twi-ny recommended events

KUROSAWA’S SAMURAI: SANJURO

Toshiro Mifune can’t believe what he sees in SANJURO.

SANJURO (Akira Kurosawa, 1962)
BAMcinématek
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Sunday, November 14, 2:00, 4:30, 6:50, 9:15
Series continues through November 21
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

In Akira Kurosawa’s sort-of sequel to YOJIMBO based on Shūgorō Yamamoto’s short story “Peaceful Days,” Toshirō Mifune returns as Tsubaki Sanjuro, a rogue samurai who shows up in a small town looking for food and fast money and takes up with a rag-tag group of wimps who don’t trust him when he says he will help them against the powerful ruling gang. Also back is Tatsuya Nakadai, this time as his accomplice Hanbei. Funnier than most Kurosawa samurai epics, the film is unfortunately brought down a notch by a bizarre soundtrack that ranges from melodramatic claptrap to a jazzy big-city score. The film is being screened at BAMcinématek as part of the series Kurosawa’s Samurai, which concludes November 21 with the King Lear epic RAN.

403 PRESENTS: VIVA LOISAIDA

Photographer Marlis Momber will look back on her thirty-five years documenting the Loisaida at 403 cultural salon (photo © Marlis Momber)

Sun Terrace Room
450 West 17th St.
Monday, November 15, $35-$40, 7:00
Admission includes light dinner and cocktails
www.facebook.com
www.vivaloisaida.org

Lelaine Lau cofounded 403 five years ago as “a cultural salon and community celebrating the exchange of ideas through presentations on the arts, culture and humanitarian concerns.” Lau gathers together a diverse group of individuals to discuss cutting-edge issues and fascinating subjects while enjoying a light dinner and cocktails, encouraging participation in an intimate, invigorating atmosphere. Previous evenings have featured photojournalists, painters, multirmedia artists, environmental activists, fashion designers, writers, and filmmakers. On Monday, November 15, Lau will present Berlin-born photographer Marlis Momber, who has been documenting the changing scope of the Lower East Side since the 1970s, focusing on the Latino community. A onetime homesteader who has lived in the neighborhood since 1975 and also worked as a fashion photographer taking glamour shots of major celebrities, Momber will discuss the area’s Puerto Rican community, her 1978 documentary, VIVA LOISAIDA, and other aspects of her life and career at the latest 403 salon.

ZERO FILM FESTIVAL

November 13 & 20, Nutroaster Studios, 120 Ingraham St., Brooklyn, $12-$15, 7:00
November 14-19, Invisible Dog Art Center, 51 Bergen St., $5 donation
November 13-20
www.zerofilmfest.com

The Zero Film Festival was founded by Richard Hooban as a platform to show truly independent, self-financed works. Now in its third year, the festival gets under way tonight with an opening party that includes two blocks of short films, four cinematic installations, visually enhanced live performances by Oberhofer, Sherlock’s Daughter, and Asobi Seksu, and a dance party with DJ Dmitry and free booze. The festival then continues at the Invisible Dog Art Center November 14-19, with screenings of international shorts, features, and special installations that the programmers promise “you will not see anywhere else.” The November 18 slate includes visually enhanced performances by Dirty Churches, Paradise Band, and Contradia. The festival concludes on November 20 with an awards ceremony, a DJ set by Bear in Heaven, a dance party with DJ Morsy and DJ Scallywag, and visually enhanced performances by Natureboy and School of Seven Bells. Admission to the opening and closing parties are $12 in advance, $15 at the door, while all other screenings request a $5 donation. This is a great opportunity to see lots of fascinating films as well as see some hot up-and-coming bands in one-of-a-kind settings.

GRINDERMAN

Grinderman will feature songs from its bold new disc at the Best Buy Theater on November 14 (photo by Deirdre O'Callaghan)

Best Buy Theater
1515 Broadway at 44th St.
Sunday, November 14, $37.50, 8:00
212-930-1950
www.myspace.com/grinderman
www.bestbuytheater.com

“Come on, baby, blow my mind!” Nick Cave proclaims on “Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man,” the opening track on GRINDERMAN 2 (Anti-, September 2010). The fifty-three-year old Gothic renaissance man may be asking his baby to blow his mind, but he is sure to blow listeners’ minds on the second album from his side project, Grinderman. Again featuring Bad Seeds Warren Ellis on various stringed instruments, Martyn P. Casey on bass, and Jim Sclavunos on drums, Grinderman does it bigger and louder — and better — than on their debut disc, which was released in April 2007. GRINDERMAN 2 features nine mind-blowing tunes, from “Worm Tamer” and “Palaces of Montezuma” to “Bellringer Blues” and the deceptively titled “Kitchenette.” Cave’s morbidly wicked sense of humor shines on such tracks as “Heathen Child,” as when he sings of the title character, “Got a little gun / Sitting in the bathtub / Having some fun,” and on the aforementioned “Mickey Mouse,” on which he declares, “Try not to wake the executioner / He’s sleeping with a fireman’s axe / He leaves his glass eye on the pillow / And his dentures floating there in a glass.” Cave has been enjoying one hell of a decade; he wrote the screenplay for the 2005 Western THE PROPOSITION, released the 2009 novel THE DEATH OF BUNNY MUNRO, composed the soundtrack for numerous films with Ellis (THE PROPOSITION, THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD, THE ENGLISH SURGEON, THE ROAD), and wrote the score, again with Ellis, for Gísli Örn Gardarsson’s theatrical productions WOYZECK and THE METAMORPHOSIS, the latter of which arrives at the Brooklyn Academy of Music November 30 – December 4. Grinderman will be playing the Best Buy (formerly Nokia) Theater on November 14, with Armen Ra opening.

TWI-NY TALK AND SIGNED BOOK GIVEAWAY: PAT COOPER

Pat Cooper signs copies of his memoir at book warming party at Friars Club earlier this month (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Monday, November 15, TGI Friday’s, Penn Station, 2 Penn Plaza, Amtrak level, 5:00
Tuesday, November 16, Borders, 10 Columbus Circle, 7:00
Wednesday, November 17, TGI Friday’s, 34 Union Sq. East, 5:00
Friday, November 19, TGI Friday’s, Penn Station, 1 Penn Plaza, LIRR level, 5:00
Saturday, November 20, Uncle Vinnie’s Comedy Club, 168 New Dorp Ln., Staten Island, $35-$75, 8:00
www.patcooper.com
www.squareonepublishers.com

Born in Brooklyn to Italian immigrant parents, young Pasquale Caputo was expected to become a seventh-generation bricklayer. Instead, he took his chances onstage, where he tried not to lay bricks. Becoming a comic while still a kid, he eventually changed his name to Pat Cooper and ultimately turned into a comedian’s comedian who is not afraid to take on the system. “He has this fantastic capacity to challenge the art form, and has done so with an exquisite approach to the human condition,” Jerry Lewis writes in the foreword to Cooper’s intimate, revealing, and extremely funny memoir, HOW DARE YOU SAY HOW DARE ME! (Square One, November 15, $24.95). The book identifies Cooper’s roots in Red Hook, then traces his path from a rather brief flirtation with the military to his wild experiences in the Borscht Belt and Vegas, telling it like it is, four-letter words and all. The smooth, breezy narrative feels as if Cooper is in the room reading the book to you; in fact, he told the story to his friend and promoter, Steve Garrin, a recording engineer and producer who founded the VoiceWorks voiceover workshop. Writer Richard Herschlag then set it down on the printed page.

On November 3, Cooper launched the book with a boisterous party at the Friars Club that spilled out of the Milton Berle Room and into the Lucille Ball Room. Cooper received tributes from dean Freddie Roman, radio host Lionel, and fellow comedian Jackie “the Joke Man” Martling. Others in attendance included Marilyn Michaels, Joe Franklin, and ninety-six-year-old Professor Irwin Corey, who makes the spry eighty-one-year-old Cooper look like a spring chicken. When Cooper took the podium, he opened with schtick befitting the man whose latest DVD is entitled YOU’RE ALWAYS YELLING!, but he soon revealed his kinder, gentler side, which shows through in the book as well.

“To me, all the years that I’ve been in this business, and to get those kinds of accolades after writing a book, I was mostly in shock because I don’t expect it, I don’t look for it, and when it comes, it’s like a bonus that you never expected,” a humbled Cooper told twi-ny a few days later. “A lot of these people who were very kind to me I don’t know personally, and I was in shock again to think that’s what they thought about me, which is just an extra bonus. So, you know, you go down the road and you say you’re very fortunate, and I just hope this book says something, and I think the word is, and my friends who read the book said, it’s the word dignity, and I hope that’s what I put across. At least people will say, ‘Well, if I didn’t like the book, it had some dignity in it.’”

Cooper will be all over New York City next week, sitting in with Opie & Anthony, Alan Colmes, and Joy Behar and holding signings at several TGI Friday’s restaurants and the Borders in Columbus Circle; he will also be performing stand-up at Uncle Vinnie’s Comedy Club in Staten Island. He’ll be back on December 12 at Di Palo Selects in Little Italy, followed by the highly anticipated “An Evening with Pat Cooper” January 25 at the 92nd St. Y. His appearance at the Y should only lend more credence to those who are sure that Cooper is actually Jewish. “They believed that the skinny kid with the horn-rimmed glasses davened in the morning, did his routines on garlic and saints at night, and said the Shema before going to bed,” he writes in the book. “He was circumcised, not baptized. He was bar mitzvahed, not given Holy Communion. He dropped out of law school, not trade school.”

To enter to win a signed copy of HOW DARE YOU SAY HOW DARE ME!, send your name and daytime phone number to contest@twi-ny.com no later than Tuesday, November 16, at 12 noon. All entrants must be at least twenty-one years of age. One winner will be chosen at random. Good luck!

EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF

Isabelle Huppert plays a prostitute who recites Bukowski to herself while plying her trade in Godard’s EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF (photo courtesy the Film Desk)

EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF (SAUVE QUI PEUT [LA VIE]) (SLOW MOTION) (Jean-Luc Godard, 1980)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
November 12-25, 1:00, 2:50, 4:40, 6:30, 8:20, 10:10
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

Screening at Film Forum in a new 35mm print in honor of its thirtieth anniversary, Jean-Luc Godard’s EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF marked a return to a somewhat more accessible narrative for the Nouvelle Vague auteur, although that does not mean it is by any means a traditional story or that it follows mainstream conventions. Arranged in four sections — the Imaginary (Slow Motion), Fear (Run for Your Life), Commerce (Trade), and Music — the film focuses on a smarmy, unlikable cigar-smoking video director, unironically named Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc), who fights with his ex-wife (Paule Muret), wonders why he can’t touch his eleven-year-old daughter (Cécile Tanner) in rather sensitive areas, has driven away his bicycle-riding girlfriend, Denise Rimbaud (Nathalie Baye), and pays for a visit from Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), a prostitute who recites lines from Charles Bukowski in her head while plying her trade and seeking her independence. Godard frames many of the images like paintings, coming alive with bright, bold colors. Nearly all of the interior scenes are filmed in long takes with no camera movement or cross-cutting (with two notable exceptions), while other scenes are filled with slow-motion shots, forcing viewers to question what they are seeing. Meanwhile, snippets of Gabriel Yared’s score and incidental music are often heard by only some of the characters, who wonder where the sounds are coming from. Godard infuses the film with various thoughts on Marxism, feminism, capitalism, pedophilia, incest, and violence against women; in one unforgettable scene, a businessman arranges a ridiculously funny Rube Goldberg-like foursome, acting like a film director, mocking Jean-Luc Godard’s own profession. Thirty years down the road, EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF, also known as SLOW MOTION and, in French, SAUVE QUI PEUT (LA VIE), feels as relevant, as challenging, and as entertaining as ever. (Note: Film critic and Godard biographer Richard Brody will introduce the 8:20 screening on November 19.)

THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER

Robert Mitchum gets caught up in some dangerous dichotomies in THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER

THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (Charles Laughton, 1955)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at Third St.
Friday, November 12, and Saturday, November13, 12 midnight
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

Robert Mitchum stars in Charles Laughton’s lurid story of traveling preacher/con man/murderer Harry Powell, who has the word “love” tattooed on one set of knuckles and “hate” on the other. While in prison, Powell bunks with Ben Harper (Peter Graves), who got caught stealing $10,000 — but the only person who knows where the money is is Ben’s young son, John (Billy Chapin). When Preacher is released from jail, he shows up on the Harpers’ doorstep, ready to woo the widow Willa (Shelley Winters) — and get his hands on the money any way he can, including torturing John and his sister, Ruby (Gloria Castillo). Laughton’s only directorial effort is seriously flawed — the scenes in the beginning and end with Lillian Gish are wholly unnecessary and detract from the overall mood. Stanley Cortez’s cinematography is outstanding, featuring his unique use of shadows, the battle between light and dark (which plays off of several themes: old versus young, rich versus poor, good versus evil, and men versus women), and some marvelous silhouettes. THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER will screen Friday and Saturday at midnight at the IFC Center.