Film Series to Watch Out For
Human Rights Watch International Film Festival
June 8?22
In case you're in denial about the genocide, extreme exploitation and other abhorrent abuses running rampant 'round the globe, Human Rights Watch International Film Festival (HRWFF) will heat your human indignation to the point at which you may, hopefully, do something to stop them.
In truth, not all films produced by people with good intentions are necessarily good films; luckily, all those on HRWFF's roster are.
Shadya is an Israeli-Arab 16-year-old who's an ambitious and independent kick-ass karate champion-until she's married off. In They Call Me Muslim, young women living in Paris protest the law that prohibits them from wearing headscarves in school. Baghdad in Fragments shows the complex cultural relationship between Iraqi Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. Black Gold's shocking statistics give you something to ponder while sipping your next Starbucks as it investigates why Ethiopia experiences continual famine while the wealthy West consumes its precious coffee.
On the fiction-feature front, Michael Caton-Jones' Shooting Dogs, starring John Hurt and Hugh Dancy as a Catholic priest and English teacher caught in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, is a brutal revelation of man's inhumanity to man. When, at one point, Hugh Dancy's character asks how much pain humans can endure before simply shutting down, it takes a moment to realize how numbing the graphic footage actually is.
-Jennifer Merin
I remember seeing The Lost Weekend-a film which fast became one of my favorites-for the first time, and being shocked that Billy Wilder had directed it. Up until then, I'd only really known him for comedies like Some Like It Hot and The Seven Year Itch. But that was ignorance on my part. If I'd been paying attention, I would've known that he'd also directed a bunch of other dramas I knew and loved, like Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard and Stalag 17.
He also made courtroom dramas (Witness for the Prosecution), political and social satires (One Two Three, The Apartment), romantic comedies (Sabrina, Foreign Affair), historical dramas (The Spirit of St. Louis), screwball comedies, film noir, WWII action pictures and a few of those searing message films. Almost all of them struck a nerve with audiences, and an awfully high percentage of them are considered classics nowadays.
Wilder remains one of the most American of filmmakers-in spite of (or because of) his Austro-Hungarian origins. Over the course of three decades he was able to capture the essence of what made us tick-both good and venal-and put it onscreen in a way that could make us both laugh and flinch.
Film Forum screens over 20 of the most fundamental Billy Wilder films, as well as a few things that Wilder wrote, but didn't direct, like Midnight, Hold Back the Dawn, Ninotchka, and the great Ball of Fire, the Howard Hawks comedy in which Gary Cooper plays a stuffy professor trying to learn street lingo from hussy-in-distress Barbara Stanwyck.
-Jim Knipfel
The Museum of the Moving Image's new retrospective seems like the place to get all educated on Kubrick, but unless you're careful, you might come away with a fairly skewed picture.
Yes, they're screening 12 of Kubrick's 13 features (he never wants his first, Fear and Desire, shown again, anywhere). All the classics are there-A Clockwork Orange, Paths of Glory, Spartacus, Dr, Strangelove-as well as his early 16-minute short, Day of the Fight. A few lectures and discussions are scheduled with the likes of Matthew Modine (Full Metal Jacket), Chris Chase (Killer's Kiss) and Kubrick biographer Vincent LoBrutto, who discusses Kubrick's Bronx years after a June 10 screening of The Killing.
All in all, it's pretty much what you'd expect from a Kubrick retrospective. But then the MMI decided to toss in a few things that are confusing, if not downright blasphemous.
First, on June 10-11, they're screening La Ronde, Max Ophüls' episodic 1950 film about interconnected trysts in turn of the century Vienna: A film Kubrick had nothing to do with, but Ophüls, see, was one of Kubrick's favorite directors. And La Ronde was based on a play written by Arthur Schnitzler. And Schnitzler, see, also wrote the story that would later form the basis for Eyes Wide Shut.
Worse than La Ronde, even, June 18 they're screening A.I.
What, were they just desperate to fill in a couple holes in the schedule? Or is Spielberg paying them off?
Instead of getting too bent out of shape, just go see The Killing. That Marie Windsor's really something, and the barfight scene's caused me nothing but trouble over the years.
-JK
Now in its fifth year, NYAFF is undisputedly America's premier showcase for Asian film. The program will have you shuttling between the Anthology Film Archives and ImaginAsian to attend festival screenings of 25 cutting edge, genre-defying films from Japan, China, Thailand, Korea, Malaysia and India.
The unusual films include quirky sci-fi send ups, punk rock dramas, un-PC cultural profiles, hard core crime thrillers and non-stop combat martial arts displays. While watching, be prepared to encounter wildly unconventional points of view, to witness brilliantly original images dancing across the screen and to try to untangle plots that sometimes seem incomprehensibly convoluted but are nonetheless intriguing, even gripping.
Deserving of special attention is Peacock, a profoundly engaging two-hour drama about a rural family recovering from the ills of China's Cultural Revolution. Directed by Gu Changwei (FYI, he served as cameraman for Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige and Robert Altman, and this is his first feature), the film offers a new vision of hope.
-JM
Michelangelo Antonioni comes to BAM to set contemporary film culture straight. This month's retrospective salutes one of Italian cinema's masters, and is not only artistically essential, it's necessary. Antonioni's movies were not only highly influential, they still teach you how to look at movies.
The Story of a Love Affair was a debut like no other. The unparalleled sense of composition. The romantic chic. The existential pondering. The aching zeitgeist. All are already present. Plus exquisite performances by Massimo Girotti and Lucia Bose.
In 1983 Antonioni adaptated Jean Cocteau fable The Eagle Has Two Heads into his The Mystery of Oberwald, which reunited the maestro with his former muse Monica Vitti. Narrative folds into experiment with visual form. This constantly surprising experiment in mid-'80s video technology (before the Blair Witch Project kids broke the medium's potential) remains audacious.
Blow Up was Antonioni's only box office smash as well as the winner of the first National Society of Film Critics' Award and the maestro's only Oscar nomination. A murder mystery about the responsibility of witnessing, it's inspired worthy knock-off's like Coppola's The Conversation and DePalma's Blow-Out.
L'Avventura is always an occasion. This existential suspense epic is open-ended and will therefore always haunt and captivate. Love and landscape never looked more thrilling; it's simply one of the greatest films ever made.
Following '60s counterculture dissent to America, the maestro turned Death Valley into a metaphor for orgiastic narcisscism and waywardness with Zabriskie Point. Film buffs take note: The apocalyptic finale was the blueprint for DePalma's orgasmic finale in The Fury.
-Armond White