twi-ny recommended events

THREE AUTEURS OF WORLD CINEMA: WONG KAR-WAI — DAYS OF BEING WILD

DAYS OF BEING WILD is Wong Kar-wai’s first collaboration with master cinematographer Christopher Doyle

DAYS OF BEING WILD (A FEI JING JUEN) (Wong Kar-wai, 1990)
Mid-Manhattan Library
455 Fifth Ave. at 40th St.
Wednesday, February 6, free, 7:00
www.nypl.org

Wong Kar-wai’s second film, Days of Being Wild, following the surprising success of his debut feature, As Tears Go By, was a popular failure, as Hong Kong audiences were not yet ready for his introspective, character-driven, nonlinear style. (However, it did win five Hong Kong Film Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor.) Days is Wong’s first film with master cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who has since shot all of Wong’s work, including Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, and In the Mood For Love. The late Leslie Cheung, who jumped out a hotel window in 2003, stars as Yuddy, a disaffected, beautiful youth who lures in women and then, after they fall in love with him, verbally mistreats them and cheats on them. Among his conquests are the gorgeous Su-Lizhen (Maggie Cheung), often shot in magnificent close-up, and the trampy Mimi (Carina Lau), who is jealous of Su, who takes comfort in telling her tale of woe to local police officer Tide (Andy Lau). Meanwhile, Yuddy, who was raised by a former prostitute, is obsessed with finding his birth mother, two facts that just might be part of the reason he treats women as he does. Set in 1960, the film’s leitmotif involves time and memory, with clocks ticking loudly and lots of long, lingering looks. The story goes a bit haywire in the latter sections, although the ending is a gem. (Look for Tony Leung there.) Days of Being Wild is screening for free February 6 at the Mid-Manhattan Library as part of the series “Three Auteurs of World Cinema: Wong Kar-wai,” which continues February 13 with Happy Together and February 20 with In the Mood for Love.

CULTUREMART 2013

Bora Yoon collaborates with Adam Larsen and R. Luke DuBois in surreal WEIGHTS AND BALANCES (photo by James Chung)

HERE
145 Sixth Ave. at Dominick St.
Through February 10, $10 in advance, $15 within twenty-four hours of show
212-647-0202
www.here.org

The HERE Artist Residency Program, known as HARP, is now in the second week of its annual Culturemart festival, consisting of unique, experimental works, often in double features, from emerging presenters in such disciplines as dance, theater, music, visual arts, and puppetry as well as a melding of several of them. On February 4-5, Mei-Yin Ng’s Lost Property Unit explores loneliness and solitude in the digital age, referencing television and movies through dance, live and prerecorded music, and robot sculptures, while in Hai-Ting Chinn’s Science Fair the mezzo-soprano combines opera with science in a multimedia performance. On February 6-7, Robin Frohardt’s The Pigeoning uses music and puppets to look at the end of the world, while Joseph Silovsky’s Send for the Million Men is a solo piece that reexamines the Sacco and Vanzettti case with puppets and handmade projectors. Also on February 6-7, Bora Yoon’s Weights and Balances is a surreal opera featuring an interactive performance design by R. Luke DuBois. On February 8-9, Stein / Holum Projects’ The Wholehearted is a work in progress about a woman boxer looking back at her glory days. On February 9 at 2:00, there will be a free performance of David T. Little’s opera-theater piece Artaud in the Black Lodge, which links Antonin Artaud, William S. Burroughs, and David Lynch through a libretto by Anne Waldman. The festival, which also celebrates HERE’s twentieth anniversary, concludes February 9-10 with HERE artistic director Kristin Marting and David Morris’s Trade Practices, a live, interactive market in which audience members become participants in the event.

LIFE OF PI

Teenager “Pi” Patel (Suraj Sharma) and Bengal tiger Richard Parker fight for survival in Ang Lee’s 3D adventure, LIFE OF PI

LIFE OF PI (Ang Lee, 2012)
In theaters now
www.lifeofpimovie.com

Based on Canadian author Yann Martel’s 2001 award-winning bestseller, Life of Pi has been adapted into an up-and-down movie that moves between the terribly boring “real” world and a man’s wildly thrilling tale of adventure on the high seas as a teenager. Rafe Sprall plays a novelist desperate for an idea to replace his abandoned book, so he has been pointed in the direction of Piscine “Pi” Patel (Indian movie star Irrfan Khan of Slumdog Millionaire). Pi proceeds to tell the writer about his childhood growing up in his family’s zoo, a time when the young boy (played through the years by Gautam Belur, Ayush Tandon, and Suraj Sharma) explored various religions, including Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam, in his search for a supreme being and meaning. But while his family is on a freighter on their way to a new life in Canada, the ship sinks, leaving Pi alone on a lifeboat with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker from the zoo. As Pi desperately struggles to survive, he develops a unique relationship with the tiger, having been taught by his father (Adil Hussain) that no matter how much he might think the tiger can gain emotional understanding and compassion, he is still a vicious killer.

Directed by Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; The Ice Storm), the film borders on the spectacular when it is on the water, detailing the teenage Pi’s battle to stay alive, gorgeously shot by cinematographer Claudio Miranda and edited with heart-stopping excitement by regular Lee editor Tim Squyres. But the framing story, in which the elder Pi discusses his life and religious beliefs, is dry and dull, at times seeming like a vignette better left for an evangelistic cable channel. Perhaps Lee needed his longtime producing partner and cowriter, James Schamus, to help work his way through the muddle; Life of Pi is Lee’s first feature film made without Schamus, with the screenplay here written by David Magee (Finding Neverland). Nevertheless, Life of Pi still supplies enough thrills and chills, especially in 3D, to get past the psych 101 philosophizing. The film earned eleven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Production Design, Best Visual Effects, Best Original Score, and Best Original Song.

CANSTRUCTION

Gensler & WSP Flack + Kurtz’s “CAN’s Best Friend” joins the fight against hunger at the World Financial Center (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

World Financial Center Winter Garden
200 Vesey St.
Through February 10, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-945-0505
www.worldfinancialcenter.com
www.sdanyc.org/canstruction
canstruction 2013 slideshow

Sponsored by the Society for Design Administration, the annual Canstruction competition believes that “one can make a difference.” The twentieth anniversary of the charity event — visitors are asked to bring a can of high-quality, nonperishable food to donate, although it is not required — was delayed because of Hurricane Sandy, but it has now settled into the World Financial Center, where it will continue through February 11. This year there are two dozen entries fighting it out for such awards as Juror’s Favorite, Structural Integrity, Best Meal, Best Use of Labels, and the Cheri Award, named in honor of Canstruction founder Cheri Melillo, who passed away in 2009 at the age of sixty. Nearly 74,000 pounds of food were collected last year, resulting in an equal number of meals for hungry New Yorkers; the competition now takes place in more than one hundred cities around the world and has raised more than fifteen million pounds of food since it first began in 1992. Among the stand-outs at this year’s Canstruction — all of which are built in a single night using as many as four thousand cans and are best seen through a camera lens to get the full effect — are Severud Associates Consulting Engineers’ “CAN You Check Mate Hunger?,” three chess pieces that suggest taking “a tactical approach to fighting hunger”; WJE Engineers & Architects’ “New York Breakfast,” a giant Anthora coffee cup; DeSimone Consulting Engineers’ “Candroid,” a green android whose mission statement includes the Jimmy Carter quote “We know that a peaceful world cannot long exist one-third rich and two-thirds hungry”; Gensler & WSP Flack + Kurtz’s “CAN’s Best Friend,” a Jeff Koons-like large balloon dog made of cans of crabmeat and organic vegetables; Gilsanz Murray Steficek’s “If You Believe, They Put a CAN on the Moon,” a rocket and crescent moon that explains, “It’s one small step for a CAN, one giant leap against Hunger”; and the MTA’s “Can You Dig It?,” a construction worker helping build the Second Avenue subway. But the runaway star — and our choice to win big when the awards are announced on February 4 — is Leslie E. Robertson Associates’ “Topping Hunger,” a spinning top that seems to defy gravity. “In a world where hunger is seemingly spinning out of control,” its mission statement declares, “it is time to take a stand.”

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF

Brick (Benjamin Walker) and Maggie (Scarlett Johansson) smell the odor of mendacity in Broadway revival of CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (photo by Joan Marcus)

Richard Rodgers Theatre
226 West 46th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Through March 30, $27-$132
877-250-2929
www.catonahottinroofbroadway.com

Over the last two years, there has been a plethora of Tennessee Williams revivals on and off Broadway in celebration of the centennial of the Mississippi-born playwright’s birth in 1911, including In Masks Outrageous and Austere, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, Vieux Carré, and A Streetcar Named Desire. The latest is a new Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which initially debuted on the Great White Way in 1955 and was last seen on Broadway in an all-black version in 2008. The problems with this current revival, directed by Rob Ashford (How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying), are evident from the very start, as the audience applauds over the opening lines spoken by Scarlett Johansson as Maggie the Cat and continues with Ciarán Hinds’s understated Big Daddy, Debra Monk’s goofy Big Mama, and Benjamin Walker’s barely there Brick. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof demands big, over-the-top performances to hide its relatively basic story line of a family hunkering for a big inheritance when they believe their patriarch to be seriously ill, in addition to a classic Williams subplot of a character having trouble facing his possible homosexuality. It’s not so much that the actors have to deal with the memories of such previous Cat stage and film superstars as Burl Ives, George Grizzard, Charles Durning, and James Earl Jones as Big Daddy, Ben Gazzara, Paul Newman, and Terrence Howard as Brick, and Elizabeth Taylor, Kathleen Turner, and Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie. Instead, Ashford presents the play as a subdued tale lacking nuance; the audience keeps waiting for electricity and explosions that never happen. Christopher Oram’s set, a large, wide-open bedroom, turns into Grand Central Terminal as characters keep traipsing through, denying Maggie and Brick any privacy as the odor of mendacity increases. This production of Williams’s second Pulitzer Prize winner — Streetcar also garnered the honor — would have been better served in a smaller off-Broadway house than under the glaring lights of the Great White Way.

TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY: PROSCENIUM WORKS, 1979-2011

LES YEUX ET L’ÂME is one of two New York premieres by Trisha Brown at BAM (photo by Stephanie Berger)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Through February 2, $20-$70, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.trishabrowncompany.org

The Trisha Brown Dance Company’s “Proscenium Works, 1979-2011” tour kicked off at BAM this week with the New York premiere of Brown’s final two works, along with several repertory classics, as Brown announced her retirement as choreographer from the troupe she founded in 1970. On January 31, the program focused on Brown’s revolutionary use of silence and experimental music and avoidance of narrative structure; none of the pieces featured traditional songs or told a dramatic story. The show began with the thirtieth anniversary presentation of the seminal Set and Reset, a stirring collaboration with Laurie Anderson and Robert Rauschenberg. As Anderson’s hypnotic, repetitive “Long Time, No See” plays, seven dancers take the stage under a three-part geometric construction on which Rauschenberg projects newsreel-style black-and-white footage. (On the other nights, 2011’s Les Yeux et l’âme, opened the program.) For 1966’s Homemade, former TBDC member Vicky Shick returned for the short solo work in which she wears an old-fashioned projector that displays a film (by Babette Mangolte, based on Robert Whitman’s original) of Shick dancing wearing an old-fashioned projector. As she slowly moves around the stage, the film appears on the back wall, on the ceiling, and on the audience itself. Different-colored wall screens by artist Donald Judd occasionally descend from above and divide the stage into claustrophobic spaces in Newark (Niweweorce), set to Judd’s minimalist score that combines silence with bolts of loud noises that resemble the sounds of an MRI, which didn’t exist when the piece debuted in 1987. And in the new I’m going to toss my arms—if you catch them they’re yours, eight dancers in loose-fitting white costumes interact with large industrial fans that blow their clothes off, revealing colorful briefs and bathing suits as Alvin Curran plays “Toss and Find” on the piano in the far corner. The informal yet elegant movement throughout all four works is slow and steady, emphasizing form and function in compelling ways, paying tribute to Brown’s profound influence on the world of postmodern dance. At the beginning of the evening, an offstage voice announced that the night will honor the “past, present, and future” of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, and the troupe will indeed continue, with Brown, now seventy-six, taking on the official title of founding artistic director and choreographer. Following the tour of “Proscenium Works, 1979-2011,” TBDC will return to its roots, concentrating on presenting multimedia works in unusual spaces beginning in 2015.

MUMIA: LONG DISTANCE REVOLUTIONARY

MUMIA: LONG DISTANCE REVOLUTIONARY examines the life and career of controversial African American journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal

MUMIA: LONG DISTANCE REVOLUTIONARY (Stephen Vittoria, 2013)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, February 1
212-924-3363
www.cinemavillage.com
www.mumia-themovie.com

In Stephen Vittoria’s overly reverential documentary Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary, actors, activists, journalists, writers, and others celebrate the life and career of the former Wesley Cook, who changed his name to Mumia Abu-Jamal and helped found the Philadelphia wing of the Black Panther Party. The two-hour film begins with right-wing media mouths and the owner of Geno’s Steaks decrying the left’s embracing of Abu-Jamal, who was convicted in 1982 of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Denied access to Abu-Jamal in prison, Vittoria uses staged re-creations, archival footage, radio interviews, and such actors as Giancarlo Esposito, Ruby Dee, and Peter Coyote reading from his many books in order to portray him as a dedicated and talented journalist who became a feared target of FBI head J. Edgar Hoover and controversial Philly mayor Frank Rizzo, ultimately being set up for a murder he did not commit. Vittoria does not delve into the details of the case, instead exploring the man himself, with stories from Abu-Jamal’s sister Lydia Barashango, comedian and activist Dick Gregory, wrongly incarcerated boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, philosopher Cornel West, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Alice Walker, fellow investigative journalist Juan Gonzalez, radical activist Angela Davis, and radio host Amy Goodman, who has broadcast numerous phone interviews with Abu-Jamal, whose 1982 death sentence was commuted to life in prison last year. Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary is completely one-sided, showing anyone against the golden-throated Abu-Jamal to be crazy as the filmmakers glorify its subject. However, it does reveal the City of Brotherly Love to be a frightening hotbed of violence and racism, even if that is not necessarily news. “Philadelphia has a veneer of liberalism and this whole Quaker mystique,” explains Temple associate professor and journalist Linn Washington. “The reality is it has been this ruthlessly racist city — really from its inception.” Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary works better when it examines the social history of the civil rights movement and the Black Panthers as covered by Abu-Jamal but falters when it treats his writings as if they were Shakespearean soliloquies. Vittoria will be present at Cinema Village to participate in several Q&As opening weekend, following the 6:30 and 9:00 screenings on Friday and 4:00 and 6:30 shows on Saturday and Sunday.