Weekend Cultural Highlights, October 23-25, 2009
by Seth Rogovoy
If this weekend were a U2 song, it would be called “When Film Comes to Town,” what with two film festivals in our region taking place separated by only a half-hour drive. (As to why they were scheduled for the same weekend, only the scheduling gods can say.)
Opening the www.williamstownfilmfest.com ">Williamstown Film Festvial’s 11th season on Friday, October 23, at Images Cinema is the Berkshire premiere of Handsome Harry. Directed by Bette Gordon, who will be at the screening and take questions after, the film features an extraordinary cast: Jamey Sheridan, Steve Buscemi, Aidan Quinn, John Savage, and WFF alumnus Campbell Scott.
Harry Sweeney (Sheridan) gets a call from a former Navy buddy of 30 years before who wants Harry to seek forgiveness on his behalf from a comrade they betrayed long ago. As memory exerts its hold, Harry drives down the East Coast to look up his old friends. As he confronts the three other men complicit in a long-ago crime, two mysteries gradually unfold - what really h appened on that night three decades ago, and how that event has shaped Harry's life ever since. Only by facing the distant past - and the man he betrayed - can Harry begin truly to live again.
Tickets for Handsome Harry are $18 (students $10).
The New England premiere of Against the Current, directed by Peter Callahan from his own screenplay which was read in a joint WFF/WTF event five years ago, takes place on Saturday at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass.
Paul (Joseph Fiennes of Shakespeare in Love) calls on his old friend Jeff (Justin Kirk) and a schoolteacher looking for excitement (Elizabeth Reaser) to join him as he carries out a dream of swimming the Hudson River from Troy to New York harbor. Rain or shine, Paul keeps a tight schedule, swimming while his friends ride alongside in an old motorboat. He's adamant that they reach New York by Augu st 28. But the journey takes a troubling turn when Paul reveals that there’s more to the trip than Jeff and Liz had thought.
With each day a ga llows humor settles over the three as they find themselves arguing the finer points of jelly doughnuts, sex, and death. An overnight stay with Liz’s mother (Mary Tyler Moore) and cousin (Michelle Trachtenberg) only complicates things. While the jokes and one-liners mix with deeper exchanges, the journey becomes a fight not only to save a friend but to discover what they seek inside themselves.
The director will attend and do a Q-&-A after the screening.
Tickets for Against the Current are $13 adults (students $7), and are available at www.williamstownfilmfest.com or (413) 458-9900. Since this is a joint WFF/MASS MoCA event, tickets may also be purchased at www.massmoca.org or at (413) 662-2111.
Returning for its tenth year, the four-day long movie marathon known as FilmColumbia comes to the village of Chatham, N.Y., October 22 - 25.
Bringing a star-studded lineup of more than 30 international screenings, plus panel discussions, script readings, parties, and more, the festival “has something for everyone,” says Peter Biskind, executive director and co-programmer (along with Larry Kardish) of FilmColumbia.
Highlights of the 2009 schedule include noteworthy releases such as The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, the last movie to star actor Heath Ledger, who died in the midst of production.
The film would’ve died too, Biskind explains, were it not for the unique script. “The characters plunge through a mirror confronting their true selves and changing their physical selves. That premise allowed three other actors—Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law—all friends of Ledger—to be incorporated into the story without revisions.”
Other movies showing this year at FilmColumbia spotlight historical characters (Mussolini in Vincere; Queen Victoria in The Young Victoria; Barack Obama in By the People); political drama (The White Ribbon, Axis of Good, The Men Who Stare At Goats); documentary work (Living In Emergency, I.O.U.S.A); comedy (The Maid, A Serious Man, and the Saturday night sneak); and melodrama (That Evening Sun, Against the Current, Fish Tank), plus numerous special interest films and cutting-edge adult animation.
Many of the screenings are followed by a Q&A session in which the director, producer, and/or actors in a film discuss the making of the movie and field questions from the audience.
Produced and organized by an all-volunteer group of members from the Chatham Film Club under the direction of Calliope Nicholas, FilmColumbia uses three Chatham village venues—the Crandell Theatre, The Morris Memorial, and the Tracy Memorial—for film screenings and special events.
For a complete listing of movies and events at this year’s festival, go to www.filmcolumbia.com. Tickets may be purchased individually for each film or moviegoers can pre-order an All-Film Pass ($80 members; $110 non-members) or a Gold Pass ($125 members; $175 non-members), which allows entry into all events. Ticket sales to Chatham Film Club members begin on October 1 by mail or telephone (518-392-3445). Sales to the general public start October 9, including online ticket orders and in-person advance sales at the Chatham Book Store. Tickets may also be purchased during the festival at the Tracy Memorial. However, most films sell out early, so advance p urchases are highly encouraged.
There will be more than movie reels coming to Chatham, however. In addition to 25-plus full length and short films being screened during the four-day movie marathon at Chatham’s Crandell Theatre and Morris Memorial building, the festival also hosts visiting filmmakers, scriptwriters, producers, and actors from around the world.
One of this year’s notable visiting celebrities is Wen-Pin Chen, the Taiwanese screenwriter and leading actor starring in No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti (“I Can’t Live Without You”), winner of the Best Film at the Taipei Film festival. Described as a “hauntingly beautiful” movie, it tells the story of an impoverished dockworker in southern Taiwan struggling to raise his daughter after the break up of his marriage. Scheduled to screen at the Morris on Park Row, Saturday, October 24 at 7:30 pm, this showing is the U.S. premiere of the foreign film. Mr.Wen-Pin Chen will be on hand for a Q&A with the audience following the movie.
In conjunction with this screening, a special photo exhibit of Taiwanese culture, people, and landscape will be installed in the lobby of the Morris. Viewing is free to the public; tickets to the film are $8 for Chatham Film Club members and students; $10 for non-members.
Also at the Morris on Saturday, the film Axis of Good will be shown at 3, followed by a content discussion with Sally Goodrich, whose crisis is profiled in the hour-long documentary. The narrative tells the story of how Sally and Donald Goodrich dealt with the sudden loss of their son—a 9/11 victim—and her subsequent battle with cancer, by making a life-affirming mission to Afghanistan to set up a school for 500 girls outside Kabul.
On tap for Sunday at 5:15 in the Crandell, Victor Navasky will present By The People: The Election of Barack Obama, a documentary directed by Amy Rice and Alicia Sams. Having gained unprecedented access to then-senator and presidential candidate Obama, Rice and Sams give a remarkable behind-the-scenes account of the historic election. Navasky, Publisher Emeritus of the Nation Magazine and a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, will lead the audience in a discussion of the film content.
Other special films in the four-day lineup include a widely-acclaimed release from the Coen brothers (A Serious Man) as well as a new film starring the late Heath Ledger (The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus). Also of note in the screenings, The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke's new movie, was this year's Palm D'or winner at the Cannes Film Festival. An Education, created fr om a script by British novelist Nick Hornby, took home the Audience Award at Sundance Film Festival this year while a dark comedy from Chile, The Maid, won Sundance's Grand Jury Prize. Currently creating much buzz and accolades from the film community is Precious, a new movie portraying the harrowing life of a young black girl in Harlem, circa 1987.
For show times, tickets, and information on these films and others at FilmColumbia, go to www.filmcolumbia.com or call 518-392-3445. Advance tickets can also be purchased at The Chatham Bookstore.
Follwing her sold-out summer engagement at Jae's Spice, Amanda McBroom brings her acclaimed cabaret performances to BSC's Stage 2 on Friday and Saturday night.
Amanda McBroom has been called “...the greatest cabaret performer of her generation, an urban poet who writes like an angel and has a voice to match.”
Her name first came to the attention of the music public when Bette Midler’s version of Amanda’s song The Rose hit number one all over the world in 1979. But it was Amanda’s performance of her own song on the Golden Globes (she won), the Grammys (she didn’t) and The Tonight Show that launched her career as a singer as well as songwriter.
Her songs have been recorded by the likes of Bette Midler, Leanne Rimes, Barry Manilow, Judy Collins, Barbara Cook, Anne Murray, Harry Belafonte, Betty Buckley, Stephanie Mills, The Manhattan Transfer, Donny Osmond, the Chipmunks, and the Baby Dinosaurs in Land Before Time (she wrote all the songs for 11 Universal Cartoon videos).
Amanda McBroom with Michele Brourman plays at BSC Stage 2, 36 Linden Street, Pittsfield, MA, on Friday, October 23 and Saturday, October 24, 2009 at 8:00 pm. Tickets are $35 for both performances and are available by calling the BSC Box Office at (413) 236-8888 or purchase online at www.barringtonstageco.org.
The Blue Heron Renaissance Choir will present a concert entitled A Century of French Song, featuring chansons of the fifteenth century, on Sunday, Oct. 25, at 3 in Brooks-Rogers Recital Hall on the Williams College campus.
Symbolic of o
ur ephemeral world, the blue heron, capable of inspiring us with its beauty and majesty, enriches our spirit as long as we are mindful. Its beauty is not enough to preserve it, nor can it be taken for granted. It takes an active effort to preserve such lovely and delicate things.
ur ephemeral world, the blue heron, capable of inspiring us with its beauty and majesty, enriches our spirit as long as we are mindful. Its beauty is not enough to preserve it, nor can it be taken for granted. It takes an active effort to preserve such lovely and delicate things. The Boston-based Blue Heron Renaissance Choir is a vocal ensemble that combines a commitment to vivid live performance of Renaissance music with the study of original source materials and historical performance practice. While of great interest to scholars, this repertoire also retains an immediacy even centuries after its creation, a power both touching and visceral.
Performing to critical acclaim, Blue Heron explores diverse repertories, including fifteenth-century English and Franco-Flemish polyphony by composers such as Dunstable, Du Fay, Ockeghem and Josquin; Spanish music between about 1500 and 1575; and neglected early sixteenth-century English music, especially the rich and unexplored repertory of the Peterhouse partbooks (c. 1540).
The ensemble also reaches outside these areas, performing very early music (organa by the twelfth-century French composer Perotinus), very recent music (new works by Elliott Gyger), and more, including the complete Eighth Book of Madrigals by Luca Marenzio, prepared for the international Marenzio conference at Harvard University in April 2006. Now celebrating its tenth anniversary, Blue Heron presents its own series of concerts in Cambridge and performs regularly throughout the northeast. Its first CD, featuring music by Guillaume Du Fay, was released in March of 2007 on the Blue Heron label.
In this concert, five singers and three instrumentalists will perform songs by Guillaume Du Fay (c. 1397-1474) and Gilles Binchois (c. 1400-1460), two of the most celebrated European composers of first part of the fifteenth century, credited by their contemporaries with bringing a new sweetness to continental music. From the next generation are songs by Busnoys, Ockeghem, Morton and Frye. Music by all six of these composers appears in the so-called "Chansonnier cordiforme," a lavishly illustrated and gilded heart-shaped songbook from the latter half of the fifteenth century. Blue Heron's instrumentalists will play harps, as well as fiddles or vielles, rebec, recorder, and douçaine, a soft double-reed instrument.
concert hotline: 413-597-3146
Tickets required. They will be available one hour prior to the performance. No Reservations.
Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living’s award-winning editor-in-chief and cultural critic. His book, BOB DYLAN: Prophet, Mystic, Poet, will be published by Scribner in November 2009
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