Tag Archives: philip seymour hoffman

RIVER FLICKS FOR GROWN-UPS: MONEYBALL

Oscar nominees Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill take a different approach with the Oakland A’s in MONEYBALL

MONEYBALL (Bennett Miller, 2011)
Hudson River Park, Pier 63 at 23rd St.
Wednesday, July 11, free, dusk
www.moneyball-movie.com
www.riverflicks.com/RFgrownups.html

After winning 102 games during the 2001 season but then falling to the New York Yankees in the American League Division Series in five tough games, the cash-poor Oakland A’s also lost three of their most prominent players, Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon, and Jason Isringhausen, to free agency. To rebuild the team with limited funds, general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) turns to an unexpected source: Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a young stat geek who believes that on-base percentage is the key to the game. The A’s scouts find it hard to believe that Beane is looking at has-been catcher Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt), aging outfielder David Justice (Stephen Bishop), and underperforming submariner Chad Bradford (Casey Bond) to get the A’s to the World Series, as does manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who refuses to use the new players the way Beane insists. But when the A’s indeed start winning after a few more questionable deals pulled off by Beane and Brand, the entire sport world starts taking a much closer look at what is soon known as “moneyball.” Based on the 2003 bestseller Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis, Moneyball is an exciting film even though the vast majority of it occurs off the field. Pitt is wonderfully understated as Beane, a former five-tool prospect for the Mets and divorced father of a twelve-year-old girl (Kerris Dorsey). Pitt earned an Oscar nod for Best Actor for his portrayal of the real-life Beane, a confident but nervous man who may or may not have a big chip on his shoulder. Hill was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his role as wiz-kid Brand, a fictional character inspired by Paul DePodesta, who refused to let his name and likeness be used in the film; Brand instead is an amalgamation of several of the people who work for Beane. Director Bennett Miller (The Cruise, Capote) takes the viewer into a number of fascinating back-room dealings, including a revealing scene in which Beane tries to acquire Ricardo Rincon from the Cleveland Indians, furiously working the phones to pull off the deal. Also nominated for Best Picture, Best Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Adapted Screenplay, Moneyball firmly belongs in the playoff pantheon of great baseball movies, with the added bonus that you don’t have to be a fan or know a lot about the game to get sucked into its intoxicating tale. Moneyball is screening July 11 at Hudson River Park’s Pier 63, kicking off the free River Flicks for Grown-Ups series, which continues through August 22 with such films as Super 8, Bridesmaids, Limitless, Cowboys & Aliens, Crazy, Stupid Love, and Horrible Bosses. For a day-by-day listing of free summer movie screenings in New York City, go here.

MOVING IMAGE MASTER CLASS: SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK

Philip Seymour Hoffman doesn’t quite understand what’s happening to him in SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, March 25, free with museum admission, 6:00
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
www.sonyclassics.com/synecdocheny

In films such as Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999), Adaptation. (Spike Jonze, 2002), Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (George Clooney, 2002), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004), writer Charlie Kaufman has created bizarre, compelling alternate views of reality that adventurous moviegoers have embraced, even if they didn’t understand everything they saw. Well, Kaufman has done it again, challenging audiences with his directorial debut, the very strange but mesmerizing Synecdoche, New York. Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as the bedraggled Caden Cotard, a local theater director in Schenectady mounting an inventive production of Death of a Salesman. Just as the show is opening, his wife, avant-garde artist Adele Lack (Catherine Keener), decides to take an extended break in Europe with their four-year-old daughter, Olive (Sadie Goldstein), and Adele’s kooky assistant, Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh). As Caden starts coming down with a series of unexplainable health problems (his last name, by the way — Cotard — is linked with a neurological syndrome in which a person believes they are dead or dying or do not even exist), he wanders in and out of offbeat personal and professional relationships with box-office girl Hazel (a nearly unrecognizable Samantha Morton), his play’s lead actress, Claire Keen (Michelle Williams), his therapist, Madeleine Gravis (Hope Davis), and Sammy (Tom Noonan), a man who has been secretly following him for years. After winning a MacArthur Genius Grant, Caden begins his grandest production yet, a massive retelling of his life story, resulting in radical shifts between fantasy and reality that will have you laughing as you continually scratch your head, hoping to stimulate your brain in order to figure out just what the heck is happening on-screen.

Evoking such films as Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 and City of Women, Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, and Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries as well as the labyrinthine tales of Argentine writers Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar, Synecdoche, New York is the kind of work that is likely to become a cult classic over the years, requiring multiple viewings to help understand it all. The film is screening March 25 at the Museum of the Moving Image and will be introduced by production designer Mark Friedberg, who will be leading a Moving Image Master Class at 3:00 ($20) with chief curator David Schwartz. In addition, Hoffman is currently appearing in Mike Nichols’s new Broadway version of Death of a Salesman, the show he is putting together in Synecdoche, New York.

DEATH OF A SALESMAN

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Linda Emond hope for better days in DEATH OF A SALESMAN (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Ethel Barrymore Theatre
243 West 47th St.
February 13 – June 2
deathofasalesmanbroadway.com

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman stakes its claim once again as the Great American Play in Mike Nichols’s poignant new version, running at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre through June 2. Winner of the 1949 Pulitzer Prize, Death of a Salesman is about nothing less than the death of the American dream. Willy Loman (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a traveling salesman who has just returned to his New York City home after an aborted attempt at a sales trip to New England. A sixty-three-year-old man who has worked for the same company for thirty-six years, Loman has been beaten down, left out of the booming post-WWII economy and lagging behind changing times. He is consoled by his gentle, stalwart wife, Linda (Linda Emond), who reminds him that both of his grown sons are back in their room upstairs, sleeping soundly. The older Biff (Andrew Garfield) has yet to find himself, having recently spent time on a farm in Texas despite grand hopes, while the younger Hap (Finn Wittrock) is a ladies’ man with big dreams of going into business with his brother. Over the course of a single day, the Lomans are forced to face some hard, cold truths about themselves and their uncertain future. Hoffman is magnificent as Loman, his barren eyes haunted by his lack of success, his body hunched over, dragging around a briefcase filled with meaningless items he has been hawking for decades — items that are never specified, because it doesn’t matter; they could be anything. All he wants is to be able to complete the payments on an appliance before it breaks, to have at least one of his sons make something of his life, to own something of value. Willy is overwhelmed by flashbacks and memories that remind him of what could have been, drifting in and out of conversations with his brother Ben (John Glover), an adventurer who struck it rich in Alaska, and with a younger Biff as he prepares for the football game that will likely earn him a college scholarship.

Father and son search for common ground in Miller masterpiece (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Hoffman — who played a theater director staging a unique version of Death of a Salesman in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York — is not made up to look much older than he actually is, yet he embodies the wear and tear that has ravaged Loman’s body, mind, and spirit. At forty-four, Hoffman is not the youngest actor to take on the iconic role; Loman originator Lee J. Cobb was a mere thirty-seven, while Dustin Hoffman was forty-six, George C. Scott forty-seven, Brian Dennehy sixty, and Fredric March fifty-three in the 1951 film. But Hoffman plays old marvelously, his Loman an everyman for whom age is not the central problem. Nichols has brought back Death of a Salesman at a critical juncture in American history, when the separation between the haves and the have-nots keeps widening amid mortgage failures and bank bailouts, ripping an ever-widening hole in the fabric of the nation. But Hoffman’s Loman (low man) is no mere victim seeking sympathy; he has been complicit in his family’s downfall, making bad choices that has thwarted them every step of the way. Filled with complexity, depth, and sparkling dialogue, Miller’s masterpiece feels as fresh and relevant as ever.

MONEYBALL

Oscar nominees Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill take a different approach with the Oakland A’s in MONEYBALL

MONEYBALL (Bennett Miller, 2011)
www.moneyball-movie.com

PRINCE OF THE CITY: REMEMBERING SIDNEY LUMET

BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD concludes weeklong tribute to Sidney Lumet at the Film Society of Lincoln Center

BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD (Sidney Lumet, 2007)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Monday, July 25, 8:30
Series runs July 19-25
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

Sidney Lumet spins an intriguing web of mystery and severe family dysfunction in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Hank (Ethan Hawke) are very different brothers who are both in desperate financial straits. Andy, a real estate exec, has a serious drug problem and a fading marriage to his sexy but bored young wife (Marisa Tomei), while ne’er-do-well Hank can’t afford the monthly child-support payments to his ex-wife (Aleksa Palladino) and daughter (Amy Ryan). Andy convinces Hank to knock off their parents’ (Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris) jewelry store, but when things go horribly wrong, everyone involved is forced to face some very difficult situations, leading to a harrowing climax. Seymour and Hawke are both excellent, the former cool, calm, and collected, the latter scattershot and impulsive. Tomei gives one of her finest performances as the woman sleeping with both brothers. Lumet tells the story through a series of flashbacks from various characters’ point of view, with fascinating overlaps — although a bit overused — that offer different perspectives on critical scenes. Adapted from a script by playwright Kelly Masterson — whom Lumet had never met or even spoken with — Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (the title comes from an Irish toast that begins, “May you be in heaven half and hour…”) is a thrilling modern noir from one of the masters of melodrama.

Sidney Lumet discusses BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD and more at the New York Film Festival in 2007 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is screening July 25 at 8:30 as part of “Prince of the City: Remembering Sidney Lumet,” the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s tribute to one of New York’s greatest directors, who passed away in April at the age of eighty-six. Trained in the Yiddish theater and married to such celebrities as Rita Gam and Gloria Vanderbilt (and Gail Jones, daughter of Lena Horne), Lumet made more than forty films during his fifty-year career, which began in 1957 with the powerful, claustrophobic 12 Angry Men (screening July 19 and 22) and continued with such gritty New York City dramas as The Pawnbroker (July 19 & 22), Serpico (July 20 & 23), and Dog Day Afternoon (July 23 & 25), virtually redefining the world’s view of the Big Apple. He also adapted Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night with Katharine Hepburn and Jason Robards (July 24), Anton Chekhov’s The Sea Gull with James Mason and Simone Signoret (July 23), and, yes, The Wizard of Oz with The Wiz, starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson (July 23). The series, which runs July 19-25, includes Q&As with screenwriter Walter Bernstein following the July 20 screening of 1964’s cold war thriller Fail-Safe and with Luis Guzman, Paul Calderon, and Judge Edwin Torres after the July 24 screening of 1990’s Q&A; Treat Williams will be on hand, along with the man he portrayed, former narcotics detective Robert Leuci, for the July 24 showing of 1981’s Prince of the City. Despite such an impressive track record — the series also includes Network (1976), The Verdict (1982), and Running on Empty (1988), as well as the little-known The Offence, in which Sean Connery plays a British detective on a very sensitive case — Lumet received only one Academy Award, an honorary Oscar in 2005.

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK

Philip Seymour Hoffman has a lot to clean up in SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)
The Philoctetes Center
247 East 82nd St.
Friday, March 25, free (suggested donation $20), 7:00
646-422-0544
www.philoctetes.org
www.sonyclassics.com/synecdocheny

Evoking such films as Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 and City of Women, Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, and Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries as well as the labyrinthine tales of Argentine writers Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar, Synecdoche, New York is the kind of work that is likely to become a cult classic over the years, requiring multiple viewings to help understand it all. The film is screening March 25 at the Philoctetes Center as part of the hundredth anniversary celebration of the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute and will be followed by a discussion with psychoanalyst Arthur Heiserman, Columbia professor Maura Spiegel, and Philoctetes film coordinator Matthew von Unwerth.

REELABILITIES: MARY AND MAX

Max becomes friends with an Australian girl in charming claymation film

MARY AND MAX (Adam Elliot, 2009)
JCC in Manhattan and other venues
334 Amsterdam Ave. at West 76th St.
Tickets: $10 per screening, Festival Pass $40
Special events: free (some require advance reservations)
212-505-5700
www.maryandmax.com
www.reelabilities.org
www.jccmanhattan.org

Having just played the New York Jewish Film Festival at Lincoln Center, Adam Elliot’s stop-motion animated MARY AND MAX is now the opening-night selection at the second annual ReelAbilities: NY Disabilities Film Festival, which runs January 28 through February 2 at the JCC in Manhattan and other venues. Winner of numerous awards all over the world, MARY AND MAX is the touching, unforgettable tale of two loners who become pen pals, sharing the details of their hopes and dreams over decades. Mary (voiced by Bethany Whitmore as a young girl and Toni Collette when she gets older) is an oddball child living in a small town in Australia. Seeking a friend, she sends a letter to a random person she finds in a phone book. Max (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a childlike middle-aged man suffering from Asperger’s Disorder in New York City. Through the years, their long-distance relationship goes through emotional ups and downs, building to a surprising ending that still has us scratching our heads. Elliot, who won an Oscar for his short film HARVIE KRUMPET in 2003, wrote, directed, and designed the sets and characters for MARY AND MAX, inspired by the photography of Diane Arbus. He brings Mary and Max to life in charming ways, adding little details and flourishes that will endear you to them even though they both are very, very strange. The film, wonderfully narrated by Barry “Dame Edna” Humphries, required more than 130,000 individual frames and 212 puppets and took 57 weeks to shoot; the result is simply charming. (MARY AND MAX will be screened January 28 at the JCC in Manhattan, January 30 at the JCC in Staten Island, January 31 at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington and at Abilities! in Albertson, and February 1 at Columbia University.)

BEESWAX looks at the Hatcher twins at Disabilities Film Festival

The festival also features Ziah H. Hamzeh’s HENRY O! documentary about a blind sportscaster; Andrew Bujalski’s widely praised BEESWAX, about the growing problems between twin sisters; Niko von Glasgow’s NOBODY’S PERFECT, in which the director tries to find eleven other people affected by Thalidomide to pose naked with him for a calendar; Dorit Hakim’s WHITE BALANCE, which follows a young boy as he loses his hearing; Gillies MacKinnon’s ZIG ZAG LOVE, a love story between a male cancer patient and woman with cerebral palsy; and Justin Edgar’s HUNGER HOUSE, a short that looks at how the Nazis treated people with disabilities. All screenings will be followed by a discussion with either the filmmakers or experts in the field covered in that work. In addition, the festival will host several special free events, including a panel discussion with a group of sighted, visually impaired, and completely blind photographers; dances from choreographer Heidi Latsky and the Infinity Dance Company; an autism-friendly concert with Jarrod Emick and Andrew Ross and another with the group Flame; a theatrical piece from Creative Alternatives NY and the Adaptations Drama Group; and a Kids Club art exhibit.