Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya's FLOATING POINT WAVES is part of HERE's annual Culturemart festival
HERE Arts Center
145 Sixth Ave. at Dominick St.
January 7-23, $15
212-647-0202
www.here.org
Culturemart, the annual festival of workshop productions by HERE’s resident artists, is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year with another slate of diverse experimental shows incorporating theater, dance, film, music, and audience interaction. Things get under way January 7-8 with Laura Peterson’s GROUND, the second part of her Wooden trilogy, in which a dance quartet performs within living grass and trees. Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya, artistic directors of the New York Butoh Festival, will present the immersive, multimedia FLOATING POINT WAVES. Betty Shamieh makes the murdered Arab from Albert Camus’s THE STRANGER the main character in the mysterious THE STRANGEST. A community of artists — as well as the audience — are all part of the interactive LUSH VALLEY, which seeks to reclaim the American dream. THE VENUS RIFF riffs on the Venus Hottentot. Democracy takes center stage in Aaron Landsman’s participatory CITY COUNCIL MEETING. Deborah Stein and Suli Holum investigate a woman who is her own twin in CHIMERA. Kamala Sankaram’s chamber opera MIRANDA mixes reality television with hip-hop and Hindustani classical music. And Lindsay Abromaitis-Smith uses puppetry to look at the sacred in EPYLLION, among other shows running through January 23, with all tickets a mere $15.
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? 
Britain’s Royal Family is notoriously protective of their personal lives, and for many years they were somehow able to keep from the public the fascinating story of Prince Albert’s difficult battle against a severe stammer. A serious stutterer himself as a child, screenwriter David Seidler (TUCKER: THE MAN AND HIS DREAM), who looked to the man known as Bertie as a role model, uncovered the dramatic tale and even got permission from the Queen Mum herself to pursue a cinematic version, as long as it came out after her death. So after gestating for decades, THE KING’S SPEECH is now a reality, a thrilling film that follows the prince’s (a marvelously vulnerable Colin Firth) struggle to find his voice as his aging father, King George V (Michael Gambon), falls ill and the prince of Wales (a wonderfully snide Guy Pearce) jeopardizes the possibility of his wearing and keeping the crown by falling in love with flirtatious, twice-divorced socialite Wallis Simpson (Eve Best). After having explored numerous ways to cure him of his debilitating and embarrassing stutter, Bertie and his loyal wife, Elizabeth (the resplendent Helena Bonham Carter), turn to an odd, failed actor, Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue (a pitch-perfect Geoffrey Rush), who uses extremely unusual methods that eventually force Bertie to reexamine his childhood while also preparing for a future that could put him on the throne as the country goes to war. Director Tom Hooper (THE DAMNED UNITED, HBO’s JOHN ADAMS miniseries) keeps the tension mounting as Bertie gains more and more public responsibility and his stage fright grows; the scenes between Firth and Rush in Logue’s rather low-rent basement office are thoroughly mesmerizing, a pair of bravura performances built around the slightest mouth twitch from Firth and knowing looks from the craggy-faced Rush. The strong cast also includes Derek Jacobi as Archbishop Cosmo Lang, Jennifer Ehle as Logue’s wife, Myrtle, Timothy Spall as Winston Churchill, Anthony Andrews as Stanley Baldwin, and Claire Bloom as Queen Mary. The only drawback is Alexandre Desplat’s overly melodramatic score, which insists on squeezing unnecessary, treacly emotion from a story where words take center stage.
Brooklyn native Darren Aronofsky, writer-director of the brilliant PI (1998) and REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000) and the muddled mess THE FOUNTAIN (2006), scores a major takedown with the marvelous comeback film THE WRESTLER. Former boxer Mickey Rourke, who made a name for himself in such 1980s films as DINER, RUMBLE FISH, THE POPE OF GREENWICH VILLAGE, 9 1/2 WEEKS, and BARFLY, stars as the Christ-like figure Randy “the Ram” Robinson, an aging professional wrestler who was the sport’s biggest name in the 1980s but is now a washed-up has-been living in a trailer park wrestling for embarrassingly small paydays at tiny local venues, still lured by the love of the sparse crowds and the respect of his opponents. After suffering a heart attack following one of his matches, the fifty-something Ram is suddenly faced with a life outside the ring. He tries to get back in his daughter’s (Evan Rachel Wood) life, attempts a relationship with stripper Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), and even gets a regular job in a supermarket, but the possibility of returning to the ring for the twentieth anniversary of his biggest match ever, his 1989 battle against the Ayatollah (Ernest Miller) in Madison Square Garden, weighs hard on his mind. Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, THE WRESTLER, shot in an arresting grainy style, is a masterfully told tale with multiple layers, with the Ram’s potential comeback mimicking Rourke’s own return to his acting glory days. Rourke, who won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Oscar for his effort, is such a natural in the role that it is hard to believe it was not written specifically for him; in fact, Nicolas Cage was first attached to the project. (Bruce Springsteen’s title song, which plays over the closing credits, took home the Golden Globe for Best Original Song but failed to garner an Oscar nod.) The film is set in the real-life world of Combat Zone Wrestling and the Ring of Honor, featuring such actual wrestlers as the Necro Butcher, who has a thing for barbed wire and staple guns. The heart-wrenching, beautiful, brutal film is screening at the Walter Reade Theater on January 5 at 6:15 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s two-day series, “Darren Aronofsky’s Dreams and Nightmares,” and will be followed by a conversation with the director. The brief festival, being held in conjunction with the release of Aronofsky’s latest, BLACK SWAN, begins on January 4 at 6:30 with the harrowing REQUIEM FOR A DREAM and continues at 9:00 with the ambitious flop THE FOUNTAIN. Aronofsky’s creepy mathematical debut, PI (π), concludes the festivities at 9:15 on January 5.