An Animated City Council
An old saying about politics is that it is Hollywood for ugly people. But Lauri Apple, a Chicago-based artist and political writer, believes politics—or, at least, the New York City Council—is more like high school.
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A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop
By Armond White
The Hollywood precedent for one great director remaking another’s work starts with Fritz Lang refashioning both Jean Renoir’s La Chienne and La Bête Humaine into, respectively, Scarlet Street and Human Desire—turning art into entertainment. Now Zhang Yimou remakes the Coen Brothers’ debut film Blood Simple into A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop, turning pop into art. Read more
Takers
By Armond White
Takers has a Brother vibe that only partly has to do with most of its dapper bank robber cast being African American. Co-producing rap artists and stars, Tip “T.I.” Harris and Chris Brown, make vivid use of the crime movie genre’s social significance, which lackadaisical film commentators have mostly ignored. Takers accents the genre’s bonhomie: its exercise of the same working-class frustrations young black artists articulated in hip-hop music and music videos under the influence of ’70s blaxploitation movies. But Takers is not a cultish parody like Machete from Robert Rodriguez. It is—to redeem a police blotter phrase—a Saturday Night Special, excitingly executed. Read more
Send in the Stars
Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch make ‘Night Music’
By Mark Peikert
What a difference a few months and two new cast members make. When I saw Trevor Nunn’s production of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s A Little Night Music last December, I was blown away by both Catherine Zeta-Jones—who ended up winning a Tony Award for her performance as actress Desirée Armfeldt—and Alexander Hanson, as her married former lover Fredrik. The rest of this elegiac musical about lust and love, set in turn-of-the-last-century Sweden, felt serviceable at best, and egregious at worst. Having just seen the show with Bernadette Peters stepping in for Zeta-Jones and Elaine Stritch replacing Angela Lansbury, I still maintain that the revival is less than sparkling, but for different reasons. Read more
City Week: September 3 – 9, 2010
A Selective Listing of Recommended Cultural & Community Events
Compiled by Shilpa Agrawal
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 3
Chair Pilates—This class, open to senior citizens, is being led by Laura Shapiro, dancer, choreographer and Pilate’s instructor. DOROT, 171 W. 85th St., 212-769-2850; 10:30-11:20 a.m., Free (suggested donation $5). Read more
Telephone Call From The Past
Writer pens ode to 100th Street phone booth
By Reid Spagna
Born in Pittsburgh, Peter Ackerman received a Bachelor’s degree in English from Yale and attended The American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco to study acting. Among other works he is the co-author of Ice Age and Ice Age 3.
The writer met his wife when she starred in his play, Things You Shouldn’t Say Past Midnight. The couple settled down on West End Avenue and has two sons.
Most recently, he is the author of The Lonely Phone Booth, his newly released children’s book. Read more
Centurion
By Armond White
Why make a genre movie—any movie, really—without inspiration? Neil Marshall, the director of the horror film The Descent, now comes up with another late genre entry: his imagination evident in the redundant antiquity battle tale’s title, Centurion. Shadowed by Zack Snyder’s fascinating 300, Marshall adds nothing new to the basic plot, least of all the kind of genre delight Snyder evidenced and not the revisionist intelligence behind Walter Hill’s 1979 neo-gladiator movie The Warriors. Read more
Mesrine: Killer Instinct & Public Enemy No. 1
By Armond White
Killer Instinct, the first of the two-part French gangster film Mesrine, finally opens in the U.S. following a highly praised home turf reception. But it also has the misfortune of coming right after the Anthology Film Archives’ compelling William Lustig program of crime movies and what Variety calls “actioners,” where zero-prestige works by Larry Cohen, Henri Verneuil and Giuliano Montaldo raised the B-movie crime film to insightful or, at least, pleasurable and personally-expressive heights. Mesrine doesn’t measure up. Read more
Young Man with a Silent Horn
By Donald Sosin
There is a conceit among some young creators of silent films, trying on the genre as a prelude to their big sound feature. They think that silents should look old, faded, out of focus and scratchy. But the new digital restorations that premiered in Bologna last month of the first films by the Lumière brothers demonstrate the astonishing clarity of the earliest motion picture film stock. Read more
The Tillman Story
By Armond White
“Fratricide” is the word used in Amir Bar-Lev’s doc The Tillman Story to describe the 4/22/04 incident in which Pvt. George Tillman was killed while on duty in Afghanistan. It is a sign of Bar-Lev’s political bias that his film favors that moralizing term over the military designation “friendly fire” to describe gunfire discharged by allies and colleagues. Bar-Lev wants the tragic implications of a taboo act and is not above structuring this investigation into exactly how Tillman became a celebrated casualty of the Afghan campaign into lurid melodrama. The Tillman Story is really about the chicanery of the U.S. Military—first in covering up the facts, then presenting a version to the media who used it to promote the war to the public. The Tillman Story is another example of how contemporary journalism and documentary-making have lost credibility. Read more
