Who: Tyler Hanes, Virgil ‘Lil O’ Gadson, Alex Wong, Max Clayton, Ryan Steele, Karla Garcia, Amber Ardolino, Christine Cornish Smith, Terk Lewis, Francesca Granell, Ryan Breslin, Blair Beasley, JJ Butler, Lauren Butler, Damian Chambers, Reanna Comstock, Adam Coy, Alexa De Barr, Joseph Fierberg, Lexi Garcia, David Guzman, Jordan Fife Hunt, Erin Kei, Major King, Katie Laduca, John Manolis, Mateo Melendez, Hamilton Moore, Nicolette Pappas, Whitney Renee, Madeline Rodrigue, Hilary Smith, Katherine Stanas, Ryan VanDenBoom, Richard Westfahl, Gabriella Whiting What: Livestream premiere of dance film Where:BroadwayHD When: Saturday, September 19, free Why: You can celebrate National Dance Day on September 19 by checking out the premiere of SC7NARIO, an eighteen-minute film choreographed by Banji Aborisade and directed by Aborisade and Moogie Brooks that features more than three dozen performers from Broadway and off Broadway moving and grooving to a score by Mason Bonner. The narrative involves a writer in a cafe working on a new tale that suddenly comes alive around him. The film was shot at Sweetleaf Coffee Roasters in Greenpoint prior to the pandemic; Barton Cortright served as cinematographer and editor, with costumes by Kathryn Bailey. A subscription service, BroadwayHD will also be streaming such shows as An American in Paris, 42nd Street, Cats, Fame, Pippin, the Royal Ballet’s Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland and The Nutcracker, and other productions as part of National Dance Day.
Who: Cary Elwes, Robin Wright, Mandy Patinkin, Wallace Shawn, Christoper Guest, Billy Crystal, Carol Kane, Chris Sarandon, Rob Reiner, Josh Gad, Eric Idle, King Bach, Finn Wolfhard, Shaun Ross, Whoopi Goldberg, Jason Reitman, Patton Oswalt, Norman Lear What: Benefit reunion reading of The Princess Bride script Where:Act Blue When: Sunday, September 13, suggested donation $27, 7:00 Why: After voting Democratic from 1988 to 2012 in the presidential election, Wisconsin went red in 2016, helping Donald J. Trump become the forty-fifth president of the United States of America. Amid protests and riots in the wake of the shooting of Jacob Blake seven times in the back by a police officer, Wisconsin is once more a key swing state, this time in the battle between Trump and former vice president Joe Biden. One way to contribute to turn the Badger State blue again is by signing up for an amazing livestreamed reunion reading of Rob Reiner’s 1987 cult classic, The Princess Bride. On September 13 at 7:00, most of the original cast will participate in a one-time-only table reading of the script, with Cary Elwes as Westley, Robin Wright as Buttercup, Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya, Wallace Shawn as Vizzini, Christoper Guest as Count Rugen, Billy Crystal as Miracle Max, Carol Kane as Valerie, and Chris Sarandon as Prince Humperdinck; joining them are director Rob Reiner as the Grandfather, Josh Gad as Fezzik, Eric Idle as the Impressive Clergyman, Finn Wolfhard as the Grandson, Shaun Ross as the Albino, Whoopi Goldberg as the Ancient Booer and the Mother, Jason Reitman as the Narrator, and King Bach as Yellin, the Assistant Brute, and the King, with Patton Oswalt as the Q&A Moderator and executive producer Norman Lear as the Man That Made It All Happen. Gad has been the king of reunions during the pandemic, having hosted online cast and crew reunions for Back to the Future, Splash, Lord of the Rings, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Ghostbusters, and The Goonies on his YouTube channel.
Based on William Goldman’s 1973 novel — he wrote the screenplay as well — The Princess Bride is a riotously told fairy tale about power, family, vengeance, and true love, with memorable lines appearing throughout. (My favorite is “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” You might prefer “As you wish,” “Anybody want a peanut?,” “You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles,” or “Inconceivable!”) In order to get the Act Blue link, you have to make a donation of any amount to the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, which explains, “Anything you donate will be used to ensure that Trump loses Wisconsin, and thereby the White House,” as per the famous saying “As goes Wisconsin, so goes the nation.” In a statement, Elwes added, “I think most people are aware by now that Donald Trump has completely abdicated his duties as president to represent and stand up for all Americans. He has failed to keep the country safe from Covid-19 and as a result he is responsible for the devastating chaos, violence, and economic collapse that we are now experiencing. If America is going to have a real chance at healing we must get rid of Trump. And that is only possible if we win Wisconsin. I am thrilled to be part of this very rare reunion of my colleagues from The Princess Bride as a way to increase awareness and garner resources for the state that will determine the fate of America.” Be sure to take a moment of silence to pay your respects to the crew and cast members who are no longer with us, including Goldman, Peter Falk (the Grandfather), André the Giant (Fezzik), Peter Cook (the Impressive Clergyman), Mel Smith (the Albino), Margery Mason (the Ancient Booer), Anne Dyson (the Queen), and Willoughby Gray (the King). When Westley says, “We’ll never survive!,” he’s of course referring to another four years of the current administration, but we also can’t forget what the Grandfather explains: “Life isn’t always fair.” (For more Princess Bride fun, check out the star-studded Quibi home movie version here, benefiting World Central Kitchen.)
Who: Mica Burton, Sonequa Martin-Green, David Ajala, Alex Kurtzman, Michelle Paradise, Wil Wheaton, Cirroc Lofton, Alexander Sidding, Nana Visitor, Armin Shimerman, Terry Farrell, Ira Behr, Anson Mount, Rebecca Romijn, Ethan Peck, Akiva Goldsman, Henry Alonso Myers, Akela Cooper, Davy Perez, George Takei, Rod Roddenberry, Kate Mulgrew, Robert McNeill, Ethan Phillips, Robert Picardo, Tim Russ, Garrett Wang, Scott Bakula, John Billingsley, Dominic Keating, Anthony Montgomery, Linda Park, Connor Trineer, Mike McMahan, Tawny Newsome, Jack Quaid, Noël Wells, Eugene Cordero, Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes What: Online celebration of all things Star Trek Where:CBS All Access and startrek.com When: Tuesday, September 8, free, select shows streaming at 3:00 am on CBS All Access, panels beginning at 3:00 pm on startrek.com Why: With so many small and large indoor and outdoor gatherings shut down during the pandemic, one of the industries taking the hardest hit is conventions. On September 8, CBS All Access and startrek.com are adapting by having a major online edition celebrating the Star Trek universe. The pop-culture phenomenon created by Gene Roddenberry continues to impact society and technology fifty-four years after the original series kicked off a three-season run on television in 1966, spreading to the big screen and the internet, with numerous live-action movies, prequels, sequels, and animated tales.
The first episode of Star Trek,The Man Trap, aired on NBC on September 8; this September 8, CBS All Access will be streaming twelve hours of shows from all over the Trek map, followed by eight live discussions on the official Star Trek site, all free. The event will be hosted by Wil Wheaton and Mica Burton and feature panels dedicated to Discovery, Deep Space Nine, Strange New Worlds, Voyager, Enterprise, Lower Decks, the original series, and The Next Generation and Picard, with more than three dozen ST veterans participating, including George Takei, Kate Mulgrew, Scott Bakula, Robert Picardo, Anson Mount, Rebecca Romijn, Patrick Stewart, and Jonathan Frakes. May they all live long and prosper.
Epicentro takes a look at paradise, imperialism, war, slavery, freedom, utopia, and the power of cinema in Cuba
Who: Hubert Sauper, Eric Hynes, Beth Gilligan What:Epicentro (Hubert Sauper, 2019) Where:Museum of the Moving Image (August 28 – September 13, $12) When: Sunday, August 30, free, 3:00; Saturday, September 5, free, 3:00 Why: Nothing was ever the same once Christopher Columbus and the Europeans arrived in Cuba on October 28, 1492. Oscar-nominated filmmaker Hubert Sauper explores more than five hundred years of Cuban history in the poetic and intimately honest Epicentro, which opens virtually August 28 through the Museum of the Moving Image here in New York City. Hubert Sauper (Darwin’s Nightmare,We Come as Friends) wanders through the streets of the island nation, taking his camera into apartments and businesses as he passes by burned-out buildings and cars, speaking with men, women, and children about such complex issues as utopia, dystopia, imperialism, racism, slavery, and freedom, relating it all to the invention of film. “Cinema projects our soul. Cinema moves humans to emotion,” a man tells a group of young students while screening documentary images of military battles and Georges Méliès’s fantastical 1902 A Trip to the Moon. The kids boo as America raises its flag in Cuba at the end of the Spanish-American War. “Havana means heaven, the dwelling place of angels, and it was the epicenter of three dystopian chapters of history: slave trade, colonization, and globalization of power, ingredients of modern empire,” Sauper narrates.
The film was inspired by Johannes Schmidl’s 2014 book, Energie und Utopie, and it isn’t hard for Sauper to find the indomitable energy of the Cuban people. Sauper eschews talking-head experts, historians, politicians, and well-known faces and instead lets the people tell their own story, especially two young girls who are wise beyond their years. At one point they have a rather remarkable conversation about Americans. “What happens here in Cuba is that we Cubans are used to . . . it is because they are treating other people like . . . they are superior to us, and they have more money and more of everything. They are richer than us. Some of us don’t know what goes on abroad,” one says. The other adds, “Some Cubans think that they are coming to harm us and treat us badly.” First girl: “Now there is that damned Trump.” Second girl: “Trump cares about nobody . . . he has no feelings.” First girl: “He does not lift the embargo, talks about the bad things in Cuba, and he closed the borders to migrants.” Later, on a rooftop, the first girl explains, “Nobody should be treated as if they were trash. Because black just like white means being a person.” As serious as the girls can get, however, they are later shown having a ball as they dress up and take pictures of each other pretending to be fashion models.
Sauper, who wrote, directed, photographed, and co-edited the film (with Yves Deschamps), also encounters prostitutes; a single mother; lots of people driving classic old cars from the Mafia era; a crowd mourning the death of Fidel Castro; a white photographer who refuses to pay his subjects (“to be photographed by me is an honor”); Oona Castilla Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin’s granddaughter, who teaches the kids about acting and music; and a tango-loving Bavarian man who notes, “Travelers who come here are people who have already traveled the world. And they are on a quest for the yet undiscovered paradise.” Meanwhile, a man in a bar complains, “I’d like to say that tourists are humanity, are human beings in their worst possible form. What kind of future is built by tourism? None. It only devours the future. It devours the past and culture, it renders everything superficial, into stupidity, into a relationship of power, constantly. . . . How much does making cinema resemble tourism?” But more than anything, Sauper captures the innate love Cubans have of their country, their history, their culture, and life itself. Their eyes glow with an infectious spirit even when they’re immersed in poverty, always ready to make the best of a situation, particularly the children, whom Sauper refers to in the credits as “little prophets.”
“Cuba is the beauty for the whole world,” a man says while pointing out the tiny island nation on a giant floor map in a theater. And Epicentro, winner of the Sundance World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, is one beauty of a film.
On August 30 at 3:00, the Museum of the Moving Image will host a live Q&A with Sauper, moderated by film curator Eric Hynes, followed on September 5 at 3:00 by a live Q&A with Sauper and Coolidge Corner Theatre director of development and marketing Beth Gilligan.
Near the start of Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin, writer-director Werner Herzog says, “Chatwin was a writer like no other. He would craft mythical tales into voyages of the mind. In this respect, we found out we were kindred spirits.” As the intimate film, which opens virtually at Film Forum on August 26, reveals, they are indeed kindred spirits, a pair of iconoclastic adventurers who detailed their journey in books (Chatwin) and documentaries (Herzog). “In this film here,” Herzog explains, “I will follow a similar erratic quest for wild characters, strange dreamers, and big ideas about the nature of human existence. These were the themes Chatwin was obsessed with.” In fiction and nonfiction works such as Grizzly Man,Fitzcarraldo,Cave of Forgotten Dreams,Encounters at the End of the World,Happy People: A Year in the Taiga,Into the Abyss, and Into the Inferno, the German filmmaker has shared his obsessions, going deep below the surface of the Earth and far into space while introducing us to a sea of fascinating humanity. “Bruce Chatwin was searching for strangeness,” Herzog notes. So is Herzog.
Born in Sheffield in 1940, Chatwin was a travel writer extraordinaire, the author of such books as The Songlines,In Patagonia, and On the Black Hill that take readers across the planet, meeting unusual people and animals in unusual places, from a Brazilian slave trader and Welsh twins to dinosaurs and Aboriginal rituals. Divided into such chapters as “The Skin of the Brontosaurus,” “Landscapes of the Soul,” “Songs and Songlines,” “The Nomadic Alternative,” and “Journey to the End of the World,” the film follows Herzog as he explores Chatwin’s legacy and their close friendship, investigating cultural appropriation by missionaries, technology as distraction, ancient cave drawings, the last nomadic people of Tierra del Fuego, the curative benefits of walking, and such concepts as truth, reality, and authenticity. He speaks with a wide range of people who knew Chatwin, including his widow, Elizabeth Chatwin; his biographer, Nicholas Shakespeare; anthropologist Petronella Vaarzon-Morel; musician and writer Glenn Morrison; Alyawerre elder Michael Liddle Pula; Arrernte elder Marcus Wheeler; Shaun Angeles Penance of the Strehlow Research Centre; writer Peter Bartlett; Warlpiri elder Robin Granites; and Scream of Stone mountain guide Alberto Castillo, who offer beguiling insight into Chatwin, who packed a lot of living into his too-short life — he died of AIDS in 1989 at the age of forty-eight.
But as much as we learn about Chatwin in the film, it’s what we discover about Herzog that gives it its dramatic punch. The director — who adapted Chatwin’s 1980 book, The Viceroy of Ouidah, into the 1987 film Cobra Verde, the final collaboration between Herzog and actor Klaus Kinski, which is a story in itself — is thoroughly enamored of Chatwin; we often see him on camera discussing their relationship, his eyes sometimes tearing, other times glowing, doing both when Shakespeare shows him Chatwin’s annotated copy of the Cobra Verde screenplay, which Herzog has not seen before, or when Herzog talks about Chatwin’s famous rucksack, which he has been using on his own nomadic adventures for decades. Herzog might be too close to his subject, resulting in occasional self-indulgent moments, but watching him open up is as enchanting as finding out so much about Chatwin. They both share the belief that “history aspires to the symmetry of myth,” which gets right to the heart of Nomad. Herzog will participate in a free, live, virtual Q&A on September 2 at 6:00; the film can be rented now online for $12 for 72 hours.
Who: Jeff Kaufman What: Celebration of the life and career of Terrence McNally Where:PBS American Masters on ITVS OVEE When: Wednesday, August 19, free with RSVP, 8:00 Why: Emmy and four-time Tony-winning legend Terrence McNally died of Covid-19 complications on March 24 at the age of eighty-one. On August 19 at 8:00, PBS’s American Masters series will be celebrating the life and career of the theater giant with a live presentation by Jeff Kaufman, who wrote, directed, and produced the 2018 documentary Every Act of Life, which I called “a lovely and loving look at playwright and activist Terrence McNally, a compelling film about chasing one’s hopes and dreams, refusing to back down, and fighting for what’s right personally and professionally, onstage and off. Kaufman speaks extensively with McNally, who is forthcoming about his career and his sexuality, which included relationships with Edward Albee and Wendy Wasserstein and several men who died during the height of the AIDS crisis.” The event will feature film clips, discussion, and a live, interactive Q&A. You can read my full review here and check out my interview with Kaufman here.
Who: Jesse Eisenberg, Jonathan Jakubowicz, Dana Arschin What: Conversation and Q&A Where:The International March of the Living Zoom When: Tuesday, August 18, free with RSVP, 1:00 Why: Writer-director Jonathan Jakubowicz’s 2020 Holocaust thriller, Resistance, features a surprising hero: French mime Marcel Marceau, who was a teenage member of the French resistance during WWII. Known at the time as Marcel Mangel, he is portrayed in the film by actor and playwright Jesse Eisenberg; the film also stars Ed Harris as General George S. Patton and Matthias Schweighöfer as Klaus Barbie. On August 18 at 1:00, Eisenberg (The Social Network, Zombieland) and Jakubowicz (Hands of Stone, Secuestro Express) will discuss the film and more with moderator and Emmy-winning reporter Dana Arschin, hosted by the March of the Living, an organization dedicated to honoring and remembering the six million Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust, supporting Israel, and fighting anti-Semitism, discrimination, hatred, and intolerance everywhere. You can watch the film in advance here.
