Tony Cragg’s undulating “Points of View” is part of Madison Square Park installation “Walks of Life” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Who: Tony Cragg
What: “Walks of Life”
Where: Madison Square Park, between Madison Ave. & Broadway and 23rd & 26th Sts., 212-520-7600
When: Daily through February 8
Why: For nearly twenty years, Turner Prize-winning artist Tony Cragg’s “Resonating Bodies” have flanked the entrance to Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park, a lively pair of large-scale musical instruments. Now the Liverpool-born artist, who lives and works in Wuppertal, Germany, has placed a trio of bronze sculptures, collectively titled “Walks of Life,” on the Madison Square Park lawns, twisting shapes that seem to shake with the location’s high energy. In the southwest corner, visitors are encouraged to walk inside “Caldera,” which stands on three tiptoes, and look up at the sky. On the central Oval Lawn, three eighteen-foot-high works form “Points of View,” rising up with dynamic, humanistic undulating forms; from various angles you can make out abstract facial profiles. And in the northwest corner, the green, dynamic “Mixed Feelings” teeters like a warped Statue of Liberty
Thank goodness Lukas Moodysson changed his mind. After his 2009 film, Mammoth, and the death of his father, the Swedish director of such indie faves as Show Me Love, Together, and Lilya 4-ever was extremely depressed and considering quitting the movie business. But he was eventually inspired to make a happy film, and the result is the absolutely delightful We Are the Best! A liberal adaptation of his wife Coco’s semiautobiographical graphic novel Never Goodnight, the film, set in 1982 Sweden, follows the adventures of thirteen-year-old best friends Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and Klara (Mira Grosin), a pair of outsiders who think they are rebellious punk rockers, making statements by running down the up escalator at the mall and writing an anti-sports song. Joined by fourteen-year-old Christian classical guitarist Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne), they form a punk band to rival middle school heavy metalers Iron Fist. Determined to show that punk is not dead, they futz with their hair, attempt to bond with a teen-boy punk trio, and try their darnedest to gel as a band, even though drummer Bobo and bassist Klara don’t really know how to play their instruments. All the adults in the film, primarily Klara’s parents (Lena Carlsson and David Dencik), Bobo’s mother (Anna Rydgren) and her strange friends, and the two youth recreation leaders (Matte Wiberg and Johan Liljemark, real-life members of the band Sabotage), are pretty goofy themselves, not exactly your prototypical role models, so silliness pervades in wonderfully funny ways.
Director David Cronenberg just might have made the best film of his career with the brilliant A History of Violence. Set to the marvelously tense music of Howard Shore — which threatens to explode at any moment — the film stars Viggo Mortensen as Tom Stall, a quiet, calm family man who runs a local diner in a small town in Indiana. Stall reluctantly becomes the town hero (and media darling) after a dangerous, bloody incident in his diner, which leads to the arrival of Carl Fogaty (the excellent Ed Harris), an East Coast mob kingpin who insists that Tom is actually Joey Cusack, a former Mafia goon who is in witness protection. As Fogaty and his men harass Tom and his family (wife Maria Bello and kids Ashton Holmes and Heidi Hayes), Stall desperately fights to protect his simple, happy life. William Hurt excels in a small role near the end of the film. A History of Violence is as suspenseful as they come, a simmering masterpiece that blows up the American dream. The film is loosely based on the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke, but as Cronenberg explained at the 2005 San Diego Comic-Con, he didn’t even know the book existed until the production was well under way, and Josh Olson’s outstanding screenplay ultimately veers far away from its source. A History of Violence is screening February 6 & 7 as part of the IFC Center’s Waverly Midnights “Cronenberg” series, which continues February 13-15 with Eastern Promises before concluding February 20-21 with Cosmopolis.