Cleveland represent! Tonight offers a fantastic sound and sight combo — think of it as 250%DV. The sounds are all Pere Ubu and their influential "avant-garage" music. The sights are also Pere Ubu, with David Thomas incarnating both ma and pa and the band the other roles. Best yet, behind the entertaining theatrics are outsized animations by the Brothers Quay, identical twins whose work with dolls is certified black and brilliant.
23 March 2010
Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance
Although this exhibition puts the past under the lens, it's curated with a lean toward the future, spotlighting several young, restless, and talented artists. Of course, it really doesn't hurt to feature work by Jeff Wall, whose art is as unassuming and monumental as his surname. Besides the hundred-or-so photographs, paintings, and other hung-up types, there are also great site-specific installations like Susan Philipsz's evocative rotunda sound work.
New York City Twestival 2010
This year's Twestival theme is "Recess" and it's a fitting one given the night's educational, do-good focus. Tonight, hundreds of cities host a festival to benefit Flavorpill's friends at Concern Worldwide, an organization that provides learning opportunities for the world's poorest children. New York's version of the shindig features music by Mister Disco and Shinbo Ninja, photographs by Maureen Pitz, and origami demonstrations by Sok Song (his giant Twitter birds are part of the raffle). The expansive, newly dug-up basement of the Hudson Hotel should be a perfect space for the revelry with a cause — you might even want to tweet about it.
Images of the World and the Inscription of War
Made nearly a half-century after those crucial topographic photographs of Auschwitz were shot, Farocki's incisive film essay also ties in France's push in the 1960s to snap veil-less Algerian women for identity cards. Jumping between and piling up images and theories, the German filmmaker offers plenty to debate in his exploration of truth and intent.
New Directors / New Films 2010
Twenty years ago, this venerable series included Days of Being Wild in its round up of new films by who-dat talent. Wong Kar-wai's luscious take on the folly and tenderness of youth was not his first film, but it was a neon-lit sign of things to come from the hep Hong Kong romantic. As in every other, this year's lineup is deep and diverse in potential. Among the fascinating pics are Samson and Delilah, a Caméra d'Or-winning aboriginal story; 3 Backyards, Eric Mendelsohn's superb trio of Long Island tales; and Down Terrace, a genre masher that follows a just-released father and son. The festival closes with the provocatively named and themed I Killed My Mother.
Modern Ruins, Urban Archaeology, and the Post-Industrial Sublime
Ruins can be eerily picturesque. After all, they are ghostly, outsize reminders of industry and inhabitation by those long gone. Tonight should be full of discovery, from eye-opening presentations by multidisciplinary artists Tarikh Korula, Ian Ference, and Julia Solis to the how-did-we-get-here discussion led by writer/editor Alan Rapp.
The Rise and Fall of Nina Simone: Montreux, 1976
The Eclipse
Between grief and nothing, widower and father-of-two Michael Farr (Ciarán Hinds) chooses grief — a perfectly Gothic response in Irish dramatist Conor McPherson's excellent and often breathtaking new film. In this atmospheric and spectral portrait — apparitions and startling hues expertly double to rouse you from the beautifully lulling gloom — Michael gets psychologically and physically beaten out of his Edgar Allan "Woe" phase (his middle-aged, ecclesiastic face initially spells "nevermore" to the opposite sex) over a cathartic weekend spent volunteering at the local Cobh Literary Festival, for which he chauffeurs two writers caught in an internecine relationship themselves.
21 March 2010
Cinema 16 w/ Sabrina Chap
The full, English title of Stella Simon's Hande is Hands: The Life and Loves of the Gentler Sex. Made in tandem with Miklos Bandy, the experimental short charts the adventures of a feminist in Weimar Berlin, shuffling then-vogue styles in photography. It's just one of the three films that Sabrina Chap enlivens with her propulsive sound at tonight's Cinema 16 lineup. The other two titles are film pioneer W.K.L. Dickson's 7 Annabelle Dances and Dances, a 1894-97 series featuring Annabelle Moore's skirt-manipulating antics, and Gina Carducci's Stone Welcome Mat, an incredible look at memory and famiglia.
Vincere
Marco Bellocchio’s breathtaking new film provides Ida Dalser — Mussolini’s alleged first wife and the mother of Benito Junior — the voice and vitality that Il Duce took when he left them in asylums to perish anonymously.
In this full-bore cri de coeur for the missus, Bellocchio depicts Dalser as a feisty, resolute, and somewhat delusional woman, rather than some haloed madonna — a figure seared into memory by Giovanna Mezzogiorno’s impassioned performance. Bellocchio contextualizes the torn-out chapter of history with actual propaganda newsreels and declamatory texts that pulsate and surge from the screen.
The “polyexpressive” first half follows the superheated courtship between Dalser and a young, ambitious, but still idealistic Mussolini; her amour fou is pointedly made to parallel the countrywide hysteria for war and, soon enough, fascism. The quieter second half, meanwhile, focuses on her struggle to gain recognition and to reunite with her long lost son.
Read about the 2005 documentary that provides the backstory, learn more about Bellocchio’s storied career, watch Mussolini speak English in a rare 1929 Fox Movietone newsreel, and catch Vincere in theaters or on demand.
Mother
Mother knows best in Bong Joon-ho’s sinuous, first-rate whodunit, the South Korean director’s first feature since The Host in 2006.
Exquisitely played by Kim Hye-ja (an actress who spent decades in Korean minds as a TV mother), the title character coddles her unpredictable idiot of a son as if the 27-year-old were 7. They eat and even sleep beside each other until, one hazy night, he’s charged with the brutal murder of a poor high-school floozy. With her maternal instinct in overdrive, Mother conducts a town-wide probe to exonerate her child, leading to Hitchcockian suspense and a Pandora’s Box of repressed secrets.
From the first to last scene — both featuring Mother dancing like a possessed marionette — Bong pulls the audience’s strings with a nimble, precise hand. His now-famous compositional polish keeps the story fluent even as it cuts between psychotic and slapstick asides, the melodrama and policier genres. And with the diehard aegis of this mother as the core focus, Bong and Kim have crafted an indelible character to top his ever-growing gallery of monsters.
Check out an interview with Bong, read the New York Times review, and see Mother’s grades at the New York Film Festival.
US Pole Dancing Championship 2010
Tonight, a bodacious dozen try to become the top pole dancer in the land of the free. Yes, stereotypes abound. But, in its second go-around, the US Pole Dance Federation's National Championship only attests to the athleticism and art needed to maneuver one's body on a 12-footer. Expect an ah-inspiring two rounds since the event also bestows Miss Congeniality-like awards for Miss Trixter (most creative display of tricks, transitions, and combos) and Miss Sexy (no explanation necessary).
20 March 2010
Focus on IFC Films
All eyes have been on IFC for its curatorial excellence. This series offers a peek at the international titles that'll fill its Sixth Avenue screens in the near future. Romania gets the spotlight with Tales from the Golden Age, a census of life during Ceausescu's twilight that counts stories by five compatriots, including much-lauded Cristian Mungiu. Coming from the Pac Rim are Vengeance, a revenge pic from Hong Kong's finest Johnnie To, and The Good, the Bad and the Weird, a feverish spaghetti western from Korea. Claire Denis, meanwhile, follows up last year's fave 35 Shots of Rum with the arresting, Africa-set White Material.
Tarkovsky x 3
There are few auteurs who compare to Andrei Tarkovsky in terms of pure rapture: the Russian had an angle to transformative beauty. Anthology offers an excellent intro to his art with this three-pic series, one capped with a director's cut of Andrei Rublev. That wondrous epic paints a portrait of the 15th-century icon painter as a troubled soul, while Mirror illustrates his mother and past (as well as memory, history, etc.) with dazzling strokes. Rounding out matters is Solaris, his phantasmagorical sci-fi film based on Stanislaw Lem's novel.
09 March 2010
Environmental Graffiti
For nearly three years, Environmental Graffiti has provided fans of the offbeat and environmentalists with an online destination for inspiring, believe-it-or-not content.
Based in the UK, the site provides a range that is nothing short of stupendous, with posts on everything from bamboo architecture and the most psychedelic river on Earth (located in Colombia’s Sierra de la Macarena) to the long history of gunpowder weaponry. Eye-catching photo galleries and videos supplement fascinating lists, such as the 35 greatest works of reverse graffiti and the world’s most terrifying spiral staircases.
Browse the site, submit a news story, sign up for the beta test of EG’s new online app, and follow Environmental Graffiti on Twitter.
“The Tallest Filing Cabinet on Earth”
“The Mysterious Shadows That Lie Behind Everyday Objects”
“The Most Terrifying Spiral Staircases on Earth”
“The Earliest Gunpowder Weapons in History”
Burtonalia
Burbank's finest is the toast of tonight's fête, which offers attendees a great chance to take in his MoMA exhibition — and his nether, under-the-bed universe — without that Cali-style pileup. The first hour and half is dedicated to studying those handcrafted misfits and monsters before a Burton-inspired variety show led by comedian Max Silvestri. The excellent lineup includes Reggie Watts, Sam Anderson, and Jon Glaser, as well as music from Brigham Bough and the harmonium-playing Wyndham Garnett, of band Elvis Perkins in Dearland.
The Exploding Girl
The pains of being pure at heart are many in Bradley Rust Gray's The Exploding Girl, a moody, osmotic character study that thoroughly stresses the awk in youthful awkwardness. The American accompaniment to wife and co-director So Yong Kim's In Between Days (both winking allusions to the same Cure single), Girl mirrors the former in its observational focus on best friends whose relationship lies between platonic and romantic. With her perfectly expressive, cherubic features, a winsome Zoe Kazan stars as Ivy, a collegiate gal who returns to Prospect Heights for a between-semester spell and ends up spending much of it with old kindred spirit Al (Mark Rendall).
Marguerite Duras on Film
The film leg of our city's all-out, month-long tribute to Marguerite Duras salutes her radical directorial career. While that means sorry to Hiroshima Mon Amour and The Lover, it does provide a chance to see the polymathic femme's classics India Song and Nathalie Granger. The languorous former stars Delphine Seyrig in colonial India, circa the '30s, and tracks her "colonial sickness," while the latter draws ellipses around the fantastic, trapped trio of Jeanne Moreau, Lucia Bose, and Gérard Depardieu. There's also the absurdist pleasure of Les Enfants, which features a 40-year-old playing a seven-year-old.
An Evening with Bernhard Schlink
Beginning with detective novels, Bernhard Schlink has made a literary career exploring the runaround with unearthing the truth, culminating in his Oscar-certified The Reader. Tonight, the German jurist/author hosts a slate of performances based on the stories that haunt him and, with his years in the courtroom, you can anticipate some very persuasive storytelling.
That's Montgomery Clift, Honey!
The face that launched a thousand Method thesps, Montgomery Clift is best remembered as the determined American dreamer who reaches up the social ladder, ever hopeful, for Liz Taylor in A Place in the Sun. With an uncanny mixture of silk and sulk, Clift left a handful of indelible performances before his untimely death in 1966. At the opposite ends of his meteoric rise and demise, there are must-see rivers: first came Howard Hawks' Red River and his oedipal clash with John Wayne, then Elia Kazan's 1960 beaut, Wild River. And let's not forget his sad-eyed turn as the ex-boxer in WWII staple From Here to Eternity.
03 March 2010
Oscars Viewing Party
The hype stops tonight. The yearly congrats for Hollywood is best seen with company, and this Tribeca gala should be a rollicking occasion with sassy, in-the-know hosts Michelle Collins, Sara Benincasa, and Sara Schaefer commenting on everything from red carpet blahs to the weepy/we-did-it speeches. Block out the decision to have ten films vie for Best Picture and bask in the awesome Alec Baldwin/Steve Martin hydra with drink specials, dressed-up carousers, and free stuff.
Fierce and Fabulous: Anne Bancroft
Lincoln Center sings here's to you Anne Bancroft with this best-of look at her lauded career. Otherwise confused for Mrs. Robinson, she delivered a handful of performances worth a chorus, including her name-making turn as Annie Sullivan in Arthur Miller's 1962 Miracle Worker. She stands out anywhere, from ballerina circles (The Turning Point) to the testy Wild West (The Last Frontier) and 19th-century London (David Lynch's studio trip Elephant Man). Special appearances by Mike Nichols, Patty Duke, and Neil Simon punctuate this retrospective.
And The Winner Is... NY!
Yet another bang-up tribute to our metropolis, this time with an Oscar leitmotif. The seventies is thoroughly represented with landmark titles Annie Hall and The Godfather as well as the old-school bravura Pacino (Dog Day Afternoon), Hoffman/Streep (Kramer vs. Kramer), and Jane Fonda (Klute). There's also other classics of city grit and gravitas such as Raging Bull and The French Connection, which still boasts one of Gotham's most propulsive scenes. MGM's first musical, The Broadway Melody, also holds the distinction of being the first NYC-set Best Picture-winner.
Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss
Leni may be more famed, but this well-made documentary reminds that Veit Harlan was equally instrumental to the Nazi's achtung propaganda. His notoriety owes largely to his then-compulsory 1940 film, Jew Süss, a brutal anti-Semitic tract set in 18th-century Germany. Director Felix Moeller looks at the fallout through his descendants, exploring how his children and grandchildren respond to such an unspeakable lineage. Guilt ghosts everything for a provocative case study of how one German family copes with its stigmatic past.
Bluebeard on Film
The tale of Bluebeard — the most notorious interpreter of that sacred, 'til-death-do-apart phrase — has long been a favorite for cinematic adaptation, many very memorable. There's post-Tramp Chaplin in his fantastically acerbic Monsieur Verdoux and Lubitsch's romp Bluebeard's Eighth Wife. And once seen, no one can forget Michael Powell's lysergic use of colors in Bluebeard's Castle. Anthology brings all these and other Bluebeard classics together in a series inspired by Catherine Breillat's recent fairy-tale spin on the femme killer, simply titled Bluebeard.
Victor Fleming Festival
With Gone With the Wind and Wizard of Oz to his name, the debonair, ever-versatile Victor Fleming should be more heralded. Lo and behold, Film Forum puts on this reappraisal, one inspired by Michael Sragow's bio on a director who minted a fair share of handsome pieces in his day. For one, there's Captain Courageous, a nautical coming-of-age with Spencer Tracy meting out tough love for a 1938 Oscar. Fleming's gusto is all over his oeuvre, whether his early pics for Douglas Fairbanks, Clara Bow, and Gary Cooper or his supreme adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson.
01 March 2010
Spike Jonze’s Tell Them Anything You Want
HBO Documentary Films: Tell Them Anything You Want Trailer
HBO | MySpace Video
With his Maurice Sendak opus Where the Wild Things Are set for DVD release on Tuesday, Spike Jonze took an evening to promote its splendid companion piece, Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait Of Maurice Sendak, due out the same day courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories. The fleet, 40-minute documentary, which originally aired on HBO last fall, is all about the octogenarian Sendak, eliding conversations that Jonze and co-director Lance Bangs had at chez Maurice over the past couple of years. It feels like a running dialogue with the illustrator extraordinaire, engaging you with the this-and-that of a remarkable life (his childhood, his obsession with death and the Lindbergh baby, his late, half-a-century-long partner Eugene Glynn) as well as how the personal seeped onto the page.
Throughout, Sendak is plain-spoken, wise, idiosyncratic, self-deprecating, a few shades dark, and very much irresistible. There are plenty of gem bits in this intimate, gilded-with-love ode, least of all the numerous montages of the work that made Sendak famous. For instance, his love for children’s literature, as it turns out, isn’t due to an out-and-out adoration for children, but a “peculiarity” in him — a real je ne sais pas.
After last night’s screening, Jonze called upon a good friend hidden in the audience to moderate a short discussion with Bangs and himself: Mike Myers. Here are a few of the more interesting exchanges:
Myers: Is your needle stuck in childhood?
Jonze: I guess creativity is a very child-like thing and I like being able to tap into that part of myself easily.
Myers: Maurice is an eccentric and, knowing you for awhile, I think you’re an eccentric as well. What do you think about eccentricity?
Jonze: I’m not sure if I am have a strong sense.
Myers: Are you so eccentric that you have no sense of other people’s eccentricity?
Myers: Maurice is an odd combination of emotion, intellect, and imagination.
Jonze: Maurice’s imagination is certainly inspiring and that’s what initially drew me to him. But the thing that I find most deeply inspiring is his ferocious honesty and his fearlessness to be honest. He has no ability for small talk or chitchat. He is who he is and he doesn’t have the energy to pretend that he’s someone else.
Jonze also took a moment to elaborate on the process of winning Sendak’s seal of approval:
The only thing that [Maurice objected to] was that Max didn’t go to his room, and the bedroom didn’t turn into the forest. That was something that Dave [Eggers] and I realized didn’t make sense in this movie we were writing. He didn’t hate it, but he did challenge me on it. He was always of the opinion that this is your movie and you got to make it the way you see it, but he kept trying to keep the idea alive. It was a hard thing to fight because a) I respect him so much and b) the image of it in the book is something I remember loving as a kid — the walls falling away, the posts turning into trees.
Art of the Steal
A compelling polemic by Philly-based Don Argott, The Art of the Steal looks at the bitter, decades-long fight over the Barnes Foundation and its singular, $25-billion-dollar art collection.
Created in 1922 by Albert C. Barnes, an early 20th-century industrialist and voracious art collector whose bio reads like Horatio Alger, the Barnes Foundation made its Merion, Pennsylvania home a mecca for aesthetes, with eyefuls of brand-name paintings (i.e. 181 Renoirs, 69 Cézannes, 59 Matisses, 46 Picassos) and only-here ephemera such as Native American ceramics. Barnes passed away in 1951, but his will declared that the works never be loaned, moved, or sold — that is until a few powerful figures in Philly saw the dollar signs in the impressionistic swirls.
Argott employs gabbing partisans, graphics, and archival footage to present a case that continues to open fault lines in the art world.
Learn more about the Barnes Foundation, read the New York Times profile, and check out a Filmmaker interview with Argott.
Monsters & Murderers: The Films of Bong Joon-ho
With just three features to his name, Bong Joon-ho has planted himself on the shortlist for favorite South Korean export. Suspense is his forte, but his gorgeously made films are also rich in humor and horror. Take his smash monster hit, The Host, which dizzies and delights with its tonal whiplash. Then there's his latest, Mother, a murder-he-wrote dandy that could be seen as a close relative to his supreme police procedural Memories of Murder. The series also includes debut Barking Dogs Never Bite, Q&As, and a shorts program that rounds up the CCTV-framed Influenza and Bong's delicate segment for the omnibus film Tokyo!.
A Discussion About Pulitzer and Murdoch
When inked with hearsay and hyperbole, the pen is indeed mightier than the sword, and might lead to actual hostilities (see: Spanish-American War). Such was Joseph Pulitzer's belief at the turn of the 20th century as he and Hearst patented yellow journalism in order to up circulation for their at-war papers. Fast forward a century later and Australian-born Rupert Murdoch's Fox-led empire also hustles the most extra-extra headlines in the name of ratings. Tonight, James McGrath Morris and Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff, authors of two new books on Pulitzer and Murdoch, share the nitty-gritty on the influential and incredibly complex moguls.
Five Easy Pieces
Two years after he made Head with the Monkees, director Bob Rafaelson lensed a not-yet-famous Jack Nicholson going ape-beep over toast. The no-substitutions breakfast scene is perhaps the most famous takeaway from Five Easy Pieces, a brooding character study of a prodigy (a classical pianist) who always prefers to be elsewhere. Alienation is the capital theme here and Nicholson gives one of those blue-chip performances: commanding even if his oil rigger whiles away day after day, aggressive when luring in his brother's fianceé back home, and incredibly moving as he strains for the right notes with his distant, now-mute father.
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