twi-ny recommended events

HIGH DIALS

The High Dials will sing about insane teenage love and more at Fontana’s on Saturday night (photo by Marieve Petit)

Fontana’s
105 Eldridge St. between Grand & Broome Sts.
Saturday, November 12, $8, 10:00
212-334-6740
www.fontanasnyc.com
www.thehighdials.net

Montreal alternapop outfit High Dials have been building their reputation with such well-received albums as 2003’s A New Devotion, 2005’s War of the Wakening Phantoms, and 2008’s Moon Country. The five-piece band, who cite the Zombies as their biggest influence — they even got to work with head Zombie Rod Argent on their 2007 EP, The Holy Ground — recorded their latest, Anthems for a Doomed Youth (Rainbow Quartz, November 2010), in a house that just might have been haunted. But there’s no need to be scared of their mellifluous, harmonic sound, featured on such tracks as “Teenage Love Made Me Insane” and “Bedroom Shadows,” with Trevor Anderson on rhythm guitar and vocals, Robbie MacArthur on lead guitar, George Donoso III on drums, Eric Dougherty on keyboards, and David Jalbert on bass. The High Dials will be at Fontana’s on Saturday night at 10:00, preceded by Blackbells (8:00) and DeVries (9:00) and followed by a free late-night dance party hosted by Future Relative.

INTO THE ABYSS: A TALE OF DEATH, A TALE OF LIFE

Werner Herzog speaks with Death Row inmate Michael Perry in INTO THE ABYSS

INTO THE ABYSS: A TALE OF DEATH, A TALE OF LIFE (Werner Herzog, 2011)
IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at Third St., 212-924-7771
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway at 63rd St., 212-757-2280
Opens Friday, November 11
www.wernerherzog.com

Upon meeting convicted murderer Michael James Perry on Death Row eight days before the twenty-eight-year-old was going to be executed by the state of Texas, master filmmaker Werner Herzog tells him, “I have the feeling that destiny, in a way, has dealt you a very bad deck of cards. It does not exonerate you, and when I talk to you, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I have to like you, but I respect you, and you are a human being, and I think human beings should not be executed.” After explaining his personal view on capital punishment, Herzog then lets the rest of the compelling documentary Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life play out like a police procedural as he investigates how and why two teenage boys murdered three people in October 2001. Herzog opens the film by speaking with Death House chaplain Rev. Richard Lopez in a potter’s field graveyard, then follows that with four sections that detail the crime, the community in which it occurred, and the family members on both sides of the law affected by the grisly, senseless murders. Herzog divides the film into four primary chapters — “The Crime,” “The Dark Side of Conroe,” “Time and Emptiness,” and “A Glimmer of Hope” — as he talks with the often smiling Perry and his cohort, Jason Aaron Burkett; Lt. Damon Hall, who shares the specific aspects of the murders of Sandra Stotler, her seventeen-year-old son, Adam, and Adam’s friend Jeremy Richardson, supplemented by original crime-scene video; Charles Richardson, Jeremy’s older brother; Lisa Stotler-Balloun, Adam’s sister, who has seen more than her fair share of loss; Melyssa Thompson-Burkett, who fell in love with Burkett after he was incarcerated; Delbert Burkett, Jason’s stepfather, who is also behind bars; and Captain Fred Allen, who oversaw executions in the Huntsville prison. Herzog asks penetrating but not leading questions that get the subjects to talk openly and honestly about the crime and its aftermath and their lives in general, many of which seem trapped in a vicious cycle of violence, jail, poor education, and other endless hardships. Into the Abyss is a powerful film that, because of Herzog’s extremely sensitive handling of an extremely controversial topic, is not nearly as polemical or political as it could have been. Into the Abyss, which was the opening-night gala selection of the recent “Doc NYC” festival, opens November 11 at the IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: ALL FOR ONE THEATER FESTIVAL

MONSTER is just one of the solo plays in this year’s inaugural All for One Theater Festival

Theater 80 St. Marks
80 St. Marks Pl. at First Ave.
November 11-20, $20
www.afofest.org
www.theatre80.net

The inaugural All for One Theater Festival gets under way tonight at Theater 80 St. Marks in the East Village, kicking off ten days of solo performances and panel discussions. Among the shows are Over There — Comedy Is His Best Weapon, in which PJ Walsh gets funny about his stint in Afghanistan; unFRAMED, with Iyaba Ibo Mandingo telling the story of his illegal emigration from Antigua; Monster, with Avery Pearson playing sixteen characters in Daniel MacIvor’s chilling tale; the emotional Happiness, written by and starring Heather Harpham; and RASH, in which Jenni Wolfson delves into her time spent as a UN worker in Rwanda. There are also such free panels as “Why Solo Performance Matters,” “Directing the Solo Show,” “How to Best Enter and Utilize the Festival Circuit,” and “Producing and Contracting for Your Solo Show.”

TICKET GIVEAWAY: Tickets to each All for One Theater Festival show is $20, but we have five pairs of tickets to give away for free. To be eligible to win, just send your name, daytime phone number, and all-time favorite solo show to contest@twi-ny.com. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; the first five responses will win a pair of tickets to the show of their choice.

MELANCHOLIA

Justine (Kirsten Dunst) faces the end of the world in Lars von Trier’s dazzling MELANCHOLIA

MELANCHOLIA (Lars von Trier, 2011)
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway at 63rd St., 212-757-2280
Angelika Film Center, 18 West Houston St. at Mercer St., 212-995-2570
Opens Friday, November 11
www.melancholiathemovie.com

Danish writer-director Lars von Trier has nothing less than the end of the world on his mind in his latest controversial drama, Melancholia. Von Trier’s latest love-it-or-hate-it cinematic foray opens with epic Kubrickian grandeur, introducing characters in marvelously composed slow-motion and still shots (courtesy of cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro) as an apocalyptic collision threatens the earth and a Wagner overture dominates the soundtrack. Kirsten Dunst won the Best Actress award at Cannes for her portrayal of Justine, a seemingly carefree young woman celebrating her wedding day who soon turns out to be battling a debilitating mental illness. Her husband, Michael (Alexander Skarsgård), is madly in love with her and does not know quite what he has gotten himself into, especially as the partying continues and Justine’s motley crew of family and friends get caught up in various forms of intrigue, including Gaby, her marriage-hating mother (Charlotte Rampling), Dexter, her never serious father (John Hurt), Jack, her pompous boss (Stellan Skarsgård), Claire, her married sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg), and Claire’s filthy rich husband, John (Kiefer Sutherland), who is hosting the event at his massive waterfront estate. While most of the film focuses on the wildly unpredictable Justine, the latter section turns its attention on Claire, who is terrified that a newly discovered planet named Melancholia is on its way to destroy the world. But Melancholia is not just about sadness, depression, family dysfunction, and the end of the world. It’s about the search for real love and truth, things that are disappearing from the earth by the minute. Justine works as an advertising copywriter, attaching tag lines to photographs to help sell product; at the wedding, Jack is determined to get one more great line of copy from her, even siccing his young, inexperienced nephew, Tim (Brady Corbet), on her to make sure she delivers. But what she ends up delivering is not what either man expected. Perhaps the only character who really sees what is going on is a wedding planner played by the great Udo Kier, who continually, and comically, shields his eyes from Justine, unable to watch the impending disaster. Just as in the film, as some characters get out their telescopes to watch the approaching planet and others refuse to look, there are sure to be many in the moviegoing public who will shield their eyes from Melancholia, choosing not to view yet another controversial film from a director who likes to antagonize his audience. They don’t know what they’re missing.

MARGARET MEAD FILM FESTIVAL: 35th ANNIVERSARY

The thirty-fifth annual Margaret Mead Film Festival is sure to take viewers to places they’ve never been

American Museum of Natural History
Central Park West at 79th St.
November 10-13, $12-$40
212-769-5200
www.amnh.org/mead

“The first Margaret Mead Film Festival, held on Mead’s own seventy-fifth birthday and her fiftieth year at the [American Museum of Natural History], was meant to be a one-time celebration, but it became one of the most enduring legacies in support of visual anthropologists, inspiring generations of anthropologists and filmmakers, including myself,” writes Faye Ginsburg in the brochure for the thirty-fifth annual Margaret Mead Film Festival, running November 10-13 at AMNH. Ginsburg, an anthropology professor and director of the Center for Media, Culture, and History at NYU, will be moderating the panel discussion “How Do We Look?” on November 13 at 4:30, examining the history of the first documentary festival of its kind. Lotte Stoops’s Grande Hotel is the opening-night selection, while Meshakai Wolf’s Flames of God, introduced by Darren Aronofsky, closes things out on Sunday night. In between are such new documentaries as Robert Nugent’s Memoirs of a Plague and Alain LeTourneau and Pam Minty’s Empty Quarter along with retrospective screenings of Jean Rouch’s Jaguar from 1967, John Marshall and Adrienne Miesmer’s N!ai, The Story of a !Kung Woman from 1980, and Gregory Bateson and Mead’s Trance and Dance in Bali from 1952. Many of the screenings will include appearances by the filmmakers and subjects in addition to related live performances, most notably following Katja Esson’s Skydancer on Sunday afternoon. With the continual technological leaps being made these days, the world might appear to be getting smaller and smaller, but it still takes a festival such as the Mead to help open one’s eyes to what is really going on out there.

OTHER ISRAEL FILM FESTIVAL

JCC in Manhattan, 334 Amsterdam Ave. at West 76th St.
Cinema Village, 22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
November 10-17, free-$12
646-505-5708
www.otherisrael.org

The fifth annual Other Israel Film Festival, whose stated goal “is to promote awareness and appreciation of the diversity of the state of Israel, provide a dynamic and inclusive forum for exploration of, and dialogue about, populations in margins of Israeli society, and encourage cinematic expression and creativity dealing with these themes,” begins tonight with an opening-night gala screening of Dani Menkin and Yonatan Nir’s Dolphin Boy at the JCC in Manhattan, about an Arab boy being bullied in northern Israel. The festival continues at the JCC and Cinema Village with screenings of such films as Sabine Lubbe Bakker and Ester Gould’s Shout, Eitan Tzur’s Naomi (Hitpartzut X), Kikuo Kawasaki’s David & Kamal, and Ibtisam Mara’ana’s 77 Steps as well as the U.S. premiere of the Israeli version of The Office television series. In addition, there will be free storytelling by Deborah Da Costa, panel discussions, Q&As, the photography exhibit “Through Others’ Eyes,” and such special guests as Mohammad Bakri, Sigal Emanuel, Caryn James, Ronit Kertsner, Ilan Kutz, Dov Waxman, and Tamar Zandberg.

THE CHOCOLATE SHOW

The Chocolate Show will be at the Metropolitan Pavilion through Sunday

Metropolitan Pavilion
125 West 18th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
November 10-13, $30-$35
www.chocolateshow.com

If you’re like us, there’s virtually no problem that a good dose of chocolate can’t make better. Every night before we hit the sack, we partake in some high-quality chocolate, usually of the very dark variety. There will be just about every kind of variety you can think of at the fourteenth annual New York Chocolate Show, serving up delectable delights November 10-13 at the Metropolitan Pavilion. More than fifty exhibitors from around the world will be selling their wares — and, occasionally, offering free samples, so bring along a little plastic bag to take some goodies home (and so they don’t melt in your pocket). Scanning the current list, we didn’t see a lot of our favorites, although the always dependable Guittard will be there, along with Chocolate Christophe Roussel, Maison Boissier, and Vincent Guerlais from France, Jer’s Chocolates from California, and D.C.’s Divine Chocolate. More familiar names include Valrhona, Jacques Torres, François Payard, and Michel Cluizel. The four-day event also features demonstrations and workshops, book signings, a Kids Zone, and the always extravagant fashion display, which pairs master chocolatiers with clothing designers to create unique haute couture incorporating cacao, with this year’s theme based on Broadway musicals. We usually get the biggest kick out of Martin “Chocolatina” Howard’s contribution; he’ll be creating a “Playbill Dress” with 24-Hour Catwalk’s Michael Plosky.

Håkan Mårtensson admires his deluxe chocolate creations for Fika (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Update: The 2011 edition of the Chocolate Show might not have a bevy of familiar names, but it does have a lot of fresh newcomers giving away plenty of free samples and offering good deals. We suggest starting out at E. Guittard, whose large booth features multiple dishes stocked with varying degrees of dark chocolate from South American countries. (We went home with the Sur Del Lago and Ambanja Bittersweet bars.) You can then cleanse the palate with a shot of rich, historical melted chocolate from American Heritage before continuing on your cacao adventure; among the standouts are the Nib-a-Licious bar from the Grenada Chocolate Company, Håkan Mårtensson’s explosive gingerbread truffles, Liddabit Sweets’ sea salt caramels, 5th Avenue Chocolatiere’s cold cocoa covered truffles (being handed out by a third-generation youngster), Maria Luisa Rodriguez’s orange zest Jazz Brownies, Pacari’s Ecuadorian salt & nibs bar, Rogue Confections’ holiday-designed Belgian circles, ChocoBolo’s chocolate cake (formerly known as the Best Chocolate Cake in the World), Co Co. Sala’s crunch bar, and Comptoir du Cacao’s flaky pralines. But don’t miss Salt of the Earth Bakery, whose chocolate-chip cookies, made with E. Guittard chocolate and Maldon sea salt, are phenomenal, rivaled only by their well-named OMG caramel and Fleur de sel de l’Ile de Re salt brownie.