this week in film and television

A LOUIS MALLE SAMPLER: SIX CLASSIC WORKS

Laurent and his mother are oh-so-close in French coming-of-age classic

MURMUR OF THE HEART (Louis Malle, 1971)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
70 Lincoln Center Plaza, 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Friday, January 1, 4:00
Saturday, January 2, 9:00
Wednesday, January 6, 9:00
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

Louis Malle’s engaging semiautobiographical coming-of-age drama is about the ultimate mama’s boy. Set in Dijon in 1954 during the French Indochine War, MURMUR OF THE HEART follows fifteen-year-old Laurent Chevalier (Benoît Ferreux) as he investigates his burgeoning sexuality while his Italian mother, Clara (Lea Massari), struggles with her own, cheating on her French gynecologist husband (Daniel Gélin) with a mystery man and flirting madly with just about everyone else. Laurent, who has a heart murmur that requires special treatment, fights with his two older brothers (Fabien Ferreux and Marc Winocourt), has an uncomfortable session with a priest (Michael Lonsdale), tries to make a go of it with a prostitute (Gila von Weitershausen), and experiments with some older local girls, but somehow he always ends up in the loving arms of his very sexy mother. Nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar and the Palme d’Or at Cannes, MURMUR OF THE HEART is a beautiful look at growing up, with a rousing jazz soundtrack featuring music by Charlie Parker, Sidney Bechet, Dizzy Gillespie, and other cool cats. The film is being screened three times as part of Lincoln Center’s Louis Malle Sampler (January 1-7), a six-pack that also includes THE FIRE WITHIN, THE LOVERS, MY DINNER WITH ANDRE, PHANTOM INDIA, and VANYA ON 42nd St.; as an added bonus, Wallace Shawn will participate in a Q&A following the 6:15 screening of MY DINNER WITH ANDRE on January 6.

THE CHASER

The chase is on in South Korean thriller loosely based on the exploits of a real-life serial killer

THE CHASER (CHUGYEOGJA) (Na Hong-jin, 2008)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at Third St.
December 30 – January 5
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

A huge hit in South Korea, Na Hong-jin’s THE CHASER is a tense, gripping thriller that is both extremely violent and deeply emotional. Kim Yun-suk stars as Jung-ho, a disgraced former cop now working as a pimp. Angry that several of his high-class prostitutes have left him, he demands that Kim Min-ji (Seo Young-hee) take on a client even though she is feeling ill. Soon after, he uncovers evidence that leads him to believe that the client he just sent Min-ji to is selling off his girls, so he sets out to find her, but he winds up caught in the middle of what could be a gruesome serial-killer case as he is continually thwarted by the mysterious john and would-be killer, Young-min (Ha Jung-woo). With Min-ji missing, Jung-ho tries to use his policing skills — he gets little help from the local cops, a group of lazy bunglers more interested in protecting the mayor of Seoul from another feces attack — to track her down while also suddenly feeling responsible for the young daughter (Kim Yoo-jeong) he didn’t know she had. Loosely based on the exploits of real-life serial killer Yoo Young-cheol, THE CHASER, which is being remade in English by Warner Bros., does a good job of getting inside the head of a troubled man whose world is unraveling before his eyes and might not be able to stop it.

OLD PARTNER

Choi and his loyal ox face the twilight of their years together in OLD PARTNER (Photo courtesy of Schcalo Media Group)

OLD PARTNER (Lee Chung-ryoul, 2008)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
December 30 – January 5
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

“Woe is me . . . Life is miserable,” complains seventy-six-year-old Lee Sam-soon as her husband, seventy-nine-year-old Choi Won-kyun, lets her go on about her hunched-over body, lack of teeth, and overall ill health. All Choi cares about is his beloved loyal ox, who has been with him for nearly thirty years. South Korean filmmaker Lee Chung-ryoul documents the final year of the loving, sometimes harsh relationship between Choi and his ox in the deeply heartwarming and thoroughly heartbreaking OLD PARTNER. As science and technology pass him by, Choi continues to farm his fields with his aging and ailing ox, who is turning forty, somewhat of a miracle as the life span of the breed is generally between twelve and twenty-four years. Choi refuses to spray insecticides, preferring to jeopardize his crop rather than his animal. And he often leaves his constantly chattering wife to work the fields alone as he goes off to find fresh fodder to feed the ox, whose own aches and pains echo those of Choi. Even Choi and Lee’s nine children, none of whom have any interest in the farm, want their father to get rid of the ox, but he merely ignores them, responding only to the ox’s bell and not his family’s questions and concerns. Named Best Documentary at the Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea, OLD PARTNER is a warm, tender, beautiful little film about life and death and relationships, with a strong emotional resonance that will stay with you for a long time.

BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND: SOLARIS

The original SOLARIS is back by popular demand at Lincoln Center

SOLARIS (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
70 Lincoln Center Plaza, 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Thursday, December 31, 1:00 & 6:30
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

Natalya Bondarchuk and Donatus Banionis star in the Russian 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, in which something strange is going on in outer space that is unexplainable to both the characters in the film and the people in the audience. Banionis plays Chris Kelvin, who is sent to the Solaris space station to decide whether to put an end to the solaristics project that Burton (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky) complicated twenty years before. What he discovers is one death, two possibly insane men, and his supposedly dead wife (Bondarchuk). Ambiguity reigns supreme in this gorgeously shot (in color and black and white) and scored film that, while technically sci-fi, is really about the human conscience, another gem from master Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (IVAN’S CHILDHOOD, ANDREI RUBLEV, NOSTALGHIA). See it whether or not you checked out Steven Soderbergh’s underrated remake with George Clooney and Natascha McElhone. The original SOLARIS is screening on New Year’s Eve at the Walter Reade Theater as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Back by Popular Demand series, highlighting works that appeared earlier in 2009 and deserve another go-round, including Orson Welles’s MACBETH (December 29, 1:30), Marco Amenta’s THE SICILIAN GIRL (December 29, 6:15), Kathryn Bigelow’s THE HURT LOCKER (December 30, 3:30), and Martin Provost’s SÉRAPHINE (December 30, 8:10 and December 31, 4:15).

THE ART OF STOP-MOTION

“The Mayor,” pastel and pencil on board, on view and for sale at Animazing Gallery in SoHo

Animazing Gallery
54 Greene St. at Broome St.
Through December 31
Admission: free
212-226-7374
www.animazing.com

In addition to visiting the Tim Burton film program and exhibition retrospective at MoMA, completists and collectors still have one last chance to make their way to the Animazing Gallery in SoHo, which is displaying – and selling – storyboards, props, and other paraphernalia from THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, CORALINE, and CORPSE BRIDE. Also on view through December 31 is a handful of select pieces from this fall’s “Sendak in SoHo” exhibition, which featured select published and conceptual illustrations from the children’s classic WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE.

HOW REAL IS THIS? (TRUTH TELLING IN FICTION FILMS)

Italian gangster epic kicks off fact-based fiction series in Harlem

GOMORRAH (Matteo Garrone, 2008)
Maysles Cinema
343 Malcolm X Blvd. between 127th & 128th Sts.
Saturday, January 2, $9, 7:30
212-582-6050
www.mayslesinstitute.org
www.ifcfilms.com

Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, GOMORRAH is a violent, intimate look at the modern-day Camorra crime syndicate in Naples and Caserta. Based on the nonfiction novel by investigative journalist Roberto Saviano — who has been living under police protection since the fall of 2006 — Matteo Garrone’s epic follows five distinct yet interrelated stories set around a dilapidated concrete-block housing project, a sort of GODFATHER meets THE SOPRANOS filtered through Italian Neo-realism. Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo) is a tailor who considers sharing his secrets with a Chinese sweatshop to make some much-needed extra cash. Roberto (Carmine Paternoster) is having second thoughts training under Franco (Toni Servillo), who runs a toxic waste dumping business. Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato) has to deal with a delicate, difficult situation when Maria’s (Italian singing star Maria Nazionale) young son joins the secessionists, a rival gang. Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone) are loose cannons who keep messing with the wrong people. And Totò (Salvatore Abruzzese) is a thirteen-year-old boy who is helping out the Camorra against his mother’s wishes — and is soon faced with a life-changing decision. Beautifully shot by Marco Onorato and featuring a cast of primarily nonprofessional actors, GOMORRAH is a deeply involving crime drama, all the more frightening because it’s based on real, current situations. GOMORRAH kicks off the Maysles Cinema’s How Real Is This? series, which investigates how truth is handled in fact-based fiction films.

TIM BURTON

Johnny Depp looks for answers in Tim Burton's haunted fairy tale SLEEPY HOLLOW

MoMA Film
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through January 31
Tickets: $10, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.timburton.com

Writer, director, producer, and animator Tim Burton is a spectacular visual stylist with an unending imagination that began when he was a child and continues now into his fifties. He burst onto the cinematic scene in 1985 with the charming PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE and followed that up with such gems as BATMAN (1989), EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (1990), ED WOOD (1994), SLEEPY HOLLOW (1999), and SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET (2007) as well as with such hit-or-miss films as MARS ATTACKS! (1996), BIG FISH (2003), and CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (2005). His name actually became part of the title in the cult classic TIM BURTON’S THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS (1993), the stop-motion animated movie directed by Henry Selick, who also helmed Burton’s production of JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH (1996). And Burton found his onscreen alter ego in Johnny Depp, who has starred in a half dozen features made by the Burbank-born filmmaker and will be playing the Mad Hatter in next year’s highly anticipated ALICE IN WONDERLAND. In conjunction with MoMA’s exciting retrospective of Burton’s work, a fantastic collection of models, shorts, costumes, storyboards, paintings, drawings, notebooks, school projects, and other paraphernalia, the museum is screening his entire oeuvre through January 31.

Michael Keaton closes out Burton retrospective in BEETLEJUICE on New Year's Eve

The upcoming schedule features the excellent SLEEPY HOLLOW on December 27 at 5:30, the dreadful PLANET OF THE APES (2001) remake on January 1 at 4:30, the great ED WOOD on January 2 at 5:30, the inconsistent MARS ATTACKS! on January 4 at 4:30, and the charming PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE on January 11 at 4:30 before finishing up with the fine BATMAN on January 23 (5:00), the up-and-down CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (4:30) and the bloody good SWEENEY TODD (8:00) on January 27, the nearly unwatchable BATMAN RETURNS (1992) on January 28, and the very funny BEETLEJUICE (1988) on January 31 (6:00). Tickets for the screenings are $10 and are available the day of the show, but they are free if you go the same day you visit the timed-ticked exhibition, which is a splendid way to experience Burton’s chaotic genius.