Museum of the Moving Image
A museum gets the Muppets, but not Bloomberg's bluppet
Mayor Michael Bloomberg today announced that Jim Henson would get his own gallery at the Museum of the Moving Image, but not his personal "bluppet." More
Todd Haynes: 'When you don't try to imitate reality, something even more real happens.'
"Genres associated with women, like domestic dramas, are denigrated and looked down upon and male associated dramas maintain a currency in contemporary culture," Haynes said. It's a reasonable argument, given the continued prevalence of contemporary science fiction, fantasy, Western and noir genre films that Hollywood and independent filmmakers alike continue to produce and critics continue to praise. More
A fittingly massive presentation of Todd Haynes' 'Mildred Pierce'
Haynes's stunning adaptation originally aired on HBO in late March and mid-April of last year. It clocks in at a little less than six hours long. The Museum's screening is part of their "Fashion in Film Festival: If Looks Could Kill" series. But this isn't the first time they've screened all of Haynes's adaptation on a big screen. (They previewed the mini-series last year before it aired on HBO.) More
The prescient, avant-garde comedy of Ernie Kovacs and Edie Adams, recovered classics of early television
A year ago, Shout! Factory issued a six-DVD box set, The Ernie Kovacs Collection. A typical review came from Jonathan Lethem in Playboy, who wrote: “The Nairobi Trio [one of Kovacs' skits] is ... one of only two things in the entire universe with the power to wildly delight any human being from age two to the most sophisticated (i.e., sullen, punk, tripping on drugs) teenager to adults of any age and not only do so on first contact but repeated to infinity.” More
Production designer Mark Friedberg shares the secrets of making the cinematic worlds of Wes Anderson, Ang Lee and Todd Haynes
“I made my career on films that probably shouldn’t have been made, economically,” said production designer Mark Friedberg at the first in a new series of quarterly master classes at the Museum of the Moving Image this past Sunday afternoon. More
The film-maker who repeats himself to create something startlingly original
Every time a new Wes Anderson movie comes out, critics whip out the same tired lament: “It’s the same movie over and over again.” Formulaic repetition is one thing. But when a director’s style becomes instantly recognizable, accusations of “self-indulgence,” that great nonsensical catchall phrase used to put down artists as disparate as Federico Fellini and Brian De Palma, are immediately trotted out. More
Hong Sang-Soo gets a well-earned retrospective of his melancholic but sharply rendered social comedies
That the films of 51-year-old South Korean writer/director Hong Sang-Soo have been a welcome mainstay on the international festival circuit over the past decade and a half should come as no surprise; his melancholic but sharply rendered social comedies about male narcissism are often set in the milieu of filmmakers and film critics. What is surprising is that these conceptually interlocking chronicles of young adults fumbling through states of drunken idiocy and false clarity so rarely gain U.S. distribution. As a stopgap remedy, Hong is being honored with a five-film retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image, in conjunction with the Korea Society, starting this weekend. More
A Capital anticipations list: Hallets Point, Aqueduct, Andy Warhol, Tennis (the band)
Each week, Capital's editors and writers will offer a list of the events, activities, releases and personal obsessions that we are looking forward to during the next week. Here is a list of our anticipations. More
'The Muppets Take Manhattan': An anthem for the struggling young New Yorker, still
It’s easy to understand why the Landmark Sunshine Cinema regularly screens The Muppets Take Manhattan as part of their midnight-movie initiative.
As an instructional guide, the movie is probably of limited use to actual human beings. But it's a fantasy you can easily relate to if you are, say, a struggling young would-be artist enrolled at New York University’s Tisch School for Performing Arts. More
