this week in film and television

JODY SPERLING / TIME LAPSE DANCE: SINGLE USE

Jody Sperling dances on the Upper West Side in plastic bags in Single Use

Who: Jody Sperling, Jennifer Congdon
What: World premiere livestream from Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance
Where: Time Lapse Dance YouTube channel and Zoom
When: Wednesday, July 22, free with RSVP for Zoom talkback, 7:00
Why: Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance has been celebrating its twentieth anniversary season over twenty weeks during the pandemic, with online repertory works and new dances that you can view on its YouTube channel, including Turbulence, Book of Clouds, Wind Rose, and the quarantine dance Plastic Virus. Sperling continues the environmental theme with Single Use, which premieres on July 22 at 7:00. The nine-minute film is choreographed, performed, and edited by Sperling, with cinematography by Angela Hunter, costume by Lauren Gaston, and music by Matthew Burtner. As Single Use begins, Sperling, wearing a mask and gloves, is standing outside the Urban Outfitters store at Broadway and One Hundredth St.; signs in the window announce that March 20 was its last day in business. Sperling then drapes herself in plastic bags from numerous retail stores and dances around the neighborhood, embracing poles and hopping atop barriers, the swishing of the plastic bags in the wind accompanying her, along with the natural sounds of a nearly empty city. She looks like a homeless person or some lost plastic creature, seeking solace somewhere while taking risks and lamenting what we’ve done to the world.

The livestream will be followed by a Zoom talkback with Sperling and Jennifer Congdon, the development director of Beyond Plastics, a Bennington College-based organization whose “mission is to end plastic pollution by being a catalyst for change at every level of our society. We use our deep policy and advocacy expertise to build a well-informed, effective movement seeking to achieve the institutional, economic, and societal changes needed to save our planet, and ourselves, from the plastic pollution crisis.” Single Use will have you thinking not only about recycling but about how we can rejuvenate and revitalize New York City and the country in these challenging times. Time Lapse Dance’s twentieth anniversary continues July 29 with the online release of another new short film, along with a live chat, July 30 with an ecokinetics workshop, and August 6 with the online premiere of Ice Cycle, followed by a conversation with Sperling and Burtner.

CARMEN ARGOTE’S LAST LIGHT SCREENING AND Q&A

Carmen Argote goes for a haunting walk in new short film Last Light

Who: Carmen Argote, Erin Christovale
What: Livestream premiere and live Q&A
Where: The Hammer Museum at UCLA
When: Tuesday, July 21, free with RSVP, 9:00 EDT
Why: Mexican-born, LA-based multidisciplinary artist Carmen Argote was scheduled to open her latest exhibition, “Hand Dog Glove,” at Clockshop in Los Angeles, but the Covid-19 pandemic has put that on hold. In the interim, Argote, the gallery, and the Hammer Museum at UCLA have teamed up to present the livestream premiere of Argote’s haunting twelve-minute film, Last Light, which she started making just before the lockdown and continued during the crisis. “Is this fear so paralyzing?” she asks as she walks through the emptying streets of her city, considering ideas of loneliness, childhood, and demolition. “I feel like I’m not made to last; I’m not the one who’s gonna make it.” Argote, who was hospitalized early in the crisis for a non-cornonavirus-related illness, takes walks as part of her discipline. In her artist statement she explains, “I explore notions of home and place. I respond to architecture and site to reflect on personal histories and on my own immigrant experience. My practice uses the act of inhabiting as a starting point, working within a space and its cultural, economic, and personal context as a material. I work at a human scale and in relationship to how my body inhabits space.” The premiere will be livestreamed on July 21 at 9:00, followed by a Q&A with Argote and Hammer associate curator Erin Christovale. (Click on the above photo to watch the trailer.)

KAYE BALLARD — THE SHOW GOES ON!

kaye ballard

Who: Special guests
What: Livestream film premiere of Kaye Ballard — The Show Goes On! with bonuses before and after screening
Where: Facebook Live
When: Tuesday, July 14, free, 8:00
Why: In January 2019, the one and only Kaye Ballard passed away at the age of ninety-three. If you don’t know anything about her, you need to, and you can do so on July 14 when the documentary Kaye Ballard — The Show Goes On! makes its virtual premiere for free on Facebook Live. Ballard was a beloved singer, actress, and comedian perhaps best known for her many guest appearances on talk shows, game shows, and variety programs, from The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (and Jack Paar) and The Mike Douglas Show to Hollywood Squares and The Perry Como Show; she also appeared on such sitcoms as The Mothers-in-Law, The Doris Day Show, and What a Dummy in addition to a bunch of films, burlesque and vaudeville, and more than two dozen stage shows, going back to 1946.

In Kaye Ballard — The Show Goes On!, director Dan Wingate speaks with Ann-Margret, Jerry Stiller, Carol Burnett, Harold Prince, Carol Channing, Michael Feinstein, Rex Reed, Joy Behar, Peter Marshall, and Ballard herself, who is seen in new interviews, classic archival footage, and clips from her 2017 one-woman show about her life. “I don’t know where I got it, I don’t know why it happened, but I think I’m lucky because I always knew what I wanted to do,” she says in the film. And now you can consider yourself lucky to discover the great Kaye Ballard either for the first time or all over again; the advance screening (the virtual release is set for July 17) will be preceded by a special introduction and followed by a surprise bonus.

OLYMPIA ONLINE PREMIERE AND Q&A

Olympia Dukakis looks back at her life and career in award-winning documentary

Who: Olympia Dukakis, Apollo Dukakis, Carey Perloff, Harry Mavromichalis, Sid Ganis, Anthoula Katsimatides
What: Livestream free premiere of Olympia (Harry Mavromichalis, 2019) followed by panel discussion
Where: Olympia Facebook page
When: Thursday, July 9, free with RSVP, 8:00 (opens virtually July 10)
Why: “Some people don’t know who the fuck I am,” San Francisco Pride parade celebrity grand marshal Olympia Dukakis says as she rides in a convertible in 2011, waving to the loud, large crowd lining the street. You’ll know just who the Oscar-winning actor is after watching Olympia, Harry Mavromichalis’s Maysles-esque documentary that has its online premiere July 9 at 8:00, followed by a Q&A with Dukakis, her brother Apollo Dukakis, writer-producer-director Mavromichalis, American Conservatory Theater artistic director emerita Carey Perloff, and executive producers Harry Sid Ganis and Anthoula Katsimatides. The film, which was shot mostly during the Obama administration and opens virtually July 10, reveals Dukakis, the star of such beloved hits as Moonstruck and Steel Magnolias and the breakthrough television series Tales of The City, to be a dynamic and imposing figure who holds nothing back as she discusses the movie business in Hollywood and the theater community in New York, shares intimate details about her sexual desires, suicidal thoughts, and drug addiction, and travels to her ancestral home in Lesbos, Greece, to reconnect with her past.

Former modern dancer Mavromichalis balances wonderful home movies and family pictures with clips from throughout Dukakis’s career, photos from her stage work, primarily with her Montclair, New Jersey–based Whole Theatre company, and words of praise from Whoopi Goldberg, Laura Linney, Diane Ladd, Rocco Sisto, Lynn Cohen, Lainie Kazan, Austin Pendleton, Ed Asner, Armistead Maupin, and her cousin, former presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. She and her husband of more than fifty years, actor Louis Zorich, speak extremely openly and honestly about their marriage, she explores her relationship with her mother, and she spends time with her children and grandchildren. Dukakis, who turned eighty-nine last month, is direct and forthright, displaying a rebellious and independent spirit along with a touching vulnerability, an intense social conscience, and a resolute sense of female empowerment that still drives her even as she tackles modern technology, specifically Siri, which presents a few challenges. She’s one tough character who has never been afraid to say what she thinks; she’s also a supremely talented actor who shines on stage and screen, including in this lively and affectionate documentary.

NETFLIX’S UNORTHODOX: ANNA WINGER, SHIRA HAAS, AND AMIT RAHAV IN CONVERSATION WITH DAVID CANFIELD

Breakout Unorthodox star Shira Haas will participate in 92Y Q&A on July 7

Who: Anna Winger, Shira Haas, Amit Rahav, David Canfield
What: Live Q&A with cocreator and costars of Unorthodox series
Where: 92Y online
When: Tuesday, July 7, free, 5:00
Why: One of the runaway television hits of the pandemic has been Netflix’s Unorthodox, about a young married Orthodox woman in Brooklyn who runs away to Berlin to escape the suffocating life she is trapped in. The four-part series has led to the breakout success of Israeli actress Shira Haas, who has a smaller but critically significant role in the earlier Israeli series Shtisel, which also involves Orthodox marriage. On July 7 at 5:00, Haas, who stars as Esty Shapiro in Unorthodox, will be joined by Amit Rahav, who plays her husband, Yanky, and showrunner Anna Winger for a free live online discussion with Entertainment Weekly’s David Canfield as part of the online partnership between EW and the 92nd Street Y.

TIM’S TWITTER LISTENING / WATCH PARTY: 20,000 DAYS ON EARTH WITH LIVE TWEETING

Nick Cave takes a look back at his life and career as only Nick Cave can in imaginative, deeply introspective documentary

Who: Tim Burgess, Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard
What: Listening/watch party of 20,000 Days on Earth (Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, 2014) with live tweeting
Where: Tim’s Twitter Listening Party
When: Sunday, June 28, Twitter free, film rental here, 11:00 pm EST
Why: During the pandemic, Tim Burgess of the Charlatans has been hosting listening and watch parties with live tweeting, highlighting such records as Camper Van Beethoven’s Telephone Free Landslide Victory, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s Dazzle Ships, Dexys Midnight Runners’ Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, and Duran Duran’s Rio, with band members chiming in as the album plays. On June 28 at 11:00 pm EST, Burgess goes audiovisual with live tweeting during a watch party of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s 2014 documentary, 20,000 Days on Earth. (You can rent the film here.)

The film might sound like a 1950s low-budget sci-fi cult classic you’ve never seen, but actually it’s an unusual and vastly inventive document of the life and times of Australian rocker, poet, novelist, film composer, screenwriter, and all-around bon vivant Nick Cave. In their debut feature, installation artists and curators Forsyth and Pollard collaborated closely with Cave, mixing reality and fantasy as they follow Cave during a rather busy day. “Who knows their own story? Certainly it makes no sense when we are living in the midst of it,” Cave, who is now sixty-two, says in the deeply poetic voiceover narration he wrote specifically for the film. “It’s all just clamor and confusion. It only becomes a story when we tell it, and retell it, our small, precious recollections that we speak again and again to ourselves or to others, first creating the narrative of our lives, and then keeping the story from dissolving into darkness.” Forsyth and Pollard journey with Cave as he delves into religion and his relationship with his father with psychoanalyst Darian Leader, visits with longtime collaborator Warren Ellis (who shares an amazing story about Nina Simone and a piece of gum), drives around as people from his past suddenly appear in his car (friend Ray Winstone, duet partner Kylie Minogue, former bandmate Blixa Bargeld), lays down tracks in the studio (“Give Us a Kiss,” “Higgs Boson Blues,” “Push the Sky Away” with a children’s orchestra), watches television with his twin sons, and goes through his archives of photographs and other ephemera from childhood to the present day.

The film reveals Cave, the leader of cutting-edge groups the Birthday Party, Grinderman, and the Bad Seeds and author of the novels And the Ass Saw the Angel and The Death of Bunny Munro, to be an intelligent, introspective, engaging fellow with a wry, often self-deprecating sense of humor and a hunger to create. “Mostly I write. Tapping and scratching away day and night sometimes,” he says while typing away with two fingers on an old typewriter in his home office. “But if I ever stopped for long enough to question what I’m actually doing? The why of it? Well, I couldn’t really tell you. I don’t know.” The film begins with a barrage of images of Cave and his influences throughout the years, whipping by machine-gun style on multiple monitors, and ends with Cave onstage with the Bad Seeds, becoming the fearless musician that has defined his career. In between, he’s a contemplative husband, father, son, and friend, an artist with a rather unique view of the world and his place in it. (Sadly, in 2015, Cave’s son Arthur died in a tragic accident, something Cave dealt with creatively in the 2016 documentary One More Time with Feeling, about the recording of the album Skeleton Tree.)

On September 20, 2014, I attended a special event at Town Hall in which Cave participated in a postscreening Q&A with Forsyth and Pollard, performed solo songs at the piano (playing what one fan described as a “dream setlist”), and spoke often about “transformation.” In its own way, 20,000 Days on Earth is a transformative documentary, a groundbreaking, unconventional, and thoroughly imaginative portrait of a groundbreaking, unconventional, and thoroughly imaginative artist.

[Note: Tim’s Twitter Listening Party continues with such other albums as the Waterboys’ Fisherman’s Blues, the Soft Boys’ Underwater Moonlight, Superchunk’s Majesty Shredding, Madness’s One Step Beyond, and Joy Division’s Closer.]

2040 WITH LIVE Q&As

Neel Tamhane and Damon Gameau discuss sustainability in 2040

2040 (Damon Gameau, 2019)
Streaming through July 1, $12
Panel discussions June 26 – July 2, free with advance RSVP
whatsyour2040.com

Australian actor and filmmaker Damon Gameau has followed up his award-winning 2014 documentary, That Sugar Film, about the effects of sugar on the body, with 2040, in which he goes around the world not only to point out how our environment is rapidly deteriorating in numerous ways but also to do something about it, for the sake of his four-year-old daughter, his wife, and the rest of the planet. “I think we’re all pretty aware that when it comes to predictions of the future, they’re almost entirely negative at the moment,” he says near the start of the film. “Any time you open your news feed or social media, there’s some kind of doom and gloom story about the future of our environment. And as a father, I think there’s room for a different story, a story that focuses on the solutions to some of these problems. So my plan is to go out and find some of these solutions and then create a vision of a different future for our daughter. I want to show her what the world would look like if the solutions I find were implemented today. So what would the world look like in 2040 if we just embraced the best that already exists. That’s my only rule: Everything I show her in this 2040 has to exist today in some form. I can’t make it up.”

Gameau heads out to Bangladesh, Singapore, Sweden, America, the UK, and Tanzania, meeting with scientists, farmers, economists, and other experts to come up with answers to questions involving carbon dioxide, methane gas, solar and wind power, automobile traffic, fossil fuels, meat consumption, and other key issues. “It’s our generational challenge,” Doughnut Economics purveyor Kate Raworth explains. Gameau speaks with Neel Tamhane about self-sustaining energy microgrids, RethinkX cofounder Tony Seba about transportation, Colin Seis about regenerative farming, Dr. Brian von Herzen of the Climate Foundation about our use of water, Dr. Amanda Cahill about women, childbirth, and education for girls, and Eric Toensmeier and Paul Hawken of Project Drawdown about greenhouse gases. Gameau shifts between 2019 and 2040, when an older version of him, his wife, and his daughter reveal what the world might be like if we take action now. It all comes down to creating more than we consume, and Gameau makes the case that we can start immediately with what we already have.

Writer-director-producer-star Gameau is an engaging character, an instantly likable fellow with a lively sense of humor. He has fun with the media of film, using animation effects to turn his home into a place of climate disaster and depicting some of the people he talks with in miniature, putting them in fireplaces and atop wind turbines. He also lets children between the ages of six and eleven tell us what they think is wrong with the world and what they want for their future, and the result is as hysterically funny as it is smart and poignant, getting right to the point.

2040 is available for streaming through July 1; Gameau will be hosting a week of free panel discussions online (see the full schedule below), delving into specific issues brought up in the documentary with various experts, including some who appeared in the film. It’s time to do something, and I’m fine with Gameau leading the way. As one of the kids says near the end, “If people keep doing what they’re doing now, the world won’t be a very good place.”

Friday, June 26
US Premiere, with Damon Gameau, Paul Hawken, Kate Raworth, and Neel Tamhane discussing innovative solutions to the climate crisis, moderated by Kate Aronoff of The New Republic, free with advance RSVP, 7:30

Saturday, June 27
“From Drawdown to Regeneration: Meet the Researchers Behind Drawdown,” with Damon Gameau, Chad Frischmann, Mamta Mehra, Ryan Allard, moderated by Crystal Chissell, free with advance RSVP, 7:30

Sunday, June 28
“Regenerative Agriculture,” with Damon Gameau, Eric Toensmeier, and Portia Adomah Kuffuor, free with advance RSVP, 4:30

“Sustainable Travel,” with Damon Gameau, Darrell Wade, and Denaye Hinds, moderated by Ashley Renne, free with advance RSVP, 7:30

Monday, June 29
“Seaweed & Marine Regeneration,” with Damon Gamean, Brian von Herzen, Brad Ack, and Jo Kelly, free with advance RSVP, 7:30

Tuesday, June 30
“The Power of Youth Voices,” with Damon Gameau, Xiye Bastida, and Alexandra Berry, moderated by Annelise Bauer, free with advance RSVP, 7:30

Wednesday, July 1
“Climate Justice & Empowering Women,” with Damon Gameau, Mary Heglar, and Amy Westervel, free with advance RSVP, 7:30

Thursday July 2
“The Importance of Hope,” with Damon Gameau, Eric Holthaus, and Renee Lertzman, free with advance RSVP, 7:30