Tag Archives: bamcinematek

DANCEAFRICA2011 — EXPRESSIONS AND ENCOUNTERS: AFRICAN, CUBAN, AND AMERICAN RHYTHMS

Cuba’s Ballet Folklórico Cutumba are part of the annual Memorial Day weekend DanceAfrica celebration at BAM

Brooklyn Academy of Music
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Through May 30, free – $50 (dance $20-$50, films $12, music and street fair free)
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Held in conjunction with the ¡Sí Cuba! Festival, BAM’s thirty-fourth annual celebration of African dance continues through Memorial Day with a bevy of great events centered around performances by Cuba’s Ballet Folklórico Cutumba, the Brooklyn-based BAM/Restoration DanceAfrica Ensemble, the Bronx’s Bambara Drum and Dance Ensemble, and Philadelphia’s Kùlú Mèlé African Dance & Drum Ensemble in the Howard Gilman Opera House and led by the ever-welcome presence of Baba Chuck Davis; the Sunday show will be followed by an Artist Talk with Davis, Idalberto Banderas, and Dr. Marta Moreno Vega, moderated by Fernando Sáez (after which dancers will take to the streets in impromptu performances). BAMcinématek’s “FilmAfrica” series will screen such works as Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Cannes Grand Jury Prize winner A Screaming Man (Un homme qui crie) (2010), Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen (Brightness) (1987), and Andrew Dosunmu’s 2011 New York-set Restless City (followed by a Q&A with the director). BAMcafé Live will host a free show by Miami’s the Nag Champayons on Saturday at 9:00, followed by a DanceAfrica Late-Night Dance Party with DJ Cato. And on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, beginning at noon each day, one of the best street fairs of the year will be held on Ashland Pl., the DanceAfrica Bazaar, featuring great food and drink, booths selling statues, clothing, shea butter, arts & crafts, and other cool goods, live music, and much more.

MOVIES BY HAL ASHBY: HAROLD AND MAUDE

Harold (Bud Cort) has a little bit of an obsession with death in very different kind of romantic comedy

HAROLD AND MAUDE (Hal Ashby, 1971)BAMcinématek
BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
May 7-8, 2:00, 4:30, 6:50, 9:15
Series runs through May 19
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Bud Cort (Harold) and Ruth Gordon (Maude) are magnificent in this glorious black comedy from director Hal Ashby (The Last Detail, Shampoo, Being There) and writer Colin Higgins. Harold is an eighteen-year-old rich kid obsessed with death, regularly flirting with suicide. Maude is a fun-loving, free-spirited senior citizen approaching her eightieth birthday. Ashby throws in just the right amount of post-1960s social commentary, including a very funny antiwar scene, without becoming overbearing, as this could have been a maudlin piece of sentimental claptrap, but instead it’s far from it. Even the Cat Stevens soundtrack (“If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out,” “Tea for the Tillerman,” “Where Do the Children Play?”) works. Harold and Maude is a tender, uproarious, bittersweet tale that is one of the best of its kind, completely unforgettable, enlightening, and, ultimately, life-affirming in its own odd way. Ashby, who died in 1988 at the age of fifty-nine, made only eleven narrative films and two concert documentaries in his too-brief life and career, which is being honored at BAMcinématek with the retrospective Movies by Hal Ashby, featuring most of his directorial efforts in additional to several films he edited: Tony Richardson’s The Loved One (1965) and Norman Jewison’s The Cincinnati Kid (1965) and In the Heat of the Night (1967). The 6:50 screening of the underrated The Landlord on May 12 will be followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Robert Downey Sr. and star Lee Grant.

MOVIES BY HAL ASHBY: SHAMPOO

SHAMPOO kicks off Hal Ashby tribute at BAM in style

SHAMPOO (Hal Ashby, 1975)
BAMcinématek
BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Friday, May 6, 2:00, 4:30, 6:50, 9:15
Series runs May 6-19
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

To use George Roundy’s favorite adjective, Shampoo, which kicks off BAMcinématek’s Movies by Hal Ashby series, is “great.” Warren Beatty, who cowrote the screenplay with Robert Towne, stars as George, a Beverly Hills hairdresser who gives his wealthy clients more than just a cut-and-blow-dry. The film takes place primarily on November 4, 1968, as Nixon is battling Humphrey for the presidency, and George can’t keep it in his pants, running back and forth between Felicia (Lee Grant), Jackie (Julie Christie), and Lorna (Carrie Fisher) while trying to open his own shop, with help from business tycoon Lester (Jack Warden) — Felicia’s husband, Jackie’s lover, and Lorna’s father. The clothing is magnificent, as, of course, are the hairstyles. Ashby’s biting comedy perfectly captures the sexual awakening of the 1970s in all its glory — and in all its vapidity. Horror fans should keep an eye out for Lester’s friend Sid Roth, who is played by gimmickmeister William Castle. Ashby, who died in 1988 at the age of fifty-nine, made only eleven narrative films and two concert documentaries in his too-brief life and career, which is being honored at BAMcinématek with the retrospective that includes most of his directorial efforts in additional to several films he edited: Tony Richardson’s The Loved One (1965) and Norman Jewison’s The Cincinnati Kid (1965) and In the Heat of the Night (1967). The 6:50 screening of the underrated The Landlord on May 12 will be followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Robert Downey Sr. and star Lee Grant.

DE PALMA SUSPENSE: SISTERS

Margot Kidder has a tough time on Staten Island in creepy SISTERS, part of a BAM tribute to Brian De Palma

SISTERS (Brian De Palma, 1973)
BAMcinématek
BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Friday, April 8, 7:30
Series continues through April 20
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Brian De Palma lets his Hitchcockian roots show in Sisters, even going so far as to hire Bernard Herrmann to compose the music for this low-budget horrorfest starring Margot Kidder as a detached Siamese twin and Jennifer Salt (Eunice from Soap) as a writer for the Staten Island Panorama, the author of such columns as “The Lost Borough,” “Save the Ferry,” and “Why We Call Them Pigs.” You’ll guess the twist about twenty minutes in, but you’ll still have a lot of fun with the usual load of De Palma sex, gore, and violence. Sisters is screening in a rare 35mm print at BAM on Friday at 7:30, kicking off the “De Palma Suspense” series, and will be introduced by writer-director Noah Baumbach (The Squid & the Whale). The series continues Saturday night with Paul Williams starring in De Palma’s cult favorite Phantom of the Paradise, which will be followed by a Q&A with producer Ed Pressman and costar William Finley. Carrie and Body Double screen on Sunday, with The Fury on Monday, Obsession on Tuesday, Blow Out on Wednesday, Raising Cain on April 18, Femme Fatale on April 19, and the great Dressed to Kill closing things out on April 20.

DENEUVE: A CHRISTMAS TALE

A CHRISTMAS TALE concludes BAMcinématek’s “Deneuve” series in high style

A CHRISTMAS TALE (UN CONTE DE NOËL) (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008)
BAMcinématek
BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Thursday, March 31, 6:30, 9:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

One of the best films of 2008, A Christmas Tale (Un Conte de Noël) is yet another extraordinary work from French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin (La Sentinelle, Esther Kahn). Desplechin, who examined family dysfunction in the masterful Kings and Queen (one of the best films of 2006), brings back much of that film’s cast in A Christmas Tale. Catherine Deneuve stars as Junon, the family matriarch who has just discovered she has leukemia and is in need of a bone-marrow transplant. Although it is rare for children to donate bone marrow to their mother (or grandmother), Junon insists that they all take the test to see if they are compatible. Soon they gather at Junon and Abel’s (Jean-Paul Roussilon) house for the holidays: oldest daughter Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), a dark and depressed woman whose teenage son, Paul (Emile Berling), has been institutionalized with mental problems and whose husband, Claude (Hippolyte Girardot), is rarely home; Ivan (Melvil Poupaud), the youngest son, a carefree sort married to Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni, Deneuve’s real-life daughter), whom Junon strongly distrusts; and black sheep Henri (Mathieu Almaric), the middle child who was initially conceived primarily to save Abel and Junon’s first son, Joseph, who ended up dying of the same leukemia that Junon has contracted. Henri, who shows up with a new girlfriend, the very direct Faunia (Emmanuelle Devos), is a philandering ne’er-do-well who is deeply estranged from Elizabeth and not close with his mother, leading to much strife as Christmas — and a possible transplant — nears. Desplechin, who wrote the script with Emmanuel Bourdieu, once again has created powerful, realistic characters portrayed marvelously by his extremely talented cast; despite the family’s massive dysfunction, you’ll feel that even spending more than two and a half hours with them is not enough. A Christmas Tale concludes BAMcinématek’s month-long “Deneuve” series in high style.

DENEUVE: 8 WOMEN

Even a cast of eight of France’s finest can’t quite save François Ozon’s murder-mystery musical

8 FEMMES (8 WOMEN) (François Ozon, 2002)
BAMcinématek
BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Wednesday, March 30, 4:30, 6:50, 9:15
Series runs through March 31
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.8femmes-lefilm.com

This should have been a great one, but controversial director François Ozon couldn’t leave well enough alone. Somewhere in 8 Women is a fabulously entertaining murder mystery set in a mansion in which the title characters are trapped — and any one of the eight could be guilty of the murder of the dude in the bedroom who has a knife in his back. The eight women embody much of the history of French cinema of the previous fifty years: Danielle Darrieux (who began making films in the early 1930s), Catherine Deneuve (who, when this movie was made, was nearly sixty!), Fanny Ardant (who had recently turned fifty), a nearly unrecognizable Isabelle Huppert (who was approaching fifty), the beguiling Emmanuelle Béart (who was nearing forty), twentysomethings Virginie Ledoyen and Ludivine Sagnier, and Firmine Richard. Inexplicably, Ozon has each of the characters perform a silly song-and-dance number that neither furthers the plot nor expands on the characters’ motives or mental state. He bit off more than he could chew; he made a compelling takeoff of the British drawing-room mystery and blew it by deciding to play off the Hollywood Technicolor musical as well. But Ardant’s lips, Deneuve’s eyelashes, and Béart’s curves are nearly worth the price of admission nonetheless. 8 Women is screening as part of BAMcinématek’s “Deneuve” series, which concludes March 31 with Arnaud Desplechin’s outstanding A Christmas Tale.

DENEUVE: TIME REGAINED

Marcello Mazzarella and Catherine Deneuve remember things past in TIME REGAINED

TIME REGAINED (LE TEMPS RETROUVÉ) (Raoul Ruiz, 1999)

BAMcinématek
BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Wednesday, March 23, 6:30, 9:40
Series runs through March 31
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Raoul Ruiz’s overly long dramatization of Marcel Proust on his deathbed, thinking back on his own life as well as the fictional life of his characters, has charm and wit and a whole lot of bizarrely entertaining set movements. Despite a cast that includes Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Béart, Marie-France Pisier, Chiara Mastroianni (Deneuve’s real-life daughter), and John Malkovich, the acting is only so-so, and it helps if you know a little Proust, but Ruiz is a director always worth watching, so give it a chance—if you have the time. Time Regained is screening March 23 as part of BAMcinématek’s “Deneuve” series, which continues through March 31 with such films as Scene of the Crime (Le lieu du crime) (André Téchiné, 1986), Donkey Skin (Peau d’âne) (Jacques Demy, 1970) , and A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008).