MLK Day features a host of special events and community-based service projects throughout the city (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Multiple venues
Monday, January 21
www.mlkday.gov
In 1983, the third Monday in January was officially recognized as Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, honoring the birthday of the civil rights leader who was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Dr. King would have turned eighty-four this month, and you can celebrate his legacy tomorrow by participating in a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service project or attending one of several special events taking place around the city. BAM’s twenty-seventh annual free Brooklyn Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. includes a keynote speech by Harry Belafonte, a live simulcast of the presidential inauguration activities, and musical performances by the Brooklyn Interdenominational Choir and Kindred the Family Soul. The JCC in Manhattan again teams up with Symphony Space for Artists Celebrate: Martin Luther King, Jr., a free evening consisting of Catherine Russell & Her Band performing “Civil Rights in Song and Spirit,” Anthony Russell, Anthony Coleman, and Michael Winograd coming together for “Convergence: Hebrew, Yiddish, Yemenite, and African-American Songs in a Contemporary Jazz Setting,” and April Yvette Thompson starring in excerpts from Liberty City, her play written with Jessica Blank, all taking place at Symphony Space beginning at 6:30. The Museum of the Moving Image will be open on MLK Day, screening Martha Burr and Mei-Juin Chen’s new documentary, The Black Kungfu Experience, as part of their “Fist and Sword” series, with martial artists Ron Van Clief, Tayari Casel, and Dennis Brown on hand to talk about the film, followed by the special presentation “Tongues Untied, True Tales Told: African-American Women Changing the Picture in Film and Television,” with Ruby Dee, S. Epatha Merkerson, and Barbara Montgomery, featuring discussion along with clips from Montgomery’s upcoming Mitote as part of the museum’s “Changing the Picture” series. The Children’s Museum of Manhattan will teach kids about King’s legacy with its “Make a Difference Pledge,” “I Have a Dream Mural,” and performances by the Harlem Gospel Choir, while the Brooklyn Children’s Museum has “Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Message of Peace” craft activity and an educational discussion of “Justice Everywhere.” And the Museum at Eldridge Street will be hosting a free Family Story Hour & Crafts highlighted by a reading of Eloise Greenfield and Jan Spivey Gilchrist’s picture book The Great Migration: Journey to the North.
In 2004-5, Christopher Trumbo’s play Trumbo: Red, White, and Blacklisted, based on the writings of his father, jailed Hollywood Ten screenwriter and novelist Dalton Trumbo (1905-76), toured the country, a staged reading directed by Peter Askin and starring such actors as Nathan Lane, Joe Mantegna, Bill Irwin, Brian Dennehy, and F. Murray Abraham in the title role. Christopher and Askin turned the show into a documentary film, with decidedly mixed results. Although Trumbo’s letters are works of art on their own, funny and incisive, biting and cynical, with a wry, dry sense of humor that summarizes the social and political climate of the cold war era, they lose much of their power when read overdramatically onscreen by Dennehy, Josh Lucas, Paul Giamatti, and others. The camera will linger on Michael Douglas or David Strathairn as they contemplate what they have just read, adding an unnecessary sense of seriousness and importance. It is almost impossible to concentrate on Trumbo’s words as you wonder why Joan Allen was selected, whether Liam Neeson should have tried an American accent, how long and white Donald Sutherland’s hair is, or how many sly gestures Lane will make as he relates a riotous treatise on onanism. Interviews with such friends and colleagues as Manny Azenberg, Kate Lardner, Kirk Douglas, and Trumbo’s children, Christopher and Mitzi, dig deeper into the kind of man Trumbo was, along with archival footage of Trumbo on talk shows, in home movies, and telling the House Un-American Committee to go to hell. Askin tries so hard to focus on the actual words of the Oscar-winning screenwriter behind such classics as Johnny Got His Gun, Roman Holiday, Spartacus, Exodus, and Papillon that he ends up obscuring the portrait as a whole. But oh, what words they are. Trumbo will be screening January 22 at the IFC Center as part of the Tuesday-night series “Stranger than Fiction,” with Askin on hand to participate in a Q&A. The series continues through February 26 with such other documentaries as Neil Barsky’s Koch, Amy Nicholson’s Zipper: Coney Island’s Last Wild Ride, and Terence Nance’s An Oversimplification of Her Beauty.
In such unique films as Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Darjeeling Limited, black-comedy master Wes Anderson has created a bizarre collection of characters who seem to live in their own alternate realities. In his latest, Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson has once again assembled an oddball assortment of men, women, and children in a terrifically clever and entertaining fairy tale all its own. Tired of being abused by his fellow Khaki Scouts and dismissed by his foster parents, twelve-year-old orphan Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) runs away from Camp Ivanhoe on the island of New Penzance, much to the chagrin of dedicated scout master Randy Ward (Edward Norton). Meanwhile, twelve-year-old loner Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) is fed up with her life as well, which she mostly spends listening to Benjamin Britten, reading fairy tales (fictitious stories made up by Anderson), watching the world through a pair of ever-present binoculars, and despising her parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand). Afraid of what might have happened to the children, the local police officer, Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis), gets involved, as does a stern woman from social services (Tilda Swinton) and, eventually, a very different kind of scout, Cousin Ben (Jason Schwartzman). The proceedings are overseen by a narrator (Bob Balaban) who ends up being more than just an omniscient presence. Moonrise Kingdom is an absolute gem of a film, an exciting, original tale about growing up told in a fabulously funny deadpan manner that combines slapstick humor with wildly ironic elements, filled with the endless wonders of childhood, although it is most definitely not for children. Newcomers Gilman and Hayward appear wise beyond their years in the lead roles, with outstanding support from an all-star cast, most prominently Norton as the by-the-book scout master on a mission. Written by Anderson with Roman Coppola and featuring a lovely score by Alexandre Desplat, Moonrise Kingdom is one of the best films of 2012, by a director whose imagination never ceases to amaze, and the Museum of the Moving Image agrees, as Moonrise Kingdom is screening January 20 as part of the museum’s “Curators’ Choice: The Best of 2012” series, consisting of works selected by chief curator David Schwartz and assistant film curator Rachael Rakes; the series continues next month with David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis and Hong Sang-soo’s In Another Country.
Jessica Chastain has rocketed into stardom in just two years, starring in seven major motion pictures in 2011 (including The Help and The Tree of Life) and four more in 2012 (from Madagascar 3 to Zero Dark Thirty) while also playing the lead role in the Broadway revival of The Heiress. Chastain kicks off 2013 with the intensely creepy scarefest Mama. Expanded from his 
Inspired by actual events that took place in his hometown of Recife, Brazil, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds is an engaging slice-of-life examination of class differences and a community in the midst of social and economic change. When Clodoaldo (Irandhir Santos) and Fernando (Nivaldo Nascimento) go door-to-door offering their services as overnight security guards protecting the street, only Francisco (W. J. Solha), an aging, wealthy sugar baron who owns much of the surrounding property, and his grandson João (Gustavo Jahn) refuse to participate in the shady proposal, but Francisco insists that they keep their hands off another of his grandsons, Dinho (Yuri Holanda), who is responsible for a spate of car-stereo robberies. This suburban neighborhood, ever more in the architectural shadow of bigger high rises going up all around them, is filled with little secrets and minor resentments. A mechanic keys an expensive car when the owner is rude to him. Clodoaldo and a maid (Clébia Souza) make use of a fancy gated house he is taking care of while the owners are away. Sisters fight over the size of a flat-screen television. And a co-op board wants to fire their longtime night watchman without a severance package because he has taken to napping on the job. Meanwhile, João, who has two children by the daughter of the family’s maid, has started a relationship with the more acceptable Sofia (Irma Brown), but the privileged João still lives in the past; when he shows an apartment in one of Francisco’s condos, he points out what would be the maid’s room, assuming everyone can afford domestic help. And Bia (Meve Jinkings) finds a different kind of domestic help, buying large quantities of pot from the water guy, finding unique ways to deal with her neighbor’s howling dog, and using household appliances to pleasure herself. A film critic who has previously made documentaries, Filho, who wrote, directed, and coedited (with João Maria) Neighboring Sounds, has populated his debut full-length feature with believable characters caught up in realistic situations, along with just the right dose of black comedy. The film was shot with natural sound at a relaxed pace, inviting viewers into this intriguing fictional tale filled with real-world implications, involving a decaying past and modern issues of safety and surveillance. While João might be the moral conscious of the story, it is Jinkings’s Bia who steals this small gem of a film, her unique methods of daily survival a joy to behold. Neighboring Sounds is screening January 19 at the Museum of the Moving Image as part of the “Curators’ Choice: The Best of 2012” series, consisting of works selected by chief curator David Schwartz and assistant film curator Rachael Rakes; upcoming screenings include Jafar Panahi’s This Is Not a Film, Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, and Hong Sang-soo’s In Another Country.