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January 06, 2006
Screening Gotham: Jan. 6-8, 2006
A few of this weekend's worthwile cinematic happenings around New York:
--Despite today's opening of Hostel-- a truly repellent film I want to eventually write about if my blood pressure can withstand the boost--not all hope is lost among New York's new releases. Take Fateless, Lajos Koltai's gorgeous adaptation of Nobel laureate Imre Kertész's semi-autobiographical Holocaust novel. In tracing the path of 14-year-old Gyuri Koves (portrayed with wide-eyed, poetic gravity by Marcell Nagy) from the idyll of Budapest to the wastelands of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, first-time director Koltai trains his legendary cinematographer's eye on the cold light framing the very nature of survival. Gyuri faces the prospect of death--"the simple secret of my universe," he narrates with the faintest hint of a grin--as matter-of-factly as he learns how to bargain to stay alive. Yet somehow, Kertész's narrative of suffering transcends tragedy; Gyuri does not lose hope so much as he comes to recognize its irrelevance. And by the end of Fateless's first reel, when you realize Koltai, Kertesz and Nagy have somehow made Gyuri's epiphany your own, it becomes virtually impossible not to know you are viewing something profound.
--Yesterday on MCN, Robert Kohler offered an interesting, fringe-eye twist on the myth of the box office slump:
A passivity is overtaking filmgoing everywhere, and it must be stopped. I mean by this a thinking that expects only a film world that exists in advertising and promotion, and assumes the non-existence of any world beyond advertising.
Which is kind of the long way around for me to say that the Museum of the Moving Image kicks off its seventh annual New York Film Critics Circle Series tomorrow in Astoria. Not that MMI is one of those way-off-the-map venues whose slow, imminent deaths Kohler seems to be dreading (and with good reason), but it also is not the multiplex, and God knows you are not going to be able to catch guys like Matt Zoller Seitz anywhere else introducing tomorrow's opening film, Hiroshima Mon Amour. More than a dozen other critics will be dropping by to introduce their own contributions for this year's "Foreign Affairs" theme, including Stuart Klawans (Naked Lunch), Lisa Schwarzbaum (Genghis Blues) and, naturally, Armond White (No Greater Glory).
Oh, and incidentally, I hear director Bennett Miller will also be hanging around MMI following Saturday's 6:30 screening of Capote. So take a deep breath, Kohler--at least one museum around here seems to have its shit together.
--The Times Arts and Leisure Weekend "TimesTalk" speaker series pretty much sold out weeks ago, but if you are anything like me, you have no reason not to just crash the CUNY Graduate Center to hear from folks like Viggo Mortensen, Robert Redford and "the Women of The Sopranos"--Lorraine Bracco, Edie Falco, Aida Turturro and Jamie-Lynn Sigler (interviewed by Caryn James!). Tickets are still available for Jim Jarmusch's chat with Dinitia Smith on Sunday afternoon, but again, as far as the rest of these talks go--nothing is ever really sold out, is it?
Posted by stvanairsdale at January 6, 2006 06:08 PM
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