What’s New: Fawlty, Jackie, Angels
I’m pulverized by this news: Andrew Sachs, from one of my all-time favorite TV comedies, “Fawlty Towers,” has died. Sachs played Manuel, the hapless Spanish waiter who ran around the hotel misconstruing (or “misconscrewing,” as Charo said in “Airplane”) everything barked at him by John Cleese’s Nigel. “Que? Que?”…The movies to see this weekend are “Elle,” for which Isabelle Huppert keeps collecting critics’ prizes, and “Jackie,” in which Natalie Portman plays Mrs. Kennedy to a fare-the-well. Don’t expect “Jackie” to be full of rah-rah Kennedy spirit: it’s concerns the aftermath of the assassination, and is quite the downer…For Worlds AIDS Day yesterday, I watched a part of “Angels in America,” with Meryl Streep’s Ethel Rosenberg visiting a dying Roy Cohn (Al Pacino). In real life, Ethel’s two sons have petitioned President Obama to exonerate her: she and her husband, Julius, were executed for espionage.
