SAMSARA (Ron Fricke, 2011)
Landmark Sunshine Cinema
143 East Houston St. between First & Second Aves.
Opens Friday, August 24
212-330-8182
www.landmarktheatres.com
www.barakasamsara.com
The filmmaking team of director Ron Fricke and producer Mark Magidson have teamed up once again to make the visually stunning documentary Samsara. The follow-up to 1985’s Chronos and 1992’s Baraka, the new work was shot in 70mm across twenty-five countries on five continents over the course of five years, immersing the audience in a barrage of striking imagery, set to a dramatic score by co-composer Michael Stearns. “Samsara was conceived as a nonverbal guided meditation on the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth,” Fricke explains, while Magidson adds, “The hope is that a viewer comes away feeling a sense of connection, a connection to the phenomenon of life around the world at this time.” Samsara, which can be translated as “the ever-turning wheel of life,” is also a personal journey to be experienced individually as it explores such spiritual concepts as flow and impermanence, without voice-overs or intertitles to explain what is happening on-screen.
SAMSARA takes viewers around the world in 70mm
TICKET GIVEAWAY: Samsara opens August 24 at Landmark Sunshine Cinema, and twi-ny is teaming up with the Interdependence Project to give away ten pairs of tickets to see this remarkable film during its opening weekend, at 4:50 and 7:15 on Saturday and Sunday.
Founded by Ethan Nichtern, the IDP is for people interested in exploring their minds on the meditation cushion and applying the insights, clarity, and wisdom developed by meditation to life, especially to the arts, ecology, activism, and community service. The IDP offers various weekly and monthly Buddhism and meditation classes in the East Village as well as workshops and retreats. Classes and workshops are offered by a variety of teachers from the Insight, Shambhala, Tibetan, and Zen traditions.
Just send your name, daytime phone number, all-time favorite nonverbal movie, and preferred showtime to contest@twi-ny.com by Tuesday, August 21, at 5:00 to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; ten winners will be selected at random.
Although the screwball romantic comedies are perhaps best loved for their madcap antics and fast-paced dialogue, there was also a fascinating underlying motif to many of them — as America came out of the Great Depression and WWII beckoned, the films tackled the theme of the growing disparity between the rich and the poor. George Cukor’s 1938 classic, Holiday, however, looks at the world from a slightly different perspective, pitting the rich vs. the super-rich. Based on the Broadway play by Philip Barry, which was turned into a 1930 film featuring Ann Harding, Mary Astor, Edward Everett Horton, Hedda Hopper, Robert Ames, and William Holden, Cukor’s version stars Cary Grant as Johnny Case, a self-made humble financial wizard who dreams of making just enough money to be able to afford to leave the business and go find himself. Following a whirlwind ten-day courtship with Julia Seton (Doris Nolan) while on vacation in Lake Placid, Johnny is shocked to find out that his fiancée is a member of the Seton clan, one of the richest families in America. Julia’s father, Edward (Henry Kolker), is not about to let his beloved daughter marry just anyone, so he puts Johnny through the ringer. Meanwhile, Johnny bonds with Julia’s sister, the black sheep Linda (Katharine Hepburn, who was the understudy for Linda on Broadway), who is desperate to live her own life but seems trapped in a fantasy, receiving only marginal support from their brother, Ned (Lew Ayres), who is never without a drink and a cynical word about the family, washing away his failure in cocktail after cocktail. “Walk, don’t run, to the nearest exit,” he advises Johnny. Honest, dependable, and a surprisingly good gymnast, Johnny finds solace from the crazy Setons in his longtime friends, Nick (Horton, reprising his role from the earlier film) and Susan (Jean Dixon), simpler folk with a fine sense of humor and little time for high society. As midnight on New Year’s Eve approaches, the main characters’ lives come together and fall apart in hysterical yet serious ways. Holiday is not your average screwball comedy, instead seeking to take on more personal, psychologically intimate issues and succeeding wildly, continually defying expectations and turning clichés inside out. Grant is as cool as ever, but he adds a seldom-seen vulnerability that adds to his charm. Holiday is screening August 19 in the BAMcinématek series “American Gagsters: Great Comedy Teams,” which runs through September 17 and consists of fifty films (all but one in 35mm), including such other memorable Grant movies as Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday on Saturday and The Philadelphia Story also on Sunday.
In conjunction with the eightieth anniversary of the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Ron Honsa has made Never Stand Still, a documentary that celebrates the long history of the national historic landmark dedicated to the art of movement. Narrated by 
When a pair of disaffected Parisians, Arthur (Claude Brasseur) and Franz (Sami Frey), meet an adorable young woman, Odile (Anna Karina), in English class, they decide to team up and steal a ton of money from a man living in Odile’s aunt’s house. As they meander through the streets of cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s black-and-white Paris, they talk about English and wealth, dance in a cafe while director Jean-Luc Godard breaks in with voice-over narration about their character, run through the Louvre in record time, and pause for a near-moment of pure silence. Godard throws in plenty of commentary on politics, the cinema, and the bourgeoisie in the midst of some genuinely funny scenes. Band of Outsiders is no ordinary heist movie; based on Dolores Hitchens’s novel Fool’s Gold, it is the story of three offbeat individuals who just happen to decide to attempt a robbery while living their strange existence, as if they were outside from the rest of the world. The trio of ne’er-do-wells might remind Jim Jarmusch fans of the main threesome from Stranger Than Paradise (1984), except Godard’s characters are more aggressively persistent. One of Godard’s most accessible films, Band of Outsiders is screening August 18 and 22 as part of the MoMA series “Gaumont Thrillers: From Fantômas to A Gang Story,” which continues with such Gaumont-produced films as Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Murderer Lives at 21, Jules Dassin’s Riffifi, and Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita and The Professional.
All work and no play makes Jack a not-so-quite dull boy in Stanley Kubrick’s classic horror story, based on the Stephen King novel. One of the all-time-great frightfests, The Shining is a truly scary movie about a writer named Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson at his overacting best) who has agreed to become the caretaker of the old Overlook Hotel in Colorado during the snowy winter when the enormous mountain resort closes down for the season. He is joined by his perpetually nervous wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and their young son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), who seems to have brought along his invisible friend, Tony, who speaks through Danny’s finger. Between taking care of the Overlook and working on his novel, Jack finds a whole bunch of other folks to hang out with, people who have populated the place during the ritzy establishment’s golden age, including a strange woman in room 237. Kubrick plays with horror conventions as he seeks to scare the crap out of the audience, something he accomplishes time and time again as Jack grows more disturbed, Wendy’s shrieks become more and more ear piercing and annoying, and Danny’s visions get more and more bloody. No matter how many times you’ve seen it, it still gets you, even when you know exactly what’s lurking around that corner. Only those who went to the film during its opening weekend, as we did, got to see the two-minute finale that Kubrick cut out immediately thereafter, which involved the iconoclastic director riding his bicycle to various theaters, armed with a pair of scissors. The Shining is screening in digital high-definition on Friday and Saturday at midnight as part of the IFC Center’s Waverly Midnights: Late-Night Favorites series, which continues next with such other greats as Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo and The Holy Mountain, the Coen brothers’ Fargo, and John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing.
The closing-night selection of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, Christophe Honoré’s Beloved attempts to be a sweeping romantic epic, but it works best when it when it keeps it simple. In 1964 Paris, Madeleine (Ludivine Sagnier) decides that making a little extra money by selling her body is a better way to afford fancier things than by stealing them, until she falls for Czech doctor Jaromil (Rasha Bukvic). But after they have a child, Soviet tanks invade Prague, and Jaromil takes a lover, they separate. Over the years, as Madeleine (later played by Catherine Deneuve) tries to make a new life for her and Vera (Deneuve’s real-life daughter, Chiara Mastroianni), Jaromil (Czech director Milos Forman) keeps reappearing in their lives, but while Madeleine seems comfortable being with her former husband again, displaying a free and open sexuality, Vera seems unable to sustain a real relationship, adored by a younger teacher (Louis Garrel) while chasing after a gay American musician (Paul Schneider). A sort of mash-up of Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour and Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Beloved features characters calmly turning to song to contemplate their inner dilemmas as they walk through the streets, singing such numbers as “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” (adapted from the Smiths’ original), then proceeding on. When Honoré (Love Songs, Dans Paris) keeps to the central plotlines, Beloved is an engaging, intimate look at sex, love, and family over a forty-five-year period. Unfortunately, he injects unnecessary sociopolitical elements that sidetrack the story and feel forced. At 135 minutes, the film is also at least a half hour too long. Had Honoré stopped earlier, he would have had quite a film, but instead it seems to go on interminably, passing up what could have been fine endings for additional scenes that quickly become tiresome and repetitive. Beloved does have its moments, but it sadly falls short of what it could have been. The director will be on hand at the IFC Center to discuss the film at the 6:55 screenings on Friday and Saturday night of opening weekend.