Rockwood Music Hall Stage 2
196 Allen St. between Houston & Stanton Sts.
Saturday, March 31, free, 7:00
212-477-4155
thedebbiemiller.com
www.rockwoodmusichall.com
“Please inhale these minutes / And hold it in, swish it around / To savor the love / That we found,” Debbie Miller sings on the touching “Inch by Inch,” the single from her brand-new EP, Measures + Waits. “Once upon a time I / Breathed warm rivulets down your spine / All I have left are / Patterns on cheekbones once buried in your chest,” she continues. The utterly delightful singer-songwriter, a native New Yorker who now lives in Seattle, mixes elements of classical, folk, jazz, Tin Pan Alley, and pop with an endearing honesty and a delightful sense of humor into her personal, intimate songs. The follow-up to her 2010 debut album, Fake Love, the EP contains five studio tracks and a live version of “Snippets from a Bathroom Stall,” which is composed of actual graffiti taken from bathroom stalls: “Love one another / Drink lots of holy water / Isaac Newton practiced alchemy . . . on your mother,” Miller sings. On the playful “What She’s Got,” Miller compares herself to a romantic rival, asking, “What’s she got that I don’t got / Except bigger boobs / A few inches to my height / And nothing to lose lose lose loo-loo-lose.” Miller, who plays piano and guitar and recently charmed audiences with the new song “Queen of Hearts” written for a Bushwick Book Club event in Seattle dedicated to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, will be at Rockwood Music Hall on March 31 celebrating the release of Measures + Waits.
Giulietta Masina was named Best Actress at Cannes for her unforgettable portrayal of a far-too-trusting street prostitute in Nights of Cabiria. Directed by her husband, Federico Fellini, produced by Dino De Laurentiis, and written in collaboration with Pier Paolo Pasolini, the film opens with Cabiria taking a romantic stroll by the river with her boyfriend, Giorgio (Franco Fabrizi), who suddenly snatches her purse and pushes her into the water, running off as she nearly drowns. Such is life for Cabiria, whose sweet, naive nature can turn foul tempered in an instant. Over the course of the next few days, she gets picked up by movie star Alberto Lazzari (Amedeo Nazzari), goes on a religious pilgrimage with fellow prostitutes Wanda (Franca Marzi) and Rosy (Loretta Capitoli), gets hypnotized by a magician (Ennio Girolami), and falls in love with a tender stranger named Oscar (François Périer). But nothing ever goes quite as expected for Cabiria, who continues to search for the bright side even in the direst of circumstances. Masina is a delight in the film, whether yelling at a neighbor, dancing the mambo with Alberto, or looking to confess her sins, her facial expressions a work of art in themselves, ranging from sly smiles and innocent glances to nasty smirks and angry stares. Fellini’s second film to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film (after La Strada), Nights of Cabiria is screening March 28 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “15 for 15: Celebrating Rialto Pictures” series honoring the fifteenth anniversary of the art-house distributor founded by Film Forum programmer extraordinaire Bruce Goldstein, who also worked on the updated translation for the 1998 restoration of this Fellini masterpiece.
A box-office blockbuster in South Korea, Shin Tae-ra’s My Girlfriend Is an Agent is a goofy but fun mosh-up of Mr. and Mrs. Smith and the television shows Get Smart and Mission: Impossible. As the movie opens, the weak-kneed Jae-joon (Kang Ji-hwan) is threatening to leave Soo-ji (Kim Ha-neul), tired of her many lies. What he doesn’t know is that she is actually a secret agent working undercover for the government, but she is not allowed to tell anyone, instead claiming she is a travel agent to explain all the time she spends away from him. Three years later, they accidentally meet up again — Soo-ji recognizes his, um, member in a men’s room while he is relieving himself at a urinal and she is pretending to be a cleaning lady — but now Jae-joon is a secret agent for a different department, working the same case but from another angle while telling her he is an accountant. Crazy hijinks ensue, including plenty of mistaken identity, a wacky car chase, and a shootout in an amusement park, with Soo-ji and Jae-joon continually bumping into each other as they get closer and closer to the international terrorists seeking to gain control of a lethal virus that could wipe out much of the country. My Girlfriend Is an Agent, which is getting the Bollywood treatment in a remake directed by Bosco, is screening on March 27 at 7:00 at Tribeca Cinemas as the second installment of the free Korean Movie Night series “It’s a Fine Romance,” which concludes on April 10 with Kim Jeong-hoon’s 2010 chick flick, Petty Romance.