more Hurricane Sandy- Tuesday

Piers Morgan noted tonight in his CNN programme that New York is living somewhat “a double-life” after the hurricane. And in truth that seems spot on: a walk up and down 1st Avenue and 2nd Avenue from 45th to 70th finds every bar and restaurant packed with clientele. Surely most of these people aren’t from lower Manhattan. Average spend per person at least $20-$50 including tax and tip. Hmmm…and Morgan didn’t give the representatives of the hospital generator failure (New York University Langone) an easy time either. Not to diminish the diligence and courage of staff who evacuated newborn babies and at risk patients. But! How could this happen in a major New York hospital? There are many uncomfortable questions to answer post-devastation. One can’t be blamed for wanting to have a pre-Hurricane ‘knees-up’. But nor can one be excused for avoiding many of the difficult questions that need answering after such an event. And with all due respect, it’s very hard to find much sympathy for the Upper West and Upper East denizens who never seem to suffer the ‘slings and arrows’ of living in NYC. Happy hill rather than ‘happy valley’.

As a postscript to the previous post, as you’d expect Manhattanites are flocking to above 39st street for food and power. At one bank (to remain nameless) ATM foyer a resourcful community had gathered to power their electronic devices. One older lady recounted that as a one-street away resident to the 14 th Street Edison power station explosion she thereafter repeated tried phoning 311 (the emergency line for non-life threatening calls) with no success.  But as one CNN reporter stated, ‘New Yorkers expect everything yesterday’. The lady had 6 cats and leg and knee problems that prevented her from evacuating with her pets. Many residents, though, at least have functioning gas with which to cook. Mention, of course, must be made of New Jersey shore residents who took the brunt of the hurricane. Extraordinary footage of boardwalks uprooted like trees and hurled into mainstreets 100s of meters away.

Hurricane Sandy- New York City

What more to be said about Hurricane Sandy that has just devastated lower Manhattan and most adjacent boroughs? It’s akin to war zones where one reads of yet another death and the fact is relegated to a statistic by most who are not next of kin and who are far from the scene. Remarkably there have been very few deaths caused by Sandy. And if you’re not where the action is it’s hard to imagine the havoc and trauma wrought by such a blast from nature. Study the uprooted trees: it's not that far from assessing the impact of a land mine.

Given that New York is unlike almost any other city in the world it’s remarkable that there is so little chaos after the event last night. All mass transit is suspended, all lower Manhattan subway tunnels flooded and unusable for at least 4 days. There is total blackout in lower Manhattan for all streets below 39th due to the flooding of Con Ed’s power station at E14th. Explosions lit up the night sky. Check the map! That’s a HUGE chunk of Manhattan that has been crippled. You would expect looting and chaos. Yet there is calm and consideration. What a difference one street block makes. A wine merchant doing brisk trade this morning on 41^st said that he’d lose $10,000 per day if he’d been ‘the wrong side of the tracks’. Whilst a deli owner just below 39th claimed $2,000 a day in lost trade. Do the math. It's frightening!

The crane that had partially collapsed on the upper floors of a 57th street midtown luxury apartment development thankfully followed the rules of gravity and its vertical weight (though scarily precarious) kept it from swinging further in the 100mph winds. The pause for thought in all this is, though,  that the New Yorkers who can least afford to be hit are the ones who’ll suffer from Sandy’s might. And that’s the very strange paradox of New York City. A Republican Mayor Bloomberg (concise, calming, apolitical in his press briefings) presiding over a (for the Manhattan isle most part) Democratic populace. A city that thrives and survives arguably on the wealth of a very few- the real estate deals, the parties, the stock exchange, the glamour. When what REALLY makes NYC a city at all are the small businesses, the ‘little’ people, the public workers without whom NYC would just not exist. Are the very few willing to dip into their pockets and save New York from future storms? I think not. And how, anyways pragmatically, do you shore up a city that for the most part is shoreline?

The category 1 Hurricane Sandy became a category 3 hurricane because of the peculiar wind/tidal patterns of the ‘New York bite’. Add a full moon and high tide at the time of landfall and nature’s armada became invincible. In all of its 108 years NYC’s subway system has never known a worst disaster. And the impending event was incredibly difficult for many: should I stay or should I go. Mayor Bloomberg’s mandatory evacuation of the low lying Zone A areas was not legally enforceable. And you can well understand many good citizens’ trepidation at moving from the comfort of their own home to a crowded shelter. There is a very regrettable selfish, conceited hard core of people in New York who revel in the reflected glory of their ‘goodness’. But it’s very doubtful that the people of the housing projects, shopkeepers and others financially debilitated by this event would ever fit that description. It’s so like Ang Lee’s latest film Life of Pi: everyone has to share the same boat – both man and tiger-and the concluding story one lives to tell is usually just too, too unbelievable.

CLOSING NIGHT - New York 2012

Denzel Washington (Flight)

John Goodman and Don Cheadle

Press conference HERE
Morephotos HERE of the opening night.

and maybe even a review to come......;)

OPENING NIGHT-New York, 2012

What an ask/task! Damned if you do and damned if you don't. How to programme the opening night for the 50th New York Film Festival. There will be detractors claiming that Life of Pi is insubstantial fare compared to many other films in this year's festival. And indeed, Lucien Castaing-Taylor at the press conference the same afternoon for Leviathan (a much more close up and personal cine-look at fishy things), made clear that films with an 'agenda' -whatever- just weren't as powerful. Nay- meaningless. Ang Lee is a rare breed of director that doesn't harbour an agenda. God knows how difficult that must have been to keep faith to that throughout his career. He is interested in life. The way life always betrays itself because the truth is always too painful to bear. The very reason cinema exists. Arguably;) His adaption of Yann Martel's bestseller book is so quintessentially Ang Lee. Everyone in life has a shipwreck. Everyone finds themselves afloat. Everyone finds that nobody wants to believe their story. Life of Pi is all about cinema i.e life. What dreams may come. What shadows may fall. What beliefs dare to state they exist. The still from the film is the poster for this year's New York Film Festival. Making and believing. One has to smile broadly about the minute detail Ang Lee gives every one of his films. Whether it be the director himself experiencing The Incredible Hulk and getting the microscope DNA believable. Or whether it be the meercats on Pi's island that almost drop off their perch as they doze off (Ang Lee avoided comedy when in fact there is a documentary that clearly shows a meercat literally plummeting off its sleepy daylight perch). As many viewers do in the cinema. Not for a moment forensically proving they don't care. So far is the truth from such logic.

There's a wondrous documentary in the New York Film Festival Celluloid Man about P.K. Nair, the founder and patron saint of the National Film Archive of India. The saddest thing is (in a country obsessed with film, Bollywood, etc etc ) that there is no one to follow in his footsteps. And moreover, though he may be a 'fuddy-duddy' - how dare they ban him from the archive that he created! To use a very hackneyed quote from Picasso: "We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realise truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies." Picasso, his life, his women, his art, his politics was no exception to his dictum.

I keep being asked if I am a CRITIC? And my only ever response is that I want to enjoy going to the movies. In that very strange thing is a healing. Like nothing else on this earth. And if one can't be constructive in writing then really what is the point in destroying someone else's creativity when you have very, very little to offer in exchange. Which in itself is somewhat blasphemous because one ought to assume that ALL people are creative. But going to the movies can most probably make them so. At least GREAT cinema. Somewhat. More. And Life of Pi achieves exactly. Reading for many is torturous. But I challenge anyone not to seek the last pages of Martel's book after seeing Ang Lee's movie and then to begin reading from Page 1: "My suffering left me sad and gloomy." One will read and watch. And seek, perhaps, again. The tiger inside could never be your friend: but such an animal could never either be one's enemy. We are all in the same boat. Now.

50th New York Film Festival

The New York Film Festival is 50 years old. (New York Times article about the change of artistic director. Rather than this blog covering the London Film Festival this year, The New York Film Festival seemed a must. The former festival screens around 75-80% of what the New York festival offers. But it's a missing percentage that is well worth the visit. Look back to the opening year of 1963. How few of those films ever see the light of a cinema screen these days or even DVD! Many, however, do manage a further theatrical release. In time. Now with the new Elinor Bunn Monroe Film Center complex across the street from the simply but splendidly proportioned Walter Reade cinema, these Lincoln Center cinemas offer an oasis of both art house and more interesting mainstream films throughout the year for New York. For the first time this year there is a Midnight Movies slot, that includes recent Brit chiller release Berberian Sound Studio. 

Photos and video will be added every few days at end of post - in the order that they were taken.

Christian Petzold (Barbara) Press conference HERE

Aquí y Allá (Here and There)

Yeşim Ustaoğlu (Araf) Pres conference HERE

Christian Mungui (Beyond the Hills) Press conference HERE

Keith Jones (Punk in Africa) Press conference HERE

Mikey Sumner, Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig (Frances Ha)
Press conference HERE 

Richard Foreman (Once Every Day)

Press conference HERE

Jun Robles Lana (Bwakaw)

Press conference HERE

 Song Fang (Memories Look at Me)

Press conference HERE

Linhas de Wellington 

                                                           Press conference HERE (audio only)

Paolo Taviani (Caesar Must Die) and Richard Peña 

Press conference HERE

more Taviani Brothers photos HERE

Véréna Paravel (Leviathan)

Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Leviathan)

 Press conference HERE

Ang Lee (Life of Pi)

Press conference HERE

Night Across the Street 

Press conference HERE 

Alan Berliner (First Cousin Once Removed)

 Press conference HERE

David Oyelowe, Lee Daniels (director), Nicole Kidman (The Paperboy)
more photos Here

 Press conference HERE

NYFF Amphitheater talks HERE 

Michael Haneke (Amour)

Press conference HERE

another photo HERE 

David Chase (L), Steven van Zandt (R)-Not Fade Away

Press conference HERE

                                   another photo HERE

India Menuez (actress), Olivier Assayas (director), Clément Métayer (actor): Something in the Air

                                    Press conference HERE
                                    more photos HERE

Abbas Kiarostami and Richard Peña (Like Someone in Love)

Press conference HERE

Sally Potter (Ginger and Rosa)

 Press conference HERE

another photo HERE

Leos Carax (Holy Motors)

 Press conference HERE

Dror Moreh (The Gatekeepers)

Press conference HERE

Richard Peña (L) and Javier Rebollo (R) -The Dead Man and Being Happy

 Press conference HERE

more photos HERE 

João Rui Guerra da Mata (co-director)-The Last Time I Saw Macao 

Press conference HERE 

Pablo Larraín (No)

Press conference HERE

more photos HERE 

David Thomson

David Thomson's new book The Big Screen

 video of his chat at the NYFF HERE

 all photos and video on the site are copyright Andrew Lucre (with

 relevant credits wherever appropriate)