this week in film and television

HANUKKAH AT 92YTRIBECA

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK is part of Chinese-and-a-movie double feature on Christmas Day at 92YTribeca

92YTribeca
200 Hudson St. at Canal St.
December 22-25
212-415-5500
www.92y.org

We’ve been celebrating Christmas by going out for Chinese food and checking out a new movie long before it became the fashionable thing to do, resulting in longer waits than ever to get into our favorite Chinatown restaurants, which doesn’t make us very happy. So we’re thrilled that such places as 92YTribeca offer special Christmas packages that combine the two. On December 25, the fifth day of Hanukkah, beginning at 2:00 ($25-$30), you can start chowing down on some chow mein while watching the Steven Spielberg adventure double feature of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jurassic Park. The downtown offshoot of the 92nd St. Y will also be honoring the Festival of Lights with two other holiday events. On December 22 at 7:00 ($18-$22), the fourth annual Beer + Latke Hanukkah Celebration will include Brooklyn Brewery expert Dan Moss’s pairings of beer with chef Russell Moss’s gourmet potato pancakes, along with candle lighting, dreidel games, a trivia contest hosted by Allison Tick, and Rabbi Dan Ain answering any “December dilemma” questions you might have. And on Christmas eve at 8:00 ($13-$15), Liam McEneaney will host Hanukkomedy, with comics Sandy Marks, MC Mr. Napkins, Todd Barry, and the always delightful Janeane Garofalo. Chag sameach, everyone!

HANUKKAH AT THE MUSEUM OF JEWISH HERITAGE

Husband-and-wife-team Aaron Hartman and Alicia Jo Rabins, the leaders of Girls in Trouble, will give a special Hanukkah concert at the Museum of Jewish Heritage on December 21

Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust
36 Battery Pl.
646-437-4202
www.mjhnyc.org

The Museum of Jewish Heritage will be celebrating the Festival of Lights with two special presentations this week. On December 21 at 7:00 ($15), Brooklyn’s Girls in Trouble, led by singer-violinist Alicia Jo Rabins and her husband, bassist Aaron Hartman, will play dark tales of biblical women featured on their two JDub albums, their eponymous 2009 debut and this year’s Half You Half Me, which include such songs as “I Was a Desert,” “I Fell Off My Camel,” “We Are Androgynous,” “Bethesda,” and “Waltz for a Beheading.” (Sadly, JDub Records, which focused on music by Jewish artists, recently announced it is closing because of financial difficulties.) The concert is being held in conjunction with the museum’s current exhibit “Emma Lazarus: Poet of Exiles.” On Christmas Day, MJH will be hosting “I Lift My Lamp: A Statue-esque Hanukkah,” with arts and crafts for children ages three to ten, family-friendly tours, and a trio of film screenings, beginning at 11:00 with An American Tail (Don Bluth, 1986) and continuing at 1:00 with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1942 espionage thriller Sabaoteur and at 3:00 with Ghostbusters II (Ivan Reitman, 1989). In addition to the Emma Lazarus exhibition, also on view are “Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race,” “Voices of Liberty,” and “Let My People Go! The Soviet Jewry Movement, 1967-1989.”

CASTLES IN THE SKY: MIYAZAKI, TAKAHATA & THE MASTERS OF STUDIO GHIBLI — SPIRITED AWAY

Hayao Miyazaki’s animated masterpiece is part of exciting month-long tribute to Studio Ghibli at IFC Center

SPIRITED AWAY (SEN TO CHIHIRO NO KAMIKAKUSHI) (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
December 17 – January 11
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.nausicaa.net

Prepare to have your spirits lifted up and away in this sensational animated feature from Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki. Ten-year-old Chihiro is unhappy about moving to a new home despite her parents’ best efforts to convince her otherwise. When her father takes a wrong turn on the road, the family ends up in an oddly deserted village that Chihiro soon finds out is a lot more than it seems. Chihiro’s adventures through this dreamlike, surreal, magical place filled with bizarre characters and evil beings are unforgettable, with nuances and references from such diverse works as The Wizard Of Oz and The Seventh Seal. The sheer visual beauty of the animation is staggering; many of the backgrounds are reminiscent of Impressionism. Joe Hisaishi’s maudlin music is way overpraised, as usual, but this Japanese box-office champ deservedly won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and was named Best Asian Film at the Hong Kong Film Awards. As with the best animated films, you don’t have to be a kid to fall in love with Spirited Away, which is screening in a new 35mm print December 17 to January 11 as part of the series “Castles in the Sky: Miyazaki, Takahata & the Masters of Studio Ghibli,” a dual presentation of the IFC Center and GKIDS’ New York International Children’s Film Festival. The dubbed version, featuring the voices of Daveigh Chase (Chihiro), Jason Marsden (Haku), Susan Egan (Lin), Michael Chiklis (Chihiro’s father), Lauren Holly (Chihiro’s mother), Suzanne Pleshette (Yubaba and Zeniba), John Ratzenberger (assistant manager), David Ogden Stiers (Kamaji), and Tara Strong (baby Boh), will be shown at all morning and afternoon screenings; the original Japanese version with English subtitles will be shown 6:00 and later.

The series also includes such other Miyazaki works as Howl’s Moving Castle, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Ponyo, My Neighbor Totoro, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Porco Rosso, Princess Mononoke, and Laputa: Castle in the Sky in addition to such lesser-known Studio Ghibli films as Hiroyuki Morita’s The Cat Returns, Tomomi Mochizuki’s Ocean Waves, Isao Takahata’s Only Yesterday, and Yoshifumi Kondo’s Whisper of the Heart, all being screened in new 35mm prints.

WEEKEND CLASSICS — AKI KAURISMÄKI: LIGHTS IN THE DUSK

LIGHTS IN THE DUSK concludes Aki Kaurismäki series at IFC Center

LIGHTS IN THE DUSK (Aki Kaurismäki, 2006)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
December 16-18, 11:00 am
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.strandreleasing.com

The final installment in his self-described Loser Trilogy (following Drifting Clouds and The Man Without a Past), Lights in the Dusk is another existential masterpiece from Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki. Janne Hyytiäinen stars as Koistinen, a pathetic little security guard who has pipe dreams of starting his own company. A lonely man with no friends — except for Aila (Maria Heiskanen), who runs a late-night hot-dog van and whom he continually shuns — Koistinen is easily taken in by Mirja (Maria Järvenhelmi), a romantic interest who has ulterior motives. But no matter how bad things get for Koistinen — and they get pretty bad — he just wanders his way through it all, preferring to simply accept the consequences, no matter how undeserved, rather than take a more active role in his life. The character has a lot in common with Kati Outinen’s sad-sack, trampled-upon Iris from Kaurismäki’s The Match Factory Girl — in fact, Outinen makes a cameo in Lights in the Dusk as a cashier at a grocery store. The film is screening December 16-18 at 11:00 am, concluding the IFC Center’s Weekend Classics Kaurismäki series that featured nine of his works, shown in conjunction with the theatrical release of his latest, Le Havre, which is still running there as well.

CASTLES IN THE SKY: MIYAZAKI, TAKAHATA & THE MASTERS OF STUDIO GHIBLI — MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO

Hayao Miyazaki’s MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO wonderfully captures the joys and fears of being a child

MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
December 16 – January 5
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.nausicaa.net

In many ways a precursor to Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece, Spirited Away, the magical My Neighbor Totoro is a fantastical trip down the rabbit hole, a wondrous journey through the sheer glee and universal fears of childhood. With their mother, Yasuko, suffering from an extended illness in the hospital, Satsuki and her younger sister, Mei, move to a new house in a rural farming community with their father, anthropology professor Tatsuo Kusakabe. Kanta, a shy boy who lives nearby, tells them the house is haunted, and indeed the two girls come upon a flurry of black soot sprites scurrying about. Mei also soon discovers a family of totoros, supposedly fictional characters from her storybooks, living in the forest, protected by a giant camphor tree. When the girls fear their mother has taken a turn for the worse, Mei runs off on her own, and it is up to Satsuki to find her. Working with art director Kazuo Oga, Miyazaki paints the film with rich, glorious skies and lush greenery, honoring the beauty and power of nature both visually as well as in the narrative. The scene in which Satsuki and Mei huddle with Totoro at a bus stop in a rainstorm is a treasure. (And just wait till you see Catbus’s glowing eyes.) The movie also celebrates the sense of freedom and adventure that comes with being a child, without helicopter parents and myriad rules suffocating them at home and school. The multi-award-winning My Neighbor Totoro is screening in a new 35mm print December 16 to January 5 as part of the series “Castles in the Sky: Miyazaki, Takahata & the Masters of Studio Ghibli,” a dual presentation of the IFC Center and GKIDS’ New York International Children’s Film Festival. The 2006 rereleased dubbed version, featuring the voices of Dakota Fanning (Satsuki), Elle Fanning (Mei), Lea Salonga (Yasuko), Tim Daly (Tatsuo), and Frank Welker (Totoro and Catbus), will be shown at all morning and afternoon screenings; the original Japanese version with English subtitles will be shown 6:00 and later.

The series also includes such other Miyazaki works as Howl’s Moving Castle, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Ponyo, Spirited Away, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Porco Rosso, Princess Mononoke, and Laputa: Castle in the Sky in addition to such lesser-known Studio Ghibli films as Hiroyuki Morita’s The Cat Returns, Tomomi Mochizuki’s Ocean Waves, Isao Takahata’s Only Yesterday, and Yoshifumi Kondo’s Whisper of the Heart, all being shown in new 35mm prints.

AN AUTEURIST HISTORY OF FILM: THE THIRD MAN

Orson Welles makes one of the greatest entrances in film history in THE THIRD MAN

THE THIRD MAN (Carol Reed, 1949)
MoMA Film
Museum of Modern Art
The Celeste Bartos Theater
The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building
4 West 54th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
December 14-16, 1:30
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

Carol Reed’s thriller is quite simply the most entertaining film you’re ever likely to see. Set in a divided post-WWII Vienna amid a thriving black market, The Third Man is heavy in atmosphere, untrustworthy characters, and sly humor, with a marvelous zither score by Anton Karas. Joseph Cotten stars as Holly Martins, an American writer of Western paperbacks who has come to Vienna to see his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles), but he seems to have shown up a little late. While trying to find out what happened to Harry, Martins falls for Harry’s lover, Anna (Alida Valli); is told to get out of town by Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) and Sergeant Paine (Bernard “M” Lee); meets a stream of Harry’s more interesting, mysterious friends, including Baron Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch) and Popescu (Siegfried Breuer); and is talked into giving a lecture to a literary club by old Mr. Crabbin (Wilfrid Hyde-White). Every scene is a finely honed work of art, filled with long shadows, echoing footsteps, dripping water, and unforgettable dialogue about cuckoo clocks and other strangeness. SPOILER: The shot in which Lime is first revealed, standing in a doorway, a cat brushing by his feet, his tongue firmly in cheek as he lets go a miraculous, knowing smile, is one of the greatest single moments in the history of cinema. The Third Man is screening December 14-16 at 1:30 as part of MoMA’s ongoing series “An Auteurist History of Film,” which continues with Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon December 21-23 and John Ford’s Wagon Master December 28-30.

KRAPP’S LAST TAPE

John Hurt listens to his past in KRAPP’S LAST TAPE, running at BAM through December 18 (photo by Richard Termine)

NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
Through December 18, $25-$90
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Originally written in 1958 for British actor Patrick Magee, Samuel Beckett’s autobiographical Krapp’s Last Tape is a haunting examination of time, memory, and the futility of language. Performed over the years by the likes of Magee, Harold Pinter, Brian Dennehy, and Michael Gambon, the fifty-five-minute one-act is perhaps most closely identified today with John Hurt, who first appeared in the play at Dublin’s Gate Theatre in 1999, starred in Atom Egoyan’s 2001 film version, and is now giving a bravura command performance at BAM through December 18. Making his New York stage debut, Hurt (Midnight Express, 10 Rillington Place) plays a failed writer named Krapp who, when first seen, is sitting at a table in silence, an old lamp dangling overhead. He says nothing for several minutes and then eventually gets up, walks around in squeaky white shoes, consumes two bananas, slips on a peel he dropped on the floor, and carefully approaches the darkness on either side of him, deciding not to venture out of the lighted area, as if something unknown and dangerous awaits outside his very private, solitary comfort zone. It is a critical moment in the play, establishing the precipice of life and death that Krapp is balancing on while also reminding the audience that this is a staged production. As he does every year on his birthday, Krapp listens to reel-to-reel recordings of messages he left on previous birthdays and makes a new one; in this case, the sixty-nine-year-old shabbily dressed man is looking for the tape he made on his thirty-ninth, which, according to his dusty old ledger, can be found in “box five, spool three.” Krapp takes delight in drawing out the word spool like he is a child. As he listens to his old self discuss the past, present, and future as he saw it thirty years before, he starts and stops the tape, remembering some moments that elicit strong emotions while clearly having no memory of others, the fractured narrative tantalizing and teasing the audience. “Thirty-nine today,” the recorded Krapp says. “Sound as a bell.” But alas, the sixty-nine-year-old Krapp is not sound as a bell, with little but death to look forward to.

Director Michael Colgan and lighting designer James McConnell have placed Krapp in a masterfully minimalist black-and-white world, surrounded by darkness, the only colors the yellow of the bananas and the green in Krapp’s description of a former love’s coat. Hurt, now seventy-one, is a less angry, more fragile and perhaps desperate Krapp than he portrayed in previous versions, cupping his ear tighter as he leans his head to hear the tape, shuffling to the back — through a minefield of his past, the boxes of tapes strewn across the floor — to steal a drink, staring straight ahead, wondering what happened to the ambitious youth he once was. (He even resembles Beckett himself this time around.) Krapp’s Last Tape is an extraordinarily complex work that delves deep into the human psyche, a challenge for both the actor and the audience, a play that will stay with you for a long time, eliciting thoughts of where you’ve been, who you are, and what awaits you in the future. Hurt will participate in a post-show artist talk on December 15; in addition, BAMcinématek will be highlighting four of the British actor’s best films in “John Hurt Quartet,” including The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980) on December 12, Scandal (Michael Caton-Jones, 1989) on December 13 (followed by a Q&A with Hurt), Love and Death on Long Island (Richard Kwietniowski, 1997) on December 14, and Nineteen Eighty-Four (Michael Radford, 1984) on December 15.