Video
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
- Soda Pictures
As his fellow students protest and march—Tokyo had its '60s radicals, too—brooding college student Toru Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama) falls into a romantic affair with the delicate, damaged Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi). The two come together in unspoken grief after the suicide of their mutual friend, Kizuki, who was also Naoko's first love.
The young couple's first sexual encounter leads to a emotional breakdown for Naoko, who retreats to a countryside sanitarium. Watanabe, meanwhile, executes a retreat of his own—into books and ideas and the new vistas of college life. He soon encounters the beautiful, free-spirited Midori (Kiko Mizuhara), whose sunniness seems a light at the end of his tunnel. Then things get complicated.
Norwegian Wood is a beautiful and melancholy film that moves to its own unhurried rhythms. Not much happens, but when it does, it's tidal in force. Young love, the film suggests, is the same in any era or place—baffling, euphoric and occasionally scary as hell.
One fascinating aspect of the film's love stories is that, for the central characters, the sex is anything but casual. The young adults in Norwegian Wood are suspended between Japanese cultural tradition and the glad tidings of the sexual revolution drifting in from the West. For them, sex is decidedly liberating—but also inseparable from honesty, responsibility and loyalty.
Director Tran Anh Hung (The Scent of Green Papaya) uses music to underline themes of past versus future; yesterday versus tomorrow. The traditional orchestral score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood is punctuated by snippets from the Doors and the Beatles. Keep in mind this is 1960s Tokyo, back when Japanese hipsters shopped for American vinyl records, and not the other way around.
Norwegian Wood is one of those great little films you can usually find migrating to home video in any given week. The film had a limited release in a few North American cities earlier this year, but otherwise you'd need to have attended a festival in Toronto or Venice to catch this one.
The Extras: English subtitles, an hour-long making-of doc and a featurette on the film's premiere at the 2010 Venice Film Festival, where it was nominated for a Golden Lion award.
Formats: DVD and various digital platforms.
Also New This Week:
- Liam Neeson continues his oddly convincing makeover into hard-guy action hero with THE GREY (DVD/Blu-ray/digital) concerning planes crashes, wolves and Dermot Mulroney.
- The acclaimed indie doc WE WERE HERE (DVD/digital) documents the AIDS crisis in 1980s San Francisco through archival footage and eyewitness accounts.
- The sci-fi drama CHRONICLE (DVD/Blu-ray/digital) was a surprise critical and commercial success earlier this year, and suggests that the found-footage gimmick isn't totally played out yet.
Plus: Glenn Close and Janet McTeer in their Oscar-nominated roles in the historical drama ALBERT NOBBS, Woody Harrelson in the cop drama RAMPART, Old Scratch in the exorcism thriller THE DEVIL INSIDE and the Criterion Collection's reissue of BEING JOHN MALKOVICH on Blu-ray and DVD.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
- Photo by Lauren Goldberg
Since she’s coming to Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill on Monday to promote her memoir Agorafabulous! , Artery rounded up 10 of her funniest moments on YouTube. (For more, look through ol’ girl’s YouTube page.)
Sara Starts Beef with Rapper Jean Grae
In what has to be one of the funniest celebrity co-signs of an MC ever, Benincasa endorses Brooklyn rapper Grae (how did those two even hook up?) by claiming to be perturbed by her witty rhymes and launching a mock campaign to stop Grae from being funnier than her. As she puts it in the clip, “I feel about Jean Grae the same way the Tea Party feels about Mexicans.”
Sara Explains Lost in Five Minutes
Sure, she hasn’t seen one episode, but she’s heard enough from obsessed friends to basically break down the entire show. To be honest, from the way she describes it—from calling it “a fucked-up, Lord of the Flies thing” to constantly referring to Josh Holloway’s Sawyer as a lesbian—her version of the show sounds much preferable.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
red, black and GREEN: a blues redefines environmentalism in hip hop culture
- photo by D.L. Anderson
- Marc Bamuthi Joseph, in "red, black and GREEN: a blues," in the Process Series at UNC-CH
Marc Bamuthi Joseph
The Process Series
Gerard Hall, UNC-CH
Jan. 22, 8 p.m.
Multi-media artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph noticed that there wasn’t a lot of overlap between the environmental movement and the people actually living in some of the most compromised environments in America. It got him to wondering why—and wondering if increased communication, exchange and cooperation between these populations were possible.
“Obviously, folks of color and folks in low-income communities have had survival practices for generations that have often gone unnoticed by the environmental movement—and unseen by ‘corporate green’,” noted colleague Hodari Davis, at a “Life is Living” festival in New York. Similar festivals over the past year in Chicago, Houston and Oakland, Calif. have attempted to redefine environmentalism in the context of hip hop culture—and have served as “field work” for a new performance piece that asks if art can facilitate community organizing and environmental change.
The name of the work in progress is “red black and GREEN: a blues.” And since it’s the latest participant in UNC’s “Process Series,” an audience in Chapel Hill sees an early version of two sections from the piece tonight.
“What we’re trying to do is create space on different levels for new work to be developed,” notes curator Joseph Megel.
This week, the three-year-old program for professional works in progress hasn’t just provided Joseph and collaborators Theaster Gates and documentary filmmaker Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi with studio time.
“We’ve created the opportunity for them to talk to professors in urban planning and ecological sciences here, so there can be a deepening of the discussion with scholarship on ecology,” says Megel.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Preview: Pilobolus and Art Spiegelman's
"Hapless Hooligan in 'Still Moving'"
The news is already breaking on the new Pilobolus Dance Theater collaboration with cartoonist Art Spiegelman, creator of In the Shadow of No Towers and the ground-breaking graphic novel, Maus.
Laura Collins-Hughes' June 20 article in the Boston Globe first tantalized us with descriptions of the working process and still images from the work.
Then Dartmouth, where the ADF co-commission work premiered, released three juicy minutes of highlights from the work, on YouTube:
About the same time, Pilobolus published a ten-minute featurette on the work, including behind the scenes intervews with Spiegelman, chhoreographer Michael Tracy and animators Dan and Jason of Hornet Inc., who had to find common ground between Spiegelman's still imagery and Pilobolus' choreography:
And finally — at least, for now — Alastair Macaulay's review of the new work, which ran Monday in the New York Times, praised its "dizzying overlap of cartoon, film, silhouette theater, and live dance," which "picks up on, and refreshes, aspects of Pilobolus that have been there since the beginning: the dream logic, the clowning, the sense of physical liberation that’s only at times highly sexual, and the defiance of categorization."
Created as part of their Retrospective Project (2009-2012), and edited by Eiko Otake Yamada with assistance from designer Tara Kelton and videographer Shoko Letton, the 37-minute film "shows the trajectory of Eiko & Koma's career through short excerpts" from works created since the duo moved to the United States in 1976.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
DURHAM—At 8:30 Saturday night, Oct. 24, Michael Jackson fans gathered at The Pavilion at Durham Central Park for a tribute to the late entertainer calledThrill the World. It was a part of a worldwide event meant to synchronize participants at 12:30 a.m. UTC/GMT doing a dance similar to the one in Jackson’s “Thriller” music video.
The first“Thriller” dance took place in Toronto in 2006, in an affair that drew 62 people and set the Guinness Book of World Records' "record" for most “Thriller” dancers in one place and time. By last year, the event had gone global and attracted more than 4,000 did the (nearly) inimitable dance.
Approximately 40 people turned out to the Durham gig, which was planned and executed locally within a span of two weeks.
Footage taken by Belem Destefani. Video produced by Belem Destefani and Sarah Ewald.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Tonight at 7, N.C. State’s Campus Cinema is showing Decasia, Bill Morrison’s hypnotic collage of decaying film stock from the early days of motion pictures. For lovers of the visual arts it’s a must-see, well worth a trip to Raleigh if you don’t live there.
For a preview of sorts, check out this short Morrison made two years after Decasia. Using the same methods and collaborating with the same composer (Michael Gordon of Bang on a Can), Light Is Calling is an 8-minute feast of images and sound that someone was thoughtful enough to post on YouTube in high definition (for best results, click through to watch the video on YouTube, then be sure to click the little “HQ” button at the bottom right of the screen to see it in high quality).
Friday, August 14, 2009
Each year, thousands of young ballerinas dream of entering The Juilliard School, the pre-eminent conservatory in the United States for professional training in the performing arts. Of those, only hundreds actually work up the resume—and the nerve—to show up for one of nine regional auditions held annually across the country.
The day begins with an advanced ballet and modern dance class—where three-fourths of the applicants are weeded out. The survivors from that round present a two-minute solo they’ve prepared: two whole minutes to show your full range and achievement as a performer. In New York, 22 members of the dance faculty are your audience—not the entire department, perhaps, but a generous representation nonetheless.
They sit and silently watch you perform the work in the video clip here. When you finish, they don’t applaud. Instead, one just says “Thank you,” and you leave.
Should you make that cut, you’re invited back to be taught a section from a piece out of Juilliard’s repertory, to see how quickly you pick up new choreography, how you function in an ensemble rehearsal, and how you respond to corrections. Survive that, and there’s the interview; a cozy one-on-one, with open-ended questions about everything from your source of inspiration as an artist to your views on the greatest challenge facing your generation.
Thousands dream of joining the ranks of famous alumni, including Martha Clarke, Susan Marshall, Ohad Naharin and Paul Taylor; of being taught by a faculty that has included Martha Graham, Anthony Tudor and José Limon.
Hundreds apply.
In the end, only twelve are chosen.
This year, one is coming from Raleigh. Her name is Lea Ved.
Further details after the jump.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Footage of the 2009 American Dance Festival program Past/Forward with performances of Faye Driscoll's There's So Much Mad in Me and Laura Dean's Infinity, as reconstructed by Rodger Belman. The piece Various Stages of Drowning: A Cabaret by Rosie Herrera is not shown here, but will also be performed.
Produced by Belem Destefani and Sarah Ewald.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Slideshow Preview for Doug Elkins and Friends: Fraülein Maria
Images of Doug Elkins and Friends performing Fraülein Maria at the 2009 American Dance Festival. Commentary and production by Belem Destefani and Sarah Ewald.
Frequent Indy contributor Kate Dobbs Ariail saw the show Monday night and just published this review at cvnc.org.
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