Two’s company. Three’s a crowd. That aphorism is at the center of Susanna Fogel’s debut as a movie-hyphenate. She both co-wrote (with Joni Lefkowitz) and directed “Life Partners,” which opened this month to much critical praise. The movie is about two women, Paige (Gillian Jacobs) and Sasha (Leighton Meester), co-dependent friends since childhood, and what…
Joyce Brabner/Mark Zingarelli “Joyce Brabner, best known as Harvey Pekar’s widow and collaborator, has released a graphic novel about early efforts in a New York gay community to fight the AIDS epidemic.” So began a recent Cleveland Plain-Dealer review of “Second Avenue Caper” (Hill & Wang, $22), a deeply moving and bitingly funny new graphic…
The banging you hear in the background? That’s the drumbeat for an Oscar nomination for Gena Rowlands. Rowlands stars in “Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks,” a movie about the impact an elderly south Florida widow and a much younger gay dance instructor have on each other’s lives. Rowlands plays Lilly Harrison, the former wife…
Frank Wildhorn will be appearing at 54 Below this week. For those who don’t know, 54 Below is a supper club located essentially underneath what was Studio 54 (where all the action used to take place). For those who don’t know Frank Wildhorn, he wrote “Where Do Broken Hearts Go,” a number one international hit…
In 2009, writer Glenn Kurtz was sifting through a closet in his parent’s Florida home when he discovered a reel of 16mm Kodachrome color film in a musty cardboard box that had belonged to his grandparents, David and Liza Kurtz. As prosperous Jewish American tourists, the Kurtz’s decided to take a six-week summer vacation through…
Sylvester Stallone as gossip blogger Gerald in ‘Reach Me.’ Image courtesy Millenium Entertainment Emmy Award-winning writer and director John Herzfeld wrote and directed the comedy drama, “Reach Me.” It’s about a neurotic widower, Teddy Raymond (Tom Berenger), who wrote an anonymous motivational book which becomes a phenomenon that attracts devoted fans including a rapper (Nelly),…
Alan Dershowitz spent 50 years on the Harvard University law faculty, including the last 20 as the Felix Frankfurter professor of law. In all that time, he didn’t just talk the talk. He walked the walk, too, representing a number of frequently unpopular clients — Mike Tyson, O.J. Simpson, Claus von Bülow — in frequently…
All images courtesy Sarah Lazarovic Equal parts autobiography, treatise, art project, and social commentary, Sarah Lazarovic’s “A Bunch of Pretty Things I Did Not Buy” (Penguin Books) chronicles a year in which the author sublimated consumer urges by drawing things instead of purchasing them. But the book’s much more than a visual diary. Lazarovic’s elegant,…
