Qiao (Zhao Tao) how her life is turning out in Jia Zhang-Ke’s Ash Is Purest White
ASH IS PUREST WHITE (Jia Zhang-Ke, 2018)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, January 4, 7:00
Series continues through January 12
718-777-6800 www.movingimage.us www.ashispurestwhitemovie.com
Museum of the Moving Image curator Eric Hynes and assistant curator Edo Choi look back at the best of 2019 in its annual series “Curators’ Choice,” consisting of a wide range of works from different platforms, from movie theaters to streaming sites. On January 4 at 7:00, MoMI turns its attention to Jia Zhang-Ke, who reaches into his recent past, and China’s, in his elegiac Ash Is Purest White. In the film, the Sixth Generation writer-director’s wife and muse, Zhao Tao, stars as Qiao, a combination of the characters she played in Jia’s 2002 Unknown Pleasures and 2006 Still Life. It’s the spring of 2001, and Qiao is living in style with her handsome, ultracool jianghu boyfriend, well-respected local gangster Guo Bin (Liao Fan). She runs a gambling parlor, where she asserts her power with men who are in awe of her. But when a rival gang attacks Bin and Qiao pulls a gun, their lives take a series of unexpected turns as the story moves first to 2006 and then to 2018, when things are decidedly, and sadly, different for both of them in a China that has changed as well.
Things are about to change for Guo Bin (Liao Fan) in Ash Is Purest White
As in many of his fiction works, Jia includes documentary elements as he touches upon China’s socioeconomic crisis, primarily exemplified by the Three Gorges Dam project, which led to the displacement of families and the literal disappearance of small communities. Working with a new cinematographer, Eric Gautier, who has lensed films for Olivier Assayas, Walter Salles, Leos Carax, Alain Resnais, and Arnaud Desplechin, among others — his longtime cameraman, Yu Lik-Wai, was unavailable — Jia incorporates general footage he shot between 2001 and 2006 of everyday people and architecture that underscores China’s many changes. There are many gorgeous shots of towns and cities, at one point bathed in white volcanic ash, with costumes of bright yellow, red, and blue, as Gautier goes from digital video to Digibeta, HD video, film, and the RED Weapon camera to add distinct textures. (Jia took the title from what was supposed to be Fei Mu’s last work, which was later made by Zhu Shilin.)
Qiao and Bin try to go back, but little is the same, except for some of their old friends, who are still trying to hold on to the way things were. Zhao (A Touch of Sin,Mountains May Depart) is slow and deliberate as Qiao, her wide eyes telling a story all their own as she wrestles with disappointment, searching for some meaning in her life, while Fan (The Final Master; Black Coal, Thin Ice) is bold and forceful as a proud, powerful man who undergoes a radical shift. “The city is developing fast. It’s ours for the taking,” Bin says early on. But in Jia’s moving, heartfelt epic, there’s nothing for them to grab on to anymore. “Curator’s Choice 2019” continues through January 12 with such other gems as Apollo 11, with director Todd Douglas Miller in person; Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé, with editor Alexander Hammer; American Factory, with Julia Reichert, Steve Bognar, and Jeff Reichert; Hail Satan?, with director Penny Lane; and The Hottest August, with Brett Story.
Three works attest to Manet’s vast skill in small but powerful show at the Frick (photo courtesy the Frick Collection)
The Frick Collection
1 East 70th St. at Fifth Ave.
Through January 5, $12-$22
212-288-0700 www.frick.org
The Frick’s seventh collaboration with Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum might not be a large-scale blockbuster, but that doesn’t make it any less of a must-see. “Manet: Three Paintings from the Norton Simon Museum,” which ends January 4, features three canvases hung side by side in the Frick’s glorious, intimate Oval Room that show off the vast skills of French modernist Édouard Manet. The 1864 still-life Fish and Shrimp reveals Manet’s masterly brushwork, the paint at times almost sculptural; the salmon appears to slither on a chest, its tail flapping. “A painter can say all he wants to say with fruit or flowers or even a cloud,” Manet related to artist Charles Toché. Manet says plenty here with seafood. To the far left is a small portrait of Manet’s wife, pianist Suzanne Leenhoff, who posed for him often. Painted around 1876, Madame Manet shows Leenhoff, who was the family’s music teacher before marrying Édouard, looking slightly away, her dress slightly darker than the shadowy gray background. Tiny parts of the canvas peek through, but the work is not unfinished; it has a sketchy quality despite many layers of paint, lending a mysterious air to the subject.
Édouard Manet, The Ragpicker, oil on canvas, ca. 1865–71, possibly reworked 1876–77, (the Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena, California)
In between those two canvases, rising above the fireplace, is The Ragpicker, Manet’s bold and provocative portrait of a bushy-bearded older man in tattered clothing, grapsing a cane, refuse in the foreground. Painted between 1865 and 1871 and possibly reworked in 1876-77 — Manet was a constant reviser — it was the final piece in the artist’s “4 Philosophers” series, focusing on beggars and men on the margins of society. Inspired by Diego Velázquez’s style and Manet’s friend Charles Baudelaire’s poem “The Ragpicker’s Wine,” the work, at more than six feet tall, elevates the subject’s importance in a way generally reserved for the wealthy and powerful, yet another reason why the Salon, the arbiter of Parisian artistic success, was not always fond of Manet, who did not gain critical acclaim until after his death in 1883 at the age of fifty-one. While at the Frick, be sure not to miss “Bertoldo di Giovanni: The Renaissance of Sculpture in Medici Florence,” which includes the dazzling bronze sculptures Battle,Lamentation over the Dead Christ, and Crucifixion by the Florentine artist (ca. 1440–91).
Giant fluffy puppies get in the way of a Portuguese soccer star’s dreams in Diamantino
DIAMANTINO (Daniel Schmidt & Gabriel Abrantes, 2018)
MoMA, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday, January 1, 2:00
Series continues through January 8 www.moma.org www.kinolorber.com
The Museum of Modern Art’s annual “Contenders” series consists of films released over the past twelve months that the institution believes will stand the test of time, regardless of how much money it made at the box office or how many awards it might win. On New Year’s Day, MoMA is screening two under-the-radar gems to welcome in 2020. At 2:00 on January 1, you can catch a documentary, foreign-language picture, political thriller, high-tech crime chiller, comedy, romantic melodrama, fantasy and sci-fi, and more — all in one wildly entertaining film. Diamantino, Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt’s full-length feature debut, is an absurdist multigenre mashup that is as tense as it is funny, an unpredictable romp that evokes Ernst Lubitsch, Howard Hawks, Michel Gondry, Philip K. Dick, South Park, Cinderella, James Bond, Being There,Minority Report, and Au Hasard Balthazar while feeling wholly original. Carloto Cotta stars as the title character, Diamantino Matamouros, a Portuguese soccer star à la Cristiano Ronaldo (pre-sexual assault allegations) who sees giant fluffy puppies when he is on the field. After botching a penalty kick in the World Cup Final, the stupendously beautiful star learns that his beloved father and mentor (Chico Chapas) has died. His evil twin sisters, Sónia (Anabela Moreira) and Natasha (Margarida Moreira), become his agents and make a secret deal with the mysterious Dr. Lamborghini (Carla Maciel) and a government minister (Silva Joana). Meanwhile, investigators Aisha Brito (Cleo Tavares) and Lucia (Vargas Maria Leite) — lovers who are soon to be married — are looking into Diamantino’s finances and devise a plan to get close to him by having Aisha pose as a male refugee named Rahim who Diamantino adopts as his son.
Diamantino Matamouros (Carloto Cotta) is surrounded by images of himself in Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt’s dazzling feature debut
Everyone except his sisters, who know better, thinks he is some kind of genius mastermind, but Diamantino is actually an addled simpleton who understands very little about life. He enjoyed playing soccer, likes eating Nutella and whipped cream sandwiches, and, following his tearful retirement, hangs out with his cat, Mittens, and dedicates himself to raising Rahim, who he does not realize is actually a grown woman. He’s reminiscent of Chance the Gardener (Peter Sellers) in Being There, but his airheaded statements — which are outrageously funny — are seldom mistaken for brilliance, except when he’s manipulated into making fascistic political statements he doesn’t understand. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes Critics’ Week, Diamantino is stunningly photographed by Charles Ackley Anderson, who quickly adapts the film’s visual style as it switches from fantasy to love story to futuristic thriller, with numerous memorable shots, including Lucia in a white nun’s habit on a motorbike, Diamantino and Rahim sleeping on pillows with large images of the soccer star’s head, and a huge fluffy puppy playing goal in the championship game. American-born directors and longtime collaborators Abrantes and Schmidt, who edited the film with Raphaëlle Martin-Holger, show a deep love and respect for movies, infusing Diamantino with charm and energy, humor and compassion, honoring, in their own way, the history of cinema. The rest of the cast and crew do their part as well, from art director Bruno Duarte and composers Ulysse Klotz and Adriana Holtz to the Moreira sisters and multidisciplinary Portuguese star Manuela Moura Guedes as television interviewer Gisele.
Alice Woodard (Emily Beecham) surveys her creation in Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe
Emily Beecham was named Best Actress at Cannes for her role as a scientist and single mother who creates a different kind of monster in Jessica Hausner’s tense and gripping Little Joe, screening at MoMA at 5:00 on January 1. The Austrian director’s first English-language film was inspired directly by Frankenstein and Invasion of the Body Snatchers while evoking elements of Rosemary’s Baby and Little Shop of Horrors as it plays with horror, sci-fi, teen drama, and other genre conventions. Beecham is Alice Woodard, a plant breeder who is developing a flower she believes can make people happy through its “mood-lifting, antidepressant” scent. She names the new species Little Joe, after her son, Joe (Kit Connor), and even sneaks one plant home for him from the highly secured lab, which is blatantly against the rules.
She works at a science institute — a pristine environment with sterile-looking halls and researchers walking around in white lab coats — with Chris (Ben Whishaw), who has a crush on her, Bella (Kerry Fox), who goes everywhere with her dog, assistants Ric (Phénix Brossard) and Jasper (Andrew Rajan), and their boss, Karl (David Wilmot), who is hesitant to release the plant to the public until rigorous testing proves its safety, even though there’s an important plant show coming up where it would be perfect to introduce it. But after the lovely red blooms start emitting clouds of white spores, first Bella’s dog, then Alice’s coworkers and son, along with his friend Selma (Jessie-Mae Alonzo), begin changing.
Joe (Kit Connor) and his mother, Alice (Emily Beecham), sit down for takeout in stylized, atmospheric Little Joe
Written by Hausner (Lourdes, Amour Fou) with Géraldine Bajard, Little Joe is thick with foreboding, as scenes play out slowly to creepy electronic music by late Japanese composer Teiji Ito, who scored films by Maya Deren. The film is set in a timeless world of brightly lit, vividly contrasting pastel yellows, reds, greens, pinks, purples, and blues that conjure the 1970s but there are cell phones; cinematographer Martin Gschlacht, editor Karina Ressler, costume designer Tanja Hausner (the director’s sister), and production designer Katharina Wöppermann invoke the atmosphere of such cult faves as auteurs John Carpenter and David Cronenberg and novelist Ira Levin — who wrote The Stepford Wives, The Boys from Brazil, and Rosemary’s Baby — as Alice soon finds herself fighting against what appears to be a spreading conspiracy, all the while exploring her fears with her understanding psychotherapist (Lindsay Duncan). Alice’s bowl-cut red hair is reminiscent of Mia Farrow’s in Rosemary’s Baby (and her last name, Woodard, is similar to Rosemary’s, Woodhouse). Like that classic horror film, Little Joe focuses on the concept of birth and parenthood from a female point of view; even as Alice tries to protect her scientific creation, she is attempting to hold on to her pubescent son as he and his father, Ivan (Sebastian Hulk), become closer. “The ability to reproduce is what gives every living being meaning,” Bella says.
Perhaps the scariest part of the film is how realistic it feels despite its heavily stylized artifice. Hausner consulted with neuroscientist James Fallon, biologist Hanns Hatt, and other experts to research the validity of her plot, particularly in an age where there is global controversy over the efficacy of genetically modified food and animal and human cloning. Beecham (Sulphur and White, Into the Badlands) is superb as Alice, a stand-in for all of us, someone who just wants to bring happiness to the world but, in this case, may not fully understand the price it comes with. “The Contenders 2019” continues through January 8 with such other recent favorites as Uncut Gems, followed by a discussion with directors Benny and Josh Safdie; Sam Mendes’s WWI drama 1917; and Melina Matsoukas’s Queen and Slim.
Sarah Sze’s Triple Point (Pendulum) is an architectural wonder (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, sixth floor
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through January 4, $14-$25 (sixteen and under free)
212-708-9400 www.moma.org
The new MoMA is all about making the most of its collection via diversity, which is just what it does with “Surrounds: 11 Installations,” ten key twenty-first-century architectural works, and one from 1998, that have never been displayed at the museum before. The show includes work by living artists from America, Cuba, Germany, Japan, India, Brazil, and the Netherlands, taking up all of the sixth floor. Inspired by her love of nature as a child, Sheila Hicks’s Pillar of Inquiry / Supple Column, which is outside the gallery space, is composed of lushly colored thick strands of acrylic fiber that pour down through the ceiling of MoMA’s top floor, evoking a kind of rainbow beanstalk reaching into the heavens. Hito Steyerl compares climate change to the 2008 financial crisis in Liquidity Inc. in telling the story of former financial analyst Jacob Wood, who became a mixed-martial-arts fighter; viewers sit on torn judo mats, which Steyerl describes as a storm-ravaged raft, while watching DIY-style news reports that are hijacked by masked anarchists. Arthur Jafa’s APEX features eight-plus minutes of 841 fast-moving images focusing on black culture, from Tupac and Miles Davis to Mickey Mouse and Mick Jagger, set to electronic club beats.
Sheila Hicks’s Pillar of Inquiry / Supple Column pours out from above — or reaches into the heavens (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Sou Fujimoto’s Architecture Is Everywhere comprises dozens of miniature constructions made of common objects on small plinths with tiny little white figures on them. Twigs with a woman sitting on a bench and a man standing nearby are accompanied by the statement “The forest is always to me the archetype of architecture.” Screws with figures relaxing on top of them are joined by the words “Different heights are in fact different worlds. A new set of relationships between people.” Visitors contribute to Rivane Neuenschwander’s Work of Days merely by walking through a room of transparent adhesive contact sheets from her studio that collect dust from each of us. Press the button to start Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s The Killing Machine, a kinetic sculpture, based in part on Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” that transforms a dentist visit into an execution, with multiple television screens and a disco ball but no apparent victim.
Two boy sopranos perform as part of Allora & Calzadilla’s Fault Lines in MoMA installation exhibition (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Every hour on the hour between eleven and four, two boy sopranos enter Allora & Calzadilla’s Fault Lines and perform beautiful choral music composed by Guarionex Morales-Matos with confrontational words taken from major literary sources as the singers make their way through a room filled with stone sculptures. The exhibition, which also includes works by Sadie Benning, Mark Manders, and Dayanita Singh, concludes with Sarah Sze’s crowd-pleasing Triple Point (Pendulum), a delicate large-scale intimate circular environment of hundreds of objects, from books, rocks, photographs, and styrofoam cups to water bottles, cracker boxes, lamps, and levels. A tenuously attached pendulum swings from above, in danger of bringing the whole thing down like a wrecking ball, but it never quite makes contact with any of the detritus, which also evokes Sze’s studio. There’s an inviting opening at one side, but viewers know not to step inside this intricately created world, the title of which refers to water’s ability to exist in three states: ice, liquid, and steam. “Surrounds: 11 Installations” bodes well for what the new MoMA has in store.
Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort St.
Through January 5 (adults $25, eighteen and under free whitney.org
Atop his official website, Jason Moran identifies himself simply as “Musician.” As his retrospective at the Whitney reveals, he is much more than that. Born in Houston in January 1975, jazz pianist and composer Moran released his debut album, Soundtrack to Human Motion, twenty years ago and has expanded his horizons significantly since then. In addition to recording such discs as Facing Left, Same Mother, Artist in Residence, Bangs, and Looks of a Lot, many with his group, the Bandwagon, consisting of bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits, he collaborates with a bevy of visual artists, creates large-scale installations, and makes eye-catching drawings.
Jason Moran’s music-inspired drawings are a highlight of multidisciplinary show at the Whitney (photograph by Ron Amstutz)
The show, simply titled “Jason Moran,” is an eye-opening exploration of a multitalented artist, one of the most surprisingly delightful exhibits of the year. Upon entering the eighth floor, you encounter Moran’s “Run,” an ongoing series of works in which Moran tapes a sheet of paper, often a vintage player piano roll, over his piano, caps his fingers in charcoal and dry pigment of different colors, and plays the keyboard, resulting in horizontal abstract images that he gives such titles as Black and Blue Gravity and Two Wings 2. Screening on a loop in the far corner is Glenn Ligon’s The Death of Tom, what was supposed to be a re-creation of the final scene from Edison/Porter’s 1903 silent movie Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which white actors played the main characters in blackface, but it turned into something very different because Ligon improperly loaded the film, resulting in what he called “blurry, fluttery, burnt-out black-and-white images, all light and shadows.” Moran improvised the score based on Bert Williams and Alex Rogers’s 1905 song “Nobody,” a hit for the black vaudeville team of Williams and George Walker, who fought racism on the road and stereotypes in their live performances. The Death of Tom might not have been the film Ligon set out to make, but it still takes on the same ideas.
Jason Moran exhibition features room of large-scale installations and three-channel videos (photograph by Ron Amstutz)
The main room of the exhibit is a beaut, featuring a trio of sculptural installations inspired by the stages of historic New York City jazz clubs, Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, Midtown’s Three Deuces, and the Lower East Side’s Slugs’ Saloon. Three large screens show behind-the-scenes footage and/or full short films from ten of Moran’s collaborations, with such artists as Joan Jonas, Carrie Mae Weems, Adam Pendleton, Julie Mehretu, Ryan Trecartin, Lizzie Fitch, and Theaster Gates. In Lorna Simpson’s three-channel Chess, on two screens the artist plays chess in a mirrored room that makes it look like there are five of her; she’s dressed as a man in one, a woman in the other. Meanwhile, on the third screen, Moran plays the piano in a similarly mirrored space, improvising one of Brahms’s fifty-one exercises for piano. The black-and-white keyboard mimics the black-and-white chess sets as both Moran and Simpson display expert finger control.
Kara Walker’s National Archives Microfilm M999 Roll 34: Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands: Six Miles from Springfield on the Franklin Road is a thirteen-plus-minute full-color video using her trademark cut-paper silhouettes like shadow puppets to tell the story of brutal violence perpetrated against an African American family during the Reconstruction era. (On October 12, Moran and Walker teamed up for the New York premiere of her Katastwóf Karavan, in which he played a steam-powered calliope housed in Walker’s old-fashioned circus wagon adorned with cut-steel silhouettes depicting powerful slave scenes.) In between some of the videos are interludes in which improvisations by Moran emit from a player piano on the “Three Deuces” stage. On January 3 and 4, Tiger Trio, consisting of pianist Myra Melford, bassist Joëlle Léandre, and flutist Nicole Mitchell, will perform at the Whitney as part of the “Jazz on a High Floor in the Afternoon” program.
Finally, around a corner, Stan Douglas’s Luanda-Kinshasa brings together Jason Moran and a group of other musicians in a fictitious recording session in a reconstruction of Columbia’s 30th Street Studio, known as the Church, where between 1949 and 1981 such artists as Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Vladimir Horowitz, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, and Miles Davis made albums. Inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s Rolling Stones concert film Sympathy for the Devil, Douglas films the band over two days in a 1970s-style setting, improvising as if this is a follow-up to Miles Davis’s 1971 album Live-Evil, part of which was recorded at the Church. Douglas himself improvises through the editing process, ending up with a six-hour jam session. Be sure to allow plenty of time to experience “Jason Moran,” an artistic jam session you won’t soon forget.
Rising PBR star Daylon Swearingen is looking forward to the Monster Energy Buck Off at the Garden (photo by Covy Moore/CovyMoore.com)
PBR: UNLEASH THE BEAST
Madison Square Garden
31st – 33rd Sts. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
January 3-5, $28-$221
1-800-732-1727 pbr.com www.msg.com
Professional bull rider Daylon Swearingen may be only twenty, but he’s already amassed an impressive resume. The 2019 PBR Canada champ, ranked #13 in the world last season, was raised in a rodeo family and has been taking home major trophies since he was sixteen. His parents, Sam and Carrie, run the Rawhide Rodeo Company; Sam was a bareback rider, while Carrie was a barrel racer and trick rider. Daylon’s younger brother, Colton, is a champion steer wrestler and calf roper competing for the Southeastern Oklahoma State University Savage Storm, and their uncles Mike Swearingen and Ken Phillips are rodeo vets as well.
The 5’6″, 150-pound Daylon, who goes by the nickname Day, will be in New York City January 3–5 for the annual Monster Energy Buck Off at the Garden, where PBR will Unleash the Beast to a rabid fan base here in the Big Apple. Daylon, who lives in Piffard, New York, spends his busy time shuttling between PBR and college tournaments; he is studying for an associate’s degree in land and ranch management at Panola College in Texas, where he met his girlfriend, fellow rodeo teammate McKynzie Bush, a barrel racer and breakaway roper. Twi-ny continues its tradition of profiling PBR participants — past years have featured interviews with Sean Willingham,Flint Rasmussen,Tanner and Jesse Byrne, and Cooper Davis — with an inside look at Day, who talks about family, studying, setting high goals, and domestic violence awareness; as young children, he and Colton witnessed terrible violence before his mother left their birth father and married Sam Swearingen, who brought the boys up.
twi-ny: You come from a rodeo family. Growing up, was there ever anything else you wanted to do?
daylon swearingen: Not really. I just wanted to ride bulls and be around rodeo, produce rodeos and stuff like that. I think it was just we always had chaps on and had a belt buckle and cowboy boots. I remember always being around it.
twi-ny: You’ve been winning competitions since you were sixteen. When did you realize that you were good enough to make a career out of it?
ds: Probably when I was sixteen and I started entering the bull riding at the rodeos. Just going to my dad’s rodeos I made a pretty good amount of money, and that made me believe I could make a living doing it.
twi-ny: You’re currently ranked #2 in the world and recently won the PBR Canadian Championship and the National Collegiate Rodeo Association Bull Riding Championship. Is it scary having so much success so quickly?
ds: I wouldn’t say it’s scary. I set my standards high, and if you have high goals you should be able to achieve high goals.
twi-ny: You’re only twenty years old, but you’ve already ridden more than two hundred bulls and just this summer logged thirty thousand miles going back and forth between college rodeo and professional tournaments. How’s your body holding up?
ds: My body is holding up good. I took some time after the NFR [National Finals Rodeo, which concluded December 14] just to feel good.
twi-ny: Do you have a different mind-set whether you’re competing in college rodeo or PBR, facing some of your heroes?
ds: I just have to ride the bull for eight seconds. It doesn’t matter the caliber, you just have to make the eight seconds. You have to ride like you want to be where you want to get to. My mind-set is the same every time I get on a bull.
twi-ny: Your girlfriend, McKynzie Bush, is also on the Panola College team. Since you’re on the road so much, how difficult is it to maintain the relationship?
ds: It’s a little difficult, especially over the summer. I went to see her, and she came to see me. I don’t like long-distance relationships, but we made it work.
twi-ny: You’re on course for graduating next May with an associate degree in land and ranch management. When do you find the time to study?
ds: I can study when I am sitting in the car, not doing a whole bunch, sometimes in hotel rooms, when I get real bored and have that idle time and should be doing something.
twi-ny: What are your ultimate plans with the degree?
ds: Just to have it in case something happens, I can fall back on that associate’s degree and what I have learned both in school and out.
Jeff Collins – my coach at school who is the 2000 World Champion bareback rider – has helped me out a lot. Going to school gave me the opportunity to live in Texas a little bit. I enjoy Texas, and also the stuff I have learned about electricity, hydraulics, all these systems, grazing cattle, and all of that. I have seen it on the ranch side, but I have never seen it as someone who studies it and gets all the facts behind everything.
Daylon Swearingen has been winning major tournaments since he was sixteen
twi-ny: You have said that Cochise is the fiercest bull you’ve ridden, yet you’ve had your best score on him, a 92 in Tulsa in August. What’s the secret to lasting eight seconds on this particular beast?
ds: I just kept moving, get around there. I was just riding loose. I didn’t think about it a whole bunch, and it just kind of happened.
twi-ny: Do you have any other favorite bulls?
ds: I have tons of favorite bulls. I breed some cows myself at home in New York. I have Bruiser calves, a couple Pearl Harbor calves. [Ed Note: Bruiser is a three-time PBR World Champion bull, while the late Pearl Harbor was a beloved world champion contender.] I enjoy a lot of bulls.
twi-ny: On your vest, you wear a symbol that supports domestic violence awareness, inspired by a terrible family situation. What do you think is most misunderstood about domestic violence in America?
ds: I think it is overlooked as a problem because so many people have a family together, or they are in a comfort zone and feel like they can’t get out. With the family part, so many people don’t want their kids growing up without a dad, so they give second and third chances. But in reality it affects those kids. They don’t think the kids see, but the kids see way more than they let on. Just getting out and not feeling stuck, kids can change if they want to. You can’t change another person, but you can change what you’re doing and your actions.
twi-ny: You’ve lived in North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, and Piffard, New York. Next week, you’ll be competing at Madison Square Garden. Does that hold any special meaning for you since you’re now a New Yorker, or is it just another bull riding event?
ds: I feel like it is kind of special. Madison Square Garden is the first place we took bucking bulls to – this major event. It is kind of cool PBR’s season starts in New York, and it’s definitely one I have always wanted to get on tour by. So now that I am there, it is very exciting.
twi-ny: When you’re in New York City, what else do you plan on doing?
The life and career of film critic Pauline Kael is profiled in documentary What She Said
WHAT SHE SAID: THE ART OF PAULINE KAEL (Rob Garver, 2018)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Wednesday, December 25
212-727-8110 www.whatshesaidmovie.com filmforum.org
I would love to read Pauline Kael’s review of Rob Garver’s What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, a documentary about the influential and pugnacious film critic who wrote about movies in her own unique, highly subjective way for nearly forty years. But the California-born Kael passed away in 2001 at the age of eighty-two, and we’ll never know. But in the film, which opens Christmas Day at Film Forum, we do learn about what many of her supporters and detractors, colleagues, fans (known as Paulettes), and targets thought of her. “We’re not talking about film criticism here; we’re talking about Pauline Kael,” explains writer and director Paul Schrader, who referred to Kael as his “second mother” in a 2001 Film Comment essay. “And, in the end of the game, what Pauline Kael promoted wasn’t film. It was her.”
Garver traces Kael’s career from her early days writing (ever-so-briefly) for McCall’s and the New Republic before moving to the New Yorker, where she covered “The Current Cinema” from 1968 to 1991, aside from a six-month hiatus when she attempted to produce a film with Warren Beatty for Paramount. Garver combines new and old interviews with Kael’s home movies and private photographs, television appearances, and narrated clips from her reviews and letters; among those discussing Kael and her work — the two are inseparable — are filmmakers John Boorman, Robert Towne, Quentin Tarantino, and David O. Russell, actor Alec Baldwin, writers Molly Haskell, Greil Marcus, Stephanie Zacharek, David Edelstein, Camille Paglia, Michael Sgragow, Joe Morgenstern, and Lili Anolik, and, seen in archival footage, Woody Allen, Norman Mailer (who referred to Kael as “lady vinegar”), Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Evans, Jerry Lewis, David Lean, and others. “Pauline could be very combative and very provocative and she could be cruel, for no reason,” Pulitzer Prize winner Morgenstern notes; Lean stopped making films for several years after Kael excoriated him at a luncheon.
We hear a lot from Kael, who split her time between New York City and her country home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, through archival footage as well as narration by Sarah Jessica Parker, who reads excerpts from Kael’s personal and professional writings; in her last review, of Steve Martin’s 1991 film L.A. Story, Kael called Parker a “bouncy nymph.” While she was loathed by plenty of people inside and outside the industry, Kael was also beloved and needed by others. She says, “People don’t tend to like a good critic. They tend to hate your guts. If they like you, I think you should start getting worried.” Marlene Dietrich wrote to her, “I am quite lost without your opinions on films.” Directors such as Wes Anderson would send her their films even after she retired, just to hear what she thought. But her daughter, Gina James, notes, “There are times when people will tell me something that she said to them and I think, that’s impossible, and then I realize they couldn’t have made it up because it is just shocking.”
Garver (Comic Belief, The Man in the Yellow Cap) also includes snippets from hundreds of films; while the clips from such movies as Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine, Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music, Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part, Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, and Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War are effective because they are shown in context with her reviews of those films, the snippets are also overused as punctuation, adding an unnecessary exclamation point at the end of a sentence to drive home a point that is already clear. For example, when Edelstein states, “Pauline would write about something, and you would not only love reading it, but then you would want to see what she wrote about so you could argue with her, or you could relive it with her, you could see it through her eyes,” Garver follows that with a scene from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver in which Robert DeNiro as Travis Bickle puts his fingers over his eyes as he watches a movie. It might be cute, but it’s also extraneous.
Ultimately, Garver’s main point is that love her or hate her, Kael, who left behind a vast legacy of her writings, including thirteen books (I Lost It at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang), and had several unsuccessful relationships with men, changed how we approach film criticism and experience films themselves. “She turned the movie review, which is this kind of flimsy vehicle — it’s a thumbs-up or thumbs-down endeavor — into this expressive art form. I mean, it was as expressive as the short story or the sonnet,” writer Lili Anolik says. Film Forum is hosting several Q&As and panel discussions during the scheduled two-week run, with Garver December 26 and 27 at 7:00, December 28 at 4:30, and December 29 with composer Rick Baitz as well at 2:30, with Zacharek and Monica Castillo on January 2 at 7:00, and with Owen Gleiberman on January 4 at 4:30.
Museum of the Moving Image curator Eric Hynes and assistant curator Edo Choi look back at the best of 2019 in its annual series “Curators’ Choice,” consisting of a wide range of works from different platforms, from movie theaters to streaming sites. On January 4 at 7:00, MoMI turns its attention to Jia Zhang-Ke, who reaches into his recent past, and China’s, in his elegiac Ash Is Purest White. In the film, the Sixth Generation writer-director’s wife and muse, Zhao Tao, stars as Qiao, a combination of the characters she played in Jia’s 2002 Unknown Pleasures and 2006 Still Life. It’s the spring of 2001, and Qiao is living in style with her handsome, ultracool jianghu boyfriend, well-respected local gangster Guo Bin (Liao Fan). She runs a gambling parlor, where she asserts her power with men who are in awe of her. But when a rival gang attacks Bin and Qiao pulls a gun, their lives take a series of unexpected turns as the story moves first to 2006 and then to 2018, when things are decidedly, and sadly, different for both of them in a China that has changed as well.
