@ Film Forum

A documentary featuring extravagant Red Chinese musicals is playing at FF through April 11th. It’s called YANG BAN XI: THE 8 MODEL WORKS, and here’s the truncated blurb —

During China’s “Cultural Revolution” (1966-76), the productions RED DETACHMENT OF WOMEN and THE WHITE-HAIRED GIRL featured ballerinas pirouetting with rifles held aloft and male dancers executing venal landlords. On screen and stage these fiercely propagandistic stories, part Chinese classical ballad, part MGM musical — in which songs praising Mao always seemed to coincide with a glorious sunrise — were termed yang ban xi, and they were the only form of art allowed. (Traditional opera was banned by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing – one of the infamous Gang of Four, later blamed for the Cultural Revolution’s violent excesses.)

Of the 13 or so revolutionary operas (essentially dramatic ballets with song), eight of the most popular were termed “the 8 Model Works.” Captured on film in gorgeous Technicolor and Scope, their influence was incalculable – the main performers became instant stars, revered throughout China. Today, young Chinese who crowd Starbucks cafes and modern discotheques are starting to learn about the very different world that was China just decades ago – yet the Yang Ban Xi remain curiously alive, as two vibrant contemporary dance numbers done for this film attest. This Dutch production blends archival footage of the bad old days with interviews with Chinese baby boomers who sometimes wax nostalgic for what was, after all, their version of the ‘60s.

…here are some things the critics have said about it –

“The director revisits the country’s recent past to explore the history and legacy of one of the strangest byproducts of totalitarian madness: the revolutionary spectacular… While the model operas were wholesale kitsch extravaganzas and enjoyably nutty… they were also deadly serious.”
– Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“An unexpectedly inventive documentary. This strange little film grows into a creative portrait of China’s broader modernization.”
– New York Magazine

“Fascinating!”
– J. Hoberman, Village Voice

…still not convinced? Watch the trailer and dig those groovy vintage clips. It looks like it could be some fun.

Veteran screenwriter Larry Gross has written an appraisal of V FOR VENDETTA that focuses on its latent sexual politics. He goes so far as to say, “V is about the gayest superhero of all time.”

Here are some snippets —

I mean he makes Batman look like Tarzan by comparison. An outcast who cannot be himself in the ultimate ways, he is at the same time a dedicated gourmand, lover of 40’s torch songs, a great dancer, an unrepentant high culture aesthete, an exceptional interior decorator and an enthusiast of 1930s black and white period costume tear-jerking swash bucklers – and maybe he’s just tomorrow’s with-it metro sexual – but given his lack of nostalgia for nuclear family or lost love, and given that he can only warm up physically to Natalie when she’s bald, it would seem to me that, well … you get where this is going.

…and…

In any case, V for Vendetta forwards the gay political agenda far more vigorously, unapologetically and, one might say, passionately than Brokeback ever did. But I wonder if the gay community wants this kind of almost apocalyptic gesture any more than the Democratic party wants Feingold to push a censure motion against Bush, (despite the fact that support for it is in the 40 percentile, including 20% of Republicans polled?)

Read the entire article at Movie City News.

Gin, glorious gin. Here’s a short history of the spirit.

KING GIN
It was born as a juniper-scented Dutch eau-de-vie. Now it’s a star in the bars of the world.
by Gaston Pinard

I started drinking alcohol back in prehistoric times, when the beverages of choice for my peer group were vodka (because one’s parents supposedly could not smell it on one’s breath), and beer because…well, just because. As my tastes grew more sophisticated, I gravitated to wine, of course, and then to cognac and to scotch. Gin was simply not part of my repertoire.

In my mid-twenties, however, when I first started traveling in Europe, I discovered cocktails. And it quickly dawned on me, as I sipped these attractive concoctions, that my favorite ones—Martinis and Negronis, above all—were based on gin.

Gin, I think it is safe to say, is the veritable king of cocktails. It seems born to mix, born to swirl and eddy in a glass in graceful counterpoint to other elements, alcoholic and otherwise. Its marriage with dry vermouth in the classic Martini is particularly successful, of course—though now that I’ve investigated gin’s origins a bit, I can’t help wondering if whoever created that signal cocktail wasn’t trying, at least subconsciously, to give back to gin some of the complexity and faint sweetness it possessed in its first incarnation.

Gin—or at least the precursor of gin as we now know it—was invented in 1650, when a Prussian-born physician and anatomist at the University of Leiden in Holland, one Franciscus Sylvius (né Franz de le Boë), experimentally infused distilled grain spirits with juniper berries for medicinal purposes. The resulting potion, which Sylvius recommended as a cure for cold feet and insomnia, turned out to be good enough to drink.

The Dutch word for juniper, and by extension for the alcohol infused with it, is jenever, or genever—of which our word gin is a corruption. Jenever remains a popular tipple in the Netherlands (see Dutch Gin Joints). The cheap stuff is head-crushing firewater; but at its best, it can be a remarkably complex and subtle spirit, reminiscent of good eau-de-vie (in the case of young jenever) or even scotch (which aged jenever sometimes resembles).

But gin as most of the world knows it today—cocktail gin—is quite different from Dutch jenever. Its evolution began only a few years after the happy experiment of Dr. Sylvius. English soldiers fighting in the Netherlands saw their Dutch counterparts drinking jenever on the battlefield, and dubbed it “Dutch courage” for the way it seemed to inspire fearlessness. And when they went home, they took it along….

Read the entire article.

This brief history of gin was first published in Saveur in July/August 1995.

I Am the Greatest!
This rerelease of Cassius Clay’s legendary 1963 recording provides the champ’s fans with a portrait of the pugilist as a sassy young man. Divided into eight playful “rounds” of verbal shadowboxing, I AM THE GREATEST! features young Cassius Marcellus Clay (soon to become heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali) performing his clever, boastful rhymes before a live audience of admirers. In the famous title track, Clay predicts that he’s destined to be the champ: “I’m the man this poem is about/I’ll be champ of the world; there isn’t a doubt/Here I predict Mr. Liston’s dismemberment/I’ll hit him so hard he’ll wonder where October and November went.” On one of the CD’s funniest cuts, Clay begins with a parody of the “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” speech from Shakespeare’s JULIUS CAESAR and then proceeds to demolish Sonny Liston rhetorically — something he’d do for real in the ring soon enough. The CD bonus tracks include a few musical numbers not on the original LP: the single of “I Am the Greatest!” (a truncated version, cut up collage-style and backed with music), his unfortunate cover of “Stand by Me,” and the “Dancing in the Street“-style novelty jam “The Gang’s All Here.” It’s all a great deal of fun and a perfect example of the youthful confidence and charisma that made Ali a star of worldwide magnitude. — D.G. [written for Barnes&Noble.com]

In one of the heaviest snowfalls in NYC history, an uptown Bus makes its way down Broadway while pedestrians waddle across the street. [Silent]

Click here to watch the video.

* If you don’t believe it was a “blizzard,” you’re technically right; you can read about the debate here. (via The Gothamist)

“CRASH”

“So apparently the Oscars were a vast conspiracy designed to force me to watch Crash, something I have successfully resisted doing despite the small mountain of screeners that Lionsgate has so thoughtfully sent my way. On the other hand, now that its greatness has been established beyond dispute, maybe I don’t have to bother….” –Dave Kehr

Quote courtesy of davekehr.com