Amanda Parer has filled Brookfield Place with supersized rabbits that glow in the dark (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Brookfield Place
250 Vesey St.
Daily through April 30, free, 12 noon – 9:00 pm (7:00 on Sundays)
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www.artsbrookfield.com
intrude slideshow
No, it’s not Night of the Lepus come to life, a pack of giant bunnies come to decimate humanity. Instead, in some ways, it’s the exact opposite. In 1788, the First Fleet introduced rabbits to Australia, but the real trouble began after a man named Thomas Austin brought two dozen wild rabbits into the country for sport. It wasn’t long before they multiplied to such levels that they became an invasive, unsustainable ecological hazard, destroying crops and contributing to soil erosion. Australian artist Amanda Parer references these problems in her installation “Intrude,” continuing at Brookfield Place through April 30.
“Intrude” highlights invasive species through April 30 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Five large-scale white blow-up rabbits, made of 210D Nylon and reaching as tall and long as thirty-nine feet, have come across the seas; as bunnies do, they have grown in number, to seven, with four having taken root on Brookfield Place’s outside deck along the river and three more, two made specifically for New York City, inside the old Winter Garden. If you don’t speak with the people watching over each rabbit, you might not learn about the havoc the feral creatures are really causing, instead just seeing it as an adorable collection of picture-taking moments. But Parer, who is originally from Sydney but is now based in Tasmania, is very serious about spreading her message; “Intrude” has previously hopped into nineteen cities, including London, Paris, and Boston, with future migrations scheduled for Houston, Los Angeles, and Denver. Although the rabbits are cute during the day, they light up at night, becoming more than a bit ominous while adding to the ultimate cool factor, illuminating visitors in more ways than one.
There’s more than meets the eye in new installation in Battery Park City (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
“I look forward to seeing the rabbits come to life at Brookfield’s properties throughout the United States,” Parer said in a statement. “I expect people will be drawn to the rabbits’ playful appearance, and I hope they will also take the time to understand the deeper meaning in the work and discuss how our actions impact the environment.” There are very specific rules for this warren of giant of rabbits: You can gently touch, kiss, pet, and hug them, but there is no kicking, punching, running, jumping, rolling, smoking, or feeding. Just remember to heed what Grace Slick once warned: “And if you go chasing rabbits / And you know you’re going to fall / Tell ’em a hookah-smoking caterpillar / Has given you the call / Call Alice / When she was just small.” And beware the Night of the Lepus
We called Tetsuya Nakashima’s 2004 hit, Kamikaze Girls, the “otaku version of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie,” referring to it as “fresh,” “frenetic,” “fast-paced,” and “very funny.” His feature-length follow-up, the stunningly gorgeous Memories of Matsuko, also recalls Amelie and all those other adjectives, albeit with much more sadness. Miki Nakatani (Ring, Silk) stars as Matsuko, a sweet woman who spent her life just looking to be loved but instead found nothing but heartbreak, deception, and physical and emotional abuse. But Memories of Matsuko, is not a depressing melodrama, even if Nakashima (Confessions, The World of Kanako) incorporates touches of Douglas Sirk every now and again. The film is drenched in glorious Technicolor, often breaking out into bright and cheerful musical numbers straight out of a 1950s fantasy world. As the movie begins, Matsuko has been found murdered, and her long-estranged brother (Akira Emoto) has sent his son, Sho (Eita), who never knew she existed, to clean out her apartment. As Sho goes through the mess she left behind, the film flashes back to critical moments in Matsuko’s life — and he also meets some crazy characters in the present. It’s difficult rooting for the endearing Matsuko knowing what becomes of her, but Nakashima’s remarkable visual style will grab you and never let go. And like Audrey Tatou in Amelie, Nakatani — who won a host of Japanese acting awards for her outstanding performance — is just a marvel to watch. Memories of Matsuko is a fine choice to conclude Japan Society’s rather eclectic 2016 Globus Film Series “Japan Sings! The Japanese Musical Film.” As curator Michael Raine notes, “The ubiquity of music and song in postwar Japanese cinema became an anti-naturalist resource for modernist filmmakers to characterize social groups (Twilight Saloon, 
“And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for!” announces the monocled, whip-snapping Mammoth Circus ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) as Max Ophüls’s 1955 CinemaScope masterpiece, Lola Montès, begins. “The most sensational act of the century!” he continues, the camera following him in a breathtaking tracking shot as he introduces “a creature a hundred times more wild than any beast in our menagerie! A monster of cruelty . . . with the eyes of an angel!” Then, with much fanfare, Lola Montès (Martine Carol) arrives like a queen — albeit a circus queen — as the ringmaster tells the audience that they (we) are about to witness “the whole truth of the extraordinary life of Lola Montès.” What follows is not necessarily the true tale of the famed courtesan and entertainer who gained more notoriety for her scandalous love affairs and hourglass body than for her abilities as an actress and dancer. Lola’s story is told in a series of flashbacks showing her with Franz Liszt (Will Quadflieg), Lt. Thomas James (Ivan Desny), conductor Claudio Pirotto (Claude Pinoteau), a young student (Oskar Werner), and, most critically, King Ludwig I of Bavaria (a dashing Anton Walbrook). The episodes reveal her to be both loved and reviled as she struggles to succeed in her career, which ends up taking second place to the men in her life. Ophüls barely shows the cigar-loving Lola performing, instead letting the camera slowly dance around her, often depicting her through window frames, screens, and curtains as if she is a caged animal, all leading to a dangerous grand finale.
Japan Society’s 2016 Globus Film Series “Japan Sings! The Japanese Musical Film” continues April 19 with a complex, hard-to-define work that is not in any way a traditional musical. But then again, it’s by Nagisa Oshima, who didn’t care much for conventions. In 1967, Oshima, who had previously made such controversial films as Pleasures of the Flesh and Violence at Noon, cowrote (with Takeshi Tamura, Mamoru Sasaki, and Toshio Tajima, although much of the film is improvised) and directed Sing a Song of Sex, the original Japanese title of which translates as A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs. The film opens with red liquid dripping on a red background, as if the Japanese flag is being stained with old and new blood. Hikaru Hayashi’s soundtrack chimes in, combining 1960s mystery and sex comedy themes. On a high school campus, many students are protesting the Vietnam War, but four virgin boys, Nakamura (pop singer Ichiro Araki), Ueda (Kôji Iwabuchi), Hiroi (Kazumi Kushida), and Maruyama (Hiroshi Satô), instead are immersed in sexual fantasies involving raping a politically active student they know only as number 469 (Kazuko Tajima). They go out drinking one night in Tokyo with their professor, Otake (Ichizô Itami), as well as three female students, Kaneda (Hideko Yoshida), Ikeda (Hiroko Masuda), and Satomi (Nobuko Miyamoto), who worship the teacher. Professor Otake gets drunk and sings a low-class shanty that demeans women, a Japanese flag behind him. Later he declares, “Bawdy songs, raunchy songs, erotic songs, songs about sex — these are the suppressed voices of the people. An oppressed people’s labor, their lives . . . and their loves. Once people became conscious of these things, they naturally turned to song to express themselves. That’s why bawdy songs represent the history of the people.” He says that he feels sorry for the youth of Japan, who don’t even know they’re being oppressed. Then another drunk man in the bar explains, “So a doomed people sing the songs of a doomed nation? What’s it matter? Japan’s full of doomed people.” That night Professor Otake dies in his hotel room, leaving the three young women to mourn for him and the four young men to continue his bawdy adventures. Meanwhile, Otake’s lover, Takako Tanigawa (Akiko Koyama), becomes involved in the controversy surrounding his death.