Get to Know Lisa Rosman Through Her Various Works

The Mayhem of Little Mister Mercury

In case you’re wondering why it’s been impossible to finish a sentence or avoid walking into walls today, not only is Mercury still retrograde but the moon’s been void of course for the last 24 hours. (Note that I am only writing about this as the moon finally shifts back into gear.) During this period Time-Warner has been out in my entire neighborhood and, though I comment not about my employer, I will say that the absence of the Internet has made it a mite difficult to do my work for them, especially as this astrological mayhem had already filled my brain with sugar and spice and nothing nice. What? Don’t ask me: I’m too cross. An otherwise perfectly nice gentleman forgot our coffee date this afternoon, and this post has already disappeared twice as I’ve attempted to type it. God knows how I’ll ever properly finish my reviews due today. But finish them I will. Workers of the world unite! Rise up against the tyranny of Young Master Mercury.

The Church of High Priestess Mermaids

My aging car Sadie has become permanently fritzy, so I decided to make these last three days a staycation. I’d have minded except the city is absolutely brilliant on holiday weekends, especially ones blessed with such agreeable weather. I wandered, alternately sola and accompanied, through park after park, festival after festival, barbecue after barbecue, reading on lawns, playing with others’ puppies, eavesdropping on benches, drinking wine in backyards, basking in early-morning movies. (3D Max Max in an empty theater; mimosa, bagels and lox smuggled in my purse.) I also got my laundry done, yessir. As I write this, my bedspread is strewn with treasures I collected from three of our five boroughs, and an awful lot of it is gold and lilac and purple and sky blue and turquoise and the deepest of blues. High priestess mermaid colors. Here’s to a really beautiful city summer, full of sirens of every sort.

‘Aloft’ and Jennifer Connelly’s Sainthood

There may be no American actor who suffers as exquisitely as Jennifer Connelly does. From her turn as a rich-girl addict in “Requiem for a Dream” (2000) to her spate of tortured-wife roles (most recently in last year’s “Noah”), she’s Hollywood’s reigning queen of the Set Jaw, the Palpable Gulp, and, oh yes, the Evocative Single Tear. Heck, she’s even won an Academy Award for this. So it’s compelling to watch her turn her skill on its head in “Aloft,” in which she plays a healer who sorely lacks a bedside manner. Alas, it’s not compelling enough to sustain our interest for the full ninety-five minutes of this unredemptively grim drama. Put bluntly, I’m not sure anything is.

Connelly stars as Nana, the working-class single mother of falcon-loving little toughie Ivan (Zen McGrath) and sweet-tempered Gully (Winta McGrath; yes, they’re brothers in real life), who’s dying of an unnamed illness. In an effort to save his life, the three, along with Ivan’s pet falcon, trek to mysterious faith healer Newman (opera singer William Shimell) – though Nana suspects he’s a charlatan. As it turns out, he’s a boozing lecher and the real deal, and he teaches her that she channels “the gift” as well. But due to an unfortunate accident for which Nana blames Ivan but could just as easily blame herself, the family fractures anyway. Fast-forward two decades, and a grown Ivan (Cillian Murphy) is a professional falconer and certifiably grim husband and father now completely estranged from his mother, a world-renowned mystic. When a French documentarian (Mélanie Laurent) with ambiguous motives pays him a surprise visit, he joins her quest to track down his notoriously elusive mum in the Arctic Circle. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy