Yearly Archives: 2012

DISAPPEARING ACT IV: POLICE, ADJECTIVE

Cristi (Dragos Bucur) is on one helluva boring stakeout in Romanian black comedy

POLICE, ADJECTIVE (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2009)
Bohemian National Hall
321 East 73rd St. between First & Second Aves.
Friday, April 13, free, 8:15
Festival runs April 10-22 at Bohemian National Hall, IFC Center, and FIAF
new-york.czechcentres.cz

The first half of Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective is as dreadfully boring as Detective Cristi’s (Dragos Bucur) assignment, tailing a student, Victor (Radu Costin), who enjoys a joint with two of his friends every day after school. While Cristi wants to nail the kid’s supplier, the cop’s boss has him on a tight deadline, insisting he arrest Victor if the investigation continues to go nowhere, but Cristi strongly disagrees with putting the teenager away for up to seven years for a crime he believes will soon be abolished by the government. However, the film picks up considerably as Cristi seeks help from various contacts, getting caught up in red tape and public servants who would really rather not be bothered. And when he get called in by the chief (Vlad Ivanov from 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days) and gets a long lecture in linguistics, well, you won’t be able to control yourself from laughing out loud. Porumboiu (12:08 East of Bucharest) keeps the pace very slow and very steady, but hang in there, because the end is a riot. Police, Adjective, which won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, screened at the New York Film Festival and at MoMA as part of the “Contenders, 2009,” series, and was Romania’s official entry for the Foreign Language Film Academy Award, is being shown April 13 at the Bohemian National Hall as part of “Disappearing Act IV,” a festival of recent European films that also includes such works as Miguel Gomes’s Our Beloved Month of August (Aquele Querido Mes de Agosto) from Portugal and France, Vaclav Kadrnka’s Eighty Letters (Osmdesat dopisu) from the Czech Republic, Jaroslav Vojtek’s The Border (Hranice) from Slovakia, Argyris Papadimitropoulos and Jan Vogel’s Wasted Youth from Greece, and Marc Bauder’s The System (Das System ― alles verstehen heisst alles verzeihen) from Germany, with many screenings followed by a Q&A with members of the cast and/or crew. The series is curated and produced by Irena Kovarova and presented in association with the Czech Center, the Romanian Cultural Institute, and the Group of European Cultural Institutes and Diplomatic Representations in New York.

VIDEO OF THE DAY: FLOATING POINT WAVES

HERE Arts Center
145 Sixth Ave. at Dominick St.
April 10-14, 8:30, $20
212-647-0202
www.here.org

In January 2011, HERE presented a workshop production of LEIMAY’s Floating Point Waves as part of its annual Culturemart festival. The experimental evening-length piece, which is now having its official premiere at HERE, continuing April 10-14, was conceived and designed by dancer-choreographer Ximena Garnica and video artist Shige Moriya, the duo that runs the New York Butoh Festival, the upcoming inaugural SOAK Festival, and CAVE. Garnica and Moriya are also the masterminds behind LEIMAY, the performance installation company whose previous works include Furnace, Trace of Purple Sadness, and Becoming. In Floating Point Waves, Garnica and Moriya, collaborating with sound composer Jeremy D. Slater and lighting designer Solomon Weisbard, create an immersive, meditative environment that shimmers with shadows and reflections, splashes of color in the darkness, and slow movement through strings and water as a live electronic score plays along with real-time video, coming together to create a mesmerizing experience. Garnica and Moriya will participate in the discussion “Tracing the Art” after the April 10 performance, while the April 11 show will be followed by an audience roundtable.

SPRING INTO SLAPSTICK: THREE STOOGES MATINEES

Larry, Moe, and Curly will be spending spring break at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens

Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Daily through April 15, free with museum admission
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

Some time ago, in a previous incarnation, we penned a bio of the Three Stooges that claimed, “It is nearly impossible for the average American citizen to go a week without somehow coming into contact with some aspect of the Three Stooges.” That statement could not be more true these days, with the impending release of the Farrelly brothers movie The Three Stooges — which is a fictional comedy, not a biopic — and three weeks of Stooges shorts at the Museum of the Moving Image, continuing through April 15. The Moving Image is concentrating on the Curly years, from 1934 to 1936, in which siblings Moses “Moe” Horwitz and Jerome “Curly” Horwitz, using the stage name Howard, teamed up with violinist Louis Feinberg, better known as Larry Fine, to make some of the wildest, craziest, and funniest shorts of cinema’s golden age. Monday through Friday at 2:00 of this week, the Astoria institution will show 1937’s Grips, Grunts and Groans, in which Curly has to stand in for a drunk wrestler, 1943’s From Nurse to Worse, in which the trio schemes to pull off an insurance scam to get some dough, and 1941’s In the Sweet Pie and Pie, in which the boys are on Death Row when they get an offer to marry three scheming dames. There will be encore presentations Saturday and Sunday at 12 noon and 3:00, along with Claymation workshops and daily demonstrations suitable for children ten and up. Short films around twenty minutes apiece was the forte of the vaudeville-trained Stooges, whose feature-length films were an embarrassment, including Have Rocket, Will Travel, Snow White and the Three Stooges, The Three Stooges Meet Hercules, and The Outlaws Is Coming, all of which were made after both Curly and Shemp had died. It remains to be seen whether the Farrelly brothers can pull off a worthwhile full-length homage, although the previews don’t bode well.

STREET VIEWS: DECASIA

DECASIA (Bill Morrison, 2002)
Maysles Institute
343 Malcolm X Blvd. between 127th & 128th Sts.
Tuesday, April 10, $10, 7:30
212-582-6050
www.mayslesinstitute.org
www.billmorrisonfilm.com

Experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison’s production company is called Hypnotic Pictures, and for good reason; the Chicago-born, New York-based auteur makes mesmerizing, visually arresting works using archival found footage and eclectic soundtracks that are a treat for the eyes and ears. Several of his films were recently shown at a retrospective at the World Financial Center (including The Miners’ Hymns, Spark of Being, The Great Flood, and his masterpiece, Decasia), but if you missed that last one, you now have another chance to catch it at the Maysles Institute on April 10, where it is screening as part of the “Street Views” series curated by Paul Dallas and Anthony Titus. Made in 2002, Decasia is about nothing less than the beginning and end of cinema. The sixty-seven-minute work features clips from early silent movies that are often barely visible in the background as the film nitrate disintegrates in the foreground, black-and-white psychedelic blips, blotches, and burns dominating the screen. The eyes at first do a dance between the two distinct parts, trying to follow the action of the original works as well as the abstract shapes caused by the filmstrip’s impending death, but eventually the two meld into a single unique narrative, enhanced by a haunting, compelling score by Bang on a Can’s Michael Gordon, which begins as a minimalist soundtrack and builds slowly until it reaches a frantic conclusion. The on-screen destruction might seem random, but it is actually carefully choreographed by Morrison, who wrote, directed, produced, and edited the film. Following the screening, Morrison will participate in a Q&A with architect David Gersten of the Cooper Union, moderated by Titus. “Street Views,” which “explores our connection to the built environment through documentaries, narratives, and experimental works,” continues April 24 with Peter Bo Rappmund’s Psychohydragraphy and concludes April 25 with Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Abendland.

JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR

JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR has been resurrected at the Neil Simon Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Neil Simon Theater
250 West 52nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tickets: $79-$142
www.superstaronbroadway.com

Des McAnuff’s revival of Jesus Christ Superstar is a rousing resurrection of the Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice flower-power rock opera. McAnuff, who cowrote and directed The Who’s Tommy, imbues this Superstar with a keen balance of over-the-top glitz and salt-of-the-earth drama that serves the bumpy musical well, as it’s always been more a series of set pieces than a character-driven narrative. A digital news ticker counts down the days to Passover as Judas (a powerful Josh Young) considers betraying Jesus (a solid if unexceptional Paul Nolan) because he believes that things have gotten way out of control — and he is jealous of his friend and master’s extremely close relationship with Mary Magdalene (an alluring Chilina Kennedy). As the seder/last supper approaches, Caiaphas (the deep-voiced Marcus Nance) and his council plot to arrest Jesus while Pontius Pilate (a regal Tom Hewitt) prepares to wash his hands of it all. Music coordinator John Miller and orchestra conductor Rick Fox don’t mess too much with the music, updating it a bit but primarily letting such familiar songs as “What’s the Buzz,” “Hosanna,” and “Everything’s Alright” stand on their own. Kennedy delivers a beautiful “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” Tony nominee Hewitt (The Rocky Horror Show) nobly talk-sings his way through a brutally violent “Trial by Pilate/39 Lashes,” and Nolan is gloriously lifted to the heavens in “Crucifixion,” but it’s Bruce Dow who steals the show as the wonderfully campy King Herod, his signature song exploding in a bevy of bright lights and kitschy glamour. “So, you are the Christ / You’re the great Jesus Christ,” he declares in the production’s biggest dance number, “Prove to me that you’re no fool / Walk across my swimming pool.” McAnuff and choreographer Lisa Shriver place the action on Robert Brill’s two-story set built around a pair of multipurpose movable metallic bleachers that tend to get overused, with cast members continually climbing up and down, and some of the songs fall flat, but this is still a very welcome return for one of Broadway’s most unusual period pieces.

EASTER PARADE AND EASTER BONNET FESTIVAL

In their Easter bonnets, with all the frills upon it, folks will be the grandest in the Easter parade

St. Patrick’s Cathedral and other locations
Fifth Ave. between 50th & 51st Sts.
Sunday, April 8, free, 10:00 am – 4:00 pm
www.nycgo.com

Every Easter Sunday, thousands of visitors descend on St. Patrick’s Cathedral to celebrate the holiday in a unique way. They show up in colorful outfits that feature all kinds of hats, from subdued and elegant to wild and crazy, meandering between 49th and 57th Sts. on Fifth Ave. And it’s not just men, women, and children; you can expect to see a whole lot of pets dressed up for the day as well. Although it is called the Easter Parade and Bonnet Festival, it is not a parade in the usual sense, with people and floats marching in line up Fifth Ave.; instead they just mill about, showing themselves off while admiring others. St. Patrick’s will hold several masses on Easter, at 7:00, 8:00, 8:45, 10:15 (ticketed), 12 noon, 1:00, 4:00 (in Spanish), and 5:30. You can also spend Easter Sunday uptown at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, where they’re hosting an Easter Paper Scavenger Hunt, a Pretty Pattern Easter Egg Collage class, and Ukrainian-inspired Patterned Easter Egg workshops, or downtown at Trinity Church, where the Easter Fun Fest takes place in the courtyard from 12:30 to 2:30, including scavenger and egg hunts, a puppet parade, the Easter Bunny, and more.

BEING SHAKESPEARE

Simon Callow goes through the seven stages of Shakespeare in one-man show (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
Through April 14, $25-$100
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Obsessed with William Shakespeare since he was six years old, British actor Simon Callow, now sixty-two, is currently at BAM playing Hermione and Leontes from The Winter’s Tale, Mark Antony and Caesar from Julius Caesar, Jaques, Orlando, and Rosalind from As You Like It, Antipholus from The Comedy of Errors, Falstaff and Prince Henry from Henry IV, Prospero and Miranda from The Tempest, Quince, Flute, Bottom, and Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Kings Henry V, Richard II, and Lear (as well as Queen Margaret), both Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Old Hamlet, and even Shakespeare himself. And he does all that and more in a mere hour and a half in the one-man show Being Shakespeare, written by Bard scholar and Oxford English literature professor Jonathan Bate and directed and designed by Tom Cairns. Built around Jaques’s seven stages of man monologue from As You Like It — “All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players / They have their exits and their entrances / And one man in his time plays many parts / His acts being seven ages” — Being Shakespeare follows the Bard from birth to death, with Callow (Shakespeare in Love, Four Weddings and a Funeral) discussing various aspects of Shakespeare’s personal life, about which precious little is known, and relating them to specific lines and characters from his plays and sonnets. Although there are a handful of Eureka! moments, there are also a lot of comparisons that are too much of a stretch, supposition instead of fact. Bate does include fascinating tidbits about Shakespeare’s sisters, working in his father’s glove-making shop, dealing with lawyers, and marrying the pregnant Anne Hathaway, but the show often feels more like a historical literary lecture than a dramatic play — and, of course, as Hamlet famously intoned, “The play’s the thing.” Callow does a magnificent job at some points, particularly his marvelously entertaining handling of an exchange between Falstaff and Prince Henry about preparing an army unit and the scene in which Peter Quince is casting Pyramus and Thisbe in Dream, but other snippets lack depth and power, perhaps better in idea than in execution. Being Shakespeare might be a treat for Shakespeare fanatics and completists, but it will leave others wanting more. Callow will participate in a postshow talk moderated by Jeff Dolven on April 12, and Bate will be in conversation with Barry Edelstein on April 15 in the BAM Hillman Attic Studio.