this week in film and television

AUTOCRATIC FOR THE PEOPLE: AN UNPRESIDENTED SERIES OF STAR-SPANGLED SATIRES / MUSICAL MIDNITES — SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT

Stan, Cartman, and Kenny can’t wait for SOUTH PARK movie to start at IFC Center

WEEKEND CLASSICS / NITEHAWK MIDNITE SCREENINGS: SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT (Trey Parker, 1999)
IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St. March 31 – April 2, 11:00 am, 212-924-7771
Nitehawk Cinema, 136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave., March 31 and April 1, 12:20 am, 718-384-3980
www.ifccenter.com
www.nitehawkcinema.com

IFC Center’s Trump-inspired “Autocratic for the People: An Unpresidented Series of Star-Spangled Satires” concludes March 31 – April 2 with Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s inimitable South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. Since 1997, Stone and Parker have been using colorful low-tech cutouts to dine on sacred cows, lambasting celebrities, politicians, religion, sexuality, the military, education, television, movies, corporations, pop culture, and just about everything else they can think of in the animated series South Park, which follows the travails of a group of eight-year-old boys in a small town in Colorado. In 1999, Eric Cartman, Kyle Broflovski, Stan Marsh, and Kenny McCormick got to star in their own feature-length animated film, in which they lead the resistance to save Terrance & Phillip while Kyle’s mom starts a war with Canada. They’re joined by such SP regulars as Chef, Mr. Mackey, Mr. Garrison, and Wendy Testeberger and such special guests as Satan, Saddam Hussein, and the mysterious Gregory, along with guest voicers George Clooney, Eric Idle, Minnie Driver, Dave Foley, and Brent Spiner. The musical numbers, written by Parker with Henry Mancini Award winner Marc Shaiman (Hairspray, Catch Me If You Can), are a riot, including the Oscar-nominated “Blame Canada,” “Uncle Fucka,” “Kyle’s Mom’s a Bitch,” and “What Would Brian Boitano Do?” Another fave is “I’m Super,” delivered by the irrepressible Big Gay Al, who sings, “Bombs are flying / People are dying / Children are crying / Politicians are lying too // Cancer is killing / Texaco’s spilling / The whole world’s gone to hell // But how are you? / I’m super / Thanks for asking!” A 35mm print will be screened at the way-too-early hour of 11:00 am from March 31 to April 2 as part of IFC’s Weekend Classics programming. Coincidentally, the film is also being shown — at the somewhat more reasonable time of 12:20 am — on March 31 and April 1 in the Nitehawk Cinema series “Musical Midnites.” Meanwhile, Stone and Parker, who also made the fab Team America: World Police, are preparing for the twenty-first season of South Park, which continues to have its finger squarely on the pulse of what is really going on in this country.

KARL MARX CITY

Documentarian Petra Epperlein investigates her father’s mysterious suicide in KARL MARX CITY

KARL MARX CITY (Petra Epperlein & Michael Tucker, 2016)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
March 29 – April 11
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
karlmarxcity.com

In 1999, filmmaker Petra Epperlein’s fifty-seven-year-old father, Wolfgang, thoroughly washed his company car, burned all of his personal papers and photographs, and then hanged himself from a tree in the family garden in their home in Chemnitz, which was known as Karl Marx City in what was formerly communist East Germany from shortly after the end of WWII to the fall of the Berlin Wall. “Much like Karl Marx City, her father set out to erase himself,” narrator Matilda Tucker, Epperlein’s daughter, says near the beginning of the intricately plotted and gripping documentary Karl Marx City. “All that he left behind were questions.” Fifteen years later, Epperlein, who has made such sociopolitical films with her husband, Michael Tucker, as Gunner Palace, The Prisoner Or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair, and Bulletproof Salesman — the duo call themselves Pepper & Bones — returned to Chemnitz to try to answer some of those questions and find out whether her father had killed himself because, as was rumored, he had collaborated with the Stasi, the much-feared East German secret police. Between 1950 and 1990, the German Democratic Republic employed 92,000 officers and 200,000 informants to spy on their own friends, neighbors, and family, using audio and video to track their every move in order to identify supposed enemies of the state. Written, directed, edited, and produced by Epperlein and Tucker — Petra also did the audio recording and Michael served as cinematographer and sound designer — Karl Marx City features declassified surveillance tapes, broadcast intercepts, and propaganda films from the Ministry for State Security (the Stasi, or Staatssicherheit) along with striking new black-and-white footage of Epperlein’s quest as she poignantly retraces her father’s steps. She meets with such current and former employees of the Stasi Archive as Lothar Raschker, Dr. Juliane Schütterle, and Dagmar Hovestadt, Cold War and GDR expert Dr. Douglas Selvage, and Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial director Dr. Hubertus Knabe to examine the history of the Stasi and detail the effects it had on the psyche of the German people.

Poignant documentary looks into Stasi control of Karl Marx City during the Cold War era

Epperlein also speaks with former classmate Jana X and her parents, Stasi collaborators R. and S., and historian and suicide-letter expert Dr. Udo Grashoff, who examines a note and postcard that Wolfgang sent Petra just before he killed himself. “The main question of the Stasi was, Who is the enemy, and how can we prove that he is an enemy or she is an enemy?” Dr. Grashoff points out. “But you and I, we have different questions. And we find in the files empirical material that allows us to answer our different questions, and this is the value of the Stasi files for me. I’m not interested in the questions of the Stasi. You can find your own truth.” Petra’s twin brothers, Uwe and Volker, and their mother, Christa, also talk about their father, with Christa sometimes hesitant and emotional. Visiting sites from her family’s past, Epperlein travels everywhere wearing headphones and carrying a large fur-covered microphone, emphasizing how her, and our, world is still under constant surveillance. “No aspect of society escaped their gaze,” Tucker narrates early on, referring to the Stasi. “Everyone a suspect. The enemy is everyone.” Epperlein occasionally addresses the camera directly, creating boundary-shattering moments between filmmaker and audience while evoking the ability of the camera and microphone to make us all subjects, particularly in this surveillance-heavy age. In addition, Karl Marx City offers a vocabulary lesson, defining such words as Die Wende (“the change”), Ostalgie (“the feeling for home”), Erinnerungskutlur (“the culture of remembrance”), and Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“the process of coming to terms with the past”), the letters shown onscreen in torn red-and-white strips as if ripped from tabloid headlines or ransom notes. Karl Marx City is an eye-opening look at a frightening past as well as a potent reminder of what can always happen again — if it isn’t already. The film opens March 29 at Film Forum and will be preceded by Alexander Lahl and Volker Schlecht’s seven-minute animated short, Broken — The Women’s Prison at Hoheneck; Epperlein and Tucker will participate in Q&As following the 7:00 shows on March 29 and 31 and the 4:40 show on April 1.

PERCEPTION: KNIFE IN THE WATER

A young hitchhiker (Zygmunt Malanowicz) throws a kink in a couple’s sailing plans in Roman Polanski’s KNIFE IN THE WATER

CABARET CINEMA: KNIFE IN THE WATER (NÓŻ W WODZIE) (Roman Polanski, 1962)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, March 17, 9:30
212-620-5000
rubinmuseum.org

“Even discounting wind, weather, and the natural hazards of filming afloat, Knife in the Water was a devilishly difficult picture to make,” immensely talented and even more controversial Roman Polanski wrote in his 1984 autobiography, Roman by Polanski. That is likely to have been a blessing in disguise, upping the ante in the Polish filmmaker’s debut feature film, a tense three-character thriller set primarily on a sailboat, filmed on location. Upper-middle-class couple Andrzej (theater veteran Leon Niemczyk) and Krystyna (nonprofessional actor Jolanta Umecka) are on their way to their sailboat at the marina when a young hitchhiker (drama school grad Zygmunt Malanowicz) forces them to pull over on an otherwise empty road. Andrzej and the unnamed man almost immediately get involved in a physical and psychological pissing contest, with Andrzej soon inviting him to join them on their sojourn, practically daring the hitchhiker to make a move on his wife. Once on the boat, the two men continue their battle of wills, which becomes more dangerous once the young man reveals his rather threatening knife, which he handles like a pro. Lodz Film School graduate Polanski, who collaborated on the final screenplay with Jerzy Skolimowski (The Shout, Moonlighting) after initially working with Jakub Goldberg, envelops the black-and-white Knife in the Water in a highly volatile, claustrophobic energy, creating gorgeous scenes intimately photographed by cinematographer Jerzy Lipman, from Andrzej and Krystyna in their small car to all three trying to find space on the boat amid the vast sea and a changing wind. Many of the shots are highlighted by deep focus in which one character is shown in close-up in the foreground with the others in the background, alerting the viewer to various potential conflicts — sexual, economic, class- and gender-based — all underscored by Krzysztof T. Komeda’s intoxicating jazz score featuring saxophonist Bernt Rosengren.

Things got kind of crowded while making KNIFE IN THE WATER

The first Polish film to be nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and winner of the Critics’ FIPRESCI Prize at the 1962 Venice Film Festival, Knife in the Water is screening March 31 in the Rubin Museum Cabaret Cinema series “Perception,” part of the institution’s latest Brainwave programming, and will be introduced by professor of psychology and neural science Dr. Clayton Curtis. “Perception” continues Friday nights through April 28 with such other mind-bending films as The Iron Giant, The Matrix, and Ghost in the Shell; meanwhile, Brainwave takes on such topics as “Keeping Your Eye on the Ball” with Patrick Vieira and John Krakauer on April 17, “Can we trust how our brain tells time?” with Ted Chiang and Dean Buonomano on April 21, and “What Makes a True Work of Art?” with Tobias Meyer and Frank Moore on April 26.

FOCUS ON FRENCH CINEMA: A MAN AND A WOMAN (WITH CLAUDE LELOUCH IN PERSON)

Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant play characters trying to escape their pasts in Claude Lelouch’s A MAN AND A WOMAN

A MAN AND A WOMAN (UN HOMME ET UNE FEMME) (Claude Lelouch, 1966)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, March 28, $40, 7:30
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

Winner of both the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman is one of the most popular, and most unusual, romantic love stories ever put on film. FIAF is celebrating the work’s fiftieth anniversary by screening a newly restored version on March 28 as part of the Focus on French Cinema festival, followed by a Q&A with the seventy-nine-year-old Lelouch, who has also made such films as Vivre pour vivre, Les Uns et les Autres, La bonne année, and La Belle Histoire, and writer-director Philippe Azoulay. In A Man and a Woman, Oscar-nominated Anouk Aimée stars as Anne Gauthier and Jean-Louis Trintignant as Jean-Louis Duroc, two people who each has a child in a boarding school in Deauville. Anne, a former actress, and Jean-Louis, a successful racecar driver, seem to hit it off immediately, but they both have pasts that haunt them and threaten any kind of relationship. Shot in three weeks with a handheld camera by Lelouch, who earned nods for Best Director and Best Screenplay (with Pierre Uytterhoeven), A Man and a Woman is a tour de force of filmmaking, going from the modern day to the past via a series of flashbacks that at first alternate between color and black-and-white, then shift hues in curious, indeterminate ways. Much of the film takes place in cars, either as Jean-Louis races around a track or the protagonists sit in his red Mustang convertible and talk about their lives, their hopes, their fears. The heat they generate is palpable, making their reluctance to just fall madly, deeply in love that much more heart-wrenching, all set to a memorable soundtrack by Francis Lai. Lelouch, Trintignant, and Aimée revisited the story in 1986 with A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later, without the same impact and success. There will also be a special twenty-minute excerpt from Azoulay’s upcoming documentary about Lelouch, Tourner Pour Vivre (Shoot to Live); the evening will conclude with an after-party featuring wine, cocktails, and hors d’oeuvres.

I CALLED HIM MORGAN

I CALLED HIM MORGAN details the complicated relationship between jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan and his common-law wife, Helen

I CALLED HIM MORGAN (Kasper Collin, 2016)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Francesca Beale Theater
144 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Opens Friday, March 24
212-875-5601
icalledhimmorgan.com
www.filmlinc.org

On February 19, 1972, during a massive blizzard, thirty-three-year-old jazz trumpeter extraordinaire Lee Morgan was shot to death by his common-law wife, Helen, in Slugs’ Saloon on the Lower East Side. Swedish director, writer, and producer Kasper Collin takes viewers behind the scenes of the tragedy in the sensational documentary I Called Him Morgan. The Philadelphia-born Morgan was a young prodigy, studying with Clifford Brown, playing with Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra when he was eighteen, and joining Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers at twenty. Preferring the term “black classical music” to “jazz,” Morgan was caught up in a lifestyle of fast cars and drugs, ultimately hitting rock bottom until he was rescued by Helen Moore, thirteen years his elder, a farm girl from North Carolina who loved throwing parties in her adopted hometown of New York City and was a beloved fixture in the jazz community. Collin amasses an impressive roster of jazz greats who share their insights, including saxophonists Wayne Shorter, Bennie Maupin, and Billy Harper, drummers Albert “Tootie” Heath and Charli Persip, and bassists Larry Ridley, Jymie Merritt, and Paul West, along with Morgan neighbor Ron St. Clair, Helen’s son Al Harrison, and Morgan’s very close friend, Judith Johnson, many of whom are going on the record for the first time. “There was never no doubt in anybody’s mind: Lee was gonna be a star, Persip remembers. “They cared about each other. They loved each other,” Maupin says about Lee and Helen. There are also rare audio clips from an interview British writer and photographer Val Wilmer conducted with Morgan in October 1971 in Lee and Helen’s Bronx apartment. The film is anchored by a remarkable interview Helen gave writer, teacher, and jazz radio announcer Larry Reni Thomas in February 1996, a month before she died. “I will not sit here and tell you that I was so nice, because I was not,” she tells Thomas, speaking often in broken phrases. “One of the . . . will cut you. I was sharp. Yeah . . . I had to be. And I looked out for me.” It all culminates in a spellbinding, detailed account of the murder itself, told by numerous eyewitnesses with “Stagger Lee”-like swagger.

Jazz greats Lee Morgan and Wayne Shorter take a break in Kasper Collin’s I CALLED HIM MORGAN

“He knew how to tell a story,” 2016 Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame inductee Shorter says of Morgan, who released more than two dozens albums (among them The Sidewinder, Search for the New Land, and Lee-Way) in his too-brief career, primarily for Blue Note, while also appearing on records by John Coltrane, Blakey, Gillespie, Quincy Jones, and many others. With I Called Him Morgan, Collin (My Name Is Albert Ayler) proves that he knows how to tell a story too. Initially inspired by a YouTube clip of Morgan performing, Collin spent seven years putting the documentary together, combing through archives and convincing people to participate. The film unfolds like an epic jazz composition as Collin and editors Hanna Lejonqvist, Eva Hillström, and Dino Jonsäter interweave amazing archival footage, a wide range of personal and professional photographs (mostly by Wilmer and Blue Note cofounder Francis Wolff), new interviews, and poetic, atmospheric shots of snow, sunsets, cityscapes, and other outdoor scenes by Oscar-nominated cinematographer Bradford Young (Selma, Arrival). Throughout, Morgan’s glorious music is heard, front and center or in the background, including such songs as “Gaza Strip,” “Tom Cat,” “New-Ma,” “Lament for Stacy,” “The Procrastinator,” “Absolutions,” “Angela” (for Angela Davis), and “Helen’s Ritual,” tunes that are not only revelatory but also a constant reminder of the talent the world lost in 1972. “I find that the essence of creativity is the newness of things,” Morgan told Wilmer in 1971. “And the only way to keep things new is to have constant changes in environment and surroundings and people, and all that, you know. And that’s the thing that makes it so exciting about being a jazz musician.” It’s also what makes Collin’s film so exciting. I Called Him Morgan opens March 24 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Francesca Beale Theater, with Collin participating in Q&As on March 24 at 6:00 (with jazz critic Gary Giddins) and 8:15 and March 25 at 6:00 with jazz historian Ashley Kahn; it will expand to Metrograph on March 31.

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA FILM FEAST

Kurt Russell can’t believe the feast that awaits at Nitehawk Cinema

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (John Carpenter, 1986)
Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
Tuesday, April 18, and Wednesday, April 19, $75, 7:15
718-384-3980
www.nitehawkcinema.com

When Nitehawk Cinema first announced that John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China would be its next Film Feast presentation on April 18, in which a special movie-related menu accompanies the screening, tickets sold out in an hour. But there are still a few seats left for an added show on April 19. In the fourth collaboration between Carpenter and Kurt Russell (Elvis, Escape from New York, The Thing), Russell stars as truckdriver Jack Burton, who gets into a bit of trouble with the Lords of Death as well as green-eyed Gracie Law (Kim Cattrall) and the evil and mysterious David Lo Pan (James Hong). The cult fave cemented Carpenter’s future as an indie king; he said, “The experience [of making Big Trouble] was the reason I stopped making movies for the Hollywood studios. I won’t work for them again. I think Big Trouble is a wonderful film, and I’m very proud of it. But the reception it received, and the reasons for that reception, were too much for me to deal with. I’m too old for that sort of bullshit.” The Nitehawk screening will feature food by one of Chinatown’s best, Nom Wah Tea Parlor, paired with beers from Lagunitas. The five-course meal, each timed to a specific scene, consists of steamed chicken and shrimp siu mai with Lagunitas IPA, Taiwanese fried pork chop sandwich with Lagunitas Undercover Investigation Shut-Down Ale, fiery dank shank lo mein with Lagunitas Waldo Triple IPA, veggie broth with Lagunitas Little Sumpin’ Sumpin’ Wheat Ale, and fried matcha sesame balls with Lagunitas Aunt Sally Sour Ale. As Burton says in the film, “Everybody relax; I’m here.”

OZU’S PASSING FANCY WITH LIVE BENSHI

Takeshi Sakamato makes the first of many appearances as Kihachi in Yasujirō Ozu’s PASSING FANCY

PASSING FANCY (DEKIGOKORO) (出来ごころ) (Yasujirō Ozu, 1933)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Sunday, March 19, $20, 4:30
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

Yasujirō Ozu might not have been keen on the latest technology — he made silent films until 1936, and his first color film was in 1958, near the end of his career — but there’s nothing old-fashioned about his mastery of camera and storytelling, as evidenced by one of his lesser-known comedy-dramas, Passing Fancy. On March 19 at 4:30, Film Forum is screening a 35mm print of the 1933 masterpiece, accompanied by a live benshi performance by Ichiro Kataoka and composer and pianist Makia Matsumura. Takeshi Sakamato stars as Kihachi, a character that would go on to appear in such other Ozu works as A Story of Floating Weeds, An Inn in Tokyo, and Record of a Tenement Gentleman. The film opens at a rōkyoku performance, where the audience is sitting on the floor on a hot day, mopping their brows and fanning themselves; Kihachi has an ever-present cloth on his head, looking clownish, a small boy with an injured eye who turns out to be his son, Tomio (Tokkankozo), sleeping by him. Foreshadowing Bresson-ian precision, Ozu and cinematographers Hideo Shigehara and Shojiro Sugimoto follow a small, lost change purse as several men inspect it, hoping to find money in it, then toss it away when it comes up empty. The scene establishes the pace and tone of the film, identifies Kihachi as the protagonist, and shows that there will be limited translated text and dialogue; in fact, Ozu never reveals what happened to Tomio’s eye. After the performance, Kihachi and his friend and coworker at the local brewery, Jiro (Den Obinata), meet a destitute young woman named Harue (Nobuko Fushimi). An intertitle explains, “Everyone years for love. Love sets our thoughts in flight.” Kihachi, a poor, single father, helps Harue get a place to stay and a job with restaurant owner Otome (Chouko Iida), hoping that Harue will become interested in him, but she instead takes a liking to the younger Jiro, who wants nothing to do with the whole situation, believing that Harue is using them.

The relationship between father (Takeshi Sakamato) and son (Tokkankozo) is at the heart of (PASSING FANCY

Ozu follows them all through their daily trials and tribulations — with hysterical comic bits, including how Tomio wakes up Kihachi and Jiro to make sure they’re not late for work — but things take a serious turn when the boy becomes seriously ill and Kihachi cannot afford to pay for the care he requires. Winner of the 1934 Japanese Kinema Junpo Award for Best Film — Ozu also won in 1933 for I Was Born, But . . . and 1935 for A Story of Floating Weeds — Passing Fancy is filled with gorgeous touches, as Ozu reveals the stark poverty in prewar Japan, focuses on class difference and illiteracy, and displays tender family relationships, all built around Kihachi’s impossible, very funny courtship of Harue and his bonding with Tomio, since love trumps all. And yes, that man on the boat is Chishū Ryū, who appeared in all but two of Ozu’s fifty-four films. For the special Film Forum screening, Kataoka will provide narration in Japanese; the event is sold out, but a standby line will start at 4:00 for this very rare and special experience.