Yearly Archives: 2012

CINDY SHERMAN — CARTE BLANCHE: FUNNY GAMES

There’s nothing funny about Michael Haneke’s FUNNY GAMES

FUNNY GAMES (Michael Haneke, 1997)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Saturday, April 7, 5:00
Series runs through April 10
Tickets: $12, 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 beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

Michael Haneke’s Funny Games is a harrowing home invasion movie that is as brutal as it is ultimately frustrating. Haneke (The Piano Teacher, Cache) manipulates the audience nearly as much as he does the characters on-screen, even breaking the fourth wall by having one of the villains address the viewer several times. When Anna (Susanne Lothar), Georg (Ulrich Mühe from The Lives of Others), and their son, Schorschi (Stefan Clapczynski), head to their summer vacation home on a lake, they have no idea what lies in store for them. A man (Arno Frisch) claiming to be a friend of their neighbors’ shows up asking for some eggs, but there is a subtle malevolence behind his odd demeanor. He is soon joined by a companion (Frank Giering) who insists on trying out one of Georg’s golf clubs. It’s not long before the two men, who alternately call each other Peter and Paul, Tom and Jerry, and Beavis and Butt-Head, have severely broken Georg’s leg, sexually harass Anna, and put a bag over Schorschi’s head, all for no apparent reason except that they are bored and want to play some games, the more dangerous the better. It’s a tense, frightening film that never lets up, even when it appears to be over. The soundtrack juices up the horror, with classical music by Mozart and Handel offset by screeching punk by John Zorn and Naked City. Mühe and Lothar later reunited for Nicole Mosleh’s Nemesis, which was completed shortly before Mühe’s sudden death from stomach cancer in 2007. Haneke made an American remake of Funny Games in 2008, with Tim Roth as George, Naomi Watts as Anna, Brady Corbet as Peter, and Michael Pitt as Paul, with an appearance by Frisch as well. The original Funny Games is screening April 7 as part of MoMA’s “Carte Blanche: Cindy Sherman” series, a collection of films curated by photographer Cindy Sherman in conjunction with her glorious retrospective at the museum, which features many of her untitled film stills. Other works in the series include David Lynch’s Inland Empire, John Frankenheimer’s Seconds, John Cassavetes’s Shadows, John Waters’s Desperate Living, and Sherman’s own Doll Clothes and Office Killer.

SPA WEEK: SPRING 2012

The upscale Exhale will offer $50 facials, mani/pedis, and mind/body classes during Spa Week

Multiple locations
All treatments: $50
www.spaweek.com

We love Spa Week. Over the years we have been massaged, pedicured, hair-styled, exercised, and pampered at fabulous (and usually expensive) studios and spas throughout New York City for amazing prices. Spa Week is all about making services available and affordable for us regular New Yorkers twice a year, spring and fall. Spa Week appointments have been booking out faster every year; this year twi-ny is pleased to report that the SpaWeek.com site has opened early, but you still better hurry to make your reservation. Participants can register now for free and choose from among a dizzying array of treatments for Spa Week 2012, which runs April 16-22. Among the $50 services offered by nearly one hundred spas spread out across four boroughs, Westchester, Long Island, and other areas are therapeutic full-body massages and aromatic well-being facials at the Salon & Spa at Saks Fifth Avenue, peppermint mani/pedis and full-body scrub with chamomile and marine wraps at Dyanna Body Nail Salon, laser hair removal at Completely Bare and Skintology, orange and grapefruit citrus facial treatments at L’Institut Sothys, acupuncture for pain management at Green Tea Massage and Spa, five-packs of mind/body classes at the classy Exhale Mind/Body Spas, eyelash extensions at Albina’Spa, and a package of Gharshana silk gloves exfoliation, Abhyanga massage, and Shirodhra head and foot massage at Fine Living New York Ayurveda. We haven’t tried the last two items yet, but they’re high on our list. Most places also accept Spa Week gift cards, so they make a pretty decent present as well.

SURVIVING PROGRESS

Robert Wright does not exactly predict a bright future for the world in intellectual documentary

SURVIVING PROGRESS (Mathieu Roy & Harold Crooks, 2011)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, April 6
212-924-3363
survivingprogress.com
www.cinemavillage.com

The highly intellectual documentary Surviving Progress begins by evoking Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, cutting from a chimpanzee studying miniature monolithic blocks to an astronaut floating in space. That is followed by author and lecturer Ronald Wright looking our in front of him, carefully considering his words before saying, “In defining progress, I think it’s very important to make a distinction between good progress and bad progress. . . . We tend to delude ourselves that these changes always result in improvements from the human point of view.” Over the course of the next eighty minutes, directors Mathieu Roy (Ecclestone’s Formula) and Harold Crooks (The Corporation) unveil a stream of scientific and cultural experts who explain that change is not always good. Inspired by Wright’s bestselling book A Short History of Progress, the film explores how twenty-first-century advancements have come with increasingly dangerous caveats. “We’re now reaching a point at which technological progress and the increase in our economies and our numbers threaten the very existence of humanity,” Wright explains. Wright is joined by a parade of experts, including author Margaret Atwood, primatologist Jane Goodall, environmental professor Vaclav Smil, the No Impact Project’s Colin Beavan, tour guide Chen Ming, cognitive psychologist Gary Marcus, geneticist and activist David Suzuki, Synthetic Genomics CEO J. Craig Venter, Friends of the Congo’s Kambale Musavuli, and others, who delve into discussions of deforestation and overpopulation, banking and finance, politics and religion, science and nature, evolution and revolution, and the everyday struggles of families across the globe. “We are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history,” theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking says. “But I’m an optimist.” After watching Surviving Progress, it’s not so easy to be filled with any such hope. (Surviving Progress opens April 6 at Cinema Village, with codirector Crooks participating in a Q&A following the 7:00 screening on April 7.)

KEYHOLE

Ulysses Pick (Jason Patric) searches for his wife in Guy Maddin’s haunting noir, KEYHOLE (photo © 2011 Cinema Atelier Tovar Ltd.)

KEYHOLE (Guy Maddin, 2011)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, April 6
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
keyhole-movie.tumblr.com

Inspired by Homer’s Odyssey, Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, and the Bowery Boys’ Spooks Run Wild, Canadian experimental filmmaker Guy Maddin has made Keyhole, a 1930s-style psychological gangster/ghost story set in a haunted house in which each room offers different thrills and chills and it’s nearly impossible to tell who is alive and who is dead. Shot in his trademark black-and-white (except for one quick image in color) but digitally for the first time, Maddin relates the barely decipherable tale of Ulysses Pick (Jason Patric), who has returned home after being away for many years. As he makes his odyssey through the house on a mission to find his ill wife, Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini), who has shackled her naked father, Calypso (Louis Negin), to her bed, Ulysses carries a drowned girl, Denny (Brooke Palsson), and drags a bound-and-gagged teenager, Manners (David Wontner), the son he does not recognize. A confident, determined man, Ulysses battles Big Ed (Daniel Enright) over control of the gang, including a tense scene with an electric chair at the center. Going door-to-door, Ulysses peers through keyholes as screams pierce through the night and clocks endlessly tick and tick and tick. “The happiness the house has known is free to vanish the moment its inhabitants leave,” Calypso intones in a voice-over, “but sorrow, sorrow must linger.” Maddin, who has previously made such gems as Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Careful, and My Winnipeg, has a unique cinematic style that veers away from linear, dialogue-laden narrative and instead concentrates on mood, offbeat characters, mysterious music, and captivating visuals that harken back to the silent-film era. In Keyhole, he has created an old-fashioned yet modern noir that, despite a meandering plot, is a captivating look at life, death, family, memory, and the human psyche.

THE ASSAULT

Terrorists hijack a plane in THE ASSAULT, based on a true story

THE ASSAULT (L’ASSAUT) (Julien Leclercq, 2010)
Village East Cinema
181-189 Second Ave. at 12th St.
Opens Friday, April 6
212-529-6799
www.lassaut-lefilm.com
www.villageeastcinema.com

French director Julien Leclercq re-creates an infamous 1994 hijacking in the action thriller The Assault. On Christmas Eve, four members of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (the GIA) boarded Air France Flight 8969 at Algiers’ Houari Boumedienne Airport and took the crew and 227 passengers hostage, demanding the release of two imprisoned Islamic Salvation Front leaders. Leclercq (Chrysalis) and screenwriter Simon Moutaïrou tells the story like a police procedural as the heavily armed terrorists begin killing passengers when their plan goes awry and they do not immediately get what they want. Meanwhile, the French Interior Ministry and the National Gendarmes Intervention Group (GIGN) are debating their response, including a possible all-out raid on the plane. Leclercq focuses on SWAT team member Thierry Prugnaud (Vincent Elbaz), whose wife (Marie Guillard) prays for his safe return; Yahia Abdallah (Aymen Saidi), a cold-blooded terrorist fiercely dedicated to his cause; and Carole (Melanie Bernier), a ministry worker who risks her career by taking charge. Although technically adept, The Assault lacks emotional resonance. The depiction of the relationship between Thierry and his wife and daughter feels forced, more of a soapy aside than an integral part of the film. There is little subtlety in evidence and plenty of clichés, with the hijackers representing pure evil, the GIGN officers primarily faceless, machinelike automatons, and the politicians overly concerned about themselves and how this will look to the world. The events, which were broadcast live in France, are quite remarkable, but Leclercq ends up draining them of much of their power, resulting in a surprisingly cold tale.

FIRST SATURDAYS: PARTY OF LIFE

Keith Haring, “Untitled,” Sumi ink on Bristol board, 1980 (© Keith Haring Foundation)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, April 7, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

Pennsylvania-born Keith Haring was one of the most influential street artists and activists of his generation. Known for his drawings and sculpture of cartoony characters, Haring redefined public art in New York City, where he moved when he was nineteen in 1978. In conjunction with the recent opening of its exhibit “Keith Haring: 1978-1982,” the Brooklyn Museum is dedicating its free April First Saturday programming to the life and career of Haring, who died in 1990 of AIDS-related complications. There will be guided tours of the exhibition, a break-dance performance by Floor Royalty Crew, workshops where visitors can make Haring-inspired buttons and Pop art prints, an artist talk by photographer Christopher Makos, who documented the street art scene in the 1970s and ’80s, a talk by Will Hermes about his new book, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever, and a dance party hosted by legendary DJ Junior Vasquez. In addition, there will be concerts by the Library Is on Fire and Comandante Zero (with live video) and a screening of Jacob Krupnick’s Girl Walk // All Day (followed by a Q&A with the director and some of the dancers in the film). As always, the galleries will be open late, giving visitors plenty of opportunity to check out the Keith Haring exhibit as well as “Playing House,” “Rachel Kneebone: Regarding Rodin,” “Raw/Cooked: Shura Chernozatonskaya,” “Newspaper Fiction: The New York Journalism of Djuna Barnes, 1913–1919,” “Question Bridge: Black Males,” and “19th-Century Modern.”

VIDEO OF THE DAY — LOST LANDER: “COLD FEET”

Professional forester Matt Sheehy, who was born and raised in Alaska and is now based in Portland, Oregon, infuses the debut album of his new group, Lost Lander, with elements of nature, animals, and the environment as the band takes off on shimmering layers of ethereal pop. DRRT (Glad I Did, January 2012) features such well-constructed songs as “Gossamer,” “Belly of the Bird / Valentina,” “The Sailor,” and “Your Name Is a Fire,” but it’s “Afraid of Summer” that’s most likely to keep swirling around in your head. The record was produced by former Menomena member Brent Knopf, who played with Sheehy in Ramona Falls. Named by Sheehy’s mother after a lake she used to vacation at in Wisconsin when she was young, Lost Lander — consisting of guitarist Sheehy, keyboardist Sarah Fennell, bassist Dave Lowensohn, and drummer Patrick Hughes — will be at Mercury Lounge on April 6 with Walk off the Earth and at Cameo Gallery on April 7 with Tan Vampire and Paper Twin.