this week in film and television

MOVIETOWN: LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF AND OTHER LA VISIONS

Los Angeles Plays Itself looks at LA as a character in the movies

MOVIETOWN: LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF AND OTHER LA VISIONS
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
July 15-28, $17 per film, 3-pack $42, 5-pack $60
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

“This is the city: Los Angeles, California. They make movies here. I live here,” Thom Andersen says in his groundbreaking 2003 documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself. “Sometimes I think that gives me the right to criticize the way movies depict my city. I know it’s not easy — the city’s big; the image is small. It’s hard not to resent the idea of Hollywood, the idea of the movies as standing apart from and above the city.”

The nonfiction work is the centerpiece of the two-week IFC Center series “Movietown: Los Angeles Plays Itself and Other LA Visions,” consisting of two dozen films in which LA plays a major role — and are included in Andersen’s nearly three-hour video essay and love letter. The wide-ranging festival features noir classics, satires, futuristic thrillers, low-budget indies, and teen rom-coms, from Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, Todd Haynes’s Safe, Martha Coolidge’s Valley Girl, and Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts to James Cameron’s The Terminator, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood, and Alex Cox’s Repo Man in addition to films by John Cassavetes, John McTiernan, Ridley Scott, Amy Heckerling, and Peter Bogdanovich.

Maybe there’s more to LA than what Alvy Singer argues in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall: “I don’t want to live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light.”

Below are select highlights from this fourteen-day cinematic sojourn to the West Coast.

The Dude will abide at IFC Center as part of LA festival

THE BIG LEBOWSKI (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1998)
Friday, July 15, 11:45 pm
Saturday, July 23, 11:40 pm
www.ifccenter.com/films/the-big-lebowski

One of the ultimate cult classics and the best bowling movie ever, the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski has built up such a following since its 1998 release that fans gather every year for Lebowski Fest, where they honor all things Dude, and with good reason. The Big Lebowski is an intricately weaved gem that is made up of set pieces that come together in magically insane ways. Jeff Bridges is awesome as the Dude, a laid-back cool cat who gets sucked into a noirish plot of jealousy, murder, money, mistaken identity, and messy carpets. Julianne Moore is excellent as free spirit Maude, Tara Reid struts her stuff as Bunny, and Peter Stormare, Flea, and Torsten Voges are a riot as a trio of nihilists. Also on hand are Philip Seymour Hoffman, David Huddleston, Aimee Mann, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, David Thewlis, Sam Elliott, Ben Gazzara, Jon Polito, and other crazy characters, but the film really belongs to the Dude and his fellow bowlers Jesus Quintana (John Turturro, who is so dirty he is completely cut out of the television version), Donny (Steve Buscemi), and Walter (John Goodman), who refuses to roll on Shabbos. And through it all, one thing always holds true: The Dude abides.

THE LONG GOODBYE (Robert Altman, 1973)
Friday, July 15, 5:30
Saturday, July 16, 1:20 & 10:00
www.ifccenter.com/films/the-long-goodbye

This is one odd detective story. King of the ’70s Elliott Gould stars as a mumbling Philip Marlowe who reluctantly becomes enmeshed in a murder case involving a friend of his played by former Yankee Jim Bouton. Marlowe lives next door to a harem of naked brownie-loving women, and he spends most of his time worrying about his cat. In fact, the opening fifteen minutes, in which he has to go out in the middle of the night to get cat food and then trick his cat, is absolutely priceless, one of the best cat story lines ever. The detective stuff plays second fiddle to director Robert Altman’s ’70s mood piece, which is fun to watch even at its most baffling and senseless.

Rowdy Roddy Piper tries to save the planet from an alien conspiracy in John Carpenter’s They Live

THEY LIVE (John Carpenter, 1988)
Saturday, July 16, 11:45 pm
Friday, July 22, 11:50 pm
www.ifccenter.com/films/they-live

How can you possibly not love a movie in which wrestling legend Rowdy Roddy Piper, brandishing a shotgun and standing next to an American flag, declares, “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass . . . and I’m all out of bubblegum.” In John Carpenter’s tongue-in-cheek Reagan-era cult favorite, the goofy 1988 political sci-fi thriller They Live, Piper, who passed away in 2015 at the age of sixty-one, stars as John Nada, a drifter who arrives in L.A. and gets a job working construction, where he is befriended by Frank Armitage (Keith David), who is otherwise trying to keep to himself and away from trouble as he makes money to send back to his family. Frank invites John to stay at a tent city for homeless people, across the street from a church where John soon finds some disturbing things happening involving a blind preacher (Raymond St. Jacques), a well-groomed man named Gilbert (Peter Jason), and a bearded weirdo (John Lawrence) taking over television broadcasts and making dire predictions about the future. John then discovers that by using a pair of special sunglasses, he can see, in black-and-white, what is really going on beneath the surface: Alien life-forms disguised as humans have infiltrated Los Angeles, gaining positions of power and placing subliminal messages in signs and billboards, spreading such words and phrases as Obey, Consume, Submit, Conform, Buy, Stay Asleep, and No Independent Thought. John seeks help from Frank and cable channel employee Holly Thompson (Meg Foster), determined to reveal the hidden conspiracy and save the planet.

Aliens use television and billboards to send subliminal messages to humanity in prescient sci-fi satire

Loosely based on Ray Nelson’s 1963 short story and 1986 comic-book adaptation “Eight O’Clock in the Morning,” They Live is a fun, if seriously flawed, film that takes on Reaganomics, consumerism, the media, and capitalism and doesn’t much care about its huge, gaping plot holes. Carpenter, an iconoclastic independent auteur who had previously made such other paranoid thrillers as Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, Escape from New York, and a remake of The Thing, wrote They Live under the pseudonym Frank Armitage (the name of David’s character as well as a reference to H. P. Lovecraft’s Henry Armitage from “The Dunwich Horror”) and composed the ultracool synth score with Alan Howarth. The movie is famous not only for Piper’s not exactly brilliant performance but for one of the longest fight scenes ever, as John and Frank go at each other for five and a half nearly interminable minutes, as well as the influence They Live had on activist artist Shepard Fairey, who admitted in 2003 that it “was a major source of inspiration and the basis for my use of the word ‘obey.’” The film is all over the place, a jumble of political commentary and B-movie nonsense, but it’s also eerily prescient, especially with what is going on in America today. Keep a watch out for such recognizable character actors as Sy Richardson, George Buck Flower, Susan Blanchard, Norman Alden, Lucille Meredith, and Robert Grasmere, whose names you don’t know but whose faces are oh-so-familiar.

Billy Wilder takes audiences down quite a Hollywood road in Sunset Boulevard

SUNSET BOULEVARD (Billy Wilder, 1950)
Sunday, July 17, 10:40 am & 3:40 pm
Tuesday, July 19, 11:15 am & 5:20 pm
www.ifccenter.com/films/sunset-boulevard

“You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big,” handsome young screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) remarks to an older woman in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small,” the former star (Gloria Swanson) famously replies. It doesn’t get much bigger than Sunset Boulevard, one of the grandest Hollywood movies ever made about Hollywood. The wickedly entertaining film noir begins in a swimming pool, where Gillis is a floating corpse, seen from below. He then posthumously narrates through flashback precisely what landed him there. On the run from a couple of guys trying to repossess his car, the broke Gillis ends up at a seemingly abandoned mansion, only to find out that it is home to Desmond and her dedicated servant, Max Von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim). They initially mistake Gillis for the undertaker who is coming to perform a funeral service and burial for Desmond’s pet monkey. (You’ve got to see it to believe it.) When Desmond discovers that Gillis is in fact a screenwriter, she lures him into working with her on her script for a new version of Salome, in which she is determined to play the lead role. “I didn’t know you were planning a comeback,” Gillis says. “I hate that word,” Desmond responds. “It’s a return, a return to the millions of people who have never forgiven me for deserting the screen.” But just as Desmond was unable to make the transition from silent black-and-white films to color and sound pictures, getting Salome off the ground is not going to be as easy as she thinks. Hollywood can be a rather vicious place, after all.

Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) keeps a close hold on screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) in Sunset Boulevard

Nominated for eleven Oscars and winner of three — for the sharp writing, the detailed art/set decoration, and Franz Waxman’s score, which goes from jazzy noir to melodrama — Sunset Boulevard wonderfully bites the hand that feeds it, skewering Hollywood while making references to such real stars as Rudolph Valentino, Mabel Normand, John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, Wallace Reid, and Tyrone Power and such films as Gone with the Wind and King Kong. Actual publicity stills and movie posters abound, in Paramount offices and Desmond’s spectacularly designed home, which was once owned by J. Paul Getty and would later be used for Rebel without a Cause. Cecil B. DeMille, who directed Swanson in many silent films, plays himself in the movie, seen on set making Samson and Delilah. Desmond’s fellow bridge players are portrayed by silent stars Buster Keaton, H. B. Warner, and Anna Q. Nilsson. Meanwhile, before Swanson fired him, von Stroheim directed her in the silent film Queen Kelly, which is the movie Max shows Gillis in Desmond’s screening room. (Swanson herself would go on to make only three more feature films; she passed away in 1983 at the age of eighty-four.) John F. Seitz’s black-and-white cinematography and inventive use of camera placement, from underwater to high above the action, makes the most of Hans Dreier’s sets and Swanson’s fabulous costumes and makeup. Sunset Boulevard is the thirteenth and final collaboration between writer-director Wilder and writer-producer Charles Brackett, who together previously made The Lost Weekend and A Foreign Affair. Wilder and Holden would go on to make Stalag 17, Sabrina, and Fedora together. Finally, of course, Sunset Boulevard concludes with one of the greatest quotes in Hollywood history.

Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep examines black life in postwar America

KILLER OF SHEEP (Charles Burnett, 1977)
Wednesday, July 20, 2:30 & 7:00
Tuesday, July 26, 4:05
www.ifccenter.com/films/killer-of-sheep
www.killerofsheep.com

In 2007, Milestone Films restored and released Charles Burnett’s low-budget feature-length debut, Killer of Sheep, with the original soundtrack intact; the film had not been available on VHS or DVD for decades because of music rights problems that were finally cleared. (The soundtrack includes such seminal black artists as Etta James, Dinah Washington, Little Walter, and Paul Robeson.) Shot on weekends for less than $10,000, Killer of Sheep took four years to put together and another four years to get noticed, when it won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1981 Berlin Film Festival. Reminiscent of the work of Jean Renoir and the Italian neo-Realists, the film tells a simple story about a family just trying to get by, struggling to survive in their tough Watts neighborhood in the mid-1970s.

The slice-of-life scenes are sometimes very funny, sometimes scary, but always poignant, as Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders) trudges to his dirty job in a slaughterhouse in order to provide for his wife (Kaycee Moore) and children (Jack Drummond and Angela Burnett). Every day he is faced with new choices, from participating in a murder to buying a used car engine, but he takes it all in stride. The motley cast of characters, including Charles Bracy and Eugene Cherry, is primarily made up of nonprofessional actors with a limited range of talent, but that is all part of what makes it all feel so real. Killer of Sheep was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1989, the second year of the program, making it among the first fifty to be selected, in the same group as Rebel Without a Cause, The Godfather, Duck Soup, All About Eve, and It’s a Wonderful Life, which certainly puts its place in history in context.

Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck get caught up in murder and deception in Double Indemnity

DOUBLE INDEMNITY (Billy Wilder, 1944)
Saturday, July 23, 11:15 am
Tuesday, July 26, 11:15 am & 6:15 pm
www.ifccenter.com

IFC Center is offering three chances to catch Billy Wilder’s endlessly romantic noir classic Double Indemnity. Three years after a brunette Barbara Stanwyck tried to swindle Henry Fonda in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve, a blonde Stanwyck is looking for a way out of her loveless marriage when opportunity knocks in the form of acerbic insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray). Stanwyck plays alluring, tough-talking femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson, who falls for Neff and soon convinces him that they should do away with her husband (Tom Powers). They’re both in it “straight down the line,” as she repeats throughout the film, but insurance fraud investigator Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) isn’t so sure that Mr. Dietrichson’s death was an accident.

John F. Seitz’s inventive black-and-white cinematography — watch for those Venetian blind shadows — set the standard for the genre. MacMurray, who had to be convinced by Wilder to take the part because he thought he’d be awful in the role, is sensational as Neff, oh-so-cool as he recites his cynical dialogue and lights matches with one hand. He might think he’s tough, but he’s no match for Stanwyck, who rules the roost. Both Stanwyck and MacMurray would go on to successful careers in television in the 1960s, he in My Three Sons, she in The Big Valley. Directed by Wilder from a script he wrote with Raymond Chandler based on a pulp novel by James Cain, with music by Miklós Rózsa — how’s that for a pedigree? — Double Indemnity was nominated for seven Oscars and won none.

The Exiles is screening as part of Los Angeles celebration at IFC Center

THE EXILES (Kent Mackenzie, 1961)
Monday, July 25, 11:30 am
www.ifccenter.com/films/the-exiles

Founded in 1990 by Dennis Doros and Amy Heller as a way to preserve great orphaned works, Milestone Films first restored Charles Burnett’s wonderful Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding. Milestone, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and preservationist Ross Lipman teamed up again to bring back Kent Mackenzie’s black-and-white slice-of-life tale The Exiles, which debuted at the 1961 Venice Film Festival and screened at the inaugural 1964 New York Film Festival before disappearing until its restoration, upon which it was selected for the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival. The Exiles follows a group of American Indians as they hang out on a long Friday night of partying and soul searching in the Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles, centering on Homer (Homer Nish) and Yvonne (Yvonne Williams), who are going to have a baby. After Yvonne makes dinner for Homer and his friends, the men drop her off at the movies by herself while they go out drinking and gambling and, in Tommy’s (Tommy Reynolds) case, looking for some female accompaniment.

As the night goes on, Homer, Yvonne, and Tommy share their thoughts and dreams in voice-over monologues that came out of interviews Mackenzie conducted with them. In fact, the cast worked with the director in shaping the story and getting the details right, ensuring its authenticity and realism, giving The Exiles a cinéma vérité feel. Although the film suffers from a poorly synced soundtrack — it is too often too clear that the dialogue was dubbed in later and doesn’t match the movement of the actors’ mouths — it is still an engaging, important independent work (the initial budget was $539) about a subject rarely depicted onscreen with such honesty. Mackenzie, who followed up The Exiles with the documentaries The Teenage Revolution (1965) and Saturday Morning (1971) before his death in 1980 at the age of fifty, avoids sociopolitical remonstrations in favor of a sweet innocence behind which lies the difficulties of the plight of American Indians assimilating into U.S. society.

QUEENS ON SCREEN: SWERVE / ENTRE NOS

Lynne Sachs’s poetic short Swerve moves to the rhythm of Queens

ENTRE NOS (Paola Mendoza & Gloria La Morte, 2009) / SWERVE (Lynne Sachs, 2022)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Friday, July 15, 7:15, and Sunday, July 17, 1:30, $15
718-777-6800
movingimage.us

The Astoria-based Museum of the Moving Image’s monthly “Queens on Screen” series — which is not about royalty or LGBTQIA+ issues but comprises films set in one of the most diverse areas on the planet — continues July 15 and 17 with two works set in the borough. Up first is Lynne Sachs’s seven-minute Swerve, in which artist and curator Emmy Catedral, blaqlatinx multidisciplinary artist ray ferreira, director and cinematographer Jeff Preiss, film curator and programmer Inney Prakash, and actor Juliana Sass recite excerpts from Pilipinx poet Paolo Javier’s O.B.B. (Nightboat, November 2021, $19.95).

Illustrated by Alex Tarampi and Ernest Concepcion, the book, which stands for Original Brown Boy, consists of such sections as “Aren’t You a Mess,” “Goldfish Kisses,” “Restrained by Time,” and “Last Gasp.” New Yorkers Catedral, ferreira, Preiss, Prakash, and Sass share Javier’s words as they wander around Moore Homestead Playground and Elmhurst’s HK Food Court. “The words each operate on their own swerve, from music that would play in the background and from overheard conversation outside my window, on the subway, at the local Korean deli,” Javier says at the beginning, writing in a notebook.

The film was shot in one day in August 2021, during the Delta wave of Covid-19, so many people are wearing masks, and the food court is nearly empty; when Prakash orders, a plastic sheet separates him from the employee. The performers recite the poems as if engaging in free-flowing speech; words occasionally appear on the screen, including “free emptiness,” “unknown thoroughfare,” and “hum your savage cabbage leaf.”

Experimental documentarian Sachs (Film About a Father Who, Investigation of a Flame), who was the subject of a career retrospective at MoMI last year, captures the unique rhythm of both Javier’s language and the language of Queens; Javier and Sachs will be at the museum to discuss the film after the July 15 screening.

Swerve will be followed by Paola Mendoza and Gloria La Morte’s Entre Nos, a deeply personal semiautobiographical story in which Mendoza stars as a Colombian immigrant whose husband deserts her, leaving her to raise two children in Queens. The film is shot by Oscar-nominated cinematographer Bradford Young (Arrival, Selma), who makes the borough its own character.

In a director’s note, Mendoza explains, “Throughout my childhood my mother worked countless double-shifts at the toilet bowl cleaners business and flipping burgers at local fast food restaurants near me. We never talked about the roaches in the house or the yearning to see our family back in the country and culture of Colombia. Instead we had to learn to smile through the grit, the trial of tears, and dealing with heartache. As the years passed, I came to a sublime new realization that our story was not unique. Thousands of immigrant mothers, for hundreds of years, have endured problems when trying to adapt to their new immigration in the USA. My mother, like those before her, have overcome all that remains for exactly the same reason, to build the foundation for a better life for their children.”

DREAMING WALLS: INSIDE THE CHELSEA HOTEL

Dreaming Walls explores the legacy of the Chelsea Hotel

DREAMING WALLS: INSIDE THE CHELSEA HOTEL (Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier, 2022)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, July 8
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

“There’s a lot of history in this building. There’s a lot of ghosts around here. Some ghosts, they just die here; some ghosts, they’re really lost, trying to find their way out. But they can’t find it,” a construction worker tells Chelsea Hotel resident and choreographer Merle Lister Levine in the documentary Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel. The man explains that he searched online for information about the hotel where he was working on major renovations and found out about numerous deaths, including murder and suicide. But he also discovered that “there were a lot of interesting people here, a lot of musicians, a lot of art people, painters.” The two of them, an elderly woman who uses a walker and a strong, vibrant young man, then do the mambo in front of a window that looks out on the city. That, in a nutshell, summarizes both the hotel itself and the documentary.

Built in the 1880s, the Chelsea Hotel (or Hotel Chelsea) has been home to such artists as Dylan Thomas, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, William S. Burroughs, Miloš Forman, Sid Vicious, Madonna, and Larry Rivers. Andy Warhol set his 1966 film Chelsea Girls there. It’s where Janis Joplin met Leonard Cohen, leading to Cohen’s song “Chelsea Hotel No. 2.” Others who have connections include Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, the Ramones, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and Stanley Kubrick. In the film, images of many of these celebrities are occasionally projected onto the chimney and walls as a reminder of what once was.

The documentary, directed by Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier, alludes to the hotel’s place in the cultural zeitgeist of New York City, but it focuses on the modern-day residents, a group of older people clinging to the Chelsea’s bygone bohemian days as they try to hold on to their apartments following the ouster of longtime manager Stanley Bard and the sale of the hotel to real estate developers in 2011, 2013, and 2016, which left their future in limbo.

Cinematographers Virginie Surdej and Joachim Philippe shoot the film with a faded, muted palette to make it all look old, as if the hotel is haunted by its memories. The effect makes the current residents seem already part of its past, if not its legacy, doomed to be lost souls wandering the hallways as gentrification takes over. This is not the prime heyday of the Chelsea Hotel as a hotbed for creativity.

At one point, architect Nicholas Pappas and his wife, structural engineer Zoe Serac Pappas, the president of the Chelsea Tenants Association who is fighting for the seemingly endless construction to be finished, are lying in bed, discussing the hotel’s link to art. “There are a lot of people going around saying they’re artists, but they don’t do art. And then there comes the question, What is art?” Nicholas points out.

Choreographer Merle Lister Levine dances with a construction worker in Dreaming Walls

The film includes an archival clip of artist and longtime hotel resident Alpheous Philemon Cole, once the world’s oldest man, being asked what’s wrong with modern art. “Everything,” he responds. In a recent interview with painter Bettina Grossman, the oldest person in the building, she says, “Everybody else was paid to leave, and they did not offer me any money to go. So I’m thinking, maybe they prefer to kill me. . . . They do things to frighten me out.”

Duverdier and van Elmbt don’t delve deeply into the troubles the hotel has experienced this century; they don’t seek comment from the current owners or anyone involved in the construction, which goes on right around the residents, as if they’re already not there.

“For a long time I felt like I was witnessing a slow-motion rape of this building,” multimedia artist Steve Willis, who lives in Joplin’s old suite, explains. “I’m not watching it anymore. I’m not participating. I’ll show up in court and say I saw it happen, but that’s it. The last straw was giving up a large chunk of my apartment here.”

Perhaps the most important line in the film, which is executive produced by Martin Scorsese and opens July 8 at IFC Center, comes from artist Rose Cory, who says, “I live a very unusual life here.”

MONTHLY CLASSICS: MOTHRA

Mothra flies into Japan Society for special screening on July 8

MOTHRA (KAIJU) (Ishirō Honda, 1961)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, July 8, $15, 7:00
www.japansociety.org

Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s — well, eventually, it’s a gigantic gynnidomorpha alisman, commonly known as a moth. But first, it’s an enormous caterpillar that moves across Japan slower than the giant breast in Woody Allen’s 1972 Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid to Ask. And while the mammoth mammary Victor Shakapopulis is hunting down in Allen’s comedy shoots out mother’s milk, the giant lepidoptera, labeled Mothra, dispenses powerful silk.

In the 1950s and ’60s, a series of Japanese films featured monsters born of the aftereffects of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the fear of alien invasion. It all started with Ishirō Honda’s Godzilla in 1954 and also included Honda’s Rodan and King Ghidorah and Noriaki Uasa’s Gamera as well as endless sequels.

In 1961, Honda gave us Mothra, a melding of Godzilla — Gojira in Japanese, the last two letters of which were added to the otherwise harmless word “moth” to make it appear much more dangerous — and the basic plot of King Kong. In fact, the next year Honda made King Kong vs. Godzilla.

The tale begins as human life is discovered on Infant Island, where the government of Rolisica (a combination of Russia and America) conducted hydrogen bomb tests thinking the land mass was uninhabitable. A group of explorers is assembled to investigate, led by the evil Rolisican Clark Nelson (Jerry Ito), who has ulterior motives. Among the others on the expedition are Dr. Shin’ichi Chûjô (Hiroshi Koizumi), an anthropologist and linguist who is excited by what might be discovered, and Zen’ichirō Fukuda (Frankie Sakai), a stowaway reporter (and comic relief) who is trying to get the big story for his demanding editor, Sadakatsu Amano (the great Takashi Shimura of Akira Kurosawa fame).

On the island, they discover a pair of “tiny beauties” (identical twins Yumi Ito and Emi Ito of the pop duo the Peanuts) called the Shobijin, singing sisters who are a mere one foot tall. Using weapons against the peaceful indigenous population, Nelson captures the fairies and brings them to Japan to exploit them. The islanders then perform a ritual ceremony to summon a great monster from its shell to bring the women back. “Whatever some giant monster does is completely unrelated with our work,” Nelson’s cohort declares, setting the stage for a final showdown in New Kirk City, a version of New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

Mothra is a bizarrely masterful movie, a warning about the dangers of atomic warfare, government greed, rampant capitalism, and disregard for indigenous societies. Written by Shinichi Sekizawa, who penned dozens of monster flicks, the film is a kind of parable of the human life cycle from birth to death. The Shobijin, two miniature women, are found on the deftly titled Infant Island, and they are almost like children, growing up in front of us as they learn to speak. Mothra evolves from egg to caterpillar to moth. It’s as if the whole world has been reborn in the aftermath of WWII, with Russia and America merging together to try to become the parents of the planet.

The special effects, courtesy of Eiji Tsuburaya, are often hilarious. When Nelson picks up the tiny beauties, it is obvious he is holding two small dolls. It is clear that many of the cars are toys, and the breaking of a dam looks like a kid’s unwieldy science experiment. Pre-CGI superimposition of characters over various locations is shaky. For some reason, the military pauses for what seems like hours while Mothra spins its cocoon. The skin of the actors portraying the indigenous denizens of Infant Island was (poorly) darkened in a way that would be totally unacceptable today (and should have been in 1961).

But then, amid an attack by Japanese planes on Mothra doing the breaststroke across the ocean, an unintended rainbow flashes for just a second, as if the heavens are declaring him our hero and promising that things will turn out okay, a feeling that is echoed in the Peanuts’ haunting, memorable song.

Mothra is screening in 35mm at Japan Society on July 8 at 7:00 and will be introduced by Kevin Derendorf, author of SF: The Japanese Science Fiction Film Encyclopedia and Kaiju for Hipsters: 101 Alternative Giant Monster Movies. In addition, there will be a Kaiju-themed pop-up sponsored by Seismic Toys, with an exclusive limited-edition Mothra Mini-Print by Robo7 on sale in the lobby.

BroadwayCon 2022

Who: Anthony Rapp, LaChanze, Andrew Barth Feldman, Carolee Carmello, Ben Cameron, Erin Quill, Fredi Walker-Browne, Julie White, Telly Leung, Ilana Levine, Jacqueline B. Arnold, Jennifer Ashley Tepper, Vanessa Williams, Judy Kuhn, Lesli Margherita, Nik Walker, Ryann Redmond, Thayne Jasperson, Hillary Clinton, more
What: BroadwayCon 2022
Where: Manhattan Center, 311 West Thirty-Fourth St., and the New Yorker Hotel, 481 Eighth Ave.
When: July 8-10, day passes $80, general pass $200, gold pass $425, platinum pass $1,250
Why: BroadwayCon is back with an in-person edition taking place July 8-10 at the Manhattan Center and the New Yorker Hotel, right by Madison Square Garden and Penn Station and just a few blocks south of the Theater District. This year’s edition includes panel discussions, interviews, live performances, podcasts, a cosplay contest, workshops, photo and autograph sessions, singalongs, meetups, and celebrations of and inside looks at such shows as A Strange Loop, Six the Musical, Chicago, POTUS, Dear Evan Hansen, Beetlejuice, Thoughts of a Colored Man, Kimberly Akimbo, SpongeBob SquarePants, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, The Kite Runner, Assassins, and Hamilton.

Among those participating at the three-day festival are Anthony Rapp, LaChanze, Carolee Carmello, Ben Cameron, Erin Quill, Julie White, Telly Leung, Vanessa Williams, Judy Kuhn, Lesli Margherita, and Hillary Clinton, talking about such topics as racial and gender diversity, disability, understudies, anxiety, body positivity, and Stephen Sondheim.

Below are select highlights for each day:

Friday, July 8
Ensemble screening, with Telly Leung, 10:00 am, followed by a talkback at 11:20, Crystal Ballroom, the New Yorker Hotel

BroadwayCon 2022 Opening Ceremony, with Ben Cameron, Manhattan Center Grand Ballroom, 12:40

Here’s to the Ladies: Hillary Rodham Clinton Live at BroadwayCon, with LaChanze, Julie White, and Vanessa Williams, moderated by Hillary Clinton, Manhattan Center Grand Ballroom, 1:00

Making a Living and Having a Life in Theatre Production, with Jameson Croasdale, Mary Kathryn “MK” Blazek, Rebecca Zuber, Lauren Parrish, and Gary Levinson, moderated by Naomi Siegel, Sutton Place Suite, the New Yorker Hotel, 2:20

Lights, Overture, Stage Fright! Breaking Down Performance Anxiety, with Kira Sparks, Sutton Place Suite, the New Yorker Hotel, 3:40

POTUS is one of several Broadway shows that will be featured at BroadwayCon (photo by Paul Kolnick)

Saturday, July 9
Black Lives Matter on Broadway, with T. Oliver Reid, Britton Smith, Emilio Sosa, Michael Dinwiddie, and Lillias White, moderated by Linda Armstrong, New Yorker Hotel Grand Ballroom, 10:00

Broadway Livestreaming: Expanding the Reach of Live Theatre, with Timothy Allen McDonald, Sean Cercone, Luke Naphat, Tralen Doler, Nathan Gehan, and Jen Sandler, moderated by Joshua Turchin, Gramercy Park Suite, the New Yorker Hotel, 11:20

Getting the Show Back on the Road: The Pandemic and Its Impact on Touring Broadway, with Jacob Persily, Sutton Place Suite, the New Yorker Hotel, 2:20

Paul Gemignani and Sondheim’s Musical Legacy, with Margaret Hall and Meg Masseron, Crystal Ballroom, the New Yorker Hotel, 3:40

BroadwayCon Cabaret, with special secret guest, hosted by Ben Cameron, Manhattan Center Grand Ballroom, 5:00

Sunday, July 10
Cheers to Understudies: The Broadway Cast Live!, with Amber Ardolino, Mallory Maedke, Tally Sessions, and Lauren Boyd, hosted by Ben Cameron, New Yorker Hotel Grand Ballroom, 10:00

Body Liberation on Broadway, with Amara Janae Brady, Shantez M. Tolbut, and Evan Ruggiero, moderated by Stephanie Lexis, Gramercy Park Suite, the New Yorker Hotel, 10:00

Directors on Debuts, with Zhailon Levingston and Tina Satter, moderated by Zeynep Akça, Crystal Ballroom, the New Yorker Hotel, 1:00

Tell Me More! Tell Me More!, special guests TBA, Manhattan Center Grand Ballroom, 2:20

Broadway Anecdotes II: Golden Age Gossip, with Kenneth Kantor, Joshua Ellis, and Mimi Quillin, moderated by Ken Bloom, Gramercy Park Suite, the New Yorker Hotel, 5:00

ECHOES OF THE EMPIRE: BEYOND GENGHIS KHAN

Robert H. Lieberman’s Echoes of the Empire is a love letter to Mongolia

ECHOES OF THE EMPIRE: BEYOND GENGHIS KHAN (Robert H. Lieberman, 2021)
Streaming on demand
www.echoesoftheempire.com

I recently spent two weeks in Mongolia, traveling across the steppes and the Gobi Desert before finishing our journey in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, known as UB. I’d never experienced anything like that; for most of our time there, we saw more animals (sheep, goats, horses, cows, gazelles, camels) than people, meeting nomadic herders, staying in gers (Mongolian yurts), and learning about Chinggis Khan, the famous Mongol warrior known to the West as Genghis Khan. His name and image are everywhere: statues and monuments, museums, beer bottles, paintings, the airport.

Shortly after returning to bustling New York City, I watched filmmaker and novelist Robert H. Lieberman’s beautiful documentary Echoes of the Empire: Beyond Genghis Khan, which is now available for online streaming after playing the festival circuit. The film, the conclusion of a trilogy that began with Angkor Awakens and They Call It Myanmar, wonderfully captures the Mongolia I had just toured as it explores the land’s history, from its unique topography and weather (particularly the wind) and Chinggis Khan’s power in the thirteenth century to the Soviet influence beginning in 1921 and the arrival of democracy and a new constitution in 1992. Essentially, Mongolia today is a very young country, barely thirty years old, with a very old culture. There’s a lot to learn as it reclaims its culture — Mongolians were not allowed to even say the name “Chinggis Khan” under the Soviets — and develops much-needed infrastructure as nomads who live as their ancestors have done for more than a thousand years now head to the big city to make a new life.

Echoes opens with gorgeous aerial shots by Michael Roberts of animals moving through vast landscapes of grass, sand, and mountains before the camera reveals UB, the past meeting the present and future as lush traditional music plays.

“As a child, I grew up on horseback leading camel caravans on the steppe,” poet G.Mend-Ooyo fondly remembers. “The nomadic life is the closest lifestyle to nature. During the summer, my family left our ger’s door open. Through the door frame, the outside always looked as if it were a painting, changing from dawn to dusk. It was like I was looking at a framed painting. This was my childhood art gallery as I grew up in a nomadic family.” I felt the same thing numerous times during my trip.

Jack Weatherford, author of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, notes, “The people move constantly, and the air moves constantly. When you’re crossing the steppe, you can go for hours and sometimes days without seeing a human habitation, but you always look for the animals, because once you see the animals, you know there are going to be people somewhere close by.” He describes the basic conventions of the ger and how herders live. “You walk into the ger and you smell family; you know that you’re home.”

Rutgers scholar Simon Wickhamsmith points out, “Mongolia today seems to me a very modern society on the surface, but just below the surface there is a feeling of great antiquity and a tremendous respect for the history and the traditional culture.”

Lieberman also speaks with journalist and filmmaker Peter Bittner, former US ambassador to Mongolia Jonathan Addleton, Mongolia Quest director D.Gereltuv, ecologist and conservation biologist T.Batbayar, Cornell biologist Allen MacNeill, economist and teacher S.Unur, University of Delaware ethnomusicologist Sunmin Yoon, and others, giving wide-ranging perspectives of Mongolia, from its land to its politics.

Activist and former Parliament member Oyungerel Tsedevdamba talks about the importance of song in nomadic culture. “That’s the only entertainment they have,” she says. When we were invited into a ger by a herder, he and his friends sang a traditional song for us. (After we had lunch, they also showed us how to tame a wild horse.)

Weatherford shares the details of Chinggis Khan’s early life, from the death of his father, the shunning of his widowed mother, and the abduction of his wife to his growing expertise in battle and his successful invasions, told with animation by Camilo Nascimento. “We remember the conquests, and the conquest was harsh, it was brutal, and it was bloody,” Weatherford states. “But no empire survives on war. War is only one phase. Empire survives when the people prosper in some way from it.” Weatherford discusses the growth of commerce, the spreading of information, religious freedom, women’s rights, diplomatic immunity, and international law that came to be under the Mongol warrior’s leadership.

Echoes of the Empire focuses on both the humans and the animals of Mongolia

As Lieberman turns to the current day, the documentary delves into problems with coal, the untenable population growth surrounding UB with districts that lack running water or paved streets, the constant traffic and pollution, and the need to reinvent the ger now that so many Mongolians are using them as permanent homes.

“Sadly, we live on a tiny part of our vast territory, which led to density and a stressful life,” G.Mend-Ooyo opines. “In fact, living in the wilderness and steppe is nowhere near as stressful as city life, but rather it is freedom.”

Gracefully edited by David Kossack and photographed by Lieberman, who produced the film with Deborah C. Hoard, Echoes of the Empire is a love letter to the extraordinary country of Mongolia, from its past to its present, but it comes with a warning about its immediate future, which was evident during my travels there as well. I highly recommend the film — and a trip to Mongolia, an experience like no other.

JIM FLETCHER ON SCREEN

Jim Fletcher played Frankensteins monster in Tony Ourslers Imponderable (photo courtesy Museum of Modern Art)

Jim Fletcher plays Frankenstein’s monster in Tony Oursler’s Imponderable (photo courtesy Museum of Modern Art)

Who: Jim Fletcher
What: Film series
Where: Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Ave. at Second St.
When: June 11-16
Why: In a January 2020 twi-ny talk, actor, writer, and editor Jim Fletcher, who is beloved in the experimental theater scene, said of his working with such companies as the New York City Players (NYCP), the Wooster Group, and Elevator Repair Service, “I’m working with people I love. It seems I never asked myself what kind of work I wanted to do, and also never the follow-up question, who best to do it with. In that sense I’m not a productive person. I think when you get close to people, you spontaneously start working in some way . . . out of sheer energy or whatever it is. Surplus.” Fans of Fletcher’s stage work (Pollock, Isolde, Why Why Always) might not realize just how productive the deep-voiced actor is, but they can find out in the Anthology Film Archives series “Jim Fletcher On Screen,” running June 11-16.

The mini-festival consists of eight programs comprising sixteen shorts, documentaries, and features starring the tall, bold Fletcher, from Roland Ellis’s ten-minute Break Down, Nicholas Elliott’s Icarus, and Laura Parnes’s Blood and Guts in High School (an adaptation of the book by Kathy Acker) to Shaun Irons’s Standing By: Gatz Backstage (a behind-the-scenes look at the eight-hour Gatz), Zoe Beloff’s Glass House (based on an unrealized science fiction project by Sergei Eisenstein), and Ellen Cantor’s Pinochet Porn (an episodic narrative that was completed after her death). NYCP founder Richard Maxwell is represented with The Feud Other, The Darkness of This Reading, and Showcase, the latter promising, “Gradually getting dressed, [Fletcher’s character] discusses life on the road, memories, moron jokes, the conference he is attending, business strategies, and a pivotal deal that went down recently under intimate circumstances. He sings.” Yes, Fletcher sings!

The celebration of all things Fletcher concludes June 16 with visual artist Tony Oursler’s 3D Imponderable, which was the centerpiece of a MoMA exhibition in 2016-17 and in which Fletcher portrays his dream role, Frankenstein’s monster. Fletcher will be at Anthology to talk about his work at several screenings, bringing along some of his friends and colleagues. Be prepared to join the ever-growing Fletcher faithful; we are legion.