Even dogs can get in on the action at the inaugural PetPride festivities, part of the PrideFest street fair on Sunday at 12:30 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Multiple venues
Saturday, June 26, and Sunday, June 27
Free – $100
www.nycpride.org
The annual Gay Pride celebration shifts into high gear this weekend with several of its signature events. On Saturday night, the seventh annual “Rapture on the River: A Women’s Dance” takes place at Pier 54, featuring music by Susan Morabito ($25 in advance, $35 day of show). The 2010 NYC LGBT Pride March gets under way Sunday at noon, beginning at 36th St. & Fifth Ave. This year’s grand marshals are Dan Choi, Judy Shepard, and Constance McMillen, with Frank DeCaro, Bruce Vilanch, and Romaine Patterson among the reviewing stand judges. The PrideFest street fair, on Hudson St. between Abingdon Sq. & West Fourteenth on Sunday, includes emcees Hedda Lettuce, Vanessa Valtre, and Kiiara Monteiro, with a special performance by Antigone Rising in addition to Nikki Exotika, Justin Utley, London Bridgez, Sprio, Melinda Hansen, and many others. And things come to a rousing conclusion Sunday night with “Dance on Pier: Dance 24,” a hot party on Pier 54 with DJs Steven Oliveri and Freemasons ($100).
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. Sgt. O’Byrne will participate in a Q&A at the Angelika following the 7:45 show on June 25; Junger was going to do the same after the 7:45 show on June 26 but has had to cancel due to scheduling conflicts.
Nothing is going right for poor Geng Hao (Huang Bo). After losing the national bike championship because he hammed it up by celebrating a split second too early, Geng’s life goes into freefall: His coach (Ma Shaohua) suffers a debilitating heart attack, and he loses everything after getting briefly involved with a shady snake-oil salesman, Li Fala (Jiu Kong), who dresses in Superman costumes as he promises that his questionable liquid concoction can turn anyone into a superhero. Soon Geng is a poverty-stricken bike messenger on the run from a Taiwanese drug kingpin and the cops, with a frozen Thai assassin in the back of his truck, and continually getting set up by Li Fala, who has some serious problems of his own. Nominated for Best Film at the 2009 Golden Horse Fillm Festival, CRAZY RACER (aka SILVER MEDALIST) is crazy good, an entertaining farce with absurd characters, a twisting plot, plenty of mistaken identity, Ning Hao’s (MONGOLIAN PING PONG) Guy Ritchie-inspired tongue-in-cheek direction, and, most of all, Huang Bo himself, who plays the sad sack Geng Hao with Buster Keaton-like appeal. Huang Bo, who will be awarded the Rising Star of Asia Award at the New York Asian Film Festival opening ceremonies on June 25, will introduce the June 26 screening and participate in a postscreening Q&A; he can also be seen in Guan Hu’s COW at the festival.