Lou Reed will participate in a discussion following a screening of his documentary RED SHIRLEY, about his hundred-year-old activist cousin
Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
January 12-27, $12
212-721-6500
www.filmlinc.com
www.thejewishmuseum.org
The Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum will be celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the New York Jewish Film Festival with nearly three dozen shorts, documentaries, and narrative features, many of which will be followed by discussions with members of the cast and/or crew. The festivities begin January 12 with Percy and Felix Adlon’s MAHLER ON THE COUCH, which details the great composer’s sessions with Sigmund Freud while his wife dallies around with architect Walter Gropius. Festival veteran Daniel Burman (EMPTY NEST, WAITING FOR THE MESSIAH) returns with 36 RIGHTEOUS MEN, a documentary examining an Orthodox pilgrimage to the tomb of the Baal Shem Tov. Lily Rivlin looks at the great writer in GRACE PALEY: COLLECTED SHORTS, Jonathan Gruber examines Jewish Americans who fought in the Civil War in JEWISH SOLDIERS IN BLUE AND GRAY, Erik Greenberg Anjou profiles the popular band in THE KLEZMATICS: ON HOLY GROUND, Eve Annenberg incorporates Hasidism and the Kabbalah into the Yiddish mumblecore picture ROMEO AND JULIET IN YIDDISH, klezmer hip-hop artist Socalled will perform with Katie Moore after a screening of Garry Beitel’s THE “SOCALLED” MOVIE, and a special showing of George Marshall’s 1953 biopic, HOUDINI, pays tribute to its late star, Tony Curtis, and will be followed by a magic performance by Josh Rand. The festival concludes on January 27 with Avi Nesher’s drama THE MATCHMAKER, which was nominated for seven Israeli Academy Awards.
South Korea’s submission for the 2010 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, A BAREFOOT DREAM is an alternately heartbreaking and heartwarming tale of hope in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Inspired by the true story of Korean soccer player Kim Shin-hwan, Kim Tae-kyun’s (CROSSING, HIGANJIMA) film follows the broke and broken Kim Won-kwang (Park Hee-soon) as he heads to East Timor in Indonesia to try to make something of his failing life. Urged to immediately return to Korea by Ambassador Park (Go Chang-seok) because of the many dangers and lack of opportunity in the first independent nation of the twenty-first century, he instead opens up a sports store after seeing a group of kids playing soccer in their bare feet. He talks them into leasing counterfeit Nike cleats from him for a dollar a day, not understanding how truly poor they are, but soon finds himself coaching them against a rival team, building their confidence as they dream of playing in an international competition in Japan, their only ray of light in an existence mired in poverty and civil war. Firmly rooted in the tradition of such sports movies as RUDY (David Anspaugh, 1993), BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM (Gurinder Chadha, 2002), HOOSIERS (David Anspaugh, 1986), and THE BAD NEWS BEARS (Michael Ritchie, 1976), A BAREFOOT DREAM is a charming picture despite its many clichés and predictability, lifted by Park Hee-soon’s sweetly innocent lead performance and some fine turns by the kids (particularly Francisco Varela as Ramos and Junior da Costa as Tua), some of whom were actual members of Kim Shin-hwan’s team. The film is being screened on January 11 as part of Korean Movie Night’s free Sports Films! series, presented at Tribeca Cinemas by the Korean Cultural Service and Subway Cinema, with director Kim Tae-kyun on hand to discuss it. The series continues January 25 with TAKE OFF (Muju, 2009), February 8 with LIFTING KING KONG (Park Geon-yong, 2009), and February 22 with FOREVER THE MOMENT (Lim Soon-rye, 2008).
Born in Parma in 1919, Angiolino Giuseppe Pascal Ventura began his unexpected film career after suffering an injury as a Greco-Roman wrestler, becoming a close friend of Jean Gabin’s and quickly establishing himself as one of the great character actors in French gangster pictures, appearing in more than seventy-five movies before his death in 1987. Over his career, he worked with such stars as Gabin, Jeanne Moreau, Annie Girardot, Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Danielle Darrieux and for such directors as Jacques Becker, Julien Duvivier, William Dieterle, Vittorio de Sica, Claude Lelouch, and Terence Young. FIAF will be paying tribute to the cool-as-a-cucumber actor with a two-brief three-week, six-film festival that begins January 11 with ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS (Louis Malle, 1957) and ARMY OF SHADOWS (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969) and continues January 18 with THE BIG RISK (Claude Sautet, 1960) and SECOND BREATH (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1966) and January 25 with MONSIEUR GANGSTER (Georges Lautner, 1963) and THE GRILLING (Claude Miller, 1981).
Fritz Lang’s 1922 expressionist epic, DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER, is one of the most thrilling crime dramas ever made. Written by Lang and his wife, Thea von Harbou, based on the popular novel by Norbert Jacques, the film focuses on the title character (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), a criminal mastermind who is a sort of Nietzschean superman able to control his victims using hypnosis and psychoanalysis. Putting his evil gaze on such easy prey as the wealthy Edgar Hull (Paul Richter) and Count Told (Alfred Abel), Mabuse tries to ruin them through a series of card games he manipulates, with the help of nightclub singer Cara Carozza (Aud Egede-Nissen) and a motley crew of assistants that includes Spoerri (Robert Forster-Larrinaga), Georg (Hans Adalbert Schlettow), Hawasch (Charles Puffy), and Pesch (Georg John). Meanwhile, steadfast prosecutor Norbert von Wenk (Bernhard Goetzke) is on the case, attempting to track down and capture the mystery man who is leaving a trail of death and destruction behind him. Divided into two sections, “The Great Gambler, a Picture of Our Time” and “Inferno — A Play of People in Our Time,” DR. MABUSE is indeed a story of its time, a document of the state of mind of the German populace between the two world wars. Mabuse, representing both chaos and tyranny, is a master of disguise, portraying numerous middle-class figures fighting against the upper class and authority. The film is not only about one evil man’s grab for power but the power of cinema itself; just as Mabuse can change characters within the film, all of the characters are merely actors in costume, performing a fiction on stunning sets created by production designer Karl Vollbrecht and photographed by cinematographer Carl Hoffmann. In fact, at one point Mabuse stares directly into the camera, his face hurtling toward the viewer, attempting a kind of mass hypnosis that, presciently, can be said to predict the rise of Nazism in Germany. But most of all, DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER, which was followed by THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE in 1933 and THE THOUSAND EYES OF DR. MABUSE in 1960, is a film about fear — fear of the unknown, fear of technology, fear of psychoanalysis, and fear of what the future holds. The film is screening as part of MoMA’s Weimar Cinema, 1919–1933: Daydreams and Nightmares series, comprising eighty-one films made between World War I and World War II; upcoming screenings include G. W. Pabst’s PANDORA’S BOX, Richard Eichberg’s THE MASKED MANNEQUIN, Wilhelm (William) Dieterle’s SEX IN CHAINS / SEX IN FETTERS, Walther Ruttmann’s IN DER NACHT and MELODY OF THE WORLD, Ernst Lubitsch’s MADAME DUBARRY (PASSION) and THE OYSTER PRINCESS, and Slatan Dudow’s WHITHER GERMANY?