this week in film and television

NOTHING COMPARES

Sinéad O’Connor explores her past and her legacy in Nothing Compares documentary

NOTHING COMPARES (Kathryn Ferguson, 2022)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, September 23
212-529-6799
www.cinemavillage.com
www.sho.com/nothing-compares

On October 16, 1992, I was at Madison Square Garden for the Bobfest, an all-star concert celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of Bob Dylan’s first album for Columbia Records. The lineup included Johnny and June Carter Cash, Lou Reed, Willie Nelson, Tracy Chapman, Kris Kristofferson, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Chrissie Hynde, Neil Young, George Harrison, and many others. But the thing that most people remember about the one-of-a-kind concert — especially those of us who were there — was the reaction when the one-of-a-kind Sinéad O’Connor took the stage.

Two weeks earlier, the twenty-five-year-old Irish activist singer-songwriter had torn up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live after performing a haunting solo version of Bob Marley’s “War,” a political song whose lyrics come from a 1963 speech by Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie. At MSG, O’Connor was met with an eerie mix of joyous applause and a building, ominous booing. She stood frozen for a moment, then Kristofferson came out and famously told her, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” Instead of playing Dylan’s “I Believe in You,” O’Connor reprised “War,” then exited.

I remember being so upset at how she was treated that I wrote my first and only letter to the editor, which was printed in the Daily News, defending her actions. I quickly received several anti-Semitic phone calls from anonymous “bastards.”

O’Connor’s appearance at the Bobfest serves as the frame for the new Showtime documentary Nothing Compares, opening September 23 at Cinema Village before streaming on the cable channel beginning September 30. The film is appropriately unusual and bends genre traditions, in homage to its iconoclastic subject. Director Kathryn Ferguson focuses on O’Connor’s life and career up to 1993, eschewing all that came after, from more albums and tours to an autobiography and her conversion to Islam. We hear a lot from her first husband, record producer John Reynolds, and about their son, Jake, but no mention is made of her subsequent three marriages and three more children.

O’Connor honestly and unabashedly shares critical insight on pivotal events that influenced who she was and what she became, but her contemporary self is mostly not seen, only heard. It’s not until the very end that we get to see her in the present day, with her band, perform an old song specially chosen for the film. In addition, all the other interviewees, from her music teacher and longtime friend to directors, journalists, and fellow musicians, are also heard but not seen on camera. This is a film about Sinead 1.0.

Sinéad O’Connor belts out an early song in the archival-heavy Nothing Compares

Ferguson (Taking the Waters, Space to Be), who will be at Cinema Village for a Q&A following the 5:00 screening on September 23, keeps the Dublin born and raised O’Connor front and center, in a barrage of archival news clips, family photographs, behind-the-scenes recording footage, staged re-creations, and more (courtesy editor Mick Mahon), as O’Connor delves into the horrible abuse she experienced at the hands of her mother (which was ignored by her father), the poor education she received from nuns, her refusal to get an abortion despite demands from her record company, her condemnation of the church because it was turning its back on pedophilia, her support for mental health programs, her insistence the national anthem not be played before a New Jersey gig, and her boycotting of awards shows because of misogyny and racism in the music industry and society at large.

“There was no therapy when I was growing up. So the reason I got into music was therapy,” she tells Ferguson, who previously directed music videos for O’Connor. “Which is why it was such a shock to become a pop star; it’s not what I wanted. I just wanted to scream.”

The film explores her swift rise from her debut album, 1987’s The Lion and the Cobra, to 1990’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got and 1992’s Am I Not Your Girl?, with detailed looks at such songs as “Troy” (a testament that was her first song truly about herself), “Mandinka,” and “Black Boys on Mopeds.” (The Prince estate did not give Ferguson permission to use “Nothing Compares 2 U” in the film, so we only see the video without hearing the music.) Stardom was not easy for her, but she became an international icon fighting the power, particularly for young girls and women, well ahead of her time. “The powers that be weren’t ready for her,” Chuck D says. Kathleen Hanna was influenced by watching O’Connor’s “feminist performance art” on television — the controversial SNL appearance.

O’Connor resisted being stereotyped or talked down to because she was an attractive woman with a shaved head who liked to dress provocatively, and both her attitude and her looks rattled well-known talk-show hosts thirty years ago.

“I just knew that I didn’t want any man telling me who I could be or what I could be or what to sound like,” she declares. “I came from a patriarchal country where I’m being told everything I can and can’t do because I’m a girl. I figured, well, if I didn’t take it from the system, and I didn’t take it from my daddy, I ain’t taking it from anybody else.”

O’Connor’s voice today is deep and mature, not immediately recognizable. She makes no apologies for the choices she made, and she remains firm in her beliefs in fighting social injustice. Her legacy shines through, even given the difficult times, which continue. She offers a compelling, profoundly personal explanation about why she ripped up the photograph of the pope and shares her thoughts on how she came to be regarded as a powerful, influential public figure.

“I didn’t mean to be strong. I wasn’t thinking to myself, I must be strong. I didn’t know I was strong,” she says. “I did suffer through a lot because everybody felt it was okay to kick the shit out of me. I regret that I was so sad because of it. I regret that, that I spent so many years very isolated and lonely, really.”

The song she was scheduled to sing at the Bobfest, “I Believe in You” from 1978’s Slow Train Coming, contains the following stanza: “They show me to the door / They say don’t come back no more / ’Cause I don’t be like they’d like me to / And I walk out on my own / A thousand miles from home / But I don’t feel alone / ’Cause I believe in you.” After all these years, O’Connor is still doing things her own way, not about to be shown to the door by anyone.

THE CAAN FILM FESTIVAL

James Caan puffs on a cigar in Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket

THE CAAN FILM FESTIVAL
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
September 16 – October 9
718-777-6800
movingimage.us

“Actors have bodyguards and entourages not because anybody wants to hurt them — who would want to hurt an actor? — but because they want to get recognized. God forbid someone doesn’t recognize them,” James Caan once said. He might not have been after fame and fortune, but he quickly became one of the most recognizable men in Hollywood history.

There was an outpouring of grief when Caan died this past July at the age of eighty-two. The Bronx-born, Sunnyside-raised actor appeared in more than ninety films and two dozen television shows, and when he was onscreen, it was impossible to take your eyes off him; he commanded the audience’s attention whether he was the star or making a cameo. Despite his critical and popular success, he was nominated for only one Oscar, for The Godfather, and one Emmy, for Brian’s Song.

The Killer Elite is part of MoMI tribute to James Caan

The Museum of the Moving Image pays tribute to Caan with its fourth not-quite-annual Caan Film Festival, running September 16 to October 9 and consisting of twelve of his films, from Howard Hawks’s 1966 El Dorado with John Wayne and Robert Mitchum and Curtis Harrington’s 1967 Games to Wes Anderson’s 1996 Bottle Rocket and Jon Favreau’s 203 Elf. Caan is his trademark tough guy with a conscience in Sam Peckinpah’s 1975 The Killer Elite, Michael Mann’s 1981 Thief, and Karel Reisz’s intense 1974 The Gambler while showing other sides of himself in Mark Rydell’s 1977 Harry and Walter Go to New York, Rob Reiner’s 1990 Misery, Rydell’s 1973 Cinderella Liberty, and Graham Baker’s 1988 Alien Nation, in which he teams up with a cop from another planet. It all kicks off with The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 masterpiece that is as powerful as ever, as is Caan’s blazing performance as Sonny Corleone, the role he will always be most recognized for, entourage or not.

MILOŠ FORMAN 90

MILOŠ FORMAN 90
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
September 9-22
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

Upon the death of master Czech filmmaker Miloš Forman in 2018 at the age of eighty-six, film curator and producer Irena Kovarova wrote in Czech Film magazine, “When Miloš Forman was a young boy, he and his parents dressed up in their Sunday best and headed over to the cinema in Čáslav for the future filmmaker’s first moviegoing experience. They took their seats and the opera Bartered Bride began on screen — as a silent film. In Forman’s telling of this story, he would always pause when delivering the paradox of this moment. Then he would continue, revealing that to his great delight, the audience, knowing the opera by heart, began to sing along. From that moment on, cinema was forever fixed in his mind as a communal experience. Miloš Forman was a remarkable storyteller. For the screen and in person. You’d hear him tell the same stories from his career on many occasions, but you’d never see him bored with his own words. They were perfectly crafted and he was incredibly generous with his audience. He knew the story worked and he was there to bring his listeners joy with his delivery, which in turn warmed his heart. He was a man larger than life: his baritone voice strong, and his r’s rolled and resounding. One believed when in his presence that his first love was for people, and he made sure that everyone around him could feel it.”

Miloš Forman celebration at Film Forum takes off with Taking Off

Kovarova is serving as the consultant on the Film Forum series “Miloš Forman 90,” celebrating the ninetieth anniversary of the director’s birth in Caslav. The two-week festival consists of all twelve of his feature films, from 1964’s Black Peter to 2006’s Goya’s Ghosts, in addition to several documentaries (Czechoslovakia, 1967) and Alfréd Radok’s 1956 Old Man Motor Car, in which Forman makes a brief appearance. Radok was a major influence on Forman; the two went on to work together at the multimedia theater company Laterna Magika.

The series boasts such beloved classics as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ragtime, and Amadeus in addition to Man on the Moon, Hair, and Valmont. Kovarova will introduce the September 15 showing of Audition, the September 17 screenings of Old Man Motor Car The Firemen’s Ball, and the September 20 screening of Věra Chytilová’s 1982 documentary, Chytilová versus Forman. Producer Michael Hausman will introduce the 1968 counterculture favorite Taking Off (starring Buck Henry!) on September 9 at 8:30; screenwriter Michael Weller will introduce Ragtime on September 11 at 3:40; screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski will introduce the 6:00 screening of Man on the Moon on September 12 and, on the same day, participate in a Q&A following the 8:30 screening of The People vs. Larry Flynt; producer Paul Zaentz will introduce the September 16 screening of Amadeus and the September 19 screening of Goya’s Ghosts.

THE BENGALI

Fatima Shaik searches for a critical piece of family history in The Bengali

THE BENGALI (Kavery Kaul, 2021)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, September 9
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com
www.thebengalifilm.com

“Why would anybody come from the other side of the world to find somebody who doesn’t even exist anymore?” author Fatima Shaik says at the beginning of The Bengali. “Why not?” asks Kolkata-born American director Kavery Kaul. Armed with a partial ship’s registry and a photograph of her grandfather, Shaik Mohamed Musa, who left his small village in India in 1893 to make a new life in the United States, in New Orleans, where he married a Black woman, Fatima travels to her ancestral country, wanting to know more about where she came from and to see a patch of land that he owned. Joined by Kaul, who is Bengali, and cinematographer John Russell Foster, who is white, they have very little information and face roadblock after roadblock until success is in reach, but everywhere she goes, Fatima is met with resistance, as Indians view her with suspicion, thinking that she, a Christian in a Muslim community, might be there to reclaim her grandfather’s land.

The Bengali is an emotional, deeply personal search for identity, almost to the point of obsession, of seeking out one’s family history in a land where you don’t speak the language and are not immediately welcome. The film opens at the Quad on September 9, with Kaul (Cuban Canvas, Long Way from Home) participating in Q&As following the 7:00 screenings on September 9 and 10 and after the 5:10 show on September 11.

MONTHLY CLASSICS: KILL!

Tatsuya Nakadai has a ball in Kihachi Okamoto’s campy Eastern Western

KILL! (KIRU) (Kihachi Okamoto, 1968)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, September 2, $15, 7:00
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

Kihachi Okamoto’s Kill! is a goofy, fun Eastern Spaghetti Western, loaded with references to other samurai flicks. If some of it feels familiar, that’s because it is based on Shūgorō Yamamoto’s novel Peaceful Days, which was also turned into Akira Kurosawa’s 1962 Asian oater Sanjuro, though with significant changes. But this time around, it’s played more for laughs. Tatsuya Nakadai, one of the main villains in both Sanjuro and Yojimbo, stars as former samurai Genta, a laid-back dude who gets caught up in the middle of an inner struggle of a split clan (one group of which contains seven rogue samurai). He meets up with former peasant farmer Hanjiro (Etsushi Takahashi), who dreams of becoming a brave samurai and involves himself in the same battle, though on an opposing side. As the plot grows more impossible to follow, with lots of betrayals, double crosses, would-be yakuza, and romantic jealousy, so does the riotous relationship between Genta and Hanjiro. Masaru Sato’s score is fab as well. Another example of Okamoto’s (The Sword of Doom, Rainbow Kids) mastery of multiple genres, Kill! is screening September 2 at 7:00 as part of Japan Society’s ongoing “Monthly Classics” series, which continues October 7 with Hideo Nakata’s unforgettable Ringu.

ROAD TRIP: INHERENT VICE

Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix reveal that opposites attract in Inherent Vice

INHERENT VICE (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
August 27, 28, 31
Series continues through September 1
212-660-0312
www.inherentvicemovie.com
metrograph.com

It makes sense that award-winning writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, who has made such complex, challenging films as Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, Licorice Pizza, and The Master, made the first cinematic adaptation of a novel by reclusive, iconoclastic author Thomas Pynchon, who has written such complex, challenging books as Gravity’s Rainbow, V., and Vineland. It also makes sense that the book he chose to adapt is Inherent Vice, probably the most lighthearted and breezy of Pynchon’s tomes. But it also makes sense that the film itself is complex and challenging — and downright confusing. Walking out of the theater, we were pretty sure we liked what we had just seen, even if we didn’t completely understand what had happened. (As Jena Malone said of the making of the film, “The logic becomes the chaos and the chaos becomes the logic.”)

The neonoir takes place in 1970 in the fictional Valley town of Gordita Beach (based on Manhattan Beach, where Pynchon lived for a long time). Joaquin Phoenix stars as Larry “Doc” Sportello, a mutton-chopped ex-hippie who is now a private gumshoe working out of a health clinic. One day his ex, Shasta Fay Hepworth (a transplendent Katherine Waterston), shows up to ask him to get her out of a jam involving her billionaire boyfriend, Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), who has gone missing, perhaps at the hands of Wolfmann’s high-society wife, Sloane (Serena Scott Thomas). Meanwhile, Doc is also hired by Hope Harlingen (Malone) to determine whether her supposedly dead husband, surf-sax legend Coy (Owen Wilson), is actually alive. As Pynchon himself says in the book trailer, “At that point, it gets sort of peculiar,” and peculiar it does indeed get, as Doc becomes immersed in a web of lies and deceit, dealing with a dangerous cult known as the Golden Fang (where Martin Short plays a sex-crazed dentist with a wild abandon), a curious health facility called the Chryskylodon Institute run by Dr. Threeply (Jefferson Mays), and Det. Bigfoot Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), a “renaissance cop” who has no time for any of Doc’s hippie crap, as the Manson murders hover over everything. Well, at least that’s what we think the plot is about.

Doc (Joaquin Phoenix) and Bigfoot (Josh Brolin) don’t agree on much in Paul Thomas Anderson adaptation of Thomas Pynchon novel

As with all Anderson films, Inherent Vice looks and sounds great; cinematographer Robert Elswit, who has shot most of Anderson’s works, bathes the quirky drama in hazy, syrupy colors, while Jonny Greenwood’s score is accompanied by songs by Can, Sam Cooke, Minnie Riperton, the Marketts, and Neil Young. (In fact, Young’s Journey through the Past experimental film served as an influence on Anderson when making Inherent Vice, as did David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker’s Police Squad and Naked Gun series, Robert Altman’s 1973 Philip Marlowe movie The Long Goodbye, and Howard Hawks’s 1946 version of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.) It all has the feel of the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski as reinterpreted by Anderson and Pynchon — who might have been on-set during at least some of the shooting and supposedly makes a cameo in the picture. The film is littered with absurdist jokes and oddities, from the way Bigfoot eats a chocolate-covered banana to a trio of FBI agents picking their noses, from the right-wing Vigilant California organization to a clip from the 1952 Cold War propaganda film Red Nightmare.

Phoenix once again fully inhabits his character, who putt-putts around in an old Dodge Dart and just wants life to be mellow and groovy. Brolin is hysterical as his foil, the straitlaced, flattop cop who has a penchant for busting down doors. The large cast also includes Benicio del Toro as Sauncho Smilax, Doc’s too-cool lawyer; Reese Witherspoon as Penny Kimball, Doc’s well-coiffed girlfriend; Maya Rudolph (Anderson’s real-life partner and the daughter of Riperton) as receptionist Petunia Leeway; Sasha Pieterse as Japonica Fenway, who hangs with Golden Fang dentist Rudy Blatnoyd (Short); and Joanna Newsom as Sortilège, the film’s narrator (who does not appear in the book). Inherent Vice is yet another unique cinematic experience from Anderson, one that is likely to take multiple viewings to understand just what is going on, but as with his previous films, it is likely to be well worth the investment.

Inherent Vice is screening August 27-31 in the Metrograph series “Road Trip: American Cinema from Coast to Coast,” which continues through September 1 with such other on-the-move flicks as Matt Cimber’s The Witch Who Came in from the Sea, Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles, Clint Eastwood’s Play Misty for Me, Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way, Wayne Wang’s Chan Is Missing, and Paul Schrader’s Hardcore.

THREE MINUTES — A LENGTHENING

Three minutes of footage tell a remarkable story in documentary

THREE MINUTES: A LENGTHENING (Bianca Stigter, 2021)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
August 18-25
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com
www.threeminutesfilm.com

“For the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk in Poland, nothing remains,” narrator Helena Bonham Carter says in Bianca Stigter’s astounding documentary, Three Minutes — A Lengthening. “The only thing left is an absence.”

In 1938, David and Liza Kurtz, Polish immigrants who had come to New York in the 1890s and found success, took a trip to Europe, where they visited Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, France, and England, on the cusp of the Holocaust. In an unusual move for Americans making a Grand Tour, they visited David’s hometown of Nasielsk in Eastern Europe that August. There, David used his brand-new movie camera to shoot footage in 16mm Kodachrome and black-and-white of the men, women, and children of the village, smiling, goofing around, and preening, of course unaware of what was to come in a very short time.

In 2009, David and Liza’s grandson Glenn Kurtz donated the three minutes of footage to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, for preservation and research. The museum posted it online, hoping that perhaps some of the people in the film could be identified. Glenn further researched the excerpt for four years, detailing his journey in the 2014 book Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film.

“Nasielsk was not an important town, unless you lived there. It was just a town,” Kurtz explains in the documentary. “But of all the Polish towns destroyed in the Holocaust, Nasielsk is among the very few that exists in moving pictures, among just a handful preserved in color.”

In 2015, Dutch historian and cultural critic Stigter made a short work-in-progress film based on the footage (Three Minutes Thirteen Minutes Thirty Minutes), and now she has expanded it into her feature-length debut, Three Minutes — A Lengthening, opening August 18 at the Quad. It’s a haunting investigation of time and memory that focuses exclusively on the 180+ seconds of David Kurtz’s Nasielsk footage; there are no other images in the seventy-minute film. Stigter and editor Katharina Wartena perform a kind of forensic analysis of each moment, zooming in on specific individuals or locations, trying to figure out the name of a grocery store, even determining what kind of trees lined the cobblestone square, understanding that anything could provide critical information.

The style of the film is reminiscent of what filmmaker Peter Greenaway did with Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, and Veronese’s Wedding at Cana, fantastically close examinations of every face and detail on the canvases, but the subjects of Three Minutes are all too real.

“These three minutes of life were taken out of the flow of time,” Bonham Carter says. That becomes particularly apparent when thirteen-year-old Maurice Chandler, born Mozek Tuchendler, is recognized by a family member, and Stigter visits him in Detroit; we hear him as he watches the footage, remembering some of the other residents and telling a charming story of some trouble he and a friend got into one day.

The only misstep, and a minor one at that, is a section in which Stigter slowly fills the screen with thumbnails of every face in the footage; while the point is to give each individual their own moment of identity, proof of their existence, it takes away from the overall flow of the film and its compelling detective-procedural-style pacing. However, stick around to the end of the credits for a little bonus.

Although Stigter, who previously served as an associate producer on Widows and Twelve Years a Slave, both directed by her husband, Steve McQueen, who is a co-producer on Three Minutes, speaks with Kurtz, Chandler, survivor Andrzej Lubieniecki, historian Zdzisław Suwiński, translator Katarzyna Kacprzak, and two of Chandler’s relatives, they are never shown; this film is about the three thousand people who lived in Nasielsk in 1938, fewer than a hundred of whom survived the Nazi invasion. It’s also about all such Eastern European Jewish towns that were decimated in the Holocaust.

“By defining the loss of that world, we might succeed in keeping the memory alive,” Kurtz says. In addition, it’s about the power of the medium of film, how it can capture the past and preserve culture and history that might have otherwise disappeared forever. Stigter has noted that there were other surprising elements that she could have pursued, some of which are included in Kurtz’s book, but she wanted to concentrate solely on what could be discovered and interpreted from the celluloid itself.

Last year, Ruth Katcher, a colleague of mine, found 8mm footage of her family holding a Passover seder in Philadelphia in April 1932, led by her great-grandfather, who, with his wife and children in 1906, had fled Donetsk in what is now Eastern Ukraine. It is a remarkable three-and-a-half-minute scene, which she discusses in an article in the Forward. “The film has special resonance, showing nearly the last seder with the family intact,” Katcher writes.

After experiencing Three Minutes, don’t be surprised if you find yourself going through closets and basements, looking for recorded remnants of your family’s past.

Stigter and Kurtz will participate in a series of Q&As following screenings on August 18, 19, 20 (all at 7:00) and 21 (2:00), moderated by Dr. Ori Z. Soltes, Aviva Slesin, or Annette Insdorf. The film will also be presented September 8 and 12 at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan.