twi-ny recommended events

MUSIC DRIVEN: AMERICAN HARDCORE

AMERICAN HARDCORE celebrates loud, fast, and angry music scene

AMERICAN HARDCORE: THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN PUNK ROCK 1980-1986 (Paul Rachman, 2006)
Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
Saturday, July 13, and Sunday, July 14, 12 noon
718-384-3980
www.nitehawkcinema.com
www.sonyclassics.com/americanhardcore

A must-see for fans of loud, fast, angry music circa 1980-86, American Hardcore looks at one of the smaller but nonetheless influential movements in American music. A basic doc in the classic do-it-yourself sensibility that informed so much of the music scene it chronicles, American Hardcore features interviews with Henry Rollins, lead singer of Black Flag; H.R., the mercurial, difficult, but brilliant lead singer for the Bad Brains; Mike Watt of the Minutemen; and various personnel from the Circle Jerks, Minor Threat, and 7 Seconds. Tommy Stinson of the Replacements and Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers weigh in as well. The abundance of old concert footage is fabulous, but director Paul Rachman and writer Steven Blush discovered much of it in shoeboxes in basements during their low-budget cross-country trip while making the movie, so the overall production quality is not high ― which in some ways works better overall. The film does a good job of lovingly showing just how home-grown and amateurish the scene was and debating the importance of the scenes in Houston, Minneapolis, DC, Boston, and Southern California. The finale with a graphic artist and cover designer calling for the next generation of hardcore is a riot. American Hardcore is screening July 13 and 14 at 12 noon as part of the Nitehawk Cinema series “Music Driven”; the Saturday show will be followed by a Q&A with director Rachman, while Blush will be on hand for a Q&A after Sunday’s screening. (In addition to writing the American Hardcore book, Blush has also created one of the great music sites, 24 Hours of Hardcore, where visitors can stream hundreds of the best, and often hardest-to-find, songs from the movement he has so thoroughly explored.) The Nitehawk series continues August 10-11 with Peter Glantz and Nick Noe’s Lightning Bolt: The Power of Salad and September 14-15 with Shane Meadows’s This Is England.

JAPAN CUTS: THE KIRISHIMA THING

Life is turned upside down and inside out when a high school hero suddenly and unexpectedly disappears in THE KIRISHIMA THING

THE KIRISHIMA THING (Daihachi Yoshida, 2012)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Sunday, July 14, 7:30
Japan Cuts series continues through July 28
212-715-1258
www.subwaycinema.com
www.japansociety.org

Life goes completely out of whack when a massively popular student suddenly and mysteriously disappears in Daihachi Yoshida’s splendid examination of the trials and travails of high school, The Kirishima Thing. With no advance warning, superstar athlete and dreamy stud Kirishima can’t be found, missing class and volleyball practice, thoroughly confusing his friends and teammates. His girlfriend, the beautiful Risa (Mizuki Yamamoto), doesn’t know where he is. Risa’s clique of cool girls, including Sana (Mayu Matsuoka), Mika (Kurumi Shimizu), and Kasumi (Ai Hashimoto), start growing apart. The not extremely talented Koizumi (Taiga) is forced to replace Kirishima on the volleyball team. Aya (Suzuka Ohgo) plays sax on a rooftop while actually spying on her secret crush, the handsome Hiroki (Masahiro Higashide), who is Sana’s girlfriend and Kirishima’s best friend. Another of Kirishima’s friends, Ryuta (Motoki Ochiai), shows up to school with ridiculously curly hair. And Kasumi begins spending more time with nerd-geek Ryoya (Ryunosuke Kamiki), who decides to defy his film teacher by going ahead and making the zombie flick Student Council of the Living Dead. Tensions heat up, fears rise to the surface, and standard hierarchical relationships go significantly off kilter as Kirishima’s unexplained absence affects everyone’s position in high school society and makes them reexamine the purpose of their young lives. Based on the omnibus novel Kirishima, Bukatsu Yamerutteyo (“Did You Hear Kirishima Quit?”) by Ryo Asai, The Kirishima Thing cleverly deals with genre clichés as Yoshida (Permanent Nobara, The Wonderful World of Captain Kuhio) and cowriter Kohei Kiyasu tackle the myriad issues that face teenagers on a daily basis, evoking both Beckett and Kurosawa through a John Hughes-like lens with scenes that are retold from multiple viewpoints but don’t provide any firm answers. Winner of Best Picture, Best Director, Most Popular Film, and Outstanding Achievement in Editing at the 2013 Japan Academy Prize awards show, The Kirishima Thing is screening July 14 at 7:30 at Japan Society as part of the Japan Cuts series, a copresentation with the New York Asian Film Festival.

THE UNAVOIDABLE DISAPPEARANCE OF TOM DURNIN

Father (David Morse, r.) and son (Christopher Denham) have a serious chat in THE UNAVOIDABLE DISAPPEARANCE OF TOM DURNIN (photo by Joan Marcus)

Roundabout at Laura Pels Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 25, $71-$81
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

After serving five years in prison for Madoff-like financial wrongdoings, disbarred lawyer Tom Durnin (David Morse) thinks he can just walk right back into his family’s life, but his wife, Karen (Lisa Emery), has left him, his daughter wants nothing to do with him, and his son, James (Christopher Denham), is torn when his father suddenly shows up in his ramshackle house, in a dilapidated would-be neighborhood that was also a victim of the mortgage crisis. His father’s fall from grace has shattered James, who had to leave Yale and now is studying fiction writing at a local college, where he meets the emotionally injured Katie (Sarah Goldberg), who has family issues of her own. Tom, who is working as a barista at a Borders bookstore — which itself would go out of business shortly — tries to find out from James where Karen is, but he’s not telling. Meanwhile, Tom meets with his son-in-law, Chris (Rich Sommer), whom he helped set up in the law firm where he was once a partner, trying to convince him to get him any job with the company, but the meek Chris, who has been told by his wife not to talk to Tom, is not about to risk his career by endorsing Tom’s return to the firm where he committed his dirty dealings.

James (Christopher Denham) and Katie (Sarah Goldberg) deal with difficult family issues in play about financial crisis (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin takes place in June 2009 in “the American exurbs, Sam’s Clubs and SUVs and Caribou Coffee and the eerie, shuttered windows of foreclosed strip malls,” representing the America that was devastated by the financial meltdown. Morse is excellent as the determined title character, who believes that he has done his time and can now get back on the path he was on, both personally and professionally, unable to recognize the continuing results of his actions. The play, written by Steven Levenson (The Language of Trees, Core Values) and directed by Scott Ellis (The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Harvey), works best when Morse is onstage, his steely gaze and solid posture revealing a man who firmly believes he has paid his price and can’t understand why everyone has turned their back on him. The scenes in which James and Katie read their writings come off as gimmicky, a too-easy way to show these characters’ twisted emotions. The country is still recovering from the financial crisis brought on by men like Tom, and Levenson’s play does a good job using the Durnin family as a microcosm of the ongoing fall-out — in which very few people have actually gone to prison for what they have wrought. (There will be free talkbacks with members of the cast following the 2:00 performance on July 13 and 21 and August 4, 10, and 17.)

L’AVVENTURA

Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’AVVENTURA, starring Monica Vitti and Gabriele Ferzetti, is a thing of existential beauty

L’AVVENTURA (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
July 12-25
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

Michelangelo Antonioni shows that being rich and fancy-free on the Italian Riviera ain’t all it’s cracked up to be in this fascinating study of a group of friends out on a yachting adventure. When Anna (Lea Massari) disappears, Claudia (Monica Vitti), Giulia (Dominique Blanchar), and Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) search for her but can’t find her. Slowly life goes on, with Sandro and Claudia falling for each other as the mystery of Anna fades away. Aldo Scavarda’s gorgeous cinematography adds beauty to this captivating, unusually told story of ultimately empty souls. Winner of a Special Jury Prize at Cannes, where it was also booed, the existential L’Avventura, the first of a trilogy by Antonioni that also includes La Notte (1961) and L’Eclisse (1962), is screening July 12-25 at Film Forum in a new 35mm restoration that should take the stunning black-and-white visuals to a whole new level.

MANHATTANHENGE 2013: PART 2

Manhattanhenge will light up crosstown traffic May 28-29 and July 12-13 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

SUNSET ON THE MANHATTAN GRID
East side of Manhattan
Full Sun: Friday, July 12, 8:23
Half Sun: Saturday, July 13, 8:24 pm
www.amnh.org
manhattanhenge slideshow

The second of the two annual Manhattanhenges takes place this week, when the sun aligns with Manhattan’s off-center (by thirty degrees) grid to send spectacular bursts of sunlight streaming across the streets. Coined by master astrophysicist and Hayden Planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson in 2002, Manhattanhenge takes place twice a year; for 2013, those dates are May 28-29 and July 12-13, when the sun (half the disk one night, the full disk the other) will create “a radiant glow of light across Manhattan’s brick and steel canyons, simultaneously illuminating both the north and south sides of every cross street of the borough’s grid,” Tyson explains on the planetarium website. “A rare and beautiful sight. These two days happen to correspond with Memorial Day and Baseball’s All Star break. Future anthropologists might conclude that, via the Sun, the people who called themselves Americans worshiped War and Baseball.” Photographers will once again line up along the city’s wider thoroughfares on the east side, including Twenty-third, Thirty-fourth, Forty-second, and Fifty-seventh Sts., risking their physical safety against oncoming traffic as they try to capture that exact moment when the sun is half above the horizon, half below it. Wrongly called the Manhattan Solstice, the event “may just be a unique urban phenomenon in the world, if not the universe,” Tyson explains. It’s quite a sight; don’t miss it.

NAYLAND BLAKE: THE RESIDUE OF A THOUSAND HUGS

Nayland Blake’s “Knee Deep in the Flooded Victory” will include a special performance on July 12, “The Residue of a Thousand Hugs” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

ICP TRIENNIAL PERFORMANCE: NAYLAND BLAKE
International Center of Photography
1133 Sixth Ave. at 43rd St.
Friday, July 12, pay what you wish, 7:00
www.icp.org
www.naylandblake.net

For ICP’s excellent triennial exhibition, “A Different Kind of Order,” which explores the impact of digital imagery on socioeconomic and political photography, native New Yorker Nayland Blake has contributed the site-specific “Knee Deep in the Flooded Victory,” which is installed in the corner by the café and the bathrooms. The artist, writer, instigator, and educator went through ICP’s archives to examine the long relationship between gay culture and Times Square, bringing together photographs and documents with works by his ICP MFA students. The pieces hang on the wall and are lined up in a citrine in the hallway, but make sure to turn the corner, where a boombox plays a discussion and T-shirts proclaim “gender neutral bathroom” amid a colorful, cloudlike atmosphere. On July 12, Blake will perform “The Residue of a Thousand Hugs,” as he takes on the persona of drag queen Victorya Spectre, described as “an elaborately costumed figure meant to evoke the queer royalty of New York’s past,” and leads a procession “through the sites of Times Square’s vanished gay adult theaters and cruising spots.” Anyone can join in on the special triennial commission and experience what should be a wacky tour with serious underpinnings. In conjunction with the installation and performance, Blake has created a related tumblr site that continues his themes with more photographs, videos, letters, articles, and other paraphernalia.

JAPAN CUTS: THERMAE ROMAE

Public baths architect Lucius Modestus (Hiroshi Abe) is amazed by what he sees as he travels back and forth through time in THERMAE ROMAE

THERMAE ROMAE (Hideki Takeuchi, 2012)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Sunday, July 14, 5:15
Series runs July 11-21
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

Adapted from Mari Yamazaki’s popular manga series, Thermae Romae is a bizarre, hysterical tale about the importance of public baths throughout history. In the year 128, architect Lucius Modestus (Hiroshi Abe) has lost his mojo, losing his job to a youngster with more modern ideas and being hounded by his wife to have greater ambition. Down on his luck, he is contemplating his bleak future when he sees a crack at the bottom of a pool, which sucks him into a contemporary Japanese bath house where a bunch of old men are relaxing. The confused fish out of water is amazed by what he sees, from bottled drinks to a clothing basket, and upon magically returning to Rome, he adds these elements to a new bath design that is a huge hit. Soon, every time he goes into water in Rome, he ends up in Japan, bumping into the adorable Mami Yamakoshi (Aya Ueto) and bringing back more ideas, eventually designing bath houses for Emperor Hadrian (Masachika Ichimura), who believes the public bath is a key way to maintain a good relationship with the common people. But despite his success, Lucius can’t help feeling like a fraud, and things only get more complicated when he gets involved in the political machinations of Rome revolving around Hadrian’s successor, either the dedicated Antoninus (Kai Shishido) or self-obsessed womanizer Ceionius (Kazuki Kitamura). Abe is a riot as Lucius, displaying wonderful deadpan flare as he stands naked in front of men and women, refers to the modern-day folk as a flat-faced tribe, and gazes in wonder at a flush toilet. His trips from Rome to Japan evoke the tunnel in Being John Malkovich, complete with appropriately goofy special effects. Writer Shōgo Mutō and director Hideki Takeuchi keep things moving at a playful pace, celebrating social interaction as well as potential romance, complete with a fun Greek chorus of Japanese bath lovers. A sequel has just come out in Japan, but you can catch the first film on July 14 at 5:15 as part of the annual “Japan Cuts” series at Japan Society, which runs July 11-21 and includes such other works as Takashi Miike’s Lesson of the Evil, Yukihiro Toda’s There Is Light, Yuki Tanada’s The Cowards Who Looked to the Sky, Mika Ninagawa’s Helter Skelter, and Keishi Otomo’s Rurouni Kenshin, many of which are copresentations with the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s New York Asian Film Festival.