SAMSARA (Ron Fricke, 2011)
Landmark Sunshine Cinema
143 East Houston St. between First & Second Aves.
Opens Friday, August 24
212-330-8182
www.landmarktheatres.com
www.barakasamsara.com
The filmmaking team of director Ron Fricke and producer Mark Magidson have teamed up once again to make the visually stunning documentary Samsara. The follow-up to 1985’s Chronos and 1992’s Baraka, the new work was shot in 70mm across twenty-five countries on five continents over the course of five years, immersing the audience in a barrage of striking imagery, set to a dramatic score by co-composer Michael Stearns. “Samsara was conceived as a nonverbal guided meditation on the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth,” Fricke explains, while Magidson adds, “The hope is that a viewer comes away feeling a sense of connection, a connection to the phenomenon of life around the world at this time.” Samsara, which can be translated as “the ever-turning wheel of life,” is also a personal journey to be experienced individually as it explores such spiritual concepts as flow and impermanence, without voice-overs or intertitles to explain what is happening on-screen.
SAMSARA takes viewers around the world in 70mm
TICKET GIVEAWAY: Samsara opens August 24 at Landmark Sunshine Cinema, and twi-ny is teaming up with the Interdependence Project to give away ten pairs of tickets to see this remarkable film during its opening weekend, at 4:50 and 7:15 on Saturday and Sunday.
Founded by Ethan Nichtern, the IDP is for people interested in exploring their minds on the meditation cushion and applying the insights, clarity, and wisdom developed by meditation to life, especially to the arts, ecology, activism, and community service. The IDP offers various weekly and monthly Buddhism and meditation classes in the East Village as well as workshops and retreats. Classes and workshops are offered by a variety of teachers from the Insight, Shambhala, Tibetan, and Zen traditions.
Just send your name, daytime phone number, all-time favorite nonverbal movie, and preferred showtime to contest@twi-ny.com by Tuesday, August 21, at 5:00 to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; ten winners will be selected at random.
Although the screwball romantic comedies are perhaps best loved for their madcap antics and fast-paced dialogue, there was also a fascinating underlying motif to many of them — as America came out of the Great Depression and WWII beckoned, the films tackled the theme of the growing disparity between the rich and the poor. George Cukor’s 1938 classic, Holiday, however, looks at the world from a slightly different perspective, pitting the rich vs. the super-rich. Based on the Broadway play by Philip Barry, which was turned into a 1930 film featuring Ann Harding, Mary Astor, Edward Everett Horton, Hedda Hopper, Robert Ames, and William Holden, Cukor’s version stars Cary Grant as Johnny Case, a self-made humble financial wizard who dreams of making just enough money to be able to afford to leave the business and go find himself. Following a whirlwind ten-day courtship with Julia Seton (Doris Nolan) while on vacation in Lake Placid, Johnny is shocked to find out that his fiancée is a member of the Seton clan, one of the richest families in America. Julia’s father, Edward (Henry Kolker), is not about to let his beloved daughter marry just anyone, so he puts Johnny through the ringer. Meanwhile, Johnny bonds with Julia’s sister, the black sheep Linda (Katharine Hepburn, who was the understudy for Linda on Broadway), who is desperate to live her own life but seems trapped in a fantasy, receiving only marginal support from their brother, Ned (Lew Ayres), who is never without a drink and a cynical word about the family, washing away his failure in cocktail after cocktail. “Walk, don’t run, to the nearest exit,” he advises Johnny. Honest, dependable, and a surprisingly good gymnast, Johnny finds solace from the crazy Setons in his longtime friends, Nick (Horton, reprising his role from the earlier film) and Susan (Jean Dixon), simpler folk with a fine sense of humor and little time for high society. As midnight on New Year’s Eve approaches, the main characters’ lives come together and fall apart in hysterical yet serious ways. Holiday is not your average screwball comedy, instead seeking to take on more personal, psychologically intimate issues and succeeding wildly, continually defying expectations and turning clichés inside out. Grant is as cool as ever, but he adds a seldom-seen vulnerability that adds to his charm. Holiday is screening August 19 in the BAMcinématek series “American Gagsters: Great Comedy Teams,” which runs through September 17 and consists of fifty films (all but one in 35mm), including such other memorable Grant movies as Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday on Saturday and The Philadelphia Story also on Sunday.
In conjunction with the eightieth anniversary of the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Ron Honsa has made Never Stand Still, a documentary that celebrates the long history of the national historic landmark dedicated to the art of movement. Narrated by 
When a pair of disaffected Parisians, Arthur (Claude Brasseur) and Franz (Sami Frey), meet an adorable young woman, Odile (Anna Karina), in English class, they decide to team up and steal a ton of money from a man living in Odile’s aunt’s house. As they meander through the streets of cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s black-and-white Paris, they talk about English and wealth, dance in a cafe while director Jean-Luc Godard breaks in with voice-over narration about their character, run through the Louvre in record time, and pause for a near-moment of pure silence. Godard throws in plenty of commentary on politics, the cinema, and the bourgeoisie in the midst of some genuinely funny scenes. Band of Outsiders is no ordinary heist movie; based on Dolores Hitchens’s novel Fool’s Gold, it is the story of three offbeat individuals who just happen to decide to attempt a robbery while living their strange existence, as if they were outside from the rest of the world. The trio of ne’er-do-wells might remind Jim Jarmusch fans of the main threesome from Stranger Than Paradise (1984), except Godard’s characters are more aggressively persistent. One of Godard’s most accessible films, Band of Outsiders is screening August 18 and 22 as part of the MoMA series “Gaumont Thrillers: From Fantômas to A Gang Story,” which continues with such Gaumont-produced films as Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Murderer Lives at 21, Jules Dassin’s Riffifi, and Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita and The Professional.