Creepy exhibition entrance leads to a treasure trove of Burtonalia (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Museum of Modern Art
West 54th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through April 26 (closed Tuesdays; Fridays free from 4:00 to 8:00)
Admission: $20 (includes same-day film screening), advance timed tickets recommended
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.timburton.com
twi-ny slideshow
There are only three weeks left in MoMA’s wildly popular Tim Burton retrospective, so you better hurry over if you want to see this vastly entertaining show. (The museum is even extending its hours over the last three days, staying open until 8:45.) More than seven hundred objects are on view, from early sketchbooks and movie models to watercolors and sculpture, from robots and wild short films (Stainboy gets a corridor all to himself!) to costumes and storyboards. It’s a carnival of excess, a virtual wonderland for fans of Burton’s eclecticism. While Burton’s movies are often hit (SWEENEY TODD, EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, SLEEPY HOLLOW, ED WOOD) or miss (BIG FISH, PLANET OF THE APES, BATMAN RETURNS), he has developed an often dazzling visual style that is evident throughout the exhibit. Raised in Burbank and currently based in London, Burton seems to have saved everything he has ever done, every idea that came his way, and has included it in the survey, from his early fascination with horror and Vincent Price to his foray into his own fractured fairy tales (just wait till you see the Hansel and Gretel show he made for Disney) and his creative reinvention of stop-motion animation. It’s all here, bringing to life the ecstatic imagination of a crazed genius who’s yet to fully grow up. (which is not necessarily a bad thing).
Mackinnon & Saunders, "General Bonesapart puppet," metal, cloth, resin, foam latex, and silicone, 2005 (photo by twi-ny/mdr, figure courtesy Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc.)
Fans of Burton’s movies will have a field day with original drawings, vitrines filled with favorite characters, and a reel of the auteur’s earliest shorts, dating from when he was a teenager. In addition to the exhibit, the film series “Tim Burton and the Lurid Beauty of Monsters” still has several screenings left, including THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN’T DIE (Joseph Green, 1962) on April 8, Tex Avery cartoons on April 9, INVADERS FROM MARS (William Cameron, 1953) on April 16, and 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH (Nathan Juran, 1957) on April 25.
Short-story writer and children’s book author Etgar Keret and playwright and kids’ book writer Shira Geffen, who are life partners, teamed up in 2007 for their feature-film directorial debut, JELLYFISH (MEDUZOT), a small, charming Israeli film that won the Camera D’Or at Cannes. Written by Geffen, the story follows three women dealing with family problems that threaten to leave them lost and lonely. After her boyfriend dumps her, Batya (Sarah Adler) heads off to her job working for a wedding caterer, where she is surrounded by happy people celebrating a marriage while she contemplates her own bleak future. But her life changes when she is sitting on the beach and a silent young girl (Nikol Leidman) comes walking out of the ocean and approaches her. When a policeman says that no one has reported the girl missing or is looking for her, Batya decides to take care of the child herself, perhaps as a reaction to the offhanded way in which her own wealthy, successful mother treats her. Meanwhile, Keren (Noa Knoller), who broke her leg at her wedding reception after being trapped in the bathroom, has to spend her honeymoon in a local seaside hotel instead of jetting off to the Caribbean; her unhappiness is soon magnified when she suspects her husband (Gera Sandler) might have eyes for an older woman who is staying alone in the deluxe penthouse suite. And Joy (Ma-nenita De Latorre) is a Filipino guest worker who has come to Israel to make money to send back to her son in the Philippines, but because she cannot speak Hebrew, it is difficult for her to communicate with anyone, especially one old woman (Zharira Charifai) she has been hired to care for. Like the multiple-character drama BABEL, Keret and Geffen’s film focuses on complex family relationship and the challenges of interpersonal communication, with water — whether it’s the leak in Batya’s ceiling, the ocean rumbling outside Keren’s hotel room, the sea the young girl mysteriously emerges from, or the large expanse that separates Joy from her family — serving as a metaphor for both life and death, joy and sorrow. This sweet, painful, and somewhat surreal examination of four generations of women might be set in Tel Aviv, but its themes are universal.
After the orchestra in which he plays cello is dissolved, Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) and his wife, Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) leave Tokyo and head back to his hometown in Yamagata. Seeing a classified ad in the local paper listing a job in “departures,” Daigo schedules an interview, thinking it is a travel agent position. But as it turns out, the boss, Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki), claims it was a typo — it should have read “the departed” — and immediately hires Daigo as his assistant encoffinor. Daigo quickly learns that he and Sasaki attend to the newly dead, picking them up for funeral directors and then preparing the bodies, in front of grieving friends and family, for the coffins and cremation through an elaborate, detailed ceremony. Daigo takes the job out of financial desperation — Sasaki throws money at him to come on board — but doesn’t tell anyone, including Mika, what he is doing, since people who work in businesses involving corpses are shunned in Japan, considered dirty. But as Daigo grows to appreciate the importance of what Sasaki does, everything he has built threatens to fall apart when his secret starts getting out. Winner of the 2008 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film (As well as ten Japan Academy Prizes), DEPARTURES is a moving portrait of life and death, told beautifully by director Yojiro Takita (WHENT THE LAST SWORD IS DRAWN, ONMYOJI) and screenwriter Kundo Koyama. Motoki, who had the original idea for the film, gives a wonderfully subtle performance as a Daigo, while Yamazaki is a riot as the stern boss with a sly sense of humor. Despite an embarrassingly unnecessary montage scene and sappy music by Joe Hisaishi (who’s never met an emotion he couldn’t overexploit), DEPARTURES is a moving portrait of a man searching for his place in the world — and meeting personal and professional obstacles when he thinks he might have found it.
At the Palm Springs International Film Festival earlier this year, China withdrew Lu Chuan’s CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH and Ye Kai’s QUICK, QUICK, SLOW in protest of the festival’s inclusion of the pro-Tibet documentary THE SUN BEHIND THE CLOUDS. CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH, which examines the 1937 Rape of Nanking, was scheduled to open at Film Forum on March 31, but the distributor could not guarantee that China would allow it to be shown, so Film Forum filled the open slot with THE SUN BEHIND THE CLOUDS. Subtitled TIBET’S STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM, the seventy-nine-minute film, made by husband-and-wife team Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam, delves into the battle between those Tibetans who follow the Dalai Lama’s Middle Way Approach, in which Tibet would seek autonomy from China but not full independence, and those that want their country back completely. Sarin and Sonam, who have been documenting the situation in Tibet for nearly twenty years in such films as THE TRIALS OF TELO RINPOCHE (1994), THE SHADOW CIRCUS: THE CIA IN TIBET (1998), the narrative feature DREAMING LHASA (2005), and THE THREAD OF KARMA (2007), focus on the March 2008 uprising, the biggest since the Chinese invasion of 1959.
