Yearly Archives: 2012

TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL: WARGAMES

Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy get into a mess of trouble in John Badham’s early computer thriller

AFTER THE MOVIE: WARGAMES (John Badham, 1983)
Saturday, April 28, SVA Theater, $25, 1:30
www.tribecafilm.com

Everyone has a few movies that they can’t turn off when they find it playing on cable. For us, John Badham’s 1983 computer thriller, WarGames, is one of those flicks. Matthew Broderick stars as David Lightman, a Seattle high school techno-geek who spends most of his time goofing around on his desktop computer. When his extremely cute classmate Jennifer Mack (Ally Sheedy) comes over, he impresses her with his mad skills, first adjusting their grades, then battling a talking computer in a pleasant game of thermonuclear war, and finally booking a trip to Europe. Unfortunately, it turns out David accidentally hacked into the Air Force’s WOPR defense system at NORAD, and soon he and Jennifer are on the run, trying to escape the grasp of blowhard Dr. John McKittrick (Dabney Coleman), who is sure they are enemy spies. As General Beringer (Barry Corbin) keeps lowering the DEFCON level, it becomes more than possible that the world might actually be on the brink of WWIII, all because of what started out as a friendly game of chess. Broderick and Sheedy are absolutely adorable in the lead roles, growing closer and closer as danger lurks around every corner, but it’s Corbin who gets most of the memorable lines, including the classic, “Hell, I’d piss on a spark plug if I thought it’d do any good.” WarGames is having a special twentieth-anniversary screening at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 28 at 1:30, followed by a panel discussion with director Badham, star Sheedy, bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen, retired Air Force intelligence officer Major William Casebeer, and hacker and futurist Pablos Holman, moderated by Craig Hatkoff.

TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL: LET FURY HAVE THE HOUR

Tom Morello offers his version of creative response in LET FURY HAVE THE HOUR

LET FURY HAVE THE HOUR (Antonino D’Ambrosio, 2012)
Saturday, April 28, AMC Loews Village 7, 7:00
www.tribecafilm.com
www.letfuryhavethehour.com

In his just-released book Let Fury Have the Hour: Joe Strummer, Punk, and the Movement That Shook the World, author, editor, and visual artist Antonino D’Ambrosio writes, “Let Fury Have the Hour, the book and film, is a call to celebrate the art of living, or being for, not against. For the movie, which is having its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival this week, D’Ambrosio brought together some fifty artists to talk about how they use creative response in a positive way to deal with the social, political, and economic outrage that began in the 1980s with the separatist policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and has exploded today. Shot over the course of seven years, the film features intelligent discourse from such musicians as Billy Bragg, Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine, Wayne Kramer from the MC5, Chuck D from Public Enemy, Eugene Hütz from Gogol Bordello, and, perhaps most eloquently, Ian MacKaye from Fugazi and Minor Threat. In addition, street artist Shepard Fairey (whose designs can be seen throughout the film), spoken-word poet Staceyann Chin, comedian Lewis Black, filmmaker John Sayles, author Edwidge Danticat, playwright Eve Ensler, choreographer Elizabeth Streb, skateboarder Tommy Guerrero, and many more share how the DIY punk aesthetic influences them in their work and their daily life as they continue to fight the power through artistic self-expression that understands the interconnectedness of everything. “Our freedom of speech is our freedom from death,” Chuck D states. The jumping-off point for many of those in the film, as well as D’Ambrosio himself, was the music of the Clash; the title comes from a line in the Clash classic “Clampdown.” D’Ambrosio and editor Karim Lopez supplement the original interviews, which are all conducted in personal settings unique to each individual, with dramatic archival footage of political and artistic movements from around the world throughout the twentieth century, backed by a score composed by Kramer with songs by Public Enemy, Hütz, Sean Hayes, and others. It all comes together in a rousing wake-up call that is a direct counter to Reagan’s “Morning in America” agenda. “A citizen is someone who participates,” DJ Spooky says in the film. D’Ambrosio is seeking to spread his message of creative response by getting as many citizens as possible to participate in any way they can, making an ambitious film that avoids coming off as propaganda and instead feels necessary in these hard times.

SEE IT BIG! INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

Veronica Cartwright can’t take any more in chilling remake of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (Philip Kaufman, 1978)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, April 28, free with museum admission, 6:00
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

Based on a magazine serial by Jack Finney, Don Siegel’s 1956 classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, was the ultimate thriller about cold war paranoia. Twenty-two years later, in a nation just beginning to come to grips with the failure of the Vietnam War, Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff, Quills) remade the film, moving the location north to San Francisco from the original’s Los Angeles. When health inspector Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland) and lab scientist Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) suspect that people, while they sleep, are being replaced by pod replicas, they have a hard time making anyone believe them, especially Dr. David Kibner (Leonary Nimoy), who takes the Freudian route instead. But when Jack and Nancy Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright) seem to come up with some physical proof, things begin to get far more serious — and much more dangerous. Kaufman’s film is one of the best remakes ever made, paying proper homage to the original while standing up on its own, with an unforgettable ending (as well as an unforgettable dog). It cleverly captures the building selfishness of the late 1970s, which would lead directly into the Reagan era. As an added treat, the film includes a whole bunch of cameos, including Siegel as a taxi driver, Robert Duvall as a priest, and Kevin McCarthy, who starred as Dr. Miles Bennell in the original, still on the run, trying desperately to make someone believe him. The sc-fi thriller is screening at the Museum of the Moving Image as part of the institution’s See It Big! series and will be introduced by Columbia professor and author Annette Insdorf, who will also be signing copies of her latest book, Contemporary Film Directors: Philip Kaufman (University of Illinois Press, March 2012, $22).

INVENTING OUR LIFE: THE KIBBUTZ EXPERIMENT

Compelling documentary examines the history of the kibbutz movement in Israel

INVENTING OUR LIFE: THE KIBBUTZ EXPERIMENT (Toby Perl Freilich, 2012)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St.
Opens Wednesday, April 25
212-255-2243
www.quadcinema.com
firstrunfeatures.com

Inspired by her eighteen-year-old sister’s move to a kibbutz back in 1968, Toby Perl Freilich has written, directed, and produced the compelling documentary Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment. Freilich (Secret Lives: Hidden Children & Their Rescuers) traces the hundred-year history of the kibbutz movement in Israel by meeting with three generations of current and former kibbutzniks, who discuss what life was like on such collectives as Degania, Hulda, and Sasa. Mixing in archival footage and black-and-white and color home movies that include some of the very people she is speaking with, Freilich delves into the daily life of the kibbutz, beginning with the earliest immigrants settling a vast wasteland and organizing socialist communes in which most everything was shared; there was no separation of wealth, children were reared and educated together mostly outside the home, and food was eaten in large dining halls that served as the center of the community’s social life. Although critical to the success of the new state of Israel in 1948, the kibbutz grew out of favor by the 1980s as the younger generation began to leave, government support waned, and privatization beckoned. Such historians and philosophers as Avishai Margalit, Moshe Halbertal, and Menachem Brinker place the kibbutz in historical context as men, women, and children talk about what they loved — and hated — about living on a kibbutz. Freilich will be at the Quad for Q&As following the 7:10 screenings on Friday and Saturday and the 5:00 show on Sunday.

ERNIE KOVACS AND EDIE ADAMS

The lasting influence of television innovators Ernie Kovacs and Edie Adams will be celebrated at Museum of the Moving Image

Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Friday, April 27, $15, 7:00
Series runs through May 27
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

Last April, the Paley Center paid tribute to Ernie Kovacs, one of television’s earliest pioneers, a comedic innovator who created such all-time-great characters as Percy Dovetonsils, Wolfgang Von Sauerbraten, Matzoh Hepplewhite, Pierre Ragout, and Eugene. The cigar-chomping Kovacs’s sketch comedy, which often included his wife, Edie Adams, was way ahead of its time, parodying Madison Ave., classical music, and television itself, all done with a sly wink and a nod. Tragically, the Trenton-born Kovacs died in a car accident in Los Angeles in 1962, just short of his forty-third birthday. The Museum of the Moving Image is honoring Kovacs and Adams, who went on to host her own well-regarded variety shows following her husband’s death, with the first-ever dual retrospective of the remarkable team on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of Kovacs’s television debut. Curated by Ben Model, the archivist for the Kovacs and Adams estates who is best known in New York for his live piano accompaniment to screenings of silent films, the series begins April 27 with a panel discussion that examines the continuing influence that Kovacs and Adams have had on the medium, with Broadway legend Harold Prince, comedy writer Alan Zweibel, television critic David Bianculli, journalist Jeff Greenfield, and Model, moderated by comedian Robert Klein. The tribute continues at the museum through May 27 with archival material playing in the TV Lounge, “Kovacs for Kids” presentations on May 19-20, and an artwork by Jim Isermann added to the permanent exhibition “Behind the Screen.”

YANG FUDONG

Yang Fudong’s seven-channel THE FIFTH NIGHT continues at Marian Goodman through Saturday

Marian Goodman Gallery
24 West 57th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through April 28, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-977-7160
www.mariangoodman.com

In the spring of 2009, Chinese artist Yang Fudong presented the five-hour, five-part Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest at Asia Society in addition to the six-screen Tate Liverpool commission East of Que Village at Midtown’s Marian Goodman Gallery. The Shanghai-based Yang is back at Marian Goodman with three new works that further his unique investigation of the process of visual storytelling. In the North Gallery, The Fifth Night unfolds like a Chinese scroll painting, with seven monitors lined up one after another on a parallel line in an otherwise dark room. Set in a 1930s-like Shanghai square, the film, made with seven cameras shooting at once, offers different angles of the same general scene. Characters wander around dreamlike, climb up a spiral staircase that goes nowhere, and pass by blacksmiths at work in the middle of the night. Yang has created a mysterious atmosphere where gangster cars and rickshaws pass through multiple screens in the background as lonely men and women move slowly through the surreal goings-on. Shot in black-and-white and using natural sound, The Fifth Night upends traditional narrative, toying with time, space, and reality while examining the very process of filmmaking itself. In the South Gallery, the nearly twenty-minute Ye Jiang (The Nightman Cometh) focuses on an ancient, scarred warrior considering his fate in a snow-covered landscape where an overturned cart hints at something gone terribly wrong. Dressed in an old-fashioned uniform, he evokes both fairy tale and history, contemplating his future as the place, a kind of spiritual way station, is visited by ghostly people and animals. Set to a minimalist elegiac score by Jin Wang, The Nightman Cometh is a beautifully realized, meditative film with gorgeous painterly imagery, which should come as no surprise, as Yang studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Hangzhou. Also on view is “International Hotel,” a small series of black-and-white photographs taken at the Art Deco swimming pool at the International Hotel in Shanghai that evoke post-WWII propaganda campaigns.

FESTEN (THE CELEBRATION)

A family celebration doesn’t go quite as expected in mesmerizing Polish production of FESTEN at St. Ann’s

St. Ann’s Warehouse
38 Water St.
Through April 29, $55-$70
718-254-8779
www.stannswarehouse.org
www.trwarszawa.pl

Festen, a mesmerizing theatrical version of the very first Dogme 95 film, Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 The Celebration, is a fitting final production at St. Ann’s Warehouse’s longtime space on Water St. in DUMBO. Adapted for the stage by Vinterberg and Mogens Rukov, Festen is set in a wealthy Danish family’s hotel, where friends and relatives have gathered to celebrate patriarch Helge’s (Jan Peszek) sixtieth birthday. But a shadow is cast over the festivities when one of his sons, Christian (Andrzej Chyra), calmly and matter-of-factly accuses Helge of having raped him and his twin sister when they were children. Christian’s brother, Michael (Marek Kalita), and sister, Helene (alternately portrayed by Danuta Stenka and Katarzyna Herman), assume that Christian is just being his dour self, making it all up, as the party continues. But as it becomes more likely that he is telling the truth, things take a turn for the worse. Director Grzegorz Jarzyna and his TR Warszawa company have transformed Festen into a multifaceted drama that incorporates elements of Chekhov and Shakespeare while adding existential staging. Jarzyna’s version doesn’t just follow the collapse of a family but evokes the fall of communism in late-twentieth-century Poland, depicting a generational battle that involves class warfare, European colonialism, and racism. In an odd pacing that ends up working well, the first act runs an hour and forty-five minutes, with the twenty-minute coda performed following intermission. A beguiling production filled with tasty little surprises, TR Warszawa’s Festen is well worth celebrating.