Who: Kelli Maroney (Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Night of the Comet), Tony O’Dell (Head of the Class), Russell Todd (Another World), Barbara Crampton (Re-Animator, Castle Freak), and Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov (Eating Raoul, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School) in cult classic
What: Chopping Mall (Jim Wynorski, 1986)
Where: Nitehawk Cinema, 136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave., 718-384-3980
When: Friday, December 19, and Saturday, December 20, $11, 12:15 am
Why: Nitehawk Cinema’s December Midnite: Xmas Chopping series concludes with a premonition of the future that became Black Friday
this week in film and television
SEE IT BIG! ANIMATION: CORALINE IN 3-D
Coraline finds a doorway to another dimension in film adapted from popular children’s book
CORALINE (Henry Selick, 2009)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, December 20, free with museum admission, 1:00
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
www.coraline.com
Coraline Jones (voiced by Dakota Fanning) is an adventurous eleven-year-old in search of some fun and excitement in her new creaky home in Oregon. She finds just what she thinks she was looking for when a rodent introduces her to a hidden passageway that leads to an alternate universe, where replicas of her parents (Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman) are more interested in her and give her whatever she wants. However, this button-eyed Other Mother and Other Father have other plans for her and her real family as well. Written and directed by Henry Selick, Coraline lacks the frantic, nonstop energy of his breakthrough film, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, but it is still a fun, creepy trip down the Narnia-esque rabbit hole. Combining his trademark stop-motion animation (James and the Giant Peach) with breathtaking stereoscopic 3-D that adds remarkable depth to the images, Selick does a marvelous job bringing to life the popular children’s novel by Newbery Medal-winning author Neil Gaiman (Sandman), who wrote the book for his young daughters. (Full disclosure: In another part of our life, we work for the company that publishes Gaiman’s children’s books, including Coraline.) The supporting cast of characters includes former music-hall divas Miss Spink and Miss Forcible (the Absolutely Fabulous British comedy team of Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French), the wise Cat (Keith David), mouse circus leader Mr. Bobinsky (Ian McShane), and local boy Wybie Lovat (Robert Bailey Jr.), who was created specifically for the movie. Be sure to stick around for one last cool 3-D effect at the end of the credits. Coraline is screening in 3-D on December 20 at 1:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “See It Big! Animation” series, which continues through December 28 with such other recent feature-length animated flicks as Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Parronaud’s Persepolis, Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, Brad Bird’s Ratatouille, and Satoshi Kon’s Paprika.
SEE IT BIG! ANIMATION: PERSEPOLIS
Animated PERSEPOLIS is part of free “Films on the Green” series, screening July 13 in Riverside Park
PERSEPOLIS (Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud, 2007)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Friday, December 19, $12, 7:00
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
www.sonypictures.com
France’s official selection for the 2007 Academy Awards, Persepolis brings to animated life Marjane Satrapi’s stunning graphic novels. Codirected by Satrapi and comic-book artist Vincent Paronnaud, Persepolis tells Satrapi’s harrowing life story as she comes of age during the Islamic Revolution in Iran in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Raised in a well-off activist family, she fights against many of the country’s crippling mores and laws, particularly those that treat women as second-class citizens, trapping them in their veils, denying them any kind of individual freedom. But the progressive Satrapi (voiced first by Gabrielle Lopes, then Chiara Mastroianni) continually gets into trouble as she speaks her mind, experiments with sex, and refuses to play by her country’s repressive rules. Satrapi and Paronnaud do an outstanding job of adapting the books’ black-and-white panels for the big screen, maintaining her unique style and emotional breadth. The first part of the film is excellent as the precocious teenager who talks to God learns about life in some very harsh ways. Unfortunately, the second half gets bogged down in Satrapi’s failures as an adult, focusing too much on her myriad personal problems and taking away the bigger picture that made the first part so entertaining as well as educational. Still, it’s a story worth telling, and well worth seeing. (Interestingly, since the film, which is in French, is subtitled in English, the audience ends up reading it similarly to the way they read the graphic novel.) The closing-night selection of the 2007 New York Film Festival, Persepolis also features the voices of Catherine Deneuve as Marjane’s mother, Danielle Darrieux as her grandmother, Simon Akbarian as her father, and François Jerosme as her radical uncle Anouche. Persepolis is screening on December 19 at 7:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “See It Big! Animation” series, which continues through December 28 with such other recent feature-length animated flicks as Marjane Satrapi and Henry Selick’s Coraline 3-D, Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, Brad Bird’s Ratatouille, and Satoshi Kon’s Paprika.
A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS 50th ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION WITH LIVE MUSIC
Charlie Brown and Linus discuss Christmas in classic holiday special (courtesy of Lee Mendelson and Bill Melendez Productions © 2014 Peanuts Worldwide LLC)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Saturday, December 20, 11:00 am & 1:30 pm, and Sunday, December 21, 2:00 & 4:00 pm, $40-$80 (includes museum admission)
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org
www.peanuts.com
First broadcast on television on December 9, 1965, A Charlie Brown Christmas has been a holiday staple for fifty years, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art is celebrating that half century of existential Christmas depression, commercialism, and faith with the special presentation “A Charlie Brown Christmas 50th Anniversary Celebration with Live Music.” “I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus,” Charlie tells his thumb-sucking, blanket-gripping best friend at the beginning of the cartoon. “Christmas is coming, but I’m not happy. I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel.” On December 20 and 21, the Met will make everyone feel a whole lot better by screening the delightful show in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium with the Rob Schwimmer Trio and the Church of the Heavenly Rest Children’s Choir playing live, reinterpreting the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s magical jazz score. Following the twenty-five-minute tale — which was written by Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, directed by Walt Disney Studios and Warner Bros. veteran Bill Melendez, and features the voices of Peter Robbins as Charlie Brown, Chris Shea as Linus, Tracy Stratford as Lucy, Kathy Steinberg as Sally, and Melendez as Snoopy — Schwimmer and Mark Stewart will lead a holiday sing-along. Tickets, which range from $40 to $80, include museum admission, so you can also check out the Met’s Christmas Tree and Neapolitan Baroque Crèche.
THE ART OF SEX AND SEDUCTION: THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN
Bertrand Morane (Charles Denner) keeps his eyes on he prize in François Truffaut’s THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN
CINÉSALON: THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN (L’HOMME QUI AIMAIT LES FEMMES) (François Truffaut, 1977)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, December 16, $13, 7:30
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org
Back in October, a Hollaback! video went viral showing a young woman walking through New York City as men harassed her by calling out suggestively to her, looking luridly at her, and even following her. It’s hard not to think about that video, posted by a nonprofit “dedicated to ending street harassment,” when watching François Truffaut’s 1977 film, The Man Who Loved Women. As Maurice Jaubert’s bright, cheery score plays, a string of women get out of their cars to attend a funeral. The hearse drives past the camera — just as cinematographer Nestor Almendros’s name flashes on the screen — and holds for a few seconds as Truffaut himself watches the hearse go by, then walks off in the other direction. “One funeral is just like another,” Geneviève (Brigitte Fossey) says in voice-over. “However, this one is special. Not a man in sight. Only women . . . nothing but women.” They have all gathered to say farewell to Bertrand Morane (Charles Denner), a man obsessed with the fairer sex, particularly when he sees their bare ankles and calves. He goes to great lengths to find them, to be with them, but he is no mere ladies’ man or womanizing misogynist seeking to add notches to his belt. Deeply affected by his rather offbeat relationship with his mother (Marie-Jeanne Montfajon), he finds it impossible to stop these constant urges. He works in a lab building and testing model airplanes for the military, still a child playing with toys. He is not a particular handsome man, nor is he that dapper or charming, but there is something in his eyes, in his mannerisms, that make him surprisingly desirable to the opposite sex. He is after more than just physical pleasure, but it always remains just out of his grasp, leaving an empty hole inside that he tries to fill by writing a book about his numerous exploits and endless search for happiness, a journey that ends with his premature death.
Bertrand Morane (Charles Denner) decides to share his love of women with the rest of the world
Truffaut, who based some situations in the film on his own life with women and his mother, fills The Man Who Loved Women with a bevy of beauties, including Nelly Borgeaud, Geneviève Fontanel, Valérie Bonnier, Nathalie Baye, and Leslie Caron. But The Man Who Loved Women is not just about eye candy, even with the nudity; it’s about the search for true love, as evidenced by a late scene between Bertrand and former flame Véra (Caron). It’s also about the art of storytelling itself, told in flashback and, in the second half, focusing on Bertrand’s book, with a stream of clever self-references linking cinema and literature. Denner, who previously starred in Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black, has an uncanny way of making us root for him despite the sheer political incorrectness of his raison d’être; The Man Who Loved Women is probably not on Hollaback!’s Christmas wish list. But as crafted by screenwriters Truffaut, Michel Fermaud, and Suzanne Schiffman, the film, which is set in the pretty city of Montpellier in the south of France, portrays Bertrand as a kind of romantic antihero, an everyman who is fully aware of what he is doing but just can’t stop it. The film was remade in 1983 by Blake Edwards with Burt Reynolds, Julie Andrews, and Kim Basinger, but it’s not the same, of course. Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women, which earned César nominations for Denner, Borgeaud, and Fontanel, concludes the French Institute Alliance Française CinéSalon series “The Art of Sex and Seduction” on December 16 at 7:30, introduced by cultural critic Laura Kipnis.
NAM JUNE PAIK: BECOMING ROBOT
Nam June Paik, “Family of Robot: Father” and “Family of Robot: Mother,” single-channel video sculptures with vintage television and radio casings and monitors, tuner, liquid crystal display, color, silent, 1986 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Asia Society Museum
725 Park Ave. at 70th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 4, $12, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm (free Fridays 6:00 – 9:00)
212-288-6400
www.asiasociety.org
www.paikstudios.com
I was on the subway late last week, reading one of the chapters in the “Nam June Paik: Becoming Robot” catalog for the splendid exhibition at Asia Society, when I looked up and saw an ad for a company that proclaimed, “The most powerful inventions are playful. . . . The most playful inventions are powerful,” touting a robot head, a remote pet feeder, and a synthar. The advertisement made me immediately think of the life and work of Paik, who instilled his highly technological, often futuristic sculptures, musical compositions, videos, drawings, installations, and live performances with an innate playfulness. If you’re not ready, willing, and able to have fun with the innovative, visionary Paik, then don’t bother going to Asia Society, because the exhibit, which continues through January 4, is nothing if not a whole lot of fun. The chapter I was reading on the subway was “Ok, Let’s Go to Blimpies: Talking about Nam June Paik,” a lively, informative, and, yes, playful discussion between museum director Melissa Chiu, former Paik studio manager Jon Huffman, former Paik studio assistant Stephen Vitiello, and Paik’s nephew, Ken Hakuta, that gets to the very essence of the international artist. Paik, who was born in Korea in 1932, moved to Hong Kong, studied in Japan, and lived and worked in Germany and New York, was way ahead of his time as he experimented with electronic music and images, television circuitry, and robots that could go to the bathroom, but with a unique, personal, warm touch that predated cell phones, social media, and interactive video games. “He wanted to redefine television [not as a] passive object, but [as] an object that we interact with,” Vitiello, who is a multimedia artist in his own right, says in the catalog. “We control our destiny. He was a humanist; he wanted to humanize everything, and technology was just a way of getting more time in which we could make better artwork, better software, have better lives.”
Nam June Paik, “TV Bra for Living Sculpture,” cello, two television sets, microphone, amplifiers, deflection coils, “fussbedienungsgerate,” cables, 1975 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The exhibition consists of more than five dozen sculptures, photographs, writings, videos, and other ephemera from throughout Paik’s career. The centerpiece is “Robot K-456,” Paik’s first automated, remote-control-operated, hermaphrotidic robot, which initially could poop beans. (It seems to have lost this function after being purposely hit by a car as part of a major 1982 show at the Whitney.) Also on display is “Family of Robot,” a mother, father, and baby created out of television monitors that blast images across their screens; “Golden Buddha,” a statue watching itself on television (and on which visitors can see themselves as well); “TV Chair,” which features a surveillance camera above and a monitor on the seat; a pair of antique television cabinets on which he has drawn over the surface; a robot brain in a glass dome; and “Three Camera Participation / Participation TV,” which gets a room unto itself, inviting everyone to see colorful, psychedelic projections of themselves in a far corner.
Nam June Paik, “Golden Buddha,” video installation with twenty-seven-inch monitor and closed circuit video camera, painted bronze Buddha with the artist’s additions in permanent oil marker, 2005 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Perhaps most fascinatingly, “Becoming Robot” explores the artistic relationship between Paik and classically trained cellist Charlotte Moorman, who would play topless or wearing Paik’s “TV Bra for Living Sculpture” or “Light Bikini.” The show documents various performances, includes a room of many of Moorman’s outfits, and delves into her arrest for indecent exposure while playing Paik’s Opera Sextronique. Nudity also play a role in “Reclining Buddha,” a stone sculpture of a female Buddha relaxing on her side, right hand holding up her head in a classic pose, atop a pair of color monitors depicting a real naked woman in the same position; nearby is a collection of Paik’s decidedly childlike toys. And be sure to allow extra time to watch clips from Paik’s 1984 satellite installation, Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, a different kind of variety show with Moorman, Laurie Anderson, Peter Gabriel, Allen Ginsberg, Merce Cunningham, Philip Glass, and Joseph Beuys, as well as a sampling of Paik’s live performances. In his 1966 Great Bear Pamphlet, “Manifestos,” Paik declared, “Cybernated art is very important, but art for cybernated life is more important, and the latter need not be cybernated.” Eight years later, Paik coined the phrase “electronic superhighway.” As “Becoming Robot” so ably shows, Paik was at the crossroads of technology and culture long before the rest of us, predicting a world that would become obsessed with broadcasting personal information and images on handheld devices that resemble their own personal television stations. All the while, though, he remained philosophical and hopeful about the future, deeply serious about his work but intent on incorporating an intoxicating playfulness that is just plain fun — and decidedly human.
CONCERNING VIOLENCE: NINE SCENES FROM THE ANTI-IMPERIALISTIC SELF-DEFENSE
Documentary uses Swedish archival footage and the words of Frantz Fanon to tell story of colonization and decolonization
CONCERNING VIOLENCE (Göran Hugo Olsson, 2014)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at Third St.
December 5-11
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.facebook.com/concerningviolence
Swedish filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson brings physician and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s seminal 1961 book, The Wretched of the Earth, to bold, vivid life in the empowering documentary Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense. “Every one of us must think for himself — always provided that he thinks at all; for in Europe today, stunned as she is by the blows received by France, Belgium, or England, even to allow your mind to be diverted, however slightly, is as good as being the accomplice in the crime of colonialism,” French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in the lengthy preface to the book. For Concerning Violence, Olsson called on Columbia University professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to provide a heavily academic introduction, setting the stage for nine examples of the relationship between settlers and natives, Europeans and Africans, in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. As he did with his previous film, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, Olsson uses amazing footage taken by Swedish journalists, including interviews with Christian missionaries, Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe, reporter Gaetano Pagano, Burkina Faso president Thomas Sankara, black revolutionaries, and privileged white men, combining those stunning images with strong statements from Fanon’s treatise, read by Ms. Lauryn Hill and blasted across the screen in big letters. “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence,” Hill states in a steady voice. “Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon. Decolonization is a historical process. It cannot be understood, it cannot become clear to itself except by the movements which give it historical form and content. Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder.”
The nine “chapters” take viewers to Angola, Rhodesia, Liberia, Tanzania, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and other current or former African nations, examining institutional racism, wealth and poverty, illegal imprisonment, guerrilla revolutions, the IMF, and the lurking “monster” that is the United States. It draws a brutal, powerful picture that pulls no punches, with expert use of archival footage never seen outside of Sweden. “There is no native who does not dream at least once a day of setting himself up in the settler’s place,” Ms. Hill reads, the words still ringing true today as riots and protests spread throughout the United States and civil wars continue in Africa and other continents. More than fifty years after its publication, The Wretched of the Earth is still a call to action, albeit one steeped in violence, as one can debate how much things have really changed. “The films in the Swedish Archive might have been part of a patronizing perspective at the time, but thirty years later, we think they reveal something important about this time to Europeans, Americans, and Africans — as well as others across the world who have been on either side of colonization, or are experiencing it now,” Olsson points out in his director’s statement. Concerning Violence opens December 5 at the IFC Center, with Olsson participating in Q&As following the 6:00 shows on Friday and Saturday.