By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
Screening Gotham: May 12-14, 2006
A few of this weekend’s worthwhile cinematic happenings around New York:
–Kyle Smith’s trenchant review in today’s Post notwithstanding (sample criticism: “The documentary, … which seeks to knock our former mayor off his pedestal, hits him with all the force of a wadded-up Kleenex.”), the new film Giuliani Time presents a dense, occasionally fascinating portrait of Rudy Giuliani’s rise through the federal attorney ranks to become “America’s Mayor” in the months following 9/11. While director Kevin Keating could shave at least 15 minutes from relating relative non-issues like the Giuliani family’s mob history (old news) and face time for camera gnats like Al Sharpton and Donald Trump, his painstaking exploration of education and law-enforcement issues provides a sobering counterpoint to the mainstream media’s unchecked Giuliani hagiography. The segment featuring former schools commisioner Rudy Crew is a tour de force that I can only hope finds a national audience if–or when–Giuliani decides to travel the presidential campaign trail come 2008.
–In 2006, on the centenary of his birth, the great writer Samuel Beckett is probably bigger than ever. His native Dublin has been celebrating the man and his work pretty much nonstop since New Year’s Day, and stateside, MoMA found an angle for its own little piece of the minimalist orgy: Film, which shares the distinction of being Beckett’s only foray into cinema as well as Buster Keaton’s final movie. It screens all weekend as part of a program also celebrating Beckett’s benefactor Barney Rosset, whose Grove Press also bankrolled works by Jean Genet and more recently, James Fotopoulos. The latter filmmaker’s latest work (based on a screenplay by Eugene Ionesco) will premiere tonight; a discussion featuring Rosset, Fotopoulos and critic Ed Halter follows. Seeing as admission is free, you could not really ask for a cheaper 100th birthday present to Beckett.
–The Robert Altman/Garrison Keillor collaboration A Prairie Home Companion will receive no fewer than three special New York screenings before its release June 9; the first takes place tonight at the Walter Reade Theater, where Keillor will drop in afterward to chat. Procrastinators rejoice, however: Makor has its own screening approaching May 30, and the Museum of the Moving Image is bringing Altman back out to Queens June 8.