Photographer Bob Gruen will be honored at 34th annual John Lennon Tribute concert at Symphony Space (photo © 1974 by Bob Gruen)
Symphony Space, Peter Jay Sharp Theatre
2537 Broadway at 95th St.
Friday, December 5, $65-$105, 8:00
212-864-5400
www.symphonyspace.org
www.lennontribute.org
The life of John Lennon is currently being celebrated eight times a week at the Union Square Theatre with Lennon: Through a Glass Onion, in which John R. Waters portrays the Smart Beatle. The legacy of the longtime New Yorker will also be honored on December 5 at Symphony Space with the 34th annual John Lennon Tribute. Presented by Theatre Within and Music Without Borders, the evening will consist of Lennon songs performed by a fab lineup of special guests: Debbie Harry, Kate Pierson, David Johansen, Joan Osborne, Joe Raiola, Amy Helm, Marshall Crenshaw, Ben E. King, Rich Pagano, the Kennedys, and Chrissi Poland. In addition, legendary photographer Bob Gruen, who took the iconic photos of Lennon in his New York City T-shirt, will receive a special honor. The evening benefits Theatre Within’s John Lennon Real Love Project, which “offers children and young adults in medical care centers, schools, and communities in need the unique opportunity to compose their own songs.”
Korean director Bong Joon-ho, who had a huge international hit in 2006 with The Host and a major critical success with 2009’s Mother, makes his English-language feature debut with Snowpiercer, a nonstop postapocalyptic thrill ride that takes its place with such other memorable train films as The Great Train Robbery, From Russia with Love, The Train, and Murder on the Orient Express. It’s 2031, seventeen years after the chemical C7, which was supposed to end climate change, instead froze the earth, killing all living beings except for a group of survivors on board a train run by a perpetual motion machine. In the rear of the train, men, women, and children are treated like prisoners, beaten, tortured, dressed in rags, their only food mysterious gelatin blocks. Soldiers led by the cold-hearted Mason (Tilda Swinton) and the yellow-clad Claude (Emma Levie), whose outift brings virtually the only color to this dark, dank, deeply depressing setting, violently keep the peace as the two women heartlessly dictate orders and abscond with the children. But Curtis Everett (Chris Evans) and Edgar (Jamie Bell) hatch a plan to get past the guards and make their way to the front of the train in order to find out just what is really going on and to meet with Wilford, the wealthy entrepreneur running the engine. With the help of defiant mother Tanya (Octavia Spencer), elder statesman Gilliam (John Hurt), train engineer Namgoong Minsu (Bong regular Song Kang-ho), and Namgoong’s daughter, Yona (Go Ah-sung), Curtis attempts to lead a small revolution that is seemingly doomed to failure.
Since 2002, Austin auteur Richard Linklater has made a wide range of successful films, from the family-friendly School of Rock and Bad News Bears to the second and third parts of the more adult Before series (Before Sunset, Before Midnight), with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, in addition to the Philip K. Dick thriller A Scanner Darkly and the Jack Black black comedy Bernie. But during that entire period he was also making one of the grandest films ever about childhood, the deceptively simple yet mind-blowingly complex Boyhood. The work follows Mason Evans Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) as he goes from six years old to eighteen, maturing for real as both the actor and the character grow up before our eyes. As the film begins, Mason, his older sister, Samantha (Linklater’s real-life daughter, Lorelei), and their mother, Olivia (Patricia Arquette), are preparing to move to Houston just as their usually absent father, Mason Sr. (Hawke), returns from a job in Alaska, supposedly ready to be a more regular part of their lives. But his emotional immaturity leads to divorce, and Mason Jr. spends the next dozen years dealing with school, stepfathers, and the normal machinations of everyday life, including sex, drugs, rock and roll, and, for him, a determination from an early age to become an artist. Along the way, his sister and parents experience significant changes as well as they all learn lessons about life, love, and loss.
