Milk Studios
450 West 15th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Admission: free with advance RSVP confirmation only
www.thecreatorsproject.com
A joint venture between Vice and Intel, the Creators Project seeks to redefine the future of creativity and culture for the twenty-first century through art, film, music, and digital technology. The ambitious global initiative launches today at Milk Studios in the Meatpacking District before heading to London July 17, São Paulo August 14, Seoul August 28, and Beijing September 17-19. Open only to those with confirmed RSVPs, which “sold out” almost immediately, today’s hotly anticipated event features twelve hours of art installations, film screenings, panel discussions, DJ sets, and live performances spread across several floors, with works by such artists as Takeshi Murata, Danny Perez & Animal Collective, Spike Jonze, Nick Zinner & Martyn Ware, Graffiti Research Lab, the xx, Radical Friend, and many more, and live music from the Rapture, Gang Gang Dance, Sleigh Bells, Interpol, Neon Indian, MIA, and others. If you weren’t lucky enough to receive an e-mail confirmation, you can watch the event streaming live at the above website, and of course twi-ny will be there to bring you all the action as well.
Creators Project sweeps up visitors into immersive environments by Muti Randolph and others (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Follow-up: The much-touted launch of the Creators Project in the Meatpacking District on June 26 was a huge success. For some twelve hours, more than thirty-five hundred people got the opportunity to experience four floors of art, music, and film at Milk Studios, organized by Vice and Intel. Experience is the right word, as virtually every installation relied on human interaction of some kind, whether it be looking into a mirror that archives and melds together its previous gazers (United Visual Artists’ “Hereafter”), participating in a Rock Band-type trio where videos play instead of music (LEGS’ “Shred Master Pro”), entering a chamber pod where one’s face merges with others in the creation of a new type of holographic being (Radical Friend’s “The Digital Flesh”), setting off monolithic LED monitors that evoke space-age sound and vision (United Visual Artists’ “Triptych”), using hand motion to make a 3D computer image ([z]ink’s “DSP”), entering an Animal Collective album (Danny Perez’s “ODDSAC”), or walking into a light sculpture that changes color and sound based on presence and movement (Muti Randolph’s “Deep Screen”).
Mira Calix collaboration features haunting music and ghostly imagery (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Spike Jonze’s piece included three sections: the screening of his charming short film about robot love, I’M HERE, followed by a live performance by ASKA, playing songs from the soundtrack, and then inviting the audience to share their reaction to the movie in a specially designed video booth that gives each person a watermarked printout of themselves. And we were absolutely mesmerized by Mira Calix’s “My Secret Heart,” a collaboration between composer Calix, Streetwise Opera, video artist Flat-e, and sound designer Dave Sheppard, projecting haunting images, which include the outlines of people, floating around a 360-degree screen, set to a rare performance of Gregorio Allegri’s mysterious “Miserere Mei.” Oh yeah, there were also some pretty hot bands taking over various stages as the afternoon flowed into night. It’s really a shame that this marvelous project was here for only one day; it deserved to be seen — and experienced — by many more here in New York before it continues on its journey.
From June 2007 to July 2008, journalists Sebastian Junger (THE PERFECT STORM) and Tim Hetherington (LIBERIA: AN UNCIVIL WAR) made a total of ten trips to the dangerous Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, documenting the full deployment of Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade. With snipers hidden all around them, the fifteen soldiers of Second Platoon built a remote, strategic outpost they named Restrepo after PFC Juan Restrepo, the well-liked company medic who was killed early on. Junger and Hetherington film such men as Captain Dan Kearney, Staff Sergeant Kevin Rice, and Sergeant Brendan C. O’Byrne as they go about their daily duties, joking around, playing the guitar, meeting with Afghan locals to get information about the Taliban, and digging trenches while prepared to be shot at at any moment. The journalists took more than 150 hours of footage, supplemented with interviews with several of the soldiers after they were safely back at home base in Italy, talking about what they went through. There is nothing political about RESTREPO, nor does it pull at the heartstrings with melodramatic, overemotional scenes; instead, it depicts the harsh realities of battle, including the long stretches of boredom punctuated by sudden life-or-death situations. There is no narration, no one discusses the possible merits of the war, and no generals or politicians are on hand to defend America’s involvement in the region. There’s no ethnocentric yahooism, nor is there racist treatment of the mostly unseen enemy. It’s just war, pure and simple, seen from the perspective of men who chose to join the army and risk their lives for their country. The film won the documentary Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Festival and recently screened at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival at Lincoln Center. Sgt. O’Byrne will participate in a Q&A at the Angelika following the 7:45 show on June 25; Junger was going to do the same after the 7:45 show on June 26 but has had to cancel due to scheduling conflicts.
Nothing is going right for poor Geng Hao (Huang Bo). After losing the national bike championship because he hammed it up by celebrating a split second too early, Geng’s life goes into freefall: His coach (Ma Shaohua) suffers a debilitating heart attack, and he loses everything after getting briefly involved with a shady snake-oil salesman, Li Fala (Jiu Kong), who dresses in Superman costumes as he promises that his questionable liquid concoction can turn anyone into a superhero. Soon Geng is a poverty-stricken bike messenger on the run from a Taiwanese drug kingpin and the cops, with a frozen Thai assassin in the back of his truck, and continually getting set up by Li Fala, who has some serious problems of his own. Nominated for Best Film at the 2009 Golden Horse Fillm Festival, CRAZY RACER (aka SILVER MEDALIST) is crazy good, an entertaining farce with absurd characters, a twisting plot, plenty of mistaken identity, Ning Hao’s (MONGOLIAN PING PONG) Guy Ritchie-inspired tongue-in-cheek direction, and, most of all, Huang Bo himself, who plays the sad sack Geng Hao with Buster Keaton-like appeal. Huang Bo, who will be awarded the Rising Star of Asia Award at the New York Asian Film Festival opening ceremonies on June 25, will introduce the June 26 screening and participate in a postscreening Q&A; he can also be seen in Guan Hu’s COW at the festival.
Although Japanese director Takashi Miike is best known for such gruesome, violent, cutting-edge films as AUDITION, ICHI THE KILLER, the DEAD OR ALIVE trilogy, and GOZU, he has recently been showing off his more childlike side in such kid-friendly fare as THE GREAT YOKAI WAR and ZEBRAMAN. Now Miike has focused his attention on the popular late 1970s animated television show YATTERMAN, turning it into a goofy live-action flick filled with bright, bold colors, a fairly simplistic plot, and very cute machinery. On the side of good is Gan-chan (Japanese teen idol Sho Sakurai) and Ai-chan (Saki Fukuda), while rat-faced Doronjo (Kyoko Fukada), pig-nosed Tonzura (Kendo Kobayashi), and sexy leader Boyakki (Katsuhisa Namase) form the nasty, rather hapless villainous trio after the giant mecha-hero Yatterman and the four pieces of the valuable Skull Stone. Nothing short of the fate of the world is in jeopardy as the increasingly silly bad guys battle our beautiful, innocent heroes. Much of YATTERMAN is discombobulated and hard to follow, and the production values at times are more akin to Saturday-morning television than a trip to the movies, but it has such a charming sense of humor and playfulness that you might just overlook many of its needless excesses. 
