This year’s smash winner at Sundance, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, a modern-day fairy tale about an African-American girl bursting with hope, pain, and exhilaration, is destined to be one of the fall’s biggest movies—as well as a serious player during awards season. Newcomer Gabourey Sidibe stars as Claireece “Precious” Jones, a pregnant, illiterate, overweight teenager living with her mother, Mary (Mo’Nique), who treats her like a slave. Trained in self-hatred—she fantasizes about being white and blonde—this inner-city Cinderella appears doomed. Then she begins meeting decent people who want to save her; in particular, her teacher, Ms. Rain (Paula Patton), who glimpses Precious’s true beauty, and the sturdy social worker, Mrs. Weiss, played so convincingly that you may not realize that the actress is Mariah Carey. For the first time, Precious starts fighting to make a decent life for herself.

The film was directed by Lee Daniels (the producer of Monster’s Ball), who never saw an emotional button he couldn’t push. Here he serves up a delirious cocktail of gritty realism, Dickensian melodrama, horror-flick chills, and crazy dream sequences in which Precious sees herself as a pop star or supermodel. Amazingly, Daniels’s pulpy approach proves enormously effective, capturing Precious’s struggle more powerfully than would more controlled filmmaking. Of course, it helps that the film is anchored by superb performances. While Sidibe is an eloquent presence as Precious—her face, once seen, is never forgotten—the film’s revelation is the comedienne Mo’Nique, who (trust me) is going to win an Oscar for her portrait of the lazy, abusive, hard-smoking Mary, a woman no less monstrous for being all too human. There hasn’t been a witch this scary since The Wizard of Oz.

—John Powers

For more movie coverage, read Absolute Powers on Vogue.com.

To say that Alice Guy Blaché (1873-1968) was the first woman director in film history is absolutely true, yet it also diminishes her.  Even if not “the first genius of the cinema,” as a critic recently called her, she was, in fact, one of the small handful of visionaries who invented the movies.  Her amazing career is finally getting its due in “Alice Guy Blaché: Cinema Pioneer,” a groundbreaking retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art opening November 6 and running until January 24. Superbly curated by Joan Simon, this selection of more than 80 rare films offers the most complete look to date at a woman who once described the cinema as her “Prince Charming.”

Alice Guy was 21 when, in 1894, she was hired as secretary to Léon Gaumont whose company made cameras and photographic equipment.  Within two years, her boss had created what is now the oldest film company in continous operation, L. Gaumont & Cie, and named her its head of production.  Exploding with ideas, the 23-year-old Guy quickly established herself as one of the new medium’s most fertile talents—she wrote, produced, and directed.  Between 1896 and 1907, she was involved in hundreds of movies, from sensuous one-minute records of folks capering in a stream to her magnum opus for Gaumont, The Life of Christ, a biblical epic with lavish production design and hundreds of extras.  (You can watch more than 60 of these films on DVD in Kino’s terrific boxed set, Gaumont Treasures: 1897-1913.)  In 1907, she married Herbert Blaché and moved to America where in 1910, still bursting with invention, she established Solax the first-ever film studio founded and run by a woman. Continue reading ›

In a career that has spanned more than forty years, documentarian Frederick Wiseman has long been preoccupied with ways in which public institutions affect the individuals involved with them; his other subjects have included a state prison, a high school, a police department, a juvenile court, a modeling agency and a welfare center, to mention but a few.

He now turns his omniscient lens to the Paris Opera Ballet. In his film, Le Danse, showing at New York’s Film Forum through November 17th, Wiseman and his longtime collaborator, cinematographer John Davey takes us on a unadulterated tour of the Le Palais Garnier and behind the scenes of the rehearsals and performances of seven ballets, among them Genus by Wayne McGregor, Le Songe de Medée by Angelin Preljocaj, and Paquita by Pierre Lacotte.  We get an intimate backstage look at the intricacies involved in administering the ballet company and the graceful coordination of choreographers, costume designers and dancers at each of its rarified echelons—from quadrilles to etoiles like Marie-Agnes Gillot, Nicolas Le Riche, and Agnes Letestu. “Admiration for the dancers and choreographers and respect for all the hard work that many so people contribute to the creation and performance of a ballet” was the most compelling thing Wiseman took away from his twelve-week immersion in the company.

Be prepared to become utterly entranced by two hours of expertly calibrated pirouettes, plies and arabesques that will make you decide to either move to Paris immediately and take up ballet or, at the very least, stop by Repetto for a new pair of ballet flats. “I hope that people will appreciate the discipline and dedication of the dancers, and the diversity of the repertoire,” says Wiseman who turns eighty this January. The filmmaker is already focusing on finishing up work on his most recent movement-centric subject: a boxing gym in Austin, Texas. Talk about a one-two punch.

—Genevieve Bahrenburg

“A woman, especially if she has the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well she can,” wrote Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. Fortunately for the English language, Austen had a tough time taking her own advice. Her immense talent spilled over into six of the best-loved novels in literature. Starting this month, the Morgan brings us “A Woman’s Wit: Jane Austen’s Life and Legacy,” a thrillingly comprehensive look at Austen and her oeuvre nearly 200 years after her death. Through rarely seen manuscripts and a never-before-seen film by Italian director Francesco Carrozzini, in which modern Austen afficiandos like Siri Hustvedt, Fran Lebowitz, and Cornel West weigh in on her work themorgan.org/video/austen.asp, a portrait emerges of a passionate novelist with a brilliant talent for social commentary who was very much ahead of her time.

“We wanted to dispel this notion of dear old Aunt Jane,” a fabricated persona her family tried to perpetuate after her death, says Co-Curator Declan Kiely. “We now understand, to the contrary, that Austen was extremely ambitious, incredibly perceptive, and wickedly funny—even scathingly so.” Continue reading ›

As Blanche DuBois in the Sydney Theatre Company’s blazing revival of Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire, which opened on Saturday night at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Cate Blanchett gives a performance as heartbreaking to endure as it is magnificent to behold. Many of us are too young to have seen Jessica Tandy’s Blanche in the original 1947 Broadway Streetcar, so our touchstone for the flighty, doomed Southern belle is Vivien Leigh, the star of Elia Kazan’s 1951 screen adaptation, whose real-life self-destruction wound its way into her portrayal to harrowing effect. I have seen several fine stage actresses try, and fail, to pin down this maddeningly elusive, mothlike creature, among them Blythe Danner, Jessica Lange, and the late Natasha Richardson. As it turns out, it took an Aussie to recapture the mercurial essence of a great American character.
 
The play opens with Blanche’s arrival from Laurel, Mississippi, on the doorstep of her sister Stella’s squalid French Quarter New Orleans tenement, having lost their ancestral plantation Belle Reve. From the moment that she appears sitting on a trunk, touchingly lovely in her makeup and travel finery, Blanchett wears the haunted look of a woman who knows that she has reached the end of the line. Trembling as she powders her nose, jumping at every noise, she captures Blanche’s trademark fragility. Delicately pouring herself a glass of whiskey while claiming, “I never take more than one,” she shows us her affected gentility and the desperation beneath it. But this Blanche is also a survivor—or, at least, she has been till now—doing whatever it takes to get by, running from an ever-mounting psychic bill that has finally come due. When she first lays eyes on her sister’s brutish hunk of a husband, Stanley, played here by the excellent Australian actor Joel Edgerton, she inhales sharply, almost flinching, then quickly recovers the flirtatious charm that she wears like armor. But she can’t entirely brush aside the terrible shock of recognition: this man will either be her victim or her executioner. Continue reading ›

I woke up at three o’clock this morning too excited to sleep and promptly received an E-mail from Roselee [Goldberg, director of Performa], too excited to sleep.

This morning we put wet towels on the base of the trees in order to keep them somewhat sprightly. I’m taking the apples that fell off in the trucks on the way here and placing them in more or less the position they would have fallen.

Jacques came and installed all the bunnies on the pedestals. They look amazing.

Right now there are six people who have been laying out the 3,600 glasses for the last three hours, and they’re about two thirds done. There’s a team piling up the ton of peanuts. They’re using the burlap stacks they came in to hold back the tide. We’re setting up the area to wash the apples, and I’m deciding where to put the giant four-feet cubes of powdered sugar so they don’t interrupt the sightlines of the bunnies.

The artists’ canvas is rolled out on the tables, and they are placing 310 pots on them. The first batch of ribs has arrived; the next batch is arriving shortly.

The phones at Performa have been ringing off the hook all day with people wanting tickets. It’s insane.

Everything is on schedule. The next hurdle is going to be setting up the ribs under the honey trap—and getting dressed. That’s the hard part. Everything else is easy.

— Jennifer Rubell

Early in This Is It, a messy but surprisingly un-terrible record of the rehearsals for Michael Jackson’s doomed final tour, the movie announces that it’s “for the fans.” While such words would bring out the cynic in Pollyanna—“for the money” is more like it—the fans I saw it with applauded when it ended. This Is It gives us only fleeting glimpses of the “real” King of Pop—a smidgen of bossy perfectionism, a few smiles filled with eerie sweetness—but the musical numbers keep reminding us that Jackson was invariably the most talented guy in the room.

I always preferred Jackson in Fred Astaire mode—you know, with just a song, an empty stage, and maybe a partner. But his own imagination ran to elaborate hokum. Where earlier icons made their personal excesses part of their performance—audiences wept for troubled Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow,” cheered the implacable Frank Sinatra belting “My Way”—Jackson reveals his personality only in his show’s impersonal excesses. This Is It is overstuffed with CGI projections and mechanical black widow spiders the size of SUVs, kitschy environmental preaching and big-carbon-footprint pyrotechnics. Now some of this is just generational pop taste—Madonna was hooked on spectacle, too—but it’s hard not to think that such fanciful teenage bombast is an almost perfect expression of the escapist impulses that defined (and confined) the Gloved One.

This Is It opens with a crawl informing us that the footage we’re about to see was shot for Jackson’s personal use. What use was that, I wonder? It haunts me to think that this poor, lost soul might have wanted a record of these rehearsals just to remind himself who, at his best, he could be.

—John Powers

The elevator is fixed—it’s so exciting!

The trees arrived this afternoon. Mr. Wickham gave me a half-hour warning from 52nd Street and Broadway—he picked a route that took him right through the heart of the city. He brought his chainsaw and stood on his flatbed truck on the middle of Twenty-second Street cutting the roots off the trunks of all three trees. He came with his friend Ed, a landscaper.

We recruited some guys to get them into the elevator, and the three trees are now lying in state on the third floor. They’re unbelievable. I started crying when I saw them.

The peanuts arrived from Bazzini in these amazing burlap sacks.

It felt like the primitive world arriving in the developed world.

—Jennifer Rubell

The xx’s self-titled album, newly released to widespread critical fervor on the aptly named Young Turks label, has an unhurried, minimally propulsive sound that concedes a steady-handedness—and a set of precociously lovelorn lyrics—befitting a much more seasoned act. The band’s four members are, in fact, 20 years old—as slyly hinted at in the group’s name—but they’re not out to impress with tightly manufactured hooks and fussy sleights of production. Even their track names—“Islands,” “Fantasy”—are refreshingly straightforward.
 
 “The earlier songs are more simple because we couldn’t really play at the time,” explains guitarist Romy Madley Croft. “ ‘VCR’ we wrote when we were sixteen.” Croft first met bassist Oliver Sims, with whom she shares vocal duties and a lifelong friendship, at nursery school in London (“It must’ve been a case of our parents’ meeting and telling us to hang out. Maybe we were just playing in a sandpit together or something,” says Croft). When it came down to making music in their teens, being old chums had the opposite effect you might expect: Croft and Sims both had designs on singing, but neither wanted to be the first to hit a note. So they started singing at the same time. “It’s a coincidence,” says Croft. “We never really tried consciously to harmonize our voices. It could’ve sounded so bad, singing with your best friend.” Continue reading ›

What a drama! The elevators that had all the materials to build the pedestals — for the glasses, the bottles, the ice  — just got stuck.  They’re being built out of drywall because they are so huge and we have team of drywall people who are going to start working tonight through the night until the pedestals are done. 

Just yesterday I discovered an Amish farmer in Pennsylvania who makes ice scoop holders. He FedExed me some and I’m going to mount them on the wall like a Donald Judd near the ice on the fourth floor.

Mr. Wickham has cut down the apple trees. He called me and tried to convince me to serve a different kind of apple than the one on the trees,  because he’s so biased against the red delicious apple — but I insisted we stick to the plan.

I visited Jacques last night. He said, Jennifer, just do me one favor: Never come back to me again and ask me to do anything! But what’s great is he’s completely excited about it, you can tell. 

We made a plan that Friday morning at 8 a.m. I’ll go over there and he and I are going to lie the bunnies in the back of his minivan and put a duvet on top of them and bring them over to the X Initiative space. We’re going to stand them up, surround them with newspaper and then Jacques is going to spray a final coat of chocolate directly on to them.

Party rental is delivering 3,600 glasses right this moment. It’s all starting to happen….

—Jennifer Rubell