A new film’s “Hotel Mumbai.” Armie Hammer and Dev Patel star. Between both, a person could get sexation overload.
Armie, hot after someone’s certain part ejected inside a peach in “Call Me by Your Name”: “I can’t break away from that now. People handed me peaches at my Broadway stage door. They all brought what’ll sit on a shelf, rot and putrify.”
Not to rot is his fame. “You learn to deal with it. Don’t get spoiled. Keep healthy boundaries. Isolate the family part. There are artificial things like combing hair, but you’re there for your wife, children, the park, gym. I live in LA for the weather, although nothing beats New York.”
OK. So, Mumbai.
“We shot there. I went everywhere — even to the fishing dock. The place, its sights and smells, is sensory overload. Scary. Don’t eat street food, avoid ice. Guys we called our ‘ambassadors’ ran interference for us. The movie’s terrific. It starts with a siege in Bombay then it’s a nonstop in-your-face onslaught.”
I pulled my gaze off his orange socks while he said:
“After this I’m off to Montreal for ‘Dreamland’ about the opioid crisis and fentanyl. But playing a drug dealer’s easier than that peach scene. When I first heard about that one, I wasn’t scared. I originally thought, ‘Oh, sweet. A movie about a peach.’ Turns out I was very wrong.”
Housewife work
Luann de Lesseps is decorating her new Catskills Port Ewing house. Shopping home goods at Kingston’s Exit Nineteen store. Doing it dressed to the nineteens. Should anyone care.
School daze
The college admissions mess. NYC food distributor Gregory Abbott’s up to his assets for allegedly slipping a few Benjamins to rate his kid’s marks higher than Greg’s own ethics.
Says a friend: “Nice guy. Smart. Started several businesses. Good athlete but didn’t go to Choate on a scholarship. Wealthy family. Mills, textile companies, big land owners.
“He didn’t need this. It’s not in his upbringing. Our class was like a monastery — chapel, friends, no girls. Take out a cigarette — and it was you who was out. Never one to cut a corner, he was definitely not that sort. He could’ve given 5 million to the school without this.”
Crime pays again
“Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) gets another shot. Bonnie Parker’s Chloë Grace Moretz. Brit Jack O’Connell is Clyde. Title: “Love Is a Gun.”
Chloë: “Our version tells their actual lives, how they met, realities of the romance, how it was ‘them against the world,’ things which led to such crime. Their relationship when he went to prison, how he came out a different man.” Yeah, like, older.
Young Hollywood considers this an original story. Shooting — you should pardon that expression — starts soon.
He’s got designs all over this town
Award-winning David Rockwell designs airports, eateries, malls, shops, Broadway scenery. In his designed Nobu, you wonder how he blew carving Miss Liberty.
Rockwell: “Onstage in ‘Tootsie,’ New York’s in watercolors. Its hard-edged full-stage apartment scene tracks. Slides upstage for another scene, 42nd Street, to part, sky-drop, close over it and re-slide down.” And if all this doesn’t happen?
“Take Anacin. Ring down the curtain. If machines break or a cue’s wrong, handle it mechanically. At the ‘Hairspray’ opening, its set wouldn’t turn. I thought my life had stopped. We did it by hand, and the audience went crazy. So did I.”
At Barolo East restaurant: “From wearing of the green to April’s IRS sharing of the green.”
NOT only in New York, kids, not only in New York.