Bill Murray stars as a cynical weatherman reliving day over and over until he gets it right in GROUNDHOG DAY
GROUNDHOG DAY (Harold Ramis, 1993)
Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
Saturday, February 6, $11, 11:45 am
718-384-3980
www.nitehawkcinema.com
“Well, what if there is no tomorrow?” asks weatherman Phil Connors in Groundhog Day. “There wasn’t one today.” Bill Murray gives one of his most nuanced performances in the 1993 comedy, ably directed by his Stripes cohort, SCTV alum Harold Ramis. Murray stars as cynical, smarmy, mean-spirited meteorologist Phil Connors, who has been sent by his local TV station to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to cover the annual Groundhog Day festivities and report on whether Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow. He is joined by segment producer Rita (a radiant Andie MacDowell) and cameraman Larry (the always funny Chris Elliott), who find him to be a pompous ass. But just like Punxsutawney Phil comes out of his hole every February 2, Phil Connors is soon getting out of bed reexperiencing the same exact day, given the chance over and over to change, for better or worse. Besides being downright hysterical, Groundhog Day has a lot of heart, making it the kind of movie you can watch, well, over and over again, still pulling each time for Connors (who, not coincidentally, has the same name as the famous groundhog) to do the right thing and become a worthwhile human being. It seems that Murray does some of his best work when paired with a small, furry creature, like when he desperately tried to catch and kill a too-smart gopher in Caddyshack. And be on the lookout for Michael Shannon in his film debut, as the wet-behind-the-ears groom at a wedding celebration. The Groundhog Day Film Feast screening at Nitehawk Cinema on Groundhog Day itself is sold out, but you can catch the movie there on February 6 at 11:45 am as part of the Williamsburg theater’s Brunch Screenings series, which continues February 13-14 with The Wizard of Oz and The Artist and February 20-21 with Charlotte’s Web and the Spoons, Toons & Booze Valentine’s Day Special.
The Coen brothers take their unique brand of dry, black comedy to a whole new level with A Serious Man. Poor Larry Gopnik (a remarkably even-keeled Michael Stuhlbarg) just keeps getting dumped on: His wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), wants to leave him for, of all people, touchy-feely Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed); his brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), keeps hogging the bathroom so he can drain his cyst; his son, Danny (Aaron Wolf), won’t stop complaining that F-Troop isn’t coming in clearly and is constantly on the run from the school drug dealer (Jon Kaminsky Jr.); his daughter, Sarah (Jessica McManus), wants to get a nose job; one of his students (David Kang) has bribed him for a passing grade; his possible tenure appears to be in jeopardy; and he gets no help at all from a series of funnier and funnier rabbis. But Larry keeps on keepin’ on in the Jewish suburbs of Minnesota in 1967, trying to make a go of it as his woes pile higher and higher. Joel and Ethan Coen have crafted one of their best tales yet, nailing the look and feel of the era, from Hebrew school to Bar Mitzvah practice, from office jobs to parking lots, from the Columbia Record Club to transistor radios, from television antennas to the naked neighbor next door. The Coens get so many things right, you won’t mind the handful of mistakes in the film, and because it’s the Coens, who’s to say at least some of those errors weren’t intentional? A Serious Man is a seriously great film, made by a pair of seriously great filmmakers. And while you don’t have to be Jewish and from Minnesota to fall in love with it, it sure can’t hurt.
French stage and opera director Patrice Chéreau made an offbeat choice for his debut film, deciding to adapt British thriller writer James Hadley Chase’s The Flesh of the Orchid, the 1948 sequel to his first novel, 1939’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish, which had been made into a 1948 film by St. John Legh Clowes considered to be one of the worst movies ever. So it’s little surprise that The Flesh of the Orchid is a dark and gloomy, not wholly successful, both tantalizing and frustrating tale of lust and greed. Following up her controversial role in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter, the exquisite Charlotte Rampling stars as Claire, a mentally unbalanced heiress who has a penchant for blinding men who attempt to have sex with her. But she takes an odd liking to Louis Delage (Bruno Cremer), a man with financial problems who is on the run after witnessing a murder committed by a pair of cold-blooded killers, brothers Gyula and Joszef Berekian (Hans Christian Blech and François Simon). Meanwhile, Claire’s aunt, the elegant, très chic Madame Wegener (Edwige Feuillère), and her ne’er-do-well son, Arnaud (Rémy Germain), are hot on her trail as well, determined to lock her away again so they can get their hands on the family money.
The extraordinary story of nineteenth-century Jewish-American Renaissance Man Solomon Nunes Carvalho is told in the beautiful documentary Carvalho’s Journey. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, the Jewish cultural center of the U.S. in 1815, Carvalho was a painter, daguerreotypist, inventor, philosopher, husband, father, and practicing Jew. In 1853, Mathew Brady recommended him to explorer John C. Frémont, who was looking for a photographer to document his fifth and final Westward Expedition. So Carvalho brought his bulky equipment and set out to do what no one had done before, take pictures of a vast and treacherous landscape, a journey that would risk the lives of everyone involved as Frémont searched for a railroad route through the Rocky Mountains. Along the way, Carvalho never lost sight of his faith and his deep love for his wife, Sarah Miriam, as evidenced by the detailed, poetic letters he wrote her in addition to his 1857 memoir, Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West. “With few men, religion is a color, a lifeless, abstract notion, but abstraction is not pure religion. Religion must signify itself in our actions in life. Aye, it must embrace the whole sphere of our activities and affections,” Carvalho, voiced by Josh Hamilton in the film, wrote. Historian David Oestreicher explains, “He was very proud of who he was, but at the same time he was a proud American; he saw the promise of America. I believe that he was being a good American by exercising his right to openly belong to his people. I don’t think he saw a conflict there.”
Romanian director Radu Jude won the Silver Bear as Best Director at the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival for Aferim!, his savagely funny blacker-than-black comic Western about bigotry, infidelity, and frontier justice in 1835 Wallachia. Lawkeeper Costandin (Teodor Corban) and his son, Ionitā (Mihai Comānoiu), are galloping through the local countryside, searching for runaway Gypsy slave Carfin (Cuzin Toma), who Boyar Iordache Cindescu (Alexandru Dabija) has accused of having an affair with his wife, Sultana (Mihaela Sîrbu). The surly Costandin leads the hunt, verbally cutting down everyone he meets, from random old women to abbots to fellow lawmen, with wicked barbs, calling them filthy whores, crows, and other foul names while spouting ridiculous theories about honor and religion; he even batters his son, saying he’s “a waste of bread” and that “if you slap him, he’ll die of grief.” It’s a cruel, cholera-filled time in which even the monks beat the poor, where Costandin regales a priest with the telling riddle, “Lifeless out of life, life out of lifeless,” which the priest thinks refers to the coming doomsday.