Biopic follows N.W.A straight outta Compton as they take their case to the people
STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON (F. Gary Gray, 2015)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Saturday, August 19, 9:40, and Sunday, August 20, 9:10
Series runs August 11-20 www.straightouttacompton.com metrograph.com
Born in New York City and raised in South Los Angeles, F. Gary Gray got his start making hip-hop videos for such artists as Outkast, Dr. Dre, TLC, and Ice Cube before directing his first film, the 1995 favorite Friday, starring cowriter Ice Cube, Chris Tucker, and Nia Long. Since then he has nine more films under his belt, focusing on action crime thrillers.
Running at Metrograph August 11-20, “F. Gary Gray in Action” consists of five of his hottest flicks, beginning with 2009’s Law Abiding Citizen, in which an honest man (Gerard Butler) battles a prosecutor (Jamie Foxx) after a home invasion. In 1996’s Set It Off, Jada Pinkett, Vivica A. Fox, Kimberly Elise, and Queen Latifah play friends who decide to rob a bank. In 2005, Gray helmed Be Cool, the sequel to the 1995 smash Get Shorty, both based on Elmore Leonard novels; this follow-up brings back John Travolta as Miami mobster Chili Palmer, who now gets involved in the music industry, joined by Uma Thurman, Vince Vaughn, Cedric the Entertainer, Andre Benjamin, Steven Tyler, Christina Milian, Harvey Keitel, Dwayne Johnson, and Danny DeVito. Gray’s 2003 remake of Peter Collinson’s 1969 heist comedy, The Italian Job, upped the action ante, with Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Edward Norton, Jason Statham, Mos Def, Franky G, and Donald Sutherland.
The ten-day series concludes with 2015’s Straight Outta Compton, which comes barreling out of the gates with all the rage and fury of the 1988 title track that kicks off with Dr. Dre declaring, “You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge.” The energetic film traces the rise and fall, or creation and dissolution, of N.W.A, the seminal south L.A. hip-hop group that changed music forever. In the late 1980s, Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), MC Ren (Aldis Hodge), and DJ Yella (Neil Brown Jr.) formed a rap group that sought to capture the sound and feel of what was happening on the streets of Compton, from drugs and gangs to racist cops and poverty.
They were a smash hit, particularly their controversial song “Fuck Tha Police,” which set up confrontations with authorities as the band hit the road on a nationwide tour. But when Cube and Dre start questioning where all the money is going — Eazy-E and manager Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti) seem to be doing a lot better than the rest of them — everything they have built up threatens to unravel. And once Suge Knight (R. Marcus Taylor) enters the picture, the violence level increases, and things start getting even more out of control.
Life threatens to get outta control for N.W.A in Straight Outta Compton
With Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Tomica Woods-Wright, Eazy-E’s widow, among the producers, Straight Outta Compton doesn’t pussyfoot around as the various characters make their cases for artistic and financial freedom while reinventing the music business. Juilliard graduate Hawkins (BlacKkKlansman,In the Heights) is outstanding as Dre, maintaining a calm demeanor even as all hell breaks loose around him, while Jackson Jr. (Just Mercy,Cocaine Bear) has trouble hitting the high notes portraying his father, Cube, and Mitchell (Detroit,Mudbound) gives Eazy-E an unpredictable nuance. Taylor (Baby Driver) wreaks havoc as Knight, the extremely dangerous cofounder of Death Row Records, who makes sure he gets what he wants, while Oscar nominee and Emmy winner Giamatti (Cinderella Man,Sideways) has a steady disposition as a white man in a black man’s world.
The music scenes are spectacular, especially a Detroit concert that turned into a showdown between the cops and N.W.A, and it’s cool to see Snoop Dogg (Keith Stanfield), Chuck D (Rogelio Douglas Jr.), and Tupac Shakur (Marcc Rose). The film wavers a bit when it tries to get overly sentimental or inject too many side stories; it’s best when it just forges ahead with the frenzy and furor that was N.W.A, taking on exasperating social conditions the only way they knew how. Straight Outta Compton also features several scenes in which primarily white cops harass black men and women that evoke what is still going on today around the country. Gray (Men in Black: International,A Man Apart) even throws in a fun reference to Friday when the band throws a naked woman out of a hotel party, telling her, “Bye, Felicia.” (If you don’t get the reference, look it up.) At the end of the song “Straight Outta Compton,” N.W.A concludes, “Damn, that shit was dope.” The same can be said of Gray’s dynamic film. Up next for Gray is the January 2024 Netflix heist thriller Lift, starring Kevin Hart.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Who: Uptown Dance Academy, the Gospel Caravan, IMPACT Repertory Theatre, Mama Foundation’s Sing Harlem! Choir, Bishop Hezekiah Walker & Choir, Ray Chew & the Harlem Music Festival All-Star Band featuring Nona Hendryx, more What: Annual Harlem Week celebration Where:U.S. Grant National Memorial Park, West 122nd St. at Riverside Dr. When: Sunday, August 13, free, noon – 7:00 pm (festival runs August 9-16) Why: One of the centerpieces of Harlem Week is “A Great Day in Harlem,” which takes place Sunday, August 13, as part of this annual summer festival. There will be an international village with booths selling food, clothing, jewelry, and more, as well as live music and dance divided into “Artz, Rootz & Rhythm,” “The Gospel Caravan,” “The Fashion Flava Fashion Show,” and “The Concert Under the Stars.” Among the performers are the Uptown Dance Academy, the Gospel Caravan, IMPACT Repertory Theatre, the Sing Harlem! Choir, and Bishop Hezekiah Walker & Choir. In addition, Ray Chew & the Harlem Music Festival All-Star Band, featuring Nona Hendryx, will perform a tribute to the one and only Tina Turner, who died in May at the age of eighty-three; Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, Miriam Makeba, and Tito Puente will also be honored.
The theme of the forty-ninth annual Harlem Week is “Be the Change: Hope. Joy. Love.”; it runs August 9-16 with such other free events as the panel discussion “Climate & Environmental Justice in Harlem: Storms, Heat & Wildfires,” A Harlem SummerStage concert, Senior Citizens Day, the Uptown Night Market,the Percy Sutton Harlem 5K Run & Walk & Children’s Run, “Choose Healthy Life Service of Renewal and Healing,” Great Jazz on the Great Hill in Central Park with Wycliffe Gordon and Bobby Sanabria, Imagenation Outdoor Film Festival screenings of Beat Street with DJ Spivey and Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes, a Youth Conference & Hackathon, Economic Development Day, an Arts & Culture Broadway Summit, Harlem on My Mind Conversations, a Jobs & Career Fair, and more. “We continue to build a stronger, more united Harlem, radiating hope, joy, and love throughout our beloved city,” Harlem Week chairman Lloyd Williams said in a statement.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Quad series celebrating Juliette Binoche runs August 4-10 (artwork by Brianna Ashby)
BEAUTIFUL BINOCHE
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
August 4-10 quadcinema.com
In preparation for the August 11 opening of her latest feature, Emmanuel Carrère’s Between Two Worlds, the Quad is taking a look back at the career of award-winning French actress Juliette Binoche with eight of her most well known works. “Beautiful Binoche” kicks off August 3 with Philip Kaufman’s 1988 adaptation of recently deceased Czech author Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which had been thought to have been impossible to film. The nearly three-hour story of a love triangle set in the Czech Republic in the late 1960s is screening August 4 at 3:30 and 7:00; the first show will be introduced by Columbia professor and author Annette Insdorf, the second by producer Paul Zaentz.
Insdorf will also introduce the 5:00 screening on August 6 of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1993 Three Colours: Blue, about tragedy and liberty, the first of a trilogy, while Zaentz will be back August 6 at 7:00 to introduce Anthony Minghella’s 1996 The English Patient, for which Binoche won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her portrayal of a French-Canadian combat nurse during WWII. Louis Malle’s 1992 Damage, in which Binoche stars as a political femme fatale involved with a Member of Parliament played by Jeremy Irons, screens twice on Saturday, while Claire Denis’s 2017 Let the Sunshine In, loosely adapted from Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, is being shown twice on August 10, with the 5:00 screening introduced by Jourdain Searles.
Binoche, who has appeared in more than seventy films since her 1983 debut, has perhaps worked with more of the world’s greatest directors than any other living performer, an astounding array of international creators that also includes André Téchiné, Jean-Luc Godard, Leos Carax, Lasse Hallström, John Boorman, Abel Ferrara, Amos Gitai, Hou Hsiao-hsien, David Cronenberg, Sylvie Testud, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Christophe Honoré. Below is a look at the three other films that are part of the Quad series, which runs August 4-10 and concludes with a sneak preview of Between Two Worlds.
Daniel Autieul and Juliette Binoche star in Michael Haneke’s Caché
Michael Haneke was named Best Director at Cannes for Caché, a slow-moving yet gripping psychological drama about a seemingly happy French family whose lives are about to be torn apart. The film stars Daniel Auteil as Georges, the host of a literary public television talk show, and Juliette Binoche as his wife, Anne, a book editor. One day a mysterious videotape is left for them, showing a continuous shot of their house. More tapes follow, wrapped in childish drawings of a boy with blood coming out of his mouth. Fearing for the safety of their son, Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky), they go to the police, who say they cannot do anything until an actual crime has been committed. As the tapes reveal more information and invite more danger, Georges’s secrets and lies threaten the future of his marriage.
Caché is a tense, involving thriller that is both uncomfortable and captivating to watch. Haneke zooms in closely on the relationship between Georges and Anne, keeping all other characters in the background; in fact, there is no musical score or even any incidental music to enhance the searing emotions coming from Auteil and Binoche. Winner of numerous year-end critics awards for Best Foreign Language Film, Caché is screening August 5 at the Quad. Oh, and be sure to pay close attention to the long final shot for just one more crucial twist that many people in the audience will miss.
William Shimell and Juliette Binoche both play annoying characters you will not want to hang out with in Certified Copy
Writer, director, poet, photographer, editor, graphic designer, and painter Abbas Kiarostami was one of Iran’s leading filmmakers for nearly forty years before his death in 2016, compiling a resume that includes such important international films as Under the Olive Trees (1994), Taste of Cherry (1997), and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). Certified Copy was his first feature made outside of his home country, a dreadfully boring and annoying art-infused romantic comedy set in Italy. Juliette Binoche was named Best Actress at Cannes for her starring role as an unnamed single mother and antiques dealer who is obsessed with English author James Miller’s (British opera star William Shimell) book on the history and meaning of art replicas, titled Certified Copy. Inexplicably, the two strangers are soon on a bizarre sort-of date, driving through Tuscany and becoming involved in a series of vignettes about love and marriage, literature and art, and other topics.
Both characters are seriously flawed and emotionally unstable in ways that make them unattractive to watch, especially in obvious set-ups that either go nowhere or exactly where you think they’re going. While Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke made the somewhat similar Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, in which two strangers from different countries spend a day together (but mostly by themselves), the sexual tension and excitement always building, Certified Copy is more reminiscent of Hans Canova’s ridiculous Conversations with Other Women, in which Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter play wedding guests with a past whom viewers can’t wait to just shut up and get off the screen. Don’t let the supposed adult dialogue of the overrated Certified Copy fool you into thinking it’s an intelligent, mature look at believable relationships; instead, it feels like a staid copy of other, better films you think you’ve seen but can’t remember — and won’t care. Certified Copy is screening on August 8 at the Quad; the 7:00 show will be introduced by film critic Simon Abrams, who likely appreciates it more than I do.
Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart mix fact and fiction in Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria
The related concepts of time and reality wind through Olivier Assayas’s beautifully poetic, melancholy Clouds of Sils Maria, much like actual snakelike clouds slither through the twisting Maloja Pass in the Swiss Alps, as life imitates art and vice versa. Juliette Binoche stars as Maria Enders, a famous French actress who is on her way to Zurich to accept an award for her mentor, playwright Wilhelm Melchior, who eschews such mundane ceremonies. But while en route, Maria and her personal assistant, the extremely attentive and capable Valentine (Kristen Stewart), learn that Wilhelm has suddenly and unexpectedly passed away, and Maria considers turning back, especially when she later finds out that Henryk Wald (Hanns Zischler), an old nemesis, will be there to pay homage to Wilhelm as well, but she decides to go ahead after all. At a cocktail party, Maria meets with hot director Klaus Diesterweg (Lars Eidinger), who is preparing a new stage production of Wilhelm and Maria’s first big hit, The Maloja Snake, but this time Maria would play Helena, an older woman obsessed with ambitious eighteen-year-old Sigrid, the role she originally performed twenty years earlier, to great acclaim. Klaus is planning to cast Lindsay Lohan–like troublemaking star and walking tabloid headline Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz) as Sigrid, which does not thrill Maria as her past and present meld together in an almost dreamlike narrative punctuated by the music of Handel and cinematographer Yorick Le Saux’s gorgeous shots of vast mountain landscapes.
Valentine (Kristen Stewart) and Maria (Juliette Binoche) go in search of the Maloja Snake in the Swiss Alps
Clouds of Sils Maria resonates on many levels, both inside and outside of the main plot and the film itself. Assayas (Irma Vep, Demonlover) cowrote André Téchiné’s 1983 film, Rendez-Vous, which was Binoche’s breakthrough; Assayas and Binoche wouldn’t work together again until his 2008 film Summer Hours, similar to the relationship between Wilhelm and Maria. Meanwhile, the story of the play-within-the-film is echoed by the relationship between Maria and Valentine, who are having trouble separating the personal from the professional. It is often difficult to know when the two women are practicing lines and when they are talking about their “real” lives. Binoche is simply extraordinary as Maria, a distressed and anxious woman who is suddenly facing getting older somewhat sooner than expected, while Stewart became the first American woman to win a French César, for Best Supporting Actress, for her sensitive portrayal of Valentine, a strong-willed young woman who might or might not be holding something back. The scenes between the two are riveting as they venture in and out of the reality of the film, their onscreen chemistry building and building till it’s at last ready to ignite. Art, life, cinema, theater, fiction, and reality all come together in Clouds of Sils Maria, as Maria, Assayas, and Binoche take stock of where they’ve been, where they are, and where they’re going.
North Circular tells the story of a Dublin road through music and its wide-ranging residents
NORTH CIRCULAR (Luke McManus, 2022)
DCTV Firehouse Cinema
87 Lafayette St.
Opens Friday, July 28
212-966-4510 firehouse.dctvny.org
“All the time I said I’d move away / I’m thinkin’, ‘Gemma, were you going insane?’” Gemma Dunleavy sings to a packed club audience over the closing credits of Luke McManus’s gorgeous, elegiac documentary musical, North Circular, opening July 28 at DCTV Firehouse Cinema.
Shot in stark, emotionally resonant black-and-white that forges a timeless atmosphere, the film takes viewers across all of Dublin’s North Circular Road, from Phoenix Park to Dublin Port, as locals talk about their lives, play music, and rail against gentrification while defending their communities.
“I think the North Circular bears the marks of its history: the marks of power and of privilege . . . Pain and poverty . . . unravelling of lives,” one man says. “The pageantry of empire, but also the reality of its military violence.”
Kids hang out on a stoop on North Circular Road in documentary musical
A slow-moving, often still camera focuses on animals, monuments, cricketers, birds, kids on stoops, construction, a pet shop, a waterfall, a cemetery. It follows a group trying to save the Cobblestone pub. It shows fans of the Bohemian Football Club, known as Bohs, preparing for a match against their archrivals, the Shamrock Rovers, at Dalymount Park. The camera lingers on images — dark passages, fireworks, unique architecture, a helicopter flying over a stadium, a man walking his ferret, the sun, the moon and clouds — making everything and everybody equal. Not a single person in the film is identified, by name, occupation, or otherwise.
A former inmate stands outside Mountjoy Prison and admits, “Not knowing what was going to happen when you went in, and actually not knowing what was going to happen when you came out, because you walked that road, whatever direction you went in. . . . The road took me in a different direction, so to speak. Because the last time I got out I walked out onto the North Circular Road and I took a different route. I took the route of looking for help.”
Along the way, people sing traditional ballads and new dirges in pubs and on the street, including Annie Hughes (“The Blackbird of Avondale”), John Francis Flynn (“The Lag’s Song”), Julie Kavanagh (“Siúil a Rún”), Séan Ó Túama (“An Cualann”), Jerry O’Reilly (“Van Diemen’s Land”), Eoghan O Ceannabháin (“Dark Horse on the Wind”), Ian Lynch (“Banks of the Nile”), and Dunleavy (“Up de Flats”), using guitar, banjo, drums, pennywhistle, and bagpipes.
“I think the hardest thing about the pipes sometimes is listening to them, you know?” a military bagpiper says, worrying that the younger generation is not turning to the instrument. (You can find out more about the music in the film here.)
In his directorial debut, McManus, who has lived just off North Circular Road for twenty years, beautifully weaves together music, dialogue, and imagery; the emotive score features incidental music by Kevin Murphy and Thomas Haugh of Seti the First, in addition to the vocal quartet Landless, that maintains the even-keeled pace.
The documentary was edited by John Murphy with a heart-wrenching, mesmerizing attention to detail; nothing is random. McManus, who cites
Gianfranco Rosi’s Sacro GRA and Zed Nelson’s The Street as inspiration, refers to the film as a “documentary musical,” explaining in a director’s note, “The use of music as a specific technique of storytelling is both an aesthetic and an editorial decision — to make a documentary that combines the musical and the factual film in a way that isn’t simply a documentary about music but is more a documentary
musical.”
North Circular is a paean to what was, what is, and what might be, in Dublin and, essentially, in tight-knit neighborhoods everywhere, particularly when it comes to class, colonialism, and gentrification. “There are people who have lived their whole lives on the road, and it is their world,” one man says. “But there are also people for whom it’s a place of transience. The flow of people is fundamental to the area.” Because in the end, it’s the people who make a place a home.
(There will be five performance Q&As with McManus, Hughes, Maeve O’Boyle, John Riordan, Donal Foreman, John Lee, and the Cobblestone’s Meabh Mulligan opening weekend at DCTV Firehouse Cinema, featuring discussion and music.)
Under the Turquoise Sky is centerpiece of 2023 Japan Cuts fest
JAPAN CUTS: FESTIVAL OF NEW JAPANESE FILM
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
July 26 – August 6
212-715-1258 www.japansociety.org
Always one of the best fests of the year, Japan Society’s Japan Cuts is back for its sixteenth iteration, consisting of two dozen features and fifteen shorts from across genres, including sci-fi/fantasy, romance, action-adventure, animation, comedy, mystery, thriller, and family drama. The Festival of New Japanese Film opens July 26 with Takehiko Inoue’s The First Slam Dunk, based on his 1990s manga about the Shohoku High School basketball team. The centerpiece is the US premiere of KENTARO’s Under the Turquoise Sky, a road movie set in Mongolia. The festival closes August 6 with the US premiere of Ryuhei Kitamura’s The Three Sisters of Tenmasou Inn, a supernatural drama set in a way station.
Japan Cuts pays tribute to the late composer Ryuichi Sakamoto with a special screening of Elizabeth Lennard’s 1985 documentary Tokyo Melody: A Film about Ryuichi Sakamoto, introduced by Akiko Yano, one of the pianist’s ex-wives, and will be followed by a Q&A with the director. The Next Generation sidebar comprises a half dozen flicks by emerging filmmakers, from actor Hiroki Kono’s debut, J005311, and Yusuke Morii’s Amiko to Ryohei Sasatani’s award-winning, 1960s-set Sanka: Nomads of the Mountain and Yuho Ishibashi’s When Morning Comes, I Feel Empty (followed by a Q&A with the director). Below is a look at several of this year’s selections, with more to be added as the festival continues.
Yuta Shimotsu’s Best Wishes to All weaves between past and present focusing on a frightening recipe for happiness
BEST WISHES TO ALL (みなに幸あれ) (MINA NI KO ARE) (Yuta Shimotsu, 2023)
Thursday, July 27, 9:00 japansociety.org
“Are you happy?” an elderly woman asks her grown granddaughter in Yuta Shimotsu’s creepy existential horror film, Best Wishes to All, making its North American premiere July 27 in Japan Society’s Japan Cuts festival. When a young Tokyo nursing student (Kotone Furukawa) returns to her grandparents’ farm in the Chikuho region, she is greeted by a surprise behind one of the doors. Or maybe it’s not really such a shocker, especially when her parents and little brother arrive and try to tell her what they claim she knew all along but refuses to face. Meanwhile, she rekindles a friendship with an old friend who is decidedly against what her family is doing.
Released earlier this year, Chie Hayakawa’s Plan 75 was a fictional, though frighteningly believable, tale about a government program in which Japanese citizens, upon reaching seventy-five years of age, could receive cash and free cremation in exchange for being euthanized in order to prevent further population growth. In Best Wishes to All, Shimotsu offers a bizarre twist on the idea of life, death, and happiness, involving — well, it wouldn’t be fair to say any more about that. But suffice to say it isn’t pretty. “I’m sorry that young people are sacrificed for old folks like me,” an old woman says to the befuddled nurse. And her grandmother scolds, “I bet you believe the world is good, right? You know nothing about the world.”
Written by Rumi Kakuta based on a story by Shimotsu, Best Wishes to All evokes such films as Takashi Miike’s The Happiness of the Katakuris and Gozu and Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On series, the latter of which makes sense, as Shimizu is an executive producer on the film. Shimotsu and cinematographer Ryuto Iwabuchi weave between the past and the present as the secret is slowly revealed, but don’t try to think too hard about it, as it doesn’t make a whole lotta sense. Furukawa (Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy) is appealing as the nurse, and the rest of the cast ably do their part playing characters who have no names, adding to the mystery and confusion.
A trio of new friends try to save humanity in From the End of the World
FROM THE END OF THE WORLD (世界の終わりから) (SEKAI NO OWARI KARA) (Kazuaki Kiriya, 2023)
Saturday, August 5, 9:30 japansociety.org
Kazuaki Kiriya’s fourth film in twenty years, From the End of the World — following 2004’s Casshern, 2009’s Goemon, and 2015’s Last Knights — is a rousing thriller, if not quite the epic it aims to be. It’s 2030, and seventeen-year-old Hana Shimon (Aoi Itô) has just lost her beloved grandmother who raised her after her parents were killed in an accident. Instead of sending her to a children’s home, Shogo Ezaki (Katsuya Maiguma) and Reiko Saeki (Aya Asahina), who may or may not be some kind of government agents, lets her stay in her home if she tells them about the dreams she’s been having. Hana often slips into terrifying black-and-white nightmares involving death and destruction, where she is joined by a young girl named Yuki (Mio Masuda) and an unidentifiable creature.
She soon finds out from an old woman with spectacular hair (Mari Natsuki) that the world will be ending in two weeks and that Hana is the only one with the power to prevent disaster. “What’s your impression of the word destiny?” the woman asks Hana. At school, Hana is befriended by Takeru (Jiei Wakabayashi), bullied by Sora (Ai Tominaga), and taught by a teacher played by director Shunji Iwai; she is also pursued by Chief Cabinet Secretary Satoshi Koreeda (Katsunori Takahashi), who has other plans for her. As the clock keeps ticking, a time capsule serves as a critical plot point as past and present merge toward an uncertain future.
Evoking elements of Stranger Things as well as both Takashi Miike (The Great Yokai War) and Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away,My Neighbor Totoro), From the End of the World — which Kiriya says will be his final directorial effort — looks fantastic, courtesy of cinematographer Chigi Kanbe, with gorgeous production design throughout as Hana travels through history. Itô (Missing,Gangoose) captures the fear and trepidation experienced by teenagers, whether having to turn in homework, battle a bully, or, well, save the Earth.
“Humans aren’t looking for salvation,” a hooded figure tells Hana. She might not have asked to be in this position, but does she have a choice?
SUMMER FOR THE CITY AT LINCOLN CENTER: ONE DANCE
David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
20 Lincoln Center Plaza
July 20-22, $24-$190 (use code KCCNYOD for 20% discount)
Korean Arts Week runs July 19-22, free www.davidhkochtheater.com www.lincolncenter.org
“All on the same line, in the same shape, with the same heart, it’s a heartfelt piece that brings us together,” Seoul Metropolitan Dance Theatre artistic director and choreographer Hyejin Jung says in a promotional video for One Dance (Il-mu), making its North American premiere at the David H. Koch Theater during Korean Arts Week, part of Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City program. The four-act, seventy-minute work, which melds traditional and contemporary Korean dance in stunning re-creations, debuted in May 2022 at the Sejong Grand Theater in Seoul.
One Dance is choreographed by Jung, Sung Hoon Kim, and Jae Duk Kim, with music by Jae Duk Kim and mise-en-scène by Ku-ho Jung, incorporating dazzling costumes and such props as bamboo sticks, swords, poles, and ritual objects. “I don’t think the beauty of Korea is an intricate technique but rather a symbolism of emptiness and abundance,” Ku-ho Jung explains in the video. “It’s really important to show the symbolism of the nuances. In fact, the process of staging One Dance was to show the Korean nuances by emptying out a lot of the material and focusing on the moves.”
One Dance is divided into four sections — “Munmu”/“Mumu,” “Chunaengmu,” “Jungmu,” and “New Ilmu” — with fifty-four dancers paying homage to courtly processions, ancient martial arts traditions, and contemporary styles through movement, music, and song. Ticket prices begin at $24; you can use code KCCNYOD for a 20% discount.
Korean Arts Week runs July 19-22 and also includes a bevy of free events: the digital artwork WAVE by d’strict, a K-Lit symposium, a family-friendly showcase by KTMDC Dance Company, Musical Theatre Storytime with KPOP composer Helen Park, silent discos with BIAS NYC and DJ Peach, a guided meditation set to Korean traditional music, a screening of Bong Joon Ho’s horror favorite The Host, and concerts by Crying Nut, Say Sue Me, Yerin Baek, Dongyang Gozupa, and Gray by Silver.
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY BILLY WILDER
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
July 14 – August 3 filmforum.org
“I have ten commandments,” Billy Wilder once said. “The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.” During his more-than-half-century career, the Austria Hungary—born writer and director wrote and/or directed more than fifty films, making unforgettable works in multiple genres, some of which he essentially created himself. Wilder’s films feature well-drawn characters in familiar and not-so-familiar circumstances in plots that take unexpected twists and turns while subtly exploring society at large — and finding humor in almost any situation.
Wilder made comedies and romances, WWII dramas and biopics, courtroom classics and suspense thrillers. Film Forum is celebrating Wilder’s unique skills in the series “Written and directed by Billy Wilder,” consisting of twenty-nine of his pictures, including four that he wrote but did not direct, in addition to the 1935 French farce Fanfare d’amour, the inspiration for Some Like It Hot.
Wilder knew how to get the most of his actors, as you will see in these films, which show off the talents of Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Edward G. Robinson, Ray Milland, Danielle Darrieux, Claudette Colbert, Don Ameche, John Barrymore, Gary Cooper, Greta Garbo, William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Ginger Rogers, Charles Boyer, Olivia de Havilland, Kirk Douglas, Jean Arthur, James Cagney, Marlene Dietrich, Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, and so many others. Below is a closer look at a handful of the offerings; you really can’t go wrong with any of them, but also high on the must-see list are Stalag 17,Irma la Douce,The Seven Year Itch,The Apartment,Witness for the Prosecution, and One, Two, Three.
“A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant, and a bastard,” Wilder said. He also pointed out, “If you’re going to tell people the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.” Wilder died in Beverly Hills in 2002 at the age of ninety-five, having accumulated six Oscars, one honorary Oscar, a Kennedy Center Honor, an AFI Life Achievement Award, a National Medal of Arts, and others, always leaving them laughing.
Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck get caught up in murder and deception in Double Indemnity
DOUBLE INDEMNITY (Billy Wilder, 1944)
July 14-17, 31, August 3 filmforum.org
“Written and Directed by Billy Wilder” kicks off with that endlessly romantic noir classic, Double Indemnity. Three years after a brunette Barbara Stanwyck tried to swindle Henry Fonda in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve, a blonde Stanwyck is looking for a way out of her loveless marriage when opportunity knocks in the form of acerbic insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray). Stanwyck plays alluring, tough-talking femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson, who falls for Neff and soon convinces him that they should do away with her husband (Tom Powers). They’re both in it “straight down the line,” as she repeats throughout the film, but insurance fraud investigator Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) isn’t so sure that Mr. Dietrichson’s death was an accident.
John F. Seitz’s inventive black-and-white cinematography — watch for those Venetian blind shadows — set the standard for the genre. MacMurray, who had to be convinced by Wilder to take the part because he thought he’d be awful in the role, is sensational as Neff, oh-so-cool as he recites his cynical dialogue and lights matches with one hand. He might think he’s tough, but he’s no match for Stanwyck, who rules the roost. Both Stanwyck and MacMurray would go on to successful careers in television in the 1960s, he in My Three Sons, she in The Big Valley. Directed by Wilder from a script he wrote with Raymond Chandler based on a pulp novel by James Cain, with music by Miklós Rózsa — how’s that for a pedigree? — Double Indemnity was nominated for seven Oscars and won none.
Would-be writer Don Birnam (Ray Milland) battles his demons in Billy Wilder classic The Lost Weekend
THE LOST WEEKEND (Billy Wilder, 1945)
July 14-15, 18, 31, August 1 filmforum.org
Ray Milland won an Oscar as Best Actor for his unforgettable portrayal of Don Birnam in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, starring as a would-be writer who can see life only through the bottom of a bottle. Having just gotten sober, he is off to spend the weekend with his brother (Phillip Terry), but Don is able to slip away from his girlfriend, Helen (Jane Wyman), and his sibling and hang out mostly with Nat the bartender (Howard Da Silva) and plenty of inner demons. One of the misunderstood claims to fame of Wilder’s classic drama is that it was shot in P. J. Clarke’s on Third Ave.; although the bar in the film was based on Clarke’s, the set was re-created in Hollywood, which doesn’t take anything away from this heartbreaking tale that will not have you running to the nearest watering hole after you see it. The Lost Weekend won three other Academy Awards — Best Screenplay (Wilder and Charles Brackett), Best Director (Wilder), and Best Picture.
Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas get involved in a battle of wits and ideologies in Ernst Lubitsch’s classic romantic comedy Ninotchka
NINOTCHKA (Ernst Lubitsch, 2012)
July 16-17 filmforum.org
Greta Garbo laughs — and says she doesn’t want to be alone — in Ernst Lubitsch’s classic pre-Cold War comedy Ninotchka, written by Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, and Walter Reisch. In her next-to-last film, Garbo is sensational as Nina Ivanovna “Ninotchka” Yakushova, a Russian envoy sent to Paris to clean up a mess left by three comrade stooges, Iranov (Sig Ruman), Buljanov (Felix Bressart), and Kopalsky (Alexander Granach). The hapless trio from the Russian Trade Board had been sent to France to sell jewelry previously owned by the Grand Duchess Swana (Ina Claire) and now in the possession of the government following the 1917 Russian Revolution. But the duchess’s lover, Count Léon d’Algout (Melvyn Douglas), gets wind of the plan and attempts to break up the deal while also introducing the three men to the many decadent pleasures of a free, capitalist society. Then in waltzes the stern, by-the-book Ninotchka, who wants to set the Russian men straight, as well as Léon. “As basic material, you may not be bad,” she tells him atop the Eiffel Tower, “but you are the unfortunate product of a doomed culture.” At first, Ninotchka speaks robotically, spouting the company line, but she loosens up considerably once Léon shows her what communism has been depriving her of, yet it’s difficult for her to turn her back on the cause, leading to numerous hysterical conversations — the razor-sharp script was written by Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch, and Billy Wilder, based on a story by Melchior Lengyel — that serve as both a battle of the sexes and social commentary on the Russian and French ways of life.
“I’ve heard of the arrogant male in capitalistic society. It is having a superior earning power that makes you that way,” Ninotchka tells Léon shortly after meeting him on a Paris street. “A Russian! I love Russians! Comrade, I’ve been fascinated by your Five-Year Plan for the last fifteen years,” Léon responds, to which Ninotchka tersely replies, “Your type will soon be extinct.” Nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Original Story, and Best Screenplay, Ninotchka is one of the most delightful romantic comedies ever made, filled with little surprises every step of the way (including a serious cameo by Bela Lugosi), serving up a blueprint that has been followed by so many films for nearly three-quarters of a century ever since.
Billy Wilder takes audiences down quite a Hollywood road in Sunset Blvd.
SUNSET BLVD. (Billy Wilder, 1950)
July 17, 22, 23, August 3 filmforum.org
“You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big,” handsome young screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) remarks to an older woman in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small,” the former star (Gloria Swanson) famously replies. It doesn’t get much bigger than Sunset Boulevard, one of the grandest Hollywood movies ever made about Hollywood. The wickedly entertaining film noir begins in a swimming pool, where Gillis is a floating corpse, seen from below. He then posthumously narrates through flashback precisely what landed him there. On the run from a couple of guys trying to repossess his car, the broke Gillis ends up at a seemingly abandoned mansion, only to find out that it is home to Desmond and her dedicated servant, Max Von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim). They initially mistake Gillis for the undertaker who is coming to perform a funeral service and burial for Desmond’s pet monkey. (You’ve got to see it to believe it.) When Desmond discovers that Gillis is in fact a screenwriter, she lures him into working with her on her script for a new version of Salome, in which she is determined to play the lead role. “I didn’t know you were planning a comeback,” Gillis says. “I hate that word,” Desmond responds. “It’s a return, a return to the millions of people who have never forgiven me for deserting the screen.” But just as Desmond was unable to make the transition from silent black-and-white films to color and sound pictures, getting Salome off the ground is not going to be as easy as she thinks. Hollywood can be a rather vicious place, after all.
Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) keeps a close hold on screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) in Sunset Blvd.
Nominated for eleven Oscars and winner of three — for the sharp writing, the detailed art/set decoration, and Franz Waxman’s score, which goes from jazzy noir to melodrama — Sunset Blvd. wonderfully bites the hand that feeds it, skewering Hollywood while making references to such real stars as Rudolph Valentino, Mabel Normand, John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, Wallace Reid, and Tyrone Power and such films as Gone with the Wind and King Kong. Actual publicity stills and movie posters abound, in Paramount offices and Desmond’s spectacularly designed home, which was once owned by J. Paul Getty and would later be used for Rebel without a Cause. Cecil B. DeMille, who directed Swanson in many silent films, plays himself in the movie, seen on set making Samson and Delilah. Desmond’s fellow bridge players are portrayed by silent stars Buster Keaton, H. B. Warner, and Anna Q. Nilsson. Meanwhile, before Swanson fired him, von Stroheim directed her in the silent film Queen Kelly, which is the movie Max shows Gillis in Desmond’s screening room. (Swanson herself would go on to make only three more feature films; she passed away in 1983 at the age of eighty-four.) John F. Seitz’s black-and-white cinematography and inventive use of camera placement, from underwater to high above the action, makes the most of Hans Dreier’s sets and Swanson’s fabulous costumes and makeup. Sunset Blvd. is the thirteenth and final collaboration between writer-director Wilder and writer-producer Charles Brackett, who together previously made The Lost Weekend and A Foreign Affair. Wilder and Holden would go on to make Stalag 17, Sabrina, and Fedora together. Finally, of course, Sunset Blvd. concludes with one of the greatest quotes in Hollywood history.
Kirk Douglas is looking for a way out in Billy Wilder masterpiece Ace in the Hole
ACE IN THE HOLE (Billy Wilder, 1951)
July 20-22 filmforum.org
Sandwiched between such hits as The Lost Weekend,Sunset Blvd.,Stalag 17, and Sabrina, Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole might just be his least-known masterpiece. A major flop upon its release in 1951, Ace in the Hole is a cynical look at Americans and their values. Chuck Tatum (a classic Kirk Douglas) is a ruthless reporter who has been fired in every major city in the nation because of his love of the bottle, his success with the ladies, and his penchant for playing hard and loose with the facts. He demands a job at a small-town paper in Albuquerque, hoping to land a story that will restore his luster and put him back in the big time. He finds his patsy in the person of Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict), a low-rent Indian artifacts hunter who gets trapped in a cave-in at the base of the Mountain of the Seven Vultures. Sharpening his fangs, Tatum makes a deal with the sheriff (Ray Teal), choosing to take the long way to rescue Minosa in order to keep the sheriff’s name in the news and the reporter’s name on the front page for a longer amount of time. Meanwhile, Minosa’s wife, Lorraine (Jan Sterling, with fabulously uneven eyebrows), who was ready to leave her husband, sees a way for her to cash in as well. The whole thing turns into a huge media circus; in fact, the studio changed the name of the film to The Big Carnival upon its release, trying for a more upbeat title.
