Photos line the ground at Duffy Square as part of JR’s Inside Out art project (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
INSIDE OUT: THE PEOPLE’S ART PROJECT
Duffy Square, 46th St. & Broadway
Daily through May 10, free, 12 noon – 8:00 pm
Midnight Moment nightly at 11:57 through May 31
www.timessquarenyc.org
www.insideoutproject.net
inside out new york city slideshow
“Tell me what you stand for and together we’ll turn the world inside out,” French artist JR says about his work, an interactive project in which ordinary citizens from around the world get to express themselves in large-scale photographs that are pasted up on walls, buildings, streets, rooftops, trailers, and other locations, reclaiming their personal identity as well as public space, often in response to crime, poverty, natural disasters, and governmental abuse. Winner of the 2011 TED Prize, “awarded to an extraordinary individual with a creative and bold vision to spark global change,” JR used the $100,000 TED grant to create Inside Out, for which he and his small team have taken and/or printed some 130,000 photographs from more than 100 countries and helped paste them up in appropriate locations with special meaning, from Haiti, Tunisia, and Sierra Leone to Colombia, Mexico, and North Dakota. People are encouraged to make any kind of face they want, the vast majority ending up being playful, filling the world with smiles while revealing the power of paper and glue in a kind of peaceful protest against tyranny as well as a celebration of life.
Participants can pose with their photo before it’s added to Duffy Square exhibition (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
JR, whose story is told in Alastair Siddons’s compelling documentary, Inside Out: The People’s Art Project, which was recently shown at the Tribeca Film Festival and debuts on HBO on May 20, is currently in New York, where he has brought his Inside Out mobile photo-booth truck to Times Square. Every day from 12 noon till 8:00 through May 10, visitors can get their photo taken, then watch as it’s added to the highly trampled ground in Duffy Square. Participants can take a picture of themselves with the three-foot-by-four-foot printout, and it’s all free. “The streets are the best gallery I could imagine,” JR says in the film. In addition, JR has also instituted the project’s first electronic pasting, as a three-minute video incorporating footage from the documentary and the photo shoots will be shown every night in May at 11:57 across numerous digital screens in Times Square as part of “Midnight Moment,” which has previously displayed short works by Robert Wilson, Tracey Emin, Björk, Yoko Ono, and others. Inside Out is a twenty-first-century project that cleverly uses modern technology to give power back to the people in these difficult, changing times.
Charlie Chaplin’s first feature, The Kid, was a breakthrough for the British-born silent-film star, a touching and tender sixty-eight-minute triumph about a poor soul getting a second chance at life. When a baby arrives at his doorstep, a Tramp (Chaplin) first tries to ditch the boy, but he ends up taking him to his ramshackle apartment and raising him as if he were his own flesh and blood. Although he has so little, the Tramp makes sure the child, eventually played by Jackie Coogan, has food to eat, clothes to wear, and books to read. Meanwhile, the mother (Edna Purviance, Chaplin’s former lover), who has become a big star, regrets her earlier decision and wonders where her son is, setting up a heartbreaking finale. In addition to playing the starring role, Chaplin wrote, produced, directed, and edited the film and composed the score for his company, First National, wonderfully blending slapstick comedy, including a hysterical street fight with an angry neighbor, with touching melodrama as he examines poverty in post-WWI America, especially as seen through the eyes of the orphan boy, played beautifully by Coogan, who went on to marry Betty Grable, among others, and star as Uncle Fester in The Addams Family. Chaplin’s innate ability to tell a moving story primarily through images reveals his understanding of cinema’s possibilities, and The Kid holds up as one of his best, alongside such other silent classics as 1925’s The Gold Rush and 1931’s City Lights. The Kid is screening on May 5 at 11:00 am as part of the Film Forum Jr. series for kids and families and will be preceded by a Little Rascals short and a Chaplin Dress-Alike Contest; the series continues May 12 with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much and May 19 with François Truffaut’s Small Change.
Tammy Caplan and Joe Tyler Gold’s Desperate Acts of Magic is an amateurish if well-meaning vanity project that is desperately in need of actors who can do magic and magicians who can act. Gold who wrote the film, inspired by his own experiences, and produced and edited it with Caplan, stars as Jason Kant, a magician trying to make it in the business, following in the footsteps of his childhood magic camp friend Steve Kramer (Jonathan Levit), who gets all the good gigs and hot women. After being swindled by the beautiful Stacy Dietz (Valerie Dillman), Jason discovers that she is a magician as well, and the two decide to start working on an act for an important magic contest. But Stacey turns out to be wild and unpredictable, so Jason teams up with groupie Ellen Taylor (Sascha Alexander) instead, which leads to a whole set of different problems as the contest approaches. Unfortunately, none of the magic in Desperate Acts of Magic, all of which was done for real, with no camera tricks, is very interesting. It might be cool to insiders, but it all seems like standard card, coin, and flower tricks to the less initiated; the movie mentions such superstars as David Copperfield, David Blaine, Criss Angel, and Penn & Teller, but all of the magic in the film is of supremely lower scale. Gold and Caplan, who plays Brenda, also have an agenda that gets tiresome, promoting the idea that women should be more than just assistants but equals to men in the business, especially when it comes to being the main magician. (The production notes stress that this is essentially the third movie in history to feature a female magician.) Gold gives his character the last name “Kant,” perhaps a reference to philosopher Immanuel Kant or even Kant Magic Shop, but it probably should have been spelled “Cant.” The lone saving grace is Dillman, who is excellent as the deeply troubled Stacey, but otherwise Desperate Acts of Magic pulls no rabbits out of any hats. The film opens at the Quad on May 3, with Gold, Caplan, and Dillman participating in Q&As following various screenings on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
If director Ryan Gielen’s Turtle Hill, Brooklyn feels real, that’s because it was written and produced by real-life partners Brian W. Seibert and Ricardo Valdez, who star as on-screen couple Will (Seibert) and Mateo (Valdez), and takes place in their Sunset Park apartment, in a neighborhood they have redubbed “Turtle Hill” for this gentle, understated slice-of-life drama. It’s Will’s thirtieth birthday, and Mateo is getting ready to throw a big party in their backyard patio. But when Will’s sister unexpectedly shows up early in the morning and suddenly discovers that her brother is gay — and is clearly not okay with that kind of lifestyle — Will and Mateo start examining themselves and their relationship as friends start arriving for the celebration, where there’s lots of food and drink as well as discussions about politics, same-sex marriage, immigration, drugs, discrimination, and America itself, none of which comes off as pedantic. Things, however, threaten to become volatile when a gym trainer stops by, exciting Will and unnerving Mateo. Shot with a handheld camera by Andrew Tank Rivara, the film invites the audience into the party, as if they are guests as well, surrounded by friends and family. (Indeed, many of the guests are friends of Seibert and Valdez’s.) It’s a welcoming atmosphere filled with believable situations and characters, even though Seibert and Valdez have explained that the plot is not autobiographical. And the film avoids the potential pitfalls of pushing a gay agenda by simply allowing the story to play out organically, resulting in an involving tale about two people in love, facing a pivotal moment in their lives together. A film festival hit across the country, Turtle Hill, Brooklyn, which won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at 2011’s NewFest, opens May 3 at the Quad, with Gielen, Seibert, and Valdez participating in Q&As following the 7:00 and 9:00 screenings on Friday and Saturday.
Olivier Assayas’s autobiographical coming-of-age tale Something in the Air is a fresh, exhilarating look back at a critical period in twentieth-century French history. In this sort-of follow-up to his 1994 film about 1970s teenagers, Cold Water, which starred Virginie Ledoyen as Christine and Cyprien Fouquet as Gilles, Something in the Air features newcomer Clément Métayer as a boy named Gilles and Lola Créton (