Village Voice | Complete Issue

In Darkness: Down in the Sewer, Desperate to Survive

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Holocaust culture has proved to be essentially infinite—almost 70 years since the end of World War II, and untold stories of decimation and survival are still hitting the mainstream with no light at the end of the tunnel. Agnieszka Holland's new film, In Darkness, opens a scab perhap...

Short and… Sweet, Sincere, Cloying, Beautiful: Oscar Nominees, in Brief

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

This year's Academy Award–nominated shorts offer a little something for every viewing temperament—though some categories require sitting through a lot of mediocre to get to the good.

Of the five documentaries, Saving Face and God Is the Bigger Elvis were sadly no...

Back from War, a Mom and Wife Fights the Consequences in Return

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Still wearing desert camo, Kelli (Linda Cardellini) comes back from a tour of duty in an unspecified country to the husband (Michael Shannon), the two young daughters, and the suburban house in a small Ohio town that she left behind a year ago. Deployed with the National Guard to work in the not-...

Down into the Black Hole with Turin Horse and Miners' Hymns

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Béla Tarr, the Hungarian director who became something like the patron saint of slow cinema with 1994's 450-minute Sátántangó, has made some of the toughest endurance tests in film history. Watching his latest, The Turin Horse (co-credited to Ágnes...

Chico & Rita

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

In Oscar nominee Chico & Rita, the life of Cuban pianist and composer Bebo Valdés seems to have been translated first into fairy tale and then through the filter of cinema before it wound up as a work of animation. The result has only a loose resemblance to Valdés's story&mda...

'Talking Landscape: Early Media Work, 1974-1984'

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Chicago-born Andrea Callard, among the first wave of Tribeca artist-settlers in the early '70s, loved to find the country in the city. Several of her Super 8 short films from that period on view at her Maysles tribute (which also includes slide shows of her hand-colored print collages) reveal nat...

The Dish & the Spoon

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

In premise, plotting, and style, Alison Bagnall's sophomore feature would seem like just another mumble-stumble down micro-indie lane. Averting makeup and employment, boho goddess Greta Gerwig tentatively inhabits a beach house off-season, while the camera, as well as the action it records, has t...

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Its production design inspired by Yes album covers and Candy Land, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island continues the weak Jules Verne–inspired adventures of 2008's Journey to the Center of the Earth. Of the original cast and major crew, only Josh Hutcherson, as Sean, a sulky teen...

Bonsai People: The Vision of Muhammad Yunus

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Ideal only for the junior-high classroom, Holly Mosher's dull-as-dishwater doc fudges the line between socially progressive message-spreading and suspicious hagiography in its celebration of Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. Working to alleviate poverty, ...

Private Romeo

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Although there was a time when only men were allowed to perform Shakespeare, writer-director Alan Brown's queer, all-male riff on Romeo and Juliet overconfidently shoehorns the star-crossed romance into a pandering coming-of-ager about sexual identity and equality. Transposed to a modern m...

Free Will Astrology: February 8-14, 2011

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

ARIES [March 21–April 19] "Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or conquest," said author George Eliot. I believe the same is true even about intimate bonds that have not been legally consecrated. Each tends to either be a collaboration of equals who are striving for common...

Best in Show: Doug Wheeler at David Zwirner; 'It's the Political Economy, Stupid'

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

When you walk toward Doug Wheeler's bright, alluring enclosure, you might feel like one of those characters about to visit another dimension in fantasy films. Wearing paper booties (supplied for the journey), you will take tentative steps toward the glowing threshold, pass through what appears to...

Pulqueria: ¡Hola, los Cocktails!

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

According to Aztec myth, Mayahuel—the divine personification of the agave plant—invented pulque and pumped the Mexican booze from her 400 breasts, feeding and intoxicating her offspring, known as the 400 Rabbits. Nowadays, the milky alcohol is made by fermenting the sap of several dif...

Kavkaz: Nuts to You

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

In a borough famous for its pickle platters, this one was exceptional. The tantalizing assortment flaunted big leaves of cabbage tinted bright pink with beet juice, slender green pepperoncini, a puckeringly tart carrot slaw, sliced unripe tomatoes, pale gooseberries with wrinkly skins, miniature ...

Charles Gayle Embraces His Alter Ego

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

The East Village has been transformed into a high-rise highbrow apocalypse, but at least one vestige of downtown's grizzled avant-garde remains: jazz titan Charles Gayle. "I walked into this because one winter, I couldn't make it anymore, living in the squat and the cold all the time," explains G...

Don Giovanni Keeps the Jersey-Punk Dream Alive

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

The informal slogan of New Jersey's Don Giovanni Records is "local hits for the drunk and alone crowd." It's a fitting characterization of a DIY label incubated in New Brunswick, a Rutgers-stuffed town close enough to New York City and Philadelphia to ...

Skrillex Gets Deep on the Cusp of the Grammys

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

This Sunday, the music business celebrates itself with the 54th running of the Grammy Awards, where the impossible task of categorizing pop music is made plain. Songs from diametrically opposed genres butt up against one another in the Big Four categories—Album, Record, and Song of the Year...

Remember How to Dance, New York?

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

New Yorkers are going to have to learn to dance again. After being conditioned to just sit around and blab thanks to years of lounges foisted on us by the city's no-dance-licenses-for-the-wicked restrictions, the gays are being cannonballed onto the dancefloor with xl, the glossy West 42nd Street...

House Arrest, Redefined

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

On a recent Tuesday around 9 p.m., 21-year-old Terrence Brown left his Bronx apartment to take out the garbage. Dressed in slippers and pajamas, he walked down the hall to the trash chute. Three police officers approached him.

"Do you live here?" one of them asked.

"Yes," he said....

Look Back in Anger: Surly to Bed

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

For the British theater, the historical importance of John Osborne's 1956 play, Look Back in Anger (Laura Pels Theatre), can't be underestimated. It marked a pivotal shift not only for theatergoers but also for Britain's cultural consciousness generally. Playwrights as different from Osbor...

Botanica: Jim Findlay's Hothouse

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Unless some local troupe stages an unusually rigorous revival of Little Shop of Horrors soon, Botanica—now playing at 3LD—likely stands as this season's only show to credit a "plant interaction designer" and a "consulting botanist." Amid a research lab/bio-dome (courtesy...

Jazz Hayden and the Fight Against Stop-and-Frisk

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Jazz Hayden might be the most unlikely character in the long-running controversy over the NYPD's stop-and-frisk campaign, which has affected more than 4 million New Yorkers since 2004.

The 70-year-old Hayden, whose given name is Joseph, is a longtime community activist in Harlem. In a pas...

The Ugly One Looks Good

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Alfredo Narciso, who plays Lette in The Ugly One, is a handsome man. Yet not according to the characters who share the Soho Rep stage with him in Marius von Mayenburg’s barbed satire. “We can’t stand the sight of you,” his boss (Andrew Garman) confesses. Even his lovin...

Protect the Abs at All Cost

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

“He's sooo hot,” the woman sitting next to me at the screening of Safe House sighed to her friend as the film's opening images of Ryan Reynolds working out flashed on the screen. She then went on to fiddle with her BlackBerry for half the movie. Based on those two actions, she ...

Where's The Real Mexico?

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Dear Mexican: This question was inspired by the recent video you did on the Republicanos and the Latina/o vote. What’s your opinion of Cuban-American and Tea Party cariñito Marco Rubio? All this talk about him being the “Hispanic” savior of the Republican...

You, My Mother: Mothers, Daughters, Animal Suits

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Where better to stage a show called You, My Mother than at La MaMa, a space that for so many years served as a womb in which experimental arts could gestate. If La MaMa has been less fertile of late, the 50th Anniversary Season attempts to merge old favorites (Ping Chong, John Jesurun) wit...

For Better or for Amnesia

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

The Vow, a full-bodied lunge for the heartstrings, has a humdinger of a premise, forcing its characters to face a question that most of us ask ourselves: If you could do the past five years over again, would you live them the same or take a mulligan?

A young married couple, Leo and...