twi-ny recommended events

COUNTRY BRUNCHIN’: SERENITY

Joss Whedon continues FIREFLY series with feature film that reunites cast for one last adventure

SCI-FIGHTERS: SERENITY (Joss Whedon, 2005)
Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
Saturday, November 7, 11:15 am
718-384-3980
www.nitehawkcinema.com
www.serenitymovie.com

We were huge fans of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, so it was with much disappointment that we watched his 2002 TV show, Firefly, come and go so quickly. But the diehard fans, known as Browncoats, wanted more than the Fox network gave them, so Whedon delivered this exciting feature-length film for Universal, reuniting the cast, including Nathan Fillion as Mal, Gina Torres as Zoe, Alan Tudyk as Wash, Morena Baccarin as Inara, Adam Baldwin as Jayne, Jewel Staite as Kaylee, Sean Maher as Simon, Summer Glau as River, and Ron Glass (yes, the guy from Barney Miller) as Shepherd. The bad guy this time around is known simply as the Operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a cold-blooded killing machine out to destroy River, who has very dangerous special powers that the Alliance wants silenced. Also getting in the crew’s way are the Reavers, vile creatures who prefer to eat their prey alive. While the Browncoats should be thrilled with the film, so should newbies to this world, as Whedon has managed to make Serenity an involving stand-alone space Western that sci-fi fans can enjoy without knowing anything about Firefly. But after you see this thoroughly enjoyable flick, you’re likely to rush to catch up on everything you missed. Serenity is screening November 7 at as part of the Nitehawk Cinema series “Country Brunchin’” and “Sci-Fighters” and will be preceded by a live performance by the Brooklyn country band Tatters & Rags. “Sci-Fighters” continues Fridays and Saturdays in November around midnight with such other fab flicks as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Alien, Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, and Paul Michael Glaser’s The Running Man.

FIGHT OR FLIGHT (LE MORAL DES MÉNAGES)

Mathieu Amalric makes his U.S. stage debut at FIAF this week in FIGHT OR FLIGHT with Anne-Laure Tondu (photo © Marc Domage)

Mathieu Amalric makes his U.S. stage debut at FIAF this week in FIGHT OR FLIGHT (photo © Marc Domage)

French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Wednesday, November 4, and Thursday, November 5, $50, 7:30
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

Acclaimed actor and director Mathieu Amalric has been rather busy in New York City, celebrating his fiftieth birthday with appearances at a pair of film festivals being held in his honor, “Mathieu Amalric: Renaissance Man,” at Anthology Film Archives and the French Institute Alliance Française. But most exciting, on November 4 and 5 he’ll be making his U.S. theatrical debut at FIAF, starring opposite Anne-Laure Tondu in the sixty-minute drama Fight or Flight (Le Moral des ménages). The play, about a forty-year-old musician facing a midlife crisis, is based on the 2002 novel by award-winning Parisian writer Eric Reinhardt and is adapted and directed by Stéphanie Cléau, Amalric’s wife, who was also his costar in his latest directorial effort, The Blue Room. (Amalric and Cléau will participate in a Q&A following the 7:30 screening of the film at FIAF on November 3.) Amalric is an extraordinarily sensitive actor, as seen in such films as Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Olivier Assayas’s Late August, Early September, and Arnaud Desplechin’s Kings & Queen, while also displaying a mischievous sense of humor, as exemplified in the French version of Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox, so this stage production should be a real treat.

SCARY MOVIES 9 — AN EVENING WITH LARRY FESSENDEN: THE LAST WINTER

THE LAST WINTER is first of two scary movies from Larry Fessendens Glass Eye Pix screening at Lincoln Center series

THE LAST WINTER is first of two scary movies from Larry Fessenden’s Glass Eye Pix screening at Lincoln Center on November 3

AN EVENING WITH LARRY FESSENDEN: THE LAST WINTER (Larry Fessenden, 2006)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Tuesday, November 3, 7:00
Series continues through November 5
212-875-5050
www.thelastwinter.net
www.filmlinc.org

In Alaska, a company called North is preparing to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, with the permission of the U.S. government. North has sent along environmentalist James Hoffman (James LeGros) and his assistant, Elliot Taylor (Jamie Harrold), to ensure that the team, led by the imposing Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman), follows all proper guidelines and agreements. But when strange things start happening — including weird visions, odd disappearances, and brutal deaths — Pollack is determined to move forward, no matter the cost. Written and directed by Larry Fessenden (Habit, Wendigo), who also makes a cameo in the film, The Last Winter is a global-warming horror story in the tradition of John Carpenter’s The Thing, where the small cast of characters never knows just what is waiting for them around every corner — and out on the treacherous, blindingly white landscape that surrounds and engulfs them. The film also stars Connie Britton (Friday Night Lights) as Abby Sellers, a strong-minded woman who has left Pollack for Hoffman; indie stalwart Kevin Corrigan (Walking and Talking) as vehicle expert Motor; Zach Gilford (Friday Night Lights) as young and innocent Maxwell McKinder; Grammy-winning composer and musician Joanne Shenandoah (Skywoman) as Dawn Russell, who prepares the meals and cleans up after everyone; and Pato Hoffmann (Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman) as Lee Means, a Native American who has a deep understanding of the land and the spirits. A scary look at an all-too-possible future, The Last Winter is screening on November 3 at 7:00 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Scary Movies 9,” appropriately enough, and will be followed by a Q&A with Fessenden, Perlman, and LeGros. “An Evening with Larry Fessenden,” who is celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of his indie film company, Glass Eye Pix, continues at 9:30 with Mickey Keating’s Darling, followed by a Q&A with Keating, Fessenden, and actors Lauren Ashley Carter and Brian Morvant.

GRAHAM GREENE’S TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT

Thomas Jay Ryan, Daniel Jenkins, Rory Kulz, and Jay Russell all play Henry in Keen revival of TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT

The Clurman Theatre at Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 14, $62.50
www.keencompany.org

“Never presume yours is a better morality,” Aunt Augusta says in Keen Company’s playful, imaginative, and frugally produced revival of Travels with My Aunt, adapted by Giles Havergal from Graham Greene’s hippie-era story about colonialism, drugs, free love, family, and, in its own way, flower power. Greene called the novel “the only book I have written for the fun of it,” and that is exactly how director Jonathan Silverstein approaches the two-act comedy of manners in which four actors take on some two dozen roles, ambitiously trading off some of the same parts, even within the same scene. It’s an inventive and, at times, confusing conceit that is introduced at the very start, when four men (Thomas Jay Ryan, Daniel Jenkins, Rory Kulz, and Jay Russell), identically dressed in black suits, white shirts, vests, ties, and bowlers, appear onstage. Three of them are sitting down, trading off lines from retired banker Henry Pulling’s first-person narration. “Everyone thought me lucky but I found it difficult to occupy my time,” Henry explains. “I had never married. I had always lived quietly, and, apart from my interest in dahlias, I had no hobby. For those reasons I found myself agreeably excited by my mother’s funeral.” At the funeral, he sees his aunt Augusta (Ryan) for the first time in more than fifty years. She surprises him with a family secret about his birth, and soon the two of them are traveling around the world, being interrogated by the police, meeting oddball characters, and getting caught up in international intrigue. Through it all, Henry (primarily portrayed by Russell) remains steadfast and droll, a boring sort who doesn’t quite understand the depth of what he has become involved in, but it’s too late to turn back now.

Thomas Jay Ryan and Jay Russell are looking for answers in low-budget adaptation of Graham Greene comic novel

Steven Kemp’s spare set is centered by what the cast and crew call “The Monster,” a movable rectangular block that contains windows and a door on one side and a gated entryway on the other. The blue-curtained backdrop eventually rises to reveal yet more fun, along with a few costume changes courtesy of Jennifer Paar. The actors are simply extraordinary, led by the always excellent Ryan (In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, In the Next Room), who divides his time between Henry and Aunt Augusta, and Russell (End of the Rainbow, The Play What I Wrote), who plays Henry as well as the young woman Tooley, her maybe-CIA father O’Toole (who is studying the lengths of his urination), Miss Keene, and Frau General Schmidt, among others. Jenkins (Big, Big River) is Henry, Mr. Visconti, Colonel Hakim, Detective Sgt. Sparrow, et al., but his main role is the now politically incorrect Wordsworth, Aunt Augusta’s immigrant lover who speaks in a stereotyped tongue. “Why, man, you not offended at Wordsworth?” he asks at one point. It’s hard not to be at least somewhat offended by this Greene character, a product of British imperialism and the British imperialist mind. Late cast addition Kulz (The Old Masters, Empire Travel Agency), in his off-Broadway debut, plays many of the more minor roles, such as a guard, a hotel receptionist, and a Turkish policeman. It’s all jolly good lighthearted fun that never takes itself too seriously, even as it deals with some important topics. “Perhaps a sense of morality is the sad compensation we learn to enjoy, like a remission for good conduct. In the vision there is no morality,” Henry says to Wordsworth. Travels with My Aunt, which was also made into a very different Oscar-winning film by George Cukor (with Maggie Smith as Aunt Augusta, Alec McCowen as Henry, and Louis Gossett Jr. as Wordsworth) offers a sly, sweet-natured look at morality in this lovely little Keen revival.

MATHIEU AMALRIC — RENAISSANCE MAN: THE BLUE ROOM

Mathieu Amalric stars as a husband and father in deep trouble in film he also directed and cowrote

CinéSalon: THE BLUE ROOM (LA CHAMBRE BLEUE) (Mathieu Amalric, 2014)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, November 3, $14, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through December 15
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org
www.lachambrebleue-lefilm.com

Real-life partners Mathieu Amalric and Stéphanie Cléau strip Georges Simenon’s short 1955 novel The Blue Room to its bare essentials — and we do mean bare — in their intimate, claustrophobic modern noir adaptation, which kicks off FIAF’s six-week tribute to Amalric, consisting of the eight-film CinéSalon series “Mathieu Amalric: Renaissance Man” and the special two-night theatrical presentation Fight or Flight (Le Moral des Ménages), starring Amalric and Anne-Laure Tondu, directed by Cléau. In addition to being one of the world’s most talented actors, starring in such films as Kings and Queen, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, A Christmas Tale, and Venus in Fur, Amalric has directed several previous works, including On Tour, which earned him the Best Director prize at Cannes. In The Blue Room, Amalric plays Julien Gahyde, a successful agriculture equipment salesman whose passionate affair with a local pharmacist’s wife, Esther Despierre (Cléau, who cowrote the script with Amalric), appears to have ended in murder. The film opens with Grégoire Hetzel’s lush, sweeping music as the camera makes its way to a blue hotel room where Julien and Esther have just made love offscreen. “Did I hurt you?” she asks. “No,” he responds. “You’re angry,” she says. “No,” he repeats as she laughs and a drop of blood falls on a creamy white sheet. Only then do we see the naked, sweaty couple, whose lurid tale has been succinctly revealed by this highly stylized, beautifully orchestrated scene. Next we hear Julien being interrogated by a magistrate (Laurent Poitrenaux) about a suspicious death, and soon we see Julien in handcuffs in the police station. We don’t know exactly what crime he has been accused of, nor do we know the victim — it could be Julien’s wife, Delphine (Léa Drucker), Esther’s husband, Nicolas (Olivier Mauvezin), or maybe even Esther herself. But as director Amalric, cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne, and editor François Gedigier cut between the past and the present, the details slowly unfold — although that doesn’t mean they ever become completely clear.

Amalric fills The Blue Room with bold splashes of color amid all the darkness and muted skin tones, from the red towel that signals Julien and Esther’s illicit rendezvous to Delphine’s blue bikini to the strikingly red hair of Nicolas’s mother (Véronique Alain) and the shiny green and yellow John Deere equipment he sells. Amalric and Cléau trim so much out of the original story that it too often feels overly cold and calculating, the manipulation too clear and obvious. The nudity also lacks subtlety; Amalric and Cléau might be comfortable with each other sans clothing, but it seems to be a bit of an obsession with Amalric the director. Nonetheless, The Blue Room, shot in the old-fashioned aspect ratio of 1:33 and running a mere seventy-six minutes, is a gripping yarn, a lurid tale of sex and murder, pain and passion, and femmes fatale, told from the point of view of a relatively quiet, reserved man who never thought his world could just fall apart like it does. With such plot elements as adultery and murder and even the presence of a young daughter (Mona Jaffart), the story cannot fail to call to mind French author Gustave Flaubert’s classic novel of provincial France and misplaced passion, Madame Bovary, but the near-echoes never become too loud, merely adding a somewhat puzzling flavor to the film, like a dream half remembered. The Blue Room is screening at 4:00 & 7:30 on November 3 in Florence Gould Hall; Amalric and Cléau will participate in a Q&A following the 7:30 show. The series continues through December 15 with such other Amalric films as My Sex Life . . . or How I Got into an Argument, The Screen Illusion, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. A companion series continues at Anthology Film Archives through November 8.

TICKET ALERT: JOHN CLEESE AT THE SKIRBALL CENTER

Who: John Cleese
What: Reading and talk in conjunction with paperback release of So, Anyway . . . (Three Rivers Press, September 2015, $16)
Where: NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 566 LaGuardia Pl., 212-992-8484
When: Saturday, November 14, $65.75 – $125, 6:30
Why: “I made my first public appearance on the stairs up to the school nurse’s room, at St. Peter’s Preparatory School, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England, on September 13, 1948. I was eight and five-sixths. My audience was a pack of nine-year-olds, who were jeering at me and baying, ‘Chee-eese! Chee-eese!’ I kept climbing the steps, despite the feelings of humiliation and fear. But above all, I was bewildered. How had I managed to attract so much attention? What had I done to provoke this aggression? And . . . how on earth did they know my family surname had once been Cheese?” So begins So, Anyway . . ., the memoir of one of the funniest men in the history of the world, Monty Python and Fawlty Towers legend John Cleese. On November 14, the star and writer of A Fish Called Wanda and cinematic portrayer of the Black Knight, Tim the Enchanter, Deadly Dirk, Nearly Headless Nick, King Harold, Q, and many other roles, will be climbing the steps of NYU’s Skirball Center on November 14, to talk about his wild and wacky life and career and all that attention and aggression. The four-time-married, self-described “writer, actor & tall person,” who is also a bit of a silly walker, is visiting Boston, Chicago, and New York celebrating the release of the paperback edition of the book. VIP tickets ($125) come with a signed copy of So, Anyway . . . and a photo opp with Mr. Cleese. Be sure to join in the chants of “Chee-eese! Chee-eese!”

SANKAI JUKU: UMUSUNA

Sankai Juku returns to BAM with UMUSUNA: MEMORIES BEFORE HISTORY (photo by Jack Vartoogian)

UMUSUNA: MEMORIES BEFORE HISTORY
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
October 28-31, $25-$75, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.sankaijuku.com

Japanese Butoh troupe Sankai Juku has returned to BAM for the first time since 2006 with another meditative work of breathtaking beauty, Umusuna: Memories Before History. As the audience enters, sand is slowly spilling out of a pair of glass cones onto scales hanging at the rear corners of the stage, immediately evoking the passage of time, of life and death, concepts that are central in the oeuvre of company director, choreographer, designer, and performer Ushio Amagatsu, who founded the group forty years ago. As the eighty-minute piece, which is divided into seven sections, opens, Amagatsu, wearing the traditional Sankai Juku costume of a white sheet folded over the lower half of his body, his bald head, arms, and bare chest covered in white powder, makes his way down a narrow path between two long, rectangular, sand-covered mats, toward a waterfall-like stream of sand at the back, beginning his journey of birth. In another vignette, the path turns blue and the background green, as four dancers reach out to the would-be river, as if lost in the wonder of human creation. And in a third section, Sho Takeuchi, Ichiro Hasegawa, Akihito Ichihara, and Semimaru wear corsets, red skirts, and dangling earrings, the path now red and running up the back wall, portraying the female spirit. Over the course of the show, the dancers, which also include Dai Matsuoka, Norihito Ishii, and Shunsuke Momoki, emerge from fetal positions, cry silently up at the sky, crawl across the sand, and swirl in circles as they experience the elements of fire, water, air, and earth. The seven parts of the work have such poetic titles as “All that is born,” “Memories from water,” “In winds blown to the far distance,” and “Mirror of forests” and are set to unfortunately trite New Age-style music by Takashi Kako, Yas-Kaz, and Yoichiro Yoshikawa. There is faster movement and more color than in such previous Sankai Juku pieces as Hibiki (Resonance from Far Away) and Kagemi: Beyond the Metaphors of Mirrors, which provide pleasant breaks from the troupe’s usual agonizingly slow choreography and black, gray, and white hues. Even their bows, during several curtain calls, were performed with gorgeous skill and grace, and even a few hints of smiles.