Multiple locations
Saturday, April 22
www.recordstoreday.com
“It is with deep honor and humility that I accept this ambassadorship. Rest assured I do not take my duties lightly,” says St. Vincent, the official ambassador for Record Store Day’s tenth anniversary event, taking place on April 22. Record stores all over the city will be participating, offering limited edition discs; the list includes Jazz Record Center, Record Mart, Rock and Soul Records, the various Academy stores, Second Hand Rose Music, Record Runner, Turntable Lab Storefront, Village Music World, Generation Records, In Living Stereo, Good Records NYC, Downtown Music Gallery, A-1 Records, Deadly Dragon Sound, and Record Grouch. Among the special 45s, twelve-inch singles, and LPs to watch out for is tunage by Prince, David Bowie, Sharon Jones, Peter Tosh, Ken Kesey, Johnny Cash, Townes Van Zandt — and some living people as well, like Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, Drive by Truckers, David Crosby & the Lighthouse, Spoon, Bettie Serveert, Sting, Pokey LaFarge, Crooked Beat, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Mike Peters, and moe., in addition to tributes to Leonard Cohen and the Clash. There are also double-sided singles by Tegan and Sara / the Regrettes, the Flamin’ Groovies / Dylan Gardner, and Talking Heads / Wildling. Record stores keep going the way of the dinosaurs, so support your local music shop and listen to songs the way they were meant to be heard. Oh, and getting back to St. Vincent, who’s following in the footsteps of such previous ambassadors as Dave Grohl, Chuck D, and Iggy Pop, you can check out her preparation for her ambassadorial responsibilities here.
Peter Getzels and Harriet Gordon’s The Penguin Counters arrives at Cinema Village just in time for World Penguin Day on April 25, which celebrates the cute and cuddly black-and-white (and often yellow) aquatic birds. However, the tuxedoed animals are facing a major challenge, as climate change threatens their very existence. The film follows Ron Naveen and his small team — Thomas Mueller of Frankfurt’s Biodiversity and Climate Research Center, research ecologist Steve Forrest, Stony Brook assistant professor Heather Lynch, and PhD candidates Mike Polito and Paula Casanovas — as they go from Argentina to Deception Island, tracking three varieties of penguins and following in the footsteps of British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, who led a famously treacherous journey to the Antarctic in the first decade of the nineteenth century aboard the aptly named Discovery. In a bit of serendipitous luck, on a cruise ship he’s essentially hitchhiking on, Naveen meets Angie Butler, the biographer of Shackleton’s right-hand man, Frank Wild, who is transporting Wild’s ashes to South Georgia so they can be buried next to Shackleton’s remains, and Naveen joins her on her mission. Naveen, the founder and president of Oceanites, is gathering information for the Antarctic Site Inventory project, which has been detailing the plight of oceanic birds and the ecosystem for more than twenty years. “We’re not explorers, climbers, or athletes,” Naveen explains in a message about the film. “The weather we face is grueling. The terrain is hostile, and we’re only kitted out with golf-ball-sized tally-whackers and waterproof spiral notebooks. But our data has been instrumental in the formation of policies among polar scientists and the fifty member nations of the Antarctic Treaty Organization.”
Made the same year Japan passed a major anti-prostitution law, Kenji Mizoguchi’s final film, 1956’s Street of Shame, is a brutally honest depiction of the decidedly unglamorous life of a group of courtesans at a Tokyo brothel. “Yoshiwara has been here three hundred years,” the Mamasan (Sadako Sawamura) says early on to a police officer. “Does an unnecessary business last so long?” Originally titled Red-Light District, the black-and-white film features an outstanding cast of women playing desperate geisha with serious family and financial problems that lead them to the embarrassment of trying to physically force men off the dark, dank street and into their rooms. Hanae (Michiyo Kogure) has to deal with aging, a baby, and a suicidal husband, Yumeko (Aiko Mimasu) doesn’t want her son to know what she does to earn money to attempt to give him a decent life, Yorie (Hiroko Machida) thinks a husband in a faraway village will gain her longed-for freedom, Yasumi (Ayako Wakao) has become a loan shark to her coworkers, and young Mickey (Machiko Kyō) is quick to share her opinions about the other women but not so quick to catch on to the debasement she is lowering herself to. The protofeminist director of such previous works as Sisters of the Gion, Osaka Elegy, Women of the Night, and The Life of Oharu as well as the brilliant two-part samurai epic The 47 Ronin, Mizoguchi spent much of his career — which included more than seventy films in thirty-three years, up to his death in 1956 at the age of fifty-eight — making films about the exploitation of women, partly influenced by having seen his sister sold into prostitution by their father. It’s a shame that Street of Shame, one of Mizoguchi’s best, also turned out to be his last, but what a way to go. Street of Shame is screening April 22 and 24 in the ongoing “Welcome to Metrograph: A to Z” series, which continues in April with such other S films as Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels, Lowell Sherman’s She Done Him Wrong, and Lech Kowalski’s Story of a Junkie A.K.A. Gringo.
New York City native Robert Vaughn, who passed away in November at the age of eighty-three, and good friend Steve McQueen, who was only fifty when he died in 1980, reunited onscreen in 1968 for the police-political thriller Bullitt. By then, each had starred in a television series — McQueen in Wanted: Dead or Alive, Vaughn as Napoleon Solo in the wildly successful, Emmy-nominated spy fave The Man from U.N.C.L.E. In Bullitt, McQueen virtually created the Hollywood antihero, playing a cool, calm cop who does things his way, often leaving a mess behind him; meanwhile, Vaughn began establishing himself as the manipulative high-class villain. In Bullitt, which was based on Robert L. Fish’s 1963 novel, Mute Witness, McQueen stars as San Francisco detective Lt. Frank Bullitt, a character inspired by real-life SF inspector Dave Toschi. Bullitt is personally selected by local politician Walter Chalmers (Vaughn) to protect an important witness, who is scheduled to testify against the Organization in forty hours. But things go awry, leading to murder and mayhem — and one of the all-time-great movie car chases — as Bullitt, distrustful of Chalmers, refuses to follow protocol. Shot on location by cinematographer William A. Fraker on the winding streets of San Francisco, the film, directed by Peter Yates and featuring a jazzy score by Lalo Schifrin, has quite a supporting cast, with Don Gordon and Carl Reindel as two members of Bullitt’s team, Simon Oakland as their boss, Norman Fell as a suspicious captain, Jacqueline Bisset as Bullitt’s designer girlfriend, Georg Stanford Brown as a doctor, Paul Genge and Bill Hickman as the hit men, Vic Tayback as the brother of the informant, and Robert Duvall as taxi driver.