Knicks Playoffs Fan Central continues May 2-3 in Grand Central (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Vanderbilt Hall, Grand Central Terminal
May 2-3, free, 7:30 am – 8:00 pm
www.grandcentralterminal.com
www.knicksnow.com
With the clearly overmatched Knicks coming home after dropping the first two games of their first-round playoff series against the Heat in Miami — and heading into these next two contests without Iman Shumpert, Jeremy Lin, and Amar’e Stoudemire — it’s not looking good for the ’Bockers, who haven’t won a playoff game in eleven years. But you can still show your true colors by attending Knicks Playoffs Fan Central today and tomorrow in Grand Central Terminal’s Vanderbilt Hall, an all-day basketball party that is expected to include appearances by Walt “Clyde” Frazier, Bernard King, Cal Ramsey, John Wallace, John Starks, Larry Johnson, Charles Smith, and the Knicks City Dancers. There will be shooting and dribbling contests, autograph sessions, videos and Knicks in 60 games on the big screen, playoff ticket giveaways, and more.
The Coen brothers take their unique brand of dry, black comedy to a whole new level with A Serious Man. Poor Larry Gopnik (a remarkably even-keeled Michael Stuhlbarg) just keeps getting dumped on: His wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), wants to leave him for, of all people, touchy-feely Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed); his brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), keeps hogging the bathroom so he can drain his cyst; his son, Danny (Aaron Wolf), won’t stop complaining that F-Troop isn’t coming in clearly and is constantly on the run from the school drug dealer (Jon Kaminsky Jr.); his daughter, Sarah (Jessica McManus), wants to get a nose job; one of his students (David Kang) has bribed him for a passing grade; his possible tenure appears to be in jeopardy; and he gets no help at all from a series of funnier and funnier rabbis. But Larry keeps on keepin’ on in the Jewish suburbs of Minnesota in 1967, trying to make a go of it as his woes pile higher and higher. Joel and Ethan Coen have crafted one of their best tales yet, nailing the look and feel of the era, from Hebrew school to Bar Mitzvah practice, from office jobs to parking lots, from the Columbia Record Club to transistor radios, from television antennas to the naked neighbor next door. The Coens get so many things right, you won’t mind the handful of mistakes in the film, and because it’s the Coens, who’s to say at least some of those errors weren’t intentional? A Serious Man is a seriously great film, made by a pair of seriously great filmmakers. And while you don’t have to be Jewish and from Minnesota to fall in love with it, it sure can’t hurt. A Serious Man is screening May 3 and 4 at MoMA as part of the series “Focus Features: 10th Anniversary Salute,” which pays tribute to the New York-based distributor responsible for such cutting-edge breakthrough independent films as Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, Fernando Meirelles’s The Constant Gardener, Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, and Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, all of which are part of this festival, which runs May 3-20.
