this week in film and television

FLEET WEEK 2017

fleet week

Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum and other locations in all five boroughs
Pier 86, 12th Ave. & 46th St.
May 24–29, pier activities free unless otherwise noted
www.intrepidmuseum.org/fleetweek
militarynews.com/app/fleetweeknewyork

The U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard will be pouring into New York City for Fleet Week, which takes place May 24-29 at the Intrepid and other locations. The annual celebration, which began in 1982, leads into Memorial Day weekend, reminding everyone that the holiday is not just about barbecues and beaches. Below are only some of the highlights; all pier events are free and open to the public. Admission to the museum is $17-$33 but free for all U.S. military and veterans.

Wednesday, May 24
Parade of Ships, New York Harbor, 8:15 am – 1:00 pm

Fort Wadsworth Fleet Week and National Park Centennial Celebration, Fort Wadsworth Overlook, Staten Island, 9:00 – 11:30 am

U.S. Navy Divers, New York Aquarium, 10:00 am – 3:00 pm

Thursday, May 25
U.S. Coast Guard Silent Drill Team Performance, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 11:00 am

U.S. Coast Guard Silent Drill Team Performance, 9/11 Memorial Plaza, 1:00

Thursday, May 25
and
Friday, May 26
Public Tours of Visiting Ship Research Vessel Neil Armstrong, end of pier 86, 10:00 am – 12:30 pm

Thursday, May 25
Friday, May 26
and
Saturday, May 27
U.S. Navy Dive Tank in Times Square, plaza between 43rd & 44th Sts., 10:00 am – 5:00 pm

Thursday, May 25
through
Monday, May 29
General Public Ship Tours, Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, Homeport Pier in Staten Island, Pier 92 in Manhattan, 8:00 am – 5:00 pm

Friday, May 26
Movie on the Flight Deck: Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986), introduced by former NASA astronaut and T-38 pilot Gregory C. Johnson, 7:00

Navy Band Concert, with Navy Band Northeast Rhode Island Sound, Military Island, Times Square, 8:00

Friday, May 26
through
Monday, May 29
Giant Leaps Planetarium Show, Intrepid, Hangar 3, Rotunda, 12:15 – 3:15

Saturday, May 27
Marine Day, with a formation run, military static displays, demonstrations, and a performance by the USMC Battle Color Detachment, 8:00 am – 4:00 pm

Broadway Showcase: Cats, Kinky Boots, School of Rock, Ernest Shackleton Loves Me, The Imbible: A Spirited History of Drinking, and Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, emceed by The Play That Goes Wrong, Pier 86, Main Stage, 12 noon

U.S. Coast Guard Search & Rescue Demo, Homeport Pier, Staten Island, 12 noon

CAMMO Voices of Service, Pier 86, Main Stage, 1:30 & 4:30

American Military Spouses Choir, Pier 86, Main Stage, 3:30 & 5:00

Navy Band Concert, with Navy Band Northeast Rhode Island Sound, Military Island, Times Square, 6:00

Battle of the Big Bands, with Harlem Renaissance Orchestra, Glenn Crytzer Orchestra with guest vocalist Hannah Gill, Gunhild Carling with the Swingadelic Big Band, Jason Prover and the Sneak Thievery Orchestra, swing dancing lessons, the Bathtub Ginnys, the Intrepid Swing Dance Brigade, contests, MC Dandy Wellington, DJ VaVa Voom and Odysseus Bailer, Flight Deck, $55-$95, 7:00 pm – 1:00 am

U.S. Marine Corps Battle Color Detachment Performance, Father Duffy Square, Times Square, 8:00

Fleet Week will feature celebrations, commemorations, and memorials May 24-30 in all five boroughs (photo courtesy Fleet Week New York)

Saturday, May 27
and
Sunday, May 28
Activities, displays, demonstrations, tours, and more, including “Dive into Density,” U.S. Coast Guard Silent Drill Team, SeaPerch Pool Demonstrations, antique military vehicles, “Signal Flags,” CEC/Seabee Historical Foundation’s STEM activity, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers North Atlantic Division, “Catch a Cable,” 10:00 am – 6:00 pm

Saturday, May 27
Sunday, May 28
and
Monday, May 29
Explosive Ordnance Disposal Navy Divers, New York Aquarium, Coney Island, $11.95 – $14.95

Meet the Author: Julia Maki, My Mom Hunts Submarines, Hangar 2, Stage, 11:00 am, 12 noon, 1:00

Sunday, May 28
Performance by Tap Life, Pier 86, Main Stage, 12:30

Performance by America’s Sweethearts, Pier 86, Main Stage, 1:00 & 3:00

Performance by Deployed: A New Musical, Pier 86, Main Stage, 1:30 & 4:30

Performance by the 78th Army Band, Pier 86, Main Stage, 2:00

Performance by Exit 12 Dance Company, Pier 86, Main Stage, 3:30

Navy Band Concert, with Navy Band Northeast Rhode Island Sound, Military Island, Times Square, 4:00

Theater of War, with Zach Grenier, Kathryn Erbe, and Reg E. Cathey, Allison & Howard Lutnick Theater, free with RSVP, 7:00

Monday, May 29
Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Day Observance, commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Midway, Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, Riverside Dr. & 89th St., 10:00 am

Activities, displays, demonstrations, tours, and more, including Minus 5 Ice Sculpting Experience, CEC/Seabee Historical Foundation’s STEM activity, FDNY Fire Safety Experience, Dina Parise Racing 3,000HP Fallen Heroes Cadillac and Porta Tree display, Veterans Vision Project and Arizona State University, U.S. Air Force Auxiliary, Veteran Artist Program, Hudson Valley Paws for a Cause, Intrepid former crew members, “Dive into Density,” SeaPerch Pool Demonstrations, “Signal Flags,” “Catch a Cable,” “What Floats Your Boat?,” Pier 86, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm

Memorial Day Ceremony, Pier 86, 11:00 am

Search & Rescue Demonstration by the U.S. Coast Guard, end of Pier 86, 2:00

Bubble Garden by the Gazillion Bubble Show, Pier 86, 2:00 – 6:00

AFTERIMAGE

Władysław Strzemiński (Bogusław Linda) looks out on a changing Poland in Andrzej Wajda’s film film, Afterimage

AFTERIMAGE (POWIDOKI) (Andrzej Wajda, 2016)
Lincoln Plaza Cinema
1886 Broadway at 63rd St.
Opens Friday, May 19
212-757-2280
www.lincolnplazacinema.com
www.filmmovement.com

In his final film, Polish master Andrzej Wajda makes a grand statement about the importance of art and its place in society. Afterimage, which was the opening-night selection of the thirteenth New York Polish Film Festival earlier this month, is based on a true story while also serving as a stern warning. Bogusław Linda, who has previously appeared in Wajda’s Man of Iron and Danton, gives a towering performance as real-life Polish avant-garde artist Władysław Strzemiński, a one-armed, one-legged painter considered one of the greatest Polish artists and theoreticians of the twentieth century but whose legacy was destroyed during the rise of Stalinism and social realism. The film begins with a bright, gleeful scene in which Professor Strzemiński and his students roll around a lush green field, smiling and laughing and loving life. Hanna (Zofia Wichłacz) arrives, wanting to study with the professor as well. “The image has to be what you absorb from this,” he tells her, pointing at the beautiful landscape while his students listen with rapt attention. “When we gaze at an object, we get its reflection in our eye. When we stop looking at it and move our gaze elsewhere, an afterimage of the object remains in the eye — a trace of the object with the same shape but the opposite color. An afterimage. Afterimages are the colors, the inside of the eye which looks at an object. Because a person really only sees what he is aware of.” He then gazes out with a big grin and closes his eyes — and Wajda cuts to him in his apartment in 1948, with the Polish United Workers’ Party now in charge; cinematographer Paweł Edelman switches to a very different color scheme, primarily dank grays save for the pervasive red of the Communist party. Virtually day by day, Strzemiński has his ability to make art and to teach stripped away a little at a time as the party enforces a strict code of what is permitted and what is not under its regime. “The purpose of art is to improve its truth on reality,” Strzemiński explains, and he has to face a series of disturbing new truths himself, especially when his young daughter, Nika (Bronislawa Zamachowska), whose mother is famous sculptor Katarzyna Kobro (Aleksandra Justa), starts falling in line with Communist ideals.

Andrzej Wajda directs Bronislawa Zamachowska on the set of Afterimage (photo © Akson Studio/Anna Włoch)

The film, written by Andrzej Mularczyk based on an idea by Wajda (The Maids of Wilko, The Promised Land), is a fitting finale for the Polish auteur, who won such prestigious prizes as the Palme d’Or, an honorary Golden Bear, and an honorary Academy Award before passing away in October at the age of ninety, following a sixty-five-year career. (In addition, four of his works were nominated for Best Foreign Language Film Oscars.) Afterimage might take place between 1948 and 1952, but it is frighteningly relevant today with so many countries around the world under dictatorships and the value of art and arts education in schools facing scrutiny even here in the United States. Much of the film has an elegiac tone, including the score, which features the music of the late Polish composer Andrzej Panufnik. Linda is brilliant as Strzemiński, who is almost always deep in thought, finding it hard to believe the lengths the party will go to in order to silence artists, including his eager students and his good friend, poet Julian Przyboś. The disheartened stares he makes while watching Nika become part of the problem instead of the solution are intensely moving. Rising Polish star Wichłacz (Warsaw 44) gives a touching performance as Hania, the new student who wants to fight the authorities and is determined to help Professor Strzemiński finish his master opus, The Theory of Vision, before everything is taken away from him. Even though the film shows Wajda at the top of his game, it might not be a stretch to suggest that the aging director identified with Strzemiński, a man who didn’t let the loss of two limbs prevent him from creating art, just as Wajda, approaching ninety at the time, didn’t let anything stop him as well; he joined up with the Polish resistance in 1942, trained to be a painter and then a filmmaker after the war, and was a major supporter of Lech Wałęsa’s Solidarity movement in the 1980s, ultimately making the film Wałęsa: Man of Hope. In the end, both Wajda and Strzemiński are inspiring figures whose works seal their legacies, from the former’s many films to the latter’s paintings and theories as well as his revolutionary Neoplastic Room, which was reconstructed in 1960 at the Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi. “Everyone sees differently,” Professor Strzemiński says in the film, which is likely to leave a long-lasting afterimage on those who watch it.

TERRY ZWIGOFF: ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL

Art School Confidential</em is part of Metrograph tribute to Terry Zwigoff

Art School Confidential is part of Metrograph tribute to Terry Zwigoff

ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL (Terry Zwigoff, 2006)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Saturday, May 20, 4:00
Series runs May 19-21
212-660-0312
metrograph.com

Director Terry Zwigoff, who has claimed to “not be interested in comics too much” and who made the fab 1995 documentary Crumb, about comic book artist R. Crumb, reteamed with comics legend Daniel Clowes for the outrageously entertaining Art School Confidential, inspired by a four-page black-and-white strip Clowes wrote in a 1991 edition of his comic book Eightball. (The two previously worked together in 2001 on the outstanding Ghost World, earning them an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.) Clowes has expanded Art School Confidential into a very funny satire/murder mystery set in a New York City art school based somewhat on Pratt in Brooklyn (though the film was shot in Southern California). Max Minghella (The Social Network, The Handmaid’s Tale) stars as Jerome Platz, an art student from the suburbs who dreams of becoming the next Picasso. Used to being beat up by bullies, he is desperately looking to fit in somewhere, and he might just find his place in Strathmore art school, along with Beat Girl, Kiss-Ass, Army Jacket, Vegan, Filthy-Haired Girl, Preppy Girl, Nympho, and other stereotypes, as well as the art teacher claiming to be preparing for his own exhibition (John Malkovich, also one of the film’s producers). Jerome is befriended by Bardo (Joel David Moore), a disillusioned student who can’t figure out yet which stereotype Jerome is. Bardo introduces Jerome to Jimmy (Jim Broadbent), a drunken, failed artist who represents many a Strathmore student’s future. Jerome falls hard for Audrey (Sophia Myles), a part-time model who is also being courted by the ridiculously straitlaced and seemingly talentless, though celebrated, Jonah (Matt Keeslar). And one of Jerome’s roommates, the hyperactive Vince (Ethan Suplee), is making a movie about the Strathmore Strangler, who has claimed several victims and is still on the loose. Art School Confidential gets just about everything right (save for two brief appearances of the boom mic), turning clichés inside out in hysterical ways. You don’t have to be a comic-book fan geek to love this film, which is screening May 20 at 4:00 as part of Metrograph’s weekend tribute to Zwigoff, who will be on hand to discuss the work. The series also includes Ghost World, Louie Bluie, Crumb, and the New York premiere of the director’s cut of Bad Santa, with Zwigoff at Metrograph for all screenings.

BORDER CROSSINGS: BABEL

Richard (Brad Pitt) gets some bad news in Babel

Richard (Brad Pitt) gets some bad news in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel

WEEKEND CLASSICS: BABEL (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2006)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Nay 19-21, 11:00 am
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

Fearing that the people of the world, who all spoke the same language, were capable of anything after building a tower that reached to the heavens, the Old Testament God confused their languages and scattered them all over the earth. The inability of people to communicate with one another is at the center of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s fascinating, compelling Babel. The plot follows three stories that slowly intertwine. On vacation in Morocco, Susan (Cate Blanchett) is the victim of a random gunshot fired by a small boy (Boubker Ait El Caid), sending her husband, Richard (Brad Pitt), into a frenzy to try to save her life. Meanwhile, their housekeeper, Amelia (Adriana Barraza), who is looking after their children, has to decide what to do with them on the day of her son’s wedding in Mexico, turning to her crazy nephew Santiago (Gael García Bernal) for help. And in Tokyo, Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) is a deaf-mute teenager who desperately wants to fall in love, but all the boys she meets — and her father (the great Kôji Yakusho, from The Eel, Cure, and Shall We Dance?) — don’t take the time to listen to and understand her. Despite a couple of minor wrong turns, Iñárritu recovers to make Babel a whirlwind of a movie, laying bear the tragic consequences that can occur when people refuse to simply communicate, even in the most basic of ways.

The film, the finale in the unofficial Death Trilogy written by Guillermo Arriaga (preceded by Amores Perros and 21 Grams), received seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay (Guillermo Arriaga), and Best Supporting Actress (both Barraza and Kikuchi). It was part of the triple play of fabulous films by Mexican directors in 2006, along with Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (nominated for six Oscars, including Best Foreign Language Film) and Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (three Oscar nominations, including Best Adapted Screenplay), all three of whom are among the world’s best filmmakers more than ten years later; Iñárritu’s films have earned three Best Picture nominations and two Best Foreign Language nods (Amores Perros, Biutiful), winning for Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance); he has been named Best Director twice, for Birdman and The Revenant. A 35mm print of Babel is screening May 19-21 at eleven o’clock in the morning in the IFC Center series “Weekend Classics: Border Crossings,” which continues Friday, Saturday, and Sunday mornings through July 2 with such other films as John Sayles’s Lone Star, the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, and Gregory Nava’s El Norte.

THE SEVENTH ART STAND: THIS IS NOT A FILM

Even house arrest and potential imprisonment cannot stop Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi from telling cinematic stories

THIS IS NOT A FILM (IN FILM NIST) (Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, 2011)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater
144 West 65th St. between Eighth & Amsterdam Aves.
Thursday, May 18, free, 7:30
212-875-5050
www.seventhartstand.com
www.filmlinc.org

“You call this a film?” Jafar Panahi asks rhetorically about halfway through the revealing documentary This Is Not a Film. After several arrests beginning in July 2009 for supporting the opposition party, the highly influential and respected Iranian filmmaker (Crimson Gold, Offside) was convicted in December 2010 for “assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic.” Although facing a six-year prison sentence and twenty-year ban on making or writing any kind of movie, Panahi is a born storyteller, so he can’t stop himself, no matter the risks. Under house arrest, Panahi has his friend, fellow director Mojtaba Mirtahmasb (Lady of the Roses), film him with a handheld DV camera over ten days as Panahi plans out his next movie, speaks with his lawyer, lets his pet iguana climb over him, and is asked to watch a neighbor’s dog, taking viewers “behind the scenes of Iranian filmmakers not making films.” Panahi even pulls out his iPhone to take additional video, photographing New Year’s fireworks that sound suspiciously like a military attack. Panahi is calm throughout, never panicking (although he clearly does not want to take care of the barking dog) and not complaining about his situation, which becomes especially poignant as he watches news reports on the earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan.

“But you can’t make a film now anyhow, can you?” Mirtahmasb — who will later be arrested and imprisoned as well — asks at one point. “So what I can’t make a film?” Panahi responds. “That means I ask you to take a film of me? Do you think it will turn into some major work of art?” This Is Not a Film, which was smuggled out of Iran in a USB drive hidden in a birthday cake so it could be shown at Cannes, is indeed a major work of art, an important document of government repression of free speech as well as a fascinating examination of one man’s intense dedication to his art and the creative process. Shortlisted for the Best Documentary Academy Award, This Is Not a Film is screening for free on May 18 at 7:30, followed by a talk, in the amphitheater at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center as part of the Seventh Art Stand, an initiative that refers to itself as “an act of cinematic solidarity against Islamophobia.” The Seventh Art Stand, which shows films in more than four dozen theaters, universities, and community centers across the United States to promote discussion about political issues involving Muslims, will also be presenting films May 11-15 from Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Yemen at Anthology Film Archives.

THE WEDDING PLAN

Michal (Noa Koler) is determined to get married even if she doesn’t have a fiancee in The Wedding Plan

THE WEDDING PLAN (Rama Burshtein, 2016)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, May 12
www.theweddingplanmovie.com
www.quadcinema.com

A month before her wedding, Michal (Noa Koler) finds out that her fiance, Gidi (Erez Drigues), doesn’t actually love her. Determined to not become an old maid, the thirty-two-year-old animal handler decides that she is going to go through with the ceremony anyway, that love — and the right man — are still out there waiting for her. “I believe God will help me find a groom by the end of Hanukkah,” she tells wedding planner Shimi (Amos Tamam), who is not so sure she is making the right decision. She then goes on a series of ever-more-silly dates with Orthodox men as her wedding day approaches, with no legitimate suitor in sight as her friends and family wonder about her sanity. And then she meets singer Yoss (Oz Zehavi), but is he Mr. Right? By then, you might not care. Written and directed by New York City native Rama Burshtein (Fill the Void, Venice 70: Future Reloaded), The Wedding Plan, which is called Through the Wall in Hebrew, is a Lifetime-like romantic comedy, trying too hard to be charming and funny, resulting in flat scenes that are predictable and trite. Michal’s wedding day is scheduled for the eighth day of Hanukkah, which holds special meaning at the end of the Festival of Lights, a time for rejuvenation; The Wedding Plan could use some rejuvenating of its own.

STEFAN ZWEIG: FAREWELL TO EUROPE

Josef Hader gives a powerful performance as exiled Austrian writer Stefan Zweig in moving biopic by Maria Schrader

STEFAN ZWEIG: FAREWELL TO EUROPE (VOR DER MORGENRÖTE) (Maria Schrader, 2016)
Lincoln Plaza Cinema
1886 Broadway at 63rd St.
Opens Friday, May 12
212-757-2280
www.firstrunfeatures.com
www.lincolnplazacinema.com

Writer, actor, and former cabaret star Josef Hader gives a deeply intelligent, intensely gentle and thoughtful performance as Austrian writer Stefan Zweig in Maria Schrader’s moving biopic, Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe, opening May 12 at Lincoln Plaza. The episodic film follows the exiled Jewish writer as he and his second wife, Lotte (Aenne Schwarz), try to find a new home as Fascism takes hold across Europe. He is a man without a country, and it profoundly troubles him; he grows more and more brittle over the course of a prologue, four chapters, and an epilogue that follows him from Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires to Bahia, New York, and Petrópolis between 1936 and 1942. But none of them is his beloved Austria. “Apart from the personal joys your country has given me, apart from its beauty, its daring architecture . . . there is an even more powerful impression that I would like to share with you,” he tells Brazilian foreign minister José Carlos de MacedoSoares (Virgílio Castelo) and an adoring crowd gathered around a gorgeously designed long table for a celebration in his honor at the Jockey Club in Rio. “Every nation, in every generation — and therefore ours too — must find an answer to the most simple and vital question of all: How do we achieve a peaceful coexistence in today’s world despite all our differences in race, class, and religion? And it seems to me that Brazil has found an answer, even though not only its vegetation but also its population are more diverse in color than in Europe. Since my arrival in the Bay of Rio, it has seemed to me like a vision of the future,” he concludes. At the XIV International P.E.N. Congress in Buenos Aires, he is interviewed by reporters who almost demand that he take a public position on Adolf Hitler and events in Germany and Austria, but he refuses to speak ill of his native land. “Where is the line between literature and politics?” his rival, Emil Ludwig, asks from the podium, insisting it is the writer’s responsibility to cry out against injustice. When Belgian author Louis Piérard (Vincent Nemeth) then reads a list of names of banned writers, including Zweig’s, Zweig buries his face in his hands, refusing to claim a place as a martyr for the cause. (However, the newspapers claimed he was crying. “What a disgusting vanity fair,” he wrote to his first wife, portrayed in the film by Barbara Sukowa.)

Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe features beautiful compositions that are like paintings

Zweig demonstrates remarkable patience as he travels from place to place, constantly hounded by fans, journalists, and local dignitaries. He meets with various publishers, determined to keep on writing — he’s working on Brazil, Land of the Future as well as his autobiography, The World of Yesterday — but he is being worn down by all the requests he is receiving to help people get out of Europe. An avowed pacifist, he’s also disgusted by the war and tormented that he is unable to do anything about it. In her second feature, director and cowriter (with Jan Schomburg) Schrader, who is also an award-winning actress (Aimée & Jaguar, Nobody Loves Me) and has appeared in works by Agnieszka Holland, Margarethe von Trotta, and Doris Dörrie, among others, doesn’t force any issues, letting the story unfold in soft, subtle ways, focusing on Zweig’s complicated conscience. Cinematographer Wolfgang Thaler, a documentary veteran, crafts gorgeously composed shots, often set up like paintings. And the ending is an absolute gem. Zweig wrote novellas (Amok, Letter from an Unknown Woman), novels (Beware of Pity, Confusion of Feelings), and biographies of Marie Antoinette, Balzac, Magellan, Mary Queen of Scots, and others during his storied career, but his own tale is unforgettable, and one that strongly resonates today in an unsettled, violent world that would still so disappoint him.