Cedar Lake summer intensive offers dance fans a unique, immersive experience
SUMMER INTENSIVE
Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet
547 West 26th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
July 24-26, $25, 7:30 & 9:00
212-244-0015
www.cedarlakedance.com
2011 360º slideshow
From July 24 to 26, Chelsea-based Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet will present its summer intensive, Cedar Lake 360°, in an immersive installation at their home on West 26th St. For the last three weeks, thirty-three advanced students have been training with interim artistic director Alexandra Damiani — former artistic director Benoit-Swan Pouffer left this past May to pursue other opportunities — and members of the talented company. They will team up Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday for two performances a night, at 7:30 and 9:00, that will include excerpts from Andonis Foniadakis’s Horizons, which had its premiere at the Joyce two months ago, and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s spectacular Orbo Novo, which we said back in October 2009 “is not just good — it’s mind-blowingly good.” Each show will also feature original choreography by Cedar Lake members Jason Kittelberger & Acacia Schachte, Jon Bond, Rachelle Scott, and Ebony Williams. The 2011 360° summer intensive was a fun, exciting event, as fifty student dancers and the Cedar Lake crew wove in and around the audience, which was encouraged to move through the space as the performers lined up on mats, leaped onto concrete blocks, and dangled from the ceiling. This year the dancers are organized into two groups, the red cast (Skylar Boykin, Emma Bradley, Tessa Crawford, Spencer Davis, Kellie Drobnick, Daphne Fernberger, Evan Fisk, Evan Flood, Allison Gee, Einar Nikkerud, Deidre Rogan, Whitney Schmanski, Katherine Sprudz, Kevin Tate, Jacob Thoman, and Lukasz Zieba) and the blue cast (Tara Bellardini, Patrick Coker, Shelby Colona, Claudia Germuga, Karly Gillespie, Madi Hicks, Nathaniel Hunt, Mason Manning, Michael Marquez, Jenna Mitchell, Courtney Spears, Stephanie Stricker, Michael Stromile, Stephanie Terasaki, Anthony Tiedeman, and Maggie Westerfield), mixing it up with company members. Tickets for each forty-five-minute show are $25, well worth such a unique experience.
The little-known story of an unusual rescue attempt of six American diplomats during the Iran hostage crisis is told in Ben Affleck’s gripping, nearly flawless thriller, Argo. On November 4, 1979, the American embassy was overtaken by Iranian militants, but a half dozen men and women — Bob Anders (Tate Donovan), Cora Lijek (Clea DuVall), Mark Lijek (Christopher Denham), Joe Stafford (Scoot McNairy), Kathy Stafford (Kerry Bishé), and Lee Schatz (Rory Cochrane) — escaped and were given shelter by Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor (Victor Garber). A stymied U.S. State Department turns to CIA operative Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) and his boss, Jack O’Donnell (Bryan Cranston), who come up with a bizarre plan to pretend they are making a Canadian movie in Iran, using that as a guise to get the six embassy employees out of the country. Affleck gets real-life producer Les Siegel (a rioutous Alan Arkin) and makeup maestro John Chambers (John Goodman) to maintain a Hollywood office as the plan kicks into gear, with Affleck serving as the producer in Iran and assigning fake behind-the-scenes roles to the six men and women as the terrorists searching for them grow ever closer. Written by Chris Terrio (Heights) and produced by Affleck with George Clooney and Grant Heslov, Argo is a superbly made thriller with expert pacing, a strong cast, and a knuckle-biting story that will captivate Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. Tension is high throughout, with just the right amount of humor and sentimentality, leading to a breathtaking finale. With Argo, one of the best films of 2012, Affleck once again proves himself as a big-time director, following the success of 2007’s Gone Baby Gone and 2010’s The Town. Nominated for seven Oscars and winning three, for Best Adapted Screenplay (Terrio), Best Film Editing (William Goldenberg), and Best Picture, Argo is screening July 24 at Hudson River Park’s Pier 63 as part of the free River Flicks for Grown-Ups series, which continues through August 21 with such other 2012 movies as Moonrise Kingdom, The Avengers, and The Hunger Games. For a day-by-day listing of free summer movie screenings throughout New York City, go 
François Truffaut shot out of the blocks in 1959 with the classic 400 Blows, and he followed it up with Shoot the Piano Player, a magnificent noir about a virtuoso saloon piano player and his always-in-trouble brother. French crooner Charles Aznavour is super-cool as the secretive, shy pianist with a hidden past who gets caught up in his crooked brother’s dangerous predicament, against his better judgment. Comedy mixes with pathos, dance-hall jollies lead to murder and kidnapping, and lost love holds a curse in a dark, haunting film you will never forget. Loosely based on David Goodis’s pulp novel Down There, the film also stars Claudine Huzé, whom Truffaut renamed Marie Dubois, as the waitress Léna and Nicole Berger, Richard Kanayan, Albert Rémy, and Jean-Jacques Aslanian as members of Aznavour’s troubled family. Shoot the Piano Player is screening July 24-26 at 1:30 in MoMA’s ongoing “An Auteurist History of Film” series, along with another black-and-white classic, Pierre Étaix and Jean-Claude Carrière’s deliriously funny short, Happy Anniversary, which won the 1963 Oscar for Best Live Action Short Subject. As a woman (Laurence Lignières) prepares a special anniversary dinner at home, her husband (Étaix) gets trapped in all kinds of craziness as he desperately tries to make it home in time, but the traffic and parking gods are against him. Hysterical slapstick ensues virtually without dialogue, like a classic silent film with a wacky score, melding Chaplin and Keaton with Tati and, dare we say, Jerry Lewis. And you’ll never be able to look at Mr. Bean the same way again. Truffaut called Étaix’s 1965 feature, Yoyo, “a beautiful film in which I loved every shot and every idea, and which taught me many things about movies,” forever linking the two French directors. It’s quite a treat, therefore, to see Truffaut’s slyly comic gangster picture right alongside Étaix’s wildly funny short.
Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo continues his fascinating exploration of cinematic narrative in In Another Country, although this one turns somewhat nasty and tiresome by the end. After being duped in a bad business deal by a family member, an older woman (Youn Yuh-jung) and her daughter, Wonju (Jung Yumi), move to the small seaside town of Mohjang, where the disenchanted Wonju decides to write a screenplay to deal with her frustration. Based on an actual experience she had, she writes three tales in which a French woman named Anne (each played by an English-speaking Isabelle Huppert) comes to the town for different reasons. In the first section, Anne is a prominent filmmaker invited by Korean director Jungsoo (Kwon Hye-hyo), who has a thing for her even though he is about to become a father with his very suspicious wife, Kumhee (Moon So-ri). In the second story, Anne, a woman married to a wealthy CEO, has come to Mohjang to continue her affair with a well-known director, Munsoo (Moon Sung-keun), who is careful that the two are not seen together in public. And in the final part, Anne, whose husband recently left her for a young Korean woman, has arrived in Mohjang with an older friend (Youn), seeking to rediscover herself. In all three stories, Anne searches for a lighthouse, as if that could shine a light on her future, and meets up with a goofy lifeguard (Yu Jun-sang) who offers the possibility of sex, but each Anne reacts in different ways to his advances. Dialogue and scenes repeat, with slight adjustments made based on the different versions of Anne, investigating character, identity, and desire both in film and in real life. Hong wrote the film specifically for Huppert, who is charming and delightful in the first two sections before turning ugly in the third as Anne suddenly becomes annoying, selfish, and irritating, the plot taking hard-to-believe twists that nearly undermine what has gone on before. As he has done in such previous films as 
