Resident artist Vijay Iyer inaugurates the Met Breuer with “Relation” (photo by Paula Lobo)
The Met Breuer
Tony and Amie James Gallery, lobby
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 31, free with suggested museum admission of $12-$25
212-731-1675
www.metmuseum.org
vijay-iyer.com
Jazz musician and native New Yorker Vijay Iyer continues his stint as the Met Breuer’s inaugural resident artist with one more week of specially curated events, through March 31. Iyer, a pianist and composer who has released such albums as Tragicomic, Historicity, and Mutations, has put together a wide range of artists who will perform with him or present their own works all day in the lobby gallery. “Relation” also features the sound installation “Fit (The Battle of Jericho)” by Mendi + Keith Obadike, which is activated in between live performances. For the final week, Iyer will perform with Heems (Himanshu Suri), Rafiq Bhatia, and Kassa Overall (THUMS UP) on March 25 at 2:00 and 3:15 and Prasanna and Nitin Mitta (Tirtha) at 6:30, with Liberty Ellman and HPrizm on March 26 in the morning and Grégoire Maret and Okkyung Lee in the afternoon, with Marcus Gilmore and Matt Brewer (Trioing) on March 27 in the morning and Gilmore, Brewer, Elena Pinderhughes, and Adam O’Farrill in the afternoon, and with Craig Taborn (Radically Unfinished) on March 29. Other performers include Courtney Bryan, Brandee Younger, and Fieldwork with Tyshawn Sorey and Steve Lehman. In addition, Prashant Bhargava’s captivating thirty-five-minute film, Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi, will be shown every day. Bhargava and Craig Marsden, armed with DSLR cameras, capture the Indian festival of spring known as Holi, celebrated with bonfires, dancing, and wild crowds dousing each other with vividly colored powdered dyes and water. The film was commissioned by Carolina Performing Arts in honor of the centennial of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” so Iyer asked Bhargava to collaborate on a work about the Hindu ritual, built in twelve arcs that alternate between footage of the real Holi taking place in Mathura and a fictional imagining of the myth of Radha and Krishna, in which actress Anna George portrays an erotically charged version of Princess Radha, waiting to make love with Krishna. Divided into sections called “Adoration” and “Transcendence,” the film, which gets its title from a traditional Hindu greeting, is a visual and aural delight, with a beautiful score by Iyer. Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi screens daily at 12:45 and 4:00 in the gallery, which is arranged with two rows of chairs on three sides of a narrow horizontal space; the setup works well for the music, but some of the seats do not offer prime viewing for the film.
As of 2005, iconoclastic writer-director Terrence Malick had made only five feature films in his forty-plus-year career, but his 2011 effort, The Tree of Life, is his very best. Following Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), and The New World (2005), The Tree of Life is an epic masterpiece of massive proportions, a stirring visual journey into the beginning of the universe, the end of the world, and beyond. The unconventional nonlinear narrative essentially tells the story of a middle-class Texas family having a difficult time coming to grips with the death of one of their sons in the military. Malick cuts between long flashbacks of Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) in the 1950s and 1960s, as they meet, marry, and raise their three boys, to the present, when Jack (Sean Penn), their eldest, now a successful architect, is still searching for answers. The sets by production designer Jack Fisk transport viewers from midcentury suburbia to the modern-day big city and a heavenly beach, all gorgeously shot by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. Every frame is so beautiful, it’s as if they filmed the movie only at sunrise and sunset, the Golden Hour, when the light is at its most pure. The Tree of Life is about God and not God, about faith and belief, about evolution and creationism, about religion and the scientific world. The film opens with a quote from the Book of Job: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation . . . while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” Early on Mrs. O’Brien says in voice-over, “The nuns taught us there are two ways through life: The way of nature, and the way of grace. You have to choose which one to follow.” Malick doesn’t get caught up in those questions, instead focusing on the miracles of life and death and everything in between.
The third jewel in Universal’s horror crown (following 1931’s Dracula and Frankenstein), The Wolf Man stars Lon Chaney Jr. in his signature role, the goofily charming Larry Talbot, who just happens to have a problem on certain evenings when there is a particularly bright, full moon. Talbot has returned home to the family mansion after the sudden death of his brother, who appeared to have been mauled by some kind of wild animal. Reunited with his erudite father, Sir John (The Invisible Man’s Claude Rains), Larry quickly gets the hots for local antiques dealer Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers), but when their first date involves the tragic death of Gwen’s friend Jenny (Fay Helm) and Bela the Gypsy (Bela Lugosi), Larry becomes a suspect in the murders. And when he keeps waking up with ripped clothing and blood on him, he begins to think that maybe he has indeed done some very terrible things. The Wolf Man is the only one of Universal’s three primary horror classics that is not based on a popular novel; instead, Curt Siodmak wrote a fascinating original script that delves deep into the psyche of its protagonist, whose physical and mental transformation echoes the rage inside us all. The all-star cast also features Ralph Bellamy as Colonel Montford, the town constable; Patric Knowles as Frank Andrews, Gwen’s fiancé; and the great Maria Ouspenskaya as the mysterious Gypsy woman Maleva. The Wolf Man might not have the chills and thrills of Dracula and Frankenstein, but it still more than holds its own after all these years. (Oh, and if you’re expecting the famous scene when Chaney’s face goes all hairy, that actually occurs in the sequel, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.) The Wolf Man is being shown at 11:45 am on March 26 & 27 in the Nitehawk Cinema series “Nitehawk Brunch Screenings” and “March Midnite & Brunch: Bark at the Moon,” which also includes Joe Dante’s The Howling on March 25 & 26 at 12:15 am.
Controversial outlaw filmmaker Nagisa Oshima takes a unique, poignant look at the continuing problems in postwar Japan in the underseen 1969 drama Boy. After a major search for an actor to play the nameless title character, Oshima found Tetsuo Abe in an orphanage, and the young boy delivered one of the most memorable performances ever by a child. Inspired by actual events, the film follows wounded war veteran Takeo Omura (Fumio Watanabe), his second, common-law wife, Takeko Taniguchi (Akiko Koyama), their baby (Tsuyoshi Kinoshita), and Omura’s son from his previous marriage, played by Abe and referred to only as “kiddo.” The family travels across Japan, surviving by means of a classic con: First the stepmother, then the boy pretend to be hit by cars so they can extort money from the drivers. Meanwhile, the boy creates an alternate fantasy life that he shares with his baby brother, involving aliens and monsters, the only time he gets to be like a real kid. Otherwise, he is often by himself, never going to school, wandering lonely through the snow or walking down an empty path on one side of the screen as children play boisterously on the other side. As the authorities close in on the family, tragedy awaits.
