twi-ny recommended events

SEVERELY DAMAGED: A TALE OF TWO SISTERS

A TALE OF TWO SISTERS is part of Kim Jee-woon retrospective at BAM

THE CINEMA OF KIM JEE-WOON: A TALE OF TWO SISTERS (Kim Jee-woon, 2003)
BAMcinématek
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Sunday, February 27, 2:00, 4:30, 6:50, 9:15
Series continues through March 2
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Returning home after having been hospitalized for mental reasons, sisters Su-mi (Im Su-jeong) and Su-yeon (Moon Geun Young) find their house very different — in addition to their father (Kim Kap-su) and his second wife, Eun-joo (Yeom Jeong-ah), there appears to be an unexplained presence that seems particularly interested in the extremely vulnerable Su-yeon. As tensions mount between the girls and the wicked stepmother, more and more blood shows up, as well as far too many confusing twists and turns. Though there is a lot to admire in this gripping psychological thriller, you’ll be scratching your head at the end, wondering just what the heck you have just seen. An Asian mix of The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999), Sisters (Brian DePalma, 1973), and the Cinderella fairy tale, Kim Jee-woon’s film has plenty of creeps that unfortunately never come together. Still, it was recently remade by Hollywood as The Uninvited, directed by Charles and Thomas Guard and starring David Strathairn and Elizabeth Banks.

A Tale of Two Sisters is screening February 27 as part of BAMcinématek’s “Severely Damaged: The Cinema of Kim Jee-woon,” which began last night with the Korean director’s latest, I Saw the Devil (2010), and continues today with A Bittersweet Life (2005), The Quiet Family (1998) on February 28, The Foul King (2000) on March 1, and The Good, the Bad, the Weird (2008) on March 2. The series gets its title from what the Korean government said about I Saw the Devil before seven minutes were cut out, proclaiming that it “severely damaged the dignity of human values.”

DocuDays New York 2011

Banksy documentary is one of ten Oscar nominees screening today and tomorrow at the Paley Center

Paley Center for Media
25 West 52nd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
February 26-27, free with museum admission of $10
212-621-6600
www.paleycenter.org

Beginning today at 12:05, the Paley Center will be screening all five nominees for Best Documentary, all free with museum admission of $10. First up is Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger’s Restrepo, set in the dangerous Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. At 1:45, Banksy’s marvelous look at the art market, Exit Through the Gift Shop, will be shown, followed by Charles Ferguson’s political stunner, Inside Job, which takes viewers inside the financial crisis. At 5:10, Lucy Walker’s Waste Land follows artist Vik Muniz’s return to his native Brazil to work with a group of catadores who pick through garbage dumps to find and sell recyclable materials. Things conclude at 6:55 with Josh Fox’s Gasland, which deals with the controversy over the drilling movement. Tomorrow, the Paley Center will show all the nominees for Best Short Subject Documentary, beginning with Sara Nesson’s Poster Girl at 12:05 and continuing with Jeff Rothstein’s Killing in the Name at 12:45, Karen Goodman’s Strangers No More at 1:30, Jennifer Redfearn’s Sun Come Up at 2:15, and Ruby Yang’s The Warriors of Quigang at 3:00. After that, you can stick around for the “Oscar Night in America” viewing party ($15, 7:00), with trivia questions, food and drink, special film clips, and more, hosted by Kevin Maher. And be sure to squeeze in a visit to the Steven Spielberg Gallery to check out the exhibit “Gimme Some Truth: The Making of John Lennon’s Imagine Album.”

VERGE: ART BROOKLYN

Multiple locations in Dumbo
March 3-6, free
www.vergeartfair.com

Last year, the Verge Art Fair was held in the Dylan Hotel on East 41st St., where artists and collectives got individual rooms to display their works. It had a mysterious, claustrophobic feel, like you were invading people’s private space. There’s nothing private about the 2011 Verge fair, which moves to galleries throughout Dumbo, including 81 Front St. (gallery exhibitors), 111 Front St. (“Brooklyn Art Now: 2011 Survey Exhibition”), One Main St. (panels and discussions), 55 Washington St. (“Material Issue: Art Brooklyn Artist’s Projects”), and 20 Jay St. (“Tomorrow’s Stars: Artist’s Open Call Exhibition” and “Material Issue”) as well as spilling out into the streets. Everything is free — even the opening night party at Galapagos Art Space, if you get there before 10:00, after which admission is $20; the party features live performances by Sister Anne; Not Blood, Paint; Clifton; the Brooklyn What?; Violens; Nebulla; Enoe; and M Panorama. Among the many international exhibitors are Antidote, Arch 402, Firecat Projects, MoCADA, and G2 Gallery, although the focus is on Brooklyn galleries, along with artist projects by Brooklyn Treasury, Dwight Baird, Kirk Bauer, Patrick W. Duffy, Karina Natis & Chloe Cheau, Midori Okuyama, Richard Silver, and many others. There will also be live, site-specific events, from mural painting to performance art, and the VIP Passport Program gives attendees a first look at the schedule and the opportunity to meet various artists in their studios.

BUILT BY ANIMALS

The Suffolk
107 Suffolk St. between Delancey & Rivington Sts.
Saturday, February 26, $3, 11:00 pm
www.builtbyanimals.com

Don’t get confused about what Discover said about Built by Animals: “It is to the eternal credit and pride of humanity that scientists like Mike Hansell strive with insight and ingenuity to catalogue the wonders of the natural world and to convey their findings in such enthusiastic fashion to the rest of us blinkered anthropocentrics.” The science magazine was talking about the 2007 book Built by Animals: The Natural History of Animal Architecture. Brooklyn music trio Built by Animals, on the other hand, catalogue the wonders of the savage corporate world with insight and ingenuity for the rest of us blinkered anthropocentrics. Lead singer and bass player Nick Crane, guitarist Morgan von Ancken, and drummer Matt Graff have been compared to a wide array of indie darlings — Weezer, Guster, Modest Mouse, Built to Spill, Vampire Weekend, Radiohead, Phoenix, the Pixies, the Strokes, Bishop Allen, and Jeff Tweedy, and we’d throw in early Hold Steady as well — but their debut EP, Corporate Syndrome (Shmiz, June 2010), is not the derivative mélange those comparisons might imply for the CMJ vets. From the opening cough on “Return to the Power Kingdom” to the killer guitar riff on “Teenage Rampage,” from the ticking time bomb of “Spreadsheets” to the twisting melodies of “Ducks,” BBA documents the natural but depressing progression from high school to college to a corporate life of cubicles and Excel reports. “Listen to them today before you give up entirely,” they explain about themselves in their mission statement. You can listen today to the streaming EP on their website, but you can also hear and see them Saturday night at the Suffolk on the Lower East Side, where they’re holding the launch party for their brand-new music video, “Ellen Page.” (They’ve previously paid homage to the late singer-songwriter “Elliott Smith.”). I Love Monsters kicks things off at 11:00, followed by Quiet Loudly at midnight and the premiere of the video and a set by BBA at 1:00, with two-buck PBRs all night long.

WORKS & PROCESS: JOHN ZORN’S MUSIC INTERPRETED

NEW CHOREOGRAPHY BY DONALD BYRD AND PAM TANOWITZ
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
February 27-28, $30, 7:30
212-423-3587
www.guggenheim.org

One of the legends of the experimental music scene, John Zorn will be featured in the latest Works & Process event at the Guggenheim, the series in which artists go behind the scenes to reveal their creative process. For this two-night program, Donald Byrd, who has been choreographing work for thirty-five years for such companies as Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Dallas Black Dance Theater, the Pacific Northwest Ballet, and Philadanco, will present the world premiere of a piece set to Zorn’s “4,” performed by Byrd’s Seattle-based Spectrum Dance Theater and accompanied by Stephen Drury on piano. New York City-based Pam Tanowitz, who has been staging pieces that comment on the complexities of dance itself since 2000, will take on Zorn’s “Femina,” a project dedicated to women artists and composed for an all-female ensemble. Zorn, Byrd, and Tanowitz will be on hand to talk about the works during interspersed discussions moderated by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Charles Wuorinen. The February 27 performance is sold out, although stand-by tickets might become available the day of the show, but there are still a few seats left for February 28.

A TRIBUTE TO IRANIAN FILMMAKER JAFAR PANAHI: OFFSIDE

OFFSIDE is part of Asia Society tribute to imprisoned Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi

OFFSIDE (Jafar Panahi, 2006)
Asia Society
725 Park Ave. at 70th St.
Saturday, February 26, 3:00
Series continues through March 11
Admission: free with advance registration
212-288-6400
www.asiasociety.org
www.sonyclassics.com/offside

Filmed on location in and around Tehran’s Azadi Stadium and featuring a talented cast of nonprofessional actors, Jafar Panahi’s Offside is a brilliant look at gender disparity in modern-day Iran. Although it is illegal for girls to go to soccer games in Iran — because, among other reasons, the government does not think it’s appropriate for females to be in the company of screaming men who might be cursing and saying other nasty things — many try to get in, facing arrest if they get caught. Offside is set during an actual match between Iran and Bahrain; a win will put Iran in the 2006 World Cup. High up in the stadium, a small group of girls, dressed in various types of disguises, have been captured and are cordoned off, guarded closely by some soldiers who would rather be watching the match themselves or back home tending to their sheep. The girls, who can hear the crowd noise, beg for one of the men to narrate the game for them. Meanwhile, an old man is desperately trying to find his daughter to save her from some very real punishment that her brothers would dish out to her for shaming them by trying to get into the stadium. Despite its timely and poignant subject matter, Offside is a very funny film, with fine performances by Sima Mobarak Shahi, Shayesteh Irani, Ida Sadeghi, Golnaz Farmani, Mahnaz Zabihi, and Nazanin Sedighzadeh as the girls and M. Kheymeh Kabood as one of the soldiers.

The film, selected for the 2006 New York Film Festival, is screening at the Asia Society as part of its two-week tribute to Panahi, who experienced visa problems when trying to come to New York for the opening of Offside and was later arrested by the Iranian government for his support of the opposition Green movement, sentenced to six years in prison and given a twenty-year ban on making new films. The series opens February 25 with The White Meadows (Mohammad Rasoulof, 2009), which Panahi edited (director Rasoulof is also serving a six-year sentence) and will be introduced by Columbia professor Hamid Dabashi and production designer Shahram Karimi. Dabashi will also introduce the March 4 screening of Panahi’s Crimson Gold (2003), while Duke associate professor Negar Mottahedeh will introduce Offside and the March 11 showing of The Circle (2000). In addition, the Asia Society will host a panel discussion on March 2 at 6:45, “A Tribute to Jafar Panahi and Creative Expression in Iran,” with Dabashi, Mottahedeh, Hadi Ghaemi of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, and Film Society of Lincoln Center program director Richard Peña. All events are free with advance registration at the above website.

FOUNTAIN ART FAIR 2011

Allison Berkoy will be back on board the Frying Pan in the Lackawanna Caboose with more of her creepy but fun multimedia, lifelike installations (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Pier 66 Maritime, the Frying Pan
West 26th St. at the Hudson River
March 3-6, $10 (March 4 VIP preview $25)
www.fountainexhibit.com

The sixth annual Fountain Art Fair, dedicated to exhibiting avant-garde works from small, independent galleries, is back on board the Frying Pan, displaying cutting-edge painting, sculpture, and installation from the most radical artists to be found during Armory Week. Following the March 3 VIP and press preview, Fountain will open its doors to the public on Friday at 12 noon with works from such galleries as What It Is, Christina Ray, Microscope, LambertArts, Cheap & Plastique, Temporary States, and, as always, the anarchist Murder Lounge down below (don’t say you weren’t warned), in addition to artists projects by Greg Haberny, Evo Love, Mark Demos, Mami Kotak, and Danni Rash & GILF! There will also be a large-scale street art installation that brings together Chris Stain, Faro, Gaia, Shark Toof, Clown Soldier, Love Me, Ellis G, Alessandro Echevarria, Lee Trice, Imminent Disaster, and Dickchicken!, and Boston’s experimental Mobius Collective will be holding four days of curated roaming and site-specific performance art pieces, called “Infiltrate!,” from Marilyn Arsem and Burns Maxey’s “Captain Burns and First Mate Arsem Discover a New Land” and Sandy and Jeff Huckleberry’s “Entrapment” to Anna Wexler and Catherine Tutter’s “Vessel for Haiti III,” Joanne Rice’s “Without,” and Alisia Lord Louise Waller’s “What Are You, Some Kind of Monster?”

Jason Douglas Griffin’s “We Have an Understanding” can be found at the Leo Kesting booth at Fountain (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Other special events include an opening-night reception with live performances by Gordon Voidwell, Tecla, and Generic and a Saturday-night Lomography Picture Party with Ninjasonik and NSR, all free with the standard admission price. This year, the show has a decidedly 1980s retro East Village feel; among the highlights are Jason Douglas Griffin’s painted door, “We Have an Understanding,” at Leo Kesting (the spray-painted lightbulb is part of the work but not the heater), Chris Smith’s “Rumblers Road Signs & Rusted Cars” at G-spot’s subtexture booth, JMR’s colorful live mural at Mighty Tanaka, Demos’s lighted, scratched, and pounded glass canvases, Victor Cox’s enticing small works in the enticing Murder Lounge, Carl Gunhouse’s photos of American real estate developments at Camel Art Space, and R. Nicholas Kuszyk’s delightful robot paintings and Morning Breath’s cool collages at McCaig-Welles. One of our Fountain favorites, Allison Berkoy, is back in the Lackawanna railroad car with “Another Night in the Caboose of Magical Light” (she was previously in the caboose in 2009, with Nuala Clarke there last year), a brand-new collection of captivating light and mirror projections that give life to inanimate objects, from dolls and rice to a bowl of soup, all featuring her face. Be sure to explore every nook and cranny of the 133-foot-long lightship, which was in operation from 1930 to 1965 and spent three years underwater before being rediscovered by salvagers. Fountain is the art fair for people who hate art fairs, where anything can happen — and probably will.