twi-ny recommended events

NYFF52 SPOTLIGHT ON DOCUMENTARY: STRAY DOG

Ron “Stray Dog” Hall takes his wife, and viewers, on a marvelous ride into the heart of America in Debra Granik’s charming documentary

STRAY DOG (Debra Granik, 2014)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Thursday, October 2, Francesca Beale Theater, 7:30
Friday, October 3, Howard Gilman Theater, 6:15
Encore screening: Sunday, October 12, Walter Reade Theater, 2:30
Festival runs September 26 – October 12
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com
www.straydogthemovie.com

Shortly after meeting Ron “Stray Dog” Hall at the Biker Church in Branson, Missouri, writer-director Debra Granik (Down to the Bone) cast the Vietnam vet as Thump Milton in her second feature, the Oscar-nominated Winter’s Bone. Upon learning more about him, she soon decided that he would be a great subject for a documentary, so she took to the road, following him across the country in the engaging and revealing Stray Dog. Nearly always dressed in black, including his treasured leather jacket covered in medals and patches — when he puts it in a suitcase for a trip, it’s a ritual like he’s folding the American flag — Hall is a wonderfully grizzled old man with a fluffy white beard. At home, he is learning Spanish online so he can communicate better with his new wife, Alicia, a Mexican immigrant, and her two sons (who still live across the border). He visits with his teenage granddaughter, who is making some questionable decisions about her future. In Missouri, he owns and operates the At Ease RV Park, where he gives breaks to fellow vets who can’t always afford to pay the rent. And when he goes on the road, participating in the Run for the Wall, joining up with thousands of other bikers heading for the annual service at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, he stops along the way at other ceremonies honoring soldiers who have gone missing, are POWs, or were killed in action in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other wars.

Hall is a gregarious, gentle man who people instantly flock to and gather around — a scene in which two of his cats sit on each of his knees is absolutely heartwarming — but he is also haunted by some of the things he did in Vietnam, suffering from nightmares that sometimes have him screaming out loud while sleeping in bed. And he wears one of his mottoes right on his arm: “Never Forgive Never Forget.” At one point he sits comfortably on a couch and says, “Just kind of being free, don’t hurt nobody, do what you want to do — a nice thing, ain’t it? You know, I’d rather live as a free man for a year than a slave for twenty.” Granik simply follows Hall as he experiences life with his surprisingly refreshing point of view; no one ever turns to the camera to make any confessions, and no talking heads are brought on board to evaluate what we’re seeing. Granik just lets this beautiful piece of Americana unfold at its own pace while also touching on such hot-button topics as immigration reform, gun control, the economic crisis, and PTSD, making no judgments as we follow the captivating exploits of a man who is part Buddha, part Santa, and all patriot. Stray Dog is making its New York premiere October 2-3 at the 52nd New York Film Festival, with Granik participating in Q&As following each screening. [Ed. note: An encore screening has been added for Sunday, October 12, at 2:30 at the Walter Reade Theater.]

RETRO METRO: THE INCIDENT

A group of straphangers are terrorized by thugs in Larry Peerce’s THE INCIDENT

THE INCIDENT (Larry Peerce, 1967)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Friday, October 3, 4:30 & 9:15
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

One of the ultimate nightmare scenarios of 1960s New York City, Larry Peerce’s gritty black-and-white The Incident takes viewers deep down into the subway as two thugs terrorize a group of helpless passengers. Joe Ferrante (Tony Musante) and Artie Connors (Martin Sheen, in his first movie role) are out for kicks, so after getting some out on the streets, they head underground, where they find a wide-ranging collection of twentieth-century Americans to torture, including Arnold and Joan Robinson (Brock Peters and Ruby Dee), Bill and Helen Wilks (Ed McMahon and Diana Van der Vlis), Sam and Bertha Beckerman (Jack Gilford and Thelma Ritter, in her last role), Douglas McCann (Gary Merrill), Muriel and Harry Purvis (Jan Sterling and Mike Kellin), Alice Keenan (Donna Mills), soldiers Felix Teflinger and Phillip Carmatti (Beau Bridges and Robert Bannard), and others, each representing various aspects of contemporary culture and society, all with their own personal problems that come to the surface as the harrowing ride continues. It’s a brutal, claustrophobic, highly theatrical film that captures the fear that haunted the city in the 1960s and well into the ’70s, with an all-star cast tackling such subjects as racism, teen sex, alcoholism, homosexuality, war, and the state of the American family. The rarely shown drama, some of which was filmed in the actual subway system against the MTA’s warnings, is screening October 3 at BAMcinématek as part of “Retro Metro,” a ten-day festival of sixteen films with key scenes set underground.

ALSO LIKE LIFE — THE FILMS OF HOU HSIAO-HSIEN: A TIME TO LIVE, A TIME TO DIE

Hou Hsiao-hsien revisits his childhood in classic of the Taiwanese New Wave

A TIME TO LIVE, A TIME TO DIE (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1993)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Friday, October 3, $12, 7:00
Series runs through October 17
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Taiwanese New Wave masterpiece, A Time to Live, a Time to Die, is a bittersweet, nostalgic look back at his childhood, after his father’s government job moves the family from Mainland China just as the Cultural Revolution is taking effect. The semiautobiographical film is seen through the eyes of young Ah-ha (You Anshun) as his father (Tien Feng) suffers ill health, his older brother gets harassed by a local gang, his mother (Mei Fang) tries to maintain the household, and his grandmother (Tang Ju-yun) keeps getting lost, being brought back by rickshaw drivers who demand ever-larger payments. The family lives in a Japanese-style home that is beautifully photographed by cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bing, with Hou favoring long shots with limited camera movement, calmly shifting from scene to scene as Ah-ha grows up into a teenager (Hsiao Ai) and discovers a whole new set of problems and reality. The middle film in Hou’s coming-of-age trilogy (in between 1984’s A Summer at Grandpa’s and 1986’s Dust in the Wind), A Time to Live is a deeply personal, intimate, unforgettable story of life, death, and the bonds of family. The film is screening October 3 at 7:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image series “Also like Life,” which continues through October 17 with such other Hou works as Daughter of the Nile, Dust in the Wind, The Sandwich Man, and A City of Sadness as well as such related films as Chen Kun-hou’s Growing Up and Jia Zhangke’s I Wish I Knew.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: INNER VOICES, A MUSIC THEATER DOUBLE BILL

INNER VOICES: GRACE / THE OTHER ROOM
The TBG Theatre
312 West 36th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves., third Floor
October 4 – November 1 (official opening October 11)
www.premieresnyc.org

In 2008, Premieres NYC expanded its mission to support the expansion of new music theater in New York City by starting the Inner Voices program, in which specially selected teams collaborate on original monologues told through song. Over the last several years, the participants in Premieres NYC projects have included Hunter Foster, Shuler Hensley, Laura Osnes, Jack Cummings III, Nilo Cruz, Michael John LaChiusa, and Arielle Jacobs. The fourth Premieres presentation is another eagerly awaited double bill, beginning October 4 at the TBG Theatre. Grace, written by Tony nominee Charlayne Woodard (Ain’t Misbehavin’, The Night Watcher) with music by Kirsten Childs (Miracle Brothers), stars Andrea Frierson (Once on This Island, Me & Ella) as an award-winning novelist facing a critical moment in her life. The show is directed by Shirley Jo Finney, with music direction by Rona Siddiqui and live bass by Marc Schmied. Grace is paired with The Other Room, written by librettist Mark Campbell (The Inspector, Songs from an Unmade Bed) with music by Marisa Michelson (The Lovers, Tamar of the River), musical direction by Ian Axness, and live cello by Brian Sanders; in the show, directed by Ethan Heard, Phoebe Strole (Spring Awakening, The Madrid) plays Lena, a woman who deals with a crisis in a positive way when learning that a dear friend has AIDS.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: Inner Voices runs Monday through Saturday, October 4 to November 1, at the TBG Theatre, and twi-ny has three pairs of tickets to give away for free. Just send your name and daytime phone number to contest@twi-ny.com by Thursday, October 2, at 5:00 to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; three winners will be selected at random.

THE WAYSIDE MOTOR INN

Ten people reevaluate their lives in a motel room in A. R. Gurney revival at the Signature (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 5, $55-$75
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Award-winning playwright A. R. Gurney is currently represented by a pair of New York City revivals of two vastly different works. The Buffalo-born Gurney’s 1988 Love Letters, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, has recently begun a star-studded production at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, directed by Gregory Mosher and featuring five pairs of big-time actors in succession — Mia Farrow and Brian Dennehy, Carol Burnett and Dennehy, Candice Bergen and Alan Alda, Diana Rigg and Stacy Keach, and Anjelica Huston and Martin Sheen — as a couple examining their long relationship by sitting down and reading letters they wrote to each other. Meanwhile, a bit southwest at the Signature Theatre, five two-character stories are being told simultaneously in a revival of Gurney’s 1977 densely packed drama The Wayside Motor Inn. Set outside Boston in the 1970s, the entire play takes place in a motel room where ten people come and go, as five unique stories occur at the same time in the same space. The set, designed by Andrew Lieberman, is a basic motel room with two queen-size beds in the center, a bathroom on the left, and a glass door with a small balcony at the right; it actually represents five separate rooms, but Gurney and director Lila Neugebauer ably guide the individual, overlapping narratives skillfully. Frank (Jon DeVries) and Jessie (Lizbeth Mackay) are an elderly couple visiting their new grandchild. Vince (Richard Topol filling in for Marc Kudisch the night we went) is an obsessed father determined that his son, Mark (Will Pullen), will get into Harvard, no matter what the moody teen really wants. Ray (Quincy Dunn-Baker) is a slick computer salesman and unfaithful spouse making a play for motel maid Sharon (Jenn Lyon). Andy (Kelly AuCoin) and Ruth (Rebecca Henderson) are in the midst of a contentious divorce. And young Phil (David McElwee) and Sally (Ismenia Mendes) are ready to make love for the first time.

Five stories overlap in unique ways in THE WAYSIDE MOTOR INN (photo by Joan Marcus)

Over the course of two hours (with intermission), each character is forced to face some hard truths about their future while coming to terms with just what they want, expect, and, perhaps most important, need out of life. They reevaluate what they’ve done and where they’ve been as well as where they’re going. Some of the plots are more mundane and cliché-ridden than others, but Gurney, who was inspired by Verdi’s operas and the biblical parable of the sower and the seed in creating the play, makes them work as a uniform whole, with small elements from some relating to others as the actors from the different tales manage not to bump into one another or step on each other’s lines. In some ways, the five narratives can even be seen as events from a sixth, unseen life as couples first meet, fall in love, fall out of love, stick it out, send a child to college, have grandchildren, then face death. The Wayside Motor Inn might not accomplish all its lofty goals, but it is a compelling and entertaining exercise in formalist structure that always stays on track. The show, which runs through October 5, is part of Gurney’s Signature Residency, which continues in May 2015 with a revival of his 1981 play What I Did Last Summer, followed by the world premiere of a new play in the 2015-16 season.

CROSSING THE LINE: “KILLER ROAD” BY SOUNDWALK COLLECTIVE & JESSE AND PATTI SMITH

Soundwalk Collective, Jesse and Patti Smith, and Lillevan collaborate on an exploration of Nico’s death in Crossing the Line presentation

Soundwalk Collective, Jesse and Patti Smith, and Lillevan collaborate on poetic audiovisual exploration of Nico’s death in Crossing the Line presentation

KILLER ROAD
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Thursday, October 2, $40, 7:30
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

A limited number of tickets have just been released for Killer Road, a one-night-only event that is part of FIAF’s annual Crossing the Line interdisciplinary arts festival. On October 2, Soundwalk Collective, the international trio of Stephan Crasneanscki, Simone Merli, and Kamran Sadeghi that specializes in site-specific audio installations, and mother and daughter composers and musicians Patti and Jesse Smith, will convene at Florence Gould Hall to present a tribute to Velvet Underground lead vocalist and Factory actress Nico. The presentation, originally performed earlier this year in Nico’s native country of Germany, focuses on Nico’s death at the age of forty-nine in 1988 while riding a bicycle on vacation in Ibiza with her son Ari. Soundwalk Collective will incorporate samples from the harmoniums that Nico played — one of which was given to her by Patti Smith after her original instrument was stolen in 1978 — as Smith reads Nico’s last poems (“Facing the wind / it’s holding me against my will / and doesn’t leave me still”) and video artist Lillevan provides visual projections. “Patti was very kind to me,” Nico said about Smith, as noted in Richard Witts’s biography Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon. “Early in 1978 my harmonium was stolen from me. I was without any money and now I couldn’t even earn a living playing without my organ. A friend of mine saw one with green bellows in an obscure shop, the only one in Paris. Patti bought it for me. I was so happy and ashamed. I said, ‘I’ll give you back the money when I get it,’ but she insisted the organ was a present and I should forget about the money. I cried. I was ashamed she saw me without money.”

NYFF52 MAIN SLATE: THE BLUE ROOM

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

THE BLUE ROOM (LA CHAMBRE BLEUE) (Mathieu Amalric, 2014)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Monday, September 29, Alice Tully Hall, 9:00 pm
Tuesday, September 30, Francesca Beale Theater, 9:00 pm
Festival runs September 26 – October 12
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com
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 makes its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival September 29 and 30. 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. Amalric will participate in a Q&A following the September 29 screening at 9:00 at Alice Tully Hall; in addition, he will sit down for a free HBO Directors Dialogue that same day at 6:00 in the Walter Reade Theater, where he’s sure to discuss such influences as Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Otto Preminger, and Fritz Lang.