this week in film and television

DOWN IN DALLAS TOWN: FROM JFK TO K2

Alan Govenar returns to Dealey Plaza in Down in Dallas Town: From JFK to K2

Who: Film director Alan Govenar
What: New York City theatrical premiere of Down in Dallas Town From JFK to K2, with 7:00 screenings opening weekend followed by director Q&As
Where: Cinema Village, 22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
When: November 17-23
Why: In conjunction with the sixtieth anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy at the age of forty-six on November 22, 1963, poet, writer, folklorist, photographer, and filmmaker Alan Govenar travels back to Dealey Plaza to take another look at that fateful day and how it has impacted contemporary society in the documentary Down in Dallas Town: From JFK to K2, opening November 17 at Cinema Village. Govenar mixes archival audio and television footage with new interviews of eyewitnesses, Kennedy experts, tourists, musicians, and more, including the first-ever interview of Mary Ann Moorman, who talks about her iconic Polaroid snapshot of the event. The film also explores many of the songs written about JFK and the murder, by such groups as the Dixie Nightingales, Los Conquistadores, the Southern Bell Singers, Freddy King, and the Sensational Six. Along the way, Govenar wonders whether JFK’s policies could have prevented the rampant homelessness, designer drug epidemic, and gun violence so prevalent in America today.

In previous films, Govenar examined tattoo legends (Tattoo Uprising), the NEA’s National Heritage Fellowships (Extraordinary Ordinary People), multidisciplinary artist Sidiki Conde, who has lost the use of his lower body (You Don’t Need Feet to Dance), and a nameless hotel that became a gathering place for Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, and others (The Beat Hotel). Here he turns his attention to a moment in American history that caused a paradigm shift that is still felt today. “Kennedy was the best president we had. I wish we still had him,” Robert from Maine tells Govenar. Down in Dallas Town is more than just another movie about JFK, and Govenar will be at Cinema Village for Q&As following the 7:00 screenings opening weekend to take it even further.

DOC NYC 2023 CENTERPIECE: UNCROPPED

Photojournalist James Hamilton is the subject of fascinating documentary (photo by Jody Caravaglia)

UNCROPPED (D. W. Young, 2023)
Available online through November 26
Festival runs November 8-26 at IFC Center, SVA Theatre, Village East by Angelika, and Bar Veloce, $13-$30
www.docnyc.net
www.uncroppedfilm.com

Once upon a time, documentaries were primarily the purview of public television and a handful of small, independent theaters in big cities. But with the explosion of streaming services and technological improvements in camera phones, we now have the ability to see more nonfiction films than ever, taking us places we’ve never been before while introducing us to a wide range of sociopolitical issues and extraordinary, and nefarious, individuals. The fourteenth annual DOC NYC festival got underway November 8, kicking off nearly three weeks of more than two hundred films and special events, including thirty world premieres and twenty-six US debuts. It’s been exciting watching the growth of the festival itself, from its relatively humble beginnings in 2010.

The opening-night selection was Clair Titley’s The Contestant, about aspiring Japanese comedian Tomoaki Hamatsu, who, unbeknownst to him, becomes a reality-show star; Sam Pollard and Llewellyn Smith’s South to Black Power is the closing-night film, a look at controversial New York Times columnist Charles Blow, with Pollard, Smith, and Blow participating in a Q&A.

The centerpiece is the world premiere of D. W. Young’s warm and lovely Uncropped, which is as gentle and unassuming as its subject, photographer James Hamilton, who should be a household name. But fame and fortune are clearly not the point for Hamilton, who grew up in Westport, Connecticut, and didn’t own his own camera until he was twenty. He’s lived in the same cramped Greenwich Village apartment since 1966 and has little online presence, especially when compared to several other photographers named James Hamilton.

“James’s work is refreshingly devoid of ego,” Sonic Youth cofounder Thurston Moore says in the film, letting out a laugh. “Let’s put it that way.”

The soft-spoken, easygoing Hamilton notes, “My whole career was all about having fun.”

And what fun it’s been.

Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine are among the many famous and not-so-famous people photographed by James Hamilton (photo by James Hamilton)

Hamilton got his start by forging a press pass to gain entry to the Texas International Pop Festival in 1969 and used the shots to get a staff job at Crawdaddy magazine. He later took pictures for the Herald, Harper’s Bazaar, the Village Voice, New York magazine, the London Times, and the New York Observer. He photographed rock stars and fashion icons; joined with print journalists to cover local, national, and international news events, including wars; shot unique behind-the-scene footage on such film sets as Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, Bill Paxton’s Frailty, and George A. Romero’s Knightriders; and captured life on the streets of New York City and elsewhere.

Among the people Young talks to are journalists Joe Conason, Alexandra Jacobs, Michael Daly, Thulani Davis, Richard Goldstein, Mark Jacobson, and Kathy Dobie, editors Eva Prinz and Susan Vermazen, and photographers David Lee and Sylvia Plachy. Young, who also edited the film and produced it with Judith Mizrachy, cuts in hundreds of Hamilton’s photos, which run the gamut from celebrities, politicians, and musicians to business leaders, kids playing, and brutal war scenes, accompanied by a jazzy score by David Ullmann, performed by Ullmann, Vincent Sperrazza, and others.

Hamilton, who has never been a fan of being interviewed, sits down and chats with Plachy, who shares fabulous stories of their time at the Voice; journalist and close friend Jacobson, who Hamilton took pictures for on numerous adventures; Conason, who discusses their transition from the Voice to the Observer; Dobie, who gets personal; and Prinz and Moore together. “We never crop James Hamilton’s photographs,” Prinz points out, raving about his remarkable eye for composition.

Uncropped, which will be available online through November 26, also serves as an insightful document of more than fifty years of New York City journalism, tracing the beginnings of underground coverage to today’s online culture where professional, highly qualified, experienced writers and photographers are having trouble getting published and paid. But through it all, Hamilton has persevered.

in his previous film, The Booksellers, Young focused on bibliophiles who treasure physical books as works of art even as the internet changes people’s relationships with books and how they read and purchase them. One of the experts Young meets with is Nancy Bass Wyden, owner of the Strand, an independent bookstore founded in 1927 and still hanging on against Amazon, B&N, and other chains and conglomerates.

Near the end of Uncropped, Young shows Hamilton and Dobie perusing the outdoor stacks of cheap books at the Strand, dinosaurs still relishing the perhaps-soon-to-be-gone days of print but always in search of more fun.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

TARIQ “BLACK THOUGHT” TROTTER IN CONVERSATION WITH JON STEWART

Tariq Trotter (photo by Joshua Kissi) will discuss his new new memoir at BAM with Jon Stewart this week

Who: Tariq Trotter (Black Thought), Jon Stewart
What: Book launch and conversation
Where: Brooklyn Academy of Music, Harvey Theater at the BAM Strong, 651 Fulton St., 30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
When: Tuesday, November 14, $44-$68, 8:00
Why: “The story of my life starts with the fire. A lot of people know I burned down my family’s home when I was six years old, but are not aware of the magnitude of that moment — and all that began to unravel after it. That, I have never spoken of publicly, and rarely even to those closest to me,” Tariq Trotter, aka Black Thought, writes at the beginning of his new memoir, The Upcycled Self: A Memoir on the Art of Becoming Who We Are (One World, November 2023, $26.99). “You sometimes hear stories about people who have ‘lost it all’ and rebuilt their lives, but what I learned at a young age is that sometimes shit is just lost forever, or the cracks are so bad the building blocks never quite Lego-fit the way they once did. We lost everything we had in that fire. Yes, material goods are just ‘things,’ but the things we collect and value — especially when we’re young, or broke, or struggling — are extensions of who we are. Our visible, tangible losses, then, represent something deeper. In the fire, we lost ourselves.”

Written with Jasmine Martin, the book features such chapters as “A Creative Reckoning,” “Family,” “An Epidemic,” “New City, New Self,” and “The (Square) Roots” as Trotter traces the arc of his life and career. Born in Philadelphia in 1973, Trotter was a graffiti artist and drug dealer before hooking up with Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson in high school and Malik B. in college and finding success as a rapper and MC in the Roots while also establishing a solo career as a musician, actor, film producer, and stage composer and lyricist. He also leads the Roots as the house band on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

On November 14 at 8:00, Trotter will be at BAM’s Harvey Theater, discussing the book with talk show legend and activist Jon Stewart, the former host of The Daily Show and The Problem with Jon Stewart, which is ending after just two seasons over creative differences with Apple about coverage of China and AI. The $68 tickets come with a copy of Trotter’s book, in which he also writes, “Our lives are a response to the call of our childhoods. Somewhere in the echoes of the past, we find our truest selves. Who am I? Who are you?”

If you can’t make it to BAM, Trotter will be at Columbia’s Miller Theatre on November 28, speaking with journalism dean Jelani Cobb.

REVERSE SHOT AT 20 — SELECTIONS FROM A CENTURY: THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is part of twentieth anniversary tribute to Reverse Shot at MoMI

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON (David Fincher, 2008)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Friday, November 3, 6:30, and Sunday, November 5, 1:00
Series continues through November 26
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
reverseshot.org

Museum of the Moving Image is honoring the twentieth anniversary of the film publication Reverse Shot, which has been its in-house journal since 2014, with a two-month retrospective of twenty-first-century works touted by what was originally a stapled zine.

Among the films that have already been screened in “Reverse Shot at 20: Selections from a Century” are Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar’s A Lion in the House, Joel Anderson’s Lake Mungo, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse, and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. On November 3 and 5, MoMI will present David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which fits in well with the name of the journal, Reverse Shot, considering what happens to the title character.

Based on the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is an unusual love story for the ages. As Benjamin (Brad Pitt) grows younger, everyone around him gets older, creating fascinating intersections among various characters, but primarily with Daisy Fuller (Cate Blanchett). It’s August 2005 in New Orleans, as Hurricane Katrina approaches. In her hospital room, an elderly, dying woman (an unrecognizable Blanchett) gives her daughter, Caroline (Julia Ormond), a diary that she begins reading out loud. It was written by a man named Benjamin Button, who was born an old man in 1918 and tells his life story as the years pass by and he ages backward, sort of a reverse Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman) in the great Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970), with a bit of the overrated Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) thrown in as well.

The film lags a bit as Benjamin and Daisy approach similar ages — actually, the closer they get to their actor selves — but the beginning is marvelous, with Fincher working magic as Pitt plays a tiny, withered old man, and the ending is heart-wrenching. Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac) and screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close) wisely choose not to turn Benjamin into a human oddity that confounds the medical profession; instead, he just goes about his life, trying to do the best he can with a positive outlook and a lust for living. Alexandre Desplat’s score is among the best of the year, supported by a soundtrack filled with New Orleans jazz. The cast also includes Tilda Swinton as a diplomat’s wife who takes a romantic interest in Benjamin, Jared Harris as the randy captain of a tugboat who teaches Benjamin about the sea (and booze and sex), Taraji P. Henson as Queenie, the woman who raises the baby Benjamin after he is abandoned by his father (Jason Flemyng), and Mahershala Ali as Queenie’s husband, Tizzy.

In Reverse Shot, Andrew Chan wrote, “The unexpected harmony of extravagant price tag and minor-key mood is just the most obvious reason this film stands as an anomaly in the landscape of contemporary Hollywood cinema. . . . This is a masterpiece through and through, and not only the best thing I’ve seen come out of Hollywood in years, but also a film that deserves to stand proudly beside the work of contemporary masters Terence Davies and Wong Kar-wai in its evocation of what it feels like to be caught in the middle of time as it endlessly, imperceptibly slips away.”

“Reverse Shot at 20: Selections from a Century” continues through November 26 with such other gems as Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum, and Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset / Before Midnight / Before Sunrise trilogy.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH MARRIAGE

Three winged Mythology Sirens (Trio Limonāde) teach Zelma (Dagmara Dominczyk) old-fashioned ideas in My Love Affair with Marriage

MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH MARRIAGE (Signe Baumane, 2022)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
October 6-12
212-255-224
quadcinema.com
www.myloveaffairwithmarriagemovie.com

“I am a girl and I am weak,” seven-year-old Zelma (voiced by Dagmara Dominczyk) is taught in Signe Baumane’s wonderful animated feature, My Love Affair with Marriage.

In her 2014 debut, Rocks in My Pockets: A Crazy Quest for Sanity, the Latvian-born, Brooklyn-based filmmaker explored her family history of mental illness. In My Love Affair with Marriage, she follows the life of Zelma, from conception through childhood and the adult quest to find an identity.

Writer, director, animator, and designer Baumane combines hand-drawn animation, papier-mâché constructions, photographed backgrounds, and stop-motion animation to create a beguiling world that mixes reality with fantasy as Zelma goes through “Inception,” “Formation,” “Implementation,” and “Reconsideration.” Poignant scenes from her life — defending herself at school, moving to new countries, losing a friend, falling in love — are supplemented by songs performed by a Greek chorus of three winged Mythology Sirens (Trio Limonāde, consisting of Iluta Alsberga, Ieva Katkovska, and Kristine Pastare) who serenade her with old-fashioned notions about soul mates, virginity, sex appeal, shaming, weakness, and other concepts of life and romance. The heavenly music and songs are by Kristian Sensini, with lyrics by Baumane.

“It’s not a war / Not a tear / Not a wound / It’s the start of your monthly cycle,” the chorus tells Zelma. “You are on your way to becoming a woman / The worst is ahead of you / The world is full of traps set just for us women / Beware of everything / especially men / There are three simple rules for a woman to succeed in life / One: Be a virgin until you marry / Two: Choose and marry well / Three: Hold the marriage together whatever it takes.” Zelma responds, “But how about love?”

Zelma (Dagmara Dominczyk) is ogled by an older man on a train (Keith Randolph Smith) in My Love Affair with Marriage

As Zelma encounters new situations that she doesn’t understand, Baumane cuts to wildly inventive biology lessons animated by Yajun Shi in which an adorable smiling neuron (Michele Pawk) discusses fallopian tubes, the limbic system, major histocompatibility complex, the effects of oxytocin and dopamine, hormones, various parts of the brain, human microbiomes, and a bevy of scientific facts that impact how and why Zelma reacts to specific stimuli.

She is told early on that “ignorance is a girl’s bliss,” but she spends the film battling her biology and gender expectations to search out happiness and fulfillment, discovering that traditional ideas of subservience and marriage are not making her feel complete. Her relationships with such men as Bo (Matthew Modine), Sergei (Cameron Monaghan), and Jonas (Stephen Lang) bring her ever closer to who she is, but it is not going to be easy, especially as she still fights off the repression that was forced into her by growing up in the Soviet Union.

My Love Affair with Marriage is an engaging film that effectively turns stereotypical tropes inside out and upside down while avoiding becoming academic, moralistic, or didactic. Baumane uses different forms of animation for the personal, biological, political, and imaginary aspects of Zelma’s life, which helps maintain the fast pace of the 108-minute film. The entrancing visuals include works by Lasse Persson, Douglas Fitch, and Sandra Osip and art historical references, from Munch to Escher.

Dominczyk (Succession, The Lost Daughter) brings a childlike wonder to Zelma, while Tony winner Pawk (Crazy for You, Cabaret) is mesmerizing as Biology; if they ever make any kind of Biology collectible, count me in. Also in the voice cast are Erica Schroeder as Elita, Emma Kenney as Sarma, Clyde Baldo as Eduards the bully, Florencia Lozano as Zelma’s mother, Ruby Modine as Nina, Carolyn Baeumler as Darya, Christina Pumariega as Darya’s mother, Tracy Thorne and Laila Robins as emcees, Dale Soules as a Soviet official, and Michael Laurence as the Big Man.

But the focus is what’s happening in Zelma’s mind and body — which represents what’s going on in the viewer’s mind and body as well, regardless of gender. It might be an all-too-familiar story, but Baumane infuses it with a bold and intriguing freshness. Her depictions of kisses, coffins, clouds, and interior spaces are captivating, showing that life as a woman is no automatic fairy tale.

“To be a woman is dangerous and can be deadly,” Zelma, who turns into an animal when threatened, says. “I was so afraid to be a woman.” But that was once upon a time.

My Love Affair with Marriage opens October 6 at the Quad, with Baumane on hand for Q&As at the 2;30, 5:00, and 7:30 screenings every day through October 11.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

FIRST & LAST: FEAR AND DESIRE

Stanley Kubrick’s first feature-length film, Fear and Desire, is screening at Metrograph in new 4K restoration

FEAR AND DESIRE (Stanley Kubrick, 1953)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
September 22-27
metrograph.com

As part of its ongoing “First & Last” series, Metrograph is presenting a new 4K restoration of Stanley Kubrick’s seldom-seen 1953 psychological war drama, Fear and Desire. The Bronx-born ex-pat’s debut full-length film, made when he was twenty-four, Fear and Desire is a curious tale about four soldiers (Steve Coit, Kenneth Harp, Paul Mazursky, and Frank Silvera) trapped six miles behind enemy lines. When they are spotted by a local woman (Virginia Leith), they decide to capture her and tie her up, but leaving Sidney (Mazursky) behind to keep an eye on her turns out to be a bad idea. Meanwhile, they discover a nearby house that has been occupied by the enemy and argue over whether to attack or retreat. Written by Howard Sackler, who was a high school classmate of Kubrick’s in the Bronx and would later win the Pulitzer Prize for The Great White Hope, and directed, edited, and photographed by the man who would go on to make such war epics as Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket, and Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Fear and Desire features stilted dialogue, much of which is spoken off-camera and feels like it was dubbed in later.

Many of the cuts are jumpy and much of the framing amateurish. Kubrick was ultimately disappointed with the film and wanted it pulled from circulation; instead it was preserved by Eastman House in 1989 and restored twenty years later — and now available in a digital restoration from Kino Lorber and the Library of Congress, which is good news for film lovers, as it is fascinating to watch Kubrick learning as the film continues. His exploration of the psyche of the American soldier is the heart and soul of this compelling black-and-white war drama that is worth seeing for more than just historical reasons. “There is a war in this forest. Not a war that has been fought, nor one that will be, but any war,” narrator David Allen explains at the beginning of the film. “And the enemies who struggle here do not exist unless we call them into being. This forest then, and all that happens now, is outside history. Only the unchanging shapes of fear and doubt and death are from our world. These soldiers that you see keep our language and our time but have no other country but the mind.” Fear and Desire lays the groundwork for much of what was to follow in Kubrick’s remarkable career; Metrograph is also screening Kubrick’s swan song, 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut, an adaptation of an Arthur Schnitzler novella that stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and features one of the most memorable parties ever put on celluloid.

JEREMY THOMAS PRESENTS: 13 ASSASSINS

A small group of samurai sets out to end a brutal madman’s tyranny in Takashi Miike’s brilliant 13 Assassins

13 ASSASSINS (JÛSAN-NIN NO SHIKAKU) (Takashi Miike, 2010)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Saturday, September 23, 4:00 & 7:00
Series runs September 18-28
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com
www.13assassins.com

Japanese director Takashi Miike’s first foray into the samurai epic is a nearly flawless film, perhaps his most accomplished work. Evoking such classics as Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, Mizoguchi’s 47 Ronin, Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen, and Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter, 13 Assassins is a thrilling tale of honor and revenge, inspired by a true story. In mid-nineteenth-century feudal Japan, during a time of peace just prior to the Meiji Restoration, Lord Naritsugu (Gorô Inagaki), the son of the former shogun and half-brother to the current one, is abusing his power, raping and killing at will, even using his servants and their families as target practice with a bow and arrow. Because of his connections, he is officially untouchable, but Sir Doi (Mikijiro Hira) secretly hires Shinzaemon Shimada (Kôji Yakusho) to gather a small team and put an end to Naritsugu’s brutal tyranny. But the lord’s protector, Hanbei (Masachika Ichimura), a former nemesis of Shinzaemon’s, has vowed to defend his master to the death, even though he despises Naritsugu’s actions. As the thirteen samurai make a plan to get to Naritsugu, they are eager to finally break out their long-unused swords and do what they were born to do. “He who values his life dies a dog’s death,” Shinzaemon proclaims, knowing that the task is virtually impossible but willing to die for a just cause. Although there are occasional flashes of extreme gore in the first part of the film, Miike keeps the audience waiting until he unleashes the gripping battle, an extended scene of blood and violence that highlights death before dishonor.

Selected for the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and nominated for the Silver Lion at the 2010 Venice Film Festival, 13 Assassins is one of Miike’s best-crafted tales; nominated for ten Japanese Academy Prizes, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay (Daisuke Tengan), Best Editing (Kenji Yamashita), Best Original Score (Koji Endo), and Best Actor (Yakusho), it won awards for cinematography (Nobuyasu Kita), lighting direction (Yoshiya Watanabe), art direction (Yuji Hayashida), and sound recording (Jun Nakamura). It’s screening September 23 at 4:00 and 7:00 (with a prerecorded intro from Miike) in the Quad Cinema series “Jeremy Thomas Presents,” consisting of a wide range of films from British producer Thomas, who says of 13 Assassins, “I met Miike at the Venice Film Festival and proposed him a Tanizaki book I had, and he said to me, ‘Well, I’ve got this idea for a special samurai movie, and would you like to produce it?’ — which started this relationship of four movies with Miike. Three years later, we were back premiering the film at the festival. It’s truly an epic story with memorable characters, and the finale rivals anything we’ve ever seen, and everything was shot in-camera with a film camera. I was thrilled with the worldwide reception for this film. Really spectacular.”

The series, which runs at the Quad through September 28, includes such other works as Stephen Frears’s The Hit, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (followed by a Q&A with Thomas and Julian Schnabel), David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (followed by a Q&A with Thomas and composer Howard Shore), Nagisa Ōshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast, and Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout, in conjunction with the September 21 theatrical release of Mark Cousins’s documentary The Storms of Jeremy Thomas, with Cousins and Thomas participating in a Q&A after the 7:15 show on September 22 to discuss their filmed trip to Cannes.