this week in film and television

ETERNITY: THE MOVIE

Myko Olivier and Barrett Crake star as an alternate Hall & Oates in ETERNITY

ETERNITY: THE MOVIE (Ian Thorpe, 2014)
AMC Empire 25
234 West 42nd St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Opens Friday, October 17
212-398-2597
www.theeternitymovie.com
www.amctheatres.com

Director Ian Thorpe’s Eternity: The Movie tries to be a good-natured riff on those lame 1980s films like Can’t Stop the Music, Fast Forward, Flashdance, and Xanadu, in which main characters dream of stardom and get their chance to make it, all set to terrible period music. Unfortunately, Eternity is more like those lame 1980s films themselves instead of a send-up of the genre. Barrett Crake stars as Todd Lucas, an eager blonde singer-songwriter who has just moved to Los Angeles from Omaha. He gets a job in “fashion” working at retailer BJ Maxx (yes, that is Eric Roberts playing his creepy boss), where he meets B. J. Fairchild (Myko Olivier) — yes, the BJ jokes are endless — a mustached brunette who specializes in playing jazzy TV cop-show themes on his sax. Todd, who’s looking for true love, and B.J., who thinks of himself as a ladies’ man, both develop a thing for bartender Gina Marie (Nikki Leonti), but when it comes right down to it, they really belong together, as writer Joey Abi-Loutfi and Thorpe continually allude to the clear and obvious gay attraction between them. The story of their rise and fall as lily-white R&B popsters Eternity, who had such synth-heavy hits as “Make Love, Not Sex” and “Sambuca & Cider,” is jaw-droppingly inane; it’s often hard to tell what is intentionally bad from what is just plain bad. Oh, and did we say that the whole thing is a one-note joke about Hall & Oates? Eternity feels like it goes on for an eternity, but don’t expect it to have much of a long life in theaters, DVD, or Netflix.

STATIONS OF THE ELEVATED

Cult subway graffiti film STATIONS OF THE ELEVATED is being shown in new restoration at BAMcinématek

STATIONS OF THE ELEVATED (Manfred Kirchheimer, 1981)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
October 17-23
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Thirty-three years after screening at the New York Film Festival, Manfred Kirchheimer’s Stations of the Elevated is finally getting its official U.S. theatrical release, in a gorgeous new restoration showing at BAMcinématek October 17-23. In 1977, Manfred Kirchheimer, whose family escaped Nazi Germany in 1936, went to the Bronx and filmed graffiti-covered subway cars at the train depot and rushing across the elevated tracks, kids playing in a burned-out housing project, and giant billboards advertising hamburgers, cigarettes, alcohol, and suntan lotion. Shot on 16mm reversal stock, Stations of the Elevated is more than just a captivating document of a bygone era; it is a deeply poetic socioeconomic journey into class, race, art, and freedom of expression, told without a single word of narration or onscreen text. Instead, producer, director, editor, and photographer Kirchheimer (Colossus on the River, Bridge High with Walter Hess) shifts from the natural sound of the environment to a superb jazz score by Charles Mingus while cutting between shots of trains covered in tags and illustrations (and such phrases as “Heaven Is Life,” “Invasion of the Earth,” “Never Die,” and “Earth Is Hell”) by such seminal figures as Blade, Daze, Lee, Pusher, Shadow, and Slave and views of colorful billboards filmed peeking through the geometric architecture of the elevated railways and set against bright blue skies. Most often, the camera focuses on the painted eyes in the ads, looking right back at the viewer as they dominate the scene, evoking the optician’s ad in that famous novel of American class, The Great Gatsby. (The concentration on the eyes also predicts how Madison Ave. was watching the graffiti movement, eventually coopting the imagery into mainstream advertising.) Through this dichotomy of meaning and execution, Kirchheimer reveals similarities in artistic styles and how the elements influenced each other; a particularly telling moment occurs when a man is shown hand painting a billboard who could have just as well been spray painting a subway car.

Kirchheimer remains outside during the course of the forty-five-minute documentary, never venturing into the tunnels, capturing the elevated train lines as if they’re just another part of New York City architecture, which of course they are. And it’s especially powerful because it was made at a time when the city was in the midst of a severe economic crisis and rampant crime epidemic, as Mayor Koch sought to eliminate the scourge of graffiti, while Kirchheimer celebrates its beauty (and New York-ness) in this glorious little film. Stations of the Elevated, which elevates the station of subway graffiti artistry with an entrancing calmness, is being shown at BAMcinématek with Claw, Kirchheimer’s 1968 film about urban renewal made with Hess; Kirchheimer, now in his early eighties, will be at BAM to participate in Q&As at the 7:45 screening on October 17 and the 7:00 screening on October 18. In addition, street artist David “Chino” Villorente will make a special presentation at the 8:00 showing on October 21 (in place of Claw).

HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR

A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) examine their Hiroshima affair in Alain Resnais classic

HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (Alain Resnais, 1959)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 West 65th St., October 17-30, 212-875-5050
Film Forum, 209 West Houston St., October 17-28, 212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
www.filmlinc.com

In July 1959, Cahiers du cinéma published a roundtable discussion with Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and others about Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, in which Rohmer said, “Hiroshima is a film about which you can say everything. . . . Perhaps Hiroshima really is a totally new film. . . . I think that, in a few years, in ten, twenty, or thirty years, we shall know whether Hiroshima was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema. . . . In any case it is an extremely important film, but it could be that it will even gain stature with years.” Some four and a half decades later, Rohmer’s prediction has come true, as a stunning new 4K digital restoration reveals Hiroshima Mon Amour to indeed be one of the most important films in the history of cinema, redefining just what the medium is capable of, as fresh and innovative today as it was to Rohmer, Godard, Rivette, et al. upon its initial release. As the black-and-white film opens, two naked, twisted bodies merge together in bed, first covered in glittering ashes, then a kind of acid rain. The woman (Emmanuelle Riva) is a French actress who is in Hiroshima to make a movie about peace. He (Eiji Okada) is a Japanese architect, a builder working in a city that has been laid to waste. Both married with children, they engage in a brief but torrid affair; as her film prepares to wrap, she gets ready to leave, but he begs her to stay. Theirs is a romance that could happen only in Hiroshima.

Director Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad, Same Old Song) was meticulous with every detail of the film, from the casting to Marguerite Duras’s stirringly poetic, Oscar-nominated script and dialogue, from Georges Delerue’s and Giovanni Fusco’s powerful, wide-ranging score to crafting each shot as a work of art in itself, using two cinematographers, Michio Takahashi in Japan and Sacha Vierny in France, to emphasize a critical visual difference between the contemporary scenes in Hiroshima and the woman’s past with a German soldier (Bernard Fresson) in Nevers. Hiroshima Mon Amour is a haunting experience, examining love and loss among the ruins of war as two people, at least temporarily, try to create something new. Riva (Three Colors: Blue, Thomas the Impostor) is mesmerizing as the confused, unpredictable woman, her eyes so often turned away from the man, unwilling to face the future, while Okada (Woman in the Dunes, The Yakuza) can’t keep his eyes off her, desperate for their romance to continue. Riva bookended her long career by starring in two of the most unusual yet beautiful love stories ever made, as more than fifty years after Hiroshima she would be nominated for an Oscar for her hypnotizing performance as an elderly woman debilitated by a stroke in Michael Haneke’s Amour. The glorious restoration of Hiroshima Mon Amour,, supervised by Renato Berta, who was Resnais’s chief cameraman on four projects, makes it, to use the words of Eric Rohmer, feel like a totally new film, like we’re experiencing it for the very first time all over again. Following its sold-out screening at the New York Film Festival, Hiroshima Mon Amour opens October 17 at Film Forum and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center. Resnais, who passed away on March 1 at the age of ninety-one, was also represented at the festival with his final work, Life of Riley. In conjunction with the theatrical release of the restoration, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will also host the series “By Marguerite Duras” October 15-22.

THALIA DOCS: ROCKS IN MY POCKETS

Signe Baumane examines her family history of suicide and depression in ROCKS IN MY POCKETS

ROCKS IN MY POCKETS: A CRAZY QUEST FOR SANITY (Signe Baumane, 2014)
Symphony Space, Leonard Nimoy Thalia
2537 Broadway at 95th St.
Sunday, October 19, $14, 7:00
212-864-5400
www.symphonyspace.org
www.rocksinmypocketsmovie.com

The recent suicide of Robin Williams shook the nation, once again pointing out that depression is no laughing matter. But Latvian-born, Brooklyn-based writer-director-producer-animator Signe Baumane takes a unique approach to depression and suicide in the darkly twisted animated film Rocks in My Pockets: A Crazy Quest for Sanity. Influenced by such animation giants as Jan Švankmajer and Bill Plympton in addition to Lithuanian-Polish illustrator Stasys Eidrigevicius and Russian animator Yuri Norstein, Baumane, a self-described “Master of Self Pity,” incorporates hand-drawn animation, papier-mâché constructions, and stop-motion animation in telling the story of her family’s long history of mental illness and suicide. Inspired by her own thoughts of ending it all, Baumane (Teat Beat of Sex), in her feature-length debut, divides the film into segments about her suicidal relatives. She narrates the tales of Indulis, an entrepreneur and failed counterfeiter with an “idea-generating brain”; Anna, a university graduate and secretary who falls in love with Indulis, her married boss; Miranda, who looks at the world as if everything were a work of art; Linda, a medical student with big dreams; Irbe, a lonely music teacher who hears voices in her head; and herself as they all experience various aspects of severe depression while facing the trials and tribulations of everyday life in a changing sociopolitical climate in Eastern Europe.

ROCKS IN MY POCKETS uses twisted humor to explore some very serious subjects

Despite the serious topics and events — and the regular appearance of nooses tempting the protagonists — Rocks in My Pockets is filled with clever jokes, imaginative visual puns, beautiful imagery, and a playful score by Kristian Sensini; Baumane refers to it as “a funny film about depression,” and that’s just what it is. The animated characters make their way through lush forests, across a real chess board, and past other colorful backgrounds as reality strikes them hard. The personal nature of the film is enhanced by Baumane’s own narration, in her thick Latvian accent. (Her mother attempted to talk her out of doing the narration, thinking it was a bad idea.) “I want to survive, but I don’t want to live,” Baumane says halfway through the film. “When my brain is idle, it starts eating itself.” Fearing that depression and suicide are part of her DNA, she’s unsure how she can get away from it — and prevent it from affecting future generations of her family. Winner of the International Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize at the 2014 Karlovy Vary Film Festival and financed in part by a Kickstarter campaign (where you can learn more about the making-of process), Rocks in My Pockets will be screening October 19 at 7:00 as part of Symphony Space’s Thalia Docs series and will be followed by a Q&A with Baumane.

THE DARK SIDE OF THE SUN — JOHN ZORN ON JAPANESE CINEMA: INFLATABLE SEX DOLL OF THE WASTELANDS

Atsushi Yamatoya’s cult pink film INFLATABLE SEX DOLL OF THE WASTELANDS features some mind-blowing visuals

INFLATABLE SEX DOLL OF THE WASTELANDS (KOYA NO DATCH WAIFU) (Atsushi Yamatoya, 1967)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Saturday, October 18, 7:00
Festival runs monthly October 18 – February 20
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

As if the title of Atsushi Yamatoya’s rarely shown 1967 cult flick wasn’t enough — it doesn’t get much better than Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands — the fetishistic Japanese noir pink film has intriguing echoes of Welles’s Touch of Evil, Godard’s Alphaville, Marker’s La Jetée, Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes, and Dalí and Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou. Yamatoya, who also directed Season of Betrayal, The Pistol That Sprouted Hair, and Trap of Lust and cowrote Branded to Kill (among many others), merges the crime genre with shaky, surreal flourishes courtesy of cameraman Hajime Kai, but the result is a violently misogynistic film that is often hard to watch, filled with rape, abuse, and impossible-to-decipher plot twists. In the middle of the desert, Naka (Masayoshi Nogami), a real estate agent, has hired Jō, a hitman (Yūichi Minato), to rescue his lover and employee, Sae (Noriko Tatsumi), and kill a gang of thugs who are sexually terrorizing her. Jō is soon facing his old enemy Kō (Shōhei Yamamoto) in a showdown that happens every day at three o’clock. There are enough phone calls and crawling ants to make Dalí proud, plenty of excess nudity, a great jazz score by Yōsuke Yamashita, and a hysterical moment that at first appears to be a still shot but turns out to be the characters trying to freeze, but it’s hard to get past the outright brutal treatment and victimization of every woman in the film. Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands is screening October 18 at 7:00 at Japan Society, opening the series “The Dark Side of the Sun: John Zorn on Japanese Cinema,” and will be followed by a reception commemorating filmmaker Koji Wakamatsu, one of Yamatoya’s regular collaborators, who passed away in October 2012.

Japan Society series curated by John Zorn includes ATTACK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE

The series, curated by electronic music pioneer John Zorn, continues once a month through February with Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Crossroads (with live shamisen accompaniment by Yumiko Tanaka), Yoshimitsu Morita’s Top Stripper, Ishiro Honda’s Attack of the Mushroom People, and the U.S. premiere of the made-for-television Nagisa Oshima’s It’s Me Here, Bellett, preceded by eight shorts by Osamu Tezuka. “I had been a huge fan of Japanese music, art, and film since the early 1960s, but late night Tokyo TV provided a peek into an entirely different world outside the classic art film masterpieces of Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, and Inagaki,” Zorn explains in his curator statement. “It was a revelation to discover that Oshima’s Cruel Story of Youth and The Sun’s Burial were not so much an isolated vision but actually two examples of an entire cinematic genre, and that directors like Seijun Suzuki, Kinji Fukasaku, Toshio Masuda, Yasuzo Masumura, Teruo Ishii, and others had made incredible and uncompromising films that spoke as much about the Japanese psyche as origami, noh theater, or the tea ceremony ever had. . . . For me, the experimental, adventurous, and uncompromising side of any society is often the home of the deepest truths, and these films each hold their truths to an often uncomfortable extreme. I hope you enjoy the (occasionally blinding) intensity of ‘The Dark Side of the Sun.’”

ALSO LIKE LIFE — THE FILMS OF HOU HSIAO-HSIEN: I WISH I KNEW

Zhao Tao wanders through modern-day China in Jia Zhang-ke’s elegiac documentary

I WISH I KNEW (Jia Zhang-ke, 2010)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Friday, October 17, $12, 7:00
Series runs through October 17
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

Throughout his professional career, which began with the 1997 underground hit Pickpocket, Sixth Generation Chinese writer-director Jia Zhang-ke has shuttled easily between documentaries (Useless, 24 City) and narrative features (The World, Still Life) — and it’s not always obvious which is which, as his steady, poetic style is built on subtlety, slow rhythms, and an innate sense of realism (and he freely mixes fantasy and reality as well). His 2010 documentary, the Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard selection I Wish I Knew, adds elements of fiction to its compelling examination of the intimately personal side effects that resulted from the Chinese civil war and Cultural Revolution, as many people left Shanghai for Taipei and Hong Kong. Jia and interviewer Lin Xudong meet with elderly men and women who tell tragic stories of family and friends being murdered and executed by the government; an especially poignant scene is set at a community gathering where senior citizens dance to Dick Haymes’s version of the old standard “I Wish I Knew”; one of the interviewees sings into the camera, “I wish I knew someone like you could love me / I wish I knew you place no one above me / Did I mistake this for a real romance? / I wish I knew, but only you can answer,” which could be as much about a personal relationship as the revolution itself. Jia also talks with several filmmakers and actresses, from Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wang Toon to Huang Baomei, Rebecca Pan, and Wei Wei, illustrating how Shanghai has been depicted on film with clips from such movies as Hou’s Flowers of Shanghai, Xie Jin’s Huang Baomie, Wang’s Red Persimmon, Lou Ye’s Suzhou River, Wang Bing’s To Liberate Shanghai, Wong Kar-wai’s Days of Being Wild, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Cina.

As the nearly two-hour documentary reaches its conclusion, they interview younger people, including bestselling writer, blogger, and race-car champion Han Han, who don’t share the same conflicted memories of communism and the Cultural Revolution, instead praising an evolving modern-day capitalistic Shanghai that has brought them vast wealth, with no interest in the past of Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong, and Chiang Kai-shek. Throughout the film, Jia’s onscreen muse, Zhao Tao, who has appeared in six of his previous works, walks through contemporary Shanghai, pausing as she languidly looks out over the ever-changing city, where intensely poor neighborhoods are being torn down right around the corner from massive construction projects. Commissioned for the 2010 World Expo held in Shanghai, I Wish I Knew might not have been quite what the expo folk expected, but then again, they did give carte blanche to Jia, who never takes the easy way out, creating yet another complex, confusing, and controversial cinematic experience. I Wish I Knew is screening October 17 at 7:00, concluding the outstanding Museum of the Moving Image series “Also like Life: The Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien.”

PULP FICTION FILM FEAST

Nitehawk Cinema’s Film Feast screenings of PULP FICTION will offer tasty delights for movie gourmands hungry for some serious shit

PULP FICTION (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
Tuesday, October 14, and Wednesday, October 15, $75, 7:20
718-384-3980
www.nitehawkcinema.com

Dinner and a movie — two things that go together like, well, Abbott and Costello, Batman and Robin, yin and yang, Bogie and Bacall, politics and corruption, football and head injuries. However, among the films that might not especially elicit thoughts of a fancy meal is Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar-nominated 1994 masterpiece, Pulp Fiction, a violent bloodbath that involves brains being blasted all over the inside of a car, a Mexican stand-off in a huge coffee shop, blasphemy, and serious discussions about foot massages and the Big Mac. (“Hamburgers: the cornerstone of any nutritious breakfast,” Jules points out.) On October 14 & 15, Nitehawk Cinema will be hosting its latest Film Feast, two evenings of Pulp Fiction screenings paired with a gourmet meal with dishes that evoke scenes from the all-star flick, which features John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer, Ving Rhames, Eric Stoltz, Rosanna Arquette, Christopher Walken, and Bruce Willis, mostly as you have never seen them before. The twentieth-anniversary screenings will begin with the “One Minute They’re Having a Denver Omelette,” consisting of pancetta, peppadew peppers, Cabot clothbound cheddar, chives, and toasted sourdough, paired with a Honey Bunny cocktail (juniper-and-hop-infused Absolut, pear and thyme honey syrup, fresh lemon, and Prosecco). Next up is “This Is a Tasty Burger!,” with grilled pineapple, jack cheese, chipotle aioli, and shoestring fries, accompanied by a Tasty Beverage (Absolut Citron and homespun cherry limeade), followed by “Jack Rabbit Slims” (coke-and-vanilla-marinated skirt steak and a Fox Force Five Herb salad) with a $5 Shake (whiskey-barrel-aged Absolut and dark chocolate milkshake). The food and drink keep coming with “Papa Tomato, Mama Tomato, Baby Tomato” (beefsteak tomato, goat cheese, sundried tomato stuffing, and green tomato catchup) and a Comfortable Silence, and then dessert: “Toaster Pastry” (cinnamon-and-sugar-dusted puff pastry and maple royale icing), Potbelly Punch (fresh SoCal fruit punch with Absolut Mandarin), “This Some Serious Gourmet Shit” (coffee panna cotta and white chocolate foam), and Some Serious Gourmet Shit (bacon-infused Absolut, house-made maple Irish Cream, and espresso). Fortunately, the chefs have skipped other obvious choices. “Hey, sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I’d never know ’cause I wouldn’t eat the filthy motherfucker,” Jules says. “Pigs sleep and root in shit. That’s a filthy animal. I ain’t eatin’ nothing that ain’t got sense enough to disregard its own feces.” Vincent replies, “How about a dog? Dog eats its own feces,” to which Jules responds, “I don’t eat dog either.” Don’t be scared off by talk like that or if the website says both nights are already sold out; we have it on good authority that more spaces will open up on Monday. Bon appetit!