Yearly Archives: 2012

THE CHOSEN ONES

Robyn Schall is one of six Jewish comics teaming up for “The Chosen Ones” Christmas Eve at Carolines

Carolines on Broadway
1626 Broadway between 49th & 50th Sts.
Monday, December 24, $20, 8:00
212-757-4100
www.carolines.com

Over at the Westside Theatre, Old Jews Telling Jokes has been knocking them dead for months with an evening of ridiculously funny Jewish jokes adapted from the popular website. But there’s no show on Christmas Eve, so the next best thing just might be the comedy show “The Chosen Ones,” in which a group of young Jewish comics gather at Carolines on Broadway to celebrate the holiday season. This year’s lineup features Harrison Greenbaum, Sam Morril, Robyn Schall, Adam Newman, Josh Rabinowitz, and Louis Katz. Showtime is 8:00, and tickets are a mere twenty bucks. Old Jews Telling Jokes is back on Christmas night and continues through May.

QUAY BROTHERS: ON DECIPHERING THE PHARMACIST’S PRESCRIPTION FOR LIP-READING PUPPETS

Career retrospective offers a dazzling look into the surreal world of the Brothers Quay (still from STREET OF CROCODILES, 1986)

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday–Monday through January 7
Museum admission: $22.50 ($12 can be applied to the purchase of a film ticket within thirty days)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

When MoMA Film associate curator Ron Magliozzi first approached twins Stephen and Timothy Quay about putting together a career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, the brothers weren’t sure why people would be interested in delving into their history and working process, but they opened their London studio to Magliozzi and helped design the appropriately strange and wonderful exhibit “On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets.” Similar in concept to the “Tim Burton” blockbuster a few years back, the Quay Brothers show is filled with paintings and drawings, film and video, early self-portraiture, photographs, collages, book and album covers, etchings, engravings, commercials, and other fascinating paraphernalia associated with their rather eclectic career, spread across several floors. Born in rural Pennsylvania in 1947 to a machinist father and homemaker mother, the Quays were heavily influenced by illustrator and naturalist Rudolf Freund, whom they met in the late 1960s; Polish poster art from the 1960s, which they saw in a 1967 exhibition at the Philadelphia College of Art; and avant-garde, experimental shorts by Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk.

Quay Brothers, detail, “O Inevitable Fatum, Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, décor,” wood, fabric, glass, metal, 1987 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The MoMA show is set up like a labyrinth, with treats around every corner, from oil snowscapes done when the brothers were still in single digits to short films made when they were in school, from the creepy Black Drawings of the mid-1970s and stage designs for opera, theater, and dance by Béla Bartók, Eugene Ionesco, Molière, Sergei Prokofiev, Georges Feydeau, E. T. A. Hoffman, and others to their British television documentaries, made with longtime producer Keith Griffiths and including the absolutely insane documentary Igor, the Paris Years Chez Pleyel, in which paper cut-outs of Bolshevik poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, French writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, and Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky hang out and do rather odd things in Paris. All of these works lend intrigue and insight to the primary sections of the exhibition, dedicated to the marvelous short films the Quays are renowned for, dark, dazzling stop-motion animations with puppets that relate mesmerizing tales set in a mysterious world of dreams and nightmares that delve into the subconscious. The Quay Brothers’ breakthrough came in 1986 with Street of Crocodiles, adapted from a Bruno Schulz short story, starring eyeless puppets with open heads and taking place in a Kinetoscope, featuring themes and elements that appear in many of their films, including machines, thread, scissors, repetitive movement, screws, bones, metal shavings, and aching, experimental music. Getting its own room, the film is followed by a two-minute outtake that has never been shown before. Among the many other classic Brothers Quay shorts on view in the galleries are In Absentia, The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer, Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, The Sandman, and the dazzling color films This Unnameable Little Broom and The Comb (from the Museums of Sleep). Downstairs outside the Titus Theaters is “Dormitorium,” a terrific collection, previously seen at Parsons the New School for Design in 2009, of film décors, glass-enclosed sets from many of the above-mentioned films as well as many others. And on the first floor by the up escalator you can find “Coffin of a Servant’s Journey,” a short film inside a coffin that can be watched by only one person at a time.

Quay Brothers, “Quay Brothers self-portrait,” photographic enlargement (Atelier Koninck QbfZ)

“On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets” is a magical trip inside the bizarre, surreal world of the Quay Brothers, an exhibition that was a long time coming and has been handled splendidly. It’s also an exhibition that requires a lot of time to be properly enjoyed, so don’t rush through it or you’ll miss so many of its myriad hidden treasures. And as far as the title itself goes, we’ll leave that to the Quays to describe themselves, as they do in the catalog in a faux interview with sixteenth-century composer Heinrich Holtzmüller: “In our mind it’s more of a teasing inducement for a journey. Not a grand journey but a tiny one . . . around the circumference of an apple. We’re no doubt gently abusing the anticipation that the prescriptive side is courting both a rational illegibility as well as an irrational legibility. Hopefully the intrigued will engage with the ambiguity. And besides, the prescription is only mildly inscrutable and one certainly won’t die from it, considering that thousands of people a year reportedly die from misread prescriptions.” You were expecting anything different?

(MoMA will be screening the Quay Brothers’ latest full-length film, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, on January 6-7 in Titus Theater 1, with a live musical score performed by Mikhail Rudy. Also on January 7, “The Essential Shorts, Part 2” will screen six shorts in the Education and Research Building, including Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, Nocturna Artificialia, Ex Voto, This Unnameable Little Broom: Epic of Gilgamesh, Maska, and Bartók Béla: Sonata for Solo Violin.)

CHINESE AND A MOVIE: BACK TO THE FUTURE PARTS I & II

Christoper Lloyd and Michael J. Fox discuss what kind of Chinese food they want in 1955, 1985, and 2015

92YTribeca
200 Hudson St. at Canal St.
Tuesday, December 25, $25-$30, 12:30
212-415-5500
www.92y.org/tribeca

“Okay. Time circuit’s on. Flux capacitor, fluxing. Engine running. All right.” Everything is ready for Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) and Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) to get in that DeLorean, hit eighty-eight miles per hour, and head into either 1955 or 2015 in the first two Back the Future movies, both directed by Robert Zemeckis, who has also given us such other popular films as Romancing the Stone, Forrest Gump, Cast Away, and now Flight. Both flicks, which at one point were going to star Eric Stoltz as Marty and John Lithgow as Doc Brown, are being shown at 92YTribeca’s annual “Chinese and a Movie” Christmas Day party, with the first film screening at 1:00 and the sequel at 3:15. They will be accompanied by a Chinese food buffet beginning at 12:30 and lasting until it is all gone. So come celebrate Christmas with Fox, Lloyd, Crispin Glover as hapless George McFly, Copernicus the dog, Thomas F. Wilson as tough local boy Biff, Lea Thompson as hot MILF Lorraine, and 1.21 gigawatts of electricity that combine with Plutonium to help the protagonists blast off into another time.

THE CLOCK

Time is off the essence in Christian Marclay’s twenty-four-hour film (© Christian Marclay)

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday–Monday through January 21
Museum admission: $25 ($12 can be applied to the purchase of a film ticket within thirty days)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

In 2010, the Whitney presented “Festival,” a thrilling interactive retrospective of the work of Christian Marclay, featuring multiple site-specific installations and live performances. The New York-based multidisciplinary artist followed that up with a supreme work of utter brilliance, the captivating twenty-four-hour video The Clock, which was initially shown at Chelsea’s Paula Cooper Gallery in early 2011 and reprised at the David Rubenstein Atrium as part of the Lincoln Center Festival this past summer. The sensational examination of time is now back for another run in the city, at MoMA through January 21. Screened in a large, dark gallery with three rows of roomy, comfortable couches in the Contemporary Galleries on the second floor, the film unfolds in real time, composed of thousands of clips from movies and television that feature all kinds of clocks and watches showing the minutes ticking away, as well as verbal mentions of the time. Masterfully edited so that it creates its own fluid narrative, The Clock seamlessly cuts from romantic comedies with birds emerging from cuckoo clocks to action films in which protagonists synchronize their watches, from thrillers with characters battling it out in clock towers to dramas with convicted murderers facing execution and sci-fi programs with mad masterminds attempting to freeze time. Marclay mixes in iconic images with excerpts from little-known foreign works, so audiences are kept on the edge of their seats, wondering what will come next, laughing knowingly at recognizable scenes and gawking at strange, unfamiliar bits.

A MoMA visitor wonders just how much longer he’ll have to wait to get in to see Christian Marclay’s THE CLOCK (© Christian Marclay)

Part of the beauty of The Clock is that while time is often central to many of the clips, it is merely incidental in others, someone casually checking their watch or a clock visible in the background, emphasizing how pervasive time is — both on-screen and in real life. Americans spend an enormous amount of time watching movies and television, so The Clock is also a wry though loving commentary on what we choose to do with our leisure time. Although it is not necessarily meant to be viewed in one massive gulp, The Clock will be shown in its entirety January 4-6, 11-14, and 18-20, beginning at 10:30 am Friday and continuing through 5:30 Sunday. Since the film corresponds to the actual time, midnight should offer some fascinating moments, although you might be surprised by just how exciting even three o’clock in the morning can be. But expect huge crowds whenever you go — capacity is 170 (130 sitting, 40 standing, first-come, first-served, and you can stay as long as you want) — so be prepared to do something with all that valuable time spent on line. But wait you should — it’s well worth every second.

SEE IT IN 70MM! IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD

Comedic giants come together for quite a wild ride in Stanley Kramer’s IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD

IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD (Stanley Kramer, 1963)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Saturday, December 22, 2:00, and Friday, December 28, 6:00
Series runs December 21 – January 1
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

They don’t come much crazier than the madcap 1963 comedy It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Producer-director Stanley Kramer takes a sharp turn with the wacky film, clearly needing a laugh following his rather serious string of issue pictures: The Defiant Ones, On the Beach, Inherit the Wind, and Judgment at Nuremberg. As he lays dying after a car crash, master thief Smiler Grogan (Jimmy Durante) tells a group of onlookers that there is $350,000 buried under a “big W” in Santa Rosita State Park. And off they go in search of the prize, willing to do just about anything and everything in order to get their greedy hands on the money. Hot on their trail is police captain T. G. Culpeper (Spencer Tracy), trying to solve one last case before he retires. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World lives up to its title, a mad, mad, mad, mad epic featuring the greatest all-star comedic cast ever assembled, including Sid Caesar, Edie Adams, Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, an absolutely lunatic Jonathan Winters, Terry-Thomas, Phil Silvers, Dick Shawn, Peter Falk, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, and Ethel Merman in addition to cameos by Jerry Lewis, Jack Benny, Joe E. Brown, Howard Da Silva, Andy Devine, Norman Fell, Selma Diamond, Leo Gorcey, Jim Backus, Marvin Kaplan, Stan Freberg, Arnold Stang, Jesse White, Carl Reiner, Don Knotts, Buster Keaton, and the Three Stooges. Basically, you can’t blink during the film’s 161 minutes or you’ll miss someone or some incredibly silly slapstick moment. And the ending is a laugh riot — literally. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is screening December 22 and December 28 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “See It in 70MM!,” comprising fifteen films being shown in their original 70mm glory, beginning December 21 with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and continuing through January 1 with such other works as Ron Fricke’s Baraka, John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn, Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, Basil Dearden’s Khartoum, Richard Brooks’s Lord Jim, and Jacques Tati’s Playtime.

BARBARA

Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld) and Barbara (Nina Hoss) try to retain their humanity under difficult conditions in 1980 East Germany

BARBARA (Christian Petzold, 2012)
Angelika Film Center, 18 West Houston St. at Mercer St., 212-995-2570
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway between 62nd & 63rd Sts., 212-757-2280
www.adoptfilms.net

Christian Petzold’s Barbara is a gripping, eerily slow-paced psychological thriller that explores fear, paranoia, and responsibility. Nina Hoss, in her fifth film with writer-director Petzold, gives a subtly powerful performance as Barbara Wolff, an East German doctor who has been shipped off by the government to a country hospital run by Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld). It is 1980, and Barbara has done something to get on the GDR watch list, causing her to be under near-constant surveillance. She carefully looks around everywhere she goes, wondering if the woman on the bus, the man out for a smoke, or the person on the pay phone is working for the Stasi. She is most suspicious of Andre as he attempts to get close to her, asking her personal questions and trying to spend more and more time with her. Meanwhile, Barbara has secret meetings with various people, including her West German lover, Jörg (Mark Waschke), who wants to get her out of the east. But as much as Barbara wants to live a free and open life, she is also a dedicated doctor who has become attached to two patients: Stella (Jasna Fritzi Bauer), a pregnant woman who does not want to be sent back to a labor camp, and Mario (Jannik Schümann), who has suffered a potentially fatal head injury following a suicide attempt. Petzold (Something to Remind Me, Wolfsburg, Yella), inspired by the likes of Claude Chabrol, To Have and Have Not, and The French Connection, drapes Barbara in a compulsive feeling of paranoia and dread, creating a blanketing atmosphere of mystery and imminent danger in which one wrong move can result in capture, imprisonment, or worse. Wrapped in a cloak of suspicion, Barbara evokes for the viewer what living in 1980 East Germany might have been like. The complex relationship between Barbara and Andre is handled with great skill by Petzold, balancing their individual needs with their responsibilities to their profession and the state. Germany’s official submission for the 2012 Best Foreign Language Film, Barbara is a tense tale that examines the cold war in unique and fascinating ways.

NOT FADE AWAY

The British Invasion changes the life of a suburban New Jersey high school kid in David Chase’s NOT FADE AWAY

NOT FADE AWAY (David Chase, 2012)
Opens Friday, December 21
www.notfadeawaymovie.com

Inspired by his brief stint as a suburban New Jersey garage-band drummer with rock-and-roll dreams, Sopranos creator David Chase makes his feature-film debt with the musical coming-of-age drama Not Fade Away. Written and directed by Chase, the film focuses on Douglas (John Magaro), a suburban New Jersey high school kid obsessed with music and The Twilight Zone. It’s the early 1960s, and Douglas soon becomes transformed when he first hears the Beatles and the Stones — while also noticing how girls go for musicians, particularly Grace (Bella Heathcote), whom he has an intense crush on but who only seems to date guys in bands. When his friends Eugene (Jack Huston) and Wells (Will Brill) ask him to join their group, Douglas jumps at the chance, but it’s not until he gets the opportunity to sing lead one night that he really begins to think that music — and Grace — could be his life. Not Fade Away has all the trappings of being just another clichéd sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll movie, but Chase and musical supervisor (and executive producer) Steven “Silvio” Van Zandt circumvent genre expectations and limitations by, first and foremost, nailing the music. Van Zandt spent three months teaching the main actors how to sing, play their instruments, and, essentially, be a band, making the film feel real as the unnamed group goes from British Invasion covers to writing their own song. Even Douglas’s fights with his conservative middle-class father (James Gandolfini) and his battle with Eugene over the direction of the band are handled with an intelligence and sensitivity not usually seen in these kinds of films. Not Fade Away does make a few wrong turns along the way, but it always gets right back on track, leading to an open-ended conclusion that celebrates the power, the glory, and, ultimately, the mystery of rock and roll.