Who: The Unbearables, Great Weather for Media, InDigest, Seven Stories Press, Three Rooms Press
What: The Monthly @ Cornelia Street Cafe, hosted by Peter Carlaftes & Kat Georges
Where: Cornelia Street Cafe, 29 Cornelia St. between Bleecker & West Fouth Sts.
When: Friday, July 3, $8 (includes a free drink), 6:00
Why: “It’s a strange time in the world of publishing,” writes Three Rooms Press cofounder Kat Georges on her company’s website. “The giant publishers continue to merge. Independent bookstores continue the struggle to keep their doors open. New technology has made it easy for authors to publish their own books. Yet, somehow, independent publishers are thriving. . . . If one thing unites the small presses, it is their dedication to their unique vision.” You can find out more about that unique vision on July 3, when five small presses come together at the Cornelia Street Cafe to discuss their publishing philosophy and present some of their authors to read from their work. Thomas Jefferson would be proud.
The fourteenth annual New York Asian Film Festival is saluting legendary Hong Kong director Ringo Lam, presenting him with the Lifetime Achievement Award. Lam, who turns sixty this year, will be at Lincoln Center for screenings of two of his works, City on Fire on June 27 and Full Alert on June 28. In the latter, Lam’s follow-up to his disappointing Hollywood debut, the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Maximum Risk, Lau Ching-wan stars as Officer Pao, a member of Hong Kong’s Special Crime Bureau who becomes involved in a case that turns deeply personal. After arresting explosives expert Mak Kwan (Francis Ng) for the brutal murder of an architect, Pao is determined to find the rest of Mak’s Taiwanese crew, which is led by mainland boss Jie (Jack Gao), and prevent the robbery of a mysterious vault. Pao and his team track Mak’s girlfriend, Chung Lai Hung (Amanda Lee), who knows more than she’s letting on, while Pao and Mak become immersed in a tense, psychological game of cat and mouse, exploring what it feels like to kill someone. There are numerous incredulous plot twists and a rather lame car chase, but the guerrilla filmmaking style of Lam and cinematographer Ardy Lam, ranging through the streets of a Hong Kong about to be handed over from the British to the Chinese, is supremely effective, as are the lead performances by Lau and Ng, evoking the relationships portrayed earlier by Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Michael Mann’s Heat and later by Andy Lau and Tony Leung in Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs. The use of mobile phones and surveillance technology feels much older than 1997, displaying how far we have come so fast. Lam saves the heavy violence for the spectacular finale, letting the emotions build before exploding. Nominated for five Hong Kong Film Awards, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actor (Lau), Full Alert is screening at the Walter Reade Theater on June 28 at 2:00, with Lam on hand to introduce it. The New York Asian Film Festival continues at Lincoln Center through July 6 with more than three dozen new and old films from China, Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Cambodia, and other Southeast Asian countries, including Sabu’s Chasuke’s Journey, Kinji Fukasuku’s Battles without Honor and Humanity, Im Sang-soo’s The President’s Last Bang, Wang Xiaoshuai’s Red Amnesia, Im Kwon-taek’s Revivre, and Sion Sono’s Tokyo Tribe.
In 1980, Jean-Luc Godard told journalist Jonathan Cott, “When you have a first love, a first experience, a first movie, once you’ve done it, you can’t repeat it,” the French auteur said about his latest film, Every Man for Himself, which he considered his “second first” film. “If it’s bad, it’s a repetition; if it’s good, it’s a spiral. It’s like when you return home — to mountains and lakes, in my case — you have a feeling of childhood, of beginning again. But in films, it’s very seldom that you have the opportunity to make your first film for the second time.” For Godard, whose real first film was 1960’s Breathless and who went on to make such other avant-garde masterworks as Contempt, Pierrot le Fou, Masculine Feminine, and Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Every Man for Himself might have been somewhat of a return to narrative, but only as Godard can do it. He still plays with form and various technological aspects, including a fascination with slow motion and an unusual, often very funny use of incidental music, and his manner of episodic storytelling would not exactly be called traditional. Sometimes it’s good, and sometimes it’s bad. Jacques Dutronc stars as mean-spirited, self-obsessed Swiss television director Paul Godard, who has recently broken up with his girlfriend, Denise Rimbaud (Nathalie Baye), who wants to leave their apartment in the city for the idyllic greenery of the country. (Yes, the characters have such names as Godard and Rimbaud, and the voice of Marguerite Duras shows up.) Paul then meets a prostitute, Isabelle Rivière (Isabelle Huppert), who is interested in Paul and Denise’s apartment, planning on bettering her life even as she still must submit to the whims of her clients, including a businessman who orchestrates a strange orgy that would make Secretary’s James Spader proud.