Sunday February 5, 2006

Rick Benjamin's Pargon Ragtime Orchestra

We are grateful for funding from the National Endowment for the Arts insupport of this program.

The Aristocrats

Director: Paul Provenza
Year: 2005
Rated: unrated
Length: 86 minutes

One hundred superstar comedians tell the same very, VERY filthy joke- one privately shared since Vaudeville.

Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette have made the funniest movie ever, because it has more funny people than have ever been in one movie before. A labor of love three years in the making, encompassing more than 100 comedians and culled from over 100 hours of footage, Provenza and Jillette shot the documentary holding DV cameras in their own hot little hands and edited it at home on a Mac. As fellow comedians, Provenza and Jillette got their cameras rolling where no real filmmaker could ever go. They let us see how professional comedians talk after their sitcoms have wrapped and the audience has gone home.

The result is a heartfelt, private, unprecedented backstage look at famous comedians playing around. Provenza and Jillette got superstar comedians being funny for other comedians, and that is really no-kidding funny. They also captured a performance portrait unlike any other: The art of comic improvisation.

We see artists draw the same nude, hear musicians play the same song, and see actors do the same Shakespearean scene. Comedians, however, never tell the same joke. Provenza and Jillette got comedians to tell the same joke.

"The Aristocrats" is a joke that has been with comics since Vaudeville. "The Aristocrats" is joke that is never told in public, a private joke for comedians, so you've never heard it before. It's a secret handshake among comics. It is also the dirtiest joke you will ever hear.

Born Into Brothels

Director: Zana Briski, Ross Kauffman
Year: 2004
Rated: R
Length: 85 minutes

A chronicle of the children born to prostitutes in Sonagchi, Calcutta’s notorious red light district.

Born into Brothels, an inspiring look at the transformative journey of a group of extraordinary children in Calcutta's red light district won the 2004 Academy Award for Best Documentary as well as over 20 other major film festival prizes.

A tribute to the resiliency of childhood and the restorative power of art, Born into Brothels is a portrait of several unforgettable children who live in the red light district of Calcutta where their mothers work as prostitutes. Zana Briski, a New York based photographer, gives each of these youngsters a camera and teaches them how to take pictures, simultaneously causing them to look at their world with new eyes. Together with Ross Kauffman, Briski captures the magical way in which beauty can be found in the most unlikely of places and how a bright and promising future becomes a possibility for children who previously had no future at all.

Touching and heartfelt, yet devoid of sentimentality, Born into Brothels defies the tear-stained tourist snapshot of the global underbelly. Briski spent years with these children and became a part of their lives. Their photographs are prisms into their souls, rather than anthropological curiosities, and a true testimony to the power of the indelible creative spirit.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

Director: Alex Gibney
Year: 2005
Rated: unrated
Length: 110 minutes

The story behind the infamous ENRON scandal.

The inside story of one of history's greatest business scandals, in which top executives of America's 7th largest company walked away with over one billion dollars while investors and employees lost everything. The almost unimaginable personal excesses of the Enron hierarchy and the utter moral vacuum that posed as corporate philosophy are revealed. The film comes to a harrowing dénouement as we hear Enron traders' own voices as they wring hundreds of millions of dollars in profits out of the California energy crisis. As a result, we come to understand how the avarice of Enron's traders and their bosses had a shocking and profound domino effect that may shape the face of our economy for years to come.

Based on the best-selling book The Smartest Guys in the Room by Fortune reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind.

Grizzly Man

Director: Werner Herzog
Year: 2005
Rated: R
Length: 100 minutes

A tribute for two Grizzly Bear activits killed while living among bears in Alaska.

One rainy afternoon in the Alaskan wilderness in 2003, a self-made man named Timothy Treadwell was mauled and eaten by a grizzly bear. It may be that the animal, a scrawny male about 28 years old and 1,000 pounds, was trying to fatten up in preparation for its winter's sleep. As it happens, Treadwell, who achieved minor celebrity as an expert on grizzlies, had pitched his tent in a feeding ground. The strange story of Timothy Treadwell, a Long Island native who came to see himself as some kind of ursine Dr. Dolittle, only to die at 46 from a bear attack, is the subject of this documentary from Werner Herzog. The director has a fondness for stories about men who journey into the heart of darkness, both without and within - men like the deranged 16th-century explorer in "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" and the early-20th-century esthete in "Fitzcarraldo" who hauls a steamboat up a mountain to bring Caruso to the Peruvian jungle. Treadwell's journey was no less bold or reckless than these earlier Herzogian tales and certainly no less enthralling. - Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

Mad Hot Ballroom

Director: Marilyn Agrelo
Year: 2005
Rated: PG
Length: 110 minutes

Several NYC schools compete in a ballroom dancing competition.

The sight of a roomful of modern New York City fifth graders determinedly going through the paces of traditional ballroom dancing - the fox trot, the rumba, even the sultry tango - has a certain charming incongruity. The dances, with their old-style Astaire-and-Rogers urbanity, fit oddly with the unlithe bodies and dressed-down urban attitudes of today's American schoolchildren. Nonetheless, thanks to a program organized by the American Ballroom Theater, students in 60 New York elementary schools not only learn the steps and postures but also display them in an annual tournament. Their competition is the subject of a slight, charming documentary directed by Marilyn Agrelo. It is the latest crowd-pleasing documentary to use a narrative device long relied upon by fictional sports movies: the road to the big game. - A. O. Scott, The New York Times

March of the Penguins

Director: Luc Jacquet
Year: 2005
Rated: G
Length: 80 minutes

A look at the annual, single-file march of the Emperor Penguins to their breeding ground.

Each winter, alone in the pitiless ice deserts of Antarctica, deep in the most inhospitable terrain on Earth, a truly remarkable journey takes place as it has done for millennia. Emperor penguins in their thousands abandon the deep blue security of their ocean home and clamber onto the frozen ice to begin their long journey into a region so bleak, so extreme, it supports no other wildlife at this time of year. In single file, the penguins march blinded by blizzards, buffeted by gale force winds. Guided by instinct, by the otherworldly radiance of the Southern Cross, they head unerringly for their traditional breeding ground where--after a ritual courtship of intricate dances and delicate maneuvering, accompanied by a cacophony of ecstatic song--they will pair off into monogamous couples and mate.

Murderball

Director: Dana Adam Shapiro, Henry Alex Rubin
Year: 2005
Rated: R
Length: 85 minutes

A film about quadriplegics who play full-contact rugby in Mad-Max style wheelchairs.

Featuring fierce rivalry, stopwatch suspense, and larger-than-life personalities, Murderball, winner of the Documentary Audience Award and a Special Jury Prize for Editing at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, is a film about tough, highly competitive rugby players. Quadriplegic rugby players. Whether by car wreck, fist fight, gun shot, or rogue bacteria, these men have been forced to live life sitting down. In their own version of the full-contact sport, they battle each other in custom-made gladiator-like wheelchairs, pursuing gold medals and proving to themselves and to anyone who sees them in action that there is life after disability.
From the gyms of middle America to the Olympic arena in Athens, Greece, Murderball tells the story of a group of indomitable, world-class athletes unlike any ever shown on screen. It will smash every stereotype you ever had about "gimps" and "cripples." It is a film about family, revenge, honor, and the triumph of love over loss. But most of all, it is a film about standing up, even after your spirit, and your spine, have been crushed.

Paper Clips

Director: Joe Fab
Year: 2004
Rated: unrated
Length: 82 minutes

Middle school children collect paper clips to commemorate each Jew killed by the Nazis.

The town of Whitwell is a tiny community of about two thousand people nestled in the mountains of Tennessee. Its citizens are almost exclusively white and Christian. In 1998, the children of Whitwell Middle School took on an inspiring project, launched out of their principal's desire to help her students open their eyes to the diversity of the world beyond their insulated valley. What happened would change the students, their teachers, their families and the entire town forever… and eventually open hearts and minds around the world.

The students responded to what had been to them a completely unfamiliar chapter in human history - the Holocaust - with a promise to honor every single soul lost in that horrible event by collecting paperclips to represent each individual exterminated by the Nazis. Their dedication was absolute. Their plan was simple but profound. The amazing result, which stands permanently in their schoolyard, is an unforgettable lesson of how a committed group of children can change the world, one classroom at a time.

Rize

Director: David LaChapelle
Year: 2005
Rated: PG-13
Length: 84 minutes

Follows a dance movement rising out of South Central L.A’s street youth culture.

Rize reveals a groundbreaking dance phenomenon that's exploding on the streets of South Central, Los Angeles. Taking advantage of unprecedented access, this documentary film brings to first light a revolutionary form of artistic expression borne from oppression. The aggressive and visually stunning dance modernizes moves indigenous to African tribal rituals and features mind-blowing, athletic movement sped up to impossible speeds. Rize tracks the fascinating evolution of the dance: we meet Tommy Johnson (Tommy the Clown), who first created the style as a response to the 1992 Rodney King riots and named it "Clowning", as well as the kids who developed the movement into what they now call Krumping. The kids use dance as an alternative to gangs and hustling: they form their own troupes and paint their faces like warriors, meeting to outperform rival gangs of dancers or just to hone their skills. For the dancers, Krumping becomes a way of life -- and, because it's authentic expression (in complete opposition to the bling-bling hip-hop culture), the dance becomes a vital part of who they are.

Three of Hearts

Director: Susan Kaplan
Year: 2004
Rated: R
Length: 102 minutes

Trinogomous? Mariage-a-trois? Monogamy, but with more than one person?

Three of Hearts follows the lives of three people in an extraordinary intimate relationship over a period of 13 years. In his early twenties, Sam Cagnina, oldest son of a Mafia hit man, meets Steven, a handsome 19-year old college student and they fall in love. One day Sam offers Steven a "visionary" idea. What if they could find a woman who would fall in love with both of them and agree to live in a "trio" relationship? Finally after seven years, they meet such a woman: Samantha, an aspiring actress. Although it's clear that the three truly love each other, people around them are never quite sure how the relationship works. Without making a big deal of it, director Susan Kaplan addresses the philosophical and mundane questions we may have about such an arrangement. Nine years into their threesome they decide to have a child together. Preparing for parenthood, they all start their own therapeutic journeys. And after 13 years, days away from the birth of their second child, all hell breaks loose. . .

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill

Director: Judy Irving
Year: 2005
Rated: G
Length: 83 minutes

Documents the friendship between a homeless man and a flock of parrots.

An uncommon bond between man and nature is the focus of Judy Irving's wonderful and informative documentary, THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL. The film follows Mark Bittner, an unemployed aging hippie, who lives off the kindness of strangers in the titular San Francisco neighborhood. His life takes on new meaning when he starts feeding a flock of wild Conures, a breed of parrot noted for its green body and cherry-red head. Native to Argentina, the birds soon feel comfortable enough to feed while perched all over Mr. Bittner. Being outcasts who yearn to remain free, a mutual respect is born between them. Daily routine soon leads to growing crowds of curious passersby, as Bittner becomes something of a local celebrity. Based on his up-close observations, Bittner gains some keen insight into the behavior of individual birds, giving them names. The resulting portraits of Connor, Mingus, Olive, Pushkin, Picasso, Sophie, and Tupelo prove that these amazing creatures deserve star credit in their own right.

WILD PARROTS features some incredible close-ups, rare in-depth glimpses into the unique and often amusing habits and activities of one flock of parrots, and a surprise ending.