Best of Anthology Film Archive

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To wrap up the Aughts, Second Avenue institution Anthology Film Archive hand-picks its blue-ribbon screenings from calendars past. Opening this retrospective are four recent shorts by the ever-experimental Alfred Leslie, the filmmaker who co-directed the beatific Pull My Daisy a half-century back; nowadays, he creates shorts like Songs of the Blue-Footed Boobies, a collage of cabaret music, film clips, and Frank O'Hara poems. Beside dedicated programs to James Nares, Beryl Sokoloff, and Jim McBride and his incisive cinema-vérité, there's George Stoney's How to Look at a City and the Harlem River-focused Cargo of Lure — one of film critic par excellence J. Hoberman's experiments in the medium.

Chanté-Noël: A Martinique Holiday Celebration

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If in Martinique, do as the Martinicans do. That's the be-merry mindset for tonight as FIAF and friends transport ticket-holders to the francophone island and its unique Christmas traditions. As the evening's title hints, there's traditional carols to be sung as well as shrubb (a liqueur uncorked only for Noël), zouk dances, a Madinina band, and a holiday-appropriate feast. The menu includes acras, a classic Martinican appetizer; boudin creole; spicy chicken Colombo; caramelized ham des Mornes; and, to top it all off, blanc mangé coco. As a bonus, there's a raffle for two round-trip tickets to the Caribbean retreat.

ITP Winter Show 2009

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This two-day showcase for the student artists of NYU's ITP Program features a floor of wonders. At this self-described "Center for the Recently Possible," the collegial talents use state-of-the-art technologies to produce works that are both interactive and highly imaginative. On display are dozens of delightful, top-grade projects, with everything from toys to LED curios to hacked electronics.

Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be

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Nostalgia is a loaded word. In this study — with a title lifted from the memoirs of French beaut and actress Simone Signoret — curators Sharon Hayes and Brooke O'Harra explore the time-tied implications of documenting performance. Several works are screened for discussion like Jeff Weiss' performance of Gertrude Stein's As a Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story, the "cow" being slang for a woman-only act. Other pieces include Wooster Group's Brace Up!, John Jeserun's live serial Chang in a Void Moon, and Faye Driscoll's Loneliness, a dance that the artist choreographed in iMovie using photos of her bedroom prancing.

Omer Fast: Nostalgia

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The nonlinear films of '08 Bucksbaum Award-winner Omer Fast go straight for the jugular. Toggling between documentary and fiction, the Berlin-based artist interviews and investigates — often through dramatization — those with recast lives, whether it be the costumed, caught-in-the-past performers at the living-history museum at Colonial Williamsburg (Godville); the Krakow residents who took the emotional and historic plunge as extras in Schindler's List (Spielberg's List); or the troubled young sergeant who talks of first romance and an unfortunate killing (The Casting). His latest, an entrancing three-part installation that's simply called Nostalgia, uses a Nigerian seeking asylum in London as the prism to study memory and cultural dislocation.

House of Yes Christmas Spectacular

The House of Yes and its chums put on an Xmas special with a festive emphasis on the variable x. There are plenty of goodies in this Yuletide fête, featuring the holy trifecta for a joyous holiday event: good humor, synchronized dancing, and a dash of sexuality. There's a slew of suggestive acts on the program including Desert Sin Dance Company, the Love Show, Jenny Rocha and the Painted Ladies, and FUCT. Plus Band of Bicycles come with their energetic, freewheeling act.

100% Folk

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Tonight, the atrium at the American Folk Art Museum should be packed tight for the Young Patrons' inaugural fête. Besides no-limit cocktails and DJs Jonny Famous and EB Sollis on the decks, arthounds have a leisurely chance to take in the raison d'etre for this gathering: the institution and its singular exhibitions. Up now are Henry Darger and the Coloring Book and Approaching Abstraction, the museum's first exhibition devoted to non-objective outsider art, featuring 40-plus artists, from art brut Europeans to self-taught Southerners.

BOMB’s Starry Night Holiday Party & Art Sale

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Art quarterly BOMB spreads holiday love the Brooklyn way, selling 178 signed and original pieces with a generous, ka-ching discount (how does 70% off market value sound?). There are about a dozen artists featured, such as the "painter of suburbs" Eric Fischl, hi-lo collagist David Salle, and pinpoint stylist Karl Haendel. Pernod Absinthe sponsors this cultured fête, which also offers pieces from famed downtowner James Nares, Jason Tomme and his "disrupted minimalism," and David Kramer, a Brooklyn-based artist whose drawings are both hilarious and trenchant.

Madcap Manhattan

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Glamour, bon mots, and mythos define this tribute to our city's comedic heritage. There are "aha"s throughout Harold Lloyd's Speedy and Buster Keaton's The Camerman, which present Manhattan locales (Washington Square, Mott Street, etc) circa 1928; battle-of-the-sexes screwball antics with Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth and the Kate-and-Spencer classic Adam's Rib by George Cukor; plus The Thin Man's debonair sleuthing, Bob Fosse's Fellini-inspired musical Sweet Charity, and Astaire polishing up his light-footed rapport with Rogers in Swing Time. Other picks from the treasury include the original and superior Producers, Billy Wilder's charm-a-rama The Apartment, and Milos Forman's first made-in-the-USA effort, Taking Off.

Tailwaiters

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A rite of passage for gridiron folk, tailgating is a pre-game experience that most never taste. Often it's because we commuters don't have the means to get to the Meadowlands with the proper menu for a full-on barbecue — think frankfurters, burgers, and salads with no greens. Like an answered Hail Mary, Tailwaiters provides the ingredients as well as a grill, a foldable table with chairs, utensils, and even clean-up. At today's Giants game against their Philly rivals, those who donate a toy for Toys for Tots receive a free hot dog and a chance to take in the parking-lot bonhomie.

SantaCon

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Santacon is one of our favorite participatory happenings on the calendar. The idea is simple: deck yourself out in that red and fur-lined regalia and march with thousands of others similarly bedecked (the sheer variety of get-ups is spectacular) through New York's streets, bodegas, parks, and most especially, bars. Besides imbibing and being jolly, singing carols is another Santacon custom, except these titles are at once familiar and hilariously WTF, with jingles like "Police Navidad" and "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Raver."

Sesame Street: A Celebration!

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Childhood's best-loved street entered midlife earlier this month (on November 10 to be precise) and BAM trumpets its grand 4-0 with this overview. From day one to today, this 'hood and its inhabitants have made PBS the acronym of educators, molding formative minds and refitting our directories for names like Cookie Monster, Elmo, and Big Bird. The weekend's catch is the best-of program that includes the first episode. There's also Big Bird in China, documentary The World According to Sesame Street, and a clip-driven look at Jim Henson's impact on the series.

Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to the Evolving Universe

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The title of this Rubin exhibition cites the "churning" sea of Hinduism's creation belief and the West's for-science explorations of the final frontier. Visions calls to mind a Carl Sagan bit — that "somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known" — uniting the world's theories on and representations of the universe's creation. Heady stuff to think about, and within the exhibit are wondrous Eastern and Western artifacts including a 12th-century sculpture of the Hindu god Vishnu, a medieval-era manuscript in which man is placed front and center in the grand scheme, and far-out photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Beyond the Absurd: Ronald Tavel & Andy Warhol

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Tavel doesn't ring quite like Edie or Nico or Paul America, but one could say that the multitalented playwright gave Warhol his voice. A guiding, avant-garde light in the Theater of the Ridiculous, Tavel is celebrated in this series for his hep, tangential, brined-in-wit scripts. Of the ten Warhol titles on queue (there's also Arthur Lubin's White Savage, starring the "perfect filmic appositeness" that is Maria Montez), the musts include Harlot and its banana mania, Hedy's Velvet Underground soundtrack, Vinyl's S&M take on A Clockwork Orange, and, of course, the dual-screen beauty of Chelsea Girls.

Zero Film Festival

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Freed from the fetters/influence of studio dollars and cents, the films in this festival display creativity at its purest and most unexpected. Take Colin, an experimental zombie flick shot in Wales for a cool hundred that found itself on the gilded shorelines of Cannes last May; it's just one of the 115 self-financed titles rounded up in Brooklyn venues this week — a motley and international collection of animation, avant-garde curios, documentaries, and bootstrap feature-lengths. Afghanistan is paid particular notice with documentaries Skateistan and Rethink Afghanistan. The former looks at the country's first skateboarding school, while the latter details the nation's current quagmire.

The Next Director: So Yong Kim and Bradley Rust Gray

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BK's finest small-scale directors are the married focus of this seven-film series. Whether you term their portraits naturalistic or neo-realist, the pair collaborate (writing, editing, producing) on works that stay bosom-close to their lead actresses, whether Gray's quiet, quotidian tracking of epileptic Zoe Kazan after a break-up in The Exploding Girl, or Jiseon Kim's plaintive and diaristic cries/interludes in Kim's eloquent debut, In Between Days. Besides Gray's lo-fi Salt and Kim's testament to children's resilience Treeless Mountain (plus a few experimental shorts), BAM programs titles by three masters of day-to-day strains: The Dardennes' Rosetta, Tsai Ming-liang's Rebels of the Neon God, and Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together.

James Whale

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Bill Condon's wonderful Gods and Monsters (1998) was a boon to the unnofficial James Whale appreciation club (of which we're a part). Now Film Forum showcases the Englishman's all-around finesse with a 16-film series that includes Condon's ode. Before his career tapered off in 1941, Whale lifted horror's cachet with gothic, starkly lit Universal titles such as Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, The Old Dark House, and Bride of Frankenstein. The rest of his stellar filmography is populated by eccentrics and outsiders too, not to mention an on-the-move camera and lodes of wit, camp, and symbolic mirrors. Must-see is the esprit of By Candlelight (adapted by P.G. Wodehouse); Paul Robeson's Show Boat performance; and the alk-soaked Remember Last Night?

Jeremy Wade's there is no end to more

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For the world premiere of his latest dance piece, Bessie-winner Jeremy Wade hurls us into the thick of Japan's kawaii ("cute") culture through a mashup of text, anime/manga, and pinpoint movement. Performed by Jared Gradinger and taking the form of a children's television show, this solo zeroes in on and strips down cuddly Hello Kitty and other incarnations of "cute" (think almond-eyed anime figures) to emphasize their true nature. The work includes contributions from Berlin-based video artist Veith Michel, architects Katja Mitte and Henning Ströh, and illustrator Hiroki Otsuka, who uses calligraphic sumi ink to produce the show's twisted imagery.

David Chang, Mario Batali, and Peter Meehan

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The ever-provocative chef David Chang appears a few blocks from his Momofuku empire — where he slangs crack pie, cereal milk, irresistible pork bites, and ramen — to promote his first cookbook, co-authored with NYT writer Peter Meehan. Joining Chang and Meehan for tonight's chat about recipes and respect is the jolly, croc-adorned Iron Chef Mario Batali, no stranger to New York's restaurant business. The book itself features Chang's usual dose of profanity and insight, tempting photos, and step-by-steps to his best-loved concoctions like fried chicken, slow-poached eggs, and, of course, those pork buns.

Before Tomorrow

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Closing out the Fast Runner trilogy on an elegiac note, Before Tomorrow offers a periscope to Inuit life in 1840, when the Arctic lands and floes neared the end of its pre-Western, pre-everything era. When the characters speak — accent on when — they do so in the Inukitut language, just one anthropological detail caught by native filmmakers Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Ivalu as if in amber. The seal-skin dress, period tools, and the premonitory ballads and oral culture ephemera only lend an authenticity and context to the gorgeous, slow-burning tale, which documents the adoring relationship between a grandmother (played by Ivalu) and grandson (actual grandson Paul-Dylan Ivalu) as they weather changes of season and scenery.