nyc

The Most Beautiful Night in the World (Sekai de Ichiban Utsukushii Yoru)

by James McNally on July 2, 2008

in Film Festivals,Travel

The Most Beautiful Night in the World (Sekai de Ichiban Utsukushii Yoru)

The Most Beautiful Night in the World (Sekai de Ichiban Utsukushii Yoru) (2008, Director: Daisuke Tengan): Thanks to the good folks at the J-Films Powwow blog, I wound up with a free ticket to this film, screening as part of the New York Asian Film Festival. It was the per­fect end to a four-day trip to the city, and a great way to spend three hours inside on another swel­tering hot day. Daisuke Tengan is the son of legendary dir­ector Shohei Imamura and is well-known as the writer of such classic films as Takashi Miike’s Audition (1999), as well as his father’s films Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (2001) and The Eel (1997). This film just opened in Japan in late May, and this screening was the second at NYAFF, where it was making its inter­na­tional premiere.

Starting with an anim­ated pro­logue, the film quickly takes this sense of whimsy and adds layers and layers of mys­tery, creep­i­ness, humour and sex until it cli­maxes (sorry!) in a huge orgy scene that scan­dal­ized the Japanese press. The mys­tery involves a small vil­lage with the highest birth rate in Japan. Our 14-year old nar­rator takes us back to a time before her birth when a journ­alist from Tokyo was exiled to work at the vil­lage news­paper as the result of a sex scandal. Since there’s no real news, he digs around trying to find out as much about the town’s eccentric inhab­it­ants. He uncovers what he thinks is a murder con­spiracy. The pro­pri­et­ress of the local bar is a mys­ter­ious and sexy woman whose fiancé and then hus­band both died under mys­ter­ious cir­cum­stances. Thinking he has an insur­ance scam artist in his sights, he pur­sues the story fur­ther but it’s nothing at all like he thought. Instead, by the end of the film, a sexual revolu­tion has been launched by the eccentric inhab­it­ants of this mys­ter­ious village.

Director Tengan, even in this enter­taining film, makes a polit­ical state­ment. Sex, he says, takes us back to our more prim­itive state, and des­troys cul­ture and civil­iz­a­tion. But in light of what civil­iz­a­tion and its rep­res­ent­at­ives (politi­cians, clergy) have done to us, maybe that’s not such a bad thing at all. Railing at all polit­ical and reli­gious creeds, he assures us “there is no prom­ised future,” only the one we make for ourselves. Though orgies and wild sex might not seem polit­ic­ally sub­versive, con­sider, one char­acter says, what would happen if everyone stopped what they were doing and just had sex for one night. We would have no war, no politics, no reli­gion. Just love and pas­sion and pleasure. It would be “the most beau­tiful night in the world.”

Yes, the sen­ti­ment is shallow and, as por­trayed on screen, a little silly, but it’s heart­felt and actu­ally kind of sexy and moving at the same time. And des­pite its run­ning time (161 minutes), the film is never less than enter­taining. Don’t make me come up with some lame joke about length here. Just see it, if you can.

Official site of the film (Japanese) including the trailer

9/10(9/10)

Tagged as: japan, newyorkcity, nyaff, nyc, sex

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Four Days in New York

by James McNally on June 25, 2008 · 1 comment

in Travel

I rarely step out from behind my film reviewer’s desk to address you dir­ectly, but I did want to men­tion that I’ll be in New York City from this Friday until the fol­lowing Monday. My wife is attending the OrigamiUSA con­ven­tion (yes, that just might qualify her as even geekier than me) and I’m tag­ging along. We spent a long weekend in the city back in January, and watched the entirely bizarre and yet strangely for­get­table Le Cerf-Volant at the MOMA. This time, I have grander film ambitions.

On Saturday night, we’re going to Brooklyn for Rooftop Films’ screening of Neo-Lounge, a doc­u­mentary about a group of expat­ri­ates in Beijing who gathered at a nightclub during the recent SARS crisis. I know nothing about the film, but the set­ting should be mag­ni­fi­cent. The film will be pro­jected on a screen on the roof of The Old American Can Factory.

And on Monday after­noon, I have acquired a pair of tickets to Daisuke Tengan’s The Most Beautiful Night in the World, screening at the IFC Center as part of the New York Asian Film Festival.

Socially, I hope to meet up with a few people with whom I’ve here­to­fore only exchanged emails, including Benten Films co-honcho Andrew Grant and Quiet City/Dance Party, USA dir­ector Aaron Katz, whom I met last weekend at Generation DIY.

If you are in NYC and want to meet up for a beverage, or if you know some­thing cool about things to do in the city, feel free to let me know in the comments.

Tagged as: nyc

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Man On Wire

by James McNally on April 23, 2008 · 10 comments

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

Man On Wire

Man On Wire (2008, Director: James Marsh): Winner of both the Grand Jury Prize: World Cinema Documentary and the World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, James Marsh’s stun­ning film brings an inex­plic­ably obscure story to life in a fresh and exhil­ar­ating way.

On August 7, 1974, a young French wire­walker named Philippe Petit spent 45 minutes sus­pended on a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center. He made eight cross­ings before the police con­vinced him to return to safety. Though this story, according to the dir­ector, is part of New York City folk­lore, not many people out­side the city seem to know any­thing about it. But what a fant­astic story, and Marsh does a mas­terful job in telling it, mostly by let­ting Petit and his com­pan­ions bring it to life.

Petit is a fas­cin­ating figure. An accom­plished jug­gler, wire­walker, and pick­pocket(!), he had sup­ported him­self since his teens by working as a street per­former. A born storyteller, he brings the nar­rative alive, even almost 35 years after his great “coup.” But best of all, Marsh gathers all Petit’s accom­plices as well and has each of them recount their own part in the story. Some were stead­fast, like his lover Annie and his child­hood friend Jean-Louis, and others fickle and cow­ardly, like Americans David Foreman and Alan Welner, who both abandon the quest at the cru­cial moment. All tell their stories can­didly and all still seem envel­oped in wonder that such a thing could be accomplished.

Man On Wire

Petit and some of his com­pan­ions had already planned and executed two other auda­cious feats of wire­walking, first at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and then on the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia. But the Twin Towers had obsessed Petit ever since he’d read about plans to build them, and the team’s pre­par­a­tions are car­ried out like the plan­ning of a bank heist, with one important dif­fer­ence. As con­spir­ator Jean-Francois says, “It may have been illegal…but it wasn’t wicked or mean.”

Marsh art­fully com­bines lively inter­views (espe­cially when Petit is on screen) with stills and film from each of the various events, and even some re-creations (which he later admitted were part of someone else’s aborted film on the sub­ject). A haunting and beau­tiful score by Michael Nyman (com­poser for many of Peter Greenaway’s films) and fea­turing music by Erik Satie, among others, cre­ated the dream­like atmo­sphere neces­sary to appre­ciate this beau­tiful “art crime.”

Of course, it would be impossible to see a film fea­turing the Twin Towers without thinking of the events of 9/11. Marsh wisely avoids making any con­nec­tions, let­ting the footage of the build­ings’ con­struc­tion speak poignantly for itself. Petit’s feat seems even more won­drous when you con­sider that the fra­gile Frenchman sur­vives while the mighty towers lie in ruins.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector James Marsh from after the screening:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 11:00

UPDATE: Mongrel Media will be releasing the DVD of the film in Canada on Tuesday December 9.

Official site for the film
Video inter­view with dir­ector James Marsh and wire­walker Philippe Petit at Sundance 2008

10/10(10/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs08, newyorkcity, nyc, worldtradecenter

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Nursery University

by James McNally on April 20, 2008

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

Nursery University

Nursery University (2008, Directors: Marc Simon and Matt Makar): Marc Simon and Matt Makar are both single, child­less law­yers who have made a film about the com­pet­itive pro­cess that par­ents in Manhattan face get­ting their chil­dren into the best nursery schools in the city. My wife and I went to see this together, and were expecting to be very annoyed with the sub­jects. You see, we’re also child­less, but after more than a decade together, the issue is far from resolved for us, and we both have strong opin­ions about par­enting. Though Toronto isn’t Manhattan, we do have a sim­ilar cul­ture of older pro­fes­sionals having chil­dren for the first time, and the par­ents’ gen­eral sense of enti­tle­ment is naus­eating. As well, they’re driven by both guilt and fear to try to give their chil­dren every advantage in a very com­pet­itive cul­ture. This type of envir­on­ment usu­ally leads to over­sched­uled and stressed-out chil­dren and par­ents, and doesn’t neces­sarily lead to the desired res­ults of fame and for­tune for the little ones.

But Simon and Makar have a light touch, and even though the par­ents ranged from middle-class bohemians living in Greenwich Village to an obvi­ously super wealthy couple living on the Upper West Side, all of them were sym­path­etic char­ac­ters, with the pos­sible excep­tion of one couple who could serve as the poster chil­dren for “entitled”. All of them knew how ridicu­lous the pro­cess looked, but felt power­less to opt out for fear of put­ting their beloved child at a dis­ad­vantage. And remark­ably, all of the chil­dren seemed bright and, at least in the final cut, well-behaved.

The strength of the film was that it was not just parent-focused. Administrators and teachers from all of the top schools were per­suaded to take part, most at the insist­ence of the remark­able Gabriella Rowe from the pres­ti­gious Mandell School. The pres­sure on these school dir­ectors is enormous, with 15–20 applic­ants for each avail­able space. The situ­ation has been driven by what the dir­ectors refer to as a “post 9/11 baby boom” that has driven tuition rates as high as $20,000 per year and cre­ated a market for “admis­sions con­sult­ants” whose ser­vices can also cost a family sev­eral thou­sand dol­lars. The admin­is­trators in this film sym­pathize with the par­ents, but laugh­ingly dis­miss their wor­ries that not get­ting into the right pre-school will affect their child’s chances of get­ting into the right col­lege one day.

Though we were pre­pared to hate these people, my wife and I found ourselves won­dering what we would do in their shoes. In Canada, at least, our public school system is still rel­at­ively healthy, so we don’t have to worry about which nursery is the right “feeder school” for the primary school we want our child to attend. Large cities like New York also face a tangle of reg­u­la­tions that make starting a new school dif­fi­cult, not to men­tion the price of real estate. For the fore­see­able future, get­ting a child into school in the city is bound to be a stressful and expensive pro­pos­i­tion. Many couples end up forced to move to the sub­urbs, des­pite their desire to raise their chil­dren in the cul­tural rich­ness of New York City.

The film was also careful to bal­ance the stressful pro­cess with the reasons why par­ents endure it. There are many images of the riches of Manhattan, and many more of the joy and delight these chil­dren bring to their par­ents. In the end, these people do it because they love their chil­dren and they love their city, and they’ll do whatever they can to ensure that they can keep both. Good luck to all of them.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ectors Marc Simon and Matt Makar from after the screening:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 13:43

Interview with dir­ector Marc Simon in the Wall Street Journal’s Law blog

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs08, children, education, manhattan, newyorkcity, nyc, parenting

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Pinewood Dialogues

by James McNally on January 4, 2008

in Travel,Web Sites

My wife and I are heading to New York City in a few weeks to enjoy a weekend of ballet, sight­seeing, food, and, I hope, cinema. I haven’t been to the city since I was a small child and so I’ve been doing some online research to find out inter­esting places for a cinephile to go. While browsing the site of the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, I found the Pinewood Dialogues, an archive of pod­casts fea­turing inter­views with actors and dir­ectors that stretches all the way back to 1989.

Even if we don’t hike it out to Queens, this online treasure trove makes the online research worthwhile.

By the way, apart from Film Forum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, where else should I con­sider spending some time on our all-too-brief weekend in the city?

Tagged as: newyorkcity, nyc, podcasts

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