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Tom Cruise came to New York this week for a triumphant premiere of “Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation.” He’s on the top of the world. The movie has excellent reviews.
Cruise swung into New York on an international premiere tour, starting in Vienna and then heading to London. From the UK Cruise came to New York for a big splashy premiere at AMC Lincoln Square theater. After that he flew to Toronto. Then we lost track of him.
The movie star saw a lot of people on this whirlwind trip, but the one person he didn’t see was his 9 year old daughter, Suri. Her mother, Katie Holmes, is living in New York with Suri right now. Last week Katie was on a lot of talk shows promoting her run in Showtime’s “Ray Donovan.” Her rep declined comment. But I am told she and Suri were in town this week while Cruise was here. It’s possible Suri saw him on Jimmy Fallon or “Entertainment Tonight.”
By all accounts, Cruise has not visited with Suri for almost two years. Sources say this is because Scientology has required him to “disconnect” from her. Cruise’s official excuse is that he’s been away shooting movies. But for a few minutes earlier this week, he and Suri were in the same city. But the mission to get together proved impossible.
Last week Prince pulled all his music off of Spotify. It was gone within minutes.
Today he released a new single to Spotify called “Stare” with a little riff from his old hit “Kiss.”
“Stare” is his best single in maybe 20 years.
What the heck? All of Prince’s catalogue is off of Spotify.
Meanwhile, Neil Young is finally off of Spotify. It took two weeks after he proclaimed the reason for leaving was the inferior sound, not the payments.
Zayn Malik has a new direction. He’s going solo, signing with RCA and Simon Cowell. He’s going to release a aolo album. Goodbye One Direction and being member of a group. He’s on his own.
In a release from RCA:
Simon Cowell of Syco Music says: “With RCA, Zayn has the perfect label to work with on his solo career. They are excited about working with him and I am sure whatever they release together will be special.”
Comments Peter Edge and Tom Corson of RCA: “Zayn’s a genius songwriter with an incredible voice, and we are proud to have him join our roster of iconic superstars. We are thrilled he has entrusted us to deliver his personal artistic vision to millions of his fans across the globe.”
Was this Zayn’s master plan when he left One Direction? You bet it was. That decision evidently had nothing to do with being tired or depressed or burnt out.
I guess I never explained why I left , it was for this moment to be given the opportunity to show you who i really am! #realmusic#RCA !!
I usually don’t get into the whole Emmy voting fray. But hear me out on one of my all time faves, beloved New York based actress Christine Baranski. She’s nominated for two Emmy Awards this year. two! Emmy voters, I think she deserves at least one, don’t you?
Baranski is nominated for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama for “The Good Wife.” Her character, Diane Lockhart, is the linchpin of this underrated and so well executed popular series. Diane is a sleek and smart panther who prowls around “The Good Wife” ready to pounce, with a big heart when it’s needed. Baranski is simply a pleasure to watch. Her biggest competitors this year are Joanne Froggatt from “Downton Abbey” and Christina Hendricks in “Mad Men.” What a category!
If that weren’t enough, Baranski is also nominated again in comedy, for Best Female Guest Star in “The Big Bang Theory.” She recurs as Dr. Beverly Hofstadter, the uptight shrink mother of Leonard (Johnny Galecki). Her appearances are a treat. Watch this one:
Nominations in drama and comedy– very unusual. But Baranski is that way. I first saw her in Mike Nichols’ original production of “The Real Thing” on Broadway. Her career has covered everything from being Ethel to Cybill Shepherd’s Lucy (and stealing the show) in “Cybill” to knockout performances in movies like “Mamma Mia” and “Into the Woods.”
One of my favorite Baranski moments though is from “Reversal of Fortune,” when she played Klaus von Bulow’s lover Andrea Reynolds. It was unforgettable:
So let’s get with it, Emmy voters. Baranski is an acting treasure. And she’s just hitting her stride!
Janis Ian is the Grammy winning singer songwriter of the classic “At Seventeen” among other hits. Her first hit, “Society’s Child,” came when she was 16. On Wednesday she posted to Facebook her recollection of Bill Cosby trying to get her banned from TV after the two of them appeared on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. This is just insane, but as crazy as the rest of the Cosby stories. Janis responded to New York magazine’s extraordinary cover story this week with photos and stories from three dozen Cosby accusers.
Do I have a stake in this issue? Yes. Of course. Outside of being female, outside of knowing women aren’t “heard” as loudly as men are heard, outside of firmly believing that if women were treated equally around the world, many if not all of the world’s problems would no longer exist – outside of all that… I have a personal stake. No, I was not sexually bothered by Bill Cosby. We met because he was curious about me. My song “Society’s Child” was climbing the charts and creating a great deal of controversy. The Smothers Brothers took a huge gamble and had me on their hit television show. I was just sixteen years old when we taped it. I’d been on the road for months, doing press and one-nighters. My chaperone/tour manager, a family friend six or seven years older than me, was doing everything in her power to make sure I was protected and getting as much rest as possible. Remember. I was sixteen. Still in high school. Fairly naive, including about my own sexuality. For months on the road, my chaperone was the only consistent face I saw. Everyone else was a complete stranger – radio personalities, newspaper reporters, magazine photographers, audiences, promoters, disc jockeys, all strangers. So I clung to my chaperone. We’d never been to a big-time TV taping. We had no idea we’d have to be inside from early early morning until whenever they called for me. There were only a couple of chairs for us on the set – I was pretty low on the totem pole, way lower than Jimmy Durante or Pat Paulsen or Mason Williams (all of whom were wonderful to us). And I was exhausted. I’d been having nightmares for weeks, the result of the controversy surrounding “Society’s Child” and the death threats I was receiving daily. I needed to sleep. So I fell asleep in my chaperone’s lap. She was earth motherly, I was scared. It was good to rest.
We taped the show. I had a ball. (You can see it on Youtube, in fact. That’s me, looking scared, in the green dress. My friend Buffy from East Orange, where I’d started high school, made it for me. I treasured it.) Then we went back to New York, and I went back to school. A while later, my manager called me into her office. “What happened at the Smothers Brothers show?!” I had no idea what she was talking about, and said so. “Well, no one else on TV is willing to have you on. Not out there, anyway.” Why? I wondered. And was told that Cosby, seeing me asleep in the chaperone’s lap, had made it his business to “warn” other shows that I wasn’t “suitable family entertainment”, was probably a lesbian, and shouldn’t be on television. Again, a reminder. I was 16. I’d never slept with a man, I’d never slept with a woman. Hell, I barely been kissed, and that in the middle of the summer camp sports area, next to the ping pong table. Banned from TV. Unbelievable. Bless Johnny Carson and his producer Freddy de Cordova, one of the nicest men I’ve ever worked with, because they didn’t listen. Or maybe they didn’t give a damn. I don’t know. I do know that they broke the barrier Cosby tried to create. There’s a lot to bother a sensible person about this. The years these women were ignored. The years they were derided. That the story finally really “broke” because a male comedian named Hannibal Buress kept bringing it up, kept calling Cosby a “rapist”. Not because woman after woman after woman went to the police, to the press, to anyone who’d listen, with horribly similar stories. Let me be snarky for a moment. Interesting that there are so few women of color in the New York Magazine photo. Interesting that the ones in the photo all appear to be light-skinned. Perhaps darker skinned women have not come forward yet? Perhaps they’re among the other 12 women who’ve accused him but aren’t pictured? Or perhaps not. I have to wonder if this rapist has some issues with his own race. Continuing the snarkiness, I find it horrifying that his wife is still insisting it was all consensual. That she sounds more upset by “the invasion of privacy” than the rapes. People seem to be confused because she continues to stand by him. I have just two words for that – money, honey. According to the press, she’s his manager, and has been for years. And his “business manager”, eg the person who handles the money. So if there were pay-offs, she saw the checks. She is complicit. If it was consensual, why pay anyone to be silent? If it was consensual, why are there so many women who do not want money, who do not need fame, who are by turns ashamed, violated, exposed, vulnerable, and still continue to speak out?
Cosby was right in one thing. I am gay. Or bi, if you prefer, since I dearly loved the two men I lived with over the years. My tilt is toward women, though, and he was right about that. But what an odd thing, that a black man who slept with so very many white women chose to take my possible lesbianism away from our one meeting, rather than the message I tried to get across with “Society’s Child.” How pathetic. How truly, truly pathetic.
Tom Cruise isn’t the only member of his family to be employed thanks to “Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation.” His sister, Cass Mapother Capazorio, is billed in the credits as his paid assistant. Cass’s third husband, Greg Capazorio, runs Scientology’s Criminon– that’s the branch that recruits ex cons into the cult. All of Tom’s sisters, their children, and his mother are embedded in Scientology. It would take the IMF to get them out!
Luckily, Scientology is not expressed on the screen in “Rogue Nation,” an otherwise very fun big studio hit, the kind of summer popcorn movie that recalls the best of the four prior “Mission Impossible” movies and the TV series from the 60s and 70s. (There are many nods to the series this time, which is maybe why “Rogue Nation” works so well.)
“Rogue Nation” is also blessed with a terrific cast in the IMF team– Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, and Ving Rhames, as well as Simon McBurney, Sean Harris and Alec Baldwin. But director Christopher McQuarrie has scored big time with Swedish-British actress Rebecca Ferguson. The take away in “Rogue Nation”– aside from Tom Cruise’s physical fitness and derring -do– is Ferguson’s Lauren Bacall-like presence. Pretty much unknown except for the mini series “The White Queen,” Ferguson is launched here like a rocket. She is sensational.
With his characters fully delineated, and a (thankfully) streamlined plot, McQuarrie can concentrate on more important things: the look and sound of the film. Robert Elswit, repeating from MI4: Ghost Protocol, gives Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and co. dreamy visuals and rich panoramics. And as usual, the music is integral to “Mission Impossible.” Lalo Schifrin’s original theme is like a character unto itself at this point. Plus, Puccini’s “Nessum Dorma” from “Turandot”– ubiquitous at this point– still works like a charm to underscore a lot of the action. I like that McQuarrie makes the audience listen to a good deal of opera.
But it’s the set pieces that will bring people in. Some have little dialogue. But watching Cruise hanging from an airplane, or holding his breath for six minutes under water, etcetera– these are are the showpieces. You won’t want to miss them. Cruise throws himself into these things with abandon, and he looks great doing them.
Will all his outside craziness matter? In the end, no. It’s different for journalists. I’ve been blocked from Cruise’s Twitter page, and I wasn’t allowed into the early screening or premiere of the film because of my writing about Scientology. I can take it, and it doesn’t matter to filmgoers. “Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation” is a movie’s movie. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
The sleeper hit of the summer could very well be “The End Of The Tour,” which tells the story of the five day interview between Rolling Stone reporter and novelist David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) and acclaimed novelist David Foster Wallace, (Jason Segel.) The interview took place right after the 1996 publication of Wallace’s groundbreaking epic novel, “Infinite Jest.”
Segel is a revelation; you’ve never him in this kind of layered, intense role. Eisenberg, always good, plays his conflicted role with his usual laser focus intensity.
Jason Segel told me his thoughts, “It’s about the terrifying moment when everything goes as well as it possibly can and you still feel pain. Here’s a man who had a vocabulary to express things that we didn’t even know that we felt. “
I spoke with the director, Sundance vet James Ponsoldt at the recent LA premiere. I asked him what he thought of the state of journalism today. “When I was a teenager I wrote for a weekly in Georgia where I grew up, I interviewed bands and concerts. Then I interned for Rolling Stone actually. I respect great journalists and I rely on them to give articulation to the issues of the day. In this case I was a huge David Foster Wallace fan. I even had his works read at my wedding. Donald Margulies, who adapted David Lipsky’s book, was my play writing professor in college. So it was born out of my love of these writers. Really though, at any given time people are not satisfied with the state of fiction, music, journalism, politics. There are inspiring lights out there. People reading and writing intelligently and finding an audience is always inspiring to me.”
What’s next for him? “I adapted a book called The Circle by Dave Eggers that I’m going to be directing. What can I say? I get inspired by great writers.”
Two other standouts are second generation young actresses. Mickey Sumner, who is Sting and Trudie Styler’s daughter, plays Wallace’s ex girlfriend, and Mamie Gummer, Meryl Streep and Don Gummer’s daughter, who plays a devoted fan turned friend. Mickey is already well known for her outstanding work in “Frances Ha.” Mamie, with dozens of credits, goes from “The Good Wife” to “Ricki and the Flash” this month.
I asked Mickey Sumner why she was drawn to the film. She said, “It was a movie about David Foster Wallace whom I adored and loved. I couldn’t believe I was asked to be involved. I know that I’m not like everyone, I’m grateful for my uniqueness and quirkiness. I just hope to keep finding those roles that I can bring what I am to them. American, English, Australian, I’ll do anything.”
“The End Of The Tour” will be released on July 31st.
The cast of Broadway’s Tony winning “Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” is leaving on September 13th. They’re all going including Alex Sharp, who won the Tony for Best Actor in a Drama. It was his first ever Broadway show, cast right out of acting school.
I told you months ago that a casting notice had gone out for replacements. When I asked Sharp, he pretended to know nothing about it. You see, that’s why he won Best Actor. I believed him.
“Curious Incident” started previews on September 10, 2014. So that’s a year. Broadway is no longer a place where anyone sticks around much longer.
The new cast features first timer Tyler Lea as Christopher. Lea is a a graduate from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.
Well, listen, we didn’t know any of the original cast when they arrived. This group will be just as good, if not better. And the amazing set remains the same.
In the pack of titles announced today for the Toronto Film Festival: a “stealth” film by Michael Moore called “Where to Invade Next.” So far there is no distributor. The whole thing is being handled by WME and Ari Emanuel, the “real” Ari from “Entourage (if you didn’t know) whose brother is the mayor of Chicago.
Moore’s been shooting on the sly– (I wondered why he’d been so quiet lately.) Moore’s film is definitely timed to current events, although I think his work is getting more anecdotally interesting than headline making. But we’ll see come September. This is going to be the hottest ticket in Toronto, by far.
The doc will explore the military industrial complex, a subject no one can be tired of and is always eye opening no matter what your political affiliation.
Moore is the winner of the 2003 Best Documentary Oscar for “Bowling for Columbine,” a movie that reverberates now as every week we hear about another mass shooting somewhere. His other hit documentaries with lasting impact include “Fahrenheit 911,” “Sicko” and “Roger and Me.”
Ellie Goulding is trending everywhere. Our story is getting rehashed everywhere– often without credit. But “Spy” in Ellie’s song registry is likely a placeholder title for “Spectre.” Read it here first.
EXCLUSIVE JULY 28TH
I can tell you exclusively that British pop star Ellie Goulding has a song registered with BMI Music called “Spy.” Is it the theme from “Spectre,” the new James Bond movie? All signs indicate yes.
Goulding posted a picture to Instagram yesterday showing her leaving Abbey Road studios, with the message “That’s a wrap.”
Only July 9th she Tweeted, “Live and let die.”
British tabloids have gone crazy wondering if she’s the one to join Shirley Bassey, Adele, Carly Simon, Nancy Sinatra, Paul McCartney and of course John Barry in supplying music for James Bond.
Recently singer Sam Smith took himself out of the running. Adele is who knows where at this point. My source on this said recently, “The choice is so random and out of left field, you wouldn’t believe it.”
If Goulding is the choice, it will break her out big time. She only has two albums, and the last was released in 2012. She has a hit single out right now. But more importantly, she has a bunch of unreleased songs on BMI besides “Spy.” The betting is she will release a third album with the “Spy” single simultaneously. And we’ll have a big pop story to write about for the end of the year.
