this week in film and television

THE CONTENDERS 2014: 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)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Sunday, November 30, 2:00
Series runs through January 16
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
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 (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. Boyhood is screening November 30 at 2:00 in MoMA’s annual series “The Contenders” and will be followed by a Q&A with Linklater and Hawke. The series, which consists of films the institution believes will stand the test of time, continues with such other 2014 works as Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (followed by a discussion with star Tilda Swinton), Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner, and Isao Takahata’s The Tale of Princess Kaguya.

SUNSHINE NOIR: IN A LONELY PLACE

Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart in IN A LONELY PLACE

Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart encounter some difficulties in Beverly Hills in Nicholas Ray’s IN A LONELY PLACE

IN A LONELY PLACE (Nicholas Ray, 1950)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Saturday, November 29, 2:00 & 7:00
Series runs November 26 – December 9
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Humphrey Bogart stars in Nicholas Ray’s powerful, intense film about a cynical Hollywood screenwriter with a violent side. Dixon Steele (Bogart, in one of his strongest performances) is asked to write a screenplay based on a pulpy romance he has little interest in, so he brings home a coat-check girl (Martha Stewart) who has read the book so she can tell him the story. The girl turns up dead, and Steele, known for his drunken forays and abuse of women, is the main suspect. Aspiring star Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), who has recently moved into the same Beverly Hills apartment complex, supplies an alibi for Steele, but she might have ulterior motives for doing so. Ray’s moody, introspective gem keeps you guessing until the very end. Ray (They Live by Night, Rebel Without a Cause) was briefly married to Grahame (The Bad and the Beautiful, Oklahoma!); they divorced when she had an affair with Ray’s teenage son, whom she later wed and had two children with. In a Lonely Place is screening November 29 at 2:00 & 7:00 as part of the BAMcinématek series “Sunshine Noir,” a two-week festival being held in conjunction with the Next Wave Festival presentation of Gabriel Kahane’s The Ambassador, a visual and musical exploration of Los Angeles, directed by John Tiffany. The film series runs November 26 – December 9 and includes such other L.A.-set works as Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, Brian De Palma’s Body Double, Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey, Joseph Losey’s remake of M, and Robert Mulligan’s The Nickel Ride.

THE CONTENDERS 2014: MANAKAMANA

A mother and daughter eat ice cream in experimental documentary MANAKAMANA

MANAKAMANA (Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez, 2013)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday, November 26, 7:30
Series runs through January 16
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
www.manakamanafilm.com

If you’re an adventurous filmgoer who likes to be challenged and surprised, the less you know about Pacho Velez and Stephanie Spray’s Manakamana, the better. But if you want to know more, here goes: Evoking such experimental films as Michael Snow’s Wavelength, Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma, and Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests as well as the more narrative works of such unique auteurs as Jim Jarmusch and Abbas Kiarostami, Manakamana is a beautiful, meditative journey that is sure to try your patience at first. The two-hour film, which requires a substantial investment on the part of the audience, takes place in a five-foot-by-five-foot cable car in Nepal that shuttles men, women, and children to and from the historic Manakamana temple, on a pilgrimage to worship a wish-fulfilling Hindu goddess. With Velez operating the stationary Aaton 7 LTR camera — the same one used by Robert Gardner for his 1986 documentary Forest of Bliss — and Spray recording the sound, the film follows a series of individuals and small groups as they either go to or return from the temple, traveling high over the lush green landscape that used to have to be traversed on foot before the cable car was built. A man and his son barely acknowledge each other; a woman carries a basket of flowers on her lap; an elderly mother and her middle-age daughter try to eat melting ice-cream bars; a pair of musicians play their instruments to pass the time.

A heavy metal band takes a picture of themselves in meditative documentary

Each trip has its own narrative, which must be partly filled in by the viewer as he or she studies the people in the cable car and the surroundings, getting continually jolted as the car glides over the joins. The film is a fascinating look into human nature and technological advances in this era of surveillance as the subjects attempt to act as normal as possible even though a camera and a microphone are practically in their faces. Produced at the Sensory Ethnography Laboratory at Harvard, Manakamana consists of eleven uncut shots of ten-to-eleven minutes filmed in 16mm, using rolls whose length roughly equals that of each one-way trip, creating a kind of organic symbiosis between the making and projecting of the work while adding a time-sensitive expectation on the part of the viewer. A film well worth sticking around for till the very end — and one that grows less and less claustrophobic with each scene — Manakamana is screening November 26 at 7:30 as part of MoMA’s annual series “The Contenders,” consisting of films the institution believes will stand the test of time. Among the other films in the series are Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (followed by a Q&A with writer-director Linklater and costar Ethan Hawke), and Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (followed by a discussion with star Tilda Swinton).

MONK WITH A CAMERA

Monk Nicholas “Nicky” Vreeland shares his unique view of the world in engaging documentary

MONK WITH A CAMERA (Tina Mascara & Guido Santi, 2014)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater / Howard Gilman Theater
144/165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
November 21-27
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com
www.monkwithacamera.com

In 1977, Nicholas “Nicky” Vreeland, the playboy grandson of fashion legend Diana Vreeland and the son of U.S. ambassador Frederick “Frecky” Vreeland, began studying Buddhism with Khylongla Rinpoche. He eventually moved to India, became a monk, and led the rebuilding of the Rato Monastery. He shares his life story in the curious, deeply engaging documentary Monk with a Camera. “I don’t know what led me to wish to pursue a spiritual path,” he says early on, dressed in his red Tibetan monk’s robes. “Was I unhappy? No more unhappy than anyone else. I did feel that there was a way, a life outside the sort of normal life. I had some kind of belief that there was something beyond material satisfaction and things like that.” Born into privilege and living life to the fullest, he was a talented amateur photographer experiencing carnal pleasures, speeding down the Champs-Élysées, and using his connections to work with such photographers as Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, But he gave it all up, eventually moving to India to undertake a more philosophical, self-reflective, and celibate existence — in the film he playfully refers to one of his cameras as his girlfriend. Vreeland fell in love with photography at a young age, and he struggles with the attachment he still has with the medium, understanding that it might be a worldly indulgence that goes against his renunciation of earthly delights. But it turns out that his photography ends up playing a major role in the expansion of Rato Monastery.

Nicky Vreeland finds his true calling in MONK WITH A CAMERA

Directors Tina Mascara and Guido Santi, who previously collaborated on Chris & Don: A Love Story, maintain a calm, meditative pace throughout Monk with a Camera, matching Vreeland’s calm, meditative demeanor. Vreeland, resembling a bald, older Steve Carell, walks and talks in carefully measured tones, adding bits of sly humor with his naturally infectious smile. Among those sharing insight into his life are his brother, Alexander Vreeland, who urged him to keep taking photos even after becoming a monk; his stepbrother, writer Ptolemy Tompkins; writer John Avedon, keeper of the Richard Avedon archives; photographer Priscilla Rattazzi; New York magazine design editor Wendy Goodman; his longtime friend and fellow Buddhist, Richard Gere; and his father, who says, “What it was that drove him to spirituality? I’m a person who doesn’t believe that there’s ever one cause for any effect, that there were multiple causes,” before telling a wonderful anecdote about Nicky’s first visit to Dharamsala. The film also includes playful comic-book-style animation by Joe Rothenberg and a lovely scene in which Nicky, Khylongla Rinpoche, and Richard Gere meet with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, who chuckles as he delivers some seriously funny lines. Monk with a Camera is a lovingly told story about one man’s unique relationship with the world, a tale that will have audiences considering their own relationship with such central Buddhist ideals as attachment and impermanence. Monk with a Camera begins a one-week run November 21 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; the 7:20 screenings on Friday and Saturday will be followed by a Q&A with producers, editors, and directors Mascara and Santi and subject Nicky Vreeland, and there will be a Q&A with Vreeland and Gere in the Furman Gallery after the 5:20 screening on Saturday for ticket holders only.

THE CONTENDERS 2014 — NYMPHOMANIAC: EXTENDED DIRECTOR’S CUT

Joe (Stacy Martin) learns about sexual pleasure in Lars von Trier’s controversial NYMPHOMANIAC

NYMPHOMANIAC: EXTENDED DIRECTOR’S CUT (Lars von Trier, 2013)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Sunday, November 23, 2:30
Series runs through January 16
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
www.magpictures.com

When I reviewed Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac earlier this year, when it was released in two separate “volumes,” I wrote, “I certainly would have preferred seeing Nymphomaniac in one complete sitting rather than in two parts, one of which stands head and shoulders above the other (although they do need each other); however, I’m not sure what I’ll do when the five-and-a-half-hour director’s cut is released later this year.” Well, as promised, the extended director’s cut is now available for viewing, being shown November 23 at 2:30 as part of MoMA’s annual series “The Contenders,” consisting of films the institution believes will stand the test of time. What follows is a slightly amended version of my initial review of the first two volumes; there are an additional thirty minutes added to the first part, while the second part now includes what MoMA refers to as “some of the most gruesome and wrenching passages ever seen on film.”

In Breaking the Waves, Danish Dogme 95 cofounder Lars von Trier’s 1996 breakthrough, Stellan Skarsgård plays a paralyzed man who convinces his wife (Emily Watson) to have sexual liaisons with other men and then tell him about the encounters in graphic detail. In von Trier’s latest controversial, polarizing work, Nymphomaniac, Skarsgård stars as Seligman, a single man who takes in a woman named Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who is soon sharing her own sexual adventures with him, in extremely graphic detail. After finding Joe severely beaten in an alley, Seligman nurses her back to health while carefully listening to her life story. She repeatedly says she is a bad, irredeemable human being because of the things she has done, which started to go off the rails when she was a small child discovering the pleasure sensations to be had in her nether regions. Her sordid tale is told in flashbacks, as her younger self (Barking at Trees’ Stacy Martin) goes from lover to lover to lover to lover to lover ad infinitum. (The specific numbers are plastered over the screen.) Along the way, Seligman offers his own interpretation of her life, praising her sense of freedom while comparing her sexuality to fly-fishing, which von Trier (Dancer in the Dark, Melancholia, Antichrist) relates in a playful way that is at first absurdly silly but actually ends up coming together. Unfortunately, however, Martin is far too bland as Joe as she beds victim after victim, including Jerôme (a miscast Shia LaBeouf), perhaps the only one who truly loves her. The film also features Christian Slater and Connie Nielsen as Joe’s parents and Uma Thurman as a scene-stealing wronged wife.

Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) continues her search for sexual pleasure and pain in the second half of NYMPHOMANIAC (photo by Christian Geisnaes)

The second half of von Trier’s four-hour graphic exploration of feminine sexuality and the very nature of storytelling itself is a masterfully crafted, often deadly dull and repetitive, but, in the end, gloriously inventive work. Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is in the midst of telling her brutally in-depth tale of sexual addiction to the sincere and respectful Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård), who brought her into his home upon finding her badly beaten in a dark alley. In the flashbacks, Joe is now played with mystery and complexity by Gainsbourg, after the young Joe had been previously portrayed by the bland and boring Stacy Martin, and the change of actress is one of the key reasons why the second part works so much better than the first. Joe shares details of trying to make a sex sandwich, giving group therapy a shot, becoming obsessed with a violent sadist (Jamie Bell), and accepting a dangerous job with L (Willem Dafoe).

L (Willem Dafoe) offers Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) a dangerous job in second volume of controversial Lars von Trier epic (photo by Christian Geisnaes)

L (Willem Dafoe) offers Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) a dangerous job in controversial Lars von Trier sexual epic (photo by Christian Geisnaes)

In between her stories, which are divided into such chapters as “The Eastern and the Western Church (The Silent Duck)” and “The Mirror,” Seligman delves into various intellectual theories to help explain her exploits, discussing religion, paradox, democracy, language, mythology, Freud, and such dichotomies as suffering and happiness, pleasure and pain, Wagner and Beethoven, and the virgin and the whore. Cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro’s camera is far more steady in these scenes, in contrast to the moving, handheld shots that dominate the flashbacks. The interplay between the calm, gentle Seligman and the lonely, lost Joe is beautifully acted and inherently touching, but, this being von Trier, the film’s ending will further controversies that already involve episodes of extreme violence and actual sexual penetration (the latter performed by body doubles). The MoMA series continues through January 16 with such other 2014 cinematic entries as Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child, Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, and Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash.

PULP: A FILM ABOUT LIFE, DEATH AND SUPERMARKETS

Jarvis Cocker takes a ride through his hometown of Sheffield as he prepares for Pulp farewell concert

PULP: A FILM ABOUT LIFE, DEATH & SUPERMARKETS (Florian Habicht, 2013)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Wednesday, November 19
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.pulpthefilm.com

Florian Habicht’s Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets is a brilliant inside look at the long-lasting relationship between a band and its hometown. In December 2012, British alternative band Pulp returned to the place of its birth, the rugged, working-class city of Sheffield in the north of England, for what was being billed as its last-ever concert on dry land. Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker hooked up with Habicht (Love Story, Woodenhead), conceiving a project in which the time and place, along with the fans, would be just as important as the band and its music, if not more so. In the nonchronological film, Habicht cuts between archival footage of Pulp, clips from the final concert, interviews on the street with old and young fans, and brief chats with Pulp tour manager Liam Rippon and the other band members: guitarist Mark Webber, keyboardist Candida Doyle, bassist Steve Mackey, and drummer Nick Banks, who are pretty much taking it all in stride. But at the center of it all is the soft-spoken, enigmatic Cocker, who founded Pulp back in 1978 when he was fifteen years old.

Habicht shows Cocker biking and driving through Sheffield, discussing his first job working for a fishmonger in a mall, and, most thrillingly, fixing a flat tire on his less-than-fancy car. The theme song of the documentary is Pulp’s “Common People,” in which a woman tells Cocker, “I want to live like common people / I want to do whatever common people do / I want to sleep with common people / I want to sleep with common people like you.” Is it possible for a rock star to be “common people”? It doesn’t really matter as Cocker reestablishes his connection to Sheffield. “We stopped playing in 2001 or 2002 or whatever it was, and I did feel that the way it finished was kind of a bit, I don’t know, not right,” he says in the film. “It didn’t feel like a good ending. . . . So I know that tidying up isn’t the greatest rock-and-roll motivation, but I did want to kind of tidy things up and give the story a happy ending.” It is all very happy indeed, as Habicht also delves into such Pulp favorites as “This Is Hardcore” and “Help the Aged” as well as “Disco 2000,” “Underwear,” and “Sheffield: Sex City.” The band, which released seven studio albums during its career, from 1983’s It through 2001’s We Love Life, has no arguments or complaints, just positive attitudes that make Pulp a thoroughly exhilarating experience.

BILL MORRISON — COMPOSITIONS: BILL FRISELL, RON MILES, TONY SCHERR, AND KENNY WOLLESEN PERFORM LIVE WITH “THE GREAT FLOOD”

BILL FRISELL, RON MILES, TONY SCHERR, AND KENNY WOLLESEN PERFORM LIVE WITH THE GREAT FLOOD (Bill Morrison, 2011)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Friday, November 21, 8:00
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
www.icarusfilms.com

Sound and image meld together beautifully in Bill Morrison’s meditative, elegiac The Great Flood. Inspired by John M. Barry’s 1997 book Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, Morrison teamed up with improvisational musician Bill Frisell on the project. The two had previously worked together on a pair of short works, The Mesmerist and The Film of Her, after meeting at the Village Vanguard when Morrison was a dishwasher at the jazz club where Frisell was playing. Morrison (Decasia, The Miners’ Hymns), who specializes in using deteriorated and degraded archival footage and experimental scores, scoured the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Hoover Presidential Library, and other sources to come up with remarkable scenes of the flooding of the Mississippi in 1927. Divided into such chapters as “Sharecroppers,” “Swollen Tributaries,” “Evacuation,” “Aftermath,” and “Watershed,” with snippets of informational text but without narration, the film follows the southern blacks who were most affected by the massive flood, being forced to shore up the levees around white areas, losing their own homes, and ultimately heading north as part of the Great Migration, bringing the Delta blues with them.

Special MoMA screening of THE GREAT FLOOD will feature live musical accompaniment

Guitarist Frisell, joined by Ron Miles on cornet, Tony Scherr on guitar and bass, and Kenny Wollesen on drums and vibes, has composed a gorgeous, moving score, heavily influenced by a trip his band and Morrison took in early 2011 up the Mississippi, with the group playing in multiple cities while the river threatened to flood again. Each chapter, from an overhead view of a computerized map that details the 1927 flood to a fast and furious foray through the Sears Roebuck catalog, from a Baptist church procession to a series of rare clips of such bluesmen as Big Bill Broonzy, Son House, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Robert Lockwood, features a different piece of music, highlighted by Frisell’s always inventive guitar and Miles’s deeply expressive horn. Of course, as the images pass by, it’s impossible not to think of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and be awed by the devastating power of nature, as well as realize how little has changed with regard to the reaction of politicians and who the victims tend to be. But the film is rarely mournful; instead, there’s often a celebratory quality about it, centered on people’s natural instinct to survive. The Great Flood is screening November 21 at 8:00, concluding MoMA’s “Bill Morrison: Compositions,” with Frisell, Miles, Scherr, and Wollesen performing the score live as a special treat. In addition, MoMA’s rotating “Bill Morrison: Re-Compositions” exhibition currently features “Decomposing Loops,” consisting of excerpts from Light Is Calling, Just Ancient Loops, and Decasia, through December 8.