Greta Gerwig

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – Greta Gerwig has been characterized as “the Meryl Streep of mumblecore.”

Thus far, the tall, blond 26-year-old Gerwig has exercised her considerable talents as an actress – as well as a writer and director – on the far fringes of movie fame, in the obscure realm of ultra-low-budget indie films known as mumblecore. Hardly a stage that puts her on par with the estimable Hollywood acting dynamo Streep.

But judging from her performance in Noah Baumbach’s astringent new comedy-drama “Greenberg,” in which the lithe actress glammed down and pudged up to play Florence Marr, an aimless 20-something groping hopefully toward an uncertain future, Gerwig is on her way to big things on the big screen.

Having cut her moviemaking teeth on barebones indie films (her first film, made while she was a senior at Barnard College, had a total budget of $3,000), Gerwig marvels at the luxury of working on a Hollywood movie set.

“I actually had my own trailer, and there was a craft services table with real food, not just packaged snacks,” Gerwig said with guileless awe during press interviews hosted by Focus Features.

In early films, such as “Hannah Takes the Stairs,” “LOL” and “Nights and Weekends,” Gerwig and fellow actors relied heavily on improvised dialogue to create a sense of realism in their austere, slices of life. In other words, they often made it up as they went.

But the highly literate Baumbach (“The Squid and the Whale”) is known to be a stickler for precise dialogue that follows his scripts word for word.

“This was completely scripted,” Gerwig said. “There’s not a word in the film that’s improvised.”

And for her, that was a great relief.

“It was actually a great gift, and something that I’d been looking for as an actress,” she said. “When I’d been in plays in high school and college, I always had a strong sense that well-written plays are very rhythmic. So if you miss even a single word it would sound strange. So when I started working on this script, it was so nice to tap into that.

“The scenes are quite long and the (director of photography) would set up cameras so that we might do six or seven pages of dialogue in a row,” she said. “It felt like little vignettes, and you always knew the dialogue was there to save you. It was like tapping into a frequency and everyone was on it.”

Gerwig’s slightly dumpy Florence is a lost soul who vaguely aspires to a singing career while biding her time as a personal assistant to an affluent Hollywood Hills family. It’s there that she strikes up an offbeat relationship with Ben Stiller’s aimless, 40-something Roger Greenberg.

In auditioning for the role, Gerwig said she was something of a hopeful novice tentatively venturing into a grown-up world from the safe confines of mumblecore.

Of her first interview with Baumbach and co-producer Jennifer Jason Leigh, she said, “I thought it had gone well, but I didn’t really believe I would get it. I hoped that maybe I could be friends with them. I wasn’t thinking all that clearly. And then my agent started calling me and telling me all the movie star girls who wanted the role.”

Gerwig said she believes she got the part because she identifies so strongly with Florence and her feeling of being caught in limbo between college life and real life.

“I thought, I know this girl,” she said. “I felt my heart go out of my chest and into her. I think there is some Florence in me but as a person I’ve built up more defenses, so that a big part of my work in being Florence was not a building up, but a breaking down.”

With the release of “Greenberg,” Gerwig senses that she’s moving up to a higher level of moviemaking.

“The next thing I do will not be tiny,” she said. “It’s been a really strange experience because for the first time in my life, because this film is getting some momentum, I’m being offered work that I’m turning down, which I’ve never done before.

“I don’t want to stop making tiny films, and I really don’t intend to,” Gerwig said. “Someone like Chloe Sevigny keeps making films because she believes in them. I don’t think I’m leaving behind something as much as trying to straddle two worlds.”

Stripped-down, rebellious movements by groups of young, avant-garde artists are nothing new in film history. From Italian Neo-realism to the French New Wave to the New German Cinema, youthful filmmakers have been forever trying to distance themselves from the groaning, big-budget studio apparatus of Hollywood-style movie making and to forge some brave new direction in cinema.

It’s the same sort of rock ’n’ roll impulse that has propelled youth culture through the ages – reject your parents’ art, invent your own (the more shocking and anti-establishment the better).

In recent years, we’ve seen the Danish-led Dogma ’95 movement wax and wane. And now apparently taking its place on the austere culturescape of micro-budget, guerrilla filmmaking is “mumblecore.”

Typically focusing on restless, white, post-college 20-somethings searching for love and a meaningful place in the world, mumblecore films are marked by loosely improvised performances, no-tech production values and talky, low-volume examinations of life, love, sexuality and pop culture.

The movement reportedly derives its name from an offhand statement about poor sound quality from a sound mixer at the 2005 South By Southwest Film Festival in Austin. But general consensus is that as a coherent aesthetic mumblecore had its genesis with Andrew Bujalski’s 2002 movie, “Funny Ha Ha,” a mellow-sweet tale about a young woman’s post-college funk.

Among stalwart innovators of the movement are Joe Swanberg, a young actor-writer-director-producer-cinematographer-editor who got his start with 2005’s “Kissing on the Mouth,” and actor-writer-director Greta Gerwig, who has teamed with Swanberg on such models of the movement as “Hannah Takes the Stairs,” “LOL” and “Nights and Weekends.”

Gerwig, in fact, seems aligned to become mumblecore’s first break-out personality, delivering a star-making performance as a typical 20-something mumblecordian opposite Ben Stiller’s 40-something, Seinfeldian grump in writer-director Noah Baumbach’s “Greenberg,” a substantially budgeted, studio-backed production.

And, as with most fringe movements, features of mumblecore are fast being co-opted by “the establishment.” In addition to Baumbach, heavy-hitters such as Gus Van Sant – who cast his recent skateboarder mystery, “Paranoid Park,” through MySpace – have adopted certain principles of the movement for mainstream pictures.

Apparently, mumblecore, with its awkward, halting embrace of youthful inarticulateness and its genteel air of hipster limbo, plugs into something both current and timeless in the state of American youth. Mumble on!

- Dennis King

This week, the most offbeat DVD to appear on release lists is:

“The Abbott & Costello Show: The Complete Series”

When they weren’t arguing over “Who’s on First?” or meeting Frankenstein, the Invisible Man or other monsters of the movies, the comedy team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello starred in a half-hour TV series starting in 1952 that incorporated many of their classic routines.

On Tuesday, a special collector’s set of all 52 series episodes, digitally restored and re-mastered, will be released in a nine-disk DVD package.

“The Abbott and Costello Show” aired in syndication on local stations around the country and drew heavily from the duo’s earlier radio series. It featured the pair as unemployed slackers who were forever scheming to find ways to pay their rent. The cast included Sidney Fields as their nagging landlord and Hillary Brooke as a friendly neighbor who often got looped into Bud and Lou’s wacky schemes.

Occasional guests included Joe Besser (one-time third Stooge) as Stinky, a man-child decked out in a Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit, and Gordon Jones as Mike the cop, who was forever busting Lou’s chops.

Most episodes featured simple plots that drew heavily from Abbott and Costello’s old vaudeville skits (including “Who’s on First?”) and from their many films. The show ran for two seasons but has enjoyed a long afterlife in TV syndication and various video and DVD incarnations.

“The Abbot & Costello Show: The Complete Series” is being released by E1 Entertainment at a suggested retail price of $59.98.

- Dennis King

“Nurse Jackie” Season One

Life’s worries and troubles got you down? Take 30 minutes of “Nurse Jackie” every Monday night at 9, and see if you don’t feel better fast. Better yet, take all 12 episodes of season one at once if you’ve got six hours to kill and you’re not afraid of overdosing on one of the smartest, wickedest comedy-dramas ever offered over the premium cable counter.

Three-time Emmy winner Edie Falco stars in the title role of this Showtime series about Jackie Peyton, a tough-minded, big-hearted, deeply flawed emergency room nurse struggling to maintain a delicate balance between the demands of her frenetic job and a fragile home life. At work she’s sharp-tongued, quick-witted, competent, dedicated and a pillar of strength to lean on for everyone from the most seasoned doctor to the lowliest orderly. At home she’s a loving wife to her younger husband (Dominic Fumusa) and adores their two little girls, constantly worrying over her oldest child, Grace, who has generalized anxiety disorder.

What hubby doesn’t know is that Jackie is having a blazing affair with hospital pharmacist Eddie (Paul Schulze), who keeps her supplied with painkillers for her bad back. Conversely, Eddie doesn’t know Jackie’s married with children, nor does anyone else at work, except for her one confidant, the cool, classy, unflappable Dr. Eleanor O’Hara (scene stealer Eve Best).

 You think you’ve got troubles?

 Rich characters and performances abound, particularly those of Anna Deavere Smith as the uptight unit supervisor, Merritt Weaver as an eager-to-please student nurse in over her head and of course Falco, as brilliant as she was in “The Sopranos” as the soiled saint. This stuff is addictive.

— Gene Triplett

James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – James Murphy knows what it’s like being a struggling musician finally breaking out of underground obscurity to find mainstream success.

Long a fixture on the downtown Manhattan music scene, Murphy and his band, LCD Soundsystem, have grown to international acclaim and Grammy recognition with such underground hits as “Losing My Edge” and “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House” from their 2005 debut album.

These days, Murphy finds himself breaking into a new musical fraternity – an elite one that’s welcomed other pop music stars such as Elton John, Phil Collins, Danny Elfman, Randy Newman and Mark Knopfler. Murphy’s first foray into film scoring is now on display in “Greenberg,” a new comedy-drama from filmmaker Noah Baumbach.

Murphy, an unassuming guy with a blue-collar attitude, said during a recent round of press interviews for the film that he knew nothing about movie scoring when he and Baumbach first met.

“I had no preconceptions,” he said. “But early on Noah asked, ‘do you know anything about scoring,’ and I said, ‘no.’ And he said, ‘great.’ And as it turned out, the way we did it was the only way I think I could have done it”.

And the way they did it was decidedly unconventional.

“Noah and I talked and he said was interested in not making a score but in just having me write songs,” Murphy said. “I tend not to like scores. I do like old scores that are very specific, but usually contemporary scores drive me crazy. They tend to be like the musical equivalent of a poetry slam, just mood tones and spacey surround-sound stuff.

“So I wrote a bunch of songs that are not directly about the movie but are like songs that we would pick out of our record collections to illustrate the movie,” he said. “We would just go back and forth and I would get scenes that Noah needed cues for – these are new words I’ve learned, ‘cues’ – and what I started doing was quickly making things that felt, like, not for scenes. I would just start making stuff and bringing it over. And he was incredibly gracious and would go, ‘oh, we’ll just try that there. Oh, I like that.’ Only a few songs were written specifically for scenes. Almost everything else was made as, like, a song. Like I would write a song. I would write it very roughly and bring it over, and then those roughs became what we became attached to.

“That became a habit of working,” Murphy explained. “Like I would make a song and then we would break it into score. So, like here’s the song, I would play it on piano and sing it. Then we’d do an acoustic guitar version. Somehow it worked, and that’s the only way I think I could have done it.”

“Greenberg” features seven new James Murphy songs, with vocals – many of which range far afield from the sound familiar to fans of LCD Soundsystem. The film’s soundtrack is due for release on Tuesday.

Murphy’s unconventional approach to film scoring earned a nod of approval from one particular cast member who knows a thing or two about movies and music. Actor Rhys Ifans, who appears in the film as a former rock guitarist, is in his offscreen time a working musician, once with the Super Furry Animals and now with a Welsh band called The Peth.

“I think James’ work here is fantastic,” Ifans said. “I don’t really like soundtrack movies. It really depresses me when a film company will just hook up with a record company and say, ‘hey, what’s new. Let’s throw it in, and let’s make some money on the CD sales.’ I think (the ‘Greenberg’ score) is very sensitively done. What it does is supply a heartbeat which is at once Greenberg’s but is also Los Angeles. There’s a hum that seems to go through the film via the music that becomes mantric almost.”

Most movie fans don’t know the name Martha Crawford Cantarini, although they’ve most likely seen her astride a horse performing some daring, breakneck stunt in some Hollywood action scene from the 1940s and ’50s.

During her stint as regular stunt double at MGM, Cantarini stood in for such well-known actors as Eleanor Parker, Ann Baxter, Claudette Colbert, Lana Turner, Debra Padget, Carol Baker and Shirley MacLaine. And in a pinch, she even passed on screen in long stunt shots for such macho men as Charlton Heston, Ronald Reagan and Clark Gable.

Cantarini’s colorful career – one that earned her entry into the Stuntmen’s Hall of Fame – is detailed in a new autobiography titled “Fall Girl: My Life as a Western Stunt Double” (McFarland, $35), co-written with Chrystopher J. Spicer and due out in April.

Cantarini, who performed under the name Martha Crawford, was only the third woman to be honored with the Golden Boot Award, known in the trade as the “Western Oscar.” Her resume includes appearances in films ranging from Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender” to the epic Western “The Big Country” to the family favorite “My Friend Flicka.”

The book, filled with photographs and Cantarini’s memories of growing up in a family of horse lovers, features insider anecdotes of the author’s association with Gable, Reagan, Jean Simmons and many other Hollywood luminaries.

Since retiring from stunt performing, Cantarini has continued to train show horses and to serve as a consultant to other writers and Western movie history buffs.

-Dennis King

This week, the oddest DVD to appear on release lists is:

“Zombies of Mass Destruction”

The latest entry in the After Dark Horrorfest DVD series comes out Tuesday and follows in the bloody footprints of such big-screen zombie comedies as “Shaun of the Dead” and “Zombieland.” “Zombies of Mass Destruction” seems to go for macabre laughs with a little political correctness thrown in for good measure.

It’s set in the conservative coastal town of Port Gamble, Wash., which is under attack from run-amok braineaters. The little town’s only hope of salvation comes from a ragtag band of humans led by an Iranian college student (Janette Armand) suspected of being a terrorist and a gay businessman (Doug Fahl) just returned to town to come out of the closet to his mother. Viscera-dripping gore and queasy hilarity ensue.

“Zombies of Mass Destruction” is rated R and runs 89 minutes. It’s being released by Lionsgate and retails for a suggested price of $19.98.

- Dennis King

“The T.A.M.I. Show” (Shout Factory)

The uncut version of the first and rarest concert film of the rock ‘n’ roll era is finally available for viewing for the first time since its initial theatrical release in November 1964.

Shot in glorious black and white under director Steve Binder at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on Oct. 29 that year, using a quartet of precusors to today’s digital cameras (dubbed “Electronovision”), “The T.A.M.I. Show” (“Teenage Awards Music International”) features live (no lip-syncing!) performances by the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, James Brown and the Flames, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Supremes, Lesley Gore, Jan and Dean, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas and the Barbarians.

Aside from the five rock bands, all the performers are backed by the band known in the history books as “the Wrecking Crew,” which played on all the Phil Spector-produced hits under the baton of Jack Nitzsche, with future stars Leon Russell on keyboards and Glen Campbell on guitar.

Here’s the Beach Boys playing note-perfect renditions of “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “I Get Around” and “Surfer Girl” (with Brian Wilson singing in crystalline falsetto just two months before retiring from touring after a nervous breakdown). The surfer dudes’ segment, cut from the film shortly after its initial release for some contractual reason, is restored here for the first time in 46 years.

The Stones (with the late Brian Jones) roll righteously through “Around and Around,” “Off the Hook” and “It’s All Over Now. The Miracles, Supremes, Gaye and especially Brown nearly steal the show with stellar performances, and Gore proves what a great belter she really was. Available only piecemeal on bootleg or low-quality tapes or laser discs until now, this complete, remastered DVD is a must-own for young and old rock fanatics alike.

— Gene Triplett

The Pretenders “Live in London” (E1 Entertainment)

The Pretenders hit the ground in high gear from the get-go of “Live in London” with the double-time grind of “Boots of Chinese Plastic,” Chrissie Hynde’s distinctive, attitude-laden contralto at the fore, lead guitarist James Walbourne, bassist Nick Wilkinson and pedal steel picker Eric Heywood lending brawny support, and original drummer Martin Chambers manning the engine room. The pace seldom lets up through the 24 songs that make up one of the most potent, in-your-kisser rock concert recordings/films to roll off the line in a long time.

That’s right, kids, the disc comes with a bonus DVD of the entire concert, captured on film by directors Pierre and Francois Lamoureux in PCM (post-code modulation, if that means anything to you) stereo and Dolby 5.1 surround audio in the relatively intimate 02 Shepherd’s Bush Empire Theatre, putting you up close and at an even level with Hynde’s intense, mascara-ringed eyes peering back at you from under those dark bangs as she rips through some of the best of the Pretenders’ songbook, from the Bo Diddley bash of 2008′s “Break Up the Concrete” all the way back to the spring-loaded, low-register twang of 1981′s “Message of Love” and the melancholy “Kid,” which she dedicated to original, late members Pete Farndon (bass) and the great James Honeyman-Scott (guitar).

“Fellas,” she says to the departed, “get the kettle on, we’re not far behind.” But at 58, she’s still lean and mean and bristling with punk chanteuse spunk. Hynde doesn’t appear to be going anywhere soon.

— Gene Triplett

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK — The stark winter weather that hangs like a pall over Roman Polanski’s new political thriller, “The Ghost Writer,” has nothing on the storm raging outside the posh midtown hotel as British actress Olivia Williams showed up for a round of recent press interviews.

The storm outside was literal and figurative. The literal storm dumped 20 inches of gloppy confetti snow on the city and caused canceled airline flights that left co-stars Ewan

Olivia Williams in "The Ghost Writer."

McGregor and Pierce Brosnan unable to attend the media gathering hosted by Summit Entertainment.

The figurative storm was the one swirling around Polanski, 76, the Oscar-winning director who is under house arrest in Switzerland awaiting court action on a 1977 case charging him with having unlawful sex with a minor. The legal controversy has left Polanski effectively mute in the process of launching his movie.

In the face of both storms, the slender, elegant Williams, best known to U.S. audiences for roles in M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense” and Wes Anderson’s “Rushmore,” stepped up gamely to carry the new film’s banner and talk up its merits.

Perhaps paradoxically, she’s cast in the seemingly thankless but deceptively calculating role of political wife in the script based on a novel (originally titled “The Ghost”) by Robert Harris, a longtime British journalist and Tony Blair confidante.

“The Ghost Writer” stars McGregor as a writer-for-hire who is brought in to finish the memoirs of a suave, former British prime minister very much in the mold of Blair. As he begins work on an isolated island off the wintry coast of New England, the writer is confronted with a web of sordid secrets and even murder that leads him on a dangerous quest for the truth.

Williams, as she will be all day, is immediately confronted with a question about Polanski’s off-screen problems and their effects on the movie. Clearly, she’s prepared as she deftly deflects discussion of legal issues and turns the talk instead to Polanski’s artistry and her own multilayered role as Ruth Lang, wife of former British Prime Minister Adam Lang, played with starchy allure by Brosnan.

“I read the novel first, and my first reaction was, ‘I hope they don’t want me to do an impersonation of Cherie Blair,’” said Williams in satiny British tones. “And when I spoke to Roman, he told me that’s not what he wanted.

“And so I went back to the text and pulled out every adjective and every clue to Ruth, and then I wrote an e-mail to the author, Robert Harris, and said, ‘OK, what do you want from this?’ I think I said, ‘Is she evil?’ And he wrote back a paragraph of basically oxymorons, you know, she is vulnerable/confident, she is naive/cynical, she is contemptuous but in love with her husband, and at the bottom he underlined in bold, ‘She is absolutely not evil.’

“And my first thought was, ‘My God, how do I do this?’ It was a really amazing challenge he set me,” Williams said. “I think the point is that nobody sets out to be a bad person, and, of course, we’re not allowed to give away the ending, but Ruth seems so transparent and nonthreatening but then turns out to be much more complicated. It was such a great pleasure to act this part. I got to lead the audience down one path and then deceive them in the end.”

Williams said Polanski’s old-school style of directing took some getting used to.

“His sets are quite intense. He’s so meticulous and so particular. Every single thing has to be exactly where he wants it,” she said. “He’ll stop a scene even to re-arrange books and pillows on the set. He spends quite a lot of time with his head in his hands and his eyes closed, which is a little distressing when you’re an actor.

“One time, I said to him, ‘You’ve got your head in your hands again. Is there anything in my performance which is upsetting you?’ And he said, ‘When my eyes are closed, I’m trying to see what it was I saw when I wrote the script.’ So, the way he directs is quite precise and demanding and idiosyncratic.

“And, you know, this was a French, Polish, German set so … instead of gentle, coaxing direction, you got (in a dead-on impression of Polanski’s Polish accent), ‘No, no, no! Do it like this!’ I’d been in California too long, where everyone is so gentle and sweet to each other, and I had to remember that kind of European inflammatory temperament. If Roman’s preoccupied, your feelings and good manners and everything else go out the window,” she said. “But a moment later, he’s joking and laughing with you.”

Despite the director’s brusque, demanding demeanor on set, he apparently earns great affection and loyalty from actors under his tutelage. Williams — with two other films, Oscar-nominated “An Education” and punk-music biopic “Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll,” now on screens — speaks glowingly of attending “The Ghost Writer” premiere last month in Berlin, “to a public in Europe that loves film and loves his work so much.”

“And to be his voice there, it was an honor and an extraordinary experience, to face a press conference where the director wasn’t there and … to be in some senses afraid to tell people of what a debt one owes him,” Williams said. “It was a very intense experience, and Ewan and Pierce were fearless in their praise of him.”