Katherine Helmond goes in for a little touch-up in BRAZIL
WAVERLY MIDNIGHTS
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Weekends at midnight through December 5
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
The IFC Center’s Monty Python Midnights series comes to a sensational close with two of Python animator Terry Gilliam’s best films. BRAZIL, the controversial 1985 drama in which a futuristic society gets buried in red tape, will screen Wednesday through Saturday night (November 25-28) at midnight. The film stars Jonathan Pryce as poor Sam Lowry, Katherine Helmond as his well-to-do mother with a thing for facelifts, the angelic Kim Greist, and a heroic Robert De Niro. And then, at midnight on December 4 & 5, Gilliam’s delightful TIME BANDITS screens, as a group of little people travel through time and space, meeting up with such historical, hysterical characters as Robin Hood (John Cleese), Sean Connery (King Agamemnon), and Napoleon (Ian Holm) while trapped in a battle between the Supreme Being (Sir Ralph Richardson) and the Evil Genius (David Warner). It’s all great fun and should be a blast at these midnight presentations.
Nothing is off limits for SOUTH PARK dudes Trey Parker and Matt Stone in this marionette musical actioner that mixes TOP GUN, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, and THE MATRIX with that old classic television puppet show THUNDERBIRDS. Kim Jong Il is determined to unleash his weapons of mass destruction on an unsuspecting world, and it is up to Team America and its newest member, actor Gary Johnston, formerly of the hit musical LEASE, to stop the North Korean leader’s heinous plan. But Team America is a reckless bunch that has a tendency to destroy major cities and landmarks (the Eiffel Tower, the Sphinx) as it attempts to take out terrorists. Meanwhile, love threatens to complicate the success of their mission. Parker and Stone skewer international politics, the military, celebrity, and the media in this very dirty, very funny flick; among their victims are Alec Baldwin, Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn, Peter Jennings, Hans Blix, George Clooney, and, mercilessly, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. There’s lots of blood and gore, a very hot puppet sex scene, and the best description ever about the three kinds of people in the world. Although it often misses its target or goes way too far – it could have been a classic like SOUTH PARK: BIGGER LONGER & UNCUT – it’s still a good way to spend a Saturday night out at the movies. And on Saturday, November 21, it will be offering even more, as the 92YTribeca screens it as part of its “Sing-along” series, adding the words on-screen so you can curse along with the characters to your heart’s delight – and they’ll even include a free beer to help get things going.
Twenty-three-year-old writer-director Damien Chazelle has expanded his senior thesis at Harvard into an unusual black-and-white musical that mixes John Cassavetes’s SHADOWS and FACES with Jacques Demy’s THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (and a little French Nouvelle Vague) as seen through the modern lens of mumblecore. An accomplished jazz drummer, Chazelle (who makes a cameo in the film behind the kits) casts real-life jazz trumpeter and first-time actor Jason Palmer as Guy, a jazz trumpeter in a relationship with Madeline (Desiree Garcia), whom he met on a Boston park bench. But when Guy strays following a chance encounter on a train with a stranger named Elena (Sandha Khin) — an electrifying scene filled with heat and passion — Madeline leaves him, instead dreaming of making a new life for herself in New York. But as the two of them go their separate ways, they still imagine what could have been. The film features such actual musicians and dancers as Andre Hayward of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, tap-dancer Kelly Kaleta, and teenage saxophone prodigy Grace Kelly. (Look for Chazelle’s father, Benard, as Paul.) Justin Hurwitz wrote the music for five of the original songs, with Chazelle supplying the lyrics. A slow-paced, heartfelt drama, GUY AND MADELINE ON A PARK BENCH, which played the Tribeca Film Festival, has the improvisational feel of a quiet jazz solo, a soft, tender film about love and loss and how fragile meaningful relationships can be.
