Who: Ayad Akhtar, Tom Santopietro, Steven Pasquale, and others
What: Discussion and performance
Where: Barnes & Noble, 150 East 86th St. at Lexington Ave., 212-369-2180
When: Tuesday, November 28, free, 4:00
Why: Pulitzer Prize winner and Tony nominee Ayad Akhtar’s latest play, Junk, is currently on Broadway, running at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater through January 7. On November 28, Akhtar, who has previously written the plays Disgraced, The Invisible Hand, and The Who & the What and the novel American Dervish as well as cowriting and starring in the film The War Within, will be at the B&N on Lexington and Eighty-Sixth St. in conversation with author, media commentator, and Broadway theater manager Tom Santopietro, discussing Junk, set during the 1980s junk-bond phenomenon. In addition, Junk star Steven Pasquale (The Good Wife, reasons to be pretty) and other cast members will perform scenes from the play, which has just been published in paperback by Little, Brown.
A groundbreaking work in the history of world cinema, Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali and its two sequels, Aparajito and Apur Sansar, have been meticulously restored by the Criterion Collection and the Academy Film Archive following a nitrate fire in 1993 — the year after Ray was awarded an honorary Oscar on his deathbed. Inspired by a meeting with Jean Renoir in Kolkata, where Renoir was shooting The River, and watching ninety-nine films in six months while working as a graphic designer for an advertising agency in London, Ray decided to make his first film, adapting Bibhutibhushan Banerjee’s 1929 novel, which he knew well; Ray had contributed illustrations to a later edition of the book. The film took nearly five years to make as Ray faced repeated financing problems, such delays as cattle eating flowers that were needed for an important scene, and a cast and crew primarily of nonprofessionals. Despite all those issues, Pather Panchali is a stunning masterpiece, a bittersweet and captivating tale of a rural family mired in poverty, struggling to survive in extremely hard times. In a small village, Sarbajaya (Karuna Banerjee) is raising her daughter, Durga (Runki Banerjee), a rambunctious teen, and son, Apu (Subir Banerjee), while her husband, dreamer Harihar (Kanu Banerjee), a wannabe playwright and poet, goes off for months at a time, trying to find work in the city. (The actors shared a common surname but were not related in real life.) Sarbajaya is also caring for their elderly cousin, “Auntie” Indir (retired theater actress Chunibala Devi), who walks very slowly, hunched over and with impossibly leathery skin. The family goes about its business from day to day, as the kids play with friends, figure out how they can get something from the sweets man, and hang out with Auntie, who offers a fresh perspective on life. Sarbajaya is embarrassed that she cannot pay back several rupees she owes her relatively wealthy neighbor, who owns an orchard from which Durga steals fruit. It’s a meager existence, but it avoids being completely dark and bleak because of Auntie’s sense of humor and Apu’s wide-eyed innocence. The film is told from his point of view — in fact, the first time we see him, he is lying down, covered, and one of his eyes pops open, dominating the screen. It’s a difficult, challenging life, but there’s always hope.
Having restored Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding, Milestone, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and preservationist Ross Lipman teamed up again to bring back Kent Mackenzie’s black-and-white slice-of-life tale The Exiles, which debuted at the 1961 Venice Film Festival and screened at the inaugural 1964 New York Film Festival before disappearing until its restoration, upon which it was selected for the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival. The Exiles follows a group of American Indians as they hang out on a long Friday night of partying and soul searching in the Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles, centering on Homer (Homer Nish) and Yvonne (Yvonne Williams), who are going to have a baby. After Yvonne makes dinner for Homer and his friends, the men drop her off at the movies by herself while they go out drinking and gambling and, in Tommy’s (Tommy Reynolds) case, looking for some female accompaniment. As the night goes on, Homer, Yvonne, and Tommy share their thoughts and dreams in voice-over monologues that came out of interviews Mackenzie conducted with them. In fact, the cast worked with the director in shaping the story and getting the details right, ensuring its authenticity and realism, giving The Exiles a cinéma vérité feel. Although the film suffers from a poorly synced soundtrack — it is too often too clear that the dialogue was dubbed in later and doesn’t match the movement of the actors’ mouths — it is still an engaging, important independent work (the initial budget was $539) about a subject rarely depicted onscreen with such honesty. Mackenzie, who followed up The Exiles with the documentaries The Teenage Revolution (1965) and Saturday Morning (1971) before his death in 1980 a the age of fifty, avoids sociopolitical remonstrations in favor of a sweet innocence behind which lies the difficulties of the plight of American Indians assimilating into U.S. society. The Exiles is screening November 29 and December 1 at the Francesca Beale Theater.
For more than thirty years, Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki (Leningrad Cowboys Go America, Drifting Clouds) has been making existential deadpan black comedies that are often as funny as they are dark and depressing. Has there ever been a film as bleak as 1990’s The Match Factory Girl, in which a young woman (Kati Outinen) suffers malady after malady, tragedy after tragedy, embarrassment after embarrassment, her expression never changing? In his latest film, the thoroughly engaging Le Havre, Kaurismäki moves the setting to a small port town in France, where shoeshine man Marcel Marx (André Wilms), a self-described former Bohemian, worries about his seriously ill wife (Outinen) while trying to help a young African boy (Blondin Miguel), who was smuggled into the country illegally on board a container ship, steer clear of the police, especially intrepid detective Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), who never says no to a snifter of Calvados. Adding elements of French gangster and WWII Resistance films with Godardian undercurrents — he even casts Jean-Pierre Léaud in a small but pivotal role — Kaurismäki wryly examines how individuals as well as governments deal with illegal immigrants, something that has taken on more importance than ever amid the growing international economic crisis and fears of terrorism. Through it all, Marcel remains steadfast and stalwart, quietly and humbly going about his business, deadpan every step of the way. Wouter Zoon’s set design runs the gamut from stark grays to bursts of color, while longtime Kaurismäki cinematographer Timo Salminen shoots scene after scene with a beautiful simplicity. Winner of a Fipresci critics award at Cannes and Finland’s official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Le Havre, the first of a proposed trilogy, is another marvelously unusual, charmingly offbeat tale from a master of the form. A selection of the 2011 New York Film Festival, Le Havre is screening at Film Forum on November 25 and 27.
By far the worst film the Coen brothers have ever made, this remake of the classic 1955 Alexander Mackendrick caper comedy is a travesty from start to finish, an absolute embarrassment to all involved, including Tom Hanks, Irma P. Hall, Marlon Wayans, J. K. Simmons, Tzi Ma, Ryan Hurst, and Diane Delano. Did anyone actually watch this film before they released it? We barely smiled once and never laughed at this ridiculous story of a group of losers using a woman’s root cellar as home base to rob a riverboat casino. Besides not being the slightest bit funny, the movie is also racist, as every black actor in the film is playing a stereotype. We get the Coens, but we don’t get this. Was it meant to be ironic? Cynical? Slapstick? All we know is that it’s just plain awful. The Ladykillers is screening at MoMA November 24.
The first half of this Coen brothers movie is stupendous. Shot in color by Roger Deakins and processed in magnificent black and white to get a richer palette, the film tells the story of Ed Crane, Billy Bob Thornton’s best role yet, a barber with almost nothing to say — ever. When he does talk, he talks slow, slower than he walks. Even his voice-over narration is delivered in a slow monotone. For about forty-five minutes, the pace is fabulous, but then it begins wearing down as the plot goes all over the place. It feels like the Coens had a bunch of different film ideas and decided to throw them all into the last hour of this movie, which seems to go on and on and on and on, with at least four places where you’ll think it’s over. The laughs go away, and a creepy, unfriendly moodiness pervades. At least you can still keep track of the awesome wigs that many of the male characters wear, and for the Californians out there it might be fun guessing the shooting locations, because much of the film was not shot on studio sets. Locations include Musso and Frank’s, a Presbyterian church on Wilshire Blvd., an empty Bank of America branch in Los Angeles, an abandoned furniture store in Glendale, Bungalow Heaven and Castle Green in Pasadena, and the streets of Orange in Orange County. The rather remarkable cast also includes Frances McDormand, Michael Badalucco, Richard Jenkins, Scarlett Johansson, Jon Polito, Tony Shalhoub, and James Gandolfini. The Man Who Wasn’t There is screening December 27 at MoMA.
