Tag Archives: ifc center

STEVE McQUEEN & ROBERT VAUGHN: THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN / BULLITT

Steve McQueen and Robert Vaughn take a break during filming of THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (photo by Jack Harris)

BORDER CROSSINGS: THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (John Sturges, 1960)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
April 21-23, 11:00 am
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

“He was a very special friend, and I’ll always miss his unique way of looking at life,” Robert Vaughn wrote of Steve McQueen in his 2008 memoir, A Fortunate Life. The longtime pals made three films together, the first being John Sturges’s classic Western, The Magnificent Seven. (They also each got their start in low-budget sci-fi cheese, McQueen in The Blob and Vaughn in Teenage Cave Man.) The film, a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 epic Seven Samurai, features Vaughn, fresh off an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in The Young Philadelphians, and McQueen, who was in the middle of his run as Josh Randall in the television series Wanted: Dead of Alive, playing two of seven sharpshooters hired by the men in a poor Mexican farming village where a group of bandits led by the evil Calvera (Eli Wallach) have been running roughshod. McQueen is Vin Tanner, a cool drifter, while Vaughn is traumatized Civil War sharpshooter Lee; the other five are Yul Brynner as leader Chris Adams, Brad Dexter as fortune hunter Harry Luck, James Coburn as knife slinger Britt, Charles Bronson as pro Bernardo O’Reilly, and Horst Buccholz as the fiery young Chico. Brynner and McQueen famously went after each other in a hotly contested battle of acting one-upmanship even as their characters work together to save the town. The magnificent film, which was shot on location in Mexico and established McQueen as a star, also boasts an unforgettably American score by Elmer Bernstein.

As part of their bonding process, the seven performers also played cards during breaks; one series of publicity photos shows Vaughn sitting next to McQueen as each wins a hand. In addition, in a 2015 interview with the Mirror, Vaughn detailed a visit he and McQueen made to a brothel that didn’t go quite as planned. (“They said, ‘How many girls would you like?’ And Steve said, ‘Seven. We are the Magnificent Seven and we want seven girls.’ Even though not all seven of us were there.”) A 35mm print of The Magnificent Seven is screening April 21-23 at eleven o’clock in the morning in the IFC Center series “Weekend Classics: Border Crossings,” which continues Friday, Saturday, and Sunday mornings through July 2 with such other cool flicks as Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel, and Tony Richardson’s The Border.

Chalmers (Robert Vaughn) has some sharp words for Bullitt (Steve McQueen) in BULLITT

WAVERLY MIDNIGHTS — ROAD RAGE: BULLITT (Peter Yates, 1968)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
April 21-22, 12:15 am
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

New York City native Robert Vaughn, who passed away in November at the age of eighty-three, and good friend Steve McQueen, who was only fifty when he died in 1980, reunited onscreen in 1968 for the police-political thriller Bullitt. By then, each had starred in a television series — McQueen in Wanted: Dead or Alive, Vaughn as Napoleon Solo in the wildly successful, Emmy-nominated spy fave The Man from U.N.C.L.E. In Bullitt, McQueen virtually created the Hollywood antihero, playing a cool, calm cop who does things his way, often leaving a mess behind him; meanwhile, Vaughn began establishing himself as the manipulative high-class villain. In Bullitt, which was based on Robert L. Fish’s 1963 novel, Mute Witness, McQueen stars as San Francisco detective Lt. Frank Bullitt, a character inspired by real-life SF inspector Dave Toschi. Bullitt is personally selected by local politician Walter Chalmers (Vaughn) to protect an important witness, who is scheduled to testify against the Organization in forty hours. But things go awry, leading to murder and mayhem — and one of the all-time-great movie car chases — as Bullitt, distrustful of Chalmers, refuses to follow protocol. Shot on location by cinematographer William A. Fraker on the winding streets of San Francisco, the film, directed by Peter Yates and featuring a jazzy score by Lalo Schifrin, has quite a supporting cast, with Don Gordon and Carl Reindel as two members of Bullitt’s team, Simon Oakland as their boss, Norman Fell as a suspicious captain, Jacqueline Bisset as Bullitt’s designer girlfriend, Georg Stanford Brown as a doctor, Paul Genge and Bill Hickman as the hit men, Vic Tayback as the brother of the informant, and Robert Duvall as taxi driver.

Oh, and as far as the plot goes, just forget about it; it doesn’t make any sense. In his memoir, Vaughn noted that he only began to understand it as McQueen kept offering more money for him to be in the film. The two friends would go on to make one more movie together, the 1974 disaster epic The Towering Inferno, with McQueen as a fire chief and Vaughn as, well, a sleazy politician. A 35mm print of Bullitt is screening April 21 & 22 at 12:15 am in the IFC Center “Waverly Midnights” series “Road Rage,” which continues through June 24 with such other high-octane thrillers as William Friedkin’s The French Connection, George Miller’s Mad Max, and Peter Collinson’s The Italian Job.

AUTOCRATIC FOR THE PEOPLE: AN UNPRESIDENTED SERIES OF STAR-SPANGLED SATIRES / MUSICAL MIDNITES — SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT

Stan, Cartman, and Kenny can’t wait for SOUTH PARK movie to start at IFC Center

WEEKEND CLASSICS / NITEHAWK MIDNITE SCREENINGS: SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT (Trey Parker, 1999)
IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St. March 31 – April 2, 11:00 am, 212-924-7771
Nitehawk Cinema, 136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave., March 31 and April 1, 12:20 am, 718-384-3980
www.ifccenter.com
www.nitehawkcinema.com

IFC Center’s Trump-inspired “Autocratic for the People: An Unpresidented Series of Star-Spangled Satires” concludes March 31 – April 2 with Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s inimitable South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. Since 1997, Stone and Parker have been using colorful low-tech cutouts to dine on sacred cows, lambasting celebrities, politicians, religion, sexuality, the military, education, television, movies, corporations, pop culture, and just about everything else they can think of in the animated series South Park, which follows the travails of a group of eight-year-old boys in a small town in Colorado. In 1999, Eric Cartman, Kyle Broflovski, Stan Marsh, and Kenny McCormick got to star in their own feature-length animated film, in which they lead the resistance to save Terrance & Phillip while Kyle’s mom starts a war with Canada. They’re joined by such SP regulars as Chef, Mr. Mackey, Mr. Garrison, and Wendy Testeberger and such special guests as Satan, Saddam Hussein, and the mysterious Gregory, along with guest voicers George Clooney, Eric Idle, Minnie Driver, Dave Foley, and Brent Spiner. The musical numbers, written by Parker with Henry Mancini Award winner Marc Shaiman (Hairspray, Catch Me If You Can), are a riot, including the Oscar-nominated “Blame Canada,” “Uncle Fucka,” “Kyle’s Mom’s a Bitch,” and “What Would Brian Boitano Do?” Another fave is “I’m Super,” delivered by the irrepressible Big Gay Al, who sings, “Bombs are flying / People are dying / Children are crying / Politicians are lying too // Cancer is killing / Texaco’s spilling / The whole world’s gone to hell // But how are you? / I’m super / Thanks for asking!” A 35mm print will be screened at the way-too-early hour of 11:00 am from March 31 to April 2 as part of IFC’s Weekend Classics programming. Coincidentally, the film is also being shown — at the somewhat more reasonable time of 12:20 am — on March 31 and April 1 in the Nitehawk Cinema series “Musical Midnites.” Meanwhile, Stone and Parker, who also made the fab Team America: World Police, are preparing for the twenty-first season of South Park, which continues to have its finger squarely on the pulse of what is really going on in this country.

AFTER THE STORM

Father (Hiroshi Abe) and son (Taiyo Yoshizawa) face challenges in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s AFTER THE STORM

AFTER THE STORM (UMI YORI MO MADA FUKAKU?) (海よりもまだ深) (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2016)
IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at Third St., 212-924-7771
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway between 62nd & 63rd Sts., 212-757-2280
Opens Friday, March 17
afterthestorm-film.com

“This isn’t how it was supposed to turn out,” Ryota Shinoda (Hiroshi Abe) says in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest masterful family drama and most personal yet, After the Storm. With the twenty-third typhoon of the year on its way, struggling writer Ryota decides to visit his mother, Yoshiko (Kilin Kiki), at the Asahigaoka Housing Complex in Kiyose, Tokyo (where Kore-eda lived for nearly twenty years, until he was twenty-eight). The broke Ryota is hoping to find some hidden treasures left behind by his father, who has recently passed away, to get him out of the financial hole he has dug for himself through a gambling addiction. His ex-wife, Kyoko (Yoko Maki), is threatening to take away his visitation rights with their young son, Shingo (Taiyo Yoshizawa), unless Ryota pays his back child support. To make some quick cash, Ryota has taken a job with a detective agency, where he is not exactly ethical; he claims he took the job as research for his next novel, but he even spies on Kyoko, who has a new boyfriend. As the storm approaches, the characters try to reconnect, and disconnect, forced to face what their lives have become. Written, directed, and edited by Kore-eda, After the Storm is a gentle, eloquent tale, where the smallest of gestures and details are packed with emotional resonance, from Yoshiko attending a class on Beethoven to Ryota purposely scuffing cleats he is buying for Shingo in order to get a discount, from Ryota and Yoshiko trying to eat frozen-solid ices to Ryota finding out something new about his father from a local pawnbroker (Isao Hashizume).

Divorced couple Kyoko (Yoko Maki) and Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) wonder what went wrong in AFTER THE STORM

Ryota is stuck in a rut of his own making, and he doesn’t know how to get out of it, or at least is unwilling to take certain risks despite his need to gamble (and lose). He wants only the best for his son, but Shingo is becoming more and more like him; playing baseball, the boy keeps his bat on his shoulder, striking out looking, trying to work out a walk instead of taking action and swinging away. None of the main adult characters, including Ryota, Kyoko, Yoshiko, and Ryota’s sister, Chinatsu (Satomi Kabayashi), are particularly happy and satisfied with how their lives turned out. The film is sharply photographed by Yutaka Yamazaki and features a soundtrack by singer-songwriter Hanaregumi that just manages to avoid being treacly. Kore-eda, who has made several documentaries as well as such poignant dramas as Our Little Sister, Still Walking, and Like Father, Like Son, fills After the Storm with a tender believability and beautifully drawn, realistic characters portrayed by an outstanding cast of familiar faces who have worked with him before. In his fourth Kore-eda film, the ruggedly handsome and tall Abe (Thermae Romae, Snow on the Blades) gives a profound performance as Ryota, a man who can’t avoid failure even though he knows better. Kore-eda’s visual storytelling style is often compared to Yasujirō Ozu’s, but he has said that After the Storm is more like a film by Mikio Naruse, tinged with sadness and melancholy. In his director’s notes for After the Storm, he also emphasizes how personal the film is to him, explaining, “Incorporating the changes that occurred within me after my mother and father died, it’s the film that is most colored by what I am. After I die, if I’m taken in front of God or the Judge of the Afterlife and asked, ‘What did you do down on Earth?’ I think I would first show them After the Storm.” That’s not such a bad choice.

AUTOCRATIC FOR THE PEOPLE — AN UNPRESIDENTED SERIES OF STAR-SPANGLED SATIRES: THEY LIVE

Rowdy Roddy Piper tries to save the planet from an alien conspiracy in John Carpenter’s THEY LIVE

WEEKEND CLASSICS: THEY LIVE (John Carpenter, 1988)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
March 17-19, 11:00 am
Series continues weekends through April 2
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.theofficialjohncarpenter.com

How can you possibly not love a movie in which wrestling legend Rowdy Roddy Piper, brandishing a shotgun and standing next to an American flag, declares, “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass . . . and I’m all out of bubblegum.” IFC Center’s Trump-inspired “Autocratic for the People: An Unpresidented Series of Star-Spangled Satires” continues March 17-19 with John Carpenter’s tongue-in-cheek Reagan-era cult favorite, They Live. In the goofy 1988 political sci-fi thriller, Piper, who passed away in 2015 at the age of sixty-one, stars as John Nada, a drifter who arrives in L.A. and gets a job working construction, where he is befriended by Frank Armitage (Keith David), who is otherwise trying to keep to himself and away from trouble as he makes money to send back to his family. Frank invites John to stay at a tent city for homeless people, across the street from a church where John soon finds some disturbing things happening involving a blind preacher (Raymond St. Jacques), a well-groomed man named Gilbert (Peter Jason), and a bearded weirdo (John Lawrence) taking over television broadcasts and making dire predictions about the future. John then discovers that by using a pair of special sunglasses, he can see, in black-and-white, what is really going on beneath the surface: Alien life-forms disguised as humans have infiltrated Los Angeles, gaining positions of power and placing subliminal messages in signs and billboards, spreading such words and phrases as Obey, Consume, Submit, Conform, Buy, Stay Asleep, and No Independent Thought. John seeks help from Frank and cable channel employee Holly Thompson (Meg Foster), determined to reveal the hidden conspiracy and save the planet.

Aliens use television and billboards to send subliminal messages to humanity in prescient sci-fi satire

Loosely based on Ray Nelson’s 1963 short story and 1986 comic-book adaptation “Eight O’Clock in the Morning,” They Live is a fun, if seriously flawed, film that takes on Reaganomics, consumerism, the media, and capitalism and doesn’t much care about its huge, gaping plot holes. Carpenter, an iconoclastic independent auteur who had previously made such other paranoid thrillers as Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, Escape from New York, and a remake of The Thing, wrote They Live under the pseudonym Frank Armitage (the name of David’s character as well as a reference to H. P. Lovecraft’s Henry Armitage from “The Dunwich Horror”) and composed the ultracool synth score with Alan Howarth. The movie is famous not only for Piper’s not exactly brilliant performance but for one of the longest fight scenes ever, as John and Frank go at each other for five and a half nearly interminable minutes, as well as the influence They Live had on activist artist Shepard Fairey, who admitted in 2003 that it “was a major source of inspiration and the basis for my use of the word ‘obey.’” The film is all over the place, a jumble of political commentary and B-movie nonsense, but it’s also eerily prescient, especially with what is going on in America today. Keep a watch out for such recognizable character actors as Sy Richardson, George Buck Flower, Susan Blanchard, Norman Alden, Lucille Meredith, and Robert Grasmere, whose names you don’t know but whose faces are oh-so-familiar. They Live is screening in a DCP projection March 17-19 at 11:00 am at IFC; the Weekend Classics series continues through April 2 with Andrew Fleming’s Dick and Trey Parker’s South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.

AUTOCRATIC FOR THE PEOPLE — AN UNPRESIDENTED SERIES OF STAR-SPANGLED SATIRES: THANK YOU FOR SMOKING

Superstar lobbyist (Aaron Eckhart) makes his point in Jason Reitman’s THANK YOU FOR SMOKING

WEEKEND CLASSICS: THANK YOU FOR SMOKING (Jason Reitman, 2006)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
February 24-26, 11:00 am
Series continues weekends through April 2
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.foxsearchlight.com

Jason Reitman, the son of producer-director Ivan Reitman (Stripes, Ghostbusters, Dave), made his sparkling feature-film debut with the brilliant Thank You for Smoking, a devilishly delightful black comedy based on the novel by acerbic wit Christopher Buckley. Aaron Eckhart gives a riotous performance as Nick Naylor, a fast-talking, handsome, smarmy lobbyist for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, a Big Tobacco laboratory that, remarkably, cannot find a link between cigarettes and health risks. A master of spin, Naylor seems to even believe himself when he tells a young boy dying of cancer that he’s better off smoking. As a grandstanding senator (William H. Macy) plans congressional hearings on the evils of tobacco — especially on teenagers — Naylor is being groomed as the industry’s savior by his high-strung boss (J. K. Simmons) and the Captain (Robert Duvall) while trying to establish a meaningful relationship with his son (Cameron Bright). The fine ensemble also features Katie Holmes as a hot young reporter who’ll go to virtually any length to get a story; Sam Elliott as the Marlboro Man, who is dying of lung cancer; Rob Lowe as a Zen-like Hollywood agent who is considering Naylor’s idea of making cigarette smoking cool in the movies again; and Dennis Miller and Joan Lunden as themselves, adding a bit of reality to the hysterical situation, which might not be as far off from the truth as we might think, especially with President Donald Trump recently promising to enact a ban preventing administration members from becoming lobbyists for five years after they leave government service.

The Merchants of Death (Maria Bello), Aaron Eckhart, David Koechner) plot their next moves in THANK YOU FOR SMOKING

Among the funniest scenes in this wicked film are Naylor’s weekly meetings with the M.O.D. Squad (the Merchants of Death), as the lobbyists for the alcohol (Maria Bello), tobacco (Eckhart), and firearms (David Koechner) industries playfully call themselves. The film is produced by David O. Sacks, who amassed his fortune when he sold his Internet baby, PayPal, to eBay in 2002 and headed straight for Hollywood. Sacks also makes a cameo as an oil lobbyist. The talented Reitman has gone on to make such films as Juno and Up in the Air, earning himself two Oscar nominations for Best Director. Thank You for Smoking is screening in a 35mm print February 24-26 at 11:00 am in the IFC Center Weekend Classics series “Autocratic for the People: An Unpresidented Series of Star-Spangled Satires,” which continues through April 2 with such other political mockeries, parodies, spoofs, and lampoons as Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog, and Andrew Fleming’s Dick.

SURVIVING AND RESISTING: A PRESIDENTS DAY EVENT

HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE provides a fascinating inside look at AIDS activists fighting the power

HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE (David France, 2012)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Monday, February 20, $15, 7:30
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.surviveaplague.com

With protests continuing around the country, and the world, against Donald Trump and his administration, IFC Center is honoring Presidents Day with the special evening “Surviving and Resisting: A Presidents Day Event.” The centerpiece is a screening of the gripping 2012 Oscar-nominated documentary How to Survive a Plague. For his directorial debut, longtime journalist David France, one of the first reporters to cover the AIDS crisis that began in the early 1980s, scoured through more than seven hundred hours of mostly never-before-seen archival footage and home movies of protests, meetings, public actions, and other elements of the concerted effort to get politicians and the pharmaceutical industry to recognize the growing health epidemic and do something as the death toll quickly rose into the millions. Focusing on radical groups ACT UP and TAG (Treatment Action Group), France follows such activist leaders as Peter Staley, Mark Harrington, Larry Kramer, Bob Rafsky, and Dr. Iris Long as they attack the policies of President George H. W. Bush, famously heckle presidential candidate Bill Clinton, and battle to get drug companies to create affordable, effective AIDS medicine, all while continuing to bury loved ones in both public and private ceremonies. France includes new interviews with many key activists who reveal surprising details about the movement, providing a sort of fight-the-power primer about how to get things done. The film also shines a light on lesser-known heroes, several filled with anger and rage, others much calmer, who fought through tremendous adversity to make a difference and ultimately save millions of lives. How to Survive a Plague is screening at 7:30 on February 20, along with three new short documentaries, Jem Cohen’s Birth of a Nation and two works from Laura Poitras’s Field of Vision online platform, Alex Winter’s Trump’s Lobby and Josh Begley’s Best of Luck with the Wall, followed by a Q&A and book signing with France, Cohen (Museum Hours, Instrument), and journalist, documentarian, and visual artist Poitras (Citizenfour, “Astro Noise”). It should be quite a night as people gather to discuss how to survive the plague that has infected the White House.

STRANGER THAN FICTION: THE LOVING STORY

The illegal interracial marriage of Mildred and Richard Jeter and their fight for justice is at center of powerful documentary

THE LOVING STORY (Nancy Buirski, 2011)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Tuesday, February 14, 7:00
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.lovingfilm.com

On June 2, 1958, Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter got married in Washington, DC. Shortly after returning to their Virginia home, Loving, a white man, and Jeter, a black and Native American woman, were arrested and imprisoned by the local sheriff, facing prison sentences because interracial marriage was illegal in their home state. Banished from Virginia, they spent nine years fighting in the courts, and their remarkable tale is now being told in the 2012 Oscar shortlisted documentary The Loving Story. First-time director Nancy Buirski, who founded the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, and editor Elisabeth Haviland James weave together never-before-seen archival footage shot by photojournalist Grey Villet, old news reports and interviews, and family home movies with new interviews with the Loving children and lawyers Bernard S. Cohen and Philip J. Hirschkop, who were ready to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary. One of the many fascinating aspects of the film is that Richard and Mildred had no desire to be trailblazers fighting miscegenation laws; they were just a man and a woman who had fallen in love at first sight and wanted to live happily ever after, in a community that fully accepted their situation. They of course have the perfect last name, because The Loving Story is a story of love and romance as much as it is about an outdated legal system, bigotry, and white supremacy. And it is more relevant than ever, given the new administration that has just taken office. Told in a procedural, chronological format, The Loving Story is also absolutely infuriating, since this all happened not very long ago at all, with many of the protagonists and antagonists still alive — and race still being such a central issue in America. An HBO production that won a prestigious Peabody Award, The Loving Story is having a special Valentine’s Day screening at IFC Center as part of the “Stranger Than Fiction” documentary series and will be followed by a Q&A with Buirski, who is likely to also discuss Jeff Nichols’s Loving, the fictionalized retelling with Joel Edgerton as Richard and an Oscar-nominated Ruth Negga as Mildred that was based on her movie. The STF series continues Tuesday nights through March 28 with such other nonfiction films as David Farrier and Dylan Reeve’s Tickled, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Brother’s Keeper, and Amanda Micheli’s Vegas Baby.