Who: Caitlin Leffel and Jacob Lehman
What: Book party celebrating release of In Love in New York: A Guide to the Most Romantic Destinations in the Greatest City in the World (Rizzoli, January 13, 2015, $24.95)
Where: The Corner Bookstore, 1313 Madison Ave. at 93rd St., 212-831-3554
When: Tuesday, January 13, free, 6:00
Why: Forget Paris, Rome, or Bayonne; there is no better place to be in love than our very own backyard, New York City. Caitlin Leffel and Jacob Lehman have followed up The Best Things to Do in New York: 1001 Ideas with In Love in New York, which features such chapters as “Love at First Sight,” “Getting Serious with the City,” and “Will You New York Me?” In the introduction, “The City that Never Sleeps Alone,” they write, “Whether you’re new to your relationship, new to the city, or an old pro at both, New York is there to seduce, excite, console, and entertain.” Their romantic suggestions are accompanied by photos of the Temple of Dendur, Lincoln Center, Central Park, the High Line, and other sensuous locations, with each chapter kicked off with an old-fashioned iconic postcard image of a favorite part of the city. And they include the top-ten make-out spots as well, in addition to the forty best places to propose, in case the kissing sessions were a big hit.
Named Best Documentary at the 2013 Haifa International Film Festival, Yael Reuveny’s Farewell, Herr Schwarz offers a unique look at the Holocaust and its continuing effects on her and her family through three generations. “We were raised to reject the Diaspora,” the Israeli-born, Berlin-based writer and director says near the beginning of her first feature-length film. “I was supposed to be ‘the new Jew’ but somehow I ended up living in Germany, in the land I wasn’t allowed to set foot in. I wasn’t allowed to be here because of my grandmother’s story. But still, her story, which haunted my childhood, eventually made me build my home here.” And a haunting story it is, filled with intrigue, mystery, and powerful emotions. Sensitively shot by cinematographer Andreas Kohler and featuring an elegiac score by Volker “Hauschka” Bertelmann, the film explores what happened between Reuveny’s grandmother, Michla Schwarz, and Michla’s beloved brother, Feiv’ke. During the war, Feiv’ke was sent to the Schleiben concentration camp in Germany, where Michla thought he perished. Yet Reuveny discovers that her great-uncle actually survived the Holocaust but remained in the same town he had been held in, changing his first name to Peter, marrying a non-Jewish German woman whose brother was a Nazi, and starting a family.
Film Forum is ringing in 2015 with the greatest American movie ever made, the epic Citizen Kane, kicking off a massive centennial celebration of the birth of its creator, the rather iconoclastic writer, director, producer, actor, and wine spokesman Orson Welles. In 1941, a young, brash, determined Welles shocked Hollywood with a masterpiece unlike anything seen before or since — a beautifully woven complex narrative with a stunning visual style (compliments of director of photography Gregg Toland) and a fabulous cast of veterans from his Mercury radio days, including Everett Sloane, Joseph Cotten, Ray Collins, Paul Stewart, and Agnes Moorehead. Each moment in the film is unforgettable, not a word or shot out of place as Welles details the rise and fall of a self-obsessed media mogul. The film is prophetic in many ways; at one point Kane utters, “The news goes on for twenty-four hours a day,” foreseeing today’s 24/7 news overload. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve never seen it and you know what Rosebud refers to; the film is about a whole lot more than just that minor mystery. Like every film the Wisconsin-born Welles made, Citizen Kane was fraught with controversy, not the least of which was a very unhappy William Randolph Hearst seeking to destroy the negative of a film he thought ridiculed him. Kane won only one Oscar, for writing — which also resulted in controversy when Herman J. Mankiewicz claimed that he was the primary scribe, not Welles. The film lost the Academy Award for Best Picture to John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, but it has topped nearly every greatest-films-of-all-time list ever since.
