Paul Notzold’s “TXTual Healing” will project audience texts onto a 14th St. building as part of Art in Odd Places public art festival
14th St. between the Hudson & East Rivers
October 1-10
Admission: free
www.artinoddplaces.org
Everyday life in New York City is built around the idea of chance — risk as well as luck, both good and bad — as residents, tourists, workers, and other visitors are all part of a daily maelstrom filled with expected and unexpected encounters with friends and strangers, taxis and buses, parks and skyscrapers. If the city is its own massive museum, then its streets are like individual galleries, and with that in mind, curators Yaelle Amir and Petrushka Bazin have taken over 14th St. from October 1 to 10. “Chance” is the latest presentation from Art in Odd Places, which seeks to stretch the limits of public art. Playing off the themes of “proposition, luck, randomness, risk, and opportunity,” Amir and Bazin have gathered together more than two dozen site-specific projects that run the length of 14th St. from the Hudson to the East River, as passersby will come upon live music, dance, sound installations, interactive sculpture, and other participatory events. Perhaps you’ll find one of Sheryl Oring’s “To a Young Poet” envelopes, inside of which is an excerpt from Rainer Maria Rilke and a request for you to respond. Or maybe your movement will be incorporated into Simonetta Moro’s “Chance Drawing: Reverse Window Shopping” at Rags-a-Gogo. Make sure you have proper identification if you want to take one of notary public Carrie Dashow’s “Great Oaths.” Go ahead and answer that ringing phone, as it could be Christopher Dameron and Annika Newell’s “Silent Call” on the other end. Be brave and enter Einat Amir’s “Enough About You,” in which you’ll be put in a room with a stranger and then have a conversation. Although it might be raining anyway, you won’t want to get wet from BroLab Collective’s “Pump 14,” which will be transporting water down 14th St. via a manual bucket filtration system. Watch to see if Irvin Morazan, munching on Cheez Doodles while dressed in a Mayan-inspired headdress, is able to hail a cab in “Taxi!! Taxi!! Taxii!!” If someone is waving at you from across the street, be sure to wave back, because it’s probably part of Flux Factory’s “Sign a Waver.” And if three women suddenly start telling you stories on a street corner, it could very well be Jessica Ann Peavy’s “Two Lies and a Truth,” and it’s up to you to decide which rumor is real. Some of the events will continue all week, while others will take place only tonight, so check the schedule at the above website if you’re interested in a specific performance.
Loosely adapted from the book by John Godey, THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE wonderfully captures the cynicism of 1970s New York City. Four heavily armed and mustached men — Mr. Blue (Robert Shaw), Mr. Green (Martin Balsam), Mr. Gray (Hector Elizondo), and Mr. Brown (Earl Hindman), colorful pseudonyms that influenced Quentin Tarantino’s RESERVOIR DOGS — hijack an uptown 4 train, demanding one million dollars in one hour from a nearly bankrupt city or else they will kill all eighteen passengers, one at a time, minute by minute. The hapless mayor (Lee Wallace) is in bed with the flu, so Deputy Mayor Warren LaSalle (Tony Roberts) takes charge on the political end while transit detective Lt. Zachary Garber (a great Walter Matthau) and Inspector Daniels (Julius Harris) of the NYPD team up to try to figure out just how in the world the criminals expect to get away with the seemingly impossible heist. Directed by Joseph Sargent (SYBIL), the film offers a nostalgic look back at a bygone era, before technology radically changed the way trains are run and police work is handled. The film also features a very funny, laconic Jerry Stiller as Lt. Rico Patrone and the beloved Kenneth McMillan as the borough commander. The film was remade as a television movie in 1998, starring Edward James Olmos, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Lorraine Bracco, and as an embarrassingly bad big-budget bomb in 2009 by Tony Scott, who we’re hoping won’t ruin his upcoming remake of THE WARRIORS as well.
It’s fourteen years after the Battle of Sekigahara, and the Tokugawa is still battling the Toyotomi as spies cross the land, leaving paths of blood in their wake. Caught in the middle is Sartobi Sasuke (Koji Takahashi) of the Sanada clan, who is after the truth. This is not your average samurai flick — there’s a little sex, nudity, Christianity, dismemberment, and even leprosy, although the plot is plenty confusing; good luck trying to figure out who is on which side, but always keep a look out for those men in the mysterious masks, as well as Sakon (Tetsuro Tamba), the dude in the silly white costume. The minimalist, noirish score by Toru Takemitsu is right on. SAMURAI SPY is part of the NYFF Masterworks section of the forty-eighth New York Film Festival, in the series “Elegant Elegies: The Films of Masahiro Shinoda,” which honors the genre-bending Japanese New Wave auteur with screenings of such works as THE ASSASSIN, KILLERS ON PARADE, MOONLIGHT SERENADE, and PALE FLOWER.
Writer, director, poet, photographer, editor, graphic designer, and painter Abbas Kiarostami has been one of Iran’s leading filmmakers for nearly forty years, compiling a resume that includes such important international films as UNDER THE OLIVE TREES (1994), TASTE OF CHERRY (1997), and THE WIND WILL CARRY US (1999). His latest film, CERTIFIED COPY, is his first feature made outside of his home country, a dreadfully boring and annoying art-infused romantic comedy set in Italy. Juliette Binoche was named Best Actress at Cannes this year for her starring role as an unnamed single mother and antiques dealer who is obsessed with English author James Miller’s (British opera star William Shimell) book on the history and meaning of art replicas, CERTIFIED COPY. Inexplicably, the two strangers are soon on a bizarre sort-of date, driving through Tuscany and becoming involved in a series of vignettes about love and marriage, literature and art, and other topics. Both characters are seriously flawed and emotionally unstable in ways that make them unattractive to watch, especially in obvious set-ups that either go nowhere or exactly where you think they’re going. While Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke made the somewhat similar BEFORE SUNRISE (1995) and BEFORE SUNSET (2004), in which two strangers from different countries spend a day together (but mostly by themselves), the sexual tension and excitement always building, CERTIFIED COPY is more reminiscent of Hans Canova’s ridiculous CONVERSATIONS WITH OTHER WOMEN (2005), in which Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter star as wedding guests with a past whom viewers can’t wait to just shut up and get off the screen. Don’t let the supposed adult dialogue of CERTIFIED COPY fool you into thinking it’s an intelligent, mature look at believable relationships; instead, it feels like a staid copy of other, better films you think you’ve seen but can’t remember — and won’t care.
Ngawang Choephel wrote, directed, produced, narrates, and composed the score for the fascinating, intensely personal documentary TIBET IN SONG. Born in western Tibet in 1966, Ngawang set out in 1995 to capture the dying folk music of Tibet, a critical part of the country’s tradition and yet another aspect of their culture being buried by the Chinese takeover that had begun in 1959. Risking his life as well as his family’s — he also wanted to find the father he had not seen in decades — Ngawang, who grew up in a South Indian refugee camp, started to record Tibetan folk music to preserve its heritage, leading to his arrest on espionage charges. But he let nothing stop him, especially when he came upon Tibetans who were using native melodies to sing propaganda lyrics supplied by the Chinese government. But TIBET IN SONG, which has won awards at the Sundance Film Festival, the One World International Human Rights Film Festival, the Asian American International Film Festival, and others, is more than just one person’s private struggle; it is an important document about human rights, particularly when Ngawang speaks with Tibetan exiles in India who are not afraid to tell the truth.
