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly! She invented them both, but her greatest invention has always been herself. Offstage, out of makeup and eyelashes and wigs like 20-pound piles of white farmhouse insulation, she was about as dumb as a brain surgeon turned rocket scientist, with a roaring IQ and a humanitarian heart as big as her bustier. Real life, as it turns out, was not always a turkey dinner. Like Judy Garland, she was no stranger to tears. Director Berinstein is too much of a fan to reveal it all. The result is cinematic Botox—a puff piece masquerading as a biopic, designed and edited for fans, drag queens and loyal chorus boys she always treated like family members because in reality she had none of her own. As a serious documentary, it is charming, sycophantic, peppy, endearing and, it must be admitted in all honesty, ultimately one-dimensional.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Carol Channing. Read More

3 By Rex Reed 1/31 7:53pm

movies

Green and McGregor.

Perfect Sense? Unexplained and Altogether Vague, The Film Never Showed a Sign of Having Any

You sense an instant prognosis of pretentiousness with the opening words of soundtrack narration in a horror called Perfect Sense: “There is darkness. And there is light. There are men and there are women. There is fruit. There are restaurants. Disease. There is work. Traffic.” And there is Ewan McGregor, who makes entirely too many movies and only occasionally makes an effort to speak the kind of English anyone can understand. Read More

1 By Rex Reed 1/31 7:47pm

theater

Steele and Garofalo.

Russian Transport is a Mail Order Mess

It’s been a calamitous week off-Broadway. In the New Group production of Russian Transport, a loud, inconsequential play full of cussing and yelling at the Acorn Theater on West 42nd Street, a family of mewling, whining Russian immigrants in a cluttered two-story house in Coney Island are struggling to keep their car service business going. Read More

By Rex Reed 1/31 7:40pm

theater

Numrich, Erbe, Galvin and Woodbridge.

Yosemite Director Pedro Pascal Leaves His Actors Out in the Cold

The best thing (correction: the only thing) worth remembering about Yosemite, a paralyzing bore at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater on Waverly Place, is the terrific set by Raul Abrego. On a stage the size of a forever stamp, we are in the middle of a snow-covered redwood forest. Gigantic trees grow into the ceiling, denuded shredded branches and fallen logs the size of Humvees litter the landscape. You can smell the evergreens and hear the wind. You reach for a sweater. Then a truckload of Valium by Daniel Talbott is dumped on the landscape while you try to stay awake, as three miserable siblings brave the cold and dig a grave to bury their baby brother wrapped in a garbage bag. Read More

By Rex Reed 1/31 7:30pm

movies

Paxton and Healy.

The Innkeepers is a Yankee Doodle Dud

The Yankee Pedlar Inn is a real hotel in Torrington, Conn., that is rumored to be haunted. The Innkeepers, a desultory indie-prod poorly written and lamely directed by Ti West, and filmed on the cheap at the actual location, is a poor-man’s rip-off of Stanley Kubrick’s hotel spookfest, The Shining, promising paranormal horrors to all who dare to enter. Where is Jack Nicholson when we need him? Read More

By Rex Reed 1/24 8:00pm

movies

Close.

Albert Nobbs is Ms. Butler

Albert Nobbs, a lumbering saga about the pitfalls of a woman posing as a man to hold down employment as a butler in 19th-century Dublin, opened for one week in December to qualify for Oscar nominations. It is now expanding to commercial marquees for public scrutiny. Thanks to a quirky performance by Glenn Close featuring enough prosthetics, wrinkles, painfully binding corsets and pinched diction to generate critical acclaim and give Meryl Streep a run for her money, attention must be paid. But not too much. As a period piece, Albert Nobbs is slower than Proust, and nothing of any consequence ever happens to write home about. In her bowler hat and high starched collars, Glenn Close looks like Conan O’Brien playing Oscar Wilde.

Awkwardly directed by Rodrigo Garcia (son of acclaimed novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez) from a novella by George Moore that was turned into a play Ms. Close performed off-Broadway 30 years ago, it’s a dull little fugue in a minor key Read More

By Rex Reed 1/24 7:56pm

movies

Elkaim and Donzelli.

Declaration of War: For Never Was a Story of More Woe

From France, a gentle, uneven, but touching and true chronicle of the fight to save the life of a child with brain cancer called Declaration of War is doubly notable because the baby’s real-life mother is the film’s director, Valérie Donzelli, who also costars and coauthored the screenplay with the baby’s father, actor Jérémie Elkaïm. Although they are no longer together and are living their own separate personal lives, their story, fictionalized but still autobiographical, bonded them for life. Apparently, they are best friends whose dedicated collaboration was the only way they could tell this harrowing story. It’s a brave effort any way you slice it. Read More

8 By Rex Reed 1/24 7:47pm

movies

Liam Neeson

The Grey Sees Unlikely Brothers Band Together ‘Neath Darkness of Primordial Instincts

Prepare to be devastated. Films of hair-raising terror about people doing unspeakable things to each other are a dime a dozen, usually with a built-in hole in their armor (people can always outsmart people). But movies about helpless humans versus uncontrollable nature are rare. A new one called The Grey, about the survivors of an airplane crash in the frozen wastes of Alaska at the mercy of carnivorous wolves, is the movie equivalent of a wet finger in a hot socket.

This is the scariest wilderness survival movie about men stalked by animals since Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins landed on the menu of a bloodthirsty, 10-ton grizzly in Lee Tamahori’s 1997 thriller The Edge, written by David Mamet. Read More

5 By Rex Reed 1/17 7:45pm

movies

Bale and Ni Ni.

From The Withered Tree, Flowers of War Bloom

In the dark history of human atrocity, one savage, inhuman chapter that is always missing from the textbooks in courses about the Pacific conflict in World War II is the Rape of Nanking. Except for the occasional documentary, this harrowing event has gone largely unexplored by filmmakers, yet it surges with historic value and the elements of heartbreaking drama. Ask history majors about what the Japanese did to freedom-loving civilians to alter the world and all they know is Pearl Harbor, Bataan and the Death March. Now the great Chinese director Zhang Yimou has made a valiant and compassionate effort to enlighten the ignorant. The Flowers of War is his best film since Raise the Red Lantern. It is emotionally shattering. Read More