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| Les Savy Fav's Tim Harrington Has a New Children's Book, This Little Piggy
"Apparently, NYPD frowns on two husky, bearded dudes in their thirties hanging out at the playground. Matter of fact, I think it's illegal if you don't have kids with you," Tim Harrington said to me as we walked down the street from his Williamsburg studio. They should make an exception f... Read More » For Fans of its Predecessors, Proceed with Armor for Before Midnight
Ask people about their favorite movies and the same titles come up regularly—Casablanca, Pulp Fiction, Annie Hall, Citizen Kane. But some movies have special meaning for people even if they don't turn up on lists of established favorites. These are the secret mo... Read More »Summer Guide: Art
James Turrell June 21–September 25, 2013 From the Museum of the Hard to Believe: Light and earth art pioneer James Turrell has not had an important survey exhibition in the U.S. since 1984. That glaring omission will be remedied this summer when three of the co... Read More »Lens Flares and the End of Film
Daniel Mindel, A.S.C., is part of an ever-shrinking population: cinematographers who have yet to shoot a feature digitally. He acknowledges that he "will be forced" to do it eventually by "the corporate entities that drive our industry," but he believes "there is no need to use an inferior techn... Read More »Film Summer Guide: Club-going Teens Turn Celebrity Burglars in Coppola's The Bling Ring
Maybe it was the toxic convergence of celebrity worship, hyper-materialism, shitty parenting, and Adderall: Starting in late 2008, a gang of spoiled Valley kids walked into the unlocked homes of Paris Hilton, Rachel Bilson, Audrina Patridge, and others, pilfering over $3 million in designer cloth... Read More »Entitled Fraternity Dicks Return to The Hangover Part III
The unlikeliest of all the Hangover trilogy's comic implausibilities might be its four pampered rich-boy leads unironically calling themselves the "Wolf Pack" without anybody ever making fun of them. In the slobs-versus-snobs comedies of the 1970s and '80s, the snooty rich kids... Read More »Cannes: Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra is a Delightful Little Curio
Ladies and gentlemen—anyone, really, who cares about his or her mug—step right up. According to a bit of advice proffered in one of the festival editions of The Hollywood Reporter a few days back, the beauty product to buy while in Cannes is Avibon, an "only-in-France aging cre... Read More »How Undercover Animal Rights Activists are Winning the Ag-Gag War
Cody Carlson had no way of preparing for this moment. He was a Manhattan kid, days removed from working as an analyst for a business-intelligence firm, where he scrutinized corporations and their executives. Now he was standing in a bleak barn at New York's largest dairy farm. Th... Read More »Lois Smith and Frances Sternhagen Continue to Live Dazzling Parallel Lives Onstage
From a certain vantage point, it's hard not to suspect that stage veterans Lois Smith and Frances Sternhagen have been living parallel lives—a suspicion that only gained credence when, at this year's Obies ceremony, Meryl Streep presented them with the award for lifetime achievement, the fi... Read More »We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks Can't Get a Fix on Its Thorny Subject Matter
There's a thing that sometimes happens to copy editors, the workhorses who do the final grammar cleanup, general fine-tuning, and, sometimes, miracle-working before a story goes to print: An editor higher on the food chain will receive a disheveled manuscript from a writer, make a few halfhearte... Read More »Theater Summer Guide: In Mr. Burns, A Post-apocalyptic World Is Held Together Only by The Simpsons
A few years ago, a playwright, a director, and seven actors sheltered together in a disused bank vault far below Wall Street. Huddled behind a thick door that cell-phone service couldn't penetrate, they imagined themselves as survivors of a nuclear apocalypse. What would the changed world look li... Read More »The English Teacher Proves that a Good Cast Doesn't Equate to Big Laughs
A film seemingly produced only because it boasts enough sizable roles to entice multiple stars, Craig Zisk's The English Teacher reveals that a respectable cast and much noisy boisterousness isn't enough to generate a single laugh. Introduced by a stuffy female British narrator as a spins... Read More »Summer Guide: Dance
Yanira Castro/a canary torsi: The People to Come June 25–29 Yanira Castro's 2009 Bessie-winning Dark Horse/Black Forest involved fraught duets in a lobby restroom at the Gershwin Hotel. For The People to Come she invites audiences to partici... Read More »Scheming Is a Blast as A Pig Across Paris Trawls Around Nazi-occupied Town
An amiable oddity crafted by a murderers' row of classic French cinema heavy hitters—including stars Jean Gabin and Bourvil, and screenwriters Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost—this 1956 lark follows two strangers (Bourvil's a crooked loser, Gabin a slumming painter) as they struggle to ... Read More »Longing and Interdependence Fill the Void of an Hasidic Community
Rama Burshtein's Fill the Void opens on green leaves, smiling faces, lush billows of fabric that when pieced together, the sensuous images accumulating into a fuller picture, become a wedding dress, tulle and silk diffusing the glow. Engagements, weddings, births, and deaths: This film is... Read More »A Green Story Is More Monotonous Than Mythic
The American immigrant experience is certainly compelling material for filmmakers, with centuries of rich tradition and robust narrative. Not that you'd know this after watching Nick Agiashvili's A Green Story, which comes across like the result of a not particularly inspired Mad Lib: "Pe... Read More »Lady Rizo and Bridget Everett Show us How Stars Get Made
"I'm fameish," slapstick chanteuse Lady Rizo deadpanned to me, understandably sounding a tiny bit bitter. Funny, Rizo doesn't look fameish. She looks like a major talent who can wow an audience with her "caburlesque" antics and who would have been great in Funny Girl when the... Read More »Geriatrics Fight for Glory in Ping Pong
Though we understand the dual nature of children, we don't think of old age as a time for growth. Ping Pong shows us people piquantly aware of the deterioration of their bodies and that they don't have much time left. It becomes clear, as they train for the fiercest competitions in table ... Read More »In a Bumper Year, Four New American Plays Won Obies; Eight More Were Strong Contenders
It was the worst of years; it was the best of years. I've never felt as much frustration and agony while theatergoing as I did during 2012–13, nor such a strong feeling that the theater was on the verge of collapse. So was the world around it: Explosions, massacres, hurricanes, and economic... Read More »Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself
Perhaps it was disingenuous for George Plimpton to insist for so long that he was above all else an "am-uh-ter." Yes, this tweedy beanpole would lark off from his day job—only editing The Paris Review, the world-champion lit mag, for almost 50 years—so that he could have a go ... Read More »Dining Summer Guide: NYC Shoreside Eats for When You Tire of the Sand Which Is There
New York has some of the best beaches on the Atlantic seacoast, with every borough but Manhattan sporting at least one. But exposing yourself to sand and surf also engenders a commensurate need to wolf something down—whether a full-blown picnic, some fried clams from a kiosk, or a more elab... Read More »Cannes: In Jimmy P. (Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian), Benicio Del Toro Acts Again!
In Arnaud Desplechin's English-language Jimmy P. (Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian), Benicio Del Toro—freed at last from the tyranny of playing bit-part heavies in American thrillers and action movies—is James Picard, a Blackfoot Indian who has lost his way in post-World... Read More »Music Summer Guide: Erykah Badu and the Brooklyn Philharmonic Team Up
When I'm nudged into Erykah Badu's backstage dressing room at the Brooklyn Museum, she's still recovering from a spontaneous outbreak of extended public adulation. The peerless soul vocalist's Q&A for the Red Bull Music Academy has just climaxed with every audience member who wasn't allowed to as... Read More »Cannes: The Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis
I. First, Something About the Badges (Then We'll Get to the Coens) Someday I'm going to write a song and call it "Ballad of the Blue Badge." I haven't figured out a rhyme scheme yet, let alone a melody, so please allow this outline to suffice: At Cannes, the color of your badge det... Read More »Summer Guide: Books
Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments By Gina Perry | New Press | September 3 We all think we know the notorious Milgram experiments of 1961—but that's because we believed what we were told. Duped by Yale psychologis... Read More »Los Carpinteros Moonwalk through the Crack-up
Jimmy Breslin was right: There is no more beautiful sight than a heaving street full of people. In Havana, on a sun-baked afternoon, that sensuous humanist observation goes double. Picture a Times Square flash mob mugged by the hurly-burly of New Orleans' scrappy Treme. For those who have... Read More »Songs of Disco and Dictators
When David Byrne dances he seems both absorbed in the movement of his body and detached from it, torso and legs vibrating rhythmically, face oddly expressionless. In his recent book, How Music Works, he describes his terpsichorean style as "jerky, spastic, and strangely formal." Yo... Read More »Williamsburg's Sweet Chick Revives an Iconic Harlem Favorite
Fried chicken and waffles seem like an odd pairing, as if somebody were trying to cram dinner and breakfast into a single meal. Which is just how it originated in the late 1940s at Wells' Restaurant in Harlem. At this celebrated wee-hours hang for jazz musicians after their gigs, jam sessions wer... Read More »Cannes: Refn's Again with Ryan Gosling, but Only God Forgives Isn't in the Same League as Drive
Expectations here in Cannes were high—or at least semi-high—for Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives, in which Kristin Scott Thomas and Ryan Gosling play a mother-son duo with what might politely be called unresolved issues. Gosling's Julian has always played second ... Read More »Fast & Furious & Elegant: Justin Lin and the Vulgar Auteurs
Justin Lin may strike some as out of place in the pantheon of contemporary auteurs. The Taiwanese-born American filmmaker, best known for having directed Fast Five and its sequel, Fast & Furious 6,... Read More »Epic Charms, but in the Most Traditional Manner
Is calling a film's narrative structure "airtight" a compliment or a pejorative? Clockwork storytelling can entertain, yet such mechanisms can also seem overly constructed, like one of those essays that gets high scores from the SAT folks. If one of those essays became an animated movie it might... Read More »Director Rama Burshtein on Fill the Void: It's About the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Community, But Isn't for Them
The Israeli arranged-marriage drama Fill the Void begins as a spy caper. Eighteen-year-old Shira (Hadas Yaron) and her mother (Irit Sheleg) play P.I. at the supermarket, observing a handsome asthmatic with gold-rim glasses and a gawky frame to see if he's marriage material. Satisfie... Read More » | ||||
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Friday, May 24, 2013
FeedaMail: Village Voice | Complete Issue
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