HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE provides a fascinating inside look at AIDS activists fighting the power
HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE (David France, 2012)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, September 21
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.surviveaplague.com
Contemporary activists stand to learn a lot from the gripping documentary How to Survive a Plague. For his directorial debut, longtime journalist David France, one of the first reporters to cover the AIDS crisis that began in the early 1980s, scoured through more than seven hundred hours of mostly never-before-seen archival footage and home movies of protests, meetings, public actions, and other elements of the concerted effort to get politicians and the pharmaceutical industry to recognize the growing health epidemic and do something as the death toll quickly rose into the millions. Focusing on radical groups ACT UP and TAG (Treatment Action Group), France follows such activist leaders as Peter Staley, Mark Harrington, Larry Kramer, Bob Rafsky, and Dr. Iris Long as they attack the policies of President George H. W. Bush, famously heckle presidential candidate Bill Clinton, and battle to get drug companies to create affordable, effective AIDS medicine, all while continuing to bury loved ones in both public and private ceremonies. France includes new interviews with many key activists who reveal surprising details about the movement, providing a sort of fight-the-power primer about how to get things done. The film also shines a light on lesser-known heroes, several filled with anger and rage, others much calmer, who fought through tremendous adversity to make a difference and ultimately save millions of lives. France will be at the IFC Center to talk about How to Survive a Plague at numerous screenings on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of opening weekend.
Barry Levinson’s poignant drama follows the trials and tribulations of the Krichinsky family, Polish immigrants trying to make a life in America. The third in Levinson’s Baltimore series (following 1982’s Diner and 1987’s Tin Men and preceding 1999’s Liberty Heights), Avalon is heart-wrenchingly beautiful, led by a sweet, innocent performance by Armin Mueller-Stahl as Sam Krichinsky, the family patriarch, and Aidan Quinn as the son who has different dreams. The outstanding cast also includes Elijah Wood, Elizabeth Perkins, Kevin Pollak, Joan Plowright, and the great Lou Jacobi as Gabriel Krichinsky, who has a hysterical Thanksgiving Day fight with his brother Sam. One of the most tender and moving multigenerational dramas of the last few decades, Avalon is screening on September 22 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “Film After Film” series, a collection of works selected by J. Hoberman focusing on how digital technology is changing the way movies are both made and viewed.
“I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That’s the two categories,” says Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) in Annie Hall. “The horrible are like, I don’t know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don’t know how they get through life. It’s amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you’re miserable, because that’s very lucky, to be miserable.” Allen’s classic 1977 Oscar-winning film — which had the working title “Anhedonia,” a medical term referring to the inability to experience pleasure — is one of the funniest, most-quoted romantic comedies in film history, a pure delight from start to finish. It’s ostensibly a luuuuuurve story about a nebbishy Jew and the ultimate WASPy goy (Diane Keaton as the title character), but it’s really about so much more: large vibrating eggs, right turns on red lights, television, Existential Motifs in Russian Literature, California, slippery crustaceans, driving through Plutonium, dead sharks, Freud, Hitler, Leopold and Loeb, religion, cocaine, Shakespeare in the Park, Buick-size spiders, planet Earth, and, well, la-di-da, la-di-da, la la. The film is screening on September 21 as part of the new Rubin Museum series “Happiness is…,” which consists of movies with a somewhat different idea of joy, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, Federico Fellini’s 8½, and Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers. Part of the larger Rubin program “
Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo continues his fascinating exploration of cinematic narrative in In Another Country, although this one turns somewhat nasty and tiresome by the end. After being duped in a bad business deal by a family member, an older woman (Youn Yuh-jung) and her daughter, Wonju (Jung Yumi), move to the small seaside town of Mohjang, where the disenchanted Wonju decides to write a screenplay to deal with her frustration. Based on an actual experience she had, she writes three tales in which a French woman named Anne (each played by an English-speaking Isabelle Huppert) comes to the town for different reasons. In the first section, Anne is a prominent filmmaker invited by Korean director Jungsoo (Kwon Hye-hyo), who has a thing for her even though he is about to become a father with his very suspicious wife, Kumhee (Moon So-ri). In the second story, Anne, a woman married to a wealthy CEO, has come to Mohjang to continue her affair with a well-known director, Munsoo (Moon Sung-keun), who is careful that the two are not seen together in public. And in the final part, Anne, whose husband recently left her for a young Korean woman, has arrived in Mohjang with an older friend (Youn), seeking to rediscover herself. In all three stories, Anne searches for a lighthouse, as if that could shine a light on her future, and meets up with a goofy lifeguard (Yu Jun-sang) who offers the possibility of sex, but each Anne reacts in different ways to his advances. Dialogue and scenes repeat, with slight adjustments made based on the different versions of Anne, investigating character, identity, and desire both in film and in real life. Hong wrote the film specifically for Huppert, who is charming and delightful in the first two sections before turning ugly in the third as Anne suddenly becomes annoying, selfish, and irritating, the plot taking hard-to-believe twists that nearly undermine what has gone on before. As he has done in such previous films as 