Mark Hogancamp tries to rebuild his life in a carefully constructed alternate reality using dolls
MARWENCOL (Jeff Malmberg, 2010)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at Third St.
Tuesday, November 10, 8:00
Series continues through November 24
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.marwencol.com
Named Best Documentary at numerous film festivals across the country, Marwencol offers a surprising look inside the creative process and the fine line that exists between art and reality. On April 8, 2000, Mark Hogancamp was nearly beaten to death outside a bar in his hometown of Kingston, New York. He spent nine days in a coma and more than a month in the hospital before being released, suffering severe brain damage that has left his memory a blur. To help put his life back together, he began using toys and dolls — Barbies, celebrity replicas, army men — to re-create his personal journey. He makes dolls of his friends and relatives, the people he works with, and others, constructing an alternate WWII-era universe he calls Marwencol, complete with numerous buildings and plenty of Nazis. He captures the detailed story in photographs that are not only fascinating to look at but that also help him figure out who he was and who he can be. This miniature three-dimensional world is reminiscent of the two-dimensional one carefully fashioned by outsider artist Henry Darger in his fifteen-thousand-page manuscript, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, which also features an alternate reality involving military battles set amid stunning artwork. Director, producer, and editor Jeff Malmberg makes no judgments about Hogancamp, and asks the same of the audience. In his first full-length film, Malmberg shares the compelling story of a deeply troubled, flawed man suddenly forced to begin again, using art and creativity to bring himself back to life. He speaks with Hogancamp’s mother, his old roommate, the prosecutor who handled his case, and others who are first seen proudly holding the doll Hogancamp made of them. And Malmberg doesn’t turn away from the more frightening aspects of Hogancamp’s daily existence. Marwencol is an unforgettable portrait of lost identity and the long road to redemption. The film is screening November 10 at 8:00 as part of the IFC Center series “Stranger Than Fiction” and will be followed by a Q&A and book signing with Hogancamp and producer Chris Shellen, who collaborated on the new book Welcome to Marwencol (November 3, Princeton Architectural Press, $29.95).
Following its prestigious midnight film screening at Cannes this past May, Hong Won-chan’s debut feature, Office, is the opening-night selection of the 2015 New York Korean Film Festival, which runs November 6-11 at the Museum of the Moving Image. In the contemporary thriller, written by Choi Yun-jin (Steel Cold Winter), Seoul salaryman Kim Byung-Guk (Bae Seong-woo) calmly comes home from work one night and butchers his family with a hammer. The next morning, Detective Jong-hoon (Park Sung-Woong) arrives at the office with plenty of questions, but no one has much to say about the killer, who was part of sales team #2 — although they are clearly hiding something. Only frazzled, insecure, wide-eyed intern Lee Mirae (Ko Ah-Sung), who had a friendly relationship with Kim, wants to tell the truth, but she keeps her mouth shut, harassed by her boss (Ryu Hyun-Kyung) and director Kim (Kim Eui-sung). When it is discovered that the murderer returned to the office after committing his vicious crime and may still be in the building, the tension ramps up, as does the body count. 
To use George Roundy’s favorite adjective, Shampoo, is “great.” In this ’70s classic, Warren Beatty, who cowrote the screenplay with Robert Towne, stars as George, a Beverly Hills hairdresser who gives his wealthy clients more than just a cut-and-blow-dry. The film takes place primarily on November 4, 1968, as Nixon is battling Humphrey for the presidency, and George can’t keep it in his pants, running back and forth between Felicia (Lee Grant), Jackie (Julie Christie), and Lorna (Carrie Fisher) while trying to open his own shop, with help from business tycoon Lester (Jack Warden) — Felicia’s husband, Jackie’s lover, and Lorna’s father. The clothing is magnificent, as, of course, are the hairstyles. Ashby’s biting comedy wonderfully captures the sexual awakening of the 1970s in all its glory — and in all its vapidity. Horror fans should keep an eye out for Lester’s friend Sid Roth, who is played by gimmickmeister William Castle. Ashby, who died in 1988 at the age of fifty-nine, made only eleven narrative films and two concert documentaries in his too-brief life and career. Shampoo is screening in a new 4K digital restoration November 6 & 9 in the MoMA series “To Save and Project: The 13th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation,” with the first show introduced by Sony Pictures executive Grover Crisp. The series, which celebrates newly preserved and restored films, runs November 4-25 and includes a wide variety of works, from the original theatrical version of Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls and William K. Howard’s Don’t Bet on Women to Otto Rippert’s silent Homunculus and the director’s cut of Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Deutschland blieche Mutter, in addition to “The Unknown Orson Welles,” including scenes from The Other Side of the Wind and The Dreamers introduced by Welles’s longtime partner, Oja Kodar, and Munich Filmmuseum director Stefan Droessler.
Woody Allen’s best film in years, Blue Jasmine is a modern-day Streetcar Named Desire filtered through the Bernie Madoff scandal. Cate Blanchett won an Oscar for her marvelously nuanced and deeply textured performance as Jasmine French, an elegant socialite whose immensely wealthy husband, Hal (a wonderfully smarmy Alec Baldwin), amassed his fortune the new-fashioned way: by lying and cheating—only he was the rare financier who got caught and ended up in jail. Now broke and distraught, Jasmine moves in with her sister, Ginger (the delightful Sally Hawkins), a single mother with two kids living in a cramped apartment in San Francisco. Ginger and her ex-husband, Augie (an excellent Andrew Dice Clay), lost all their money by investing with Hal, and she is now trying to rebuild her life, working as a cashier and dating the gruff but dedicated Chili (a strong Bobby Cannavale). Not used to taking care of herself, Jasmine seems lost in a world that no longer treats her like a princess; she takes a job working for a dentist (Michael Stuhlbarg) and attends a computer class, but she is determined to regain her previous status. And that chance comes when she meets Dwight (a gentle Peter Sarsgaard), a man with grand plans who just might be the one to lead her back to the level to which she is accustomed.
