this week in film and television

SEE IT BIG! 70MM: IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD

Comedic giants come together for quite a wild ride in Stanley Kramer’s IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD

IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD (Stanley Kramer, 1963)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, August 15, and Sunday, August 16, $12 (includes museum admission), 2:00
Series runs through August 30
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

They don’t come much crazier than the madcap 1963 comedy It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Producer-director Stanley Kramer takes a sharp turn with the wacky film, clearly needing a laugh following his rather serious string of issue pictures: The Defiant Ones, On the Beach, Inherit the Wind, and Judgment at Nuremberg. As he lays dying after a car crash, master thief Smiler Grogan (Jimmy Durante) tells a group of onlookers that there is $350,000 buried under a “big W” in Santa Rosita State Park. And off they go in search of the prize, willing to do just about anything and everything in order to get their greedy hands on the money. Hot on their trail is police captain T. G. Culpeper (Spencer Tracy), trying to solve one last case before he retires. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World lives up to its title, a mad, mad, mad, mad epic featuring the greatest all-star comedic cast ever assembled, including Sid Caesar, Edie Adams, Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, an absolutely lunatic Jonathan Winters, Terry-Thomas, Phil Silvers, Dick Shawn, Peter Falk, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, and Ethel Merman in addition to cameos by Jerry Lewis, Jack Benny, Joe E. Brown, Howard Da Silva, Andy Devine, Norman Fell, Selma Diamond, Leo Gorcey, Jim Backus, Marvin Kaplan, Stan Freberg, Arnold Stang, Jesse White, Carl Reiner, Don Knotts, Buster Keaton, and the Three Stooges. Basically, you can’t blink during the film’s 161 minutes or you’ll miss someone or some incredibly silly slapstick moment. And the ending is a laugh riot — literally. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is screening August 15-16 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image series “See It Big! 70MM,” of old and new films being shown in all their 70mm glory, including Robert Wise’s West Side Story, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, Steven Lisberger’s Tron, and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.

HARLEM WEEK: SUMMER IN THE CITY / HARLEM DAY

Kenny Lattimore will be performing at Harlem Week Summer in the City festivities

West 135th St. between Malcolm X Blvd. & Frederick Douglass Blvd.
Saturday, August 15, and Sunday, August 16, free, 12 noon – 6:00 pm
harlemweek.com

The annual Harlem Week festival continues August 15 with Summer in the City and August 16 with Harlem Day, two afternoons of special events along West 135th St. that honor the theme “Celebrating the Journey: Embracing the Future.” Saturday’s festivities include the Historic Black College Fair & Expo, the Peace in Our Community Conference, New Yorkers Are “Dancing in the Street” (with Alvin Ailey instructors and dancers), the Fabulous Fashion Flava Show, the first day of the NYC Children’s Festival (with a parade, sports clinics, health testing, arts & crafts, and more), Harlem Honeys & Bears swimming activities in the Hansborough Recreation Center, an International Vendors Village, the Uptown Saturday Concert with Kenny Lattimore, the Jeff Foxx Band, and Deborah Cox, an Our Lives Matter program, and a screening in St. Nicholas Park of Damani Baker and Alex Vlack’s 2010 documentary, Still Bill, about newly inducted Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Bill Withers. Sunday’s Harlem Day celebration features the Upper Manhattan Auto Show, tennis clinics, a health village, the second day of the NYC Children’s Festival (with a Back to School theme), the Upper Manhattan Small Business Expo & Fair, live music, dance, and spoken-word performances, another fashion show, and a musical tribute to Malcolm X with Doug E. Fresh, Vivian Green, and others.

HUDSON RIVER FLICKS — BIG HIT WEDNESDAYS: BOYHOOD

Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) and Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke) take a look at their lives in Richard Linklater’s brilliant BOYHOOD

BOYHOOD (Richard Linklater, 2014)
Pier 63 Lawn, Hudson River Park
Cross at West 22nd or 24th St.
Wednesday, August 12, free (with free popcorn, 8:30
www.hudsonriverpark.org
www.boyhoodmovie.tumblr.com

Since 2002, Austin auteur Richard Linklater has made a wide range of successful films, from the family-friendly School of Rock and Bad News Bears to the second and third parts of the more adult Before series (Before Sunset, Before Midnight), with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, in addition to the Philip K. Dick thriller A Scanner Darkly and the Jack Black black comedy Bernie. But during that entire period he was also making one of the grandest films ever about childhood, the deceptively simple yet mind-blowingly complex Boyhood. The work follows Mason Evans Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) as he goes from six years old to eighteen, maturing for real as both the actor and the character grow up before our eyes. As the film begins, Mason, his older sister, Samantha (Linklater’s real-life daughter, Lorelei), and their mother, Olivia (Oscar winner Patricia Arquette), are preparing to move to Houston just as their usually absent father, Mason Sr. (Hawke), returns from a job in Alaska, supposedly ready to be a more regular part of their lives. But his emotional immaturity leads to divorce, and Mason Jr. spends the next dozen years dealing with school, stepfathers, and the normal machinations of everyday life, including sex, drugs, rock and roll, and, for him, a determination from an early age to become an artist. Along the way, his sister and parents experience significant changes as well as they all learn lessons about life, love, and loss.

Olivia (Patricia Arquette) reads to children Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) and Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) in BOYHOOD

To make the film, the cast and crew met every year for three or four days of shooting, with writer-director Linklater moving the story ahead by incorporating real elements from Coltrane’s life that add to the natural ease and flow of the story. Despite the obvious difficulties of maintaining continuity over a dozen years, cinematographers Lee Daniel and Shane Kelly and editor Sandra Adair do a masterful job of keeping the narrative right on track. It’s breathtaking to see Mason Jr. go upstairs in one scene, then come downstairs a year later, ready for something new, dressed slightly differently, with a little more facial hair, to signal the change in time. (Linklater also uses the soundtrack to note the passing years, with songs by Coldplay, the Hives, Cat Power, Gnarls Barkley, the Flaming Lips, and others.) Mason Jr.’s unique relationship with each parent and his sister is utterly believable, complete with all the pluses and minuses that entails; at one point, Lorelei, tired of being in the movie, asked her father to kill off her character, and even that energy is apparent onscreen. In addition to Coltrane’s career-making performance, Hawke and Arquette are sensational, doing something no other actors before them have ever done. You won’t be bored for a second of this two-hour, forty-minute journey with a relatively average American family that helps define the modern human condition like no other single film before it. “Photography is truth . . . and cinema is truth twenty-four times a second,” Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor) tells Véronica Dreyer (Anna Karina) in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat. With Boyhood, that statement has rarely been so true. Nominated for six Academy Awards, Boyhood is screening August 12 as part of the free “Hudson River Park: Big Hit Wednesdays” series in Hudson River Park, which concludes August 19 with Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.

INDIE 80s: BLUE VELVET

Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) gets introduced to a dangerous, candy-coated world by Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) in David Lynch’s BLUE VELVET

BLUE VELVET (David Lynch, 1986)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Saturday, August 8, 4:30 & 9:30
Series continues through August 27
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

David Lynch reveals the dark underbelly of American society in his 1986 masterpiece, Blue Velvet. Channeling Douglas Sirk and Alfred Hitchcock as well as John Badham’s War Games, Lynch creates a unique look and feel in this modern erotic noir thriller, set in the small suburban town of Lumberton, North Carolina, where danger and darkness lurk just below the surface. Lynch, who had previously made the well-received Eraserhead and The Elephant Man as well as the disastrous Dune, establishes the American theme at the heart of the movie with Blue Velvet’s opening shot, red roses in front of a white picket fence with a bright blue sky in the background. As the soundtrack plays Bobby Vinton’s 1963 hit version of the title song, Lynch then shows a red fire truck moving in slow motion down a tree-lined street, a fireman in a blue shirt on the truck, waving, standing next to a Dalmatian; children being beckoned across a street by a crossing guard; a woman (Priscilla Pointer) on her couch watching a black-and-white crime movie in which a man with a gun enters a living room; and her husband (Jack Harvey) suffering a heart attack while watering the lawn, the hose shooting out from his groin area as he lies on the ground. Lynch then zooms in on a human ear in a windy green field, the organ being devoured by bugs, followed by a billboard announcing, “Welcome to Lumberton.” That’s quite a welcome, indeed. Lynch begins the main narrative as college student Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) visits his father in the hospital, then finds that now-ant-covered ear in the field. The camera swoops in closer and closer, finally taking viewers inside the detached organ, and the story takes off, as Jeffrey and high school student Sandy (Laura Dern), the daughter of local police detective John Williams (George Dickerson), get involved with a group of demented, crazed criminals led by the deranged Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who are abusing singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) while apparently holding her husband and son hostage. The more Jeffrey immerses himself in this maniacal, candy-coated world, the more peril he finds himself in as his relationships grow with both Sandy and Dorothy.

Dennis Hopper restarted his career with memorable performance as the maniacal Frank Booth in BLUE VELVET

Like the true surrealist he is, Lynch populates Blue Velvet with all kinds of insects, from the ants and other creepy crawly things on the dismembered ear to a bug a robin brings to the Beaumont kitchen; when Frank Booth puts on his oxygen mask to suck in an unidentified drug that most likely is nitrous oxide or amyl nitrate, he resembles a bug, and when Jeffrey needs to gain access to Dorothy’s apartment, he pretends to be an exterminator — and is spotted by the man in the yellow jacket (Fred Pickler). Lynch doesn’t overplay his hand; he deleted a scene involving Aunt Barbara’s (Frances Bay) obsession with termites; the story does take place in Lumberton, after all. The American dream turns into an American nightmare as Lynch also turns Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” into a theme fraught with menace, lip-synced by the very strange Ben (Dean Stockwell) and mimicked with evil glee by the maniacal Booth. The song, which includes the key line “Too bad it only seems / It only happens in my dreams,” has led some to consider that most of the film is a dream, taking place in Jeffrey’s head from the time the camera zooms into the ear and then eventually emerges near the end. (It would also help explain why high school student Sandy is wearing a ring on her wedding finger throughout the movie.) Even the casting and character names are filled with tantalizing references: Sandy’s mother is played by Hope Lange, who was nominated for an Oscar for her performance as Selena Cross in Peyton Place, a film about a different underside to an American town; Stockwell was a child actor who starred in such films as The Boy with Green Hair and later as a cold-blooded killer in Compulsion; and even the Beaumont family name evokes Hugh Beaumont, who played the patriarch of the Cleaver (!) family in Leave It to Beaver. It’s also extra difficult to watch Vallens get so physically and emotionally abused, knowing that she is played by the daughter of one of cinema’s most beloved and beautiful stars, Ingrid Bergman; Rossellini gives a brave and courageous career-defining performance as a wife and mother who will do anything to get her family back. Nearly thirty years old, Blue Velvet holds up marvelously well, as dark and depraved, and as shimmering and vibrant, as ever, set in a luridly colored world stunningly photographed by Frederick Elmes and featuring a haunting throwback score by Angelo Badalamenti, a frightening yet appealing world that Lynch turns upside down and inside out. Blue Velvet is screening August 8 as part of the BAMcinématek series “Indie 80s,” which continues through August 27 with such other seminal ’80s films as the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple, Gregory Nava’s El Norte, Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth, and Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead.

RICHARD LESTER — THE RUNNING JUMPING POP CINEMA ICONOCLAST: A HARD DAY’S NIGHT

The Fab Four are on the run in A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, screening at Lincoln Center as part of Richard Lester retrospective

A HARD DAY’S NIGHT (Richard Lester, 1964)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Saturday, August 8, 1:00
Festival runs August 7-13
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org
www.thebeatles.com

The Beatles are invading America again with the fiftieth anniversary restoration of their debut film, the deliriously funny anarchic comedy A Hard Day’s Night. Initially released on July 6, 1964, in the UK, AHDN turned out to be much more than just a promotional piece advertising the Fab Four and their music. Instead, it quickly became a huge critical and popular success, a highly influential work that presaged Monty Python and MTV while also honoring the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, and the French New Wave. Directed by Richard Lester, who had previously made the eleven-minute The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film with Peter Sellers and would go on to make A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Petulia, and The Three Musketeers, the madcap romp opens with the first chord of the title track as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr are running down a narrow street, being chased by rabid fans, but they’re coming toward the camera, welcoming viewers into their crazy world. (George’s fall was unscripted but left in the scene.) As the song blasts over the soundtrack, Lester introduces the major characters: the four moptops, who are clearly having a ball, led by John’s infectious smile, in addition to Paul’s “very clean” grandfather (Wilfrid Brambell, who played a dirty old man in the British series Steptoe and Son, the inspiration for Sanford and Son) and the band’s much-put-upon manager, Norm (Norman Rossington). Lester and cinematographer Gilbert Taylor (Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Repulsion, Star Wars) also establish the pace and look of the film, a frantic black-and-white frolic shot in a cinema-vérité style that is like a mockumentary taking off from where François Truffaut’s 400 Blows ends. The boys eventually make it onto a train, which is taking them back to their hometown of Liverpool, where they are scheduled to appear on a television show helmed by a hapless director (Victor Spinetti, who would star in Help as well) who essentially represents all those people who are dubious about the Beatles and the sea change going on in the music industry. Norm and road manager Shake (John Junkin) have the virtually impossible task of ensuring that John, Paul, George, and Ringo make it to the show on time, but there is no containing the energetic enthusiasm and contagious curiosity the quartet has for experiencing everything their success has to offer — while also sticking their tongues out at class structure, societal trends, and the culture of celebrity itself.

Lester and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Alun Owen develop each individual Beatle’s unique character through press interviews, solo sojourns (the underappreciated Ringo goes off on a kind of vision quest; George is mistaken by a fashion fop for a model), and an endless stream of spoken and visual one-liners. (John sniffs a Coke bottle; a reporter asks George, “What do you call your hairstyle?” to which the Quiet One replies, “Arthur.”) Oh, the music is rather good too, featuring such songs as “I Should Have Known Better,” “All My Loving,” “If I Fell,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “I’m Happy Just to Dance with You,” “This Boy,” and “She Loves You.” The working name for the film was Beatlemania, but it was eventually changed to A Hard Day’s Night, based on a Ringo malapropism, forcing John and Paul to quickly write the title track. No mere exploitation flick, A Hard Day’s Night is one of the funniest, most influential films ever made, capturing a critical moment in pop-culture history and unleashing four extraordinary gentlemen on an unsuspecting world. Don’t you dare miss this glorious eighty-five-minute explosion of sheer, unadulterated joy. The restoration, courtesy of Janus Films, is screening August 8 at the Walter Reade Theater as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center tribute series “Richard Lester: The Running Jumping Pop Cinema Iconoclast” and will be preceded by The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film. The festival runs August 7-13 and consists of most of the now-eighty-three-year-old Philadelphia native’s films, including Robin and Marian, The Bed Sitting Room, Juggernaut, Cuba, The Royal Flash, and the above-mentioned titles. “Growing up, I always thought of Richard Lester as one of the 1960s’ most typically English filmmakers — not just because of his irreverent and absurd sense of humor and his feel for English life but also for the affectionate way he sent up familiar icons from the Beatles to the Three Musketeers to even Superman,” Film Comment editor and FSLC senior programmer Gavin Smith said in reference to the series. “Imagine my surprise when I first learned he was actually an expat Yank. Regardless, he’s still a great English filmmaker!”

MOVIE MASKS: THE FACE OF ANOTHER

Tatsuya Nakadai will reveal his actual face when he appears at the Museum of the Moving Image to screen and discuss THE FACE OF ANOTHER

Hiroshi Teshigahara examines identity and more in THE FACE OF ANOTHER

CABARET CINEMA: THE FACE OF ANOTHER (TANIN NO KAO) (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, August 7, $10, 9:30
212-620-5000
rubinmuseum.org

Kôbô Abe and director Hiroshi Teshigahara collaborated on five films together, including the marvelously existential Woman of the Dunes in 1964 and The Face of Another two years later. In the latter, Tatsuya Nakadai (The Human Condition, Kill!) stars as Okuyama, a man whose face has virtually disintegrated in a laboratory accident. He spends the first part of the film with his head wrapped in bandages, a la the Invisible Man, as he talks about identity, self-worth, and monsters with his wife (Machiko Kyo), who seems to be growing more and more disinterested in him. Then Okuyama visits a psychiatrist (Mikijirô Hira) who is able to create a new face for him, one that would allow him to go out in public and just become part of the madding crowd again. But his doctor begins to wonder, as does Okuyama, whether the mask has actually taken control of his life, making him as helpless as he was before. Abe’s remarkable novel is one long letter from Okuyama to his wife, filled with utterly brilliant, spectacularly detailed examinations of what defines a person and his or her value in society. Abe wrote the film’s screenplay, which tinkers with the time line and creates more situations in which Okuyama interacts with people; although that makes sense cinematically, much of Okuyama’s interior narrative, the building turmoil inside him, gets lost. Teshigahara once again uses black and white, incorporating odd cuts, zooms, and freeze frames, amid some truly groovy sets, particularly the doctor’s trippy office, and Tōru Takemitsu’s score is ominously groovy as well. As a counterpart to Okuyama, the film also follows a young woman (Miki Irie) with one side of her face severely scarred; she covers it with her hair and is not afraid to be seen in public, while Okuyama must hide behind a mask. But as Abe points out in both the book and the film, everyone hides behind a mask of one kind or another. The Face of Another is screening August 7 as part of the Rubin Museum Cabaret Cinema series “Movie Masks,” being held in conjunction with the excellent exhibition “Becoming Another: The Power of Masks,” and will be introduced by RISK! podcast host Kevin Allison. The film series continues through August 28 with such other mask-related works as Mario Bava’s Black Sunday, Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution, and Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief.

ANDREI TARKOVSKY, SCULPTING IN TIME: THE MIRROR

Andrei Tarkovsky masterpiece reflects back on life and art

THE MIRROR (ZERKALO) (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)
Museum of Arts & Design
2 Columbus Circle at 58th St. & Eighth Ave.
Friday, August 7, $10, 7:00
Series continues Friday nights through August 28
212-299-7777
madmuseum.org

“Words can’t really express a person’s emotions. They’re too inert.” So explains Andrei Tarkovsky in his 1975 semiautobiographical masterpiece, The Mirror, in which the Soviet auteur takes a literal and figurative looking glass to reflect on his life, particularly his childhood, in twentieth-century Russia. The nonlinear film, which features long, beautifully composed scenes with little or no dialogue, alternates between color and black-and-white as Tarkovsky maneuvers between three time periods, telling the fragmented and disjointed story of forty-year-old Alexei, who is never onscreen as an adult (he is only heard offscreen in voiceover by Innokenty Smoktunovsky) but is shown as a young boy (Filipp Yankovsky) and an adolescent (Ignat Daniltsev, who also plays Alexei’s son, Ignat). Margarita Terekhova portrays Alexei’s ex-wife, Natalia, as well as his mother, Maria; Tarkovsky’s own mother, Maria Vishnyakova, plays the elderly Maria (who is also called Masha and Marusya), and his father, Arseny Tarkovsky, a successful poet, reads several of his works over the gorgeous imagery that is composed, in many cases, like paintings. Incorporating archival footage of WWII, the Spanish Civil War, and the Sino-Soviet split, Tarkovsky explores family relationships as seen through the eyes of the young Alexei and Ignat, adding mystery and magic, including levitation and slow motion, to the personal, poignant tale. As with Andrei Rublev, the film begins with an odd prologue in which Ignat turns on a sepia-toned television show in which a woman uses a type of hypnosis, concentrating on the hands, to help a student speak without a stutter, as if Tarkovsky is warning the viewer about what is to follow, a deeply hypnotic film that speaks in unusual ways.

Stunning imagery can be found throughout Andrei Tarkovsky’s hypnotic tone poem, THE MIRROR

In his 1986 book, Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky wrote, “Generally people’s memories are precious to them. It is no accident that they are coloured by poetry. . . . It occurred to me then that from these properties of memory a new working principle could be developed, on which an extraordinarily interesting film could be built. Outwardly the pattern of events, of the hero’s actions and behavior, would be disturbed. It would be the story of his thoughts, his memories and dreams. And then, without his appearing at all — at least in the accepted sense of the traditionally written film — it would be possible to achieve something highly significant: the expression, the portrayal, of the hero’s individual personality, and the revelation of his interior world.” Cowritten with Aleksandr Misharin and photographed by Georgi Rerberg — Tarkovsky’s regular cinematographer, Vadim Yusov, pulled out of the project because of artistic differences — The Mirror is a visual wonder, a true revelation, filled with stunning scenes that will emblazon themselves in your memory, from a burning barn to parts of a ceiling falling from above, from a woman washing her hair to a man sitting down next to a woman on a fence and breaking it. Don’t worry if you can’t always figure out who is who and what exactly is going on at any one moment and just put your trust in the hands of a genuine master. The Mirror is screening August 7 at 7:00 as part of the Museum of Arts & Design series “Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time,” which runs Friday nights through August 28 and includes all seven of Tarkovsky’s full-length films (Solaris, Stalker, Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, The Mirror, Nostalghia, The Sacrifice) before concluding with the behind-the-scenes documentary Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.