Few directors can be said to have changed the way films are made, but Mike Nichols, who died Wednesday at 83, was one of them. His first film, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1966), ended decades of Hollywood censorship of adult content and freed the movies for mature language and subject matter ever after. His second film, "The Graduate," was the first serious mainstream movie to feature a rock soundtrack (spawning Simon and Garfunkel's hit "Mrs. Robinson") and, through its casting of Dustin Hoffman, expanded Hollywood's notion of what a leading man ought to look and sound like.
Nichols wasn't born in America (he and his family escaped from Nazi Germany when he was a child), but he was one of the best chroniclers of contemporary America -- its politics, its aspirations, its dreams, its aristocracy, and its successes and failures -- in movies. His youth in Manhattan as the son...
Nichols wasn't born in America (he and his family escaped from Nazi Germany when he was a child), but he was one of the best chroniclers of contemporary America -- its politics, its aspirations, its dreams, its aristocracy, and its successes and failures -- in movies. His youth in Manhattan as the son...
- 11/20/2014
- by Gary Susman
- Moviefone
One day in late January, the novelist, n+1 editor, and now self-taught Marxist political economist Benjamin Kunkel left Buenos Aires and flew to Rio. He’d been living in Argentina more on than off since the recession hit, an enviably high-minded take-the-money-and-run expat in the frothy wake of his novel Indecision, and his travel schedule was like a con man’s, always shifting. In Rio, he met the leftist playwright Wallace Shawn and his girlfriend of 40 years, the short-story goddess Deborah Eisenberg, who were staging a one-night-only performance of Shawn’s The Designated Mourner for the benefit of Glenn Greenwald, the national-security-state crusader and Edward Snowden accomplice, who lives there. Not to benefit; for the benefit of. Greenwald couldn’t feel comfortable coming to New York to see the play, which describes the death of liberal culture at the hands of reactionary forces, so they took the entire Public Theater...
- 3/11/2014
- by David Wallace-Wells
- Vulture
Who says it’s not easy being green? Well, Kermit the Frog did actually, but if you’re literal high-flyer Elphaba in the musical Wicked, it’s pretty darn boss, especially give that the teen-adored Stephen Schwartz musical (which received mixed reviews upon opening in 2003) just celebrated 10 years on Broadway this week. (EW just featured leads Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel on our annual Reunions cover). And unless Halloween rendered you deaf from overzealous trick-or-treaters, Broadway became all abuzz with the debuts of real-life, smoldering couple Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz in a revival of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, but...
- 11/2/2013
- by Jason Clark
- EW.com - PopWatch
“I think staying awake rather than falling asleep when people are talking to you is an important component of the definition of clarity,” wrote Wallace Shawn in “Notes in Justification of Putting the Audience Through a Difficult Evening,” an essay appended to his ‘85 play Aunt Dan and Lemon. “And I think theatre can give people a certain training or practice in this type of vigilance.” Andre Gregory’s new production of Shawn’s The Designated Mourner isn’t what I’d call a “difficult evening” — this isn’t some Abramovic endurance experiment after all, and much of it is broadly funny. (Here’s a gem of a line, if you’re in the Wally Shawn novelty-t-shirt business, a business someone should be in: “My dick lay limply inside my trousers, like a little lunch packed by Mother.”) The moral content is richer than just about anything you’re likely to find elsewhere; Shawn,...
- 7/23/2013
- by Scott Brown
- Vulture
The Public Theater Artistic Director Oskar Eustis Executive Director Patrick Willingham and Theater for a New Audience Founding Artistic Director Jeffrey Horowitz Managing Director Dorothy Ryan and Chairman of the Board, Henry Christensen III will present The Wallace Shawn-Andr Gregory Project in 2013, a celebration of the remarkable 40-year collaboration between Wallace Shawn and Andr Gregory. The two plays, The Designated Mourner and Grasses Of A Thousand Colors, will offer a long overdue retrospective of Shawns work as well as an opportunity for him to appear on the New York stage again under Gregorys direction. The Public Theater presented Shawns first play in New York, Our Late Night, in 1975, directed by Gregory.
- 8/1/2012
- by BWW News Desk
- BroadwayWorld.com
World-weary and uneasy, David Hare's 21st century spooks are office-bound but watchable
There's been a lot of talk at Edinburgh this year about the lack of gala premieres, but one film that organisers have secured as a world debut is David Hare's first directorial effort for 14 years, since The Designated Mourner in 1997. Even though Page Eight is aimed at TV transmission, rather than cinema release, its screening still counts as something of a major event.
Hare's ostensible subject is the British intelligence services: Hare's own comment about Page Eight is that it analyses "how intelligence operations have had to adapt to the new century". His central protagonist is Johnny Worricker, a suave, besuited, well-spoken gent who occupies a spotless office in some nameless Whitehall department.
Bill Nighy is the natural, almost inevitable casting. Worricker's immediate superior, and the head of his section, is another besuited, well-spoken gent called Baron,...
There's been a lot of talk at Edinburgh this year about the lack of gala premieres, but one film that organisers have secured as a world debut is David Hare's first directorial effort for 14 years, since The Designated Mourner in 1997. Even though Page Eight is aimed at TV transmission, rather than cinema release, its screening still counts as something of a major event.
Hare's ostensible subject is the British intelligence services: Hare's own comment about Page Eight is that it analyses "how intelligence operations have had to adapt to the new century". His central protagonist is Johnny Worricker, a suave, besuited, well-spoken gent who occupies a spotless office in some nameless Whitehall department.
Bill Nighy is the natural, almost inevitable casting. Worricker's immediate superior, and the head of his section, is another besuited, well-spoken gent called Baron,...
- 6/20/2011
- by Andrew Pulver, Bill Nighy
- The Guardian - Film News
He is not now, nor was he ever, a matinee idol, a chameleonic star, or the go-to guy for second-banana roles. But Wallace Shawn has amassed an astonishing number of rich, varied credits—as an actor and as a writer. The actor who plays Vizzini the Sicilian evil genius in "The Princess Bride" also penned the provoking play, later a screenplay, "The Designated Mourner." His ultra-disturbing anti-war play "Aunt Dan and Lemon" clashes in our heads with the Republican Stuart Best on "Murphy Brown." Or, maybe that's all just good acting—even with what others term his speech "impediment." Nonetheless, judging from various interviews, Rex the anxious, insecure dinosaur in the "Toy Story" series may be among the closest characters to Shawn's view of himself. And yet we can still visualize him talking, at length but fascinatingly, at dinner with the co-writer Andre Gregory in "My Dinner With Andre."On...
- 1/21/2011
- backstage.com
By Sean O’Connell
Hollywoodnews.com: You might be able to scratch one actress’s name of the list of potential female performers lining up for a part in Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises.”
That’s because Rachel Weisz — who yesterday was on a short-list of Batman candidates alongside Keira Knightley, Natalie Portman and every other beautiful starlet in a five-block radius – has flipped over to David Hare’s spy thriller “Page 8, which begins shooting in January.
The title, according to the Daily Mail, refers to the eighth page in a top-secret document. Weisz joins a spectacular cast that reportedly includes Bill Nighy as an MI5 operative, Michael Gambon as the director general of the Security Service, Judy Davis, and Ralph Fiennes, whom she worked with on her Oscar-winning vehicle, “The Constant Gardener.”
David Hare was nominated for two Oscars for penning “The Hours” and “The Reader.” But...
Hollywoodnews.com: You might be able to scratch one actress’s name of the list of potential female performers lining up for a part in Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises.”
That’s because Rachel Weisz — who yesterday was on a short-list of Batman candidates alongside Keira Knightley, Natalie Portman and every other beautiful starlet in a five-block radius – has flipped over to David Hare’s spy thriller “Page 8, which begins shooting in January.
The title, according to the Daily Mail, refers to the eighth page in a top-secret document. Weisz joins a spectacular cast that reportedly includes Bill Nighy as an MI5 operative, Michael Gambon as the director general of the Security Service, Judy Davis, and Ralph Fiennes, whom she worked with on her Oscar-winning vehicle, “The Constant Gardener.”
David Hare was nominated for two Oscars for penning “The Hours” and “The Reader.” But...
- 11/12/2010
- by Sean O'Connell
- Hollywoodnews.com
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