U.S. Grant National Memorial Park
West 122nd St. at Riverside Dr.
Sunday, July 28, free, 12 noon – 8:30 pm
877-427-5364
www.harlemweek.com
On Sunday, July 28, “A Great Day in Harlem” kicks off the annual Harlem Week festivities, a month of free events including live music, film screenings, community fairs, a college expo, and more. This year’s theme is “Living the Dream: Celebrating History,” paying tribute to the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. “A Great Day in Harlem” takes place in U.S. Grant National Memorial Park, featuring a cultural showcase with music and dance at 1:00, a gospel caravan at 3:00, and a fashion fusion showcase at 5:00, followed by “A Concert under the Stars: Songs in the Key of Life,” a salute to Stevie Wonder’s seminal 1976 Motown classic, led by Ray Chew & the Harlem Music Festival All-Stars with special guests. Harlem Week continues through August 24 with such other events as Great Jazz on the Great Hill in Central Park, the Tri-State Junior Tennis Classic in Mill Pond Park, Summer in the City with Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Contours, and the ImageNation Outdoor Film Festival in St. Nicholas Park, the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival in Marcus Garvey Park, the 5K Anti-Gun Violence Walk for Peace, and much more.
After more than twenty years, it finally arrived. Zack (300) Snyder’s brilliant, near panel-by-panel re-creation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s genre-defining Watchmen doesn’t update the setting one bit. It’s still an alternate history, a dystopian 1980s with Richard Nixon in office, celebrating victory in Vietnam while trying to with the Cold War against the Russians. That era’s very real preoccupations might not quite match our own, but in this age of international terrorism, fear of violent death is still used as an effective political tool. Snyder’s bold move, to keep the ’80s setting intact, complete with hair, color, and style, is visually stunning, if oddly disconcerting; he also does an outstanding job going back to the ’50s and ’70s, following Gibbons’s beautiful design and Moore’s musical sensibility. (The soundtrack includes obvious songs by Dylan, Hendrix, Simon & Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, and Wagner as well as a killer “Desolation Row” by My Chemical Romance over the closing credits.) Yet the genius lies in the universal nature of Moore’s story. Snyder maintains his atmosphere of dread, of people being tiny cogs caught in a machine manufacturing fear to control humanity, and it works. Because for many, that same system operates today, albeit with different faces, different bad guys, and different silhouettes and color schemes. Snyder’s refusal to update the superficial points out all the more strongly the essential power of Moore’s observations. The look is superb, with Gibbons’s characters walking right off the page and into three dimensions, breathing humans that fully embody their two-dimensional origins, often more fascinating out of costume than dressed for duty.
Daniel Day-Lewis gives a spectacular, Oscar-winning performance as an independent oil man in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Day-Lewis, in remarkable voice, absolutely embodies Daniel Plainview, a determined, desperate man digging for black gold in turn-of-the-century California. His first strike comes at a heavy price as he loses one of his men in a tragic accident, so he adopts the worker’s infant son, raising H.W. (Dillon Freasier) as his own. The growth of his company leads him to Little Boston, a small town that has oil just seeping out of its pores. But after not allowing Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), the charismatic preacher who runs the local Church of the Third Revelation, to say a prayer over the community’s first derrick, Plainview begins his descent into hell. Using Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil! as a starting point (and employing echoes of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons in addition to the obvious reference, George Stevens’s classic 1956 oil flick Giant), writer-director Anderson (Boogie Nights, The Master) has created a thrilling epic about greed, power, and corruption as well as jealousy, murder, and, above all, family, where oil gushes out of the ground with fire and brimstone. Robert Elswit’s beautiful, Oscar-winning cinematography is so gritty and realistic, audiences will be reaching for their faces to wipe the oil and blood off. The piercing, classically based score, composed by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, builds to a mind-blowing crescendo by the end of the film — a finale that is likely to be much talked about and widely criticized. Filmed in the same location — Marfa, Texas — where Giant was set, There Will Be Blood is an unforgettable journey into the dark heart of one man’s soul. The film is screening in a DCP projection July 27 at 5:30 and July 28 at 1:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image series “See It Big! The American Epic,” which continues July 28 at 4:30 with longtime Christian Science Monitor film critic Peter Rainer introducing Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, followed by a book signing of his new Rainer on Film: Thirty Years of Film Writing in a Turbulent and Transformative Era.
Back in 2000, documentarian Nina Davenport made Always a Bridesmaid, in which she shared her views on being single and nearly thirty as she worked as a wedding videographer. A dozen years later, in the deeply personal First Comes Love, she turns the camera on her private life once again as she contemplates being single, childless, and forty-one — and takes matters into her own hands, deciding to have a baby on her own. With her best friend, Amy, by her side and her college friend, Eric, agreeing to be the sperm donor, Nina details every critical moment and more as she goes on this intimate journey, opening up her life for all to see. She discusses things with her family, particularly her adoring mother and her distant, hard-to-please father, as well as other relatives and friends, who give their opinions on whether they think it’s a good idea. Several of her acquaintances have also either recently had a baby on their own or are considering it as well, revealing the changing patterns of the American family in the twenty-first century, especially in New York City. Serving as writer, director, producer, editor, cinematographer, and principal subject, Davenport, in the style of one of her Harvard mentors, Ross McElwee (Sherman’s March), holds nothing back, which at times becomes overly self-indulgent and a bit much to take, but the combination of her eagerness and her fears, along with her willingness to show it all, ultimately makes First Comes Love the most human of stories. The film is running July 24-30 at the IFC Center, with Davenport participating in Q&As following the 7:35 screenings on July 24 and 25; it also premieres on HBO on July 29.