Jan Vogler (Photo by Jim Rakete) and Bill Murray (photo by Marco Grob) seek out new worlds in unique collaboration
Who: Bill Murray, Jan Vogler, Mira Wang, Vanessa Perez
What: Carnegie Hall concert
Where: Carnegie Hall, Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage, 881 Seventh Ave. at Fifty-Seventh St., 212-247-7800
When: Monday, October 16, $40-$250, 8:00
Why: Bill Murray has been singing his whole career, from goofing around as Nick the lounge singer on Saturday Night Live, where he would make up words to the Star Wars theme and annoy Linda Ronstadt, to delivering a rousing rendition of “Let’s Get Physical” on Late Night with David Letterman and a tender karaoke version of Roxy Music’s “More than This” in Lost in Translation. But just as he went from being a comedian to a more serious actor, he will be taking his vocal career to unseen heights on October 16 at Carnegie Hall for “Bill Murray, Jan Vogler & Friends: New Worlds,” an evening of classical music and American literature. Suburban Chicago native Murray and German cellist Jan Vogler, who met on an airplane in 2013, attended a poetry walk across the Brooklyn Bridge together in 2015, and then decided to team up on this project, will be joined by Chinese-born violinist Mira Wang (Vogler’s wife) and Venezuelan-born pianist Vanessa Perez on compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach, Astor Piazzola, Stephen Foster, George Gershwin, Henry Mancini, Van Morrison, Leonard Bernstein, and others; Murray will recite text by Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Sondheim, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and more alongside Vogler’s Stradivari cello. With its international quartet, the show will also focus on various connections between America and Europe. “I am bathing in this experience, really. I can’t get enough of it,” Murray said in a statement. The New Worlds studio album will be released by Decca Gold on September 9. For a sneak peek at what to expect, check out this promotional video.
I never went to boarding school, but if I had, I’d like it to have been at the Headfort School in Kells, County Meath, Ireland, which promises “an education that lasts a lifetime.” The institution, founded in 1949 in a two-hundred-year-old building, is highlighted in the extraordinarily enchanting documentary School Life. Director and cinematographer Neasa Ní Chianáin and director and producer David Rane focus on the daily exploits of husband and wife teachers John and Amanda Leyden, who have been at Headfort for more than forty-five years. The film follows them from their quaint house to their classrooms and special projects: John, tall and thin, with an acerbic wit and scraggly white hair on the back of his head, is putting together the school rock band, while Amanda, short and stout with an infectious enthusiasm for life, is staging Hamlet with a handpicked group of students. Headmaster Dermot Dix, who attended the school himself and had the Leydens as teachers, gives them a wide berth, and they are allowed to be themselves, questioning the existence of a supreme being and supporting same-sex marriage; in fact, everyone at Headfort, from the teachers to the students and the administrators, is encouraged to be themselves, rather than pigeonholed into standard, uniform expectations. Dix even considers it a place where students can “horse around” and “get mucky and muddy”; at one point John, who also teaches math and Latin, is outside in the forest, pushing one of the girls on a makeshift swing. Previously titled In Loco Parentis — “in place of parents” — when it was a hit at Sundance, School Life rarely shows any mothers or fathers, which is extremely refreshing in this age of helicopter parenting. Ní Chianáin (Fairytale of Kathmandu, The Stranger) also avoids talking heads, instead opting for a fly-on-the-wall style that puts us right in the middle of things, without so-called experts explaining to us what is happening and why it’s all so engaging.
In 2015, Minnesota dentist Dr. Walter Palmer shot and killed the beloved Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe, setting off international outrage about trophy hunting. Director Shaul Schwarz and codirector Christina Clusiau explore the much-reviled sport, with surprising results, in Trophy. The film, beautifully photographed in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Namibia by Schwarz and Clusiau, can be extremely difficult to watch, but it is a must-see even though it includes several scenes of brutal animal shootings, including the harrowing killing of an elephant that cries out after it falls to the ground, its family nearby. But what starts out as a horrific look at hunters who pay seemingly ridiculous amounts of money to hunt the Big Five — it can cost upwards of half a million dollars to shoot a buffalo, leopard, elephant, lion, and rhino — quickly turns into a compelling study of conservation, poaching, and sustainability. “I know that a lot of people are confused how hunting and conservation go together,” Safari Club International Foundation president Joe Hosmer says. Despite a serious decline in the number of lions, elephants, and rhinos in the world since 1900 — the film points out that sixty percent of all wild animals have been lost since 1970 — some argue that hunting is necessary and that breeders are helping keep these animals from disappearing from the planet, while others claim just the opposite. “There’s a big industry in our country, not just the crocodiles — the lions, the sable, the buffalo. Everything has been bred for a purpose,” says Christo Gomes, hunting outfitter for Mabula Pro Safaris. “So, yeah, sure, some of them will be hunted. We as humans are going to eat it, we are going to use the skins; that’s the cycle of life.” Born Free USA CEO Adam Roberts explains, “You can just pick whatever animal you want from the menu that they offer you, see the price, and book the kill.” Ecologist and author Craig Packer sees both sides of the issue but can’t escape the basic idea that “canned hunting [is] not sport; it’s just killing.” South African Predator Association president Pieter Potgieter complains, “If we can’t get hunters to hunt our lions, we slaughter the lions and sell their bones.” Somewhere in the middle is South African wildlife officer Chris Moore, whose job is to find a balance between canned hunting, poaching, and animals that can destroy local families’ livelihoods. “Every single morning I look in the mirror because we’ve got to make sure that we don’t cross the bounds . . . that we can’t lose our humanity for humanity,” he says, acknowledging that some hunting is absolutely necessary to help both the animal population and the people, who are desperately poor, but adding, “We have to keep this fight going.”
Legendary cat lover and filmmaker Chris Marker (La Jetée, Sans Soleil) goes on a search for a friendly feline in the slight, playful hour-long documentary The Case of the Grinning Cat. In post-9/11 Paris, when much of the world was proclaiming “We are all Americans,” Marker discovered a series of stenciled yellow cats showing up in odd places, from the sides of buildings to internet sites to classical works of art. After disappearing for a short time — causing Marker great frustration — they return as placards and masks at protest movements against U.S. imperialism and other causes. Although the film is fun to watch, it never quite connects all the dots. The Case of the Grinning Cat is screening at 2:00, 5:15, and 8:30 on September 10 in the BAMcinématek series “Plus ça change: French New Wave in the New Millennium.”
