this week in film and television

BLACK HISTORY MONTH: LIVING LEGACY

Carrie Hawks will discuss her upcoming documentary, BLACK ENUF, at the Brooklyn Museum’s free First Saturday program for Black History Month

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

The theme of this year’s annual Brooklyn Museum First Saturday celebration of Black History Month is “Living Legacy,” another eclectic, wide-ranging collection of music, dance, film, art, discussion, and more. The free evening will feature live performances by Chel Lo and Asante Amin’s multimedia “Soundtrack ’63,” Water Seed, and Bilal; screenings of Byron Hurt’s 2013 documentary Soul Food Junkies and Carrie Hawks’s doc-in-progress Black Enuf, both followed by talkbacks with the directors; a quilt-making workshop; a talk with artists Devin Kenny and Sondra Perry with Black Contemporary Art blog founder Kim Drew; a poetry reading and community forum hosted by Mahogany L. Browne, Jonterri Gadson, and Amanda Johnston of Black Poets Speak Out; and J. Ivy discussing his new memoir, Dear Father: Breaking the Cycle of Pain. In addition, you can check out such exhibitions as “Revolution! Works from the Black Arts Movement,” “Judith Scott — Bound and Unbound,” “Double Take: African Innovations,” and “Chitra Ganesh: Eyes of Time.”

CRONENBERG: A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

Viggo Mortensen is determined to protect wife Maria Bello and their family in David Cronenberg’s A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

WAVERLY MIDNIGHTS: A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (David Cronenberg, 2005)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Friday, February 6, and Saturday, February 7, 12 midnight
Series runs through February 21
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.historyofviolence.com

Director David Cronenberg just might have made the best film of his career with the brilliant A History of Violence. Set to the marvelously tense music of Howard Shore — which threatens to explode at any moment — the film stars Viggo Mortensen as Tom Stall, a quiet, calm family man who runs a local diner in a small town in Indiana. Stall reluctantly becomes the town hero (and media darling) after a dangerous, bloody incident in his diner, which leads to the arrival of Carl Fogaty (the excellent Ed Harris), an East Coast mob kingpin who insists that Tom is actually Joey Cusack, a former Mafia goon who is in witness protection. As Fogaty and his men harass Tom and his family (wife Maria Bello and kids Ashton Holmes and Heidi Hayes), Stall desperately fights to protect his simple, happy life. William Hurt excels in a small role near the end of the film. A History of Violence is as suspenseful as they come, a simmering masterpiece that blows up the American dream. The film is loosely based on the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke, but as Cronenberg explained at the 2005 San Diego Comic-Con, he didn’t even know the book existed until the production was well under way, and Josh Olson’s outstanding screenplay ultimately veers far away from its source. A History of Violence is screening February 6 & 7 as part of the IFC Center’s Waverly Midnights “Cronenberg” series, which continues February 13-15 with Eastern Promises before concluding February 20-21 with Cosmopolis.

BALLET 422

Viewers are taken behind the scenes as Justin Peck creates a new work for New York City Ballet

BALLET 422 (Jody Lee Lipes, 2014)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center, Francesca Beale Theater, 144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave., 212-875-5600
Landmark Sunshine Cinema, 143 East Houston St. between First & Second Aves., 212-330-8182
Opens Friday, February 6 (special advance screening February 3 at 7:00 at BAMcinématek)
www.magpictures.com

In Ballet 422, Jody Lee Lipes takes viewers behind the scenes as twenty-five-year-old New York City Ballet dancer Justin Peck choreographs the 422nd original piece for the prestigious company, Paz de la Jolla. One of fifty dancers in the Corps de Ballet, which the film calls “the lowest rank” of NYCB, Peck was named by company head Peter Martins to be the New York Choreographic Institute’s first active choreographer-in-residence for the 2011-12 season, and he is the only current NYCB dancer to choreograph for the company. Documentarian and cinematographer Lipes (NY Export: Opus Jazz, Tiny Furniture) focuses on the fascinating collaboration that goes into creating a ballet. “As a former soloist with New York City Ballet, I had long dreamed about pulling back the veil on the making of a new ballet,” producer Ellen Bar explains on the film’s Hatchfund page, which has raised more than $55,000 for the project. “Even as a dancer who was often part of the choreographic process, I never saw the other artistic and technical elements develop until the very end. Wouldn’t it be amazing to invite audiences into a world they can never visit in person and to let them watch it unfold in real time?” Lipes does just that, showing Peck and ballet master Albert Evans working out specific moves with principal dancers Sterling Hyltin, Amar Ramasar, and Tiler Peck; costumers Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung discussing materials with the performers; Mark Stanley detailing the lighting design; and Peck meeting with conductor Andrews Sill, who reveals that the orchestra is not particularly fond of playing the ballet’s musical score, Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu’s “Sinfonietta la Jolla.”

Sterling Hytlin, Amar Ramasar, and Tiler Peck rehearse with Justin Peck on 422nd original piece for New York City Ballet

There are no talking heads in the film, no experts chiming in on the beauty and intricacy of ballet, no one pontificating on how unusual it is for such a young dancer to already be choreographing his fifth work for the company, following Year of the Rabbit, Tales of a Chinese Zodiac, In Creases, and Capricious Movements. No one stops and looks into the camera, sharing their fears, hopes, or dreams; Lipes doesn’t even identify who’s who, instead allowing the drama to play out sans editorial comment. A few times, the camera goes with Peck as he puts on his backpack and heads home to his unglamorous Queens apartment, and the surprise ending puts everything in fabulous perspective. You don’t have to love ballet or know anything about it to enjoy Ballet 422, an intimate, compelling inside look into the creative process, but don’t be surprised if you soon find yourself ordering tickets for an upcoming NYCB production — perhaps even Peck’s latest work for the company, a new interpretation of Aaron Copland’s Rodeo, which is having its premiere February 4 at the David H. Koch Theater. Ballet 422 opens February 6 at the Landmark Sunshine and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, where Lipes and Peck will participate in a Q&A following the 7:15 screening and will introduce the 9:35 show on February 6. In addition, the film is having a sneak peek February 3 at 7:00 as part of the BAMcinématek series “Two by Jody Lee Lipes,” followed by a Q&A with Lipes.

ECCENTRICS OF FRENCH COMEDY: YOYO

All the wealth in the world can’t make a lonely millionaire (Pierre Étaix) happy in YOYO

CINÉSALON: YOYO (Pierre Étaix, 1965)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, February 3, 4:00
Series continues Tuesdays through February 24
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

French auteur Pierre Étaix’s strange and beautiful films were long inaccessible, the subject of nearly two decades of legal wrangling, but on February 3 at 4:00, the French Institute Alliance Française will be presenting his 1965 bittersweet black-and-white slapstick charmer, Yoyo, as part of its January-February CinéSalon “Eccentrics of French Comedy” series, followed by a wine reception. (In April 2010, Étaix was finally able to once again bring his films to the public, his entire output restored and making their New York debut at a festival of all five features and three shorts at Film Forum in October 2012.) Étaix, who wrote Yoyo with master collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière, who also cowrote films by Luis Buñuel, Miloš Forman, Volker Schlöndorff, Andrzej Wajda, Nagisa Oshima, and Louis Malle and won an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement in 2014, stars as a ridiculously wealthy but extremely bored man who lives alone in an ornately decorated, absurdly large chateau. It’s 1925, and he has servants for absolutely everything, as well as his own private band and flappers, but he pines for his lost love, Isolina (Claudine Auger). One day she arrives with a traveling circus, along with a young boy (Philippe Dionnet) who turns out to be his son. She at first rejects the multimillionaire, but when he loses it all on Black Tuesday, the three of them form their own traveling circus, with the boy ultimately turning into a popular clown named Yoyo (played as an adult by Étaix) and seeking to restore the chateau and his family.

French auteur Pierre Étaix takes clowning around very seriously in rediscovered classic

The first section of the film is a glorious homage to the silent film era and other cinematic comedians, with director and star Étaix evoking his mentor, Jacques Tati; Charlie Chaplin; Buster Keaton; and, later, Jerry Lewis, with whom he’d appear as Gustav the Great in Lewis’s never-to-be-seen Holocaust film The Day the Clown Died. Nouvelle Vague cinematographer Jean Boffety (An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge; Je t’aime, je t’aime) shoots Yoyo in a sharp, gorgeous black-and-white, composing breathtaking shots that boast a dazzling symmetry that must make Wes Anderson giddy with delight, while Étaix fills the film with ingenious sight gags that would make Ernie Kovacs proud (just wait till you see the supposed still-life painting), all anchored by Jean Paillaud’s memorable musical theme. But once the stock market crashes and talkies take over, dialogue enters the picture, and the camera is often off balance, the perfect symmetry a thing of the past. With Yoyo, Étaix, who had previously made Heureux Anniversaire and The Suitor and would go on to make The Great Love and En pleine forme, was influenced by the sudden, tragic death of his father, his love of the circus — he had already worked under the big tent, and he would leave films to become a clown in a traveling circus in the early 1970s — and his viewing of Fellini’s 8½ (look for the La Strada poster) resulting in a film that sometimes gets a little lost and too surreal, but he ultimately brings things back around as Yoyo grows into a star and the story travels through the arc of twentieth-century entertainment, from the silent era to talkies to television. It’s a real treat that Étaix’s work is undergoing this rediscovery; lovers of Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist will particularly enjoy Yoyo. “Eccentrics of French Comedy” continues through February 24 with Riad Sattouf’s The French Kissers introduced by Jean-Philippe Tessé, Jacques Rozier’s Du côté d’Orouët introduced by Annie Bergen, Eric Rohmer’s The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque introduced by Nicholas Elliott, and Luc Moullet’s The Land of Madness introduced by Pavol Liska.

ORSON WELLES 100: TOO MUCH JOHNSON — FILM & LIVE THEATER EVENT

Joseph Cotten stars in Orson Welles’s newly edited 1938 silent comedy, TOO MUCH JOHNSON, screening for the first time ever at Film Forum

Who: Orson Welles
What: Encore presentation of Too Much Johnson as part of “Orson Welles 100” series
Where: Film Forum, 209 West Houston St., 212-727-8110
When: Thursday, February 5, $25, 7:30
Why: In August 2013, the raw footage of Orson Welles’s first professional film, a deliriously entertaining 1938 silent comedy made in conjunction with the Mercury Theatre staging of William Gillette’s 1894 farce and starring Joseph Cotten, Virginia Nicolson, Arlene Francis, Mary Wickes, John Houseman, and Welles, was discovered in Italy, and it has now been edited by William Hohauser and is being screened for the first time ever at Film Forum; the February 2 show is sold out, so they’ve added a special encore presentation on February 5, with the film, as originally intended, serving as prologues to live theatrical readings by the Film Forum Players (Carl Wallnau, Yelena Shmulenson, Jacqueline Sydney, Bob Ader, Karen Sklaire, Ben Rauch, Jonathan Smith), directed by Allen Lewis Rickman and with live music by Steve Sterner (you can see the unedited footage here).

AMERICAN SNIPER

Best Actor nominee Bradley Cooper takes aim in Clint Eastwood’s controversial AMERICAN SNIPER

AMERICAN SNIPER (Clint Eastwood, 2014)
In theaters now
www.americansnipermovie.com

Three dozen years ago, I remember being blown away by Alan Parker’s Midnight Express, the supposedly true story of Billy Hayes, a New York City native busted for smuggling hash into Turkey in 1970 who ended up escaping from prison five years later. Although the film was based on Hayes’s book, it took liberties with the truth, turning Hayes into a heroic figure and inventing nonexistent characters; Hayes was particularly disappointed with the depiction of the Turkish people in the film. “My problem with the movie is there are no good Turks in it,” he said years later, pointing out that in reality he had made several good Turkish friends. “All the Turks in Midnight Express are bad. . . . It’s all very one-dimensional.” In 2004, screenwriter Oliver Stone apologized for his embellishments. “It’s true I overdramatized the script,” Stone said in Istanbul. “For years, I heard that Turkish people were angry with me, and I didn’t feel safe there.” Filmmakers are always given a certain amount of poetic license, but when does it become too much? The Midnight Express scenario ran through my mind shortly after seeing American Sniper, Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-nominated film about Chris Kyle, based on the Navy SEAL’s memoir about his multiple tours overseas, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History. It’s a tense, expertly made thriller about a sharpshooter who is compelled by the events of 9/11 to join the military and defend his country and democracy. Bradley Cooper is mesmerizing as Kyle, making viewers watch him as closely as he watches his targets. Cooper, who has been nominated for an Oscar three years in a row now, following nods for Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle — he might also find himself up for a Tony for his bravura performance in The Elephant Man on Broadway, furthering confirming him as one of America’s finest actors — is especially effective when depicting the PTSD that deeply affected Kyle.

AMERICAN SNIPER controversy is reminiscent of complaints about MIDNIGHT EXPRESS

However, the film, written by Jason Hall, has come under attack for playing hard and loose with the facts and fomenting racial hatred, jingoistically creating a world in which all Americans are good, all Arabs are bad, with nothing in between. Kyle is no longer here to defend himself, but his book speaks volumes, as he refers to Iraqis as “savages” and “evil.” There have been many articles that have compared the book with the movie, and the differences are striking. The opening scene itself sets the stage for what is to come; in the book, this prologue is titled “Evil in the Crosshairs.” Kyle is on a rooftop as a troop of Marines move into a small Iraqi town. In the movie, a young woman and a boy appear on the street, carrying a Russian grenade; Kyle must decide whether to shoot the woman and the boy, a frightening choice for anyone to make. He ultimately kills them both. However, in the book, the woman is carrying a Chinese grenade, and there is no boy at all; he is a complete fiction. But by starting the film by showing that even Iraqi women and children are not to be trusted, Eastwood and Hall — and Cooper, who is also one of the producers — are making all Arabs the enemy.

It’s difficult to say how much is true and how much isn’t; Kyle was suffering from PTSD when he wrote the book, so his memory might have been shaky at times. (His claims of shooting looters in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have been unsubstantiated, and his declaration that all proceeds from the sale of the book would go to veterans charities has been questioned as well.) Kyle’s friend and fellow Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell also wrote a book that was made into a movie, Lone Survivor, that had much of its accuracy debated as well. In December, American Sniper producer Rob Lorenz told the Washington Post, “You have to make choices and skip over some logic in order to fit the story on the screen in a reasonable amount of time.” Meanwhile, the eighty-four-year-old Eastwood told the Toronto Star that all the complaints are “a stupid analysis. . . . It was an important story, but you have to embrace [Kyle’s] philosophy if you’re going to tell a story about him.” So is American Sniper emblematic of a nation split between conservative, hawkish Republicans and liberal, dovelike Democrats? Does it matter that so many facts were changed when the “philosophy” is still intact? Should it be judged merely as a movie by itself, without everyone, including Michael Moore, Seth Rogen, and Bill Maher, analyzing its motives and themes in such detail? Well, it seems that the public, and the Academy of Arts and Sciences, has spoken. The film is breaking box-office records, having grossed more than $270 million worldwide and garnering six Oscar nominations, for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and, tellingly, Best Adapted Screenplay.

JOHN CARPENTER: LOST THEMES

The career of iconoclastic auteur John Carpenter is the focus of a talk and film series at BAM

Who: John Carpenter
What: John Carpenter in conversation with NPR host Brooke Gladstone
Where: BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Peter Jay Sharp Building, 230 Lafayette Ave., 718-636-4100
When: Thursday, February 5, $25-$50, 8:00
Why: Writer, director, and composer John Carpenter discusses his career in film and music, in conjunction with the release of his album John Carpenter’s Lost Themes (Sacred Bones, February 3, 2015) and the BAMcinématek series “John Carpenter: Master of Fear,” which runs February 5-22 and consists of eighteen of Carpenter’s films, including Halloween, The Thing, Assault on Precinct 13, Escape from New York, They Live, and Starman in addition to three films specially selected by Carpenter: Straw Dogs, Sorcerer, and Forbidden Planet.