twi-ny recommended events

DOC NYC: REVENGE OF THE MEKONS

Sally Timms and Jon Langford fight the curse of the Mekons in stirring documentary

SONIC CINEMA: REVENGE OF THE MEKONS (Joe Angio, 2013)
SVA Theatre
333 West 23rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Friday, November 15, 9:45
Festival runs November 14-21
212-924-7771
www.mekonsmovie.com
www.docnyc.net

Called “the most revolutionary group in the history of rock ‘n’ roll” by Lester Bangs, the Mekons have been making some of the best music on the planet for more than thirty-five years. But despite a rabid fan base and constant critical adoration, the band, which formed at the University of Leeds back in 1977, has never quite made the big time. Joe Angio captures the wild, DIY spirit of this unique music and art collective in the stirring documentary Revenge of the Mekons. Angio (How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company [and Enjoy It]) follows the self-deprecating band — the members of which are quick to joke about their lack of financial and popular success, especially when they’re onstage and learn from fans that an upcoming gig has been canceled — as they celebrate their thirtieth anniversary and record their most recent excellent album, Ancient and Modern. Angio talks with the current Mekons lineup, which includes cofounders Tom Greenhalgh and Jon Langford along with Susie Honeyman, Rico Bell, Lu Edmonds, Sarah Corina, Steve Goulding, and Sally Timms, as well as such former members as Kevin Lycett, Mark “Chalkie” White, Andy Corrigan, and Dick Taylor, as they recount the band’s rollicking history, beginning with its Leeds days as a socialist punk band battling over shows with Gang of Four through its mid-1980s transformation into alt-country folk rockers.

Mekons doc is one heckuva wild and crazy show

Mekons doc is one helluva wild and crazy ride, just like their long career

Angio mixes in amazing raw footage from the 1970s with more contemporary scenes as the Mekons, with their usual reckless abandon and utter joyfulness, play such songs as “Where Were You,” “The Hope and the Anchor,” “Ghosts of American Astronauts,” “Millionaire,” “Hello Cruel World,” “Hard to Be Human,” “Memphis, Egypt,” and “The Curse.” Sharing their love of all things Mekons are such wide-ranging pundits as Jonathan Franzen, Greil Marcus, Gang of Four’s Hugo Burnham and Andy Gill, Will Oldham, Greg Kot, Craig Finn, Luc Sante, Mary Harron, and performance artist Vito Acconci. Back in October 2011, we wrote that “a world that includes the Mekons is just a better place for everyone,” and that still holds true. So start by watching this wonderfully crazy documentary, about a group of crazy characters who have formed a crazy kind of family, then go out and pick up such seminal records as Fear and Whiskey, The Mekons Honky Tonkin’, So Good It Hurts, The Mekons Rock‘n’Roll, Natural, Ancient Modern, etc., and be sure to catch them live when they come anywhere near your town. Revenge of the Mekons is having its world premiere November 15 at 9:45 at the SVA Theatre as part of the “Sonic Cinema” section of this year’s DOC NYC festival, with Angio, Langford, Timms, Bell, and Goulding on hand to talk about the film. DOC NYC, which seeks to “cultivate new audiences [by] attracting newcomers with the excitement of a festival atmosphere,” runs November 14-21 at the IFC Center and the SVA Theatre; among the other “Sonic Cinema” selections are Rodrigo H. Vila’s Mercedes Sosa: Voice of Latin America, Trevor Laurence and Simeon Hutner’s Harlem Street Singer, and Jeremy Xido’s Death Metal Angola.

DOC NYC: THE ACT OF KILLING

Proud mass murderers envision themselves as movie stars in Joshua Oppenheimer’s THE ACT OF KILLING

SHORT LIST: THE ACT OF KILLING (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Friday, November 15, 1:45
Festival runs November 14-21
212-924-7771
www.theactofkilling.com
www.docnyc.net

Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is one of the most disturbing, and unusual, films ever made about genocide. In 1965-66, as many as a million supposed communists and enemies of the state were killed in the aftermath of a military coup in Indonesia. Nearly fifty years later, many of the murderers are still living in the very neighborhoods where they committed the atrocities, openly boasting about what they did, being celebrated on television talk shows, and even being asked to run for public office. While making The Globalization Tapes in Indonesia in 2004, the Texas-born Oppenheimer met some of these self-described gangsters and, struck by their brash, bold attitudes, decided to create a different kind of documentary. In addition to following them around as they go bowling, play golf, sing, and dance, proudly showing off how happy their lives are, Oppenheimer offered them the opportunity to tell their story as if it were a Hollywood movie. The men, whose love of American noir and Westerns heavily influenced the stylized killings they perpetrated, loved the idea and began to restage torture and murder scenes in great detail for the camera, getting in period costumes, putting on makeup, going over script details, reviewing the dailies, and playing both the violent criminals and their victims. The leader is master executioner Anwar Congo, who is perhaps the only one haunted by his deeds; although on the surface he is proud of what he did, he is tormented by constant nightmares. Such is not the case for the others, who laugh as they go over the gory details, especially paramilitary leader Herman Koto, Congo’s protégé and a man seemingly without a conscience. Meanwhile, fellow executioner Adi Zulkadry wonders whether telling the truth will actually negatively impact their legendary status. “Human rights! All this talk about ‘human rights’ pisses me off,” Congo says in one scene. “Back then there was no human rights.” Oppenheimer also depicts how frighteningly powerful the three-million-strong, government-connected Pancasila Youth is, ready to fight for the very same things that led to the genocide in the first place. It’s hard to comprehend how these men continue to walk free, and one can argue whether Oppenheimer should indeed be giving them the platform that he does. Watching these gangsters — or “free men,” as they like to call themselves, since the Indonesian word for gangster is “preman,” derived from the Dutch “vrijman” — artistically re-create scenes of horrific violence is both illuminating and infuriating on multiple levels that will leave viewers angry and incredulous. A selection of this year’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival, The Act of Killing is screening November 15 at 1:45 at the IFC Center as part of the annual DOC NYC fest in the “Short List” category, which consists of films expected to make an impact come awards season; among the other “shortlisted” documentaries, all of which have already been released theatrically, are Jehane Noujaim’s The Square, Morgan Neville’s 20 Feet from Stardom, Dawn Porter’s Gideon’s Army, and Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell.

ILYA AND EMILIA KABAKOV: ENTER HERE

Emilia and Ilya Kabakov discuss their life and work in new documentary (photo by Jacques De Melo)

ILYA AND EMILIA KABAKOV: ENTER HERE (Amei Wallach, 2013)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
November 13-26
212-727-8110
www.kabakovfilm.com
www.filmforum.org

“Epic and boring,” Russian newspaper Vedomosti wrote in a review of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s highly anticipated 2008 Moscow exhibition; the same can be said about Amei Wallach’s documentary about the renowned Russian art couple, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here. Wallach assembled the same team she worked with on 2008’s Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine (except for her late codirector, Marion Cajori) to follow the Kabakovs as they prepare for a major series of shows in six venues in Moscow, marking Ilya’s return to the city for the first time since fleeing the country twenty years earlier. Wallach is given virtually unlimited access to Ilya, a soft-spoken conceptual artist filled with fascinating and unusual ideas, and Emilia, whom he married in 1992 and who handles his business affairs and assists her husband in the studio. Wallach delves into Ilya’s past as a struggling artist who was rarely allowed to show his work publicly and became part of an underground avant-garde that also included Oleg Vassiliev, Igor Makarevich, and Andrei Monastyrsky, all of whom appear in the film, as does Robert Storr, Matthew Jesse Jackson, and other scholars. Much of Ilya’s work is innately, if not overtly, political, evoking a changing Russia / Soviet Union as it evolved through such leaders as Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, quietly exploring many sociopolitical elements of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The film’s emotional high point involves a voiceover reading a letter from Ilya’s mother that she wrote to him when she was eighty, as the camera takes viewers through such monumental yet intimate and personal installations as “Red Wagon” and “The Toilet.” Among the other works featured are “The Palace of Projects,” “Life of Flies,” “Labyrinth (My Mother’s Album),” “School No. 6,” “How to Meet an Angel,” and “Alternative History of Art,” in which Ilya is joined by his past and future alter egos, Charles Rosenthal and Igor Spivak.

The Kabakovs attend the opening of their 2008 Moscow exhibition, marking their highly anticipated return to the city

Unlike such other recent art documentaries as Cutie and the Boxer and Gerhard Richter Painting, which focused on unique and engaging characters, the Kabakovs are not particularly entertaining in and of themselves; it’s their work that makes them fascinating, so some stretches of the documentary drag on a bit, and it is difficult for Wallach and editor-cinematographer Ken Kobland to capture on film the feeling of what it is like to experience one of the Kabakovs’ massive installations. (However, it is possible for New Yorkers to see “Catch the Little White Man,” which is on view along with seven paintings at Pace Gallery in Midtown through December 21.) But Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here is still a treat, offering an inside look at a husband and wife who are considered the most important Russian artists alive today. “The first thing to say is that art is another world,” Ilya explains early on. “And one must leave one’s body and one’s mentality, and one’s blah, blah, blah . . . and one’s everyday element, and enter another world. This is the major purpose and aim of our work. Leave and come with me to another world.” That’s a difficult offer to pass up. Enter Here begins a two-week run at Film Forum on November 13, with Ilya and Emilia on hand to talk about the film at select screenings on November 13, 16, 23, and 24; the 7:50 show on November 23 will be followed by a Q&A with Wallach and Kobland.

MEET THE DOC NYC SHORT LIST

Morgan Neville, director of 20 FEET FROM STARDOM, will be part of free DOC NYC panel discussion about the art of documentary filmmaking

20 FEET FROM STARDOM director Morgan Neville will be part of free DOC NYC panel discussion about the art of documentary filmmaking

DOC NYC
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Wednesday, November 13, free, 5:00
Festival runs November 14-21
212-924-7771
www.docnyc.net
www.ifccenter.com

The annual DOC NYC festival, which celebrates documentary storytelling with a week of screenings at the IFC Center and the SVA Theatre, kicks off on November 13 at 5:00 with the free panel discussion “Meet the DOC NYC Short List.” The Short List category consists of ten recently released nonfiction films that festival organizers Raphaela Neihausen, Thom Powers, John Vanco, and Harris Dew believe are the ones to watch come awards season. Moderated by Powers, the talk will feature eight of the directors whose work has been selected for the Short List: Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom), Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing), Gabriela Cowperthwaite (Blackfish), Lucy Walker (The Crash Reel), Richard Rowley (Dirty Wars), Alan Berliner (First Cousin Once Removed), Dawn Porter (Gideon’s Army), and Roger Ross Williams (God Loves Uganda). Free tickets will be available at the box office thirty minutes before the event, first come, first served, after Insider Pass holders have entered. The festival runs November 14-21, with Errol Morris’s The Unknown Known, about Donald Rumsfeld, the opening night selection; John Maloof and Charlie Siskel’s Finding Vivian Maier the centerpiece film; and Michel Gondry’s Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? An Animated Conversation with Noam Chomsky the closing night pick. The stated mission of DOC NYC is to “curate, cross-fertilize, cross generations, cultivate new audiences, expand distribution, create social space, and make the most of NYC,” which it has been doing now for nine years.

THE JACKSONIAN

Beth Henley’s southern Gothic THE JACKSONIAN features an all-star cast and a pair of mysterious murders (photo by Monique Carboni)

The Acorn Theatre at Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Through December 22, $75-$95
212-560-2183
www.thenewgroup.org
www.theatrerow.org

Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz aren’t the only real-life husband and wife playing a troubled married couple onstage these days. (They’re currently in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal at the Barrymore). A few blocks southwest, Ed Harris and Amy Madigan have troubles of their own in the New York premiere of Beth Henley’s The Jacksonian. As the play opens, Bill Perch (Harris) is covered in blood, filling up a bucket of ice at the Jacksonian Motel in Jackson, Mississippi. Standing front and center, wrapped in a blanket, his sixteen-year-old daughter, Rosy (Juliet Brett), tells the audience, “There’s been an accident there’s going to be I need to stop an accident at the motel.” The action then shifts between May 1964 and December of that year, on Walt Spangler’s two-part stage, the motel bar on the left, the interior of Bill’s tiny room on the right; Daniel Ionazzi’s lighting signals scene changes. Bill, a successful local dentist, has moved into the motel temporarily while dealing with his wife Susan’s (Madigan) psychological problems. He hangs out at the bar, drinking and talking with creepy bartender Fred Weber (Bill Pullman, looking like an Elvis impersonator gone seriously wrong), who is trying to avoid the advances of motel employee and local floozy Eva White (Glenne Headly), a racist who wants to marry Fred. Bill’s daughter, Rosy, visits him on and off, an extremely strange, mannered, and lonely girl who attracts Fred’s attention, if not her parents’. Later, Susan (Madigan) arrives, a confused woman who still doesn’t know what she wants out of life. Meanwhile, there’s been a robbery and shooting at a local gas station, blamed on a black man who is probably innocent, but Eva can’t wait to see him fried. Everyone’s story converges in a crazy night of Lynchian sex and violence that reveals the darker side of humanity. “Everything in our family is fine,” Rosy tells Eva. Um, not quite.

Husband and wife Amy Madigan and Ed Harris play a couple in the midst of some serious problems in Beth Henley’s gripping thriller (photo by Monique Carboni)

Pulitzer Prize winner Henley (Crimes of the Heart, The Miss Firecracker Contest), who was born in Jackson, has crafted a gripping southern Gothic black comedy with sharp, unpredictable dialogue and heavily stylized direction by Goodman Theatre artistic director Robert Falls (Desire Under the Elms, Talk Radio). An actor’s actor, Harris (Pollock, Fool for Love) gives an exceptional performance as the seemingly stalwart dentist who just wants to have a normal family. Madigan (Twice in a Lifetime, A Lie of the Mind) plays Susan with a tension ready to explode at any moment. Pullman (The Last Seduction; The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?) is nearly unrecognizable as the bartender harboring more than a few secrets, while Headly (Dick Tracy, Balm in Gilead) has fun chewing some scenery as the scheming Eva. But it’s Brett (Admission, Still Life with Iris) who packs the biggest punch in a breakout role as Rosy, an unusual, complex, but insightful character in the tradition of such southern truth-telling adolescents as Harper Lee’s Scout and Carson McCullers’s Frankie Adams. The Jacksonian is a quirky, offbeat drama with dark surprises around every corner, a Broadway-caliber production that can be seen through December 22 in a small, intimate theater just down the street from the Great White Way.

PUBLIC WALKS: CAROL BOVE’S “CATERPILLAR” ON THE HIGH LINE

(photo by Juan Valentin / courtesy of Friends of the High Line)

Free public walk will take ticket holders to wild part of High Line to see Carol Bove’s “Caterpillar” installation (photo by Juan Valentin / courtesy of Friends of the High Line)

High Line at the Rail Yards
Saturdays & Sundays, November – December, free with advance RSVP, 10:00 am, 11:00, 12 noon, 2:00, 3:00
December RSVPs start November 12 at 4:00 pm
“Caterpillar” remains on view through May 2014
www.art.thehighline.org

Red Hook–based artist Carol Bove has installed a specially commissioned series of large-scale sculptures across a three-hundred-yard section of the High Line that is still in its wild, self-seeded state, scheduled to become the third part of the park’s miraculous renovation project next year. Bove, who was born in Geneva and raised in Berkeley, has presented the site-specific “Caterpillar,” seven pieces that alternate between white powder-coated twisting steel (“Celeste,” “Prudence”), a silicon bronze and stainless-steel platform (“Monel”), a brass and concrete vertical object (“Visible Things and Colors”), and rigid, rusted steel beam constructions (“14,” “Cow Watched by Argus”). A kind of contemporary Zen garden on the West Side of Manhattan, “Caterpillar” can only be seen up close as part of public walks being held on Saturdays and Sundays at 10:00, 11:00, 12 noon, 2:00, and 3:00. Tickets are free but must be obtained in advance; RSVPs for the December walks can be made beginning at 4:00 on November 12. To go on the forty-five-minute walk, you’ll have to sign a safety waiver, and it is recommended that you wear sturdy shoes, because you’ll be going over uneven terrain. No one under eighteen will be allowed on the tour. The High Line has been transformed into a glorious outdoor elevated park with wonderful views, cutting-edge art, live performances, food and drink stations, and more, but this is a rare opportunity to experience what it was like before the change. The walks fill up quickly, so don’t hesitate to reserve your spot. (Through January 2014, you can also catch Bove’s indoor installation “The Equinox” on the fourth floor of MoMA.)

VIDEO OF THE DAY: “FIRE” BY ANNA CALVI

On December 23, sultry British-Italian singer Anna Calvi will release the single “Suddenly” from her sophomore album, One Breath (Domino, October 2013), backed by a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Fire.” But you don’t have to wait till Christmastime to hear the Bruce cover, as you can check out her recent solo performance of the song above, and maybe she’ll play it when she appears November 11 at the Music Hall of Williamsburg with DC duo GEMS. On the new record, the classically trained, London-born Calvi melds together wide-ranging genres to create a haunting cinematic atmosphere on such tracks as “Suddenly,” “Eliza,” and “Sing to Me.” “I’ve got one / one breath to give / I’ve got one / one second to live / before I say / what I’ve got to say / before I breathe / It’s gonna change everything,” Calvi seductively whispers on the title track, while on the emotionally powerful “Cry” she cuts loose ever so briefly with her intense, unique guitar style. The Brooklyn show is only one of three in America (Los Angeles and San Francisco are the other two) before Calvi heads out to France, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Scandinavia, Slovenia, and other European destinations. You can get another taste of Calvi in a recent concert streaming here.