Downton Abbey

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What Other Actors Should Join Shirley MacLaine in Next Season’s Downton Abbey Stunt Casting?

Z’oh my heavens, Mr. Crawley! Terms of Endearment star Shirley MacLaine will be joining the cast of Downton Abbey, which has replaced This Old House and Ken Burns documentaries as PBS’ must-see TV.

Ms. Maclaine will be playing the proud American mom to ex-pat Lady Cora (Elizabeth McGovern) on season 3. (This visit will not go over well with Dame Maggie Smith’s Lady Grantham, we’re sure.)
This news was accompanied by rumors that other stateside cameos might be in the works, so we made several educated guesses as to which American actors could hold their own against the upstairs/downstairs scheming of the McGovern household. Read More

theater

Osnes and Jordan.

Bonnie and Clyde Isn’t Theatergoers’ Big Payday, but It’s Definitely a Steal No Less

Hang on to your lids, kids. I actually liked the new Broadway musical version of Bonnie and Clyde. Didn’t love it, mind you. But the show, at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, is polished, touching and tuneful, a worthy showcase for a few professional performers in leading roles who are vastly entertaining and amount to nothing short of major discoveries. In a dreary Broadway season of nothing but deadly letdowns, including an unspeakable sonic blast from the pitch-impaired and tonally challenged Patti Lupone and Mandy Patinkin as well as the dreariest second-rate production of Follies in 40 years, at least there’s something to enjoy in addition to Hugh Jackman. Read More

The Geezer Roués

Bad news, ladies: the Geezer Roué—the dashing older (and much older) playboy who saw New York as the verdant playing field of seduction; that dignified and slightly sleazy social genus (and genius) who bloomed in New York City like some rank but irresistible flower, spreading sulfurous spores through the open windows of young women’s studio Read More

Revolutionary Romance: Lefties Look for Love

The poster for Reds, Warren Beatty’s 1981 epic about American radicals in the early 20th century, has a single, striking image: a couple embracing at a train station. It’s not the summation one would expect of a 194-minute film that spans half a decade, globe-trots through more than a dozen countries, and wrangles an ensemble Read More

Revolutionary Romance: Lefties Look for Love

The poster for Reds, Warren Beatty’s 1981 epic about American radicals in the early 20th century, has a single, striking image: a couple embracing at a train station. It’s not the summation one would expect of a 194-minute film that spans half a decade, globe-trots through more than a dozen countries, and wrangles an ensemble Read More

Wonderful Towne! Lever House Hosts Homage to Screenwriter

Hollywood is all over Lever House! On Sept. 12, artist Sarah Morris’ Robert Towne installation, inspired by the famous screenwriter of mysterious, shadowy Chinatown and the dank, sequiny Shampoo, opened at the glassy modernist skyscraper on 53rd and Park. No one expected it to be a W.P.A. mural of Faye Dunaway screaming, “My sister! (slap) Read More

Bloggorhea

** Exclusive! **

SOURCES: WARREN BEATTY TO BLOG!

The Observer has learned that Warren Beatty, the 68-year-old actor and director, will likely join a lineup of liberal all-stars who will “group blog” on a Web site to be launched next month by columnist Arianna Huffington.

“I probably will,” Mr. Beatty said, on the phone Read More

Citizen Insane

“We are in a street fight,” seethes Leonardo DiCaprio, as Howard Hughes in The Aviator, speaking about his nemesis, Pan Am owner Juan Trippe. “And I’m not going to lose.”

When last we met on the Harvey Weinstein–Martin Scorsese field of battle, it was about two years ago; the producer and the director were in Read More

Warren Beatty’s Late-Life Crisis … More Suffering From Dogma 95

Warren Beatty’s

Late-Life Crisis

Rotten movies directed by music-video hacks I’ve never heard

of starring people I never want to see again are such a daily ritual in this

business that I rarely expect anything better. But when mature stars I admire

and rely on for sanity, symmetry and vision turn out incomprehensible gibberish Read More

Ruling Class Rebels Get Their Boswell

It looks as if we shall have to speak of a Weekly Standard school of sociology. First came How We Got Here , by Standard contributing editor David Frum, a supple look at the 70′s and its effect on everything. Now his colleague David Brooks gives us Bobos in Paradise -a portrait not, as you Read More