this week in film and television

CHRISTOPHER LEE: THE MUMMY

Christopher Lee is about to get wrapped up in murderous trouble in THE MUMMY

WAVERLY MIDNIGHTS: THE MUMMY (Terence Fisher, 1959)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Friday, February 26, and Saturday, February 27, 12:20 AM
Series runs through March 19
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

Knighted British actor Christopher Lee might be best known to the younger generations as the evil wizard Saruman in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, but over the course of more than two hundred movies Lee, who passed away last June at the age of ninety-three, also portrayed Fu Manchu, Georges Seurat, Sherlock Holmes, Rasputin, Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, and the Mummy. The IFC Center’s eight-film Waverly Midnights tribute to Lee, who also hosted Saturday Night Live back in 1978 (you can watch him introduce Meat Loaf here), continues February 26-27 with Lee as the immortal character in Terence Fisher’s 1959 Hammer favorite, The Mummy, a remake of Karl Freund’s 1932 original starring Boris Karloff. On an archaeological excavation in Egypt, John Banning (Peter Cushing), his father, Stephen Banning (Felix Aylmer), and his uncle, Joseph Whemple (Raymond Huntley), discover the vast tomb of Princess Ananka (Yvonne Furneaux). Warned by an Egyptian zealot, Mehemet Bey (George Pastell), to leave the tomb undisturbed, the older Banning instead reads from the Scroll of Life, unleashing the murderous mummy Kharis (Christopher Lee), who had dutifully protected his princess centuries before. Three years later, Bey arrives in England with Kharis, determined to have the mummy wreak revenge on the three men who dared disrespect Princess Ananka and the god they both served, Karnak.

The Mummy is a horror hoot, one of the scary-fun monster movies that were trademarks of Hammer productions. Writer Jimmy Sangster (Blood of the Vampire, The Horror of Frankenstein) and director Terence Fisher (The Phantom of the Opera, The Earth Dies Screaming) get right to the point, avoiding grand statements and instead gleefully satisfying pop culture’s fascination with ancient ritual and religion while being sure to embrace all the genre tropes, including a local drunk (Gerald Lawson), a disbelieving lawman (Eddie Byrne), and a beautiful woman (Furneaux) who might just hold the secret that will save everyone. Veteran Hammer cinematographer Jack Asher keeps the look of the film lovingly murky in the present and pastel-colored in the past, while Franz Reizenstein’s score ebbs and flows right on time. It’s always a treat to see Cushing and Lee side-by-side; they made twenty-two films together, from Hamlet and Moulin Rouge to The Curse of Frankenstein, Horror of Dracula, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Gorgon, and Night of the Big Heat, the last five all directed by Fisher, and The Mummy is one of their best. While the erudite Cushing struggles to make sure he limps with the same bad leg from scene to scene, the tall, magnetic Lee acts up a storm with just his piercing eyes, which shine a glow that goes much deeper than just a zombielike killer’s. Sure, it gets silly at some points and clichéd at others, but hey, it’s a Hammer horror film. The Mummy is screening at 12:20 am on February 26 & 27; the series continues March 11-12 with Joe Dante’s Gremlins 2: The New Batch (seriously; we’re not kidding) and concludes March 18-19 with Raul Garcia’s Extraordinary Tales, the 2013 Edgar Allan Poe omnibus that features the voices of Lee, Roger Corman, Bela Legosi, Julian Sands, and others.

THE BIG OSCARS QUIZ THING

biq quiz oscars thing

(le) poisson rouge
158 Bleecker St.
Sunday, February 28, $10 in advance, $15 at the door, 5:30
212-505-4474
www.bigquizthing.com
www.lepoissonrouge.com

Just how good is your knowledge of Oscar history? How do you do every year in your Oscar pool? You can test your skill on Sunday night, when the Big Quiz Thing hosts its fourth annual Academy Award–themed multimedia team trivia competition. The Big Oscars Quiz Thing will take place at (le) poisson rouge in Greenwich Village, leading right into the actual Oscars telecast, which will be broadcast live at the club on large screens, starting with the red carpet; Quizmaster EdP will keep the trivia questions coming during the Oscars show. Among the giveaways you’ll be trying to win are passes to On Location Tours, an Intro to Improv class at the PIT, Insomnia cookies to make sure you stay awake for what is always a rather long ceremony, a membership to (le) poisson rouge, screening passes to Videology, passes to the Broadway Comedy Club, and tickets to Scott’s Pizza Tours. Here’s one question to get you going, and remember, no cheating: Who was the youngest actor to ever win an Oscar?

GREATER NEW YORK

Lionel Maunz’s “Fertilize My Mouth” emphasizes feeling of absence at “Greater New York ”show at MoMA PS1 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave. at 46th Ave.
Thursday – Monday through March 7, suggested donation $5-$10 (free with MoMA ticket within fourteen days of MoMA visit), 12 noon – 6:00 pm
718-784-2084
momaps1.org

The fourth iteration of MoMA PS1’s quinquennial exhibition, “Greater New York,” is very much about absence and presence, what is not there as well as what is. Instead of focusing primarily on up-and-coming artists, curators Peter Eleey, Douglas Crimp, Thomas J. Lax, Mia Locks, Mark Beasley, and Jenny Schlenzka have included works by nearly 150 artists, more than 60 of whom are over 50 (or would have been if they were still alive), resulting in a wide-ranging look at how New York City and the art market have changed over the last generations. James Nares’s 1976 Super 8 video “Pendulum” shows a wrecking ball ominously swinging in an empty Tribeca alley but not actually knocking anything down — yet. Amy Brener encases such found objects as watches, motherboards, and calculators into colorful resin, foam, glass, and plaster sculptures that harken back to a long-gone era. Alvin Baltrop’s silver gelatin prints remind us what the piers were like prior to renovation and gentrification and what gay life was like before AIDS. Liene Bosquê uses found souvenirs from around the world to construct imaginary cities in “Recollection.” Henry Flynt’s SAMO© Graffiti Portfolio photographs from 1979 reintroduce us to Jean-Michel Basquiat. A large gallery of lifelike sculptures by Tony Matelli, Elizabeth Jaeger, John Ahearn, Judith Shea, and others create a false sense of reality and investigate the human figure and physical relationships. Joy Episalla’s photos of motel bedrooms reflected in television sets fill viewers with personal memories. Fierce Pussy’s “For the Record” features backward text about the AIDS crisis, repeating such sentences as “he would be at this opening if she were alive today” (sic).

Amy Brener repurposes found items into memory sculptures at “Greater New York ”show at MoMA PS1 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Glenn Ligon’s silkscreened “Housing in New York: A Brief History” details the various places he lived between 1960 and 2007 and reveal how the neighborhoods changed. In the boiler room, Lionel Maunz’s cast iron and concrete “Fertilize My Mouth” consists of a pair of disembodied legs standing in front of a tilted slab of concrete on which something bad appears to have happened. Louise Lawler’s “Not Yet Titled (adjusted to fit)” is a stretched photo of Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Bingo” sculpture of a derelict house. And photographs of Matta-Clark’s “Building Cuts” into the walls of PS1 back in 1976 bring the exhibition full circle. Among the other artists in the show are Chantal Akerman, Richard Artschwager, Dara Birnbaum, Mel Bochner, Rudy Burckhardt, John Giorno, William Greaves, Yvonne Rainer, Ugo Rondinone, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, and Sergei Tcherepnin. If you were around in the 1970s, you know that New York City was not exactly a paradise — and “Greater New York” takes us back there while also putting it all in a contemporary now you see it, now you don’t context.

Sound comes and goes in Christine Sun Kim’s visitor-operated “Game of Skill 2.0” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The exhibition will be on view through March 7, and there are still a handful of programs left on the schedule. On February 21 at 4:00, Hayley Aviva Silverman’s live-action “Twister” casts dogs as characters from Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Jan de Bont’s 1996 disaster film, Twister; Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World is being shown February 21-27; on February 25 at 7:00, Fia Backström will perform “Aphasia as a visual shape of speaking – A-production and other language syndromes”; on February 28 at 1:00, Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts New York will host participatory activities; on February 28 at 4:00, Devin Kenny will deliver the performance essay “Love, the Sinner”; short films by Ken Jacobs, Jack Smith, Ira Sachs, and others are screening February 28 through March 7; on March 3 & 4 at 7:00, Geo Wyeth will present “Storm Excellent Salad”; and on March 6, you can catch Stewart Uoo’s “It’s Get Better III” at 3:00 and Angie Keefer’s roundtable “What Is Authority?” at 4:00.

STEVE McCURRY SELECTS: LIMELIGHT

Charlie Chaplin looks back on his life and career in the melancholic classic LIMELIGHT

LIMELIGHT (Charles Chaplin, 1952)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, February 19, $10, 9:30
Series continues Friday nights through February 26
212-620-5000
rubinmuseum.org

“You will feel closer to Charlie the man, seeing this film, than in any of the other films where he plays a character, magnificently, but this is different. This is him,” Claire Bloom said before a sixtieth anniversary screening of Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight. In what was intended to be his farewell film, Chaplin bids adieu to his Little Tramp character and laments the end of an era in this deeply personal work, which features five of his children, his brother, his half-brother, and silent film comedians Snub Pollard and Buster Keaton. Though made in Hollywood in 1951, Limelight is set in Chaplin’s native London in 1914, the year he began his movie career at Keystone Studios. Chaplin is Calvero, a former vaudeville-style music hall star — modeled on himself as well as comedian Frank Tinney, Spanish clown Marceline, and his father — who is now a down-on-his-luck forgotten drunk. He comes home one day, smells gas, and breaks down the door of a neighbor’s apartment, saving a beautiful young ballerina, Thereza “Terry” Ambrose (Claire Bloom), from suicide. As the kind and gentle Calvero nurses her back to health, determined that she resume her career (in a way, as a surrogate for his current failures), Terry falls in love with him. Calvero tells her that it is not a real, romantic love; the character is partially based on Chaplin’s mother, whom he cared for while she suffered from mental illness, although there are obvious age parallels to his real-life wife, Oona O’Neill, whom he married in 1943 when he was fifty-four and she was eighteen. (Chaplin was sixty-three when Limelight was released, Bloom twenty-one.) But Terry insists her love is genuine and true, and soon they are both restarting their careers, with very different results.

Calvero (Charles Chaplin) cares for suicidal ballerina Terry (Claire Bloom) in LIMELIGHT

Aptly called “a sublime exorcism” by Bernardo Bertolucci, Limelight is overly long, too melodramatic, frustratingly repetitive, and often absurdly sentimental, but it’s impossible not to become engrossed in its touching magic, especially when considering its autobiographical nature. At the time, Chaplin, whose previously film was 1947’s much-maligned Monsieur Verdoux, was being investigated by the U.S. government for suspected communist ties and questionable morality; when he went overseas for Limelight’s British premiere, he was barred from returning to America, and he would not come back to the States until 1972, when he was awarded an honorary Oscar; even then, he was allowed only a temporary stay. Chaplin, who wrote, directed, produced, and choreographed the film and composed the score, fills Limelight with emotional statements that range from philosophical and psychological to quaint and treacly, though relevant to both the fictional Calvero and the real-life comedian. Cinematographer Karl Struss (The Great Dictator, Some Like It Hot) regularly zeroes in on Calvero’s often pitiable face, eyes occasionally turned directly into the camera and at the viewer; the sadness Chaplin expresses particularly when removing stage makeup is heartbreaking. “I believe I’m dying, Doctor,” he says at one point. “Then, I don’t know. I’ve died so many times.” The melancholic film, which intelligently deals with art and aging in changing times, also stars Nigel Bruce, best known as Watson to Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes, as the ballet company owner, Norman Lloyd as the company manager, Marjorie Bennett as Calvero’s landlady, Canadian ballerina Melissa Hayden as Terry’s dance double, and André Eglevsky as the male ballet dancer. The sketch performed by Chaplin and Keaton, the only time they worked together on film, is, of course, a gem, as painful as it is funny. Perhaps the most telling line is when Terry says to composer and pianist Neville (Sydney Earl Chaplin, Charlie’s brother), “What is more eloquent than silence?” Chaplin would go on to make only two more pictures, 1957’s A King in New York and 1967’s A Countess from Hong Kong, his only film in which he didn’t have a major role. He died on Christmas Day in 1977, at the age of eighty-eight, still married to Oona. Limelight is screening February 19 as part of the Rubin Museum Cabaret Cinema series “Steve McCurry Selects,” held in conjunction with the photo exhibition “Steve McCurry: India,” and will be introduced by Teva Bjerken. The series concludes February 26 with Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, introduced by journalist Phil Zabriskie.

EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT

EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT takes viewers on an extraordinary journey into the heart of darkness and beyond

EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT (EL ABRAZO DE LA SERPIENTE) (Ciro Guerra, 2015)
Film Forum, 209 West Houston St., 212-727-8110
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway at 63rd St., 212-757-2280
Opens Wednesday, February 17
embraceoftheserpent.oscilloscope.net

Colombian writer-director Ciro Guerra takes viewers on a spectacular journey through time and space and deep into the heart of darkness in the extraordinary Embrace of the Serpent. Guerra’s Oscar-nominated film, the first to be shot in the Colombian Amazon in thirty years, opens with a 1909 quote from explorer Theodor Koch-Grünberg: “It is not possible for me to know if the infinite jungle has started on me the process that has taken many others to complete and irremediable insanity.” Inspired by the real-life journals of Koch-Grünberg and botanist and explorer Richard Evans Schultes, Guerra poetically shifts back and forth between two similar trips down the Vaupés River, both led by the same Amazonian shaman, each time guiding a white scientist on a perilous expedition in a long, narrow canoe. Shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, ailing white ethnologist Theo (Jan Bijvoet) and his native aid, Manduca (Yauenkü Migue), seek the help of Karamakate (Nilbio Torres), a shaman wholly suspicious of whites and who believes he is the last of his tribe. However, Theo claims he knows where remnants of Karamakate’s people live and will show him in return for helping him find the magical and mysterious hallucinogenic Yakruna plant that Theo thinks can cure his illness. Forty years later, white botanist Evan (Brionne Davis) enlists Karamakate (Antonio Bolívar Salvador) to locate what is thought to be the last surviving Yakruna plant, which he hopes will finally allow him to dream in order to heal his soul. Evoking such films as Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Embrace of the Serpent makes the rainforest itself a character, shot in glorious black-and-white by David Gallego (Cecilia, Violencia) in a sparkling palette reminiscent of the work of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. As the parallel stories continue, the men encounter similar locations that have changed dramatically over time, largely as a result of rubber barons descending on the forest and white missionaries bringing Western religion to the natives. It’s difficult to watch without being assailed by imperialist concepts of the “noble savage,” mainly because the Amazon — and our Western minds — have been so profoundly affected by those ideas. “Before he can become a warrior, a man has to leave everything behind and go into the jungle, guided only by his dreams,” the older Karamakate says. “In that journey he has to discover, completely alone, who he really is.”

Guide Karamakate (Antonio Bolívar Salvador) and botanist Evan (Brionne Davis) explore dreams in Ciro Guerra’s EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT

Winner of the Directors’ Fortnight Art Cinema Award at the Cannes Film Festival and nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award, Embrace of the Serpent is an unforgettable spiritual quest into the ravages of colonialism, the evils of materialism, the end of indigenous cultures, and what should be a sacred relationship between humanity and nature. Written by Guerra (2004’s Wandering Shadows, 2009’s The Wind Journeys) and Jacques Toulemonde (Anna), it is told from the point of view of the indigenous people of the Amazon, whom Guerra worked closely with in the making of the film, assuring them of his intentions to not exploit them the way so many others have. Aside from the Belgian Bijvoet and the Texan Davis, the rest of the cast is made up of members of tribes that live along the Vaupés. Guerra actually brought along a shaman known as a payé to perform ritual ceremonies to ensure the safety of the cast and crew and to protect the jungle itself. “What Ciro is doing with this film is an homage to the memory of our elders, in the time before: the way the white men treated the natives, the rubber exploitation,” Torres, in his first movie, says about the film. “I’ve asked the elders how it was and it is as seen in the film; that’s why we decided to support it. For the elders and myself it is a memory of the ancestors and their knowledge.” Salvador, who previously had bad experiences with filmmakers, notes, “It is a film that shows the Amazon, the lungs of the world, the greater purifying filter, and the most valuable of indigenous cultures. That is its greatest achievement.” Embrace of the Serpent is a great achievement indeed, an honest, humanistic, maddening journey that takes you places you’ve never been. Embrace of the Serpent opens February 17 at Lincoln Plaza and Film Forum; Guerra will participate in a Skype Q&A at Film Forum following the 6:40 screening on February 20.

GUIDO VAN DER WERVE: NUMMER ZESTIEN, THE PRESENT MOMENT

Three-channel audiovisual installation by Guido van der Werve explores the id, ego, and superego in provocative ways (photo © Guido van der Werve / courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York)

Luhring Augustine
531 West 24th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through February 17, free, 10:00 am — 6:00 pm
212-206-9100
www.luhringaugustine.com

Locations for Dutch artist, triathlete, and classically trained pianist Guido van der Werve’s previous films have included Mount St. Helens, the San Andreas Fault, the summit of Aconcagua in the Andes, the North Pole, and the Arctic Ocean, where he walked across an iceberg while being trailed by a huge ship. For his latest work, Nummer zestien, the present moment, making its debut at Luhring Augustine in Chelsea through February 17, van der Werve, a classically trained pianist who is based in Finland, Amsterdam, and Berlin, takes viewers inside his head, where he explores characters relating to his id, ego, and superego. The three-channel installation follows a trio of groups, one depicting older, naked men and women as they go through such daily activities of waking up, eating, and napping; a second consisting of a mixed-age collection of men and women barefoot and dressed in black, doing yoga and meditating; and the third comprising younger men and women (professional porn actors) engaging in ever-more-intimate acts of sex, with nothing (and we mean nothing) held back. In the center of the gallery is a player piano, which plays a lovely score written and performed by van der Werve, who is not appearing in one of his films for the first time; there’s not even a piano bench for visitors to contemplate his physical presence. The film is divided into twelve sections, each dedicated to a different sign of the zodiac and time of year; the camera movement on all three screens slowly traces the outline of the constellation in the sky. The action on each screen is set in a black room with a soft floor, a kind of visual psyche that highlights the whiteness of the all-Caucasian cast. In addition to relating to Freud’s theories about personality, Nummer zestien, the present moment also brings up issues of life and death as the three groups of people continue their own explorations of the mind and/or body. Van der Werve, who specializes in making films that portray durational activities, has created yet another involving, provocative work, one that will have you considering your own place in the universe, at the present moment.

NITEHAWK CABIN FEVER MIDNITE SCREENINGS: THE THING

A crew of scientists in Antarctica can’t believe its latest discovery in John Carpenter’s THE THING

THE THING (John Carpenter, 1982)
Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
Friday, February 19, and Saturday, February 20, 12:10 am
Series continues through February 27
718-384-3980
www.nitehawkcinema.com

“What were they doing flying that low, shooting at a dog, at us?” meteorologist Bennings (Peter Maloney) asks Dr. Copper (Richard Dysart) after watching a Norwegian helicopter pilot pursue a dog in the Antarctic, at the beginning of John Carpenter’s The Thing. “Stir crazy. Cabin fever. Who knows?” the doc answers, more than justifying Nitehawk Cinema’s inclusion of the cult film in its February Midnite series Cabin Fever. Carpenter’s 1982 remake of Christian Nyby’s 1951 Cold War sci-fi classic, The Thing from Another World, adds touches of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Alien, with Kurt Russell leading an all-star cast of familiar character actors set up like a Vietnam War platoon. Russell is the cowboy-hat-wearing R. J. MacReady, part of a group of men at U.S. National Science Institute Station 4 in the frozen Antarctic. The crew also includes soft-spoken biologist Dr. Blair (Wilford Brimley), pot-smoking hippie assistant mechanic Palmer (David Clennon), nice guy geophysicist Vance Norris (Charles Hallahan), dedicated dog handler Clark (Richard Masur), funkster cook Nauls (T. K. Carter), assistant biologist Fuchs (Joel Polis), excitable communications officer Windows (Thomas G. Waites), serious station commander M. T. Garry (Donald Moffat), and skeptical chief mechanic Childs (Keith David). Soon some kind of monster from outer space is on the loose, able to disguise itself as other living creatures, making everyone suspicious of one another, the paranoia growing along with the terror and violence.

Kurt Russell fights a foreign terror in John Carpenter’s remake of Cold War classic

Based on John W. Campbell Jr.’s novella Who Goes There?, The Thing was the third of former child star Russell’s four films with Carpenter, following Elvis and Escape from New York and preceding Big Trouble in Little China and Escape from L.A. The film was shot by longtime Carpenter and Robert Zemeckis cinematographer Dean Cundey (Halloween, Back to the Future) and written by Bill Lancaster, Burt’s son, who died in 1997 at the age of forty-nine after penning only three scripts: the first two Bad News Bears movies along with The Thing. Carpenter composed the creepy, pulsating music for most of his films, but he got spaghetti Western genius Ennio Morricone to write the score this time around. (Carpenter is about to set out on his first-ever concert tour, coming to New York City in July, playing music from his films as well as songs from his recent albums.) Carpenter’s wife at the time, Adrienne Barbeau, is the voice of the fantastically old-fashioned Chess Wizard computer game that frustrates MacReady. The special effects, by Rob Bottin (The Fog, RoboCop) and Oscar winner Stan Winston (Aliens, Jurassic Park), hold up pretty well, as does the general feeling of peril, although, like with many Carpenter films, the plot doesn’t always make sense. But Carpenter is nothing if not a master of dark mood, and he nails it again in this thriller. The first of Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy (to be followed by Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness), The Thing is being shown February 19-20 at 12:10 am as part of Nitehawk Cinema’s February Midnite: Cabin Fever series, which concludes February 26-27 with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.