Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko let audiences get the inside scoop in fascinating documentary
KLITSCHKO (Sebastian Dehnhardt, 2011)
Sunday, April 24, SVA Theater, 9:30
Tuesday, April 26, AMC Loews Village 7, 10:00
Thursday, April 28, AMC Loews Village 7, 2:30
Saturday, April 30, Tribeca Cinemas, 10:00
www.tribecafilm.com
www.broadview.tv
When brothers Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko first entered the boxing arena in the 1990s, they were each like Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, seemingly unbeatable Russian machines. But both of them ended up facing tremendous adversity and rising up again, as depicted in the surprisingly intimate German documentary Klitschko. Director Sebastian Dehnhardt was given unlimited access to the brothers, their parents, Vitali’s wife, and other members of Team Klitschko, revealing the two skyscrapers to be much more than just a couple of great fighters. Both Vitali and his younger brother, Wladimir, are shown to be intelligent, well-spoken men (each with PhDs) who had one goal when they left kickboxing for professional boxing — to be heavyweight champions of the world. On their remarkable journey, Dehnhardt captures them training together, carefully watching each other’s performances in the ring, and playing chess. At one point Wladimir bans Vitali from his training camp, evoking the separation between “Irish” Micky Ward and his brother, Dicky Eklund, as seen in David O. Russell’s Oscar-nominated The Fighter, but the Klitschkos handle it very differently. The film features plenty of original fight footage in which Dehnhardt zooms in and slows things down to get breathtaking action shots from such contests as Vitali’s epic battle with Lennox Lewis, in which Klitschko got a horrifically deep gash over his left eye; Wladimir’s dizzying loss to Lamon Brewster; and both brothers taking on Corrie Sanders and Samuel Peter. Sharing their thoughts on the Klitschkos are longtime manager Bernd Bonte, Wladimir’s trainer Emanuel Steward, Vilati’s coach Fritz Sdunek, former champions Lewis, Brewster, and Chris Byrd, and boxing announcer Larry Merchant, none of whom have anything bad to say about the brothers, who come off as calm, thoughtful souls who love their mother dearly and rarely get riled up outside the ring. The film is disjointed, with an often hard-to-follow time line, and background information seems haphazard at best, but Klitschko is still a knockout of a film.
In many ways, Stuck Between Stations is the quintessential American festival movie. The low-budget indie feels like a deeply personal work, teetering on the edge of collapsing into overwrought melodrama but always able to get back on track. Cowriter and coproducer Sam Rosen stars as Casper, a young man who returns to his Minneapolis home for his father’s funeral. At a bar he bumps into his childhood crush, Rebecca (Zoe Lister-Jones), a grad student whose life is being turned upside down, as the head of her department just discovered that Zoe has been having an affair with her husband. Casper gets into a fight with Rebecca’s friends, then ends up spending the rest of the very long night with her as they wander through Minneapolis visiting a bizarre circus, breaking into a house, and talking openly and honestly about their lives, revealing only little bits at a time. It takes a while to warm up to the two main characters, but once director and coproducer Brady Kiernan gets things rolling, Stuck Between Stations becomes a compelling, moving ride. To keep the protagonists on-screen the whole way, Kiernan, in his feature-length debut, employs split screens whenever the two are physically separated, a conceit that ends up working. The film also stars Michael Imperioli as Rebecca’s mentor/lover and Josh Hartnett as the leader of a late-night partying bike crew. The title comes from a 2006 song by the then-Minneapolis-based band the Hold Steady in which Craig Finn sings, “Boys and girls in America, they have such a sad time together.” Audiences will end up not having a sad time together watching Stuck Between Stations.
Akira Kurosawa’s marvelous reimagining of Macbeth is an intense psychological thriller that follows one man’s descent into madness. Following a stunning military victory led by Washizu (Toshirô Mifune) and Miki (Minoru Chiaki), the two men are rewarded with lofty new positions. As Washizu’s wife, Asaji (Isuzu Yamada, with spectacular eyebrows), fills her husband’s head with crazy paranoia, Washizu is haunted by predictions made by a ghostly evil spirit in the Cobweb Forest, leading to one of the all-time classic finales. Featuring exterior scenes bathed in mysterious fog, interior long shots of Washizu and Asaji in a large, sparse room carefully considering their next bold move, and composer Masaru Sato’s shrieking Japanese flutes, Throne of Blood is a chilling drama of corruptive power and blind ambition, one of the greatest adaptations of Shakespeare ever put on film. Throne of Blood is screening April 17-18 as part of Film Forum’s “5 Japanese Divas” series, featuring four weeks of films starring Yamada, Machiko Kyo, Kimuyo Tanaka, Setsuko Hara, and Hideko Takamine, who play strong, determined women in such classic works as Yasujiro Ozu’s Early Summer (1951) and Tokyo Story (1953), Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another (1966), Mikio Naruse’s Okaasan (1952) and Flowing (1956), Kurosawa’s The Idiot (1951) and Throne of Blood (1957), Keisuke Kinoshita’s Carmen Comes Home (1951) and Twenty-Four Eyes (1954), and Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953), Sansho the Bailiff (1954), and Street of Shame (1956), among others.