twi-ny recommended events

TRUE CRIME: MEMORIES OF MURDER

Detectives Park (Song Kang-ho) and Cho (Kim Roe-ha) are on the case in MEMORIES OF MURDER

MEMORIES OF MURDER (SALINUI CHUEOK) (Bong Joon-ho, 2003)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Saturday, July 18, 4:30, and Saturday, July 25, 4:40
Series continues through August 5
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

Inspired by actual events, Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder is a psychological thriller set in a rural South Korean town. With a serial killer on the loose, Seoul sends experienced inspector Suh (Kim Sang-kyung) to help with the case, which is being bungled by local detectives Park (Song Kang-ho) and Cho (Kim Roe-ha), who consistently tamper with evidence, bring in the wrong suspects, and torture them in both brutal and ridiculously funny ways. But as the frustration level builds and more victims are found, even Suh starts considering throwing away the book and doing whatever is necessary to catch the killer. Bong’s first major success, earning multiple awards at film festivals around the world, Memories of Murder is a well-paced police procedural that contains just enough surprises to overcome a few too many genre clichés. The film is beautifully shot by Kim Hyung-gu, from wide-open landscapes to a busy, crowded factory. But the film is dominated by Song’s (The Host, Snowpiercer) big, round face, a physical and emotional wonder whether he’s goofing around with a prisoner or dead-set on catching a criminal. Winner of numerous international film festival awards, Memories of Murder is screening July 18 & 25 as part of Film Forum’s “True Crime” series, which continues through August 5 with such other ripped-from-the-headlines favorites as Sidney Lumet’s Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, Franceso Rosi’s The Mattei Affair, Fritz Lang’s M, and double features of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope and Tom Kalin’s Swoon and Robert Wise’s The Body Snatcher and I Want to Live!

JAPAN CUTS 2015: ASLEEP

Terako (Sakura Ando) hides from life in her bed in Shingo Wakagi’s ASLEEP

FESTIVAL OF NEW JAPANESE FILM: ASLEEP (SHIRAKAWAYOFUNE) (Shingo Wakagi, 2015)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Thursday, July 16, $13, 6:30
Series runs July 9-19
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

Shingo Wakagi’s Asleep is a quiet gem of a film, a poignant drama about three women’s relationship with beds and sleep. Sakura Ando stars as Terako, a young woman who is sleeping most of her life away. The only time she wakes up and gets out of bed is when her married lover, the somewhat older Mr. Iwanaga (Arata Iura), calls her to make a date. Terako’s best friend and former roommate, Shiori (Mitsuki Tanimura), recently committed suicide shortly after complaining about the difficulties of her job as a soineya, providing companionship — but not sex — by lying in bed with strangers who do not want to sleep alone. And Terako soon discovers that Iwanaga’s wife is languishing in a hospital bed in a deep coma. As Terako cares more and more for Iwanaga, she finds it harder and harder to get out from under the covers, trying to hide from a life surrounded by loneliness and death.

Terako (Sakura Ando) and Mr. Iwanaga (Arata Iura) try to find love and romance in ASLEEP

Ando (Love Exposure) and Iura (After Life, Air Doll), who played rival siblings in Yang Yong-hi’s Our Homeland, have an offbeat yet sweet chemistry as lovers in Asleep, each in need of different forms of physical and psychological comfort. Wakagi (Waltz in Starlight, Totemu: Song for Home) cowrote, directed, and photographed the film, based on Banana Yoshimoto’s 1989 novella, and he gives it a literary quality with soft voice-over narration by Ando as the troubled Terako, who is first shown lying flat on her back on her futon, in black-and-white, as if she’s dead. “If someone could guarantee that this is really love, I’d be so relieved I’d kneel at her feet,” she says after receiving a phone call from Iwanaga, continuing, “And if it isn’t love, don’t let me hear when he calls,” hiding under the sheets and plowing her head deeper into her pillow. Asleep is an intimate tale, playing out almost like a confessional as a young woman deals with love and depression, nearly paralyzed by a fear of taking control of her life. Wakagi includes little dialogue and no musical score, only the natural sounds of the city and the deafening silence of the bedroom, broken only by the buzzing of the telephone offering her an opportunity that both excites and frightens her. Asleep is part of the Centerpiece Presentation of Japan Society’s annual Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film, screening July 16 at 6:30, with Ando on hand to introduce the film and participate in a Q&A afterward. The festival runs through July 19 with such other works as co-Centerpiece Presentation 100 Yen Love, also starring Ando; The Voice of Water, with an intro by and Q&A with director Masashi Yamamoto and special guests Yui Takagi and Shigetaka Komatsu; and This Country’s Sky, with director Haruhiko Arai and star Youki Kudoh at Japan Society to talk about the film.

GEORGE CLINTON AND PARLIAMENT FUNKADELIC: SHAKE THE GATE TOUR

George Clinton brings the Mothership to New York for three area shows in five days

SummerStage: Wednesday, July 15, Queensbridge Park, free, 7:00
BAM’s R&B Festival at MetroTech: Thursday, July 16, MetroTech Commons, free, 12 noon
Paramount: Sunday, July 19, Huntington, $25-$65, 9:00
georgeclinton.com

Climb aboard the Mothership for free in Queens when George Clinton brings his legendary funk ensemble and outrageous stage show to the East River on a summer night. Performing on Wednesday as part of the City Parks Foundation SummerStage series in Queensbridge Park (on the Queens side of the East River, with a view of Roosevelt Island, just a few blocks from the 21st St. stop on the F train), Clinton and his Shake the Gate Tour will also appear for free on Thursday at noon in Brooklyn as part of BAM’s R&B Festival at MetroTech and then in a ticketed show at the Paramount in Huntington on Sunday night. But there may be no better place to see Clinton — who turns seventy-four next week — play such mind-bending classics of funk as “Atomic Dog,” “Loopzilla,” and “Do Fries Go with That Shake?” than on a sweaty July night outdoors. The creator of both Parliament and Funkadelic in the 1970s, he and collaborators including Maceo Parker, Bernie Worrell, and Bootsy Collins were responsible for monster dance-floor hits such as “Flashlight,” “One Nation Under a Groove,” and the epic 1970 album Free Your Mind . . . and Your Ass Will Follow. Mixing R&B with the psychedelic guitar stylings of Jimi Hendrix, Cream, and others, Clinton was among the chief creators of funk as we know it, submerged for a time beneath the shiny disco of the ’80s, emerging triumphant again in the ’90s and the new millennium as rap and hip-hop artists such as Outkast, Busta Rhymes, Fishbone, and especially Dr. Dre have sampled him countless times. Youngsters know “Loopzilla” from the soundtrack of the video game Grand Theft Auto, as well as many other Clinton songs used on TV and in movies. As he has stated: “Funk is the DNA of hip-hop and rap” and “Sure, sample my stuff. . . . Ain’t a better time to get paid than when you’re my age. You know what to do with money. You don’t buy as much pussy or drugs with it — you just buy some.” Caught for years in a morass of licensing, copyright, and ownership issues, Clinton has been forced to limit his recent output; the latest is 2014’s (First Ya Gotta) Shake the Gate, available only on iTunes and as a three-CD Amazon set. Although musical director Garry “Starchild” Marshall Shider (aka Diaper Man) left for the next world in 2010, and in keeping with the brilliant chaos that swirls around the band, the lineup can be fluid, the current slate of Mothership members consists of many, such as guitarist Michael “Kid Funkadelic” Hampton, who have played with Parliament Funkadelic since the 1970s. Keep an ear open for “Maggot Brain”; that’ll be Hampton on lead guitar, as it has been for decades. In his 2014 memoir, Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You? (Atria, October 2014, $27), Clinton titles his introduction “Let’s Take It to the Stage (1978),” and thankfully, nearly forty years later, he’s still doing it, with three area shows in five days.

TRUE CRIME: BONNIE AND CLYDE

Faye Dunaway and Clyde Barrow glamorize bank robbery in Arthur Penn classic

BONNIE AND CLYDE (Arthur Penn, 1967)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Friday, July 17, and Saturday, July 18
Series continues through August 5
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

Arthur Penn changed the course of Hollywood — and world cinema — in 1967 with Bonnie and Clyde, a film previously offered to such Nouvelle Vague luminaries as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Cowritten by David Newman (Superman I-III) and Robert Benton (Kramer vs. Kramer), the film mythologizes the true story of depression-era bank robbers Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, played magnificently by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. At its heart, Bonnie and Clyde is a passionate yet unusual love story, filled with close-ups of the gorgeous Dunaway, who is first seen naked, running to her bedroom window confident and carefree, more a modern 1960s woman than a poor 1930s small-town waitress. Meanwhile, Barrow might know how to shoot a gun, but he’s a dud in bed; “I ain’t much of a lover boy,” he tells Bonnie early on, so their passion plays out in fast-moving car chases and shootouts rather than under the covers (while also playing off of Beatty’s already well-deserved reputation as a ladies’ man). They pick up an accomplice in gas-station attendant C. W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard) and are soon joined by Clyde’s brother, Buck (Gene Hackman), and his wife, Blanche (Oscar winner Estelle Parsons), and continue their rampage as heroic, happy-go-lucky hold-up artists, leading up to one of the most influential and controversial endings ever put on celluloid, an unforgettable finale of violent and poetic beauty. Penn (Little Big Man, Target), editor Dede Allen (The Hustler, Serpico), and Oscar-winning cinematographer Burnett Guffey (All the King’s Men, Birdman of Alcatraz) redefined the gangster picture with their creative use of slow motion, long takes, and crowded shots, defying Hollywood conventions in favor of unique and innovative storytelling devices, allowing the film to work on multiple levels. Nominated for ten Academy Awards, Bonnie and Clyde is screening July 17 & 18 as part of Film Forum’s “True Crime” series, which continues through August 5 with such other ripped-from-the-headlines favorites as Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Leonard Kastle’s The Honeymoon Killers, and double features of John Milius’s Dillinger and Don Siegel’s Escape from Alcatraz and Richard Fleischer’s 10 Rillington Place and The Boston Strangler.

HAPPY DAYS

Brooke Adams is all smiles in Beckett’s HAPPY DAYS at the Flea (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Flea Theater
41 White St. between Broadway & Church St.
Through July 18, $70-$150
866-811-4111
www.theflea.org

Andrei Belgrader brings a twenty-first-century spin to Samuel Beckett’s absurdist Happy Days in this Boston Court production continuing at the Flea through July 18. Beckett’s two-act play, which premiered in 1961 at the Cherry Lane, features a husband and wife facing the passage of time and looking at the end of their lives; Beckett gives them the names Willie and Winnie, each of which comes with multiple meanings, including sexual references. Brooke Adams plays the central role of Winnie, a smiling, positive-thinking fifty-ish woman who is immobile, buried to the waist in a barren mound in the middle of nowhere, surrounded only by a painted trompe l’oeil backdrop of blue skies and white clouds. Blonde and cheerful, she is awoken each day by a loud bell, greeting the day with hope despite her predicament. “Another heavenly day,” she declares. Boasting a heavy bosom in a sexy outfit, she goes through her pocketbook and performs her morning ablutions, brushing her teeth, taking medicine, putting on lipstick, and pulling out a revolver. She wakes up the sixty-ish Willie, played by her real-life spouse, Tony Shalhoub, who unfolds his aged copy of the Liberty Tribune and reads the obituaries and the want ads out loud. Throughout the rest of the play, Winnie does nearly all of the talking, with Willie interacting only occasionally. She remembers old loves, tries to read the writing on her toothbrush (which begins, “Fully guaranteed genuine pure…”), and makes repeated references to quotes she can’t actually recall. (“What is that unforgettable line?” she says over and over again in various ways.) By the second act, she has sunk deeper into the abyss, only her neck and head aboveground, unable to use her hands. She is still smiling, claiming “great mercies,” that “it will have been a happy day, after all, another happy day,” but she also seems to recognize that her situation is a bit more serious now, especially when Willie does not respond to her calls.

We will never know exactly what Willie (Tony Shalhoub) is reaching for in HAPPY DAYS (photo by Joan Marcus)

Adams (Days of Heaven, Invasion of the Body Snatchers) is fabulous as Winnie, her bright eyes sparkling throughout the show despite what must be physical discomfort, trapped in Takeshi Kata’s rustic set. She makes direct eye contact with the audience, spreading her charm, skillfully playing to the crowd at the start of the second act, saying, “Someone is looking at me still. Caring for me still. That is what I find so wonderful. Eyes on my eyes.” The audience spends most of the show looking into Adams’s eyes, and they radiate back a thrilling warmth, guiding us through the bizarre shenanigans and word games. Shalhoub (Act One, Monk), who displayed a wonderful propensity for physical comedy in The Mystery of Love and Sex, ups the ante here, really cutting loose, dressed in a vaudevillian-like tux and makeup that makes him nearly unrecognizable. (The splendid costumes are by Melanie Watnick.) Written in the same period in which Beckett also gave us Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, Act without Words, and Fragments, Happy Days is filled with playful sexual innuendo, double entendres, and allusions to life and death, God and religion as Willie and Winnie discuss eggs, formication (no, that is not a typo), prayer, masturbation, and castrated male swine in classic Beckett style. Although Beckett might have had the end of the world in mind when writing Happy Days — “Do you think the earth has lost its atmosphere?” Winnie asks, in addition to hoping “that perhaps some day the earth will yield and let me go, the pull is so great, yes, crack all round me and let me out” — he could not have known that fifty-plus years later the audience would be thinking so much about global warming and climate change as Willie and Winnie approach their potential fate, but Belgrader (Endgame, The Master Builder) wisely doesn’t force the issue. The bell that rouses Willie and Winnie in the morning and prevents them from falling asleep during the day — it also wakes up any dozing audience members — is kind of a wakeup call for all of us. But in no way would I be so bold as to claim that Happy Days is about anything specific, be it climate change, or matrimony, or aging, or love, or death, or time, or freedom, or guns, or personal hygiene, or theater itself. At intermission, three older patrons left the Flea, two stating that they would not come back for the second act. (One of them finally realized, noticing a poster on the way out, that the play was written by Beckett.) “But I want to find out what happens,” the third one said. They didn’t come back. And of course, nothing happened, except everything.

TWO EVENINGS OF FILMS WITH YOKO ONO

RAPE will be the focus of one of two special evenings in which Yoko Ono will screen and discuss her film work

MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building
4 West 54th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Monday, July 13, and Wednesday, July 15, 7:30
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk and online beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

MoMA’s excellent “Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971” sheds new light on the seminal period of the Tokyo-born multimedia artist’s career, comprising music, photographs, sculpture, interactive performances, memorabilia and ephemera, paintings, films, and instruction pieces. “Ono’s art from this period is run through with a complex interplay between her own absence and presence,” Klaus Biesenbach writes in the extensive exhibition catalog. “Over time, Ono was able to turn her complex handling of artistic presence and absence into a sophisticated treatment of a public image, which allowed her to reach a broad audience with her artistic and political messages.” The artist will be present at MoMA this week for a pair of special presentations of her films and videos. On Monday, July 13, “An Evening with Yoko Ono and Chrissie Iles” will explore Ono’s musical oeuvre through well-known conceptual films and rare footage, followed by a discussion between Ono and Whitney curator Chrissie Iles. On Wednesday, July 15, “An Evening with Yoko Ono and Alexandra Munroe” examines Ono’s 1969 feature-length collaboration with husband John Lennon, Rape, along with the shorts Film No. 4 (Bottoms) and Takahiko Iimura’s Ai (Love), followed by a conversation between Ono and Guggenheim senior curator Alexandra Munroe, who refers to Ono as “one of my dearest friends. Whether sitting around a kitchen table or in more canonized theatres, at this point in our relationship, the most valued time I spend with her are the conversations we have together.” In the catalog, Clive Phillpot explains, “Lennon biographer Ray Coleman claimed that [Rape] ‘parodied the story of the Beatles’ escalator to success,’ but it is much more likely that it reflected what curator Chrissie Iles described as ‘the tension and fear felt by Ono and Lennon as the intrusive press and public attention generated by their fame became increasingly harder to bear.’” The exhibition itself includes such marvelous Ono films as Fly, Cut Piece, Eyeblink, and Film No. 5 (Smile).

4KNOTS VIDEO OF THE DAY: “COLORS IN THE WHITES OF YOUR EYES” BY HEAVEN

Who: Surfbort, Heaven, Heaters, Meatbodies, Happyness, Screaming Females, Mikal Cronin, Twin Peaks, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, and Super Furry Animals
What: Fifth annual Village Voice 4Knots Music Festival
Where: Pier 84, Hudson River Park, West 44th St. at 12th Ave.
When: Saturday, July 11, general admission $25, VIP $50, 12 noon – 10:00
Why: At most outdoor music festivals, there’s almost nobody there for the first few groups, save for a few family members, a coupla friends, a photographer or two, and one dude who is determined to hold his front-and-center spot for the next ten hours. But if you choose to show up for only the bigger-name bands at 4Knots, you’ll be missing out on the wild and unpredictable Surfbort and the somewhat calmer Brooklyn dream popsters Heaven, who will be taking the stage while many in their home borough are just starting to get out of bed. Guitarist and singer Matt Sumrow and drummer Mikey Jones let some of their influences show on their 2013 Covers EP, which featured versions of New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle,” Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way,” and the Kinks’ “See My Friends,” followed shortly thereafter by their debut full-length, Telepathic Love, which boasts such tracks as “Colors in the Whites of Your Eyes,” “Falling Apple,” “Mountains Move,” and “Southern Rain.” Sumrow, Jones, Yoi Fujita, and Ian Fenger will be going on at 12:40 on Saturday; try not to show them your love telepathically and instead by cheering them on at the pier.

Surfbort — 12:00
Heaven — 12:40
Heaters — 1:25
Meatbodies — 2:05
Happyness — 2:45
Screaming Females — 3:45
Mikal Cronin — 4:45
Twin Peaks — 5:45
Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks — 6:45
Super Furry Animals — 8:30