twi-ny recommended events

BALLET 422

Viewers are taken behind the scenes as Justin Peck creates a new work for New York City Ballet

BALLET 422 (Jody Lee Lipes, 2014)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center, Francesca Beale Theater, 144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave., 212-875-5600
Landmark Sunshine Cinema, 143 East Houston St. between First & Second Aves., 212-330-8182
Opens Friday, February 6 (special advance screening February 3 at 7:00 at BAMcinématek)
www.magpictures.com

In Ballet 422, Jody Lee Lipes takes viewers behind the scenes as twenty-five-year-old New York City Ballet dancer Justin Peck choreographs the 422nd original piece for the prestigious company, Paz de la Jolla. One of fifty dancers in the Corps de Ballet, which the film calls “the lowest rank” of NYCB, Peck was named by company head Peter Martins to be the New York Choreographic Institute’s first active choreographer-in-residence for the 2011-12 season, and he is the only current NYCB dancer to choreograph for the company. Documentarian and cinematographer Lipes (NY Export: Opus Jazz, Tiny Furniture) focuses on the fascinating collaboration that goes into creating a ballet. “As a former soloist with New York City Ballet, I had long dreamed about pulling back the veil on the making of a new ballet,” producer Ellen Bar explains on the film’s Hatchfund page, which has raised more than $55,000 for the project. “Even as a dancer who was often part of the choreographic process, I never saw the other artistic and technical elements develop until the very end. Wouldn’t it be amazing to invite audiences into a world they can never visit in person and to let them watch it unfold in real time?” Lipes does just that, showing Peck and ballet master Albert Evans working out specific moves with principal dancers Sterling Hyltin, Amar Ramasar, and Tiler Peck; costumers Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung discussing materials with the performers; Mark Stanley detailing the lighting design; and Peck meeting with conductor Andrews Sill, who reveals that the orchestra is not particularly fond of playing the ballet’s musical score, Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu’s “Sinfonietta la Jolla.”

Sterling Hytlin, Amar Ramasar, and Tiler Peck rehearse with Justin Peck on 422nd original piece for New York City Ballet

There are no talking heads in the film, no experts chiming in on the beauty and intricacy of ballet, no one pontificating on how unusual it is for such a young dancer to already be choreographing his fifth work for the company, following Year of the Rabbit, Tales of a Chinese Zodiac, In Creases, and Capricious Movements. No one stops and looks into the camera, sharing their fears, hopes, or dreams; Lipes doesn’t even identify who’s who, instead allowing the drama to play out sans editorial comment. A few times, the camera goes with Peck as he puts on his backpack and heads home to his unglamorous Queens apartment, and the surprise ending puts everything in fabulous perspective. You don’t have to love ballet or know anything about it to enjoy Ballet 422, an intimate, compelling inside look into the creative process, but don’t be surprised if you soon find yourself ordering tickets for an upcoming NYCB production — perhaps even Peck’s latest work for the company, a new interpretation of Aaron Copland’s Rodeo, which is having its premiere February 4 at the David H. Koch Theater. Ballet 422 opens February 6 at the Landmark Sunshine and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, where Lipes and Peck will participate in a Q&A following the 7:15 screening and will introduce the 9:35 show on February 6. In addition, the film is having a sneak peek February 3 at 7:00 as part of the BAMcinématek series “Two by Jody Lee Lipes,” followed by a Q&A with Lipes.

ECCENTRICS OF FRENCH COMEDY: YOYO

All the wealth in the world can’t make a lonely millionaire (Pierre Étaix) happy in YOYO

CINÉSALON: YOYO (Pierre Étaix, 1965)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, February 3, 4:00
Series continues Tuesdays through February 24
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

French auteur Pierre Étaix’s strange and beautiful films were long inaccessible, the subject of nearly two decades of legal wrangling, but on February 3 at 4:00, the French Institute Alliance Française will be presenting his 1965 bittersweet black-and-white slapstick charmer, Yoyo, as part of its January-February CinéSalon “Eccentrics of French Comedy” series, followed by a wine reception. (In April 2010, Étaix was finally able to once again bring his films to the public, his entire output restored and making their New York debut at a festival of all five features and three shorts at Film Forum in October 2012.) Étaix, who wrote Yoyo with master collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière, who also cowrote films by Luis Buñuel, Miloš Forman, Volker Schlöndorff, Andrzej Wajda, Nagisa Oshima, and Louis Malle and won an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement in 2014, stars as a ridiculously wealthy but extremely bored man who lives alone in an ornately decorated, absurdly large chateau. It’s 1925, and he has servants for absolutely everything, as well as his own private band and flappers, but he pines for his lost love, Isolina (Claudine Auger). One day she arrives with a traveling circus, along with a young boy (Philippe Dionnet) who turns out to be his son. She at first rejects the multimillionaire, but when he loses it all on Black Tuesday, the three of them form their own traveling circus, with the boy ultimately turning into a popular clown named Yoyo (played as an adult by Étaix) and seeking to restore the chateau and his family.

French auteur Pierre Étaix takes clowning around very seriously in rediscovered classic

The first section of the film is a glorious homage to the silent film era and other cinematic comedians, with director and star Étaix evoking his mentor, Jacques Tati; Charlie Chaplin; Buster Keaton; and, later, Jerry Lewis, with whom he’d appear as Gustav the Great in Lewis’s never-to-be-seen Holocaust film The Day the Clown Died. Nouvelle Vague cinematographer Jean Boffety (An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge; Je t’aime, je t’aime) shoots Yoyo in a sharp, gorgeous black-and-white, composing breathtaking shots that boast a dazzling symmetry that must make Wes Anderson giddy with delight, while Étaix fills the film with ingenious sight gags that would make Ernie Kovacs proud (just wait till you see the supposed still-life painting), all anchored by Jean Paillaud’s memorable musical theme. But once the stock market crashes and talkies take over, dialogue enters the picture, and the camera is often off balance, the perfect symmetry a thing of the past. With Yoyo, Étaix, who had previously made Heureux Anniversaire and The Suitor and would go on to make The Great Love and En pleine forme, was influenced by the sudden, tragic death of his father, his love of the circus — he had already worked under the big tent, and he would leave films to become a clown in a traveling circus in the early 1970s — and his viewing of Fellini’s 8½ (look for the La Strada poster) resulting in a film that sometimes gets a little lost and too surreal, but he ultimately brings things back around as Yoyo grows into a star and the story travels through the arc of twentieth-century entertainment, from the silent era to talkies to television. It’s a real treat that Étaix’s work is undergoing this rediscovery; lovers of Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist will particularly enjoy Yoyo. “Eccentrics of French Comedy” continues through February 24 with Riad Sattouf’s The French Kissers introduced by Jean-Philippe Tessé, Jacques Rozier’s Du côté d’Orouët introduced by Annie Bergen, Eric Rohmer’s The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque introduced by Nicholas Elliott, and Luc Moullet’s The Land of Madness introduced by Pavol Liska.

ORSON WELLES 100: TOO MUCH JOHNSON — FILM & LIVE THEATER EVENT

Joseph Cotten stars in Orson Welles’s newly edited 1938 silent comedy, TOO MUCH JOHNSON, screening for the first time ever at Film Forum

Who: Orson Welles
What: Encore presentation of Too Much Johnson as part of “Orson Welles 100” series
Where: Film Forum, 209 West Houston St., 212-727-8110
When: Thursday, February 5, $25, 7:30
Why: In August 2013, the raw footage of Orson Welles’s first professional film, a deliriously entertaining 1938 silent comedy made in conjunction with the Mercury Theatre staging of William Gillette’s 1894 farce and starring Joseph Cotten, Virginia Nicolson, Arlene Francis, Mary Wickes, John Houseman, and Welles, was discovered in Italy, and it has now been edited by William Hohauser and is being screened for the first time ever at Film Forum; the February 2 show is sold out, so they’ve added a special encore presentation on February 5, with the film, as originally intended, serving as prologues to live theatrical readings by the Film Forum Players (Carl Wallnau, Yelena Shmulenson, Jacqueline Sydney, Bob Ader, Karen Sklaire, Ben Rauch, Jonathan Smith), directed by Allen Lewis Rickman and with live music by Steve Sterner (you can see the unedited footage here).

AMERICAN SNIPER

Best Actor nominee Bradley Cooper takes aim in Clint Eastwood’s controversial AMERICAN SNIPER

AMERICAN SNIPER (Clint Eastwood, 2014)
In theaters now
www.americansnipermovie.com

Three dozen years ago, I remember being blown away by Alan Parker’s Midnight Express, the supposedly true story of Billy Hayes, a New York City native busted for smuggling hash into Turkey in 1970 who ended up escaping from prison five years later. Although the film was based on Hayes’s book, it took liberties with the truth, turning Hayes into a heroic figure and inventing nonexistent characters; Hayes was particularly disappointed with the depiction of the Turkish people in the film. “My problem with the movie is there are no good Turks in it,” he said years later, pointing out that in reality he had made several good Turkish friends. “All the Turks in Midnight Express are bad. . . . It’s all very one-dimensional.” In 2004, screenwriter Oliver Stone apologized for his embellishments. “It’s true I overdramatized the script,” Stone said in Istanbul. “For years, I heard that Turkish people were angry with me, and I didn’t feel safe there.” Filmmakers are always given a certain amount of poetic license, but when does it become too much? The Midnight Express scenario ran through my mind shortly after seeing American Sniper, Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-nominated film about Chris Kyle, based on the Navy SEAL’s memoir about his multiple tours overseas, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History. It’s a tense, expertly made thriller about a sharpshooter who is compelled by the events of 9/11 to join the military and defend his country and democracy. Bradley Cooper is mesmerizing as Kyle, making viewers watch him as closely as he watches his targets. Cooper, who has been nominated for an Oscar three years in a row now, following nods for Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle — he might also find himself up for a Tony for his bravura performance in The Elephant Man on Broadway, furthering confirming him as one of America’s finest actors — is especially effective when depicting the PTSD that deeply affected Kyle.

AMERICAN SNIPER controversy is reminiscent of complaints about MIDNIGHT EXPRESS

However, the film, written by Jason Hall, has come under attack for playing hard and loose with the facts and fomenting racial hatred, jingoistically creating a world in which all Americans are good, all Arabs are bad, with nothing in between. Kyle is no longer here to defend himself, but his book speaks volumes, as he refers to Iraqis as “savages” and “evil.” There have been many articles that have compared the book with the movie, and the differences are striking. The opening scene itself sets the stage for what is to come; in the book, this prologue is titled “Evil in the Crosshairs.” Kyle is on a rooftop as a troop of Marines move into a small Iraqi town. In the movie, a young woman and a boy appear on the street, carrying a Russian grenade; Kyle must decide whether to shoot the woman and the boy, a frightening choice for anyone to make. He ultimately kills them both. However, in the book, the woman is carrying a Chinese grenade, and there is no boy at all; he is a complete fiction. But by starting the film by showing that even Iraqi women and children are not to be trusted, Eastwood and Hall — and Cooper, who is also one of the producers — are making all Arabs the enemy.

It’s difficult to say how much is true and how much isn’t; Kyle was suffering from PTSD when he wrote the book, so his memory might have been shaky at times. (His claims of shooting looters in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have been unsubstantiated, and his declaration that all proceeds from the sale of the book would go to veterans charities has been questioned as well.) Kyle’s friend and fellow Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell also wrote a book that was made into a movie, Lone Survivor, that had much of its accuracy debated as well. In December, American Sniper producer Rob Lorenz told the Washington Post, “You have to make choices and skip over some logic in order to fit the story on the screen in a reasonable amount of time.” Meanwhile, the eighty-four-year-old Eastwood told the Toronto Star that all the complaints are “a stupid analysis. . . . It was an important story, but you have to embrace [Kyle’s] philosophy if you’re going to tell a story about him.” So is American Sniper emblematic of a nation split between conservative, hawkish Republicans and liberal, dovelike Democrats? Does it matter that so many facts were changed when the “philosophy” is still intact? Should it be judged merely as a movie by itself, without everyone, including Michael Moore, Seth Rogen, and Bill Maher, analyzing its motives and themes in such detail? Well, it seems that the public, and the Academy of Arts and Sciences, has spoken. The film is breaking box-office records, having grossed more than $270 million worldwide and garnering six Oscar nominations, for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and, tellingly, Best Adapted Screenplay.

JOHN CARPENTER: LOST THEMES

The career of iconoclastic auteur John Carpenter is the focus of a talk and film series at BAM

Who: John Carpenter
What: John Carpenter in conversation with NPR host Brooke Gladstone
Where: BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Peter Jay Sharp Building, 230 Lafayette Ave., 718-636-4100
When: Thursday, February 5, $25-$50, 8:00
Why: Writer, director, and composer John Carpenter discusses his career in film and music, in conjunction with the release of his album John Carpenter’s Lost Themes (Sacred Bones, February 3, 2015) and the BAMcinématek series “John Carpenter: Master of Fear,” which runs February 5-22 and consists of eighteen of Carpenter’s films, including Halloween, The Thing, Assault on Precinct 13, Escape from New York, They Live, and Starman in addition to three films specially selected by Carpenter: Straw Dogs, Sorcerer, and Forbidden Planet.

A DELICATE BALANCE

John Lithgow, Glenn Close, and Lindsay Duncan star in stellar Broadway revival of Edward Albee’s A DELICATE BALANCE (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Golden Theatre
252 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 22, $60 – $155
www.adelicatebalancebroadway.com

It seems that everyone wants to live with Agnes (Glenn Close) and Tobias (John Lithgow) in their elegant New England suburban home, but it’s hard to understand why in Edward Albee’s Pulitzer Prize–winning A Delicate Balance, running at the Golden Theatre through February 22. Tobias is a calm, retired businessman who likes to sit in his chair and read while sipping fancy cocktails. Agnes is a stern, cold woman who believes that “there is a balance to be maintained . . . and I must be the fulcrum.” They sleep in separate bedrooms and, while civil to each other, don’t seem to be particularly close anymore. Agnes’s wild and unpredictable sister, Claire (Lindsay Duncan), is already living with them. Tobias and Agnes’s thirty-six-year-old daughter, Julia (Martha Plimpton), has just left her fourth husband and is on her way to move back in with her parents yet again. But before Julia arrives, Tobias and Agnes’s best friends, Harry (Bob Balaban) and Edna (Clare Higgins), show up unannounced, claiming that they are too frightened to remain in their own house, quickly heading upstairs and locking themselves in Julia’s room. So when the bitter Julia returns home to find that her room is spoken for, the already none-too-happy woman gets even more upset. But since Tobias and Agnes both try to avoid confrontation, not much gets resolved in this growing household, even as secrets are being whispered and certain emotions are reaching the boiling point. It’s not quite as explosive as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but it’s no barrel of laughs either. “Do we dislike happiness?” Agnes asks. Apparently, yes.

Daughter Julia (Martha Plimpton) drives the emotional angst in Pulitzer Prize-winning play (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Daughter Julia (Martha Plimpton) brings the emotional angst to a boil in Edward Albee’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Director Pam MacKinnon, who helmed the recent smash Broadway revival of Woolf as well as Bruce Norris’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Clybourne Park, lets the anger simmer before it erupts as the play examines themes of loss and fear. Agnes, who is questioning her sanity, is afraid of facing certain truths about her husband and her life, Tobias is frightened that Agnes will find out about his long-ago indiscretion, Claire is scared of being sober and responsible, and Julia is still terrified of growing up. Harry and Edna never reveal precisely what it was that drove them from their home, but they appear to be afraid of not being afraid. Albee, who also won Pulitzers for Seascape and Three Tall Women, captures suburban angst and WASP culture with his incisive, biting dialogue, which was written with very specific performance notes; in addition, most of the characters were based on relatives of his. The play has quite a history; the original Broadway production in 1966, starring Hume Cronyn (Tobias), Jessica Tandy (Agnes), Rosemary Murphy (Claire), Henderson Forsythe (Harry), Carmen Matthews (Edna), and Marian Seldes (Julia), won the Pulitzer and was nominated for a Tony. Thirty years later, the first Broadway revival won the Tony with another stellar cast: George Grizzard (Tobias), Rosemary Harris (Agnes), Elaine Stritch (Claire), John Carter (Harry), Elizabeth Wilson (Edna), and Mary Beth Hurt (Julia). And Tony Richardson’s 1973 film featured Paul Scofield (Tobias), Katharine Hepburn (Agnes), Kate Reid (Claire), Joseph Cotten (Harry), Betsy Blair (Edna), and Lee Remick (Julia). Nearly fifty years after its Broadway debut, A Delicate Balance still feels fresh and alive, poignant and relevant. In 1996, Albee wrote in an introduction to a newly published edition of the work, “The play does not seem to have ‘dated’; rather, its points seem clearer now to more people than they were in its first lovely production. Now, in its lovely new production (I will not say ‘revival’; the thing was not dead — unseen, unheard perhaps, but lurking), it seems to be exactly the same experience. No time has passed; the characters have not aged or become strange. . . . I have become odder with time, I suppose, but A Delicate Balance, bless it, does not seem to have changed much — aged nicely, perhaps.” It has aged nicely indeed, in yet another lovely production.

VIRUNGA

Park ranger Andre Bauma risks his life to care for mountain gorillas in Oscar-nominated VIRUNGA

VIRUNGA (Orlando von Einsiedel, 2014)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, January 30
212-924-3363
www.virungamovie.com
www.cinemavillage.com

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary, Orlando von Einsiedel’s gripping Virunga is back on the big screen, in a return engagement at Cinema Village. In his debut feature, von Einsiedel, who previously made short documentaries about skateboarders in Kabul, young women knitting in Nigeria, and illegal fishing in Sierra Leone, originally set out to make a heartwarming story about a group of rangers caring for the mountain gorillas and natural environment of Virunga National Park in the eastern Congo. But as the civil war ramped up, he found himself in the middle of a fierce life-and-death struggle involving the criminal exploitation of the UNESCO world heritage site. As the London-based SOCO International moves in to prepare to drill for oil illegally, von Einsiedel starts following the money, uncovering a series of payoffs being tracked by French journalist Melanie Gouby. Meanwhile, ranger Andre Bauma cares for orphan mountain gorillas Ndeze, Nkadasi, Maisha, and Koboko, protecting them and other animals from poachers who want to sell their body parts — or kill them outright so the government won’t need to preserve the park just to save any wildlife.

French journalist Melanie Gouby risks her life to uncover the truth about what is happening in Virunga National Park

Virunga begins with the funeral of a ranger named Kasereka, one of more than 130 rangers who have been killed in the line of duty “trying to rebuild this country” during the ongoing civil war. Von Einsiedel follows that with a brief history of European colonization of Africa, which led to so much of the violence and the exploitation of the continent’s rich natural resources. But things take an even more drastic turn when Congolese rebels, the newly formed M23, start heading toward the park, leaving a bloodbath in their wake. Rodrigue Mugaruka Katembo, the head ranger and warden of the Rwindi Sector, and Belgian anthropologist Dr. Emmanuel de Mérode, chief warden of the park, are not about to let SOCO, the rebels, and local officials corrupted by bribes simply march in and take over. A Netflix original that includes Leonardo DiCaprio as one of its executive producers — all proceeds from the film go back into the park — Virunga is set up like an action-adventure thriller, with segments that are hard to believe are real and not re-created or dramatized for emotional impact. But it’s all true, from Gouby’s dangerous undercover work to von Einsiedel’s dodging of bombs and bullets, as a group of brave men and women are determined to expose the truth that so many have turned their backs on in order to line their pockets. In many ways, the film evokes Gillo Pontecorvo’s fictionalized classic The Battle of Algiers, depicting the horrific effects of colonization, but in this case it’s unfolding for real. Photographed by von Einsiedel and Franklin Dow, the film also features gorgeous shots of Virunga National Park, one of the most beautiful places on earth.