this week in film and television

GRAVITY

Space debris from a Russian satellite threatens an American shuttle crew in GRAVITY

GRAVITY (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013)
Opens Friday, October 4
www.gravitymovie.warnerbros.com

Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is a breathtaking thriller that instantly enters the pantheon of such classic space fare as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, and The Right Stuff. While medical engineer Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is fixing a computer glitch outside the shuttle Explorer, veteran astronaut and wisecracker Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), on his final mission before retirement, is playing around with a new jetpack and Shariff (voiced by Paul Sharma) is having fun going on a brief spacewalk. But disaster strikes when debris from a destroyed Russian satellite suddenly comes their way, killing Shariff and the rest of the crew and crippling the shuttle, leaving Stone and Kowalski on their own in deep space, their communication with Mission Control in Houston (voiced by Ed Harris, in a nod to his participation in Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff) gone as well. Kowalski is cool and calm, listening to country music as he tries to come up with a plan that will get them to the International Space Station, but the inexperienced Stone is running out of oxygen fast as she tumbles through the emptiness, Earth in the background, so close yet so far. Written by Cuarón (Y Tu Mamá También, Children of Men) with his son Jonás, Gravity is spectacularly photographed by Emmanuel Lubezki, the master behind numerous works by Cuarón and Terrence Malick (The New World, The Tree of Life), among others. Lubezki and his team even created a new LED light box to increase the film’s realism, which is nothing less than awe-inspiring and mind-bending as it takes place in real time. Despite the vastness of space, Gravity often feels claustrophobic, particularly as Stone struggles to get a breath or attempts to operate a foreign module.

Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) try to remain together in Alfonso Cuarón’s masterful space epic

Close-ups of Stone and Kowalski reveal reflections of the shuttle and Earth, emphasizing the astronauts’ dire situation as they engage in a very different kind of pas de deux. Gravity also succeeds where directors like James Cameron often fail, as a solid, relatively unsentimental and unpredictable script accompanies the remarkable visuals, which evoke both harrowing underwater adventures as well as dangerous mountain-climbing journeys. (Cuarón also manages to bring it all in in a terrifically paced ninety minutes.) Cuarón and Lubezki favor long takes, including an opening shot lasting more than thirteen minutes, immersing the viewer in the film, further enhanced by being projected in IMAX 3D, which is not used as merely a gimmick here. Stephen Price’s score increases the tension as well until getting melodramatic near the end. Clooney is ever dapper and charming and Bullock is appropriately nervous and fearful in their first screen pairing, even though they only make contact with each other through bulky spacesuits, their connection primarily via speaking. Cuarón, who also edited Gravity with Mark Sanger, has made an endlessly exciting film for the ages, a technological marvel that should have a tremendous impact on the future of the industry.

Nominated for ten Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director (Alfonso Cuarón), Best Actress (Sandra Bullock), Best Cinematography (Emmanuel Lubezki), Best Film Editing (Alfonso Cuarón and Mark Sanger), Best Original Score (Steven Price), Best Visual Effects (Tim Webber, Chris Lawrence, Dave Shirk, and Neil Corbould), Best Sound Editing (Glenn Freemantle), Best Sound Mixing (Skip Lievsay, Niv Adiri, Christopher Benstead, and Chris Munro), and Best Production Design (Andy Nicholson, Rosie Goodwin, and Joanne Woollard)

A TOUCH OF SIN

Zhao San (Wang Baoqiang) is one of four protagonists who break out into sudden acts of shocking violence in Jia Zhangke’s A TOUCH OF SIN

A TOUCH OF SIN (TIAN ZHU DING) (Jia Zhangke, 2013)
IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at Third St., 212-924-7771
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway at 63rd St., 212-757-2280
www.kinolorber.com

During his sixteen-year career, Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke has made both narrative works (The World, Platform, Still Life) and documentaries (Useless, I Wish I Knew), with his fiction films containing elements of nonfiction and vice versa. Such is the case with his latest film, the powerful A Touch of Sin, which explores four based-on-fact outbreaks of shocking violence in four different regions of China. In Shanxi, outspoken miner Dahai (Jiang Wu) won’t stay quiet about the rampant corruption of the village elders. In Chongqing, married migrant worker and father Zhao San (Wang Baoqiang) obtains a handgun and is not afraid to use it. In Hubei, brothel receptionist Ziao Yu (Zhao Tao, Jia’s longtime muse and now wife) can no longer take the abuse and assumptions of the male clientele. And in Dongguan, young Xiao Hui (Luo Lanshan) tries to make a life for himself but is soon overwhelmed by his lack of success. Inspired by King Hu’s 1971 wuxia film A Touch of Zen, Jia also owes a debt to Max Ophüls’s 1950 bittersweet romance La Ronde, in which a character from one segment continues into the next, linking the stories. In A Touch of Sin, there is also a character connection in each successive tale, though not as overt, as Jia makes a wry, understated comment on the changing ways that people connect in modern society. In depicting these four acts of violence, Jia also exposes the widening economic gap between the rich and the poor and the social injustice that is prevalent all over contemporary China — as well as the rest of the world — leading to dissatisfied individuals fighting for their dignity in extreme ways. A gripping, frightening film that earned Jia the Best Screenplay Award at Cannes this year, A Touch of Zen opens October 4 at Lincoln Plaza and the IFC Center, with Jia and Zhao appearing at Lincoln Plaza for a Q&A following the 4:55 screening and to introduce the 7:25 show, after which they will head over to IFC for a Q&A following the 7:00 screening and to introduce the 9:35 show.

I DON’T KNOW: CABARET

Joel Grey will introduce CABARET at Rubin Museum screening on October 4

CABARET CINEMA: CABARET (Bob Fosse, 1972)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, October 4, free with $7 bar minimum, 9:30
212-620-5000
www.rmanyc.org

There’s nothing ignorant about this presentation from the Rubin Museum. In conjunction with the Rubin’s impressive “Ignorance” series of talks, films, live music, and more, the museum will be screening Bob Fosse’s Cabaret as part of, well, its weekly Cabaret Cinema program. And to up the ante, the one and only Joel Grey, who won a Tony for playing the Emcee in the original Broadway production, followed by an Oscar for the 1972 film, will “Willkommen” everyone, serving as emcee at the Rubin, introducing the film. Winner of more Academy Awards (eight) than any other non-Best Picture honoree, Cabaret is set in 1930s Berlin, where American singer Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) is trying to establish a career and a relationship with a British writer (Michael York) while Germany is preparing for major changes. The film includes such classic Kander and Ebb tunes as “Willkommen,” “Maybe This Time,” “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” and “Money, Money.” You actually won’t need much money, money on Friday night, as admission to the museum is free starting at 6:00, and a seven-dollar bar tab gets you into the film as well. The “I Don’t Know” series — “about what we don’t know, or choose not to know” — continues October 11 with Pam MacKinnon introducing Sidney Lumet’s Network, October 18 with the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple, and October 25 with Michael Mayer introducing Otto Preminger’s Laura.

MASSIVE ATTACK V ADAM CURTIS

Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Through October 4, $60
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

For twenty-five years, Robert “3D” Del Naja has been half of the British trip-hop group Massive Attack, along with Grant “Daddy G” Marshall, releasing such seminal records as Blue Lines, Protection, Mezzanine, and 100th Window. For thirty years, BBC journalist and filmmaker Adam Curtis has been making such award-winning documentaries and nonfiction series as Pandora’s Box, Modern Times: The Way of All Flesh, The Century of the Self, and The Power of Nightmares. Del Naja and Curtis have now teamed up to create the immersive multimedia production Massive Attack v Adam Curtis, co-commissioned by the Manchester International Festival, the Ruhrtriennale International Festival of the Arts, and the Park Avenue Armory. Former graffiti artist Del Naja and Curtis are joined by United Visual Artists, which has been providing LED installations for Massive Attack’s live shows since 2003, set designer Es Devlin (Howie the Rookie, The Master and Margarita), and vocalists Liz Fraser and Horace Andy as they delve into what Del Naja calls “a collective hallucination” and Curtis refers to as “a musical entertainment about the power of illusion and the illusion of power.” In the general admission show, multiple screens project a dizzying array of images examining the global sociopolitical culture of the last fifty years, declaring that “you are the centre of everything” while also including stories of individuals trying to find some hope for a better future. Massive Attack v Adam Curtis runs through October 4 in the armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall; the October 3 performance will be preceded by the ticketed panel discussion “Viewing Media Through an Artistic Lens” with Simon Critchley, Joyce Barnathan, and Alexis Goldstein, moderated by Graham Sheffield.

Massive Attack and Adam Curtis fight the power in multimedia show (photo by James Medcraft)

Update: The title Massive Attack v Adam Curtis might suggest that the trip-hop band and the controversial experimental filmmaker are locked in some kind of competition, but instead Robert Del Naja and Curtis come together in exciting ways in their thrilling multimedia show. The ninety-minute production takes place in an elongated rectangular section of the Park Avenue Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall, where fifteen hundred people squeeze in, with four large screens to the right and left and three more in the front, behind which Massive Attack plays a wide variety of cover songs (as well as a few snippets of their own tunes), joined by the Cocteau Twins’ Liz Fraser and Jamaican singer Horace Andy, both of whom have collaborated with the British band before. Curtis’s Everything Is Going According to Plan flashes across the eleven screens, as archival news footage, superimposed text, and narration by David Warner focus in on such figures as Donald Trump, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, economist Fischer Black, Jess “the Automat” Marcum, and others who Curtis believes have contributed to the economic and political downfall of the world. He also tells the powerful, tragic stories of British painter Pauline Boty and Russian postpunk musician Yegor Letov. Meanwhile, Massive Attack performs the Shirelles’ “Baby, It’s You,” the Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar,” Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey,” Dusty Springfield’s “The Look of Love,” This Mortal Coil’s “Dreams Are Like Water,” “Yanka’s Song,” “Safe from Harm,” and other songs, accompanying Curtis’s brutal, funny, cynical, and ironic images that portend the end of the world as we know it. The finale implores people to take action and save the planet from certain destruction, but you might be too dizzy and depressed by that point to care.

DANTE FERRETTI: DESIGNING FOR THE BIG SCREEN — SWEENEY TODD, THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET

Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter hide a dark secret in SWEENEY TODD

SWEENEY TODD, THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET (Tim Burton, 2007)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Monday, September 30, 4:00
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
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.sweeneytoddmovie.com

Oh yes, there will be blood. Tim Burton’s adaptation of the hit Broadway musical Sweeney Todd is bloody good fun. After being sent to prison for fifteen years by Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), who had designs on his wife (Laura Michelle Kelly), innocent barber Benjamin Barker (Johnny Depp) returns to nineteenth-century London, reborn as Sweeney Todd, now a dark, ominous figure dead set on gaining his dastardly revenge. He gets back his coveted silver razors, which he considers an extension of his arm, and sets up shop in his old place, above the store where Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) sells meat pies crawling with cockroaches. When Todd begins slicing throats with expert precision, Lovett has a novel way of doing away with the bodies — while increasing business. Burton and screenwriter John Logan (The Aviator, The Last Samurai) terrifically translate the show onto the big screen, as Depp, Bonham Carter, and the rest of the cast — including Sacha Baron Cohen as a magical elixir salesman, Timothy Spall as the judge’s wingman, and Jayne Wisener as Todd’s daughter, who is doomed to marry the judge — do a wonderful job with such Stephen Sondheim songs as “No Place Like London,” “Poor Thing,” “My Friends,” “Pretty Women,” and “Not While I’m Around.” Depp is marvelous as the demon barber of Fleet Street, wearing a fright wig with a shocking streak of white, singing most of his dialogue with a gentle devilishness, enhanced by his haunting, penetrating eyes. The goth opera not only sounds good but looks even better, courtesy of cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, Oscar-winning production designer Dante Ferretti, and costume designer Colleen Atwood. Burton and Depp, who previously collaborated on Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Corpse Bride, have another winner on their hands. Sweeney Todd is screening September 30 at 4:00 as part of the MoMA series “Dante Ferretti: Designing for the Big Screen,” being held in conjunction with the exhibit “Dante Ferretti: Design and Construction for the Cinema” and continues through February 9 with such other fab-looking works as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea, Federico Fellini’s City of Women, and Julie Taymor’s Titus.

NYFF51 — AFTERNOON OF A FAUN: TANAQUIL LE CLERCQ

The tragic career of dancer Tanaquil Le Clercq is examined in new documentary

AFTERNOON OF A FAUN: TANAQUIL LE CLERCQ (Nancy Buirski, 2013)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Monday, September 30, 6:00 pm
Howard Gilman Theater, 144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Friday, October 11, 1:00
Francesca Beale Theater, 144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Sunday, October 13, 6:00
Festival runs September 27 – October 13
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

“Tanny’s body created inspiration for choreographers,” one of the interviewees says in Nancy Buirski’s documentary Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq. “They could do things that they hadn’t seen before.” The American Masters presentation examines the life and career of prima ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, affectionately known as Tanny, who took the dance world by storm in the 1940s and ’50s before tragically being struck down by polio in 1956 at the age of twenty-seven. Le Clercq served as muse to both Jerome Robbins, who made Afternoon of a Faun for her, and George Balanchine, who created such seminal works as Western Symphony, La Valse, and Symphony in C for Le Clercq — and married Tanny in 1952. In the documentary, Buirski (The Loving Story) speaks with Arthur Mitchell and Jacques D’Amboise, who both danced with Le Clercq, her childhood friend Pat McBride Lousada, and Barbara Horgan, Balanchine’s longtime assistant, while also including an old interview with Robbins, who deeply loved Le Clercq as well. The film features spectacular, rarely seen archival footage of Le Clercq performing many of the New York City Ballet’s classic works, both onstage and even on The Red Skelton Show. The name Tanaquil relates to the word “omen” — in history, Tanaquil, the wife of the fifth king of Rome, was somewhat of a prophetess who believed in omens — and the film details several shocking omens surrounding her contracting polio. The film would benefit from sharing more information about Le Clercq’s life post-1957 — she died on New Year’s Eve in 2000 at the age of seventy-one — but Afternoon of a Faun is still a lovely, compassionate, and heartbreaking look at a one-of-a-kind performer. Afternoon of a Faun is screening at the New York Film Festival on September 30 at the Walter Reade Theater (followed by a Q&A with the director), on October 11 at the Howard Gilman Theater, and on October 13 at the Francesca Beale Theater.

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL: NOBODY’S DAUGHTER HAEWON

A couple tries to rekindle their romance in NOBODY’S DAUGHTER HAEWON

A couple considers rekindling their romance in NOBODY’S DAUGHTER HAEWON

NOBODY’S DAUGHTER HAEWON (NUGU-UI TTAL-DO ANIN HAEWON) (Hong Sang-soo, 2013)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Alice Tully Hall, 1941 Broadway at 65th St.
Sunday, September 29, 9:00 pm
Francesca Beale Theater, 144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Monday, September 30, 3:30
Festival runs September 27 – October 13
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

In South Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s latest bittersweet tale, Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, nearly everyone who meets college student Haewon (Jeong Eun-chae) tells her that she’s “pretty,” from her mother (Kim Ja-ok), who has decided to pack up and move to Canada, to legendary star Jane Birkin (playing herself), whom she bumps into on the street, to a hot bookstore owner, to fellow students and teachers. Rather stuck up and direct on the outside but much more tender and lost on the inside, Haewon reaches out to a former lover, film professor Seongjun (Lee Sun-kyun), who is married with a baby. As they contemplate rekindling their affair, they wind up getting drunk on sake with a group of Seongjun’s students, who suspect the teacher-student romance and clearly do not like Haewon. Meanwhile, Haewon, who is reading Norbert Elias’s The Loneliness of the Dying, is intrigued by the flirtations of another film professor, Jungwon (Kim Eui-sung), who teaches in San Diego. From Seoul’s West Village to the historic Fort Namhan, Haewon tries to find her place in the world as writer-director Hong employs a chronological narrative that combines her dreams with reality over the course of a few weeks in springtime.

A drunken night at a sake restaurant reveals some hard truths in Hong Sang-soo’s latest New York Film Festival entry

Hong has explored similar terrain in such previous films as Like You Know It All, Oki’s Movie, Woman on the Beach, and Tale of Cinema, but there’s just enough of an edge to Nobody’s Daughter Haewon to prevent it from feeling repetitive and more of the same. As always, Hong favors long establishing shots and a stationary camera that suddenly and awkwardly zooms in, instantly reminding viewers that they are watching a film. However, the scene in the restaurant goes on for several minutes with no cuts or camera movements, letting the acting and the dialogue tell the story without cinematic interference. Nobody’s Daughter Haewon also clocks in at a mere hour and a half, much shorter than most of his earlier work, which tends to go on way too long, but this one feels a little lighter in substance as well. Nobody’s Daughter Haewon is screening at the New York Film Festival on September 29 at Alice Tully Hall and on September 30 at the Francesca Beale Theater; Hong was initially scheduled to appear at one of the shows for a Q&A but is now unable to do so.