Yearly Archives: 2012

GOON

Everything is not quite kosher in Mike Dowse’s GOON, which explores the bloodier side of the great sport of hockey

GOON (Mike Dowse, 2012)
Opens Friday, March 30
www.magnetreleasing.com

Mike Dowse’s ultraviolent hockey comedy, Goon, comes along at a pivotal moment in the history of the NHL. More than ever before, the league is disciplining most kinds of physical contact that result in injuries, particularly concussions, following the early death of three current and former enforcers last summer. Fighting, however, has been allowed to continue, regularly argued that fisticuffs are necessary in order to avoid other, more vicious attacks on the ice. Somehow Dowse and cowriters Evan Goldberg (Superbad, Pineapple Express) and Jay Baruchel manage to skirt the more serious issues, making a very funny, extremely lowbrow movie that truly honors the sport that it loves so much while celebrating the bloodier aspects of the game. Seann William Scott (American Pie) stars as Doug Glatt, a none-too-swift Jewish bouncer whose parents (Eugene Levy and Ellen David) could not be more disappointed in him. When a minor-league hockey coach sees Glatt lay out one of his players who jumped into the crowd, he decides to turn Glatt into a hockey goon — but first he has to teach him how to skate. Soon Glatt is promoted to a better league, where his fists make him an instant star and lead to a growing fan club headed by his best friend, Pat (Baruchel), and Eva (Alison Pill), a self-admitted slut whom Glatt immediately falls for. As Glatt’s team starts winning, the hockey world prepares for the ultimate showdown between the up-and-coming Glatt and living legend Ross “the Boss” Rhea (noted thespian Liev Schreiber), a nasty player who wants to go out with one last bang before he retires. You don’t have to know much about hockey to get a kick out of Goon, which was inspired by real-life enforcer Douglas Smith’s book, Goon: The True Story of an Unlikely Journey into a Minor Hockey League, as well as the escapades of minor league fighter Mike Bajurny and Baruchel’s own father, who played on a Jewish youth team when he was a kid. The film is filled with offensive jokes that sometimes teeter on that fine line between funny and homophobic, but such locker-room talk is ultimately trumped by the film’s endearing good nature that makes it likable even when it crosses various lines of ethics and taste. There have been fewer than twenty movies made about hockey, from the classic (Slap Shot) to the solid (Miracle, The Rocket), to the absurd (Youngblood, MVP: Most Valuable Primate). Goon might not be in the same league as Slap Shot, but it can stand its ground and duke it out with the best of the rest. (Stick around for the closing credits, which include video of some of Smith’s greatest battles.)

SUNSHINE AT MIDNIGHT: HOUSE

Japanese cult horror comedy finally gets a theatrical release

Japanese cult horror comedy will delight midnight-movie fans at Landmark Sunshine


HOUSE (HAUSU) (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977)

Landmark Sunshine Cinema
143 East Houston St. between First & Second Aves.
Friday, March 30, and Saturday, March 31, 12 midnight
212-330-8182
www.landmarktheatres.com
www.janusfilms.com/house

One of the craziest movies ever made, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 cult classic, House (Hausu), is truly one of those things that has to be seen to be believed. House is a psychedelic black horror comedy musical about Gorgeous (Kimiko Ikegami) and six of her high school friends who choose to spend part of their summer vacation at Gorgeous’s aunt’s (Yoko Minamida) very strange house. Gorgeous, whose mother died when she was little and whose father (Saho Sasazawa) is about to get married to Ryoko (Haruko Wanibuchi), brings along her playful friends Melody (Eriko Ikegami), Fantasy (Kumiko Oba), Prof (Ai Matsubara), Sweet (Masayo Miyako), Kung Fu (Miki Jinbo), and Mac (Mieko Sato), who quickly start disappearing like ten little Indians. House is a ceaselessly entertaining head trip of a movie, a tongue-in-chic celebration of genre with spectacular set designs by Kazuo Satsuya, beautiful cinematography by Yoshitaka Sakamoto, and a fab score by Asei Kobayashi and Mickie Yoshino. The original story actually came from the mind of Obayashi’s eleven-year-old daughter, Chigumi, who clearly has one heck of an imagination. Oh, and we can’t forget about the evil cat, a demonic feline to end all demonic felines. The film was released theatrically in 2010 prior to its appearance on DVD from Janus, the same company that puts out such classic fare as Federico Fellini’s Amarcord, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Jacques Tati’s M. Hulot’s Holiday, François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa Vie, so House has joined some very prestigious company. And who are we to say it doesn’t deserve it?

LA VITA E CINEMA — THE FILMS OF NANNI MORETTI: CARO DIARIO

Doctors can’t help Nanni Moretti find out what’s wrong with him in charming CARO DIARIO

CARO DIARIO (DEAR DIARY) (Nanni Moretti, 1994)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
March 31 – April 2
Series continues through April 5
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

Nanni Moretti’s highly personal and very funny memoir, Caro Diario, is simply wonderful; Moretti plays himself, a filmmaker roaming around Rome on his Vespa and riding into charming little vignettes, including bumping into Jennifer Beals, with whom he’s obsessed. Moretti then travels to the Eolie Islands with his friend Gerardo (Renato Carpentieri), and more comic adventures ensue. The mood changes when Moretti comes down with a rash that doctor after doctor diagnoses differently. This international hit earned Moretti nominations and awards galore, including being named Best Director at the David di Donatello Awards and at Cannes. Caro Diario is screening Saturday, Sunday, and Monday as part of the IFC Center series “La Vita e Cinema: The Films of Nanni Moretti,” being held in conjunction with the U.S. theatrical release of Moretti’s latest, We Have a Pope, which opens at the IFC Center on April 6. Moretti will discuss the film at the 5:45 screening on April 1. Other films in the retrospective include I Am Self-Sufficient, Bianca, Sweet Dreams, The Son’s Room, and The Mass Is Ended.

THE REVIEW PANEL: WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2012

The National Academy will examine the Whitney Biennial on March 30

National Academy Museum
1083 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Friday, March 30, $12, 6:30
212-369-4880 ext201
www.nationalacademy.org
whitney.org

We know what we think of this year’s Whitney Biennial — and we’ll be letting you know soon — but in the meantime you can find out others’ thoughts on the 2012 exhibit at the next meeting of the Review Panel, being held March 30 at 6:00 at the National Academy. The National Academy regularly invites a small group of art critics and writers to discuss current exhibitions going on around the city, but this time they’ll focus only on the biennial, for which curators Elisabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders have added some different elements. David Cohen of artcritical.com will moderate the discussion, with participants Bill Berkson (artcritical.com, Art in America), Will Heinrich (The New York Observer), and Karen Wilkin (The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal). The National Academy is in the midst of its own annual exhibition right now, which we’ll also be telling you more about shortly. The next Review Panel is scheduled for April 27 with Cohen, Lance Esplund, Maddie Phinney, and Barry Schwabsky examining several shows taking place around town.

YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS: CITIZEN KANE

Rubin Museum screening of Orson Welles masterpiece focuses on memory

CITIZEN KANE (Orson Welles, 1941
Cabaret Cinema, Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, March 30, free with $7 bar minimum, 9:30
212-620-5000
www.rmanyc.org/cabaretcinema
www2.warnerbros.com/citizenkane

Citizen Kane is the best-made film we have ever had the pleasure to watch — again and again and again — and it is even more brilliant on the big screen. A young, brash, determined Orson Welles created a masterpiece unlike anything seen before or since — a beautifully woven complex narrative with a stunning visual style (compliments of director of photography Gregg Toland) and a fabulous cast of veterans from his Mercury radio days, including Everett Sloane, Joseph Cotten, Ray Collins, Paul Stewart, and Agnes Moorehead. Each moment in the film is unforgettable, not a word or shot out of place as Welles details the rise and fall of a self-obsessed media mogul. The film is prophetic in many ways; at one point Kane utters, “The news goes on for twenty-four hours a day,” foreseeing today’s 24/7 news overload. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve never seen it and you know what Rosebud refers to; the film is about a whole lot more than just that minor mystery. Like every film Welles made, Citizen Kane was fraught with controversy, not the least of which was a very unhappy William Randolph Hearst seeking to destroy the negative of a film he thought ridiculed him. Kane won only one Oscar, for writing — which also resulted in controversy when Herman J. Mankiewicz claimed that he was the primary scribe, not Welles. The film lost the Oscar for Best Picture to John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, but it has topped nearly every greatest-films-of-all-time list ever since. Citizen Kane will be screening March 30 at 9:30 as part of the Rubin Museum series “You Must Remember This,” focusing on memory in conjunction with its current Brainwave series and will be introduced by Israeli journalist Rula Jebreal. Admission to the Rubin is free on Friday nights, so you should also check out the exhibitions “Hero, Villain, Yeti,” “Modernist Art from India,” and the outstanding “Casting the Divine.”

SONG OF THE DAY — DEBBIE MILLER: “INCH BY INCH”

Rockwood Music Hall Stage 2
196 Allen St. between Houston & Stanton Sts.
Saturday, March 31, free, 7:00
212-477-4155
thedebbiemiller.com
www.rockwoodmusichall.com

“Please inhale these minutes / And hold it in, swish it around / To savor the love / That we found,” Debbie Miller sings on the touching “Inch by Inch,” the single from her brand-new EP, Measures + Waits. “Once upon a time I / Breathed warm rivulets down your spine / All I have left are / Patterns on cheekbones once buried in your chest,” she continues. The utterly delightful singer-songwriter, a native New Yorker who now lives in Seattle, mixes elements of classical, folk, jazz, Tin Pan Alley, and pop with an endearing honesty and a delightful sense of humor into her personal, intimate songs. The follow-up to her 2010 debut album, Fake Love, the EP contains five studio tracks and a live version of “Snippets from a Bathroom Stall,” which is composed of actual graffiti taken from bathroom stalls: “Love one another / Drink lots of holy water / Isaac Newton practiced alchemy . . . on your mother,” Miller sings. On the playful “What She’s Got,” Miller compares herself to a romantic rival, asking, “What’s she got that I don’t got / Except bigger boobs / A few inches to my height / And nothing to lose lose lose loo-loo-lose.” Miller, who plays piano and guitar and recently charmed audiences with the new song “Queen of Hearts” written for a Bushwick Book Club event in Seattle dedicated to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, will be at Rockwood Music Hall on March 31 celebrating the release of Measures + Waits.

THE SOAP MYTH

Annie Blumberg (Andi Potamkin) and Milton Saltzman (Greg Mullavey) search for the horrific truth in THE SOAP MYTH (photo by Richard Termine)

Black Box Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Through April 22, $50-$60
212-352-3101
www.thesoapmyth.com
www.nationaljewishtheater.com

For more than sixty years, historians and Holocaust survivors have debated whether or not the Nazis actually manufactured soap from the fat of Jewish victims. Inspired by the true story of concentration camp survivor Morris Spitzer, whose one-man crusade to get Holocaust museums to include exhibits on soap made from murdered humans was detailed in a 2000 article in Moment magazine, Jeff Cohen’s The Soap Myth examines the horrific claim in an emotionally moving production running at the Black Box Theatre through April 22 (with no shows during Passover). Greg Mullavey (Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman) stars as Milton Saltzman, a survivor who is determined to convince Holocaust museum historians and curators Esther Feinman (Dee Pelletier) and Daniel Silver (Donald Corren) that the Nazis indeed made soap from human remains. He just can’t understand why they have changed their minds about something that used to be accepted as fact. Feinman and Silver try to explain to him that because of the growing number of Holocaust deniers, the bar for evidence has been raised dramatically, so there is not enough documentation to support this specific claim anymore. “The question of soap no longer meets our evidentiary criteria,” Feinman tells Saltzman. Thrust into the middle of the battle is Annie Blumberg (the adorable Andi Potamkin), a young writer assigned by a magazine to do an article on Saltzman and soap. “I am just a witness,” Saltzman explains to the journalist, whom he continually says is too nice to take on such an important story. “And soon I will be gone. Soon, all the witnesses will be gone.” Despite some serious structural flaws — Blumberg addresses the audience directly several times, a device that is klunky and awkward; a midpoint transition to Pelletier as a popular Holocaust denier seems to come out of nowhere; and a late embrace descends into treacly melodrama — The Soap Myth does a good job of presenting all sides of the controversy. Cohen (The Man Who Ate Michael Rockefeller), who was given a copy of the Moment article directly by Spitzer, has written a compelling play that is not just about soap but about the search for the truth and the importance of getting things right as the number of Holocaust witnesses decline. Mullavey gives a powerful performance as Saltzman, a tightly wound old man who sees only his own reality. Corren is also strong as a Borscht Belt comic, Silver, and a series of Nuremberg witnesses who appear behind a scrim on Heather Wolensky’s sparse set. Directed by Arnold Mittelman for the National Jewish Theater, The Soap Myth offers an intriguing look into the speculative nature of history and one man’s furious dedication to setting the record straight.