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)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, Howard Gilman Theater
Sunday, December 22, 2:00, and Tuesday, December 24, 7:00
Series runs December 20-26
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com
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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 December 22 at 2:00, followed by a Q&A with Heinzerling, and December 24 at 7:00 as part the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “For Your Consideration: Documentary Oscar Hopefuls,” which runs December 20-26 and consists of all fifteen nonfiction features that have made the Academy Awards short-list, including Blackfish, The Act of Killing, Life According to Sam, The Crash Reel, First Cousin Once Removed, and Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? The festival will be followed December 27 – January 2 by “For Your Consideration: Foreign Oscar Hopefuls,” comprising such international fare as Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster, Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds, and Haifaa Al Mansour’s Wadjda.
In 2003, Amsterdam’s crown jewel, the Rijksmuseum, was closed to begin a major renovation. Little did everyone know at the time that the project would be delayed for years and go hundreds of millions of dollars over budget. Dutch director Oeke Hoogendijk captures all the surprisingly gripping fun and intrigue in the two-part, four-hour documentary The New Rijksmuseum. Hoogendijk brings her camera into every architectural meeting, monetary debate, and contractor dilemma, gaining remarkable access as no one shies away from sharing their personal and professional feelings on everything from the heated battle with community cycling activists over public use of the building’s entrance as a bike passage to such exacting details as paint color, smoothness of the walls, the art-historical value of certain works, and staying true to Pierre Cuypers’s 1885 building. The first documentary follows museum director Ronald de Leeuw as the process gets under way and continually gets mired in such issues as bidding contests that end up having only one participating company and the city’s dislike for a modern study center addition. In the second film, Wim Pijbes takes over as museum director in 2008, and his problems quickly mount as well as construction work eventually starts and deadlines approach. “I spend more time on cyclists than Rembrandt,” he acknowledges. “It’s my fate.” The interplay among such architects as Antonio Cruz, Antonio Ortiz, and Jean-Michel Wilmotte, a succession of project managers, curators of individual museum galleries, and the director is simply fascinating as they all give their very frank opinions on the renovation of the home of such treasures as Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” and Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid.” There’s also a whole lot of hysterical eye rolling. Hoogendijk’s two films are part mystery, part thriller, part absurdist comedy, but at the heart of it all is a deep love of art and the understanding of its cultural importance. “You gain all this knowledge only to forget it all again, but the essence remains with you,” says Asian Pavilion curator Menno Fitski. “You don’t have to remember everything you see in a museum. The experience is what makes you feel like a better human being.” The New Rijksmuseum will change the way you experience museums, especially the next time you walk through MoMA, the Met, the Louvre, or any other major cultural institution, and perhaps most of all, it will make you want to go to Amsterdam and see the new Rijksmuseum itself. The two parts are being shown at Film Forum through January 1; although you can see them separately for the price of one admission, it’s a lot more exciting watching them back to back, immersing yourself in this crazy, complicated love story.
The slogan “Free Pussy Riot!” is being shouted around the world — and was even seen on Madonna’s back — ever since the Russian government arrested three members of punk collective Pussy Riot after they staged an anarchic performance of less than one minute of “Mother Mary, Banish Putin!” at Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow on February 21, 2012. British documentary producer Mike Lerner and Russian filmmaker Maxim Pozdorovkin follow the sensationalistic trial of Pussy Riot leaders Maria “Masha” Alyokhina, Nadezhda “Nadia” Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina “Katia” Samutsevich as they each face years in prison for social misconduct and antireligious behavior for what some consider a sacrilegious crime and others view as freedom of speech. The three women do a lot of eye rolling and smiling in court as they are enclosed in a glass booth, proud and unashamed of what they did, continuing to make their points about the separation between church and state, feminism, freedom, and the seemingly unlimited power of Vladimir Putin. Lerner and Pozdorovkin speak with Masha’s mother and Nadia’s and Katia’s fathers, all of whom fully support their daughters’ beliefs and discuss what their children were like growing up. Meanwhile, other members of Pussy Riot and men and women across the globe take to the streets and airwaves to try to help free the incarcerated trio, who are responsible for such songs as “Kill the Sexist,” “Death to Prison, Freedom to Protests,” and “Putin Lights Up the Fires.” Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer is screening December 20-21 as part the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “For Your Consideration: Documentary Oscar Hopefuls,” which runs December 20-26 and consists of all fifteen nonfiction features that have made the Academy Awards short-list, including Cutie and the Boxer, Dirty Wars, Stories We Tell, Blackfish, and 20 Feet from Stardom. The festival will be followed December 27 – January 2 by “For Your Consideration: Foreign Oscar Hopefuls,” comprising such international fare as Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster, Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds, and Haifaa Al Mansour’s Wadjda.