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August 21, 2008

The man who gave Warhol & Fellini ideas

Director Mary Jordan restores the reputation of a major avant garde artist of the 1950s and ’60s in the documentary “Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis,” which will be released on DVD Tuesday by Arts Alliance America and Arthouse Films.
Smith gained a lot of notoriety in the early 1960s for the “underground” film “Flaming Creatures” which was banned in many places around the country because of its then shocking — albeit brief — glimpses of female and male nudity.
The picture was a cause celebre in the art world, but Jordan points out how the legal battles took a lot of the wind out of Smith’s sails. He spent much of the rest of his life shooting elaborate sequences for films that were never completed.
Smith became an angry man after pop artist Andy Warhol decided to move into film and swiped many of Smith's ideas and the notion of underground “superstars” from his one-time friend.
Indeed, many people now know Smith primarily from his strikingly bizarre performances in some of the Warhol movies of the mid to late 1960s.
Jordan assembled a very impressive group of interview subjects for her film, including such downtown New York bohemians as Taylor Mead, Nick Zedd and Jonas Mekas of the Anthology Film Archives in the East Village.
Mekas was a champion of Smith’s films but the artist grew to believe the exhibitor did not pay him as much as he deserved from the screenings.
Smith also became increasingly confrontational with museum curators and other people he felt represented America’s opposition to revolutionary art.
Jordan does a great job of editing scenes from Smith’s unfinished films into haunting montages filled with striking imagery. She also shows us how Federico Fellini borrowed heavily from Smith for two of his most surreal dramas — “Juliet of the Spirits” (1965) and “Fellini Satyricon” (1970).
Smith died from complications of AIDS in 1989 and faded into obscurity, so it is wonderful to have his reputation restored in this excellent documentary.

Posted by Joe on 4:19 PM | Comments (0)

August 20, 2008

From the specific to the universal

“Animals Out of Paper” is a terrific new play by Rajiv Joseph that is being presented through Sunday at the Second Stage Theatre’s small uptown space (at 76th and Broadway).
Although I have been busily working to be ready to take off for a vacation next week, when two theater friends told me in separate e-mails that I had to see Joseph’s play, I squeezed it in on Saturday between a movie and another play (!)
And, boy, am I glad I heeded their advice.
“Animals Out of Paper” combines an unusual backdrop — the world of origami artists — with three of the best-written and best-acted characters I’ve seen in a New York theater recently.
The subject matter might sound off-putting to some people — who cares about paper folding? — but Joseph uses origami in a manner slightly akin to the role mathematics played in the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “Proof.”
The three very different people we meet in “Animals” — Ilana (Kellie Overbey, right), Andy (Jeremy Shamos) and Suresh (Utkarsh Ambudkar) — are brought together by their interest in origami, but the play quickly shifts to their surprising and very moving relationships.
Ilana is a renowned origami artist (and writer) who is depressed and hunkered down in her very messy apartment when the lights go up. Soon, Andy is knocking on her door saying he has important American Origami Association papers to deliver. She reluctantly lets him in, and we are off on a gripping personal journey.
Andy turns out to be a teacher — as well as a student of origami — and he introduces Ilana to star pupil Suresh who seems to have a natural talent for incredibly complex folded paper art objects.
Andy is a lonely man with a crush on Ilana and Suresh covers the pain of his mother’s recent car accident death with rather profane, rap music-inspired behavior. Ilana goes from being unhappily isolated (in the aftermath of a failed marriage) to forging two new and very intimate relationships.
The scenes in the play feel so real — and we grow to care so much for these three people — that we can’t wait to see what is going to happen next (even when we fear we won’t like what is going to happen).
The theater was full Saturday afternoon and the audience was obviously thrilled by what they saw, but “Animals Out of Paper” cannot have its present run extended because Second Stage has to vacate the theater for another production. While I’m sure a piece this strong will turn up again in New York — or in one of our regional theaters — if I were you, I would try to catch it during the next five days with these three brilliant actors.
(To order tickets for “Animals Out of Paper” call 212-246-4422 or go online to www.2st.com. As of this afternoon, some tickets were still available for weekend performances.)

Posted by Joe on 3:15 PM | Comments (0)

August 19, 2008

Getting back to Coney

The “New York before Disney” film series at the Fairfield Theatre Company is continuing tonight at 7 p.m. with a free screening of the 1979 Walter Hill gang drama, “The Warriors.”
The movie had its original release curtailed after violence broke out in a few urban theaters, but over the years it has become a huge cult favorite, even inspiring an elaborate video game homage three years ago.
At last month’s “Martini and a Movie” night — which I have had the pleasure of hosting for the past two years — the audience seemed to relish looking back at Manhattan in the bad old days of the 1970s with a screening of the 1974 subway hostage film, “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.”
The irony of New York City’s situation in the 1970s was that the terrible financial crisis and a rapidly rising crime rate inspired some of the best movies of the modern era.
The great New York-based directors Martin Scorsese and Sidney Lumet made their names with gritty crime stories such as “Serpico” (1973) and “Taxi Driver” (1976).
“The Warriors” didn’t receive the same sort of unanimous critical acclaim as the Scorsese and Lumet classics — it was treated more like a B-picture than a prestige film in the winter of 1979 — but it did get a strong review from Pauline Kael in The New Yorker.
The movie’s premise is rather simple. A gang from Coney Island — The Warriors — attends a city-wide rally of youth gangs one night in the Bronx. Violence breaks out, a major gang figure is shot, and The Warriors are falsely accused of committing the crime. They spend the rest of the night — and the movie — making their way back to Coney while being chased by gangs from all over the city.
What makes the picture special is Hill’s stylized approach to the story. Each gang has its own signature costume — one group dresses like baseball players with Kiss-style face make-up — and the fights and chases are shot and cut almost like musical numbers.
Cinematographer Andrew Laszlo shot the entire film at night on very difficult locations — a good portion of the movie is set on subway trains and platforms — but he infuses the action with continuous beauty and visual excitement.
The storytelling is part Western, part comic-book, but it’s the premise and the look of the picture that make it special. And these days, it opens a window on a long-vanished New York City in which only brave locals rode the subways in the late night hours..
(The Fairfield Theatre Company is at 70 Sanford St. in Fairfield Center.)

Posted by Joe on 1:13 PM | Comments (0)

August 18, 2008

Be careful what you wish for

The genie-in-a-bottle mythology we’ve all enjoyed in movies and on the “I Dream of Jeannie” TV series is both debunked and expanded in a charming new comedy that is being presented at the New York International Fringe Festival.
“Wish We Were Here” follows a hapless unemployed actor (Michael Phillis) who wishes on a hookah while stoned one night and is stunned to have a gorgeous genie (Christine Corpuz) pop out of his drug paraphernalia.
Granted the usual three wishes, the stoner actor makes his first wish “I wish for unlimited wishes!” and lives to regret it (sort of).
The show we are watching is an off-shoot of the actor’s desire to create an autobiographical one-man piece that might jumpstart his career.
“Wish We Were Here” isn’t quite what the actor expected, however, since the genie keeps threatening to take over the show and humiliate her “master.” The genie contradicts much of what the actor tells us, and makes her own case against his piggish attempt to abuse her powers.
The unlimited-wishes wish triggers a contractual “addendum” that results in the genie being permanently assigned to the actor but with the freedom to tweak his desires with her own improvisations.
Within this rather silly supernatural premise, "Wish We Were Here" manages to include surprisingly pointed satire of the over-sized expectations central to modern American life.
Phillis wrote the show and co-produced it with his pal Corpuz. She lives in New York and he lives in San Francisco but together they've created "Bowdashoot Productions," a "bicoastal artists' collective (whose) mission is to create art that promotes positive change."
Corpuz and Phillis are a comedy team of the first order — his attempts to gain control of the genie and her witty manipulations make for a very winning hour in the theater.
(The Fringe Festival will present only one more performance of “Wish We Were Here” on Saturday at 5:30 p.m. at the CSV Cultural and Educational Center at 107 Suffolk St. Tickets are $15 and may be ordered online at www.FringeNYC.org.)

Posted by Joe on 2:46 PM | Comments (0)

August 15, 2008

Bridgeport doesn’t play itself

Just as good film actors are valued for their ability to portray a multitude of different characters, many of the “locations” we see in movies are real places that are pretending to be somewhere else.
When we see a “New York” story, we naively assume it was filmed there.
Back in 1981, I was shocked to learn that most of the terrific Louis Malle-John Guare film “Atlantic City” was shot in Montreal.
Connecticut moviegoers are getting an education in the amazing trickery production designers can pull off in the current “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2,” in which a series of Bridgeport-shot sequences are presented as taking place in Providence, R.I. and New York City.
Just as the Louis Malle picture was made in Canada because of tax incentives, a new wave of Connecticut productions are dressing up familiar local sites to become other places.
Tuesday night, I attended a press screening of the new Barry Levinson film, “What Just Happened” — set to open Oct. 3 — which generated lots of press coverage in 2006 when Robert DeNiro and Sean Penn arrived in Bridgeport for several days of filming inside the Showcase Cinemas in the Black Rock section of the city.
The first ten minutes of "What Just Happened" take place inside the theater — where a Hollywood bomb-in-the-making is undergoing a disastrous test screening — but the movie tells us we are in Costa Mesa, California.
It’s fun but disorienting to see DeNiro (as the harried producer of the flop) and Catherine Keener (as an angry studio head) arguing (above) in the lobby of a multiplex many of us know very well. (There is also another key scene in the men’s room of the Showcase Cinemas).
After watching “Traveling Pants” and “What Just Happened” I was left wondering how many other films are pulling off such completely convincing location magic. Clearly, appearances can be totally deceiving when it comes to Hollywood filmmaking.

Posted by Joe on 6:31 PM | Comments (0)