this week in film and television

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!

HALLOWEEN IN NYC: A NITE TO DISMEMBER 2014

MIDNITE SCREENINGS / ONE NITE ONLY
Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
Friday, October 31, $50, 12 midnight
718-384-3980
www.nitehawkcinema.com

Last year Williamsburg’s Nitehawk Cinema celebrated Halloween with the inaugural Nite to Dismember, an all-night horror-movie marathon that included An American Werewolf in London, Burn Witch Burn, Fright Night, The Burning, and Dawn of the Dead. For the second annual event, which begins at midnight on Halloween, Nitehawk will be honoring the sequel with an all-night marathon of horror sequels. The frightful fun begins with a 35mm screening of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II, which is really more of a parody remake, followed by digital projections of James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein, Steve Miner’s Friday the 13th: Part 2, Terence Fisher’s Dracula: Prince of Darkness (with Christopher Lee and dubbed Scream Queen Barbara Shelley), and Dan O’Bannon’s The Return of the Living Dead, with the Pathmark man himself, James (Poltergeist) Karen. In addition, there will be horror shorts, trivia, giveaways, and a costume contest, all hosted by Fangoria’s Sam Zimerman and Nitehawk’s Kris King, eighteen and over only, please. This is likely to sell out well in advance, so don’t wait to get tickets for this sequel-filled sequel. (Keep on watching twi-ny as we highlight other crazy, weird, funny, scary, bizarre, wacky, eclectic, and downright stupid things to do for Halloween this year.)

NYFF52 REVIVALS: 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
Friday, October 10, Walter Reade Theater, 6:00
Festival runs September 26 – October 12
212-875-5050
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. Hiroshima Mon Amour is screening October 10 at 6:00 as part of the Revivals section of the 52nd New York Film Festival in advance of its October 17 opening at Film Forum and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center. Resnais, who passed away on March 1 at the age of ninety-one, is also represented at the New York Film Festival with his final work, Life of Riley. In addition, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will host the series “By Marguerite Duras” October 15-22.

CBGB MUSIC AND FILM FESTIVAL 2014

Billy Idol will give the keynote interview and play a short acoustic set at CBGB Festival

Multiple venues in Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan
October 8-12
www.cbgbfest.com

Last year, the second CBGB Music & Film Festival spread throughout the city, glomming its brand name onto already scheduled shows in addition to hosting a series of cool free concerts in Times Square. This year is another haphazard affair that probably wouldn’t please Hilly Kristal and longtime CB devotees, as there’s still no information on when and where headliners Jane’s Addiction (performing Nothing’s Shocking) and Devo will be taking the stage. The keynote interview will feature Billy Idol talking with Timothy Sommer, followed by a brief acoustic set October 9 at Center 548 by the author of the new autobiography Dancing with Myself. There will also be discussions with Daniel Lanois, Duff McKagan, Dirty South, and others. Among the thirty film screenings are Chris Cheatham’s A Decade with an Unsigned Rock Band about August Christopher, Nick Hall’s I Need a Dodge! Joe Strummer on the Run, John Jeffcoat’s Big in Japan about Tennis Pro, Robert Zemeckis’s I Wanna Hold Your Hand, and Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke, presented by Beastie Boy Adam Horvitz. Bands participating in the festival include the Muffs, Murphy’s Law, Rocket & the Ghost, the Howl, Crazy Pills, Session 73, We Are Temporary, Echo Station, Boy Toy, and Emily Danger. Center 548 will also be home to the exhibition “From Bathroom Stalls to Gallery Walls: A Visual Tribute to CBGB & OMFUG.” But that doesn’t mean that this festival really has all that much to do with CBGB itself. [Ed. note: It has since been announced that Devo and Jane’s Addiction will be performing as part of Sunday’s free concert in Times Square, with two stages of live music that features Midnight Mob and Ex-Cops at 11:00, Face the King at 11:30, Cheeky Parade at 12 noon, We Are Scientists at 12:30, Surfer Blood at 1:15, Devo at 4:30, School of Rock and Robert Delong at 5:25, and Jane’s Addiction at 6:25.]

20,000 DAYS ON EARTH

Nick Cave takes a look back at his life and career as only Nick Cave can in imaginative, deeply introspective documentary

20,000 DAYS ON EARTH (Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, 2014)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
September 17 – October 16
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
www.20000daysonearth.com

The film 20,000 Days on Earth might sound like a 1950s low-budget sci-fi cult classic you’ve never seen, but actually it’s an unusual and vastly inventive document of the life and times of Australian rocker, poet, novelist, film composer, screenwriter, and all-around bon vivant Nick Cave. In their debut feature, installation artists and curators Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard collaborated closely with Cave on the film, mixing reality and fantasy as they follow Cave during a rather busy day. “Who knows their own story? Certainly it makes no sense when we are living in the midst of it,” Cave, who just turned fifty-seven, says in the deeply poetic voiceover narration he wrote specifically for the film. “It’s all just clamor and confusion. It only becomes a story when we tell it, and retell it, our small, precious recollections that we speak again and again to ourselves or to others, first creating the narrative of our lives, and then keeping the story from dissolving into darkness.” Forsyth and Pollard journey with Cave as he delves into religion and his relationship with his father with psychoanalyst Darian Leader, visits with longtime collaborator Warren Ellis (who shares an amazing story about Nina Simone and a piece of gum), drives around as people from his past suddenly appear in his car (friend Ray Winstone, duet partner Kylie Minogue, former bandmate Blixa Bargeld), lays down tracks in the studio (“Give Us a Kiss,” “Higgs Boson Blues,” “Push the Sky Away” with a children’s orchestra), watches television with his twin sons, and goes through his archives of photographs and other ephemera from childhood to the present day.

The film reveals Cave, the leader of cutting-edge groups the Birthday Party, Grinderman, and the Bad Seeds and author of the novels And the Ass Saw the Angel and The Death of Bunny Munro, to be an intelligent, introspective, engaging fellow with a wry, often self-deprecating sense of humor and a hunger to create. “Mostly I write. Tapping and scratching away day and night sometimes,” he says while typing away with two fingers on an old typewriter in his home office. “But if I ever stopped for long enough to question what I’m actually doing? The why of it? Well, I couldn’t really tell you. I don’t know.” The film begins with a barrage of images of Cave and his influences throughout the years, whipping by machine-gun style on multiple monitors, and ends with Cave onstage with the Bad Seeds, becoming the fearless musician that has defined his career. In between, he’s a contemplative husband, father, son, and friend, an artist with a rather unique view of the world and his place in it. At a special event at Town Hall on September 20, Cave participated in a postscreening Q&A with Forsyth and Pollard, performed solo songs at the piano (playing what one fan described as a “dream setlist”), and spoke often about “transformation.” In its own way, 20,000 Days on Earth, which has been held over at Film Forum, is a transformative documentary, a groundbreaking, unconventional, and thoroughly imaginative portrait of a groundbreaking, unconventional, and thoroughly imaginative artist. (For more on Cave’s history, be sure to check out the online Museum of Important Shit, which highlights additional strange paraphernalia from Cave’s life and career.) Following its month-long run at Film Forum, 20,000 Days on Earth makes its way to Williamsburg, where it is scheduled to play at Nitehawk Cinema through October 25.

THE BLUE ROOM

Mathieu Amalric stars as a husband and father in deep trouble in film he also directed and cowrote

THE BLUE ROOM (LA CHAMBRE BLEUE) (Mathieu Amalric, 2014)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, October 3
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.lachambrebleue-lefilm.com

Real-life partners Mathieu Amalric and Stéphanie Cléau strip Georges Simenon’s short 1955 novel The Blue Room to its bare essentials — and we do mean bare — in their intimate, claustrophobic modern noir adaptation, which made its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival last week. In addition to being one of the world’s most talented actors, starring in such films as Kings and Queen, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, A Christmas Tale, and Venus in Fur, Amalric has directed several previous works, including On Tour, which earned him the Best Director prize at Cannes. In The Blue Room, Amalric plays Julien Gahyde, a successful agriculture equipment salesman whose passionate affair with a local pharmacist’s wife, Esther Despierre (Cléau, who cowrote the script with Amalric), appears to have ended in murder. The film opens with Grégoire Hetzel’s lush, sweeping music as the camera makes its way to a blue hotel room where Julien and Esther have just made love offscreen. “Did I hurt you?” she asks. “No,” he responds. “You’re angry,” she says. “No,” he repeats as she laughs and a drop of blood falls on a creamy white sheet. Only then do we see the naked, sweaty couple, whose lurid tale has been succinctly revealed by this highly stylized, beautifully orchestrated scene. Next we hear Julien being interrogated by a magistrate (Laurent Poitrenaux) about a suspicious death, and soon we see Julien in handcuffs in the police station. We don’t know exactly what crime he has been accused of, nor do we know the victim — it could be Julien’s wife, Delphine (Léa Drucker), Esther’s husband, Nicolas (Olivier Mauvezin), or maybe even Esther herself. But as director Amalric, cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne, and editor François Gedigier cut between the past and the present, the details slowly unfold — although that doesn’t mean they ever become completely clear.

Amalric fills The Blue Room with bold splashes of color amid all the darkness and muted skin tones, from the red towel that signals Julien and Esther’s illicit rendezvous to Delphine’s blue bikini to the strikingly red hair of Nicolas’s mother (Véronique Alain) and the shiny green and yellow John Deere equipment he sells. Amalric and Cléau trim so much out of the original story that it too often feels overly cold and calculating, the manipulation too clear and obvious. The nudity also lacks subtlety; Amalric and Cléau might be comfortable with each other sans clothing, but it seems to be a bit of an obsession with Amalric the director. Nonetheless, The Blue Room, shot in the old-fashioned aspect ratio of 1:33 and running a mere seventy-six minutes, is a gripping yarn, a lurid tale of sex and murder, pain and passion, and femmes fatale, told from the point of view of a relatively quiet, reserved man who never thought his world could just fall apart like it does. With such plot elements as adultery and murder and even the presence of a young daughter (Mona Jaffart), the story cannot fail to call to mind French author Gustave Flaubert’s classic novel of provincial France and misplaced passion, Madame Bovary, but the near-echoes never become too loud, merely adding a somewhat puzzling flavor to the film, like a dream half remembered. Following its screenings earlier this week at the New York Film Festival, The Blue Room opens October 3 at the IFC Center.