BookCourt
163 Court St. between Dean & Pacific Sts.
Tuesday, September 27, free, 7:00
718-875-3677
www.bookcourt.org
German writer Bernhard Schlink, whose 1995 novel, The Reader, was turned into a 2008 film directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet, will be at BookCourt in Brooklyn on September 27 for a reading and signing of the paperback edition of his latest book, The Weekend (Vintage International, September 27, 2011, $15). A different kind of Big Chill, the novel is set in a rural estate where a group of old friends have gathered to celebrate the early release of Jörg, who has spent more than two decades in prison for having committed murder related to the group’s revolutionary terrorist activities. But everyone is much older now and has gone their separate ways, leading to crises of conscience, reevaluating past relationships, dealing with suicide, and reexamining their lives individually and as a whole, with each chapter seen through a different character’s eyes. “Henner didn’t know what to make of the weekend they were about to spend together, and what he should expect from it: from meeting Jörg again, along with Christiane and his other old friends,” Schlink writes at the beginning of the second chapter. “When Christiane’s call had come, he had said yes right away. Because he had heard a plea in her voice? Because a friendship formed in youth can claim a lifelong loyalty? Out of curiosity?”
One of the grandest epics ever made, William Wyler’s Ben-Hur is screening October 1 at Alice Tully Hall as part of the New York Film Festival’s Masterworks sidebar, which also includes Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, Sara Driver’s You Are Not I, and the thirty-seven-film “Velvet Bullets and Steel Kisses: Celebrating the Nikkatsu Centennial.” The digital restoration of Wyler’s remake of Fred Niblo’s 1925 silent version starring Ramón Novarro and Francis X. Bushman (there was also a fifteen-minute Ben Hur made in 1907, all adapted from Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel) celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the eleven-time Oscar winner, which garnered Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Charlton Heston as Judah Ben-Hur), Best Supporting Actor (Hugh Griffith as Sheik Ilderim), Best Score (Miklós Rózsa), Best Cinematography, Best Set Decoration, Best Costume Design, and Best Special Effects, among other trophies. The $15 million blockbuster tells the story of two childhood friends, Judah Ben-Hur and Messala (Stephen Boyd), who get caught up in religion, politics, and slavery in first-century Rome and eventually have a magnificent showdown on the chariot course. As cinema spectacles go, they don’t get much better than this. The special screening at the New York Film Festival will be introduced by Wyler’s daughter Catherine and Heston’s son Fraser.
Writer-director Baltasar Kormákur’s adaptation of Arnaldur Indriðason’s award-winning novel Jar City (Myrin) is a bleak but compelling police procedural that focuses on a fact-based controversial government initiative that is cataloging genetic research on all Icelandic families. When an aging man named Holberg (Thorsteinn Gunnarsson) is murdered in his home, brooding inspector Erlendur (Ingvar E. Sigurdsson) heads the investigation into the death, leading him to a thirty-year-old rape, a dirty cop, a trio of criminals (one of whom has been missing for a quarter century), a woman who killed herself shortly after her four-year-old daughter died, and a doctor who collects body parts. The divorced Erlendur also has to deal with his troubled daughter (Augusta Eva Erlendsdottir), a pregnant drug addict who hangs out with some very sketchy company. Meanwhile, a mysterious man (Atli Rafn Sigurdarson) is up to something following the traumatic death of his young daughter. Kormakur weaves together the story line of the two fathers side by side — in the book, the unidentified man appears only near the conclusion, although who he is still remains a mystery for most of the film — centering on the complex relationship between parents and children and what gets passed down from generation to generation, both on the outside and the inside. Sigurdsson plays Erlendur with a cautious seriousness, the only humor coming from the way he treats his goofy partner, Sigurdur Oli (Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson). Iceland’s entry for the 2007 Foreign-Language Oscar and winner of the Crystal Globe at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Jar City is a dark, tense intellectual thriller. Indriðason has turned Erlendur into a continuing character in such follow-ups as Silence of the Grave and Voices; here’s hoping Kormákur and Sigurdsson do the same. Jar City will be screening on September 22 at 7:20 and 9:30 at BAMcinématek as part of the ongoing “Cinemachat with Elliott Stein” series, with the early showing including a discussion with Stein.
