this week in film and television

DISAPPEARING ACT IV: POLICE, ADJECTIVE

Cristi (Dragos Bucur) is on one helluva boring stakeout in Romanian black comedy

POLICE, ADJECTIVE (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2009)
Bohemian National Hall
321 East 73rd St. between First & Second Aves.
Friday, April 13, free, 8:15
Festival runs April 10-22 at Bohemian National Hall, IFC Center, and FIAF
new-york.czechcentres.cz

The first half of Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective is as dreadfully boring as Detective Cristi’s (Dragos Bucur) assignment, tailing a student, Victor (Radu Costin), who enjoys a joint with two of his friends every day after school. While Cristi wants to nail the kid’s supplier, the cop’s boss has him on a tight deadline, insisting he arrest Victor if the investigation continues to go nowhere, but Cristi strongly disagrees with putting the teenager away for up to seven years for a crime he believes will soon be abolished by the government. However, the film picks up considerably as Cristi seeks help from various contacts, getting caught up in red tape and public servants who would really rather not be bothered. And when he get called in by the chief (Vlad Ivanov from 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days) and gets a long lecture in linguistics, well, you won’t be able to control yourself from laughing out loud. Porumboiu (12:08 East of Bucharest) keeps the pace very slow and very steady, but hang in there, because the end is a riot. Police, Adjective, which won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, screened at the New York Film Festival and at MoMA as part of the “Contenders, 2009,” series, and was Romania’s official entry for the Foreign Language Film Academy Award, is being shown April 13 at the Bohemian National Hall as part of “Disappearing Act IV,” a festival of recent European films that also includes such works as Miguel Gomes’s Our Beloved Month of August (Aquele Querido Mes de Agosto) from Portugal and France, Vaclav Kadrnka’s Eighty Letters (Osmdesat dopisu) from the Czech Republic, Jaroslav Vojtek’s The Border (Hranice) from Slovakia, Argyris Papadimitropoulos and Jan Vogel’s Wasted Youth from Greece, and Marc Bauder’s The System (Das System ― alles verstehen heisst alles verzeihen) from Germany, with many screenings followed by a Q&A with members of the cast and/or crew. The series is curated and produced by Irena Kovarova and presented in association with the Czech Center, the Romanian Cultural Institute, and the Group of European Cultural Institutes and Diplomatic Representations in New York.

SPRING INTO SLAPSTICK: THREE STOOGES MATINEES

Larry, Moe, and Curly will be spending spring break at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens

Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Daily through April 15, free with museum admission
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

Some time ago, in a previous incarnation, we penned a bio of the Three Stooges that claimed, “It is nearly impossible for the average American citizen to go a week without somehow coming into contact with some aspect of the Three Stooges.” That statement could not be more true these days, with the impending release of the Farrelly brothers movie The Three Stooges — which is a fictional comedy, not a biopic — and three weeks of Stooges shorts at the Museum of the Moving Image, continuing through April 15. The Moving Image is concentrating on the Curly years, from 1934 to 1936, in which siblings Moses “Moe” Horwitz and Jerome “Curly” Horwitz, using the stage name Howard, teamed up with violinist Louis Feinberg, better known as Larry Fine, to make some of the wildest, craziest, and funniest shorts of cinema’s golden age. Monday through Friday at 2:00 of this week, the Astoria institution will show 1937’s Grips, Grunts and Groans, in which Curly has to stand in for a drunk wrestler, 1943’s From Nurse to Worse, in which the trio schemes to pull off an insurance scam to get some dough, and 1941’s In the Sweet Pie and Pie, in which the boys are on Death Row when they get an offer to marry three scheming dames. There will be encore presentations Saturday and Sunday at 12 noon and 3:00, along with Claymation workshops and daily demonstrations suitable for children ten and up. Short films around twenty minutes apiece was the forte of the vaudeville-trained Stooges, whose feature-length films were an embarrassment, including Have Rocket, Will Travel, Snow White and the Three Stooges, The Three Stooges Meet Hercules, and The Outlaws Is Coming, all of which were made after both Curly and Shemp had died. It remains to be seen whether the Farrelly brothers can pull off a worthwhile full-length homage, although the previews don’t bode well.

STREET VIEWS: DECASIA

DECASIA (Bill Morrison, 2002)
Maysles Institute
343 Malcolm X Blvd. between 127th & 128th Sts.
Tuesday, April 10, $10, 7:30
212-582-6050
www.mayslesinstitute.org
www.billmorrisonfilm.com

Experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison’s production company is called Hypnotic Pictures, and for good reason; the Chicago-born, New York-based auteur makes mesmerizing, visually arresting works using archival found footage and eclectic soundtracks that are a treat for the eyes and ears. Several of his films were recently shown at a retrospective at the World Financial Center (including The Miners’ Hymns, Spark of Being, The Great Flood, and his masterpiece, Decasia), but if you missed that last one, you now have another chance to catch it at the Maysles Institute on April 10, where it is screening as part of the “Street Views” series curated by Paul Dallas and Anthony Titus. Made in 2002, Decasia is about nothing less than the beginning and end of cinema. The sixty-seven-minute work features clips from early silent movies that are often barely visible in the background as the film nitrate disintegrates in the foreground, black-and-white psychedelic blips, blotches, and burns dominating the screen. The eyes at first do a dance between the two distinct parts, trying to follow the action of the original works as well as the abstract shapes caused by the filmstrip’s impending death, but eventually the two meld into a single unique narrative, enhanced by a haunting, compelling score by Bang on a Can’s Michael Gordon, which begins as a minimalist soundtrack and builds slowly until it reaches a frantic conclusion. The on-screen destruction might seem random, but it is actually carefully choreographed by Morrison, who wrote, directed, produced, and edited the film. Following the screening, Morrison will participate in a Q&A with architect David Gersten of the Cooper Union, moderated by Titus. “Street Views,” which “explores our connection to the built environment through documentaries, narratives, and experimental works,” continues April 24 with Peter Bo Rappmund’s Psychohydragraphy and concludes April 25 with Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Abendland.

CINDY SHERMAN — CARTE BLANCHE: FUNNY GAMES

There’s nothing funny about Michael Haneke’s FUNNY GAMES

FUNNY GAMES (Michael Haneke, 1997)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Saturday, April 7, 5:00
Series runs through April 10
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

Michael Haneke’s Funny Games is a harrowing home invasion movie that is as brutal as it is ultimately frustrating. Haneke (The Piano Teacher, Cache) manipulates the audience nearly as much as he does the characters on-screen, even breaking the fourth wall by having one of the villains address the viewer several times. When Anna (Susanne Lothar), Georg (Ulrich Mühe from The Lives of Others), and their son, Schorschi (Stefan Clapczynski), head to their summer vacation home on a lake, they have no idea what lies in store for them. A man (Arno Frisch) claiming to be a friend of their neighbors’ shows up asking for some eggs, but there is a subtle malevolence behind his odd demeanor. He is soon joined by a companion (Frank Giering) who insists on trying out one of Georg’s golf clubs. It’s not long before the two men, who alternately call each other Peter and Paul, Tom and Jerry, and Beavis and Butt-Head, have severely broken Georg’s leg, sexually harass Anna, and put a bag over Schorschi’s head, all for no apparent reason except that they are bored and want to play some games, the more dangerous the better. It’s a tense, frightening film that never lets up, even when it appears to be over. The soundtrack juices up the horror, with classical music by Mozart and Handel offset by screeching punk by John Zorn and Naked City. Mühe and Lothar later reunited for Nicole Mosleh’s Nemesis, which was completed shortly before Mühe’s sudden death from stomach cancer in 2007. Haneke made an American remake of Funny Games in 2008, with Tim Roth as George, Naomi Watts as Anna, Brady Corbet as Peter, and Michael Pitt as Paul, with an appearance by Frisch as well. The original Funny Games is screening April 7 as part of MoMA’s “Carte Blanche: Cindy Sherman” series, a collection of films curated by photographer Cindy Sherman in conjunction with her glorious retrospective at the museum, which features many of her untitled film stills. Other works in the series include David Lynch’s Inland Empire, John Frankenheimer’s Seconds, John Cassavetes’s Shadows, John Waters’s Desperate Living, and Sherman’s own Doll Clothes and Office Killer.

SURVIVING PROGRESS

Robert Wright does not exactly predict a bright future for the world in intellectual documentary

SURVIVING PROGRESS (Mathieu Roy & Harold Crooks, 2011)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, April 6
212-924-3363
survivingprogress.com
www.cinemavillage.com

The highly intellectual documentary Surviving Progress begins by evoking Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, cutting from a chimpanzee studying miniature monolithic blocks to an astronaut floating in space. That is followed by author and lecturer Ronald Wright looking our in front of him, carefully considering his words before saying, “In defining progress, I think it’s very important to make a distinction between good progress and bad progress. . . . We tend to delude ourselves that these changes always result in improvements from the human point of view.” Over the course of the next eighty minutes, directors Mathieu Roy (Ecclestone’s Formula) and Harold Crooks (The Corporation) unveil a stream of scientific and cultural experts who explain that change is not always good. Inspired by Wright’s bestselling book A Short History of Progress, the film explores how twenty-first-century advancements have come with increasingly dangerous caveats. “We’re now reaching a point at which technological progress and the increase in our economies and our numbers threaten the very existence of humanity,” Wright explains. Wright is joined by a parade of experts, including author Margaret Atwood, primatologist Jane Goodall, environmental professor Vaclav Smil, the No Impact Project’s Colin Beavan, tour guide Chen Ming, cognitive psychologist Gary Marcus, geneticist and activist David Suzuki, Synthetic Genomics CEO J. Craig Venter, Friends of the Congo’s Kambale Musavuli, and others, who delve into discussions of deforestation and overpopulation, banking and finance, politics and religion, science and nature, evolution and revolution, and the everyday struggles of families across the globe. “We are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history,” theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking says. “But I’m an optimist.” After watching Surviving Progress, it’s not so easy to be filled with any such hope. (Surviving Progress opens April 6 at Cinema Village, with codirector Crooks participating in a Q&A following the 7:00 screening on April 7.)

KEYHOLE

KEYHOLE (Guy Maddin, 2011)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, April 6
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
keyhole-movie.tumblr.com

Inspired by Homer’s Odyssey, Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, and the Bowery Boys’ Spooks Run Wild, Canadian experimental filmmaker Guy Maddin has made Keyhole, a 1930s-style psychological gangster/ghost story set in a haunted house in which each room offers different thrills and chills and it’s nearly impossible to tell who is alive and who is dead. Shot in his trademark black-and-white (except for one quick image in color) but digitally for the first time, Maddin relates the barely decipherable tale of Ulysses Pick (Jason Patric), who has returned home after being away for many years. As he makes his odyssey through the house on a mission to find his ill wife, Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini), who has shackled her naked father, Calypso (Louis Negin), to her bed, Ulysses carries a drowned girl, Denny (Brooke Palsson), and drags a bound-and-gagged teenager, Manners (David Wontner), the son he does not recognize. A confident, determined man, Ulysses battles Big Ed (Daniel Enright) over control of the gang, including a tense scene with an electric chair at the center. Going door-to-door, Ulysses peers through keyholes as screams pierce through the night and clocks endlessly tick and tick and tick. “The happiness the house has known is free to vanish the moment its inhabitants leave,” Calypso intones in a voice-over, “but sorrow, sorrow must linger.” Maddin, who has previously made such gems as Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Careful, and My Winnipeg, has a unique cinematic style that veers away from linear, dialogue-laden narrative and instead concentrates on mood, offbeat characters, mysterious music, and captivating visuals that harken back to the silent-film era. In Keyhole, he has created an old-fashioned yet modern noir that, despite a meandering plot, is a captivating look at life, death, family, memory, and the human psyche.

THE ASSAULT

Terrorists hijack a plane in THE ASSAULT, based on a true story

THE ASSAULT (L’ASSAUT) (Julien Leclercq, 2010)
Village East Cinema
181-189 Second Ave. at 12th St.
Opens Friday, April 6
212-529-6799
www.lassaut-lefilm.com
www.villageeastcinema.com

French director Julien Leclercq re-creates an infamous 1994 hijacking in the action thriller The Assault. On Christmas Eve, four members of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (the GIA) boarded Air France Flight 8969 at Algiers’ Houari Boumedienne Airport and took the crew and 227 passengers hostage, demanding the release of two imprisoned Islamic Salvation Front leaders. Leclercq (Chrysalis) and screenwriter Simon Moutaïrou tells the story like a police procedural as the heavily armed terrorists begin killing passengers when their plan goes awry and they do not immediately get what they want. Meanwhile, the French Interior Ministry and the National Gendarmes Intervention Group (GIGN) are debating their response, including a possible all-out raid on the plane. Leclercq focuses on SWAT team member Thierry Prugnaud (Vincent Elbaz), whose wife (Marie Guillard) prays for his safe return; Yahia Abdallah (Aymen Saidi), a cold-blooded terrorist fiercely dedicated to his cause; and Carole (Melanie Bernier), a ministry worker who risks her career by taking charge. Although technically adept, The Assault lacks emotional resonance. The depiction of the relationship between Thierry and his wife and daughter feels forced, more of a soapy aside than an integral part of the film. There is little subtlety in evidence and plenty of clichés, with the hijackers representing pure evil, the GIGN officers primarily faceless, machinelike automatons, and the politicians overly concerned about themselves and how this will look to the world. The events, which were broadcast live in France, are quite remarkable, but Leclercq ends up draining them of much of their power, resulting in a surprisingly cold tale.