FriendsWithYou’s interactive outdoor installation “Rainbow City” continues through July 5 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
30th St. & Tenth Ave.
Saturday & Sunday, 8:00 am – 11:00 pm, Monday & Tuesday, 11:00 am – 10:00 pm
Admission: free
www.aolartists.com/rainbowcity
rainbow city slideshow
In conjunction with the extension of the High Line, the Miami-based art collective FriendsWithYou, consisting of Samuel Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III, has installed the fun installation “Rainbow City” at the corner of 30th St. & Tenth Ave. at the north end of the elevated railway that has been turned into a spectacular park. Situated next to the Lot on Tap, the new outdoor space under the High Line that serves Brooklyn Brewery seasonal beers and hosts such local food trucks as Eddie’s Pizza, CoolHaus, and Rickshaw Dumplings, “Rainbow City” is a temporary playland of forty colorful inflatables, ranging from ten to forty feet high, populating a sixteen-thousand-square-foot area. Numerous shapes, from mushrooms and circles to a snowman and a tall tower, are tied to the candy-striped ground, along with a pop-up store that is essentially a box that has popped open. Visitors can go inside some of the inflatables, while they can touch and push others as the balloons twist in the wind, but please do not turn them into punching bags. (If the wind gets too strong, the park will close.) FriendsWithYou also has an interactive, participatory show, featuring lots of smiley faces, at the Hole at 312 Bowery, continuing through August 6.
Japanese director Takashi Miike might be most well known for such wild and crazy violence-filled works as Ichi the Killer, Audition, and the recent 13 Assassins, but among the ninety films he has made during his twenty-year career are a handful of kids movies, from the charming (Zebraman) and the fantastical (The Great Yokai War) to the overwrought (Yatterman) and now, with Ninja Kids!!!, to the relatively mundane. Based on the long-running Japanese children’s program Rantaro the Ninja Boy, which began in 1993 and is now approaching 1,500 episodes, Ninja Kids!!! follows the trials and tribulations of young Rantaro, played by Japanese child star Seishirô Katô (wearing oversized glasses that make him look like a cross between Poindexter and the Warner Bros. bookworm), who is sent off by his farmer parents to ninja school. There he encounters fellow students dripping snot and baby-sitting, a crazy master who continually challenges death, a teacher who is more like a drill sergeant, a big-headed villain who keeps falling over, an old woman who can change appearance at will, and other oddities as he trains to become the master ninja his father never was. The film is composed of a series of vignettes, some that work, many that don’t, but they never come together to form a cohesive narrative. The costumes are colorful and the hairstyles brilliant, but just as with Yatterman, the look of the film clearly trumps the story, which is disjointed and way too over the top, even though it’s supposed to be cartoonish. Ninja Kids!!! is having its world premiere July 3 at the Walter Reade Theater, a joint presentation of the New York Asian Film Festival and Japan Cuts: The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema.
Azazel Jacobs follows up the widely praised Momma’s Man, in which he cast his real-life parents (experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs and painter Flo Jacobs) in a story about a married adult and new father (Matt Boren) who keeps extending a visi t to his ancestral home, with another idiosyncratic tale about growing up. Terri, adapted by Patrick deWitt from a series of his interrelated short stories, follows the trials and tribulations of the title teen, played with great subtlety by newcomer Jacob Wysocki. Terri is a grossly overweight kid who shows up late to school every morning wearing pajamas; lives with and takes care of his uncle (The Office’s Creed Bratton), who is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s; becomes obsessed with catching mice; and has a secret crush on high school cutie Heather (Olivia Crocicchia). When the vice principal, Mr. Fitzgerald (a wonderfully offbeat John C. Reilly), takes a personal interest in him, Terri is at first confused, but then seems okay with it, until he finds out that he is part of a group of deeply troubled teens that Mr. Fitzgerald meets with regularly, including such loser outcasts as Chad Markson (Bridger Zadina), who likes to pull out his own hair and say very inappropriate things at inopportune moments. They are soon joined by Heather, who was nearly expelled for allowing a boy to touch her during class and is now shunned by the cool clique. The unlikely threesome, along with Mr. Fitzgerald, who appears to mean well but can’t stop putting his foot in his mouth, exemplify the difficult teenage years as they come together, and break apart, over the course of this charming, eclectic film. As with Momma’s Man, Jacobs has faith in his narrative, eschewing grand statements and teen clichés in favor of a poignant and intelligent examination of adolescence that anyone can relate to, whether they were the teased or the teaser back in those tumultuous and torturous high school days.
The award-winning documentary Dark Days takes a frightening look at a community of homeless men and women — many of them former or current crack users — who live in the Amtrak tunnels beneath Penn Station. They sleep in tents, cardboard shacks, and small plywood shanties, some of which have been painted and decorated. As the belowground residents shave, cook, play with their pets, and take showers under leaking pipes, trains speed by, and rats scavenge through the countless mounds of garbage. At times some of the men venture aboveground (“up top”) to go through trash cans, mostly looking for recyclable bottles and junk items they can resell. First-time filmmaker Marc Singer became a part of this colony for two years (he initially went down to help the people, not to film them), getting the residents to open up and tell their fascinating stories, which turn out to be filled with a surprising zest for living. In fact, all of the underground shooting was completed with the help of the subjects themselves acting as the crew when they were not on camera. DJ Shadow composed the haunting music for this strangely enriching look at a mysterious, truly terrifying part of New York City. Dark Days celebrates its tenth anniversary with a theatrical run beginning July 1 at Cinema Village in advance of the July 19 release of the special-edition DVD, which includes featurettes on the making of the film, an update on many of the characters, Singer revisiting the tunnels, a photo essay by Margaret Morton, and more. 