this week in film and television

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER TIME: CELEBRATING THE MUSIC OF “INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS”

Benefit concert will celebrate music of latest Coen brothers film, INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS

The Town Hall
123 West 43rd St. between Sixth Ave. & Broadway
Tickets on sale Wednesday, August 21, 12 noon
Concert takes place September 29, $75-$150, 7:30
212-840-2824
www.insidellewyndavis.com
www.the-townhall-nyc.org

In 2000, filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen teamed up with producer T Bone Burnett to create an award-winning soundtrack for their hit film O Brother, Where Art Thou? The 1930s-set movie featured a mix of traditional Americana, country, folk, and blues, including such songs as “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow,” “O Death,” and “Lonesome Valley” performed by such musicians as Norman Blake, Jerry Douglas, Alison Krauss, Ralph Stanley, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, and the Soggy Bottom Boys. In their latest film, Inside Llewyn Davis, which premiered at Cannes in May, the Coens tell the story of a week in the life of a 1960s Greenwich Village folksinger, with Burnett once again on board to steer the soundtrack. On September 29, the music of the film will take center stage at the Town Hall, when “Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of Inside Llewyn Davis” takes place, featuring an all-star lineup raising funds for the National Recording Preservation Foundation. The roster is unusually impressive, featuring the Avett Brothers, Joan Baez, Rhiannon Giddens, Lake Street Drive, Colin Meloy, the Milk Carton Kids, Marcus Mumford, Conor Oberst, the Punch Brothers, Secret Sisters, Patti Smith, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, Willie Watson, and Jack White in addition to cast members Oscar Isaac, John Goodman, Carey Mulligan, and Stark Sands. The concert will include songs from the film in addition to 1960s tunes that inspired them. The film will screen at this fall’s New York Film Festival before opening in December. Tickets are $75 and $150 and go on sale August 21 at noon.

TCM CLASSIC FILM TOUR

Meet near Broadway at 51st St.
Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, August 22 – January 9, children $27, adults $43, 11:30 am
212-913-9780
www.onlocationtours.com

Throughout Hollywood’s fabled history, many of its greatest films were made right here in New York City. Turner Classic Movies and On Location Tours have now teamed up to present the TCM Classic Film Tour, a three-hour exploration through some of the Big Apple’s most iconic cinema sites. Among the dozens of stops the bus will make are at the Empire State Building (King Kong, An Affair to Remember), Grand Central Terminal (North by Northwest, Superman), Central Park (Ghostbusters, The Fisher King), the Dakota (Rosemary’s Baby, Hannah and Her Sisters), the Plaza Hotel (Plaza Suite, Barefoot in the Park), Rockefeller Center (Elf, On the Town), Tiffany’s (Breakfast at Tiffany’s), FAO Schwarz (Big, Baby Boom), and Zabar’s (You’ve Got Mail). There will also be trivia quizzes and movie clips along the way. We’re a little disturbed that the On Location website promises a “fantastic view of the Manhattan Bridge you’ll recognized [sic] from Woody Allen’s Manhattan,” since it’s actually the Queensboro Bridge that appears in the iconic scene (as displayed in the tour logo), but we’ll catch them a break this time and hope that the tour itself isn’t laden with additional mistakes.

A TIME FOR BURNING — CINEMA OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT: THE INTRUDER / NINE FROM LITTLE ROCK

William Shatner plays shady character Adam Cramer in powerful film about school integration in a southern town

THE INTRUDER (Roger Corman, 1962)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Tuesday, August 20, 9:30
Series continues through August 28
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Exploitation master Roger Corman shot out of the gates in the mid-1950s, directing and/or producing more than three dozen films between 1955 and 1961, directing doomsday disasters (Day the World Ended, Last Woman on Earth) and sci-fi quickies (It Conquered the World, Attack of the Crab Monsters), cheapie Westerns (Gunslinger, The Oklahoma Woman) and teen rave-ups (Sorority Girl, Teenage Doll), crime dramas (Machine-Gun Kelly; I, Mobster) and horror (A Bucket of Blood, The Undead), as well as the tales of Poe (House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum). But he tried something a little different with 1962’s The Intruder, a gripping, yet still exploitative, story of integration set in the ultraconservative south. Adapted by Charles Beaumont from his 1959 novel, which itself was inspired by the Little Rock Nine, the film stars William Shatner as Adam Cramer, a self-styled “social reformer” who arrives in the small southern town of Caxton just after integration has become law and just as ten black students, led by Joey Greene (Charles Barnes), are about to join whites at the local high school. Under the auspices of the John Birch-like Patrick Henry Society, Cramer is determined to continue the fight against integration, stirring the locals to potential mob violence through carefully orchestrated speeches filled with hate and lies. He allies himself with wealthy plantation owner Verne Shipman (Robert Emhardt) and cozies up to high school girl Ella McDaniel (Beverly Lunsford), daughter of newspaper editor Tom McDaniel (Frank Maxwell), one of the only reasonable white men in town. The manipulative Cramer will do just about anything to rile up the masses to keep the blacks from ruining America, but his own questionable personal morality might just get in the way, especially as he flirts with Vi (Jeanne Cooper), the wife of traveling salesman Sam Griffin (Leo Gordon).

Beaumont, who wrote nearly two dozen episodes of The Twilight Zone — though neither of the classics starring Shatner — appears in the film as Mr. Paton, a teacher in the school, along with fellow Twilight Zone scribe George Clayton Johnson, who plays Phil West; Johnson later wrote “The Man Trap,” the first regular episode of Star Trek. Indeed, The Intruder contains numerous Rod Serling-like elements, from the general social and political themes to Taylor Byars’s black-and-white cinematography and Herman Stein’s score. The Intruder is screening August 20 with Charles Guggenheim’s Oscar-winning short, Nine from Little Rock, as part of the BAMcinématek series “A Time for Burning: Cinema of the Civil Rights Movement,” which runs through August 28 with such other political films as Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow, Daniel Petrie’s A Raisin in the Sun, Edward Pincus and David Neuman’s Black Natchez, and St. Clair Bourne’s Let the Church Say Amen! The two-week festival was organized to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, but it now takes on even more meaning with the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that a central part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is unconstitutional.

VIDEO OF THE DAY: “USE ME” BY LIV WARFIELD, SHELBY J, AND NEW POWER GENERATION AT CITY WINERY

Over the years, Prince has put the spotlight on a series of musical protégés, from Wendy and Lisa, Sheila E., and Vanity to Apollonia 6, Carmen Electra, and Sheena Easton. City Winery will be celebrating His Most Purpleness’s newest up-and-comers as current backup singers Shelby J and Liv Warfield take center stage, with the NPG Hornz, for a series of hotly anticipated shows. The Purple Week festivities begin on August 19 with a free screening (advance RSVP required) of Albert Magnoli’s 1984 film Purple Rain, in which Prince stars as the Kid, performing such classic tracks as “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Darling Nikki,” “When Doves Cry,” and “I Would Die 4 U.” The movie will be preceded by a set by Prince tour DJ Dudley. Then Shelby J, Liv Warfield, and the New Power Generation Hornz will play two shows a night August 21, 22, 23, and 25 ($75 – $150), with special unannounced guests at each show. Will TAFKAP himself show up? He currently is not out on the road, so who knows. In any case, it should be one funky week.

FUN CITY — NEW YORK IN THE MOVIES 1967-75: THE LANDLORD

Young Elgar Winthrop Julius Enders’s (Beau Bridges) spoiled life of privilege is about to dramatically change in THE LANDLORD

THE LANDLORD (Hal Ashby, 1970)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, August 18, free with museum admission, 2:00
Series runs through September 1
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

When rich kid Elgar Winthrop Julius Enders (Beau Bridges) finally decides to do something with his spoiled life of privilege, he takes a rather curious turn, buying a dilapidated tenement in a pregentrified Park Slope that resembles the South Bronx in Hal Ashby’s poignant directorial debut, The Landlord. At first, the less-than-worldly Elgar doesn’t quite know what he’s gotten himself into, believing it will be easy to kick out the current residents and then replace the decrepit building with luxury apartments. He pulls up to the place in his VW bug convertible, thinking he can just waltz in and do whatever he wants, but just as his car is vandalized, so is his previously charmed existence, as he gets to know wise house mother Marge (Pearl Bailey), the sexy Francine (Diana Sands), her activist husband, Copee (Louis Gossett Jr.), and Black Power professor Duboise (Melvin Stewart), none of whom is up-to-date with the rent. Meanwhile, Elgar starts dating Lanie (Marki Bey), a light-skinned half-black club dancer he assumed was white, infuriating his father, William (Walter Brooke), and mother, Joyce (a delightful, Oscar-nominated Lee Grant), who are in the process of setting up their daughter, Susan (Susan Anspach), with the white-bread Peter Coots (Robert Klein).

Elgar has a whole lot of learning to do in Hal Ashby’s New York City-set black comedy

Based on the novel by Kristin Hunter, The Landlord is a telling microcosm of race relations and class conflict in a tumultuous period in the nation’s history, as well as that of New York City, coming shortly after the civil rights movement and the free-love late ’60s. The film is masterfully shot by Astoria-born cinematographer Gordon Willis (Klute, Annie Hall, Manhattan, all three Godfather movies), who sets the bright, open spaces of the Enderses’ massive estate against the dark, claustrophobic rooms of the dank tenement. Screenwriter Bill Gunn (Ganja and Hess) and Ashby avoid getting overly preachy in this at times outrageous black comedy, incorporating slapstick along with some more tender moments; the scene in which Joyce meets Marge is a marvel of both. And just wait till you see Coots’s costume at a fancy fundraiser. The Landlord began quite a string for Ashby, who followed it up with Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound for Glory, Coming Home, and Being There in a remarkable decade for the former film editor (In the Heat of the Night) who died in 1988 at the age of fifty-nine. The Landlord is screening August 18 at 2:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image series “Fun City: New York in the Movies 1967-75,” guest curated by J. Hoberman and continuing through September 1 with such other Big Apple fare as The Angel Levine, The French Connection, Coogan’s Bluff, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and Taking Off.

GUITAR INNOVATORS: IN SEARCH OF BLIND JOE DEATH: THE SAGA OF JOHN FAHEY / APPROXIMATELY NELS CLINE

The life and career of iconoclastic musician and composer John Fahey is investigated in new documentary

IN SEARCH OF BLIND JOE DEATH: THE SAGA OF JOHN FAHEY (James Cullingham, 2012)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, August 16
212-924-3363
www.johnfaheyfilm.com
www.cinemavillage.com

“He created a new language, modally speaking, harmonically speaking,” Pete Townshend says about guitarist and composer John Fahey at the beginning of In Search of Blind Joe Death: The Saga of John Fahey. “And if that’s not an iconoclast, I don’t know what is, really,” the Who axman continues, comparing Fahey to William S. Burroughs and Charles Bukowski. Those are apt comparisons for the so-called American primitive guitarist who did things on his instrument that no one has done before or since. Decemberists guitarist Chris Funk then calls the multifaceted Fahey, who was born in Washington, DC, in 1939, an “independent label owner, like maybe the first; record collector, musicologist, alcoholic, hobo, thrift store master.” Unfortunately, the documentary, directed by James Cullingham, spends the rest of its nearly sixty minutes cutting between amazing archival footage of Fahey, particularly in an early television interview with Laura Weber in which he shyly talks about his work, uses his guitar as an ashtray, and plays, which is mesmerizing to watch, and various experts trying to describe what might just be indescribable. The documentary never quite flows like a Fahey composition, instead going through fits and starts as talking heads (including Fahey college friend Barry Hansen, better known as Dr. Demento) discuss his influence, which turns out to be more interesting, perhaps, for Fahey purists than for general music fans. However, the scene with record collector Joe Bussard is a riot. Throughout the film, Cullingham, who met Fahey in 1982, dryly reads from Fahey’s writings and regularly returns to images of a turtle, a major Fahey symbol, but the director might have been better served by incorporating more archival footage of Fahey, who never did what was best for his career and today languishes in relative obscurity, twelve years after his death at the age of sixty-one.

Guitarist Nels Cline displays his chops and teams up with an eclectic group of musicians in studio-set documentary

APPROXIMATELY NELS CLINE (Steven Okazaki, 2013)
www.farfilm.com
In Search of Blind Joe Death: The Saga of John Fahey is part of a “Guitar Innovators” double feature that also includes Steven Okazaki’s lovely little Approximately Nels Cline, in which the multinominated director goes inside the studio to capture guitarist Nels Cline reimagining a pair of Irish folk songs with an eclectic group of musicians. Cline, a philosophy major who has played with Wilco, the Bad Plus, Mike Watt, Thurston Moore, Elliott Sharp, and his own Nels Cline Trio and Nels Cline Singers in addition to so many others, speaks eloquently about his process in a friendly, personable manner that makes him instantly likable. The sessions are a joy to watch, performed with violinist and vocalist Carla Kihlstedt, bassist Devin Hoff, trumpeter Ron Miles, Cibo Matto keyboardist Yuka Honda, clarinetist Ben Goldberg, and drummer Matthias Bossi. Oscar winner Okazaki (Days of Waiting, Troubled Paradise) primarily lets the music do the talking, from experimental noise to jazzlike improvisation to carefully orchestrated sections. “It’s really important if you feel something that’s really sensitive, and that’s really transporting, whether it’s a chord or if it’s a sound, I just try to process that and manifest it in a way that’s personal,” Cline explains. The only drawback is that the film is a mere twenty-seven minutes; we would have loved to see and hear more. In Search of Blind Joe Death: The Saga of John Fahey and Approximately Nels Cline open August 16 at Cinema Village, with Cullingham and Nels Cline producer Jeff Wood participating in Q&As following the 8:45 screenings on Friday and Saturday night.

CUTIE AND THE BOXER

Documentary tells the engaging story of a pair of Japanese artists and the life they have made for themselves in Brooklyn

CUTIE AND THE BOXER (Zachary Heinzerling, 2013)
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway between 62nd & 63rd Sts., 212-757-2280
Landmark Sunshine Cinema, 143 East Houston St. between First & Second Aves., 212-330-8182
Opens Friday, August 16
www.facebook.com/cutieandtheboxer

Zachary Heinzerling’s Cutie and the Boxer is a beautifully told story of love and art and the many sacrifices one must make to try to succeed in both. In 1969, controversial Japanese Neo Dada action painter and sculptor Ushio Shinohara came to New York City, looking to expand his career. According to the catalog for the recent MoMA show “Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde,” which featured four works by Ushio, “American art had seemed to him to be ‘marching toward the glorious prairie of the rainbow and oasis of the future, carrying all the world’s expectations of modern painting.’” Four years later, he met nineteen-year-old Noriko, who had left Japan to become an artist in New York as well. The two fell in love and have been together ever since, immersed in a fascinating relationship that Heinzerling explores over a five-year period in his splendid feature-length theatrical debut. Ushio and Noriko live in a cramped apartment and studio in DUMBO, where he puts on boxing gloves, dips them in paint, and pounds away at large, rectangular canvases and builds oversized motorcycle sculptures out of found materials. Meanwhile, Noriko, who has spent most of the last forty years taking care of her often childlike husband and staying with him through some rowdy times and battles with the bottle, is finally creating her own work, an R. Crumb-like series of drawings detailing the life of her alter ego, Cutie, and her often cruel husband, Bullie. (“Ushi” means “bull” in Japanese.) While Ushio is more forthcoming verbally in the film, mugging for the camera and speaking his mind, the pig-tailed Noriko is far more tentative, so director and cinematographer Heinzerling brings her tale to life by animating her work, her characters jumping off the page to show Cutie’s constant frustration with Bullie.

Ushio Shinohara creates one of his action paintings in CUTIE AND THE BOXER

During the course of the too-short eighty-two-minute film — it would have been great to spend even more time with these unique and compelling figures — the audience is introduced to the couple’s forty-year-old son, who has some issues of his own; Guggenheim senior curator of Asian Art Alexandra Munroe, who stops by the studio to consider purchasing one of Ushio’s boxing paintings for the museum; and Chelsea gallery owner Ethan Cohen, who represents Ushio. But things never quite take off for Ushio, who seems to always be right on the cusp of making it. Instead, the couple struggles to pay their rent. One of the funniest, yet somehow tragic, scenes in the film involves Ushio packing up some of his sculptures — forcing them into a suitcase like clothing — and heading back to Japan to try to sell some pieces. Cutie and the Boxer is a special documentary that gets to the heart of the creative process as it applies both to art and love, focusing on two disparate people who have made a strange yet thoroughly charming life for themselves. Cutie and the Boxer opens August 16 at Lincoln Plaza and the Landmark Sunshine; Ushio and Noriko will be at the latter for several Q&As over the weekend, including some with Heinzerling as well.