this week in film and television

STANLEY KUBRICK: FEAR AND DESIRE / THE SEAFARERS

Stanley Kubrick’s first feature-length film, FEAR AND DESIRE, is screening at IFC retrospective with bonus treat

FEAR AND DESIRE (Stanley Kubrick, 1953) / THE SEAFARERS (Stanley Kubrick, 1953)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Monday, January 30, 12:20 & 7:30
Series runs through February 2
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

IFC Center is celebrating the January 27 theatrical release of Alex Infascelli’s documentary S Is for Stanley, about longtime Stanley Kubrick aide Emilio D’Alessandro, with a two-week festival that includes every one of the Bronx-born ex-pat’s feature works, nearly all of which are being projected in DCP, along with a pair in 35mm. Kubrick’s 1953 seldom-seen psychological war drama, Fear and Desire, will be shown on January 30, along with the auteur’s half-hour industrial short The Seafarers. His first full-length film, made when he was twenty-four, Fear and Desire is a curious tale about four soldiers (Steve Coit, Kenneth Harp, Paul Mazursky, and Frank Silvera) trapped six miles behind enemy lines. When they are spotted by a local woman (Virginia Leith), they decide to capture her and tie her up, but leaving Sidney (Mazursky) behind to keep an eye on her turns out to be a bad idea. Meanwhile, they discover a nearby house that has been occupied by the enemy and argue over whether to attack or retreat. Written by Howard Sackler, who was a high school classmate of Kubrick’s in the Bronx and would later win the Pulitzer Prize for The Great White Hope, and directed, edited, and photographed by the man who would go on to make such war epics as Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket, and Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Fear and Desire features stilted dialogue, much of which is spoken off-camera and feels like it was dubbed in later. Many of the cuts are jumpy and much of the framing amateurish. Kubrick was ultimately disappointed with the film and wanted it pulled from circulation; instead it was preserved by Eastman House in 1989 and restored twenty years later, which is good news for film lovers, as it is fascinating to watch Kubrick learning as the film continues. His exploration of the psyche of the American soldier is the heart and soul of this compelling black-and-white war drama that is worth seeing for more than just historical reasons. “There is a war in this forest. Not a war that has been fought, nor one that will be, but any war,” narrator David Allen explains at the beginning of the film. “And the enemies who struggle here do not exist unless we call them into being. This forest then, and all that happens now, is outside history. Only the unchanging shapes of fear and doubt and death are from our world. These soldiers that you see keep our language and our time but have no other country but the mind.”

Stanley Kubrick cut his teeth making such promotional films as THE SEAFARERS

Fear and Desire lays the groundwork for much of what is to follow in Kubrick’s remarkable career; however, the same can’t be said for The Seafarers, a promotional short he directed and photographed in 1953 for the Seafarers International Union, aka the SIU, which is still in existence. “This is a story simple but dramatic, a story about the men who crew our ships, the seafarers,” television newsman Don Hollenbeck, who narrates the film, says in an onscreen preface. The straightforward script, written by Will Chasan, discusses how the union works, detailing responsibilities, benefits, job security, procedures, and more as Kubrick’s camera roams a hiring hall, a food station, various ports, a card game, the Seafarers Log printing press, and a barbershop with a nudie calendar, all set to a splendidly clichéd, lilting musical score. Kubrick also takes viewers inside an actual meeting, where secretary-treasurer Paul Hall gives a speech; Hall went on to become the SIU’s second president and in 1967 was honored with the naming of the Paul Hall Center for Maritime Training and Education in Maryland. Kubrick’s first color film, The Seafarers doesn’t lend a whole lot of insight into his methods, but it is a treat that will satisfy completists. Kubrick was also going to make The Halifax Story, about the 1949 Canadian Seamen’s Union strike, but that project never reached fruition. The IFC Center series continues through February 2 with all of Kubrick’s feature films in addition to Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, based on a treatment by Kubrick. S Is for Stanley director Infascelli will be on hand for Q&As following screenings of his Italian documentary on Friday at 8:00 and Saturday at 7:15.

GLOBAL WARNING — NATURE IS A MOTHER: SNOWPIERCER

Curtis (Chris Evans) leads a revolt in Bong Joon-ho’s futuristic thriller, SNOWPIERCER

WAVERLY MIDNIGHTS: SNOWPIERCER (Bong Joon-ho, 2014)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Friday, January 27, 12:25 am, and Saturday, January 28, 12:05 am
Series runs Friday and Saturday nights through April 1
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.snowpiercer-film.com

Korean director Bong Joon-ho, who had a huge international hit in 2006 with The Host and a major critical success with 2009’s Mother, made his English-language feature debut with Snowpiercer, a nonstop postapocalyptic thrill ride that takes its place with such other memorable train films as The Great Train Robbery, From Russia with Love, The Train, and Murder on the Orient Express. It’s 2031, seventeen years after the chemical C7, which was supposed to end climate change, instead froze the earth, killing all living beings except for a group of survivors on board a train run by a perpetual motion machine. In the rear of the train, men, women, and children are treated like prisoners, beaten, tortured, dressed in rags, their only food mysterious gelatin blocks. Soldiers led by the cold-hearted Mason (Tilda Swinton) and the yellow-clad Claude (Emma Levie), whose outift brings virtually the only color to this dark, dank, deeply depressing setting, violently keep the peace as the two women heartlessly dictate orders and abscond with the children. But Curtis Everett (Chris Evans) and Edgar (Jamie Bell) hatch a plan to get past the guards and make their way to the front of the train in order to find out just what is really going on and to meet with Wilford, the wealthy entrepreneur running the engine. With the help of defiant mother Tanya (Octavia Spencer), elder statesman Gilliam (John Hurt), train engineer Namgoong Minsu (Bong regular Song Kang-ho), and Namgoong’s daughter, Yona (Go Ah-sung), Curtis attempts to lead a small revolution that is seemingly doomed to failure.

Mason (Tilda Swinton) has something to say about potential revolution on board train to nowhere

Inspired by the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige by Jean-Marc Rochette and Benjamin Legrand (who both make cameos in the film), Snowpiercer is a tense, gripping thriller that unfolds as a microcosm of contemporary society, intelligently taking on race, class, poverty, drug addiction, education, and corporate greed and power. Evans (Captain America, Push) is almost unrecognizable as Everett, a flawed hero trying to make things right, followed every step of the way by cold-blooded killer Franco the Elder (Romanian star Vlad Ivanov of Police, Adjective and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days). The film features splendid production design by Ondrej Nekvasil; each train car offers a completely different look and feel as Curtis heads toward the front, leading to a finale that is everything the conclusion to the Matrix trilogy wanted to be. Bong (Memories of Murder), who cowrote the film with Kelly Masterson (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead), doesn’t shy away from violence in telling this complex story – of course, it doesn’t hurt that one of the producers is Korean master Park Chan-woo (the Vengeance trilogy, Thirst), who had just made his first English-language film as well, 2013’s Stoker. A fantastically claustrophobic chase film, Snowpiercer is screening January 27 and 28 in the IFC Center Waverly Midnights series “Global Warning: Nature Is a Mother,” consisting of films in which weather plays a key role; the series continues weekends through April 1 with such other climate-related works as Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running, George Miller’s four Mad Max flicks, Ron Underwood’s Tremors, and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

VINCE GIORDANO: THERE’S A FUTURE IN THE PAST

Vince Giordano shows off his remarkable collection of Jazz Age arrangements in THERE’S A FUTURE IN THE PAST

VINCE GIORDANO: THERE’S A FUTURE IN THE PAST (Dave Davidson & Amber Edwards, 2016)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Through Thursday, January 26
212-529-6799
www.cinemavillage.com
www.firstrunfeatures.com

Vince Giordano has an infectious glee throughout most of Vince Giordano: There’s a Future in the Past, a lively documentary that celebrates his dedication and passion for keeping the music of the 1920s and 1930s alive. “He’s totally consumed by his mission,” one member of his band, the Nighthawks, explains. “He’s meant to be a bandleader,” another one says. Director-producers Dave Davidson and Amber Edwards follow the youthful Giordano, who will turn sixty-five in March, as the band plays at the Newport Jazz Festival, with Garrison Keillor on A Prairie Home Companion, at Sofia’s in the Edison Hotel, at Lincoln Center’s Midsummer Night’s Swing, and at the New York Hot Jazz Festival at the Players club as well as recording a tune in the studio with David Johansen for Boardwalk Empire. The Grammy-winning Giordano and the Nighthawks have performed music for nearly two dozen films, including several by Woody Allen. But leading a Jazz Age band in the modern era is no easy task; Giordano, who plays the tuba, the string bass, and the bass saxophone and handles the vocals, has no roadies and no agent, so he and partner Carol Hughes are seen lugging equipment around, scrambling for gigs, and getting the orchestrations just right, testing Giordano’s gleeful onstage demeanor. “When I first met him, I thought he was very unusual and a nice person, but I didn’t think he was exceptional and crazy like he is,” Hughes says. The Brooklyn-born Giordano is also a music historian and archivist, having collected some sixty thousand arrangements, with twenty-five hundred brought to any single show, making for a wide range of setlists. Among those singing Giordano’s praises are many members of the eleven-piece Nighthawks, some of them who have been part of the band since the 1970s; sharing fun stories are reed players Mark Lopeman and Dan Levinson, trumpeters Jon-Erik Kellso and Mike Ponella, violinist Andy Stein, pianist Peter Yarin, trombonist Jim Fryer, and guitarist Ken Salvo.

The heart of the film is watching the remarkable band play such songs as “Stampede,” “Shake That Thing,” “The Moon and You,” and a glorious “Rhapsody in Blue” at Town Hall, by such legendary composers and bandleaders as George Gershwin, Fletcher Henderson, Paul Whiteman, Bix Beiderbecke, and Duke Ellington. One of the most poignant parts occurs when Sofia’s, where Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks played every Monday and Tuesday night for five years, closes, so Giordano must find a new home, which he does, at Iguana NYC. (You can also catch them at the “Highlights in Jazz” forty-fourth annual gala on February 9 at BMCC’s Tribeca Performing Arts Center with Ms. Vinnie Knight and Cynthia Sayer & Her Joyride Band.) Vince Giordano: There’s a Future in the Past is a poignant tale of a New York City treasure whose obsession brings great joy to the rest of us.

SPLIT

James McAvoy plays a man suffering from dissociative identity disorder in M. Night Shyamalan’s SPLIT

SPLIT (M. Night Shyamalan, 2016)
Opens Friday, January 20
www.splitmovie.com

M. Night Shyamalan’s latest bit of cinematic trickery and deception, Split, can be split itself, right down the middle. The first half of the film is a tense, intriguing psychological thriller. However, the second half devolves into a jaw-droppingly inane horror debacle. For much of the film, James McAvoy is mesmerizing as Kevin, a man with twenty-three personalities who has kidnapped three teenage girls: good friends Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) and Marcia (Jessica Sula) and their strange classmate, Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy). Various personalities take over, in clothing, age, speech, and mannerisms, as Kevin watches over the girls and visits his therapist, Dr. Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley), an expert in dissociative identity disorder and trauma victims who believes that the many personalities inside people with DID, like Kevin, can be different physically and psychologically; DID sufferers may have the ability to use the brain in ways that the rest of the population can’t, unlocking undreamed-of human potential. Meanwhile, the mysterious Casey has flashbacks of when she was five years old (played by Izzie Coffey) and her father (Sebastian Arcelus) taught her lessons in survival while her uncle (Brad William Henke) taught her other things when his brother wasn’t looking.

Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), Claire (Haley Lu Richardson), and Marcia (Jessica Sula) await what terror comes next in half-baked psychological thriller

In the first hour, writer-director Shyamalan explores some fascinating scientific issues and treats the female victims, particularly the sensitive, odd Casey, with at least a modicum of respect. But as the plot holes start piling up, the story turns into a cliché-ridden jumble with soft-core exploitation shots of teenage bodies and references to such superior films as Saw, The Shining, Room, 28 Days Later, and, primarily, the more controversial parts of The Silence of the Lambs; mental health providers and those suffering from mental illness are not going to be too happy with Split,, just as the LGBTQ community was angry with Jonathan Demme back in 1991. Even McAvoy (Atonement, The Last King of Scotland) loses his edginess at the absurd climax, followed by a surprise self-referential finale that is downright embarrassing; if Shyamalan, who makes a cameo in the film, really wanted to use that last scene, it should have come during or after the credits. Throughout his career, Shyamalan has proved himself a master of ideas, from The Sixth Sense, Signs, and Unbreakable to The Village, Wayward Pines, and The Visit, but all too often he is unable to bring it all together, leaving only scornful disappointment in his wake, and theaters full of audiences wondering what could have been.

WE ARE THE FLESH

The very strange Mariano (Noé Hernandez) rules a bizarre underground lair in Emiliano Rocha Minter’s WE ARE THE FLESH

WE ARE THE FLESH (TENEMOS LA CARNE) (Emiliano Rocha Minter, 2016)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, January 20
212-529-6799
www.cinemavillage.com

In his debut feature, twenty-five-year-old writer-director Emiliano Rocha Minter paints a horrifying vision of modern-day Mexico in We Are the Flesh. The film, a hit at festivals around the world, takes place in a kind of surreal, postapocalyptic underground hellmouth ruled by lunatic ogre Mariano (Noé Hernandez), who is delighted when siblings Lucio (Diego Gamaliel) and Fauna (María Evoli) come stumbling into his lair. As the three of them build a bizarre womblike structure, they engage in taboo acts that can best be described as foul, vile, disgusting, putrid, and demented — as well as strangely beautiful and maddeningly erotic — luridly photographed by Yollótl Alvarado on eerie sets designed by Manuela García. Esteban Aldrete’s threateningly pulsating score is interrupted by moans, screams, and occasional songs, several of which transform into oddly beguiling music videos. Minter also edited the film, with Yibran Assuad, maintaining a steady, sinister pace in which the audience awaits the next bit of craziness with both gleeful revulsion and terrifying excitement. Dialogue is limited and eccentric but gets the point across: “You were chosen by chance,” Mariano says, “and remember that chance is the most dangerous criminal who has roamed the earth.”

Mexican filmmaker Emiliano Rocha Minter’s debut feature is a violent, erotic fairy tale where anything can happen, and does

The film, which deals with various kinds of hunger as well as birth and rebirth, was inspired by the stories and pictures in sensationalist rags that are sold at newsstands throughout Mexico. “These newspapers remain unmatched as a gaze into a country that finds its pleasures in Hell,” Julio Chavezmontes explains in his producer’s statement. “This is the reality that Tenemos la Carne has dared to address. This is a film that is in total synchrony with its time and the ravaged country that gave it birth. It is a fearless, unprecedented vision of Mexico.” It’s also a film that goes where few films venture — with good reason, of course; watching it is like reading one of Charles Bukoswki’s more depraved stories: You know you should stop and put the book down, but you just can’t, in the same way you can’t turn away from Minter’s film. The dark tale evokes the work of such auteurs as Alejandro Jodorowsky, Kenneth Anger, Gaspar Noé, Dario Argento, and Carlos Reygadas, yet it’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen, a hallucinatory adult fairy tale with a twist ending that brings it all home. Opening January 20 at Cinema Village, We Are the Flesh packs a whole lot of punch into its maniacal eighty minutes.

CERTAIN WOMEN: THE HEADLESS WOMAN / THE FUTURE

A wealthy woman (María Onetto) looks the other way after she might have run over someone in THE HEADLESS WOMAN

THE HEADLESS WOMAN (LA MUJER SIN CABEZA) (Lucrecia Martel, 2008)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Saturday, January 21, 2:00 & 9:00
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
www.miumiu.com

Since 2011, Prada’s Miu Miu brand of women’s clothing and accessories, named for founder Miuccia Prada, has been sponsoring “Women’s Tales,” fashion-themed short films by such female directors as Ava DuVernay (Selma), Agnès Varda (Vagabond), Zoe R. Cassavetes (Day Out of Days), Alice Rohrwacher (The Wonders), and Crystal Moselle (The Wolfpack). The Metrograph series “Certain Women” pairs six of the commissioned works with a feature film made by the director (indicated in parenthesis above). The brief series concludes this week with Lucrecia Martel and Miranda July. Inspired by nightmares she has in which she commits murder, Martel’s The Headless Woman details a woman’s emotional and psychological reaction after having possibly killed someone. María Onetto gives a mesmerizingly cool, distant performance as Veronica, a middle-aged, upper-class wife and mother whose biggest worry appears to be the turtles that have infested the new pool built behind a veterinary office. But one afternoon, while out driving carelessly in her Mercedes along a twisting, barren road, she hits something. Not sure if it was a child, an adult, or an animal, she decides to continue on, telling no one what she has done. But when a poor, local boy goes missing, she begins to suspect that she might have killed him. An intriguing mix of Luis Buñuel’s class-consciousness and Edgar Allan Poe’s flair for suspense, The Headless Woman is an unusual kind of murder mystery. In Veronica, Argentine writer-director Martel (La Cienaga, The Holy Girl) has created a compelling protagonist/villain, played with expert calm and faraway eyes by Onetto. The Headless Woman is screening at Metrograph on January 21 at 2:00 and 9:00, preceded by Martel’s 2011 seven-minute Miu Miu short, the highly stylized, dialogue-free Muta.

Hamish Linklater and Miranday July contemplate their future

Hamish Linklater and Miranda July contemplate their future in THE FUTURE

THE FUTURE (Miranda July, 2011)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Sunday, January 22, 2:00
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
www.thefuturethefuture.com

Multimedia performance artist and indie darling Miranda July scored a major breakthrough with her 2005 cinematic debut, the utterly charming romantic comedy Me and You and Everyone We Know. While her follow-up, The Future, lacks many of the endearing qualities that made her first film such a success, it is still a quirky, beguiling drama that offers a bittersweet breath of fresh air. July stars as Sophie, a children’s dance teacher living with Jason (Hamish Linklater), a work-at-home IT dude. The slackers spend their time sitting on the couch, both on their laptops, having offbeat conversations and pretending they can stop time. But when they are told that the sick cat they want to adopt won’t be well enough to leave the veterinary hospital for another month, they decide that this will be their last thirty days of freedom, thinking that the arrival of the feline will confer upon them the responsibilities of adulthood they have been so good at avoiding up to now. Given this last bastion of hope, they quit their jobs to pursue their dreams: Jason starts going door-to-door selling trees, while Sophie sets out to perform a dance a day and post them on YouTube. No, this oddball, somewhat freakish couple doesn’t exactly dream big. And, of course, their idea of freedom doesn’t turn out to be exactly what they had hoped.

Miranda July’s Miu Miu short, SOMEBODY, will screen with THE FUTURE at Metrograph on January 22

The Future veers off in way too many directions, some good, some bad, but it is held together by July’s bright eyes and lanky, comedic body even as she explores the horrors of mainstream suburban living. As with much of her performance art, she challenges the audience to stay with her as she defies standard narrative conventions and turns to the surreal, including a talking moon. The film is nearly stolen by Joe Putterlik, an elderly man whom Jason meets through a Pennysaver ad for a three-dollar used hair dryer; Putterlik, who also is the voice of the moon, was actually discovered by July through a Pennysaver ad, and much of his dialogue is improvised and set in his own apartment as he talks about his real life. Sadly, he died immediately after shooting was concluded. The film is narrated by the ill cat, Paw Paw (voiced by July in a creepy monotone), who dreams of her own freedom, wanting desperately to get out of her cage and be taken in by people who will love her. And after all, isn’t that what we all want? The Future is screening at Metrograph on January 22 at 2:00, preceded by July’s 2014 ten-minute Miu Miu short, Somebody, about a messaging app in which strangers participate in people’s personal situations.

THE END IS THE BEGINNING: PAN’S LABYRINTH

Guillermo de Toro creates a mystical fairy-tale world in PAN’S LABYRINTH

NITEHAWK BRUNCH SCREENINGS: PAN’S LABYRINTH (EL LABERINTO DEL FAUNO) (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)
Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
Saturday, January 21, and Sunday, January 22, 11:15 am
718-384-3980
www.nitehawkcinema.com
panslabyrinth.co.uk

The closing night film of the 2006 New York Film Festival and an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth is a breathtaking fairy tale set in 1944 Spain, shortly after the Spanish Civil War. When her mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil), marries Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez), young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) must move to the middle of the woods, where Vidal and his small group of soldiers are defending the last vestiges of Franco’s Fascist regime against a group of resistance fighters seeking peace and freedom for all. Led by a mysterious flying creature, the adventurous Ofelia makes her way through an ancient underground labyrinth, where she meets the Faun (Hellboy’s Doug Jones), who tells her that she just might be the reborn, long-missing princess they’ve been waiting centuries for — but first she’ll have to perform three tasks to prove that she has returned to claim her throne. As Vidal shows more concern for the baby that Carmen is carrying than for Carmen herself — and also brutally tortures and kills anyone who gets in his way, whether it is one of the revolutionaries or one of his own people — Ofelia meets a dangerous yet engaging series of beings as she hopes for her fairy-tale dreams to come true and erase the nightmares of the real world. In Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro (Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone) has cleverly balanced fantasy and reality, alternating between scenes of horror and graphic violence aboveground and below as seen through the eyes of a brave young girl trapped in both. Nominated for six Academy Awards and winner of three (for Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, and Best Makeup), Pan’s Labyrinth is being shown January 21 and 22 at 11:15 am in the Nitehawk Cinema series “Nitehawk Brunch Screenings” and “The End Is the Beginning,” the latter consisting of movies in which the ending is told at the beginning. Inspired by Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, the series, which also featured Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, concludes January 28 and 29 with Sam Mendes’s Oscar-winning American Beauty.