E/S Orcelle cargo carrier, concept model. No Picnic AB. Client: Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics. Sweden/Norway, 2005, to be completed 2025
Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
2 East 91st St. at Fifth Ave.
September 4-6
Admission: free
212-849-8400
www.cooperhewitt.org
We’ve never quite understood why the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum isn’t free all the time, like the National Museum of the American Indian downtown and all the Smithsonian museums in DC. But we don’t have to worry about that over Labor Day Weekend, when the institution opens its doors for free Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. (Admission is usually $15.) Currently the Cooper-Hewitt is in the midst of its fourth National Design Triennial,“Why Design Now?” which continues through January 9. The exhibit focuses on such themes as energy, mobility, community, health, communication, and simplicity, looking at social housing, charging stations, cargo carriers, LED replacements, tableware, threshers, and the ripple effect. Also on view is “Ted Muehling Selects: Lobmeyr Glass from the Permanent Collection.”
Based on a magazine serial by Jack Finney, Don Siegel’s 1956 classic, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, was the ultimate thriller about cold war paranoia. Twenty-two years later, in a nation just beginning to come to grips with the failure of the Vietnam War, Philip Kaufman (THE RIGHT STUFF, QUILLS) remade the film, moving the location north to San Francisco from the original’s Los Angeles. When health inspector Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland) and lab scientist Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) suspect that people, while they sleep, are being replaced by pod replicas, they have a hard time making anyone believe them, especially Dr. David Kibner (Leonary Nimoy), who takes the Freudian route instead. But when Jack and Nancy Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright) seem to come up with some physical proof, things begin to get far mores serious — and much more dangerous. Kaufman’s film is one of the best remakes ever made, paying proper homage to the original while standing up on its own, with an unforgettable ending (as well as an unforgettable dog). It cleverly captures the building selfishness of the late 1970s, which would lead directly into the Reagan era. As an added treat, the film includes a whole bunch of cameos, including Siegel as a taxi driver, Robert Duvall as a priest, and Kevin McCarthy, who starred as Dr. Miles Bennell in the original, still on the run, trying desperately to make someone believe him. The sc-fi thriller is screening at the Rubin as part of the museum’s Memento Mori series, being held in conjunction with the exhibition “Remember That You Will Die,” and will be introduced by Georgia Clark.