ROBIN HOOD
Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett can’t believe where the script is taking them in Ridley Scott’s ROBIN HOOD
ROBIN HOOD (Ridley Scott, 2010)
Opens Friday, May 14
www.robinhoodthemovie.com
Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett join the long line of illustrious acting duos that have teamed up as Robin Hood and Maid Marion (or Marian), following in the footsteps of Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland (THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD), Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn (ROBIN AND MARIAN), Kevin Costner and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES), Cary Elwes and Amy Yasbeck (ROBIN HOOD: MEN IN TIGHTS), and even Brian Bedford and Monica Evans (Disney’s animated ROBIN HOOD) in Ridley Scott’s potential franchise starter, ROBIN HOOD. Although they do generate some heat, the Aussies are led astray by vastly overrated screenwriter Brian Helgeland (THE POSTMAN, THE TAKING OF PELHAM 1 2 3) and the game but misguided Scott (ALIEN, BLADE RUNNER, GLADIATOR), who tinker way too much with the tale in the first half of the film and then devolve into a boring retread of TROY meets BRAVEHEART in the second. Their version is the superhero origin story of the man who will later steal from the rich and give to the poor, seen here first marching with King Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston), who seeks to reclaim his throne after ten years of fighting in the Crusades. But his immature brother, Prince John (Oscar Isaac), has other plans, enlisting the villainous Godfrey (Mark Strong) to do his dirty work for him. The movie has all the pomp and circumstance associated with such adventure flicks, with swordfights, expert archery, heavy chainmail, a raucous, mead-filled celebration, and lusty romance, but it loses itself halfway through, leading up to an epic battle that gets just plain ridiculous. This ROBIN HOOD steals too much from previous films while ultimately giving audiences the shaft.
RICHARD WOODS: PORT SUNLIGHT
Richard Woods has wrapped up Lever House in Victorian splendor (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Lever House
390 Park Ave. at 54th St.
Through January 30 (extended into February)
Admission: free
www.leverhouseartcollection.com
flickr slideshow
Last year, British artist Richard Woods papered two City Hall security booths in a white-and-redbrick design that made them look like they were toys; he also covered a City Hall lobby door in a graphic representation of itself, turning it into a cartoon in an otherwise formal lobby. Now Woods has taken over the inside and outside of Lever House, designing all of the posts and Noguchi benches in a series of nine decorative patterns inspired by the legacy of nineteenth-century socialist designer William Morris. Using woodblock prints, Woods packages up Gordon Bunshaft’s minimalist building in Victorian splendor, even adding two aluminum “rugs” that people can walk on in the lobby. Lever House comes alive with colorful flowers, leaves, and birds as well as black-and-white geometric shapes, repeated over and over again. The two floor pieces take Carl Andre to the next level, almost too captivating to walk on, but it’s rather thrilling to trod upon them as you watch others passing by on the concrete and asphalt of Park Ave. By titling the site-specific installation “Port Sunlight,” Woods reaches into the past of both Lever House and his childhood. When he was a small boy, the first art institution he ever visited was the Lady Lever Gallery, which was in the model village known as Port Sunlight, built by William Lever as a home for the employees of his soap factory, where their first cleaning product was Sunlight. And so Woods’s “Port Sunlight” offers a sweet respite in the middle of swirling Midtown Manhattan
GLOBAL LENS, 2010: THE SHAFT
The local mine dominates a family’s life in Zhang Chi’s mesmerizing debut
DIXIA DE TIANKONG (THE SHAFT) (Zhang Chi, 2008)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
January 21-27
Tickets: $10, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
Not to be confused with Li Yang’s 2003 film, BLIND SHAFT (MANG JING), which was also set in a rural Chinese coal-mining town, THE SHAFT (DIXIA DE TIANKONG) is a beautifully shot, mesmerizingly slow-paced debut feature from writer-director Zhang Chi. The story is told in three sections: In the first, Song Daming (Li Chen) overhears that his girlfriend, Ding Jingshui (Zheng Luoqian), might have slept with the boss to get a promotion, forcing him to reconsider their relationship. In the second, Ding Jingsheng (Huang Xuan), Jingshui’s brother, is a lazy slacker who is not smart enough to go to university, refuses to work in the mine, and instead thinks he could become a pop singer. And in the third, Ding Baogen (Luo Deyuan), Jingsheng and Jingshui’s father, has reached retirement age and is not sure what to do with the rest of his life, as the only thing he knows is the mine. THE SHAFT moves at a snail’s pace, reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch’s STRANGER THAN PARADISE but without any humor, a meditative examination of the decaying social and economic structure in rural China. Cinematographer Liu Shumi’s camera lingers on scenes long after they appear to be over, as characters just stand and stare out at the dim gray and black countryside, occasionally saturated in lush blues and reds; out there somewhere is Beijing, more than a dream away, but the big city doesn’t necessarily hold any answers either. Dialogue is kept to a bare minimum, with no musical soundtrack, just natural sound that often borders on complete silence. THE SHAFT, which is screening at MoMA January 21-27 as part of the Global Lens festival, is an intense, rewarding, uneasy experience from an extremely talented young filmmaker.
GLOBAL LENS, 2010: DIOSES (GODS)
DIOSES is a biting slice-of-life portrait of the Peruvian upper class (courtesy Global Film Initiative)
DIOSES (GODS) (Josué Méndez, 2008)
MoMA Film
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Thursday, January 14, 4:00 & Saturday, January 23, 1:30
Series runs January 14-29
Tickets: $10, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.diosesthemovie.com
Named Best Peruvian Feature at the 2008 Lima Film Festival and Best Film at the Biarritz Film Festival, DIOSES (GODS) opens the seventh annual Global Lens series at MoMA, which promotes socially relevant works from developing nations. Written and directed by Josué Méndez (DÍAS DE SANTIAGO), DIOSES takes a biting look at the exclusive Peruvian upper class. While wealthy industrialist Agustín (Edgar Saba) is introducing his young fiancée, Elisa (Maricielo Effio), to snooty society people spending the summer at a fancy beach retreat, his daughter, Andrea (Anahí de Cárdenas), is drinking and drugging herself to sleep every night at wild parties, not remembering whom she slept with, as her tortured brother, Diego (Sergio Gjurinovic), pines away for her physical love. Elisa, from a poor family, studies to try to fit in, reading books on gardening and mythology to keep up with the other women and refusing to allow her mother and grandmother to visit for fear that her lower-class roots will spoil her entrée. Meanwhile, Agustín is trying to prepare his son to join him at the factory, but Diego seems more concerned with peeking at and touching his sister’s body as she sleeps off another crazy night. Featuring beautiful cinematography by Mario Bassino, DIOSES is an intelligent slice-of-life portrait of the shallow, materialistic relationships among the Peruvian upper class, a socially conscious depiction of the vapid emptiness of connection they have with each other, themselves, and the real world.
The Global Lens series also includes Bui Thac Chuyen’s Vietnamese drama CHOI VOI (ADRIFT), Lyes Salem’s Algerian tale MASCARADES (MASQUERADES), Alejandro Gerber Bicecci’s Mexican story VAHO (BECLOUD), Granaz Moussavi’s MY TEHRAN FOR SALE from Iran, Enrique Buchichio’s EL CUARTO DE LEO (LEO’S ROOM) from Mexico, Rajesh Shera’s Indian tragedy OCEAN OF AN OLD MAN, and Zang Chi’s highly regarded Chinese film DIXIA DE TIANKONG (THE SHAFT).
BLACK DYNAMITE
BLACK DYNAMITE is not as explosive as it could have been
BLACK DYNAMITE (Scott Sanders, 2008)
Opens Friday, October 16
http://www.blackdynamite.com
In the 1970s, the so-called blaxploitation genre gave rise to such films as SHAFT, SUPER FLY, ACROSS 110th STREET, CLEOPATRA JONES, BLACK CAESAR, and DOLEMITE, movies of varying degrees of quality that tackled such themes as urban drug use, prostitution, and crime, made primarily by black filmmakers with black actors and comedians and rousing soul soundtracks. In 1997, Quentin Tarantino paid homage to the genre with JACKIE BROWN, while Keenen Ivory Wayans spoofed it in 1988’s I’M GONNA GIT YOU SUCKA. Scott Sanders’s BLACK DYNAMITE, which screened at the Sundance and Tribeca Film Festivals, can’t decide whether it’s paying tribute to the genre, spoofing it, or merely remaking it, leaving it in a no-man’s land with some very funny scenes that ultimately fall flat as a whole.
Cowriter Michael Jai White stars as Black Dynamite, a mythic figure determined to clean up the ghetto. But when his brother, Jimmy (Baron Vaughn), is murdered, he sets out to find the killers and exact his punishing revenge. A kung fu master who is expert with both a .44 Magnum and a shiny set of nunchucks, BD’s search leads him to such genre-worthy characters as Osiris (Obba Babatunde), Cream Corn (Tommy Davidson), Afroditey (Dionne Gipson), Tasty Freeze (Arsenio Hall), Sweet Meat (Brian McKnight), Mahogany Black (Nicole Ari Parker), Kotex (John Salley), Mo Bitches (Miguel Nunez), Chicago Wind (Mykelti Williamson), Honey Bee (Kym Whitley), Bullhorn (cowriter Byron Minns), Back Hand Jack (Bokeem Woodbine), and Chocolate Giddy-Up (Cedric Yarbrough). As actors trip over their lines, the boom mic gets in the way, and purposefully bad edits elicit some laughs, they also become repetitive. The soundtrack features original songs that too often mimic exactly what’s going on in the plot, including “Jimmy’s Apartment,” “Man with the Heat,” “Anaconda Malt Liquor,” and “Your Kiss Sho Nuff Dynamite.” The film had us much of the way, but things really fall apart when President Nixon (James McManus) enters the fray.
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