In addition to laying siege to numerous communities in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, causing horrific death and destruction, Hurricane Sandy’s wrath forced the cancellation of many events that make the tristate area, and particularly New York City, what it is. With power back on throughout much of the five boroughs, some of these shows have been rescheduled, so you still have a chance to catch them. One of the most intriguing is an international double bill Tuesday night pairing Mexico City indie band Rey Pila, led by Los Dynamite founder Diego Solórzano, and Toronto quartet the Darcys. The Darcys will be playing their latest album, Aja (Arts & Crafts, January 2012) — yes, a reimagining of Steely Dan’s 1977 classic — in its entirety. You can get a free download of the record (as well as their self-titled debut) here. Rey Pila will be highlighting songs from their upcoming 2013 sophomore release, which includes such ’80s-inspired English-language synth-pop dance tracks as “Blast,” “The Future Sugar,” and “White Night,” featuring Solórzano’s deep, rolling voice. Above, you can check out Rey Pila’s remix of the Darcys’ version of Steely Dan’s “I Got the News.” The Darcys and Rey Pila will be at Mercury Lounge on November 6 for a gig that was originally scheduled for November 1 but had to be postponed because of the storm.
Yearly Archives: 2012
SAVOR THE BRONX: 2012 RESTAURANT WEEK
Multiple locations
November 5-16, lunch $16.41, dinner $20.12, or 15% off
www.savorthebronx.com
Postponed seven days because of Hurricane Sandy, the second annual Savor the Bronx Restaurant Week will run November 5-16, with nearly three dozen eateries offering special deals, either 15% off or prix-fixe lunches for $16.41 and dinners for $20.12. (The $16.41 price celebrates the year 1641, when Dutch immigrant Jonas Bronck purchased five hundred acres of land that later became part of the world’s toughest borough.) “Most local businesses and restaurants have suffered from the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, and we need to show them our support during these hard times,” said Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation president Marlene Cintron in an official statement. “Go out with your family and friends and enjoy a delicious meal at one of the participating restaurants, helping them when they need our help the most.” The restaurants offering one or both prix-fixe deals include the Bronx Ale House, Cozy Cottage Restaurant, Piper’s Kilt, the Clock, Sabrosura, Bistro SK, Arthur Avenue Trattoria, Artie’s Steak & Seafood, Giovanni’s, the Ice House Cafe, Mario’s, Spoto’s, Tosca Café, Ceetay, Palace of Japan, Babalu, Havana Café, and Pio Pio.
BONES BRIGADE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Documentary details the high-flying world of the Bones Brigade
BONES BRIGADE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (Stacy Peralta, 2011)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Saturday, November 3
212-924-7771
www.bonesbrigade.com
www.ifccenter.com
Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as skateboarding began to take off on the West Coast, one group of kids became the face of the growing movement. Sponsored by the Powell Peralta company founded by skateboard engineer George Powell and skater Stacy Peralta, the Bones Brigade was led by the core team of Tony Hawk, Mike McGill, Lance Mountain, Rodney Mullen, Steve Caballero, and Tommy Guerrero, who revolutionized the sport with their incredible tricks and long domination of competitions. Peralta, who went on to make such seminal skating films as Dogtown and Z-Boys and Riding Giants (as well as the gang documentary Crips and Bloods: Made in America), tells the oral and visual history of the early days in Bones Brigade: An Autobiography. Incorporating remarkable archival footage — cameras seem to have captured virtually every key moment in the team’s development — the film features the skaters talking about the rivalry among them, the pressure that came with winning so much, their personal struggles, and their intense desire to make Peralta happy. “I loved seeing these guys succeed,” Peralta says at one point. “They were so talented. I loved it more than I loved my own career.” The most fascinating tales are told by Mountain, who felt he was never as good as the others and essentially reexamined his life when he first saw McGill’s incredible McTwist, and Mullen, who had a long battle with his father and has an unusual way of expressing himself. Peralta also talks to such Bones Brigade rivals as Tony Alva and Christian Hosoi as well as such celebrity skaters and skate fans as Shepard Fairey, Ben Harper, and Spike Jonze. And there’s a hysterical look at the team’s extremely silly first full-length film, the legendary cult classic The Search for Animal Chin (which you can download for free here). Like some of the best skateboard moves, Bones Brigade: An Autobiography starts off slowly but picks up speed, racing toward an emotional finish. You don’t have to know anything about skateboarders to get a kick out of this compelling story of a once-in-a-lifetime team whose impact has now spread across several generations. (For our twi-ny talk with Tony Hawk, go here.)
GREGORY CREWDSON: BRIEF ENCOUNTERS
Gregory Crewdson carefully composes his next photograph in BRIEF ENCOUNTERS (courtesy Zeitgeist Films)
GREGORY CREWDSON: BRIEF ENCOUNTERS (Ben Shapiro, 2012)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
November 4-13
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
www.gregorycrewdsonmovie.com
From 2002 to 2008, Gregory Crewdson created a sensational body of work he called “Beneath the Roses,” consisting of intricately arranged large-scale photographs that capture the mysterious underside of small-town, middle-class America. Filmed primarily in the Western Massachusetts community where his family spent their summers while he was growing up, the photographs, all taken at twilight, are powerful, emotional still shots that look like they’re from a movie, usually involving solitary figures on the street or in a tense room, staring out, often with a car nearby, its door or trunk flung open, compelling viewers to come up with their own narrative of what they’re seeing. For ten years, Ben Shapiro followed Crewdson around as he worked on that series and others, and he details the Park Slope-born photographer’s unique creative process in the vastly entertaining and informative documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters. Crewdson, who shoots only at twilight, is obsessive about the shot he gets, agonizing first over the setting itself, then going over every little detail, from the turn of a character’s head to the proper amount of leg to reveal, with a crew that includes a director of photography, a production designer, a casting director, and other jobs usually more associated with film. “My pictures are about a search for a moment — a perfect moment,” he explains. “To me the most powerful moment in the whole process is when everything comes together and there is that perfect, beautiful, still moment. And for that instant, my life makes sense.”
Gregory Crewdson, “Untitled (The Madison),” from “Beneath the Roses,” archival pigment print, 2007 (© Gregory Crewdson)
Crewdson also talks about his past as he drives around Pittsfield searching out locations or looks through a photo album, discussing how he was influenced by his psychologist father and a trip they made to see a Diane Arbus exhibition at MoMA in 1972, when Crewdson was ten. Among those who share their thoughts about Crewdson are writers Russell Banks and Rick Moody, photographer Laurie Simmons, Aperture editor in chief Melissa Harris, and Crewdson’s director of photography, Richard Sands. Shapiro also travels to Rome with Crewdson for his 2010 “Sanctuary” series, taken at the abandoned Cinecittà studio in Rome, furthering his interest in film. Just as it’s fascinating to spend time exploring Crewdson’s photographs, it’s equally fascinating spending time with the man himself, a complex, bigger-than-life character with an intriguing outlook on his medium as well as the world at large. Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters will screen at Film Forum November 3-13, its original October 31 opening having been delayed because of Hurricane Sandy.
REPULSION
Catherine Deneuve is mesmerizing as a deeply troubled soul in Roman Polanski’s REPULSION
REPULSION (Roman Polanski, 1965)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
November 3-8
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
If you think Lower Manhattan was scary this last week while the power was out, just wait till you see Roman Polanski’s first English-language film, the 1965 psychological masterpiece Repulsion. Catherine Deneuve gives a mesmerizing performance as Carol Ledoux, a deeply troubled, beautiful young woman who shies away from the world, hiding something that has turned her into a frightened childlike creature who barely speaks. A manicurist who lives in London with her sister, Hélène (Yvonne Furneaux), Carol becomes entranced by cracks in the sidewalk, suddenly going nearly catatonic at their sight; in bed at night, she is terrified of the walls, which seem to break apart as she grips tight to the covers. A proper gentleman (John Fraser) is trying to start a relationship with her, but she ignores him or forgets about their meetings, unable to make any genuine connections. Deneuve’s every movement, from the blink of an eye to a wave of her hand, reveals Carol’s submerged inner turmoil and desperation, leading to an ending that is both shocking and not surprising. Shot in a creepy black-and-white by Gilbert Taylor (A Hard Day’s Night, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) and featuring a pulsating score by jazz legend Chico Hamilton, Repulsion is a brilliant journey into the limitations and possibilities of the human mind, with Polanski expertly navigating through a complex terrain. Winner of a pair of awards at the fifteenth Berlin International Film Festival, Repulsion, the first of Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy (followed by 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby and 1976’s The Tenant), will be screening in a new 35mm print November 3-8 at Film Forum, which is reopening this afternoon after having lost power because of Hurricane Sandy.
FIRST SATURDAYS — JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL: MY WAY
Jean-Michel Othoniel, “The Secret Happy End,” Murano glass, Saint Just’s mirror glass, metal, vintage carriage, 2008 (© Jean-Michel Othoniel)
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, November 3, free, 5:00 – 9:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org
The Brooklyn Museum is hosting a somewhat abbreviated version of its monthly free First Saturdays program tonight because of the hurricane, but it’s still packed with cool events built around the exhibition “Jean-Michel Othoniel: My Way,” a career survey of the idiosyncratic French artist that continues through December 2. There won’t be a dance party, but there will be live music by Slowdance, Jarana Beat, and Savoir Adore, a performance of The Blue Belt by Andrew Benincasa and Shadow Organ Theater, the experimental dance Ghost Lines by Cori Olinghouse, an origami demonstration, a movement workshop with Hip-Hop Dance Conservatory, a sensory gallery tour incorporating touch, smell, sight, and sound, an artist talk with members of Urban Glass, a glass-painting workshop, a book-club talk with Ruth B. Bottigheimer (Fairy Tales: A New History), and the psychedelic light projection “Cosmic Morning” by Don Miller. Also on view at the museum now are “Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the Universe,” “Materializing ‘Six Years’: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art,” and “Aesthetic Ambitions: Edward Lycett and Brooklyn’s Faience Manufacturing Company” in addition to long-term installations and the permanent collection.
6 DEGREES OF HELL
Corey Feldman plays a minor role in minor haunted horror flick
6 DEGREES OF HELL (Joe Raffa, 2012)
reRun Gastropub Theater
147 Front St. between Jay & Pearl Sts., Brooklyn
November 4-10, $7
718-766-9110
www.reruntheater.com
www.sixdegreesmovie.com
Set in a former hotel that itself was a subject on Ghost Detectives, Joe Raffa’s 6 Degrees of Hell is a Halloween horror flick that starts off promisingly before falling flat and careening into a meandering maelstrom. Paranormal investigator Kyle Brenner (Corey Feldman, who gets top billing but has very few scenes) has come to the small town of Metcalf to find out what happened one horrible night. Deputy Len Hendricks (Brian Anthony Wilson) fills him in as the story is told in a series of flashbacks in which Uncle Jack (Brian Gallagher) prepares his “Hotel of Horror” attraction with the help of Chris (David J. Bonner), Kelly (Ashley Sumner), Kellen (Raffa), and Rachel (Tereza Hakobyan), the classic quartet of partying youngsters who are either doomed from the start or destined to be heroes. They are joined by local ghost hunter Erik Sanborn (Kyle Patrick Brennan), who is harboring a secret of his own. Raffa (You’ll Know My Name) and screenwriter Harrison Smith fill 6 Degrees of Hell with references to a myriad of other horror movies, including, Night of the Living Dead, Friday the Thirteenth, The Exorcist, Fright Night, Creepshow, and the Hammer films, but it never manages to establish a uniqueness of its own. There are a handful of gruesome moments that are just excuses for blood and gore, leading to an infuriating ending that will disappoint the hell out of you. It’s better to keep several degrees of separation from this hackneyed haunted house movie.