Multiple venues
October 19-23
Full Festival Badge: $495; CMJ Play Pass: $149
Individual tickets available
www.cmj2010.com
CMJ offers the opportunity to check out more than just up-and-coming bands from the small towns of Ohio, Georgia, Texas, and across the United States; the festival also includes several international showcases featuring new bands from all around the world that music fans probably wouldn’t get the chance to see otherwise, and certainly not all together in one evening. The durably chic Hiro Ballroom will be hosting the two-night France Rocks NYC showcases — of course, would you expect a French band to be seen in a less-than-chic venue? On Tuesday, the Rodeo, the Bewitched Hands on the Top of Our Hands, Emilie Simon, Revolver, and Soko play the Bureauexport Party, followed by Thursday’s Social Club Party with Mustang, the Aikiu, Pilooski, Yuksek & Brodinsky (aka the Krays), and Mikix the Cat, hailing from Paris, Bordeaux, Nice, and other hotspots Française. The French showcase at Hiro in 2008 was more than worthwhile; it’s hard to go wrong with French Europop, so we’re looking forward to these as well.
The annual Oh Canada event takes place Tuesday night at Fontana’s, with free admission, free Bloody Caesars, and free beer — oh yeah, there will also be performances by in-Flight Safety, Whaletooth, Freedom or Death, Gobble Gobble, and Kidstreet, hosted by Alan Cross. New Zealand was a CMJ darling in 2008, spurred by the popularity of the HBO series Flight of the Conchords, about a slacker folk duo trying to make it in New York City. Although Rhys Darby won’t be on hand as he was when we checked out the talent-packed New Zealand showcase at the Delancey two years ago, Tuesday night’s lineup at (le) poisson rouge should still be a Kiwi lover’s delight, with Lawrence Arabia, Street Chant, Ruby Frost, Kids of 88, Zowie, and Electric Wire Hustle, with complimentary 42Below cocktails.
Israel Unlimited is presenting the Sound Exchange Showcase Wednesday night at Drom, with Onili, Sagol 59, Hybrid Lava, Carusella, Tamar Eisenman, Izabo, and Ivri Lider taking the stage. A bit of the Blarney comes to CMJ on Thursday night as Windings, James Vincent McMorrow, Autumn Owls, and the Cast of Cheers lead the Music from Ireland showcase into the Bowery Poetry Club. Japan’s Boom Boom Satellites are at the electro showcase headlined by legend Gary Numan (“Cars”!) at the Best Buy Theater (formerly the Nokia) on Saturday, along with Brooklyn’s Rasputina; the other Japanese band at the fest, Sparky Quano, will be at Googie’s Lounge on Friday, with Germany’s Mark Mulholland, Brooklyn’s Danny Ross, the American duo the Winterlings, and Louisville’s Mark Geary. Saturday night is Swedish night at the Backstage Bar, with Raymond & Maria (who will also be playing Googie’s Lounge on Wednesday), Moto Boy, and the suspiciously faux-Irish-sounding O’Spada, with DJ sets and an afterparty by the Swede Beat and Taken by Trees. In addition, the Stockholm folk group First Aid Kit will be at the Delancey on Thursday and the Rockwood Music Hall on Friday.
In a very poor South American village, four men are needed to transport two truckloads of nitroglycerin to the scene of an industrial accident. The men jump at the chance to risk their lives for a small amount of cash because they have nothing else in their pitiful lives. Yves Montand stars in this endlessly tense, harrowing film that won the Golden Bear in Berlin, the BAFTA in England, and the Grand Prize at Cannes. The cast also includes Charles Vanet, Peter van Eyck, Folco Lulli, and Véra Clouzot, the wife of director Henri-Georges Clouzot (LES DIABOLIQUES, LES ESPIONS). THE WAGES OF FEAR will be screening as part of the French Institute Alliance Française series Hollywood Loves French Cinema, along with William Friedkin’s surprisingly gripping 1977 remake, SORCERER, in which Roy Scheider does an outstanding job playing the torturous Montand role as a driver who must go through hell to try to get a shipment of nitroglycerine to its intended destination.
Inspired by nightmares she has in which she commits murder, Lucrecia Martel’s THE HEADLESS WOMAN details a woman’s emotional and psychological reaction after having possibly killed someone. María Onetto gives a mesmerizingly cool, distant performance as Veronica, a middle-aged, upper class wife and mother whose biggest worry appears to be the turtles that have infested the new pool built behind a veterinary office. But one afternoon, while out driving carelessly in her Mercedes along a twisting, barren road, she hits something. Not sure if it was a child, an adult, or an animal, she decides to continue on, telling no one what she has done. But when a poor, local boy goes missing, she begins to suspect that she might have killed him. An intriguing mix of Buñuel’s class-consciousness and Poe’s flair for suspense, THE HEADLESS WOMAN is an unusual kind of murder mystery. In Veronica, Argentine writer-director Martel (LA CIENAGA, THE HOLY GIRL) has created a compelling protagonist/villain, played with expert calm and faraway eyes by Onetto.
From June 2007 to July 2008, journalists Sebastian Junger (THE PERFECT STORM) and Tim Hetherington (LIBERIA: AN UNCIVIL WAR) made a total of ten trips to the dangerous Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, documenting the full deployment of Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade. With snipers hidden all around them, the fifteen soldiers of Second Platoon built a remote, strategic outpost they named Restrepo after PFC Juan Restrepo, the well-liked company medic who was killed early on. Junger and Hetherington film such men as Captain Dan Kearney, Staff Sergeant Kevin Rice, and Sergeant Brendan C. O’Byrne as they go about their daily duties, joking around, playing the guitar, meeting with Afghan locals to get information about the Taliban, and digging trenches while prepared to be shot at at any moment. The journalists took more than 150 hours of footage, supplemented with interviews with several of the soldiers after they were safely back at home base in Italy, talking about what they went through. There is nothing political about RESTREPO, nor does it pull at the heartstrings with melodramatic, overemotional scenes; instead, it depicts the harsh realities of battle, including the long stretches of boredom punctuated by sudden life-or-death situations. There is no narration, no one discusses the possible merits of the war, and no generals or politicians are on hand to defend America’s involvement in the region. There’s no ethnocentric yahooism, nor is there racist treatment of the mostly unseen enemy. It’s just war, pure and simple, seen from the perspective of men who chose to join the army and risk their lives for their country. The film won the documentary Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Festival and recently screened at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival at Lincoln Center.