Results tagged “ifc”

Thursday night was a milestone for anyone who ever came home to find their newly purchased parrot was not just pining for the fjords. The remaining five members of Monty Python gathered for a rare reunion in honor of the theatrical version of their new film, “Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut)." The lengthier version will be showed over six nights next week on IFC, starting tomorrow night. John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam took the stage after the screening for a Q&A, with the late Graham Chapman represented by a large cardboard cutout. At least they didn't spill his ashes like they did at the Aspen Comedy Festival in 1998!

Last night Radar Magazine hosted a screening of the film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's satirical novel Choke, about a sex-addicted med-school drop-out (played by Sam Rockwell) who works as an Irish indentured servant in a Colonial-era theme park to keep his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother in an expensive private medical hospital. The movie's creepiness gets under your skin a little bit, but it also has a lot of heart, and it's very funny and full of twisted surprises we won't spoil here. Suffice it to say that the anal bead Choke bookmark (photo after the jump) that came with the gift bags speaks volumes about this "dirty-minded, satirical-psychotic comedy."

Sometimes the only interesting parts of Super Bowl Sunday are the ads and the halftime show, and neither of those things are really that great. But not this year! On top of getting a home team in the big game, we get Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers performing during the halftime.

Last year two biopics about John Lennon's assassination made the festival rounds, and are now poised to hit theaters in 2008. One, titled Chapter 27, stars Jared Leto as Mark David Chapman and an actor named Mark Lindsay Chapman portraying John Lennon. While it may be an accurate casting to have Leto playing someone who kills music, his involvement in the film will likely have us choosing the second biopic, The Killing of John Lennon (trailer below).

SKATE: Free skating at Bryant Park just got...more free! Now you can get free rental skates every Wednesday provided you are one of the first 100 people to get over to The Pond Exhibit Area.

MOVIES: A lavishly restored print of Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s visionary film The Holy Mountain has been making the rounds this year; it’s back again this weekend at IFC Center for a pair of midnight screenings. First released in 1973, The Holy Mountain has grown into a cult classic for its surreal, psychedelic imagery and a serpentine, metaphysical storyline, which takes as inspiration, among other things, "The Ascent of Mt. Carmel" by St. John of the Cross and the idea of a mountain uniting heaven and earth.

FOOD: If you haven't been indulging enough this holiday season, have we got a sweet soiree for you. Chocoholics come together tonight to indulge in the finest goodies from around the world. Expect music, cocktails and a giant chocolate buffet.

It's hard to say what enigmatic actor Crispin Glover is best known for: Back to the Future's George McFly? His role in Charlie's Angels? Almost kicking David Letterman in the head? If Glover has his way, he'll ultimately make his mark with his trilogy of films exploring the ways in which the monolithic American movie industry systematically excises various taboos from cinema. The first film in the series, the surreal non-narrative What Is It?, employed...

BAM Cinématek

Recently, IFC News was at the Walter Reade Theater for a New York Film Festival Press Conference for the Brian De Palma film Redacted, where the director was found defending his edit. At the end of the film disturbing images are shown in a montage sequence, photographs that Brian De Palma says "all exist on the internet." That may be so, but Magnolia Pictures owner Mark Cuban doesn't want them on the big screen.

READING: Our interviewee from yesterday, Adrian Tomine, will be reading tonight at Book Court. The graphic novelist not only has his work in some of the more prestigious rags, he's also got a full length graphic novel, titled Shortcomings.

is the project that really encouraged his brilliant madness. It's one of the greatest potential disaster stories in film making and it won Herzog a best director prize at Cannes.

THEATER: In November, Tom Stoppard’s latest smash hit Rock ‘n’ Roll will transfer from London to Broadway (delighting Rushmore fans by bringing Brian Cox – AKA Dr. Guggenheim – in tow.) In the meantime, fans of our most intellectually dazzling living playwright can plug into Stoppard Goes Electric, an evening of three short teleplays that Stoppard penned for BBC early in his career. According to the Boomerang Theatre Company, which is producing the program, some have never been seen live on stage before. Ends Sunday.– John Del Signore

THEATER: We like our comedy like we like our women: black and absurd. So it’s promising that the press release for a new play by Kevin Mandel uses those two irresistible words to describe A New Television Arrives, Finally. The strange story concerns “an American couple visited by a charismatic man presenting himself as a television set. Is the handsome stranger a charlatan or a guru?” Emmy award-winning actor Tom Pelphrey [Guiding Light] leads the cast at tonight’s premiere performance. - John Del Signore

AARON: To that extent, I'd say Benten is a sort of fan-based promotion.

READING: Rosemarie Tichler, casting director and artistic producer at New York's Public Theater, and playwright Barry Jay Kaplan have put together a written work called Actors at Work. Tonight they'll be discussing this quintessential, and inspirational, resource.

BAM Cinématek

at IFC Center

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a pedestrian was struck at East 51st St. and Linden Blvd. in Brooklyn, a fatality as a person was struck by a train at West Houston St., and a baby water rescue on Bodine St. on Staten Island.
• In response to an overabundance of animals at city shelters, Broadway stars gathered to promote pet adoption this weekend at Broadway Barks.
• Little Leaguers played tee-ball on the South Lawn of the White House, and all wore number 42 in honor of Brooklyn Dodger Jackie Robinson. It's the 60th anniversary of Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball.
• A seventh floor apartment in the newly renovated Plaza on 5th Ave. and Central Park South was sold in 2006 for more than $51 million.
• The Vatican says that the Pope's NYC visit is being scheduled for sometime in 2008.
• IFC will be airing ten more installments of R. Kelly's "Trapped in the Closet" rap opera series. The channel will be also streaming the original twelve episodes with the ten extra chapters.
• WNYC public radio host Soterios Johnson has a very large and devoted contingent of fans.
• The tourist who had his neck broken at Yankee Stadium, when a possibly drunken fan fell on him, was released from the hospital today.

Film Society of Lincoln Center

IFC Center and Asia Society

THEATER: Gertrude Stein is regarded as an avant-garde intellectual whose adventurous prose has long overshadowed her plays – despite her Broadway hit Four Saints in Three Acts. (Who could forget?) A crack team of downtown experimental theater types are now hoisting six of Stein’s one-acts out of obscurity with a production in the East Village. The evening, irresistibly dubbed Steinese Takeout, boldly embraces Stein’s radicalism and runs with it. How radical are these plays? “How about no plot, no setting, and no pre-defined characters. Cryptic? Definitely. Absurd? Perhaps. Balderdash? Not at all.” – John Del Signore

Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center

Film Forum

(directed by Julia Loktev)

), who've been filming Christo and Jean-Claude's work since in the '70s. They were there with their cameras in '79 when the artists first pitched their idea to the city of installing hundreds of orange gates throughout the park for two weeks in winter. To hear the nay sayers shooting the idea down originally and then to see footage of the rapturous crowds in 2005, is to understand just a little bit better Christo and Jean-Claude's tremendous artistic vision. Ultimately they insist they do their work for themselves alone, but to be reminded how public art enriches our city dwelling experience is really inspiring. We see the gates drawn on photographs, fabricated, constructed, unfurled and then enjoyed against the backdrop of a lush snow storm. Gates from up above, from far away and then from close up--this movie is a gates-gasm. While some of the extensive footage of the orange sails flapping in the winter winds does drag in spots, it's still some very lovely camera work. Maysles and his co-director Antonio Ferrara have done a wonderful job of documenting that particular moment in New York for posterity.