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.
Joe's View
Archive for August, 2008
The man who gave Warhol & Fellini ideas
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.
Culture clash in Queens
A new film about the struggles of Mexican immigrants in Queens — “Amexicano” — will be sneak previewed tomorrow night at 7:30 by the Ridgefield Playhouse Film Society.
Director and producer Matthew Bonifacio will do a question and answer session after the screening.
The film was an official selection of the Tribeca Film Festival last year and received the Grand Jury Prize for “best narrative feature film” at the Sonoma Valley Film festival earlier this year.
“Amexicano” is set for theatrical release in September.
Screenwriter (and leading player) Carmine Famiglietti explores the culture clash between old and new ethnic groups in Queens.
The Italian-American Bruno played by Famiglietti loses his job, runs out of unemployment benefits and finds himself doing landscaping and construction work.
Bruno meets the Mexican day laborers who “work the corners” along Northern Boulevard each morning hoping for work.
The day laborers don’t speak English and Bruno doesn’t speak Spanish.
Bruno becomes friends with Ignacio (Raul Castillo) and his wife Gabriela (Jennifer Pena), who open a door into a whole new culture for the Italian man.
The movie blends comedy and drama in a telling reminder that the Mexicans are just the most recent in a long line of “foreigners” who have come to this country to better themselves.
The screening is latest offering of the Ridgefield Playhouse Film Society which has been programming special film events at the Ridgefield Playhouse since 2004.
Tickets for “Amexicano” are $10, with a $2.50 discount for senior citizens and a $5 discount for students.
To order tickets in advance call 438-5795 or go online to www.ridgefieldplayhouse.org.
The Playhouse is at 80 East Ridge Road in Ridgefield.
A supporting player who should be the star
“Entourage” has managed to run on HBO almost as long as “Sex and the City” did, but you don’t hear many people talking very enthusiastically about the series.
When it was launched four years ago, the show looked like it was designed to be a male version of “SATC” set in Hollywood rather than Manhattan — four show biz guys on the prowl for connections in a very realistically rendered contemporary Los Angeles.
The other night I watched most of the new season four DVD set that HBO Video will release on Aug. 26.
A mediocre series has declined and become unwatchable with the exception of the funny and energetic performance by Jeremy Piven (left) as Ari Gold, the long-suffering agent of actor Vince Chase (Adrian Grenier).
Piven has stolen every scene in which he has appeared as the manic flesh peddler. The character has all of the color and energy and wit that is missing from Vince and his old New York City gang — best friend turned manager Eric Murphy (Kevin Connolly); faded 1980s brat packer Johnny “Drama” Chase (Kevin Dillon); and court jester Turtle (Jerry Ferrara).
Ari is a man surrounded by boys.
Although the Vince crew has been in Los Angeles for four years they are basically the same adolescent louts we met in the first season. Women have come and gone in these guys’ lives, but none of them have stayed long enough to work any lasting changes on the buddy dynamic.
“SATC” went through peaks and valleys during its six seasons on HBO, but the four women did evolve and mature.
The crude joking of Drama and Turtle is a sexist bore, Eric is a semi-nice guy stick figure and the rising movie star at the center of the action remains no more than a pretty cipher. The show gives the illusion of taking us behind the scenes of the Hollywood entertainment industry, but the low brow New York buddy quartet could be transplanted to a sitcom set in any other city and any other business.
Piven won a deserved supporting actor Emmy for his work on “Entourage” but he is so much better than the rest of the cast — and his scenes at the agency and with his neurotic wife (Perrey Reeves) ring so true — that I wish he could be spun off into a series focused on Ari.
It would be fun to see Piven freed up to react to adults rather than the dopey Vince crew. Ari is a powerhouse who squanders his energy on people who don’t deserve to be in the same space he occupies.
An “Entourage” about Ari and his wife and his OTHER clients could be a terrific show.
When men write romance novels
“The Boy in the Basement” shows us what happens when a struggling young male writer decides to adopt a female pen name to produce a commercial romance novel about four college women who turn the tables on a sexy intruder.
Writer-actress Katharine Heller (right) based the play on a self-published novel she wrote a few years ago in college after she picked up a box of romance paperbacks at a garage sale.
“The Boy in the Basement” is about the differences between female and male romantic fantasies as played out in our pop culture.
Heller shows how her writer hero (played by Nick Fondulis) keeps veering from female romance novel territory into a male porn scenario as three of the four girls decide to live out their sexual fantasies after tying up Lance Speedworth (Tom Macy, right) in their basement.
Heller has written a good role for herself in the form of Xandra, a hot-blooded Latina who has a torrid night with Lance but then heads in an entirely different sexual direction.
The twist in the play comes from the most naïve of the four college girls — Anna (Meghan Powe) — who doesn’t know Lance is being used as a sex slave and falls in love with him.
Lance also finds himself falling for the sweet and unavailable Anna which gives Heller lots of opportunities to satirize the mix of love and sex in all of those paperback books with bare-chested men on the covers.
Nick Fondulis is hilarious as the writer who spends much of the show on the side of the stage narrating the action, but can’t help getting involved in what his steamy characters are doing.
“The Boy in the Basement” is perhaps closer to an extended comedy sketch than a full-fledged play, but the talented and attractive company of actors make it a fun 75 minutes.
(The New York International Fringe Festival is presenting “The Boy in the Basement” on Thursday at 3:45 p.m., Aug. 21 at 11:45 a.m. and Aug. 23 at 10 p.m. The performances are at Manhattan’s Soho Playhouse, 15 Vandam St. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased online at www.FringeNYC.com or by calling 1-866-468-7619.)
