this week in film and television

FIRST SATURDAY: WOMEN CHANGEMAKERS

Curator tour of “Judith Scott: Bound Unbound” is part of free First Saturday program at Brooklyn Museum (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Curator tour of “Judith Scott — Bound and Unbound” is part of free First Saturdays program at Brooklyn Museum (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, March 7, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum celebrates women in the March edition of its free First Saturdays program. “Women Changemakers” will feature live performances by Alissia & the Funketeers, Princess Nokia, and the DJ duo JSMN and MeLo-X; a curator talk by Catherine Morris about the exhibition “Judith Scott — Bound and Unbound”; a Colored Girls Hustle mix tape workshop; a sketch class in which participants will draw from a live woman model; a book club talk with Dao X Tran, author of 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed U.S. History; screenings of Julianna Brannum’s LaDonna Harris: Indian 101 and Rahwa Asmerom’s Didn’t I Ask for Tea?; a healing space with tarot readings, herbalism, acupressure, and more led by Harriet’s Apothecary; and a discussion with Tavi Gevinson about her online Rookie magazine and the print companion Rookie Yearbook Three. In addition, you can check out such exhibitions as “Revolution! Works from the Black Arts Movement,” “Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic,” “The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago,” and “Chitra Ganesh: Eyes of Time.”

THE ADAM CAROLLA SHOW PODCAST AND FILM PREMIERE

Adam Carolla will be at Carolines this week for live podcasts and the NYC premiere of his new film, ROAD HARD

Who: Adam Carolla and special guests
What: Two-night stand in Times Square
Where: Carolines on Broadway, 1626 Broadway between 49th & 50th Sts., 212-757-4100
When: Live podcast March 4-5, $54.50 – $125.25, 7:00/7:30; film premiere March 5, $22, 9:00
Why: In his most recent book, President Me: The America That’s in My Head (It Books, May 2014, $26.99), podcast king and former Man Show cohost Adam Carolla writes, “Consider this book my official campaign platform. As you’ll see, I have an assload of opinions and a dump truck full of ideas on how to make this country better.” Carolla continues his presidential aspirations this week at Carolines, where on Wednesday and Thursday he’ll host live editions of his ferociously popular podcast, The Adam Carolla Show, joined by David Alan Grier on March 4 and Alec Baldwin on March 5. The March 5 podcast will be followed by the separately ticketed New York City premiere of his directorial feature debut, Road Hard, which Carolla wrote with Kevin Hench (The Hammer) and stars in alongside a bevy of actors and comedians, including Grier, Diane Farr, David Koechner, Illeana Douglas, Howie Mandel, Jay Mohr, Dana Gould, and Larry Miller.

COMMITTED: SHOCK CORRIDOR

Reporter Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) gets into more trouble than he bargained for in Samuel Fuller’s SHOCK CORRIDOR

ONE NITE ONLY: SHOCK CORRIDOR (Samuel Fuller, 1963)
Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
Wednesday, March 4, $15, 7:30
Series runs March 4-29
718-384-3980
www.nitehawkcinema.com

On the surface, Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor is about a reporter’s unyielding determination to win a Pulitzer by playing a unique game of Clue: He gets his girlfriend and his publisher to help commit him to an insane asylum so he can get a big scoop by answering the question “Who killed Sloan with a knife in the kitchen?” But the tense psychological drama is actually about so much more, a treatise on the state of mid-twentieth-century America as well as the nature of storytelling itself. A former crime reporter, Fuller was inspired by Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House when making Shock Corridor, but his film is not so much an expose on the treatment of the mentally ill as an investigation into such prevalent societal ills as racism, war, communism, nuclear annihilation, and, er, nymphomania. Desperate for a big story, Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) gets a lesson in how to act insane from Dr. Fong (Philip Ahn); they’ve decided that Johnny’s “ailment” will be incest, and he must pretend that he is in love with his sister, a role that will be taken by his girlfriend, Cathy (Constance Towers), a burlesque performer who is uncomfortable with the whole plan. The only other person who knows of the scheme is Johnny’s editor, old-time newspaperman Swanee (Bill Zuckert). Once locked inside the mental hospital, Johnny seeks out the three witnesses to Sloan’s slaying: Stuart (James Best), who thinks he’s a Confederate general still fighting the Civil War; Trent (Hari Rhodes), a black man who believes he’s a white supremacist; and Boden (Gene Evans), a scientist who has reverted to being a child because of the misuse of nuclear power. Keeping a close watch on everything are two attendants, the amiable Wilkes (Chuck Roberson) and the mean-spirited Lloyd (John Craig), along with Dr. Cristo (John Matthews), who has a thing for electric shock therapy. As Johnny keeps getting closer to the truth, however, the cost might be his own sanity.

The multiple levels of the characterizations in Shock Corridor are best represented by a patient played by Larry Tucker who thinks he is Pagliacci, a fictional character in the Leoncavallo opera who is portrayed by a tenor named Canio. Like Pagliacci, Fuller’s Shock Corridor is built around stories within stories (within stories) and actors playing characters pretending to be someone else. The film, which evokes The Snake Pit while presaging Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, including an important use of gum, is shot by Stanley Cortez in noirish black-and-white, but Fuller adds several full-color dream sequences taken from footage he photographed for other projects, further blurring the lines between fiction and reality within the context of this original drama. As with so many of Fuller’s works, the film is highly influential, although more beloved and known by fellow filmmakers than mainstream audiences. And it does no favors for the treatment of the mentally ill, either on the doctor or patient side of things. But it’s all worth it for the amazing rain scene that will blow your mind. Shock Corridor is screening in a 35mm print on March 4 at 7:30, kicking off Nitehawk Cinema’s March Brunch “Committed” series, with a special guest to be announced. Yes, 7:30 pm is an odd time to have brunch, but maybe the programmer had temporarily lost his marbles. The series continues on March weekends — at the more normal brunch times of either 11:30 or 12 noon — with Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Suddenly, Last Summer, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and James Mangold’s Girl, Interrupted.

IT CAME FROM BALTIMORE — 40 YEARS OF CINEMA FROM THE CHARM CITY: PUTTY HILL

Matt Porterfield directs the cast in a scene from PUTTY HILL

PUTTY HILL (Matt Porterfield, 2011)
Museum of Arts & Design
2 Columbus Circle at 58th St. & Eighth Ave.
Thursday, March 5, $10, 7:00
212-299-7777
www.puttyhillmovie.com
www.madmuseum.org

The city of Baltimore has not exactly been depicted kindly in film and on television, with such series as Homicide: Life on the Street, The Wire, and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood focusing on the rash of drugs and violence that have devastated the community, while native son John Waters has shown its wackier side in such films as Polyester and Hairspray. Born and raised in a suburb just inside the Baltimore city line, writer-director Matt Porterfield (Hamilton, I Used to Be Darker) has taken a different view in his second feature film, Putty Hill. When financing for his coming-of-age drama Metal Gods fell through, he decided to keep the cast and crew together and instead shoot a cinéma verité story about the after-effects of a young man’s drug overdose on a tight-knit community inspired by the one he grew up in. Not much is revealed about Cory as his funeral nears and life goes on, with his younger brother, Cody (Cody Ray), playing paintball with Cory’s friends; his uncle, Spike (Charles Sauers), tattooing customers in his apartment; and Spike’s daughter, Jenny (Sky Ferreira), returning to her hometown for the first time in several years and hanging out with her old friends like nothing much has changed. Working off a five-page treatment with only one line of scripted dialogue, Porterfield and cinematographer Jeremy Saulnier capture people just going on living, taking Cory’s death in stride; Porterfield interviews much of the cast, who share their thoughts and feelings in relatively unemotional ways. Shot on a minuscule budget in only twelve days, Putty Hill uses natural sound and light, nonprofessional actors, and real locations, enhancing its documentary-like feel, maintaining its understated narrative and avoiding any bombastic or sudden, big revelations. It’s a softly moving film, a tender tale about daily life in a contemporary American working-class neighborhood. The film is screening at the Museum of Arts & Design on March 5 at 7:00, concluding the series “It Came from Baltimore: 40 Years of Cinema from the Charm City,” which previously showed such gems as Waters’s Pink Flamingos, Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, and David Simon’s The Corner.

WIM WENDERS: PARIS, TEXAS

Harry Dean Stanton gives a staggering performance as a lost soul in PARIS, TEXAS

PARIS, TEXAS (Wim Wenders, 1984)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Monday, March 2, 3:45, and Wednesday, March 11, 6:15
Series runs March 2-17
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

Winner of both the Palme d’Or and the Critics Prize at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas is a stirring and provocative road movie about the dissolution of the American family and the death of the American dream. Written by Sam Shepard and adapted by L. M. Kit Carson, the two-and-a-half-hour film opens with a haggard man (Harry Dean Stanton) wandering through a vast, deserted landscape. A close-up of him in his red hat, seen against blue skies and white clouds, evokes the American flag. (Later shots show him looking up at a flag flapping in the breeze, as well as a graffiti depiction of the Statue of Liberty.) After he collapses in a bar in the middle of nowhere, he is soon discovered to be Travis Henderson, a husband and father who has been missing for four years. His brother, Walt (Dean Stockwell), a successful L.A. billboard designer, comes to take him home, but Travis, remaining silent, keeps walking away. He eventually reveals that he is trying to get to Paris, Texas, where he has purchased a plot of land in the desert, but he avoids discussing his past and why he walked out on his wife, Jane (Nastassja Kinski), and son, Hunter (Hunter Carson, the son of L. M. Kit Carson and Karen Black), who is being raised by Walt and his wife, Anne (Aurore Clément). An odd man who is afraid of flying, has a penchant for arranging shoes, and falls asleep at key moments, Travis sets out with Hunter to find Jane and make something out of his lost life.

Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) and Hunter (Hunter Carson) bond while searching for Jane in Wim Wenders road movie

Longtime character actor Stanton (Repo Man, Wise Blood) is brilliant as Travis, his long, craggy face and sad, puppy-dog eyes conveying his troubled soul and buried emotions, his slow, careful gait awash in loneliness and desperation. The scenes between Travis and Jane are a master class in acting and storytelling; Stanton and Kinski (Tess, Cat People) will break your heart over and over again as they face the hardest of truths. Wenders and regular cinematographer Robby Müller use a one-way mirror to absolutely stunning effect in these scenes about what is hidden and what is revealed in a relationship. Wenders had previously made the Road Movie Trilogy of Alice in the Cities, The Wrong Move, and Kings of the Road, which also dealt with difficult family issues, but Paris, Texas takes things to another level. Ry Cooder’s gorgeous slide-guitar soundtrack is like a requiem for the American dream, now a wasteland of emptiness. (Cooder would later make Buena Vista Social Club with Wenders. Another interesting connection is that Wenders’s assistant director was Allison Anders, who would go on to write and direct the indie hit Gas Food Lodging.) A uniquely told family drama, Paris, Texas is rich with deft touches and subtle details, all encapsulated in the final shot. (Don’t miss what it says on that highway billboard.) Paris, Texas is screening in a new digital restoration at MoMA on March 2 at 3:45 and March 11 at 6:15 as part of a two-plus-week Wenders retrospective in advance of the release of his latest film, the Oscar-nominated documentary The Salt of the Earth; the director will be on hand to introduce the March 2 screening. The series continues through March 17 with such other Wenders works as The American Friend, Wings of Desire, Until the End of the World, Tokyo-Ga, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, and other well-known gems and rare early shorts, with Wenders at the museum for Q&As and introductions at all screenings through March 7.

MAPS TO THE STARS

Jerome Fontana (Robert Pattinson) and Agatha Weiss (Mia Wasikowska) look to the Hollywood hills in MAPS TO THE STARS

MAPS TO THE STARS (David Cronenberg, 2014)
Opens Friday, February 27
www.focusfeatures.com

Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg and American novelist and screenwriter Bruce Wagner, a match made in Hollywood Babylon, paint a savage portrait of celebrity culture in the absolutely incendiary and off-the-charts satire Maps to the Stars. The darkly funny comic drama centers on Agatha Weiss (Mia Wasikowska), a young woman who returns to Hollywood after having been put away for a long time for a dangerous deed, her face and body marked by burns. Befriending limo driver Jerome Fontana (Robert Pattinson), who is an aspiring actor and writer, Agatha gets a job working for disgruntled actress Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), who is desperate to star in the remake of Stolen Moments, playing the role that made her mother, Clarice Taggart (Sarah Gadon), famous, but Havana fears that according to Hollywood she is much too old. Havana undergoes regular intense physical and psychological therapy to deal with her mommy issues with television healer Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), Agatha’s father, who has banished his daughter from ever contacting the family again. Meanwhile, Agatha’s younger brother, thirteen-year-old child star Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird), is a Bieberesque character fresh out of rehab who is negotiating the sequel to his massive hit, Bad Babysitter, with his very serious stage mom, Cristina (Olivia Williams). Slowly but surely, everyone’s lives intersect in a riot of fame and misfortune, drugs and guns, ghosts and incest.

Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore) screams for success in dazzling collaboration between David Cronenberg and Bruce Wagner

Cronenberg, who has made such previous cult favorites as Scanners, The Fly, Naked Lunch, and A History of Violence, and the L.A.-based Wagner, author of such stinging novels as I’ll Let You Go, Still Holding, The Empty Chair, and I’m Losing You, which he also turned into a film, leave nothing and no one unscathed in this thoroughly brutal depiction of Hollywood as a haunted La La Land of dreams and nightmares, both literally and figuratively. Rising star Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland, In Treatment, Jane Eyre) is superb as Agatha, her inner and outer scars revealing more and more of themselves as she reinserts herself into the life of her crazy family, with Cusack channeling a bit of Nicolas Cage as the overprotective patriarch, a self-help guru who could use a little help himself. Moore was named Best Actress at Cannes for her harrowing portrayal of an actress teetering on the edge of reality. Shooting for the first time ever in the United States, Cronenberg captures the sights and smells of Los Angeles and its environs; most of the film was shot in Canada, however, but Cronenberg kept Wagner, a former Hollywood limo driver himself, close by, trying to attain as much authenticity as possible. Twilight hunk Pattinson, who spent all of Cronenberg’s previous movie, Cosmopolis, in the back of a limo, gets in the driver’s seat here, playing an alternate, reimagined version of Wagner. The severely screwed-up Weiss family serves as a microcosm for Hollywood’s own severely screwed-up dysfunction, as Cronenberg melds the ridiculous with the sublime, the tragic with the comic, the bizarre with the, well, more bizarre, creating a modern-day fairy-tale mashup of Shakespeare and Williams, Sunset Boulevard and Less than Zero, a caustic, cautionary tale of the price you pay for getting what you wish for.

EASTERN BOYS

Marek (Paul Kirill Emelyanov), Boss (Danil Vorobyev), and Daniel (Oliver Rabourdin) get involved in a dangerous game in EASTERN BOYS

EASTERN BOYS (Robin Campillo, 2013)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Howard Gilman Theater, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
February 27 – March 5
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com

Robin Campillo takes a genuinely compassionate look at immigration, home invasion, and sexual obsession in the compelling, always surprising Eastern Boys. Seeking out companionship, middle-aged Daniel (Olivier Rabourdin) spots young Marek (Kirill Emelyanov) and cruises him at the Gare du Nord station in Paris. They set up a paid rendezvous at Daniel’s apartment for the next day, but Marek’s arrival is preceded by that of his primarily male friends from Eastern Europe, illegal immigrants who begin taking things from Daniel’s place as they dance and drink; it’s a heartbreaking party scene, with Daniel not knowing how to react, an implicit if not overt threat to his physical well-being hovering over the thick atmosphere. But when Marek eventually does show up, Daniel is desperate for his attention, still determined to be alone with him, an attraction that has dangerous consequences.

Employing a cinéma vérité style, writer, director, and editor Campillo, whose previous, debut feature was 2004’s Les Revenants and has written several films with Laurent Cantet, including The Class and Heading South, tells the intimate story of Daniel and Marek’s complicated relationship with grace and subtlety as they both balance fear with desire, knowing that the unpredictable and violent Boss (Danil Vorobyev), the leader of the gang, is lurking around them. The opening scene has a documentary, neo-Realist quality, but it’s all fiction, the characters portrayed by actors. Campillo divides the film into four chapters based on location and thematic elements, with the home invasion set in his own apartment so he could feel like he himself was being invaded while making it. Nominated for three César Awards (Best Picture, Best Director, and Emelyanov as Most Promising Actor) Eastern Boys goes from a dark romance to a gripping thriller in the final section, but Campillo never reverts to purely good and evil characters, and he provides no straightforward answers, especially in the open-ended finale, while raising important questions about society. It’s a deeply affecting film, one that seeps into your system, an often uncomfortable experience that mirrors Daniel’s fascination with Marek; you’ll squirm in your seat, but you won’t be able to turn away.