The eepybird.com guys will be back at the Maker Faire, re-creating the Bellagio fountain out of Coke and Mentos (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
New York Hall of Science
47-01 111th St., Flushing Meadows Corona Park
September 29-30, $12-$27.50 per day, weekend pass $20-$50
718-699-0005
www.makerfaire.com
2011 maker faire slideshow
Last year’s Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Science was an absolute blast, both literally and figuratively, capped by a massive Coke-and-Mentos fountain display orchestrated by the folks at eepybird.com. The fair, dedicated to all kinds of cutting-edge technology and DIY creativity, is back this weekend with another full slate of family-friendly programs on Saturday and Sunday. There will be more than five hundred maker exhibits at the third annual fair, scattered around the 3D Printer Village, the Arduino Tent, the BUST Craftacular Marketplace, and the Maker Shed Store, showing off miraculous movement machines, wearable art, steampunk fantasies, robots, electrical experiments, computer games, rockets, food, and so much more. Attendees can check out the ITP Nerdy Derby, the Life Size Mousetrap, the Circus Warehouse, the Power Racing Series, the Swap-o-Rama-Rama Fashion Show, and, yes, the return of the massive Coke-and-Mentos exploding fountain. Among those giving special presentations in the NYSCI Auditorium are John Dudas (FIRST Robotics), Seth Godin (Art and Science and Making Things), Carla Hall (The Chew), Alton and Carrie Barron (Making Things Makes Us Better), and Jenny Sabin (Between Architecture and Science: Material Analogs), while dozens more will be hosting lectures, demonstrations, and workshops at several outdoor stages, examining such topics as “Controllable Paper Airplanes,” “The Useless Machine,” “Imaging the Future and Building IT,” “Crowdfunding Success Patterns,” and “Creating an Urban Tiny House Community.” The Music Stage will be home to a wide range of offbeat concerts using unusual instruments and electronics, with performances by Kelvin Daly, C. Chris Peters, Parallax Moon, Kim Boekbinder — The Impossible Girl, Moldover, and others. It doesn’t matter whether you were a high school science geek (or an adult science geek) or think you learned nothing in chemistry, biology, and physics; the Maker Faire will make you feel like a kid again, even as it leads the way into the future. For a look at last year’s fest, go here.
Fernando Meirelles knows how to make movies. His previous film, the remarkable City of God (2002), was deservedly nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and he earned a nod for Best Director as well, sending him off to Hollywood for his first English-language effort. The result is this exciting tale of a low-level British diplomat who becomes obsessed with investigating his radical wife’s murder. As he uncovers more and more information, he learns surprising things about his wife — and the British government. Based on John Le Carré’s novel, The Constant Gardener opens with the murder of Tessa Quayle (Rachel Weisz); her husband, Justin (Ralph Fiennes), is a diplomat stationed in Kenya who prefers not to ruffle any feathers. As he is told what might have happened to her, he continues watering his plants, tending to his garden. Tessa’s death is ruled a crime of passion, allegedly committed by a peace worker, Dr. Arnold Bluhm (Hubert Koundé), but Justin believes there’s more to it. He soon finds himself in the middle of a complex conspiracy that puts him in the cross hairs of some very powerful — and dangerous — people. Meirelles alternates between the past and the present, using flashbacks to reveal Justin and Tessa’s complicated, often mysterious relationship. By focusing on the characters instead of the conspiracy, Meirelles has crafted an exciting spy thriller with a heart. Nominated for four Oscars, The Constant Gardener is screening at BAM on September 27, kicking off the BAMcinématek series “John le Carré,” comprising suspense films based on the espionage novels of onetime MI5/MI6 officer David Cornwell and also including Tomas Alfreson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Frank Pierson’s The Looking Glass War, Sidney Lumet’s The Deadly Affair, John Boorman’s The Tailor of Panama, Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and George Roy Hill’s The Little Drummer Girl.
Queer filmmaker Kim Kyung-mook, a film festival favorite, follows up his controversial 2005 feature debut, the three-part Faceless Things, which centers on an explicit gay sexual tryst, and his 2008 work, A Cheonggyecheon Dog, about sex changes and a talking dog, with another unconventional narrative. In Stateless Things, Kim examines the difficult life of social minorities in modern-day Korea. In the first section, filmed primarily with a handheld camera, North Korean defector Joon (Lee Paul) works at a gas station with Soonhee (Kim Sae-byuk), an ethnic Korean who has just gotten out of China. The two shy, quiet people work for a manager (Kim Jeong-seok) who sexually abuses Soonhee and mistreats Joon until they can take no more, fighting back and heading out on the run. In the second section, Yeom Hyun-joon plays Hyun, a beautiful young man being kept by successful businessman Sunghoon (Lim Hyung-kook), his jealous, closeted sugar daddy. The two make love in a stunning apartment with spectacular views of Seoul, but they are trapped in their own little world, filled with fear and obsession. Save for one quick scene in a bathroom stall — an extremely graphic scene, reminiscent of Carlos Reygadas’s Battle in Heaven, that will ensure the film is unrated — it is hard to connect the two parts until after the title credit is emblazoned on the screen and the shorter third section attempts to bring everything together in poetic, abstract, and surreal ways. Like its predecessors, Stateless Things is aimed at more adventurous moviegoers who don’t need films tied up in a little bow at the end but instead enjoy being challenged by what they are shown. And there is a lot of challenge in Stateless Things, not all of which works. Stateless Things is screening on September 28 at 8:00 as part of MoMA’s third annual “Yeonghwa: Korean Film Today” series, a collaboration with the 