this week in film and television

NEW YORK ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL OPENING NIGHT: BAD GENIUS

Bad Genius

Lynn (Chutimon Cheungcharoensukying) keeps looking over her shoulder as a cheating scandal gets serious in Bad Genius

BAD GENIUS (CHALARD GAMES GONG) (Nattawut Poonpiriya, 2017)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Friday, June 30, 7:00
Festival runs June 30 – July 16
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org
www.subwaycinema.com

The sixteenth annual New York Asian Film Festival gets under way June 30 with writer-director Nattawut Poonpiriya’s big Thai hit, Bad Genius. The amazingly smart Lynn (NYAFF 2017 Screen International Rising Star Award winner Chutimon Cheungcharoensukying) switches schools for an opportunity to win a coveted scholarship and go to a better college, with the help of her father, a respected teacher (Thaneth Warakulnukroh). She quickly becomes besties with the popular Grace (Eisaya Hosuwan), who is dating snobby rich kid Pat (Teeradon Supapunpinyo). Lynn mentors Grace, who is not a very good student, and is then hired by Pat’s wealthy father (Sahajak Boonthanakit) to tutor his son to improve his low grades. Soon Grace, Pat, and several of Pat’s other friends (Vittawin Veeravidhayanant, Suwijak Mahatthanachotwanich, Narwin Rathlertkarn, Thanawat Sutat Na Ayutthaya, and Thanachart Phinyocheep) are paying substantial money to Lynn, who has devised unique ways to cheat on multiple-choice tests. As she and Bank (Chanon Santinatornkul), another smart scholarship student — whose parents (Uraiwan Puvichitsutin and Somchai Ruedikunrangsi) run a small laundry, which embarrasses him and drives him to improve his, and their, lot — compete for a prestigious Singapore scholarship, lies, betrayal, greed, and deception lead to major troubles for everyone as the crucial standardized STIC tests approach.

Bad Genius

Bank (Chanon Santinatornkul) and Lynn (Chutimon Cheungcharoensukying) face a terrifying future in Nattawut Poonpiriya’s Bad Genius

Over the last ten years, such YA books and movies as Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy and Veronica Roth’s Divergent series have turned teen angst over the SATs and college admissions into futuristic dystopian nightmares, but with Bad Genius, Poonpiriya’s second film — his debut, Countdown, was part of the 2013 NYAFF — takes a much more straightforward and honest approach to the fears kids experience when faced with taking tests that could impact the rest of their lives. In her film debut, Cheungcharoensukying reveals a subtle depth as Lynn, a brainiac who just wants to be accepted by her peers, while also insisting on excelling at everything she does (including cheating) and helping her divorced father with expenses. She knows exactly what she’s doing, understanding it is wrong, and she can’t stop, but it’s not only about the money. Aside from a few silly scenes and the occasional use of overly dramatic license, Poonpiriya mostly avoids genre clichés as the two-hour Bad Genius evolves into a genuine thriller with a fab chase scene, cleverly keeping the audience on the edge of their seats with unexpected twists and turns. It’s both a primer on how to cheat and how to deal with potentially getting caught. The opening-night selection of the NYAFF, Bad Genius is screening on June 30 at 7:00 at the Walter Reade Theater and will be followed by a Q&A with Nattawut “Baz” Poonpiriya, Chanon Santinatornkul, and Chutimon “Aokbab” Chuengcharoensukying and an after-party. The festival, which runs through July 16 at Lincoln Center and the SVA Theatre, consists of more than fifty films from China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia, including a surprise twenty-fifth anniversary screening of a 1992 classic.

SOUTHERN GOTHIC: THE BEGUILED

Clint Eastwood in The Beguiled

Clint Eastwood in The Beguiled

THE BEGUILED (Donald Siegel, 1971)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
June 26-30
Series runs June 26 – July 11
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

In conjunction with the theatrical release of Sofia Coppola’s remake of The Beguiled, which earned her the Best Director award at Cannes, BAMcinématek is hosting the sixteen-film series “Southern Gothic,” which begins with, appropriately enough, Don Siegel’s twisted 1971 original, based on Thomas P. Cullinan’s 1966 novel, A Painted Devil. On the outskirts of Mississippi, Union corporal John “McB” McBurney is seriously wounded and found in the woods by twelve-year-old Amy (Pamelyn Ferdin), who has been gathering mushrooms for dinner. The hirsute hunk is brought to Mrs. Farnsworth’s Seminary for Young Ladies to convalesce before Martha Farnsworth (Geraldine Page) turns him over to the Confederates. (The film was shot at the Ashland-Belle Helene Plantation in Louisiana.) Confined to bed until he starts getting around on crutches, McB becomes an object of romantic interest to several of the girls and women in the house, including the kindhearted Edwina (Elizabeth Hartman), who is about to become a partner in the school; the innocent Amy, who compares the wounded soldier to an injured crow; the devilishly wicked Carol (Jo Ann Harris); and Martha herself, who has been running the school and former farm by herself since the death of her beloved brother. Also intrigued by McB’s presence are young students Abigail (Melody Thomas), Lizzie (Peggy Drier), and Janie (Pattye Mattick) while Doris (Darleen Carr) doesn’t understand why they’re all helping the enemy and considers turning him in. The only one seeing the situation clearly is the slave Hallie (blues singer Mae Mercer), who discusses the concept of freedom with the corporal — who is not quite the heroic, Jesus-like figure the girls think he is — in one of the film’s most intelligent scenes. It all reaches its apex one crazy night, setting up quite a finale.

The Beguiled was the third of five movies Siegel (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Killers) made with Eastwood, after 1968’s Coogan’s Bluff and 1970’s Two Mules for Sister Sarah and before 1971’s Dirty Harry and 1979’s Escape from Alcatraz. It is both a feminist and sexist fantasy that is more than a little bit creepy; the original trailer referred to the females at Mrs. Farnsworth’s seminary as “man-eager girls.” The film also deals with patriotism and treason, incest and pedophilia, trust and lies, first love and sexual jealousy, and a sadomasochistic ideals of pleasure and pain that relates to the painting on Mrs. Farnsworth’s bedroom wall, Sandro Botticelli’s late-fifteenth-century “Lamentation over the Dead Christ.” Six-time Oscar nominee and Emmy and Grammy winner Lalo Schifrin’s score is all over the place, from Baroque and Renaissance music to twentieth-century melodrama and horror; in addition, an offscreen Eastwood himself mumbles the antiwar theme song, “The Dove She Is a Pretty Bird,” heard at the beginning and end of the film. Eastwood is at his stern best in The Beguiled, while Emmy and Oscar winner Page (Interiors, The Trip to Bountiful) is elegantly fragile and Oscar nominee Hartman (A Patch of Blue, Walking Tall) is achingly virginal. (The two women also costarred in Francis Ford Coppola’s underseen You’re a Big Boy Now.) The film, both a love story and a revenge thriller that is very possibly a likely influence on Stephen King’s Misery, constantly borders on misogyny but manages to raise the issue more than exploit it by the grisly end. It’s an extremely strange movie, one of the oddest ever made about the Civil War, and, as the title warns, absolutely beguiling. The Beguiled is screening June 26-30 at BAM; “Southern Gothic” continues through July 11 with such other films as Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou, John Huston’s Wise Blood, Andrei Konchalovsky’s Shy People, Robert Aldrich’s Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and Luis Buñuel’s The Young One.

BERTRAND TAVERNIER: MY JOURNEY THROUGH FRENCH CINEMA

Bertrand Tavernier looks back at his life and career by analyzing French cinema in thrilling documentary

Bertrand Tavernier looks back at his life and career by analyzing French cinema in unique ways in thrilling documentary

MY JOURNEY THROUGH FRENCH CINEMA (Bertrand Tavernier, 2016)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, June 23
212-255-2243
cohenmedia.net
quadcinema.com

Auteur and film historian Bertrand Tavernier takes viewers on a fascinating, deeply personal trip into the world of early French movies in the extraordinary My Journey through French Cinema. Inspired by Martin Scorsese’s 1995 A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies and 1999 My Voyage to Italy, the French auteur recounts how he believes that going to the theater as a child helped him survive a serious illness and led to a lifelong love of cinema; he even battled and beat cancer while making this documentary. In more than three hours that fly by surprisingly quickly, Tavernier examines dozens and dozens of French films, not looking at them as a historian or a fan but as a fellow director; in addition, the film unfolds neither chronologically nor thematically but in a delightfully charming stream of consciousness as Tavernier shares personal anecdotes that lead him from film to film and director to director. He begins by describing the first movie that had a major impact on him, Jacques Becker’s Dernier Atout, and moves on to his days working with Volker Schlöndorff for Jean-Pierre Melville, who thought he was a terrible assistant and turned him into a publicist; Tavernier also wrote for Les Cahiers du cinema and Positif. Through voiceover and onscreen appearances, Tavernier spends a lot of time discussing Melville (Bob le flambeur, Le Doulos) and Claude Sautet (Classe tous risques), whom he considers his cinematic godfathers; Becker (Casque d’Or, Le Trou); Jean Renoir (A Day in the Country, Rules of the Game); Marcel Carné (Le jour se lève, Hôtel du Nord); Jean-Luc Godard (Contempt, Pierrot le fou); composers Maurice Jaubert (Port of Shadows, L’Atalante) and Joseph Kosma (Le Chat, House on the Waterfront); and actors Jean Gabin (La Bȇte Humaine, Grand Illusion) and Eddie Constantine (Alphaville, Cet homme est dangereux). Also garnering significant mention are Jean Sacha, Gilles Grangier, Henri Decoin, Jean Delannoy, Edmond T. Gréville, Lino Ventura, and Pierre Schoendoerffer.

What makes My Journey through French Cinema so special is that Tavernier, who has made such films as The Clockmaker, Coup de Torchon, and ’Round Midnight, approaches his subjects from the point of view of a director, examining camera angles, sound, script writing, music, dialogue, and performance; it’s not so much a crash course as a master class that only Tavernier could give, adding insightful stories of his vast experience in the industry, alongside archival footage of some of the people he is discussing. And oh, the clips; there are hundreds of scenes of well-known and under-the-radar films that fans are going to want to revisit or see for the first time after watching Tavernier wax eloquent about their subtle joys. (Be aware: He sometimes goes right to the ending.) “I would like this film to be an expression of gratitude to all those filmmakers, screenwriters, actors, and musicians who have erupted into my life,” Tavernier notes in a statement. “Memory keeps us warm: This film is a piece of glowing charcoal for a winter night.” In the documentary itself, he pays tribute to “filmmakers who believe that movies could change things a bit, who believed, as Renoir told me one day, you have to make a film thinking that you’ll change the course of history. But you also must be humble enough to think, if you touch two people, you’ve done something extraordinary.” In My Journey through French Cinema, Tavernier has done something extraordinary indeed here, becoming “what every French creator should be: a French ambassador to France,” as his mentor Melville once said to him of Jean Cocteau. And like Scorsese, Tavernier is a film preservationist; because of the documentary, many of these old works are now being restored. My Journey opens June 23 at the Quad, with Tavernier participating in a Q&A after the 4:45 show on June 24. The Quad is also presenting “Tavernier Treasures,” four films selected by Tavernier by other directors, as well as “Film & Nothing But: Bertrand Tavernier,” a retrospective that continues through June 29. Tavernier will be at many of the screenings to talk about the works. (And there’s more to come, as Tavernier is making an eight-hour series for French television that continues his cinematic adventure.)

NOBODY SPEAK: TRIALS OF THE FREE PRESS

Hulk Hogan

Documentary goes behind the scenes of Hulk Hogan case, which turns out to be about a lot more than a sex tape

NOBODY SPEAK: TRIALS OF THE FREE PRESS (Brian Knappenberger, 2017)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, June 23
www.ifccenter.com
www.netflix.com

After closing the 2017 Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Brian Knappenberger’s Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press is getting a theatrical run at IFC beginning June 23, the same day the Netflix original begins streaming on the channel. The film is a deeply troubling look into the growing battle between billionaires and the fourth estate, between a person’s right to privacy and freedom of the press. Knappenberger begins by exploring the landmark Bollea v. Gawker case, in which Hulk Hogan, whose real name is Terry Gene Bollea, sued online media outlet Gawker for posting nine seconds of a tape depicting Bollea having sex with Heather Clem, the wife of his then-best friend, Todd Alan Clem, better known as radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge. The jury awarded Bollea $140 million, bankrupting Gawker, but Knappenberger reveals that the case was about a lot more than invasion of privacy — it was really about control of the media by the extremely wealthy. And Hogan/Bollea is not that wealthy. “Don’t be fooled into thinking that just because this case is so sleazy and rests on sex that it’s not important; this is one of the most important First Amendment cases in American history,” says Leslie Savan, who blogs on politics and the media for The Nation. “We’re talking about the very notion of truth,” she later adds. Knappenberger speaks extensively with Gawker cofounder Nick Denton, who defends what the company did as well as its overall journalistic ethics, covering stories that others wouldn’t; Knappenberger also meets with Gawker cofounder Elizabeth Spiers; former editor in chief A. J. Daulerio, who posted the Hogan story and sees himself as a patsy; former deputy editor James Wright; Hogan lawyers David Houston and Charles Harder; and former Gawker executive editor John Cook, who is boldly outspoken about Gawker’s purpose. “I wanted to write true things about bad people, and that’s what Gawker gave us all the freedom to do,” he says. First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams notes, “The reason to save Gawker was not because Gawker is worth saving. The reason to save it is that we don’t pick and choose what sort of publications are permissible, because once we do, it empowers the government to limit speech in a way that ought to be impermissible.” Among the other talking heads offering compelling insight are Politico media writer Peter Sterne, associate professor of journalism Jay Rosen, Buzzfeed business reporter Will Alden, NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik, and former New York Times columnist David Carr. The story takes a strange turn when it is discovered that there were potential improprieties involving Judge Pamela Campbell and that the lawsuit is being funded by billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who was outed by Gawker in 2007 and is now exacting a dangerous kind of revenge.

Nick Denton and A. J. Daulerio

Nick Denton and A. J. Daulerio are under fire in explosive Bollea v. Gawker case, which is detailed in Nobody Speak documentary

Knappenberger then shifts to Las Vegas, where the well-respected Las Vegas Review-Journal is sold to a mystery buyer. A stalwart group of reporters, including Mike Hengel, Jennifer Robison, and John L. Smith, risk their careers in discovering that it’s right-wing casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who is unhappy about negative articles written about him. “Some stories are worth losing your job over,” Robison says. The lengths to which Thiel, who later spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention and served on Donald Trump’s transition team, and Adelson, a major player in the political arena, go in order to try to silence the press are absolutely terrifying. Knappenberger (The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz, We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists) concludes with a look at Trump himself, who regularly attacks the media, calling them liars that spread fake news, threatening violence against them, and promising that “we’re going to open up libel laws and we’re going to have people sue you like you’ve never got sued before.” Although some of the narrative shifts are a bit clumsy and the film gets too high and mighty at the end, Knappenberger’s point is clear, that the media is under attack from a small group of thin-skinned billionaires who believe they are more powerful than the truth and have made the press their avowed enemy.

FILM & NOTHING BUT — BERTRAND TAVERNIER: THE PRINCESS OF MONTPENSIER

Marie de Mézières (Mélanie Thierry)

Mélanie Thierry stars as the alluring Marie de Mézières in sweeping romantic epic by Bertrand Tavernier

THE PRINCESS OF MONTPENSIER (Bertrand Tavernier, 2010)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Tuesday, June 27, 4:00
Series runs June 20-29
quadcinema.com
www.ifcfilms.com

In Bertrand Tavernier’s sweeping romantic epic, young and beautiful Marie de Mézières (Mélanie Thierry) has a big problem: It seems that every man she meets falls in love with her. Already in a passionate relationship with the heroic Henri de Guise (Gaspard Ulliel), a leader of the Catholics against the Protestant Huguenots in the French Wars of Religion of the 1560s, Marie is suddenly part of a shady deal between her father (Philippe Magnan) and the Duke de Montpensier (Michel Vuillermoz), marrying her off to the rather uninspiring though steadfast Prince Philippe de Montpensier (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet), who warms to his bride much quicker than she to him. Returning to the battlefield, Philippe asks his mentor, the older and wiser Count de Chabannes (Lambert Wilson), to teach Marie in the ways of the court to prepare her for meeting Catherine de Medici, but even such a solid, moralistic man as Chabannes — who deserted from the army after killing a peasant family, supposedly in the name of his lord and saviour — cannot prevent himself from succumbing to the many charms of his unaware charge. And when she meets the wild and unpredictable Duke d’Anjou (Raphaël Personnaz), the king’s brother is smitten as well. But through it all, Marie, a modern woman who wants to learn to write and make her own choices, remains fiercely drawn to Henri, a forbidden love that threatens dire consequences. Based on the 1662 novella by Madame de La Fayette, The Princess of Montpensier is a thrilling tale of love and war, of honor and betrayal.

Master filmmaker Tavernier (The Clockmaker of Saint-Paul, A Sunday in the Country), who cowrote the daring script with longtime collaborator Jean Cosmos and François-Oliver Rousseau, focuses on character and story rather than pomp and circumstance, creating an intoxicating intimacy often missing from the genre. Thierry is alluring as Marie, who can be seen as an early feminist in a time when women were little more than possessions. Even at two hours and twenty minutes, the film flies by; you’ll feel sorry you can’t spend more time with the many wonderfully drawn characters who help make The Princess of Montpensier such a marvelous treat. The film is screening at the Quad on June 27 at 4:00 in the series “Film & Nothing But: Bertrand Tavernier,” consisting of seventeen Tavernier films being shown in conjunction with the theatrical release of his new documentary, My Journey through French Cinema, which opens June 23 at the Quad; Tavernier will introduce or participate in Q&As at nine screenings, including A Week’s Vacation, Death Watch, and Safe Conduct. In addition, he’ll be at all four films that make up “Tavernier Treasures,” a quartet of his favorites: Marcel Carné’s Hôtel du Nord, Pierre Schoendoerffer’s The 317th Platoon, Jacques Becker’s It Happened at the Inn, and Henri Decoin’s The Truth of Our Marriage..

IN TRANSIT

Albert Maysles final film takes viewers on a journey across the heart and soul of America

Albert Maysles’s final film takes viewers on a journey across the heart and soul of America

IN TRANSIT (Albert Maysles, Lynn True, Nelson Walker, David Usui, and Ben Wu, 2015)
Metrograph, 7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts., 212-660-0312
Maysles Documentary Center, 343 Lenox Ave./Malcolm X Blvd., between 127th & 128th Sts., 212-537-6843
Opens Friday, June 23
www.maysles.org

“There’s something about a train that’s magic,” Richie Havens sang in a series of 1980s Amtrak commercials. Master documentarian Albert Maysles goes in search of that magic in his final film, In Transit. In 2014-15, Maysles, who passed away in 2015 at the age of eighty-eight, and his team took several trips on Amtrak’s Empire Builder, described as “America’s busiest long-distance train route,” which carries passengers between Chicago and the Pacific Northwest over the course of three days, following much of the route that explorers Lewis and Clark mapped out in the early nineteenth century. Maysles, Nelson Walker, David Usui, and Ben Wu focus handheld cameras on men, women, and children of all ages and ethnicities as they talk with other passengers about transitions they’re going through. One pregnant woman is past her due date, hoping she makes it to Minnesota to give birth with members of her family. She makes friends with a man who is photographing everywhere they go. A young man has suddenly quit his job to try to make a new life with his high school sweetheart in Indiana. A Native American talks about how he is riding the train to think about his relationship with his partner, which is on the ropes. An abused woman is returning from seeing her daughter for the first time in nearly half a century. Sometimes they’re speaking directly with Maysles, and other times the filmmakers are like flies on the wall, picking up snippets of conversations as the passengers share their hopes and dreams, along with their struggles and fears, in true cinéma vérité fashion. Everyone is open and free, including the conductors. “This is the only job I’ve ever wanted,” one of the trainmen explains.

Early on, a young woman says, “My friend CJ is always like, ‘How do you do it? How do you go to these places? How do you do these things? How do you just pack up and go? Aren’t you scared?’ Like, yeah, of course you’re scared. And it’s like at the same time you know what’s scarier? Staying exactly where you were, doing exactly what you always have done.” To which a young man adds, “Sometimes you just gotta do it. You know, what have you really to lose?” The Empire Builder has a viewing carriage, a car with a row of comfortable seats that face the window, offering passengers beautiful views of an America that not everyone sees, an America in which they are trying to start anew. It’s a calm, slow-moving film that doesn’t identify anyone by name, seventy-six minutes that share a narrow but candid look at who we are, and where we’re going. “I don’t really want to get off the train,” a single mother of four admits. It might not be one of Maysles’s best — his legacy consists of such seminal works as Salesman, Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens, and What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A., made with his brother, David — but In Transit is a fitting end to his journey. “I wanted to make a film about trains, but really about the unity of humankind,” he said shortly before his death. In Transit opens June 23 at Metrograph on the Lower East Side and the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem; the 7:00 Metrograph screening on June 23 will be introduced by True and will be followed by a Q&A with True, Usui, and casting director Martha Wollner, while MDC will host Q&As with True and supervising producer Erika Dilday at the 7:00 show on June 24, with True at the 5:00 show on June 25 and the 7:30 show on June 27, and with True and Walker at the 7:30 show on June 29, with more to be announced.