twi-ny recommended events

NEW YORK ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL: NO MAN’S LAND

Ning Hao’s NO MAN’S LAND is finally making its North American premiere, at the NYAFF

NO MAN’S LAND (WESTERN SUNSHINE) (Ning Hao, 2009)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Walter Reade Theater
144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
Tuesday, July 1, 9:15
Festival continues through July 10
212-875-5600
www.filmlinc.com
www.subwaycinema.com

Finally getting its North American premiere after being banned in its home country of China, Ning Hao’s No Man’s Land is a violently beautiful black comedy that takes on modernization and commercialization with tongue firmly and riotously rooted deep in cheek. Xu Zhen stars as Pan Xiao, a young hotshot lawyer, if he does say so himself, who gets a vicious falcon poacher (Duo Bujie) off for killing a cop. The poacher promises to wire Pan his fee, but the lawyer instead demands collateral in the form of the red car the poacher bought for his dead wife. Pan then sets out for home, riding across the Gobi desert in Xinjiang in northwest China, but things don’t go too well for him, as he keeps getting involved with strange, dangerous, ever-more-surreal men and women, from a pair of truck drivers transporting hay (Wang Shuangbao and Sun Jianmin) to an extortionist gas station owner (Yan Xinming) and his back-room prostitute (Yu Nan) to another falcon poacher (Huang Bo) who can’t avoid getting the crap beaten out of him time and time again. But Pan keeps trying to persevere, believing he is better than everyone around him, but it takes him quite a while to learn his lesson, if he ever really does.

NO MAN’S LAND pays homage to such genre films as BLOOD SIMPLE, THE ROAD WARRIOR, and RED ROCK WEST

Gorgeously photographed in a desert palette by Du Jie and featuring a noirish neo-spaghetti Eastern score by Nathan Wang, No Man’s Land is a thoroughly entertaining genre picture that pays tribute to such forebears as the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, George Miller’s The Road Warrior, John Dahl’s Red Rock West, and the Quentin Tarantino / Robert Rodriguez collaborations. Hao (Crazy Racer, Mongolian Ping Pong) is in firm control of his wacky tale, which is lovingly paced even as the craziness reaches major proportions. Xu (Lost in Thailand) and Duo (Mountain Patrol: Kekexili) manage to gain sympathy for their characters despite all outward appearances, making for an engaging and unusual kind of odd couple. No Man’s Land is a helluva lot of fun, exactly the kind of film we’ve come to expect from the New York Asian Film Festival, where it will be screening July 1 at 9:15 at the Walter Reade Theater. The thirteenth annual NYAFF continues through July 10 with some five dozen films, including Park Joong-hoon’s Top Star, Kim Ki-duk’s Moebius, Hitoshi Matsumoto’s R100, and Matt Chow’s Chickensss before leading into the two-week Japan Cuts series at Japan Society.

RAGNAR KJARTANSSON: ME, MY MOTHER, MY FATHER, AND I

Epic durational performance at the New Museum comes to a close on June 29 (photo by Benoit Pailley/New Museum)

New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Through Sunday, June 29, $16
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org

“This is it. Is this it?” a group of musicians sing over and over again on the fourth floor of the New Museum. Today, after more than eight weeks, it will finally be it for the ten guitarists and vocalists who have been performing the song “Take Me Here by the Dishwasher: Memorial for a Marriage” as part of Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s first museum show, “Me, My Mother, My Father, and I.” Since May 7, the ten troubadours — eight of whom have remained with the project for its duration — have been playing the song, composed by former Sigur Rós member Kjartan Sveinsson, while sitting on chairs, a couch, stools, or mattresses or walking around barefoot or in socks, boots, or sneakers as a short clip from the first Icelandic feature film, director Reynir Oddsson’s 1977 Morðsaga (Murder Story), is repeated on the far wall. In the scene, Kjartansson’s mother plays a housewife who fantasizes about having sex in the kitchen with the plumber, played by Kjartansson’s father. Supposedly, Kjartan Ragnarsson and Guðrún Ásmundsdóttir had sex for real the next night, conceiving Ragnar. Sveinsson’s ethereal composition, which hints at such familiar tunes as Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses,” and David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” becomes a kind of meditative mantra that really can be listened to for hours on end, highlighted by the central recognizable phrase “by the dishwasher” (where the on-screen couple make love). Audience members are encouraged to sit in one of the chairs or lie on a mattress that isn’t being used and even chat with the performers, particularly when they go on break; unsurprisingly, the ten men have received many telephone numbers during the length of the show. (However, keep away from the refrigerator; the beer is for the band only.)

Band members have played “Take Me Here by the Dishwasher: Memorial for a Marriage” for nearly eight weeks straight (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Meanwhile, in a corner of the space, the video Me and My Mother is looped on a small monitor, depicting Kjartansson’s mom spitting in his face every five years; it was hard not to consider whether the band members have ever thought about spitting on Kjartansson as well, but it turns out that “Me, My Mother, My Father, and I” is not torturous at all. What makes it so visceral is how the musicians approach the song; instead of merely going through the motions, they invest themselves in it, keeping it fresh and alive despite the endless repetition, interacting with the crowd and each other. One guitarist suddenly struts to the center, singing loudly. Another starts noodling on the six-string, adding bluesy notes or echoes of Jerry Garcia. Another is rejuvenated by his girlfriend giving him a shoulder rub as he plays. Yet another, seeing one of his compatriots nodding off, goes over and gives him a little kick, and both jump into action. Several react when a woman gets off a mattress and starts dancing and twirling. And then, as if by magic, the ten musicians gather together for a final flourish fifteen minutes before closing time. Last year, Kjartansson presented “A Lot of Sorrow” at MoMA PS1, in which Brooklyn band the National performed its song “Sorrow” for six consecutive hours in the VW Dome. “Me, My Mother, My Father, and I” takes such durational performance to a whole new level, an inspiring and inspirational show that gets into your soul. You might never look at your dishwasher the same way again.

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO: STILL LIFE

Hiroshi Sugimoto, “Manatee,” gelatin silver print, 1994 (courtesy Pace Gallery)

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO: STILL LIFE
Pace
510 West 25th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through Saturday, June 28, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
www.pacegallery.com
www.sugimotohiroshi.com

In his “Portraits” series, Tokyo-born, New York City-based artist Hiroshi Sugimoto created what appear to be painting-like photographs, in stark black-and-white, of such figures as Pope John Paul II, Fidel Castro, and Yasser Arafat as well as, quite impossibly, Henry VIII, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Rembrandt. The long-exposure pictures were actually taken of figures from wax museums, set against a dark background to take them out of historical context. In his ongoing “Dioramas” series, Sugimoto similarly plays with reality, as what at first seem to be beautifully composed deep-focus shots of living, breathing nature scenes turn out to be photographs of dioramas of fake trees, painted mountains, and taxidermied animals taken in natural history museums. Seventeen of the stunning photographs are on view in “Hiroshi Sugimoto: Still Life,” running through June 28 at Pace’s 510 West 25th St. gallery.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, “Olympic Rain Forest,” gelatin silver print, 2012 (courtesy Pace Gallery)

“Upon first arriving in New York in 1974, I did the tourist thing,” Sugimoto points out on his website. “Eventually I visited the Natural History Museum, where I made a curious discovery: the stuffed animals positioned before painted backdrops looked utterly fake, yet by taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished, and suddenly they looked very real. I’d found a way to see the world as a camera does. However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real.” The inviting pictures look very real indeed, from groups of wapiti, California condors, and South Georgian penguins to several lush forests. The most dazzling of the silver gelatin prints features a manatee floating just above some rocks, rays of sunlight breaking through the surface of the water, bathing the fascinating creature in an otherworldly glow. It practically makes you want to tap the glass to get the large mammal’s attention. Sugimoto, who was just awarded the Isamu Noguchi Award for Kindred Spirits in Innovation, Global Consciousness, and Japanese/American Exchange, has also explored the nature of how we visually interpret what we see in such other series as “Seascapes,” “Theaters,” and “Lightning Fields”; in “Dioramas,” he again makes the viewer question what is real while examining the very meaning of “still life” in his own special way.

THE UNCHAINED THEATRE FESTIVAL 2014

David Bellantoni’s LAUNDRY is looking to clean up at the Chain Theatre on Saturday night (photo by Grace Wissler)

Chain Theatre
21-28 45th Rd., Long Island City
Saturday, June 28, $15, 7:00
www.variationstheatregroup.com

For the last several weeks, more than a dozen entrants have been fighting it out, and now the stakes are even higher as the four finalists are ready to do battle this weekend to crown a new champion. No, we’re not talking about the World Cup — which has more than its fair share of histrionics — but the second annual Unchained Theatre Festival, organized by the Variations Theatre Group. On Saturday night, June 28, the four surviving one-act plays will be performed at the small, intimate Chain Theatre around the corner from MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, competing for the Best Play Award. The finalists are Eugenie Carabatsos’s Stalled, Marc Castle’s What Would Jesus Do?, Jon Spano’s The Sweat, and David Bellantoni’s Laundry. “We are excited about the success and audience response to this year’s festival,” VTG co-artistic director Rich Ferraioli told twi-ny. “Each of the pieces this year was both engaging and relevant for our audiences. The final group, specifically, range from comedic Laundromat thrillers to religious blind dates and even to an ensemble-based piece set entirely in a car.” For the other awards, the Best Actor category features Curtain Call’s Ryan Barry, The Sweat’s Aaron Matteson, and Laundry’s Joe Wissler, while The XXX Scholar’s Jenni Graham, What Would Jesus Do?’s Cari McHugh, and Laundry’s Malika Nzinga are up for Best Actress. Duking it out for Best Director are Stalled’s Andrew Wells Ryder, The Sweat’s Reginald L. Douglas, and WWJD? writer Castle. The casts of Stalled, The History of the Donner Party: A Country Musical!, and The XXX Scholar are up for Best Ensemble. “This is sure to be a night of laughs, smiles, and good quality theater in LIC,” Ferraioli added. Based on the preliminaries we saw earlier this week, we heartily agree, but you better act fast, as seating is limited.

NEW YORK ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2014

Ning Hao’s NO MAN’S LAND is finally making its North American premiere, at the NYAFF

Film Society of Lincoln Center
Walter Reade Theater
144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
June 27 – July 10
212-875-5600
www.filmlinc.com
www.subwaycinema.com

Year after year, the New York Asian Film Festival screens the wildest, craziest, most wide-ranging collection of cinematic adventures from China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and Hong Kong, delighting fans with premieres from favorite directors, welcome dips into the past, celebrations of cult classics, and intriguing works from up-and-coming artists. The thirteenth annual NYAFF is no exception, consisting of forty-four films from across the spectrum, along with special tributes to Sandra Ng (Queen of Comedy Star Asia Award), Sol Kyung-gu (Star Asia Award), Park Joong-hoon (Celebrity Award), Fumi Nikaido (Screen International Rising Star Award), Lee Jung-jae (Korean Actor in Focus), and Jimmy Wong Yu (Lifetime Achievement Award). Also making appearances will be Alan Mak & Felix Chong, Moon So-ri, Anna Broinowski, Zishuo Ding, Fei Xing, Lee Sujin, Shin Yeon-shick, and Umin Boya. Looking for a sexy comedy? In 3D? Try Lee Kung-lok’s Naked Ambition. Want a peek into the filmmaking side of Dear Leader Kim Jong-il? There’s Anna Broinowski’s Aim High in Creation! In the mood for some Shaw Brothers? Then check out Roy Ward Baker and Change Cheh’s The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. You can’t leave out Zombies, so Sabu has that covered with Miss Zombie.

A chef decides to do a different kind of slicing and dicing in SOUL

Hungry for a neo-spaghetti Eastern? Ning Hao is serving up No Man’s Land. How about the very first openhanded martial arts film? Jimmy Wang Yu’s 1970 The Chinese Boxer puts you in the middle of the action. You’ll also find new films by such familiar names as Kim Ki-duk, Hideo Nakata, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa and featuring such stars as Andy Lau, Chow Yun-fat, Simon Yam, Hitoshi Matsumoto, and Tadanobu Asano. The opening-night selection is Mak and Chong’s Overheard 3, the international premiere of the conclusion of the gangster trilogy. The centerpiece choice is Boya’s three-hour Kano, about a pioneer Taiwanese baseball team. In conjunction with the NYAFF, the always awesome Japan Cuts follows immediately, running July 10-24 at Japan Society, comprising more than two dozen contemporary films from Japan, only a few of which were also part of the NYAFF.

SEE IT BIG! SCIENCE FICTION (PART TWO): SILENT RUNNING

Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) and drones Dewey and Huey tend to a space garden in SILENT RUNNING

SILENT RUNNING (Douglas Trumbull, 1972)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, June 28, free with museum admission of $12, 7:00
Series continues through July 12
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

Special effects master Douglas Trumbull, who worked on such sci-fi classics as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner, made his feature directorial debut with the environmentally prescient Silent Running. Bruce Dern stars as Freeman Lowell, one of four men stationed on the space terrarium Valley Forge, which is charged with protecting forests that can no longer grow on Earth. While it’s just another assignment for John Keenan (Cliff Potts), Marty Barker (Ron Rifkin), and Andy Wolf (Jesse Vint), it’s become an obsession for Lowell, who sleeps under a “Conservation Pledge” on the wall next to his bed and only eats food from his massive garden. But when the captain of the Berkshire (voiced by Joseph Campanella) informs them that the forests must be destroyed and they are to return home, Lowell takes matters into his own hands, fighting to protect what he has helped create. Soon he is alone on the Valley Forge, tending to the forest with drones Huey (Cheryl Sparks) and Dewey (Mark Persons), as Louie (Steven Brown) is no longer with them. At first Lowell thinks he is in his own private paradise, but extreme loneliness awaits him, along with some other shocks. Written by Deric Washburn and Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter) and Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law), the low-budget Silent Running is a deserving cult classic, a worthy influence on such films and television shows as WALL-E, Moon, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and Red Dwarf. Emerging from the late-1960s Flower Power movement, the film’s ecological theme is boosted by environmentally friendly folk songs sung by Joan Baez, with overly melodramatic music by Peter Schickele. Dern gives a beautifully nuanced performance as Lowell, going from calm and meditative to distressed and angry in a heartbeat, and his paternal relationship with Huey and Dewey is both heartwarming and heartbreaking. A film that could only be made in the 1970s, with bright, bold colors and cheesy futuristic sets, Silent Running is screening June 28 at 7:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “See It Big! Science Fiction (Part Two)” series, which continues through July 12 with such other sci-fi flicks as Alain Resnais’s Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in 70mm, and Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks!

TONY MATELLI: SLEEPWALKER

Tony Matelli’s “Sleepwalker” sculpture at Wellesley became a crime scene when vandals struck

Marlborough Chelsea
545 West 21st St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through August 8, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-463-8634
www.marlboroughchelsea.com
www.wellesley.edu/davismuseum

Several weekends ago, after coming home from a jaunt through Chelsea galleries, I showed my wife photos I’d taken of some of my favorite works. Upon seeing one of them, she immediately said, “I think that’s the same piece that caused such a furor at Wellesley.” Indeed, I had shown her a photo of Tony Matelli’s “Sleepwalker,” a life-size painted bronze sculpture of a zombielike middle-aged white man in his underwear, eyes closed, arms outstretched, standing on the outdoor deck of the Marlborough Gallery on West 21st St. Being a sucker for lifelike sculpture — I can spend hours checking out works by Ron Mueck, Paul McCarthy, Mark Jenkins, and others — I got a huge kick out of the piece, which I found intriguing and humorous, not threatening at all, perhaps even symbolic of an America that often seems to be half asleep. However, context is everything. My wife quickly pointed out that a significant number of Wellesley students were aghast when a fiberglass cast of “Sleepwalker” had been placed outside, on campus, in February as part of the “Tony Matelli: New Gravity” exhibition at the university’s outstanding Davis Museum, the Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based sculptor’s first solo museum show. Coincidentally, we were going to Wellesley the following weekend, where we looked forward to seeing the sculpture for ourselves in an environment very different from the Chelsea deck, but sadly it had had to be removed in May, ahead of the July 20 conclusion of the exhibition, for a very surprising reason.

Shortly after the unveiling of “Sleepwalker,” which was placed outside in a wooded area near the Davis, where it could be seen from a window, hundreds of Wellesley students signed an online petition calling for the work to be moved inside the museum. The petition read in part, “Within just a few hours of its outdoor installation, the highly lifelike sculpture . . . has become a source of apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault for some members of our campus community. While it may appear humorous, or thought provoking to some, the ‘Sleepwalker’ has already become a source of undue stress for a number of Wellesley College students, the majority of whom live, study, and work on campus.” Davis Museum director Lisa Fischman defended the installation, explaining, “Art has an extraordinary power to evoke personal response, and to elicit the unexpected. . . . Art provokes dialogue, and discourse is the core of education. In that spirit, I am enormously glad to have your response.”

“Sleepwalker” will stay up at the Marlborough Chelsea through August 8 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Matelli himself chimed in on the debate, telling CBS Boston, “I think that these people are misconstruing this work. I think they’re seeing something in this work that isn’t there. But who am I to say how people should react to this?” He added, “I don’t think they’ll take the statue down. But if they make that decision, that’s fine with me.” I’m not sure it’s fine with Matelli why it ultimately had to be taken down; first, a student (since suspended) spray-painted the statue yellow, her class color (she did the same to Matelli’s nearby small dog sculpture), then a still-unidentified perp broke the five-foot, nine-inch-high “Sleepwalker” at its ankles, apparently in an effort to kick it down. I was shocked when I saw photos of the damage, which totaled the work, leaving it irreparable; was this really possible at such a liberal, free-thinking college as Wellesley? Is this type of censorship any different from Attorney General John Ashcroft and deputy director of public affairs Monica Goodling using a blue curtain to cover up the partially nude “Spirit of Justice” Art Deco aluminum statue in the Great Hall of the Justice Department in 2002? Or when performance artist Alexander Brener spray-painted a green dollar sign over Kazimir Malevich’s “Suprematisme 1920-1927” in 1997 in protest of the commercialism of art? (“I view my act as a dialogue with Malevich,” Brener said in court.) During the Wellesley reunion weekend, I spoke with numerous current and former students of all ages, and each had an individual reaction to the installation of “Sleepwalker” itself and to the eventual damage. Some felt that art is art and people should “get a life” and not interpret everything so personally. Others believed it was a gross error on the part of the museum and the school to put a statue so suggestive to survivors or victims of sexual abuse outside, near a wooded area, at a woman’s college. Fortunately, no one was in favor of the vandalism. Yes, it’s encouraging that a work of art elicited such strong personal feelings on many fronts, but have we become a bunch of whimpering souls, not able to look the other way when it comes to an inanimate sculpture that means different things to different people? If something is displeasing to some but not to others, must it be wished away into the cornfield, hidden where no one will ever see it? Or is it further evidence that the gender divide is still much larger than we imagined, even at such an illustrious college as Wellesley? You can check out Matelli’s “Sleepwalker” at the Marlborough through August 8, but, of course, you’ll never be able to see the Wellesley version.