twi-ny recommended events

THE CONTENDERS 2013: BEFORE MIDNIGHT

Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) are back together again in Richard Linklater’s BEFORE MIDNIGHT

BEFORE MIDNIGHT (Richard Linklater, 2013)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday, November 27, 7:00
Series continues through January 16
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.sonyclassics.com/beforemidnight

Unable to resist revisiting the characters who first fell in love in 1995’s Before Sunrise and again in 2004’s Before Sunset, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy reprise their roles as Jesse and Celine, respectively, in Richard Linklater’s absolutely wonderful Before Midnight. The couple first met on a train to Vienna in 1994, talking at length about their hopes and desires and planning on getting together in six months’ time, but they don’t reconnect for another nine years, when Celine comes to one of Jesse’s book signings in Paris. In real time, they walk around the City of Light, catching up on what has happened in their lives as Jesse prepares to take a plane back home to his wife and son. And now another nine years have passed, and Jesse and Celine are living together, the parents of twins (Charlotte and Jennifer Prior). As the film opens, the divorced Jesse is putting his teenage son, Hank (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick), on a plane after having spent the summer together in Greece. What follows is a marvelous fourteen-minute scene of Jesse driving down a mountain road as he and Celine essentially let the audience know what has occurred over the last nine years: They have twin girls (sleeping in the back), Celine has been offered an important environmental job, and Jesse is considering moving to Chicago to be closer to Hank. They return to a country estate owned by Patrick (award-winning cinematographer Walter Lassally, making his acting debut at the age of eighty-six), who is hosting an outdoor lunch with a group of friends (including French actress Ariane Labed, coproducer and filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari, and Xenia Kalogeropoulou, who came out of retirement to appear in her first picture since 1985). They all talk of life and love, with Celine being particularly charming. But when Jesse and Celine go off to a hotel room for what is supposed to be a romantic rendezvous, some things are said and truths revealed that complicate things.

Cowriters Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke explore life and love in Greece in third film about Celine and Jesse

As with the first two films, Before Midnight consists of long takes of Jesse and Celine discussing their past, present, and future as cowriters Linklater (Slacker, Dazed and Confused), Delpy, and Hawke, who were nominated for an Oscar for their script for Before Sunset, continue to explore these engaging characters; both the dialogue and the acting have matured with an intelligent grace and elegance that are captivating. The couple wanders around Messinia examining their lives as only fortysomethings can, trying to figure out whether what they have is what they want. The central focus, though, once again is time, whether it is the years Jesse and Celine have spent together, the time they have left, time as a concept in Jesse’s semiautobiographical novels, or Jesse making a joke about being a time traveler. It’s been eighteen years since we first met Jesse and Celine, and we’ve grown eighteen years older too, lending fascinating perspectives that can’t help but force us to take a look at our own lives as well. The trilogy is America’s version of François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series, filled with humor, lyricism, and an inherent understanding of twenty-first-century realities. Will there be a fourth film in nine years? As of now, the principals aren’t saying because they just don’t know, but Before Midnight ends on just about the perfect ambiguous note. Before Midnight is screening November 27 at 7:00 as part of MoMA’s annual series “The Contenders,” which consists of exemplary films that MoMA believes will stand the test of time, continuing with such films as Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours, Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin, Spike Jonze’s Her, and Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha.

STEPHEN WESTFALL ON NEIL WELLIVER

Neil Welliver, “Blueberries in Fissures,” oil on canvas, 1983

National Academy Museum
1083 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Tuesday, November 26, $15, 6:30
212-369-4880
www.nationalacademy.org

The National Academy’s current exhibition, “See It Loud: Seven Post-War American Painters,” on view through January 26, examines a lesser-known group of U.S. artists who, in the years following World War II, walked the fine line between representation and abstraction. “There was very nearly a moral dimension to the opposition between the two aesthetics,” notes senior curator Bruce Weber. The seven artists featured in the exhibition are Leland Bell, Paul Georges, Peter Heinemann, Albert Kresch, Stanley Lewis, Paul Resika, and Neil Welliver. On November 26 at 6:30, Schenectady-born painter, critic, professor, and National Academician Stephen Westfall, a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow and winner of a 2009 Rome Prize in the visual arts, will discuss the work of Welliver (1929-2005), whose large-scale landscapes, including the beautifully composed and somewhat dizzying “Blueberries in Fissures,” are a highlight of the show. The talk will be followed by a screening of artist and collector Rudy Burckhardt’s half-hour documentary, Neil Welliver Painting in Maine. (Also in conjunction with the exhibition, Lewis will be teaching the “Working from the Masters” painting class on December 5; tuition is $200.)

THE CONTENDERS 2013: CUTIE AND THE BOXER

Documentary tells the engaging story of a pair of Japanese artists and the life they have made for themselves in Brooklyn

CUTIE AND THE BOXER (Zachary Heinzerling, 2013)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Tuesday, November 26, 8:00
Series continues through January 16
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.facebook.com/cutieandtheboxer

Zachary Heinzerling’s Cutie and the Boxer is a beautifully told story of love and art and the many sacrifices one must make to try to succeed in both. In 1969, controversial Japanese Neo Dada action painter and sculptor Ushio Shinohara came to New York City, looking to expand his career. According to the catalog for the recent MoMA show “Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde,” which featured four works by Ushio, “American art had seemed to him to be ‘marching toward the glorious prairie of the rainbow and oasis of the future, carrying all the world’s expectations of modern painting.’” Four years later, he met nineteen-year-old Noriko, who had left Japan to become an artist in New York as well. The two fell in love and have been together ever since, immersed in a fascinating relationship that Heinzerling explores over a five-year period in his splendid feature-length theatrical debut. Ushio and Noriko live in a cramped apartment and studio in DUMBO, where he puts on boxing gloves, dips them in paint, and pounds away at large, rectangular canvases and builds oversized motorcycle sculptures out of found materials. Meanwhile, Noriko, who has spent most of the last forty years taking care of her often childlike husband and staying with him through some rowdy times and battles with the bottle, is finally creating her own work, an R. Crumb-like series of drawings detailing the life of her alter ego, Cutie, and her often cruel husband, Bullie. (“Ushi” means “bull” in Japanese.) While Ushio is more forthcoming verbally in the film, mugging for the camera and speaking his mind, the pig-tailed Noriko is far more tentative, so director and cinematographer Heinzerling brings her tale to life by animating her work, her characters jumping off the page to show Cutie’s constant frustration with Bullie.

Ushio Shinohara creates one of his action paintings in CUTIE AND THE BOXER

During the course of the too-short eighty-two-minute film — it would have been great to spend even more time with these unique and compelling figures — the audience is introduced to the couple’s forty-year-old son, who has some issues of his own; Guggenheim senior curator of Asian Art Alexandra Munroe, who stops by the studio to consider purchasing one of Ushio’s boxing paintings for the museum; and Chelsea gallery owner Ethan Cohen, who represents Ushio. But things never quite take off for Ushio, who seems to always be right on the cusp of making it. Instead, the couple struggles to pay their rent. One of the funniest, yet somehow tragic, scenes in the film involves Ushio packing up some of his sculptures — forcing them into a suitcase like clothing — and heading back to Japan to try to sell some pieces. Cutie and the Boxer is a special documentary that gets to the heart of the creative process as it applies both to art and love, focusing on two disparate people who have made a strange yet thoroughly charming life for themselves. Cutie and the Boxer is screening November 26 at 8:00 as part of MoMA’s annual series “The Contenders” and will be followed by a discussion with Heinzerling. “The Contenders,” which consists of exemplary films that MoMA believes will stand the test of time and continues with such films as Haifaa Al-Mansour’s Wadjda, Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station, Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, and Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight.

THE MOBILE SHAKESPEARE UNIT: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

The Public Theater
425 Lafayette Ave.
November 25 – December 15, $20 general admission
212-967-7555
www.publictheater.org

The Public Theater’s Mobile Shakespeare Unit is back from its three-week tour of all five boroughs and other locations, bringing its free production of Much Ado About Nothing to places where people have limited or no access to the arts, including the Park Avenue Armory Women’s Mental Health Shelter in Manhattan, the Queensboro Correctional Facility and the Fortune Society in Queens, the Rose M. Singer Center and the Eric M. Taylor Center on Rikers Island, the DreamYard Project in the Bronx, and the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester. The last stop is the Public Theater itself, where the Bard’s 1598-99 comedy about romantic mischief, mystery men, and marital mayhem will run from November 25 through December 15. The show is directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah (Detroit ’67, Elmina’s Kitchen), with choreography by Chase Brock (The Tempest, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark) and original music by Shane Rettig (The Unknown, the Atomic Grind Show). The cast features Michael Braun as Benedick, Samantha Soule as Beatrice, A. Z. Kelsey as Claudio and Conrade, Kerry Warren as Hero, Marc Damon Johnson as Don Pedro and Verges, Ramsey Faragallah as Leonato, Lucas Caleb Rooney as Dogberry and Don John, and Rosal Colón as Margaret, Borachia, and Friar Francis. Tickets are only $20, and there are only twenty-three performances, so you better act fast.

VIDEO OF THE DAY: “ADULT DIVERSION” BY ALVVAYS

“Is it a good time / or is it highly inappropriate?” Molly Rankin asks in “Adult Diversion,” the first single from Toronto’s Alvvays. You can decide yourself when the group plays Mercury Lounge (incorrectly identified as “Always”) on November 25, opening for Honey Wild, Hippy, and the Sanctuaries, and at Glasslands on November 26, headlining for Jacksie, Boytoy, and No Kill. Singer-guitarist Rankin, the next generation of Nova Scotia folk favorites the Rankin Family — her father, fiddler John Morris Rankin, died in a car accident in 2000 when Molly was twelve — formed Alvvays with her Cape Breton childhood neighbor, keyboardist Kerri Maclellan, later adding guitarist Alec O’Hanley, bassist Brian Murphy, and drummer Phil MacIsaac. The band has posted two songs online, the dreamy indie pop duo “Adult Diversion” and “Archie, Marry Me,” a pair of infectious tunes highlighted by Rankin’s lilting vocals. Alvvays is currently putting together its debut record for Royal Mountain, working with Canadian musician Chad VanGaalen, Graham Walsh of the Holy Fuck, and John Agnello (Sonic Youth, the Hold Steady). The disc is due next year, but you can catch the group this week and check out more of their sweet sound at these two area shows.

THE MIDDLE AGES ON FILM — SHAKESPEARE: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

Warner Bros. production of Shakespeare play is a bizarre classic

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM (Max Reinhardt & William Dieterle, 2004)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Monday, November 25, 6:30, and Tuesday, November 26, 7:30
Series runs November 20 – December 1
212-505-5181
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org

Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle’s 1935 adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one freakishly weird flick. In a misty forest, fairies go around sprinkling love potions on sleeping humans, creating mixed-up relationships that even venture out into the realm of bestiality. “The course of true love never did run smooth,” Lysander tells Hermia, and that sums up this star-studded screwball comedy of a sort. Warner Bros. put together quite a lineup for this big-time production, with plenty of strange casting choices that end up working rather splendidly. James Cagney prances about as Bottom, Dick Powell plays Lysander, Olivia de Havilland makes her film debut as Hermia, Joe E. Brown is Flute, Billy Barty plays Mustardseed, and a teenage Mickey Rooney offers a delirious take on Puck, howling at the moon with sheer glee. The wacky movie also features Ian Hunter, Arthur Treacher, Victor Jory, and Anita Louise as the fairy queen Titania. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture, and won for Best Cinematography and Best Film Editing, will be screening November 25 & 26 as part of the Anthology of Film Archives series “The Middle Ages on Film: Shakespeare,” consisting of ten cinematic adaptations of several of the Bard’s history plays, set in the Middle Ages, including Grigori Kozintsev’s King Lear, Bela Tarr’s Macbeth, and Akira Kurosawa’s Ran and Throne of Blood. The twelve-day festival was curated in collaboration with professor and scholar Martha Driver, who notes about A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “In Reinhardt’s enchanted forest, the fairies, gnomes, and elves are inspired by German folk tradition. While the bewildered young lovers and the rude mechanicals are imported intact from Shakespeare’s original, the spinning of Titania’s wedding veil (before she beds Bottom) to the Wedding March of Felix Mendelssohn, a modest addition to Shakespeare’s play, remains surreal and haunting. Jimmy Cagney is a crackjack Bottom and Pyramus while Joe E. Brown inhabits the twin roles of Flute and Thisbe with panache.”

DOMESTICATED

Laurie Metcalf and Jeff Goldblum play characters at opposite ends of the spectrum in Bruce Norris’s searing DOMESTICATED (photo by Joan Marcus)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through January 5, $87
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

In his previous play, the Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Clybourne Park, Bruce Norris presented an examination of race and community in two distinct halves, the first act taking place in 1959, the second in 2009. In his follow-up, Domesticated, Norris (The Pain and the Itch, The Parallelogram) again divides his story into two parts, but this time it’s a bitter battle of the sexes, with the wife stating her case in the first act and the husband making his in the second. The torn-from-the-headlines plot begins as a disgraced cabinet member, gynecologist Bill “the Pulverizer” Pulver (Jeff Goldblum), holds a press conference to announce his resignation because of a sex scandal, with his wife, Judy (Laurie Metcalf), by his side but looking none too pleased. For nearly the rest of the first act, Judy does not allow Bill to say a word as she lets him have it, reevaluating their life together as more of Bill’s extracurricular activities come out and a young woman lies in a coma. Their high school age daughter, the rather chatty and self-involved Casey (Emily Meade), is furious about the whole situation, while their adopted Asian daughter, asthmatic thirteen-year-old Cassidy (Misha Seo), speaks only to introduce certain scenes, discussing the mating habits of various animals as if delivering a school report, with the female of the species growing more and more powerful over the course of the play. “The purpose of this presentation is to examine the nature of sexual dimorphism and the advantages and disadvantages thereby conferred,” she says early on, speaking into a microphone as video images are projected onto small screens hanging from the ceiling. “Sexual dimorphism is the physical differentiation by gender within a given species, and may include such diverse manifestations as size, color, and the presence or absence of anatomical parts such as ornamental feathers, horns, antlers, or tusks.”

The Pulverizer (Jeff Goldblum) has a whole lot of explaining to do in tense family drama (photo by Joan Marcus)

By the end of the first act, Bill has pretty much been plucked clean, but in the second act he explains himself to anyone who will listen, from a bartender to a transgendered individual to a patient at the health clinic he cofounded. (The cast also includes Vanessa Aspillaga, Lizbeth Mackay, Mary Beth Peil, Karen Pittman, and Aleque Reid playing multiple roles, with Mia Barron as the Pulver family’s attorney and Robin De Jesus as the bar patron.) Judy and Bill then fight it out one last time in a brutal war of words that is both complex and surprising. For Domesticated, the Mitzi Newhouse has been arranged in a circle, with the action taking place in the small center space. Steppenwolf member Anna D. Shapiro, who’s directed five previous Norris plays in addition to winning a Tony for August: Osage County, has each scene overlap the next in the first act, creating a fast, fluid atmosphere that slows down considerably in the far more static second act. The show is set up like a classic courtroom drama, the prosecution presenting its case first, then the defense, and it holds up well despite the apparent one-sidedness of the argument. Some scenes fall flat, especially the ones involving an Oprah-like talk show host (Pittman), and the second act drags on too long as it documents Bill’s downfall, but it becomes alive again during its fiery conclusion. Metcalf (The Other Place) once more shows why she’s become one of New York’s most dependable, gifted, and eminently watchable stage actors, giving beautifully subtle nuances to a character who could have been one-note and repetitive. Goldblum is solid as well, easily transitioning from a silent film comedian in the first act to an overblown misogynist in the second, although the script occasionally lets him down as he does indeed grow repetitive. The play also features an important warning to all couples: Beware the triplewart seadevil. (On December 19, Goldblum and Metcalf will take part in a free Platform Series discussion in the Vivian Beaumont lobby at 6:00.)