Who: Ethan Nichtern, Dani Shapiro
What: Book release party for The Dharma of the Princess Bride: What the Coolest Fairy Tale of Our Time Can Teach us about Buddhism and Relationships (North Point Press, September 12, $25), featuring a talk and book signing
Where: Deepak HomeBase, mezzanine, ABC Carpet & Home, 888 Broadway at Seventeenth St.
When: Tuesday, September 19, $30 (includes copy of book), 7:00
Why: “Hello. My name is Ethan Nichtern. The Six-Fingered Man was my father’s best friend. Prepare to read.” So begins author and Buddhist teacher Ethan Nichtern’s fourth book, a unique exploration of one of the most beloved films of the 1980s, Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride. Based on William Goldman’s novel, the cult classic begins with a grandfather (Peter Falk) reading his grandson (Fred Savage) the best bedtime story ever. The romance fantasy adventure stars Cary Elwes as Westley, Robin Wright as Buttercup, Chris Sarandon as Prince Humperdinck, Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya, Christopher Guest (a close friend of Nichtern’s father since childhood) as Count Rugen, Wallace Shawn as Vizzini, and André the Giant as Fezzik, along with appearances by Billy Crystal, Carol Kane, and Peter Cook. Although the film is not a Buddhist parable, Nichtern, a husband and new father whose previous books, including The Road Home and One City, combine serious philosophy with humor and pop-culture references, examines the Buddhist nature of life, especially his own, through the lens of his favorite film. In the book’s introduction, “Fairy Tales, the Real World, and True Love,” Nichtern writes, “As for the movie’s relation to Buddhism — it may be correlation rather than causation, but here’s the truth: almost everything I know about relationships, I learned over the past thirty years of doing two things that seem to have very little to do with each other — loving The Princess Bride and practicing Buddhism.” Among the chapters in the hardcover are “Find Your Inner Fezzik: The Practice of Friendship,” “Fred Savage Is a Jerk, and I Am Fred Savage: Gratitude for Your Lineage,” and “Have Fun Storming the Castle.” Nichtern will be at ABC Carpet & Home on September 19 to launch the book, in conversation with writer Dani Shapiro (Family History, Devotion) and signing copies of The Dharma of The Princess Bride.
The setup for the 1966 Mexican Western Time to Die is just about as standard as they come. But there’s little else that is standard for Arturo Ripstein’s startling debut, a tense, atmospheric tale that has been called a neo-Western, a chile-Western, and even a kreplach Western. The screenplay was written by Colombian film journalist Gabriel Garciá Márquez — whose breakthrough magical realism novel One Hundred Years of Solitude would be published the following year — assisted by Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes (Terra Nostra, The Old Gringo), who focused on the dialogue. Ripstein was only twenty-one when he made the film and had already worked with Luis Buñuel, serving as his personal assistant on The Exterminating Angel; Ripstein’s father, Alfredo, was a major player in the Mexican film industry and produced Time to Die, known as Tiempo de Morir in Spanish, with César Santos Galindo. Shot in a lustrous black-and-white by Alex Phillips and featuring a poignant soundtrack by Carlos Jiménez Mabarak, the film is in many ways as much a noir as a Western. Jorge Martínez de Hoyos, who played Hilario in John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven, stars as Juan Sáyago, a gunfighter who returns to his remote village after eighteen years in prison. He’s older, moves slower, and now needs reading glasses, but he wants to go back to the life he led, ready to reclaim his horse, his saddle, his house, and his fiancée, Mariana Sampedro (Marga López).
“Everything stupid,” thirteen-year-old Dayveon (Devin Blackmon) says at the beginning of Amman Abbasi’s impressive debut film, Dayveon. Dayveon lives in a rural Arkansas town, where he is having a hard time overcoming the recent shooting death of his beloved older brother, Trevor (Errick Tillar). The wayward, disillusioned adolescent lives with his sister, Kim (Chasity Moore), and her gentle giant of a boyfriend, Brian (Dontrell Bright), but when Brian reaches out to him, Dayveon runs off. He is taken in by the local Bloods gang, led by Mook (Lachion Buckingham, who also served as a producer) and Country (Marquell Manning), who take him and his best friend, Brayden (Kordell “KD” Johnson), on a convenience store robbery that goes wrong, but even that does not deter Dayveon from staying on the bad track, angry at a world that has let him down. Despite knowing better, Dayveon continues hanging out with the gang, leading to a moment of truth that will determine his future.
Longtime writer and composer Alexander Janko’s directorial debut, Year by the Sea, is a Hallmark Hall of Fame-type drama that ebbs and flows with the tide, mostly treacly and predictable but led by a lovely, understated performance by Karen Allen. Allen plays real-life writer Joan Anderson, author of the film’s source book, A Year by the Sea: Thoughts of an Unfinished Woman. After her older son, Andrew (Tyler Haines), gets married and her husband, Robin Wilcox (Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cristofer), gets transferred to Wichita, Joan suddenly decides to set off on a new adventure by herself, moving to a ramshackle house in Cape Cod that is reachable only by rowboat across Narragansett Bay. She quickly gets a job working for fishmonger John Cahoon (Yannick Bisson); becomes friends with the impulsive, free-spirited Joan Erikson (Olivier Award winner Celia Imrie), who is married to famed developmental psychiatrist Erik Erikson (Alvin Epstein); and tries to help Luce (Monique Curnen), who is in an abusive relationship with Billy (Kohler McKenzie). Meanwhile, Judy (Jane Hajduk), who is married to John, is suspicious of how close Joan A. and her husband are getting. And then Joan’s agent, Liz Bloomington (S. Epatha Merkerson), arrives, trying to get her client back on track with her next book.
In 2015, Minnesota dentist Dr. Walter Palmer shot and killed the beloved Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe, setting off international outrage about trophy hunting. Director Shaul Schwarz and codirector Christina Clusiau explore the much-reviled sport, with surprising results, in Trophy. The film, beautifully photographed in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Namibia by Schwarz and Clusiau, can be extremely difficult to watch, but it is a must-see even though it includes several scenes of brutal animal shootings, including the harrowing killing of an elephant that cries out after it falls to the ground, its family nearby. But what starts out as a horrific look at hunters who pay seemingly ridiculous amounts of money to hunt the Big Five — it can cost upwards of half a million dollars to shoot a buffalo, leopard, elephant, lion, and rhino — quickly turns into a compelling study of conservation, poaching, and sustainability. “I know that a lot of people are confused how hunting and conservation go together,” Safari Club International Foundation president Joe Hosmer says. Despite a serious decline in the number of lions, elephants, and rhinos in the world since 1900 — the film points out that sixty percent of all wild animals have been lost since 1970 — some argue that hunting is necessary and that breeders are helping keep these animals from disappearing from the planet, while others claim just the opposite. “There’s a big industry in our country, not just the crocodiles — the lions, the sable, the buffalo. Everything has been bred for a purpose,” says Christo Gomes, hunting outfitter for Mabula Pro Safaris. “So, yeah, sure, some of them will be hunted. We as humans are going to eat it, we are going to use the skins; that’s the cycle of life.” Born Free USA CEO Adam Roberts explains, “You can just pick whatever animal you want from the menu that they offer you, see the price, and book the kill.” Ecologist and author Craig Packer sees both sides of the issue but can’t escape the basic idea that “canned hunting [is] not sport; it’s just killing.” South African Predator Association president Pieter Potgieter complains, “If we can’t get hunters to hunt our lions, we slaughter the lions and sell their bones.” Somewhere in the middle is South African wildlife officer Chris Moore, whose job is to find a balance between canned hunting, poaching, and animals that can destroy local families’ livelihoods. “Every single morning I look in the mirror because we’ve got to make sure that we don’t cross the bounds . . . that we can’t lose our humanity for humanity,” he says, acknowledging that some hunting is absolutely necessary to help both the animal population and the people, who are desperately poor, but adding, “We have to keep this fight going.”