Kris Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand will heat up Central Park on Saturday night in viewers choice winner A STAR IS BORN
Central Park
Landscape between Sheep Meadow and the 72nd Street Cross Dr.
August 23-27, free, 8:00 (gates at 6:30)
www.centralparknyc.org
The Central Park Conservancy Film Festival begins today, kicking off five nights of movies focusing on music. Taking place on the landscape between Sheep Meadow and the 72nd Street Cross Dr., each evening will begin at 6:30 with DJs, with the films beginning at 8:00. Although picnicking is encouraged, alcoholic beverages are not. First up is the Hector Lavoe biopic El Cantante (Leon Ichaso, 2006), followed by the Charlie Parker flick Bird (Clint Eastwood, 1988) on Wednesday. Thursday’s feature is the Broadway adaptation Dreamgirls (Bill Condon, 2006), with the Rolling Stones documentary Shine a Light (Martin Scorsese, 2008) helping fans to get their ya-ya’s out on Friday night. The series concludes on Saturday with the viewers choice, Kris Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand in the remake of A Star Is Born (Frank Pierson, 1976), which beat out Loretta Lynn and Coal Miner’s Daughter (Michael Apted, 1980).
Writer-director Brad Bird won Oscars for his animated features The Incredibles (2004) and Ratatatouille (2007), but the Simpsons veteran first made his mark with the charming 1999 sci-fi cartoon The Iron Giant. Based on the 1968 book The Iron Man by Ted Hughes, the animated film is set during the Cold War, with the general populace and the military fearful of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. So when rumors that a fifty-foot-tall iron giant (voiced by Vin Diesel) has fallen from the sky, the government wants to destroy it, but it is being hidden by young Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal), who has saved its life. Hogarth keeps his new best friend a secret from his mother (Jennifer Aniston) and federal agent Kent Mansley (Christopher McDonald) with the help of the town beatnik, Dean McCoppin (Harry Connick Jr.), who takes a liking to Hogarth’s mom. The screenplay, written by Tim McCanlies (Secondhand Lions), plays with various genre clichés just enough to avoid being clichéd itself, instead making The Iron Giant a delightful, nearly flawless twist on the E.T. mythos, mixed in with a little Androcles & the Lion, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and even Frankenstein and King Kong. The film, which also features the voices of Cloris Leachman (Mrs. Tensedge), John Mahoney (General Rogard), and M. Emmet Walsh (Earl Stutz), is a treat for children and adults. Bird, meanwhile, has graduated to live action; his next movie will be Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, and Simon Pegg. The Iron Giant is screening for free on August 23 at dusk as part of the Red Hook Summer Movies series in Valentino Pier, which continues August 30 with Pump Up the Volume (Allan Moyle, 1990), September 6 with Highlander (Russell Mulcahy, 1986), and September 13 with the viewers choice selection, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (Tim Burton, 1985).
“You’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?” Clint Eastwood created a cinematic legend, cool, calm Bay Area cop Harry Callahan, in Don Siegel’s genre redefining 1971 thriller, Dirty Harry. Callahan, confidence radiating out of every pore, has a penchant for getting himself into trouble, leaving mayhem and chaos behind him as he polices the mean streets of San Francisco. The first film of the series is by far the best of the bunch, as Harry is on the hunt for a crazed serial killer who goes by the name Scorpio (Andy Robinson). The underappreciated Harry Guardino is Callahan’s boss, Al Bressler, Reni Santoni plays Callahan’s rookie partner, Chico Gonzalez, and John “Dean Wormer” Vernon is the mayor who does not approve of Callahan’s rather violent tendencies. But the real star of the film might just be Harry’s .44 Magnum, “the most powerful handgun in the world and would blow your head clean off.” Dirty Harry led to the sequels Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983), and The Dead Pool (1988), each one essentially at least one major step down in quality. We know what you’re thinking: In all this excitement, did he fire six shots, or only five? You can find out Monday night as Dirty Harry closes out the 2011 Bryant Park Summer Film Festival.
Learning of many of the horrible things the Third Reich was doing, Charlie Chaplin could not hold his tongue anymore, finally making his first talking picture in 1940. In The Great Dictator, writer-director-producer Chaplin unrelentingly mocks Adolf Hitler and the rise of the Nazis in Germany, albeit with a very serious edge, as WWII threatens. Chaplin plays the dual roles of a simple Jewish barber living in the ghetto (who has elements of the Little Tramp) and Adenoid Hinkle, the rather Hitler-esque Fascist leader of the country of Tomania. Just as he named the nation after a foodborne illness (ptomaine poisoning), Chaplin does not go for subtlety in the film; his right-hand man is Herr Garbitsch (Henry Daniel spoofing Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels), and his military mastermind is Field Marshal Herring (Billy Gilbert making fun of Heinrich Himmler). Chaplin plays Hinkle like a cartoon character, with pratfalls galore, and when he speaks in German, especially when he gives a major speech, he spits out fake German words with a smattering of funny English ones. When he learns that Benzino Napaloni (Jack Oakie as a melding of Benito Mussolini and Napoleon Bonaparte) has gathered his troops on the Osterlitz border (think Anschluss), Hinkle invites the Bacteria dictator to his Tomanian palace, where they engage in numerous hysterical bouts of one-upmanship, including a riotous battle involving barber chairs. Meanwhile, Chaplin performs another of the film’s most memorable scenes, the shave of an old man set to Brahms’s “Hungarian Dance No. 5.” But when Commander Schultz (Reginald Gardiner) leaves the Nazi regime and decides to help the Jewish people in the ghetto, Hinkle sends his stormtroopers out to find the traitor, leading to a major case of mistaken identity and a heartfelt, if overly melodramatic, finale. In addition, Chaplin’s lover at the time, Paulette Goddard, plays Hannah (named for Chaplin’s mother), a young Jewish woman living in the ghetto, and Bowery Boys fans will recognize Bernard Gorcey, who played sweet-shop owner Louie Dombrowski in the goofy film series, as Mr. Mann.The Great Dictator is filled with marvelous moments, from Hinkle dancing with a balloon globe to several of the Jews in the ghetto trying to hide in the same chest, but the film does suffer from pedagoguery in making its political points, and some of the slapstick is too lowbrow. Nominated for five Oscars, it falls somewhere between the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933) and the Three Stooges’ You Nazty Spy! (1940) while also referencing the 1921 silent film King, Queen, Joker, in which Chaplin’s older half-brother, Sidney (who also directed), played the dual role of a modest barber and the king of the fictional Coronia. A seminal achievement that was supposedly seen by Hitler twice, The Great Dictator is screening on August 21 as part of Symphony Space’s “Chaplin” series, which is presenting many of his works on the big screen in HD for the first time ever; the series continues with such films as