The Avengers face a powerful enemy in Joss Whedon’s action-adventure superhero blockbuster
THE AVENGERS (Joss Whedon, 2012)
South Street Seaport
Corner of Front & Fulton Sts.
Saturday, July 5, free, 8:00
www.southstreetseaport.com
www.marvel.com
After a spectacular energy device known as the Tesseract opens a wormhole that allows the evil Loki (Tom Hiddleston) to enter present-day Earth and ultimately steal the machine, turning Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and Dr. Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård) into unwitting allies in the process, S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) and director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) bring back the Avengers Initiative, reuniting Tony Stark / Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Steve Rogers / Captain America (Chris Evans), Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and an extremely tentative Dr. Bruce Banner / Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), who are gathered together to regain the Tesseract and foil Loki’s evil plans to take over Earth. Also entering the fray is Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Loki’s brother, who needs to decide which side of the battle he is on. As egos get in the way and wisecracks fly by like so much machine-gun rattle, particularly from Stark, the Avengers realize they are facing a supremely powerful force, one that will require, well, superhuman effort to defeat. Writer-director Joss Whedon, the genius behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly, plays things a little loose in this comic-book blockbuster, not worrying too much about gaping plot holes that could have been created by the Tesseract itself and letting the superhero banter and tech-heavy set pieces take center stage. Downey goes over the top as the brash Stark, while Ruffalo, following in the failed footsteps of Edward Norton and Eric Bana (and, of course, the great Bill Bixby), is relegated to a whole lot of brooding. But there’s still lots of fun to be had as the characters team up to save the world. Be sure to stick around through the credits for a pair of bonus scenes. The Avengers is screening July 5 at 8:00, preceded by a Midtown Comics Fan Party at 4:00 in which costumed attendees can win prizes and drink specials, concluding the South Street Seaport’s free July 3-5 “Pier/Party,” which also includes live performances by the Hungry March Band, Dandy Wellington & His Band, Chris Bergson Blues, Mike Verge, Twin Forks ft. Chris Carrabba, and Sam Barnes Bluegrass Review. For a day-by-day listing of free summer movie screenings throughout New York City, go here.
Finally getting its North American premiere after being banned in its home country of China, Ning Hao’s No Man’s Land is a violently beautiful black comedy that takes on modernization and commercialization with tongue firmly and riotously rooted deep in cheek. Xu Zhen stars as Pan Xiao, a young hotshot lawyer, if he does say so himself, who gets a vicious falcon poacher (Duo Bujie) off for killing a cop. The poacher promises to wire Pan his fee, but the lawyer instead demands collateral in the form of the red car the poacher bought for his dead wife. Pan then sets out for home, riding across the Gobi desert in Xinjiang in northwest China, but things don’t go too well for him, as he keeps getting involved with strange, dangerous, ever-more-surreal men and women, from a pair of truck drivers transporting hay (Wang Shuangbao and Sun Jianmin) to an extortionist gas station owner (Yan Xinming) and his back-room prostitute (Yu Nan) to another falcon poacher (Huang Bo) who can’t avoid getting the crap beaten out of him time and time again. But Pan keeps trying to persevere, believing he is better than everyone around him, but it takes him quite a while to learn his lesson, if he ever really does.
Special effects master Douglas Trumbull, who worked on such sci-fi classics as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner, made his feature directorial debut with the environmentally prescient Silent Running. Bruce Dern stars as Freeman Lowell, one of four men stationed on the space terrarium Valley Forge, which is charged with protecting forests that can no longer grow on Earth. While it’s just another assignment for John Keenan (Cliff Potts), Marty Barker (Ron Rifkin), and Andy Wolf (Jesse Vint), it’s become an obsession for Lowell, who sleeps under a “Conservation Pledge” on the wall next to his bed and only eats food from his massive garden. But when the captain of the Berkshire (voiced by Joseph Campanella) informs them that the forests must be destroyed and they are to return home, Lowell takes matters into his own hands, fighting to protect what he has helped create. Soon he is alone on the Valley Forge, tending to the forest with drones Huey (Cheryl Sparks) and Dewey (Mark Persons), as Louie (Steven Brown) is no longer with them. At first Lowell thinks he is in his own private paradise, but extreme loneliness awaits him, along with some other shocks. Written by Deric Washburn and Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter) and Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law), the low-budget Silent Running is a deserving cult classic, a worthy influence on such films and television shows as WALL-E, Moon, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and Red Dwarf. Emerging from the late-1960s Flower Power movement, the film’s ecological theme is boosted by environmentally friendly folk songs sung by Joan Baez, with overly melodramatic music by Peter Schickele. Dern gives a beautifully nuanced performance as Lowell, going from calm and meditative to distressed and angry in a heartbeat, and his paternal relationship with Huey and Dewey is both heartwarming and heartbreaking. A film that could only be made in the 1970s, with bright, bold colors and cheesy futuristic sets, Silent Running is screening June 28 at 7:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “See It Big! Science Fiction (Part Two)” series, which continues through July 12 with such other sci-fi flicks as Alain Resnais’s Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in 70mm, and Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks!
Inspired by Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain also involves symbolically non-Euclidean adventures in mountain climbing, funneled through Carlos Castaneda, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and magic mushrooms and LSD galore. What passes for narrative follows a Jesus look-alike thief (Horacio Salinas) and an alchemist with a thing for female nudity (Jodorowsky) on the path to enlightenment; along the way they encounter the mysterious Tarot, stigmata, stoning, eyeballs, frogs, flies, cold-blooded murder, naked young boys, chakra points, life-size plaster casts, Nazi dancers, sex, violence, blood, gambling, turning human waste into gold, death and rebirth, and the search for the secret of immortality via representatives of the planets, each with their own extremely bizarre story to tell. Jodorowsky, who is credited with having invented the midnight movie with the 1970 acid Western El Topo, literally shatters religious iconography in a kaleidoscopic whirlwind of jaw-droppingly gorgeous and often inexplicable imagery composed from a surreal color palette, set to a score by free jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and Archies keyboardist Ron Frangipane. (Frangipane also worked with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who produced this film with their business manager, Allen Klein.)