Whether it’s a small family gathering or a big birthday blow-out, choosing the right performer for your child’s party can be a make-it-or-break-it decision. We’ve compiled a list of New York’s favorite children’s entertainers for bashes of any size or style.

Clowns
Each child who attends Looney Lenny’s hilarious, interactive magic show (with juggling!) receives their own clown-o-rific name. Every party guest walks away with a balloon animal. looneyluckylennyland.com

Juliet Schaefer Jeske studied clowning at the New York Goofs Ultimate Clown School, which should tell you all you need to know. Schaefer’s talents include face painting, balloon twisting, stilts, silly magic and the ukulele. rednosesnewyork.com

Sammie and Tudie’s clowning philosophy: Life is better when you’re laughing. Boasting over 20 years of experience, this comedic magic circus show is ideal for ages 3 and up. sammieandtudie.com

Face Painting
Not your typical face painting experience, the award-winning Faces by Derrick will make your kids, ages 3 and up, never want wash their faces again. facesbyderrick.com

Girls love the signature unicorn design of Face Art by Melissa. This mother of two does fabulous face art and gorgeous glitter tattoos. faceartbymelissa.com

The owner of Hearts Face Painting & Balloon Art brings both creative art forms to birthday environments. Her professional background lies in painting, so party spaces and little faces are sure to transform. facepaintingballoontwisting.com

Kiki’s Faces and Balloons is an all-encompassing entertainment company offering face painting, balloon sculpting, “silly people” and princesses. kikisfacesandballoons.com

Party Faces By Rachel’s namesake has a background that’s practically a Ph.D. in paint. The Brooklyn preschool teacher’s ability to charm the little ones while she works helps keep them comfortable with the painting process. partyfacesbyrachel.com

Magicians
The Amazing Max is so beloved he has his own Off-Broadway show for mega-magic families. His high-energy, interactive show blends comedy and juggling. maxdarwinmagic.com

Paying tribute to the great magicians of the turn of the century, Cardone the Ultimate Vaudeville Magician’s act includes escape artistry, ventriloquism and classic scarf, coin and card tricks. cardonethemagician.com

Ages 3-7 will fold into fits of laughter at Gary the Great’s comedic magic act. He adapts his show based on audience response, so no two performances are alike. ahrealmagic.com

Magic Al’s sleight-of-hand tricks will stupefy even grown-ups, and his goofy antics keep kids in stitches throughout every performance. magic-al.com

Mario the Magician’s 45-minute set is aimed at kids ages 4-11 who are sure to go nuts for his silly antics, age-old slapstick humor and a live dove named Mozzarella. mariothemagician.com

Kids ages 3-8 (and their parents) will adore Silly Billy. This self-proclaimed “comedian for children” uses magic, balloon twisting and lots of jokes to drum up laughter. sillybillymagic.com

Musicians
Led by Audra Tsanos, a highly sought-after Music for Aardvarks instructor, Audra Rox’s family-friendly band is just right for Big Apple birthdays. Audra incorporates the birthday child in the music and will have every guest jamming along on percussion props. audrarox.com

Brett Band is the brainchild of early childhood music educator Brett Rothenhaus, formerly of Little Maestros. His original music and kiddie classics make for a playlist that gets everybody on their feet. brettband.com
Moey’s Music Party brings the pompoms, maracas and parachute for 45 minutes of fun. Try the Princess Party Package, filled with boas, bling and boogeying. moeysmusicparty.com

Meredith LeVande, perhaps better known as Monkey Monkey Music, specializes in upbeat, original tunes for little ones. Her parachute-, instrument- and bubble-infused party shows instantly get all ages grooving. monkeymonkeymusic.com
mr. RAY, a pioneer of the kiddie genre, takes a mix-it-up approach to birthday gigs. Beginning with a concert and transitioning into a dance party, the festivities end with kids stepping up to sing solos on the mic. mrray.com

A one-man band, Rockin’ With Andy makes kids and their parents want to shake their groove things. Mom and dad love Andy’s acoustic guitar versions of grown-up hits, and the little ones go bananas for his kids’ classics. Andy also brings shakers, bells, scarves and animal puppets for maximum rocking. rockinwithandy.com

Specialty
If you can dream it, Nick the Balloonatic can make it. At it for 20 years, Nick’s handiwork includes flower bouquets, superheroes, monkeys on palm trees, top hats and much more. nicktheballoonatic.com

Wendy the Pipe Cleaner Lady is a category unto herself. Girls adore her tiaras, boys covet her spider creations and even Martha Stewart wants her pipe cleaner flower rings. thepipecleanerlady.com

Robin Saks Frankel is a mother of two toddlers and a freelance writer, editor and social media addict.
For more birthday party planning tips, visit newyorkfamily.com.

Harvey

Hot on the heels of last year’s debut in The Normal Heart, two-time Emmy winner Jim Parsons (The Big Bang Theory) returns to the stage in this revival of Mary Chase’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic. Parsons is Elwood P. Dowd, the role immortalized on screen by James Stewart, a middle-aged man whose best friend is a 6-foot-tall rabbit. Is Harvey real or a figment of Elwood’s imagination? You’ll have to head over to the Studio 54 Theater to find out. Co-stars include Larry Bryggman (Doubt), Tracee Chimo (Circle Mirror Transformation), Jessica Hecht (A View from the Bridge), Carol Kane (Wicked), Charles Kimbrough (TV’s Murphy Brown) and Rich Sommer (TV’s Mad Men).
In previews now, runs June 14-Aug. 5; $37+. Studio 54, 254 W. 54th St., roundabouttheatre.org

Democracy 

This June-long event, running at Williamsburg’s Brick Theater, is dedicated to the idea of putting on a summer theater festival of the people, by the people and for the people in this election year. Eight candidates will campaign against each other in a series of public appearances for the title of “President of the Brick.” The elected official will be given reign over The Brick for two weeks next January and will be entrusted with curating all Brick programming during this time period. Shows include works from Matthew Freeman, Eric John Meyer, Jeremey Catterton, Zack Calhoun and Roger Nasser. Attendance is mandatory, as all voters must cast their ballot in person.
May 31-July 1; $15. The Brick Theater, 575 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn, bricktheater.com.

Uncle Vanya

Some of New York’s finest actors have signed on to this world premiere reimagining of the Chekhov classic about a visiting professor and his alluring younger wife at Soho Rep. The winning team of director Sam Gold and writer Annie Baker (The Aliens, Circle Mirror Transformation) have recruited a top-notch ensemble that includes Reed Birney, Maria Dizzia, Georgia Engel, Peter Friedman, Matthew Maher,  Rebecca Schull, Michael Shannon, Paul Thureen and Merritt Wever. Take note: a June 19 benefit performance will include a post-show vodka reception with the cast and creative team.
Opens June 7; $0.99-$40. Soho Rep Theatre, 46 Walker St., sohorep.org.

Sovereign

The conclusion to Mac Rogers’ Honeycomb trilogy is off-off-Broadway’s answer to The Return of the King, and not just because of the similarities in the title. This play, part of Gideon Productions in collaboration with the BFG Collective at the Secret Theater, will confirm the fates of the characters we’ve come to love in Advance Man and Blast Radius, particularly Ronnie (Hanna Cheek), now a hardened governor lording over a slowly rebuilding human race and her defiant brother Abbie (Stephen Heskett). Rogers’ trilogy, directed by Jordana Williams, has offered so many surprising turns, it’s hard to predict where this tale will end—but incredibly exciting at the same time. It’s safe to say that by now, the Secret is out.
June 14-July 1; $15-$18. The Secret Theatre, 44-02 23rd St., Long Island City, www.gideonth.com .

Into the Woods

The second of this summer’s Shakespeare in the Park entries (following As You Like It) is this James Lapine-Stephen Sondheim favorite, in a production based on the acclaimed 2010 staging at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park, London. Woods was just mentioned this week on Glee as the most vocally demanding of Sondheim’s canon—so why revive this tale of what happens to fairy tale characters after their happy ending? With three-time Oscar nominee Amy Adams onboard as the Baker’s Wife, two-time Tony-winner Donna Murphy to play the Witch and current Tony nominee Jessie Mueller (On a Clear Day You Can See Forever) playing Cinderella, why wouldn’t you?
July 23-Aug. 25; free. Delacorte Theater in Central Park, accessible via 81st St. & Central Park West or 79th St. & 5th Ave., shakespeareinthepark.org.

Every summer, a string of events hit the city that provide, depending on your perspective, either a fun-filled, leisurely day of shopping, eating and entertainment or a hellish, traffic-jamming, noise-making, government-sanctioned takeover of public places. To many, they are just street fairs. Some love them, many enjoy them, and some scratch their heads with wonder at how such things are allowed so often.

There are different types of street fairs permitted by the city: multi-block and single-block. (Block parties, which require only the closing of one block and don’t involve the sale of any goods or services, are categorized separately but must get similar city approvals.) The multi-block events are the big ones that take place on the avenues and span anywhere from a couple blocks up to, on the Upper West Side, 15 blocks. They’re all run for the benefit of nonprofit organizations, from churches to schools to charity groups, and they all have to go through an approval process that lets the community board and local residents weigh in first.

“The street fairs on side streets tend to be to benefit an organization, and one of the requirements, not surprisingly, is that the organization is actually on the street,” said Mark Diller, chair of Community Board 7. “You usually hear a bit of grumbling about parking and amplified sound because people’s homes are right there.”

Diller said that overall, the board doesn’t hear too many complaints about street fairs; some people don’t like them when they happen right in front of their building, but the city doesn’t usually allow the same side street to be closed more than once a year.

While the approval process on the Upper West Side is relatively calm and uncontroversial, Upper East Side community board members have recently been grappling with resident complaints about the sheer number of street fairs and whether ones specifically held for private institutions, like a street closure for a private school’s graduation celebration, should be approved at all.

At Community Board 8’s March meeting, several board members spoke out against specific street closures for relatively small events, based on how the sponsoring organization behaved in the community and how it ran its event. Some opposed allowing Marymount Manhattan College to have a four-hour block party, but supported churches and other schools hosting similar events. One church event drew support from some who pointed out that the church is committed to social service in the community and vitriol from others who called their event “horrible” and “outrageous.” The board disapproved a block party hosted by Lenox Hill Hospital because it’s a private event and not open to the public, as well as two applications from the Central Park Precinct Community Council for two separate block parties because they normally have their meetings on the West Side.

“Let them have their street fairs in Board 7 where they chose to have their meetings,” said David Rosenstein, a sentiment echoed by many members. The board is considering amending their criteria for street fair and block party applications to address the differences between public and private events, as well as tightening the requirements for community involvement.

On the West Side, City Council Member Gale Brewer said that she hears from some people who are vehemently opposed to fairs taking over their streets, but that she also has a unique viewpoint gained by attending every major fair in her district and seeing firsthand how residents interact with the events. She brings a table, sets it up with pamphlets on city and local issues, and spends the day chatting with people who come by. “It’s a lot of work, but I’ve never missed one,” Brewer said.

While some residents have complained that the street fairs cater to visitors at their expense, turning their streets into tourist attractions, Brewer said that the proof is in the depleted stacks of flyers at the end of the day.

“Tourists are not interested in tenant information; I can see that it’s local people,” she said.

The biggest complaints tend to be over traffic—streets are rerouted and curbside parking becomes even tighter than usual when several avenue blocks are closed—and the fear that street vendors are siphoning business from the brick-and-mortar stores that sit just behind the temporary booths. Recently, however, some of the major street fair production companies—like Mort and Ray Productions, which puts on many of the Upper West Side’s major festivals—have been making efforts to accommodate merchants by offering them prime spaces outside of their own stores at discounted rates and agreeing not to place a vendor selling dresses outside of a women’s clothing boutique or a cupcake truck outside of a bakery.

“We take great care to make sure that no one is selling a similar product to merchants,” said Andrew Albert, executive director of the West Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, which produces the Amsterdam Avenue and Columbus Avenue festivals. “We’ve got a very sophisticated computer program that we paid a lot of money for that ensures that doesn’t happen. We also walk the avenue and speak to the merchants and tell them about the fairs.”

He said he’s heard from some small business owners who were delighted to find that street fair foot traffic morphed into regular customers.

“There’s Gazala’s at 78th Street, a Middle Eastern place,” Albert said. “After people sampled their food at the fair, people came back for months afterward. It’s a great way to promote the business.”

Albert stressed that the Chamber of Commerce picks up the entire tab, on top of a fee it pays to the city, to keep the streets clean and safe during and after their events, which is a requirement of all street fairs.

“Everyone thinks there’s tremendous money in it, but there’s really a lot of expenses too,” Albert said. “We hire the Doe Fund to help clean the street afterward; we actually leave the street cleaner than when we found it.” They also employ extra security to supplement the police officers the city sends out, and charge each vendor a sanitation deposit that they only get back if they leave their space spotless.

“People really do vote with their feet,” Albert said. “It’s a day when the street is free of traffic and people are just free to walk and schmooze with our neighbors.”

Upper West Side’s 2012 Street Fairs

24th Annual Broadway Spring Festival, May 6, 11 a.m. – 6 p.m., Broadway between West 93rd and 96th streets

On a Wing: Family Festival, May 19, 12 – 3 p.m., Belvedere Castle, Central Park; Mid-park about 79th Street

Ninth Avenue International Food Festival, May 19-20, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m., 9th Avenue between West 42nd and 57th streets

Amsterdam Avenue Festival, May 20, 12 – 5 p.m., Amsterdam Avenue between West 77th and 90th streets

25th Annual Livable West Side Festival, May 27, 11 a.m. – 6 p.m., Broadway between West 82nd and 86th streets

35th Annual Plantathon and Crafts Fair, June 10, 11 a.m. – 6 p.m., Broadway between West 73rd and 82nd streets

Summer on the Hudson: 10th Annual West Side County Fair, Sept. 9, 1–6 p.m., West 71st Street Basketball Courts

19th Annual Upper Broadway Autumn Festival, Sept. 15, 11 a.m. – 6 p.m., Broadway between West 110th and 116th streets

Columbus Avenue Festival, Sept. 23, 12 – 5 p.m., Columbus Avenue between West 66th and 86th streets

24th Annual Upper Broadway Harvest Festival, Sept. 30, 11 a.m. – 6 p.m., Broadway between West 103rd and 106th streets

20th Annual Upper Broadway Fall Festival, Oct. 6, 11 a.m. – 6 p.m., Broadway between West 110th and 116th streets

21st Annual Broadway Fall Festival, Oct. 14, 11 a.m. – 6 p.m., Broadway between West 86th Street and 90th streets

Denzel Washington is a movie star in the sense that you can’t imagine him as anything else because he never effaces himself enough to become a character. Denzel always lets you know he’s Denzel—the first black matinee idol without the yoke of being a standard-bearer. But at least he keeps his bluster to a minimum as seasoned train conductor Frank Barnes in Unstoppable. In this 90th partnership with hyperactive Tony Scott—his ideal collaborator—Denzel keeps a relative cool. Money, Denzel and Tony have made their least offensive, easiest-on-the-mind, most enjoyable movie.

Eight cars of an unmanned freight train loaded with the hazardous material Molten Phenol hurtles through Pennsylvania (“It’s a missile the size of the Chrysler building!” worries dispatcher Rosario Dawson) unless Barnes and his rookie co-worker Will Conlon (Chris Pine) can figure out how to stop it. This comically simple premise suits Tony Scott’s agitated temperament. It’s all about momentum and becomes an exercise in traffic cop logistics—moving several trains, TV news choppers, cars and trucks at various speeds. If Scott’s coordination was slightly better it would match the mechanical choreography of Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express.

Given the kinetic emphasis, Denzel and Tony don’t amp up the machismo as usual. The minimalist characterizations even allow Denzel to grant climactic heroics to Chris Pine, whose undulating abs, scruffy beard and blue eyes perfectly fit the beer-commercial bonhomie of Scott’s advert aesthetic. Brief talk about Barnes’ forced early retirement with half benefits and Will’s family connections lends a proletarian valor to their daring professionalism. It’s almost a tribute to the working man’s muscle and ingenuity and courage; in post-9/11 terms, a new appreciation of civilian bravery. This is why the terrorists envy us.

Unstoppable’s only negative is Barnes’ sketchy family backstory: We see his twin daughters working their way through college as waitresses at Hooters. This grade-B idea fits with Denzel’s refusal to be a standard-bearer while completing Tony Scott’s essentially fatuous, TV-commercial style.
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Unstoppable
Directed by Tony Scott
Runtime: 98 min.

“Can we cope?” is Sally Hawkins incredulous reply to a journalist reporting on her stressful leadership of striking auto workers. “We’re women. Now don’t ask a stupid question.”

Don’t call her Norma Rae.

That one moment—one of the best in the British working-class drama Made in Dagenham—says more about the world and the indomitable female spirit than all of For Colored Girls. Telling the story of a 1968 labor action by women employed at the huge Ford Motor Company plant in Dagenham, England, Made in Dagenham is essentially a story of female coping. (Ford hired 55,000 men but only 187 women to make 3,100 vehicles a day.) Hawkins, as Rita O’Grady, puts up with her disbelieving husband and the strain of raising a family while making political progress and social history.

None of this means that Made in Dagenham is a great movie—in fact, it lacks true excellence. But director Cole’s appreciation for how women cope and achieve goes in the right direction, more so than the pathetic sob stories by which Tyler Perry, Oprah Winfrey and Lee Daniels have stereotyped African-American female experience. Cole, who made the 2003 Calendar Girls, has a particular interest in the way women assert themselves. His attention to social history and female resolve—Calendar Girls saluted middle-aged, working-class women who dared to pose naked to publicize their independence—results in a rare sense of femaleness. You don’t have to be George Cukor or Sofia Coppola to achieve it. But you do need an orderly sense of drama, and Made in Dagenham messily compiles observation of England’s abundant working class with casual details of female boldness. These no-nonsense workers strip down to their brassieres to bear the factory heat; they talk back to men out of a natural—not fashionable—sense of human equality.

Hawkins, a plucky personality as Mike Leigh’s optimistic protagonist in the superb Happy-Go-Lucky, gets lost in Rita’s reluctant labor heroine. She’s often too anxious and deferential than necessary. But Hawkins is also good at Rita’s pluckiness, and in the latter part of the film she is winningly gallant and confident. Also better than all of For Colored Girls are scenes where Rita becomes infatuated with Lisa (Rosamund Pike), a Cambridge grad who has acquiesced to the norms of marriage and Rita’s clash-then-empathy with Barbara Castle (Miranda Richardson), the female factory executive.

Richard’s formal, theatrical virtuosity complements Hawkins’ working-class naturalism. The boardroom scene where Barbara remembers her individuality (“I am what’s known as a fiery redhead”) is as rousing as Rita correcting her husband’s condescending politeness, reminding him of his duty (“It’s rights, not privileges. That’s as it should be, Eddie!”). Here’s where these actresses redeem doctrinaire feminism. British filmmakers have a stronger, clearer sense of class entitlement and obligation (as in the excellent Brassed Off) than American filmmakers who get tangled up in fashionable, P.C. privilege as enjoyed by the middle-class, like in the obnoxious The Kids Are All Right and Charlize Theron’s phony North Country.

Rita’s big speech is wonderfully egalitarian: “Men and women, we are in this together. We are not divided by sex. Only by those willing to accept injustice.” But Cole is slow to dramatize this realization; he pays more attention to the legacy of the story of striking female workers than to the reality of England’s class, gender and race structure. Documentary footage of the actual strike shows only white women workers—a fact that must be computed by the audience to understand the social and cultural scope of the story. Other newsreel footage verifies blacks and Asian male factory workers. Some aspect of the black/Asian experience would have given fuller dimension to this inspiring story. Made in Dagenham proves that the struggle for human rights is not only for white or colored girls.
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Made in Dagenham
Directed by Nigel Cole
At the Angelika Film Center & Lincoln Plaza Cinema
Runtime: 113 min.

Claire Denis’ African fetish goes wild in White Material, an artsy depiction of a white family (Isabelle Huppert, Christophe Lambert and Nicolas Duvauchelle) who try holding on to their coffee plantation, and colonialist pride, in an unnamed African country when the black natives begin a murderous political revolt.

Isabelle Huppert goes native.

As Madame Vial, Huppert wanders through the turmoil like a wraith—pale, freckled, hair flowing through dust and smoke, yet still a bit haughty—Queen of the Nihilists. She’s determined to hold on to her land and business despite the inevitable revolution because—crazily—it’s her last stand, having given up the European life for the adventure and danger of the Dark Continent. But Denis finds darkness in her heroine’s psychological state. That’s what distinguishes White Material as different from imperialist romances like Hollywood’s 1955 Untamed, starring Susan Hayward, or Out of Africa with Meryl Streep. Madame Vial is a post-colonial Joseph Conrad character redefined through Denis’ embrace of Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial criticism. She represents European decadence, the flipside of Denis’ typical fetish, which is her fascination with decline.

White Material is titled after the rebels’ tag for the European interloper—reducing them to a non-human element. (“These whites, they scorn us.”) Denis employs a chic masochism that turns this vague story of an uprising into a color-coded fantasy (beige and yellow predominate). A distant view of mountain ridges resembles the form of a nude woman reclining, as if waiting to be ravished. Madame Vial embodies an indolent empire (an idea better explicated when Huppert played Patrice Chereau’s Gabrielle). In a kinky form of reverse ethnic cleansing, Denis slowly details the Vial family’s disintegration: the matriarch’s folly, the husband’s ineffectual panic and the son Manuel’s jungle fever. After he is violated by a couple of child-soldiers, he goes native; he shaves his head and raids the family stockpile, hastening his own death and encouraging the rebels’ self-destruction.

Denis photographs African physiognomy more ardently than any other European director. These faces are not inscrutable—in fact, they’re handsome and quite transparent. They’re the return of the repressed: Beautiful kids carrying spears and machete recall the eroticized boys who pop up throughout Gael Morel’s Apres Lui and the gun-toting ragamuffins in Hype Williams’ Belly. Their impulses are clearly vengeful. Even a lecherous adult verbally assaults Madame Vial: “Extreme blondness brings bad luck. It cries out to be pillaged. Blue eyes are troublesome.”

Post-colonial thinkers like Fanon and Aimé Césaire spoke to the liberation of the Third World, but Denis (collaborating with novelist Marie N’Diaye) drifts into cynical, apolitical reverie. Her muse Isaach De Bankolé, who played the gorgeous young native boy in 1989’s Chocolat, appears here as a tired, wounded counterinsurgent known as “The Boxer.” He’s a new kind of fetish object, suggesting a background of European experience, and now De Bankolé’s nobility resembles a death mask’s. Denis’ elliptical narrative avoids politics. This siege tale ignores the details of colonial life to gloss its chaotic collapse. Her equanimity is tiresome. Instead of scrutinizing conflicting political behaviors in occupied territories—as John Ford classically did in Fort Apache—Denis substitutes the complexity of ethics and duty with Madame Vial’s and the marauding militias’ fetishized madness. A sequence involving mass-suicide followed by bloody mutilations lets Denis indulge her horror-movie kick as she did in Trouble Every Day. No wonder the smart-about-movies crowd who routinely ignore excellent films about the black diaspora experience have heaped praise on White Material. By reducing third-world tragedy to a fashion show of nihilism, it’s Halloween at the art house.
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White Material
Directed by Claire Denis
At the IFC Center
Runtime: 102 min.

Decades after the cultural moment when black American theater was thriving, the movie For Colored Girls—Tyler Perry’s “serious” film of Ntozake Shange’s 1974 “choreo-poem”—feels like a throwback. It doesn’t revive the post-Civil Rights, Black militant spirit of aggressive entitlement felt by radicalized (urban intellectual) black women who needed to talk back to that part of the world—including Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul On Ice chauvinism—that would hold them down. Instead, Perry’s lugubrious film adaptation resembles pre-enlightenment. It is all too literally a “weepie.” Perry’s weakness for the lowest common denominator transforms both anger and affirmation into sludge, not great poetic cinema like Spielberg’s The Color Purple, Jonathan Demme’s Beloved or Rodrigo Garcia’s Mother and Child.

Supposedly set in contemporary New York City, For Colored Girls’ story of nine intergenerational women whose lives intersect actually occurs in conceptual art territory—Coincidenceville. The litany of miseries portrays common oppression, always at the hands of deceitful men or an unseen Patriarchy. Kimberly Elise plays a mother of two who lives with a disturbed war vet; Loretta Devine plays a community counselor with middle-age man trouble; Thandie Newton plays a rapacious bartender; Phylicia Rashad is the snooping landlady in the building they share. Anika Noni Rose plays an overly trusting dance instructor; Janet Jackson an imperious magazine editor with an untrustworthy husband; Whoopi Goldberg plays a religious fanatic hovering over her teenage daughter. Tessa Thompson is a gal who hasn’t yet left home and Kerry Washington plays a social worker desperate to have a baby.

These actresses are all strong enough presences to render stage names unnecessary (the abstract rainbow-colored monikers Shange used are pointless given Perry’s realistic pretext). The rarity of seeing so many women—especially ethnically specific ones—provides the film’s only virtue. In the opening recitation, their assorted voices declaiming a common Shange verse briefly evoke an aural sense of commiseration. The versifying works better than the accompanying gauzy dance movements Perry stages. Right off, he doesn’t know how to activate a graceful, theatrical metaphor for femaleness like Almodóvar created in the choreographed opening of Talk To Her or the great Rosie Perez dance Spike Lee used to personify urban American energy in Do the Right Thing. However, the overlapping and harmonizing vocal timbres do generate a palpable womanliness for which the term “girls” seems pitifully anachronistic.

Trouble began with Perry’s title, which is truncated from the original For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. Although it’s a dedication, it also segregates. This seems retrograde in the “post-racial” Obama era, conveniently harkening to the 1970s when the cultural mainstream embraced a radical chic fondness for black exclusivity that was also accusatory: It asserted a curious, exotic defiance. Today’s perverse radical chic too-readily embraces black pathology—like last year’s scandalous Precious, which Perry publicly endorsed. Here he uses a similar self-deprecating mode as both marketing strategy and, more troublingly, to wallow in the effects of racism on black female identity. This, too, is a throwback. At the same time that Perry showcases his cast of black actresses, he mires them in tears, stereotypes and primitive agit-prop from which their huge talents cannot escape.

No doubt For Colored Girls will be sold (and misread) as a triumph of feminine expression, but it’s oddly unliberating. The way dialogue lapses into poetry (“Sing a black girl’s song… Let her be born and handled warm”) clashes with the naturalistic presentation and blunt, TV-style imagery. Perry’s technique crashes these anguished women’s personal space; we’re in their faces, prying into their intimacy. He lacks the sensual, portraitist’s skill that helps Ingmar Bergman’s and Mike Leigh’s actresses seem to reveal their souls, or that made Spielberg and Demme’s films breakthroughs in black female screen iconography.

Too often the offenses these women suffer (rape, battery, betrayal, abortion, disease, the B-word) play like public service announcements. It’s the same P.C. trap that suckered naive viewers into defending the outrages in Precious as “dirty laundry.” Audiences are eager to see African-American experience reduced to tragic social issues rather than as deeply imagined life. (That’s why film culture has yet to give The Color Purple and Beloved their due.) Strangely, Perry depends on such stigmatizing in order to pass off his crude speechifying and undigested neuroses as authentic. While avoiding freaky deaky Lee Daniels’ salacious sensationalism—although a rape montage incorporating violence, opera and burnt pork chops comes close—Perry indulges the Oprah Winfrey brand of mortified indignation where female victimhood is constant. Shamelessly substituting for the truth of black American life, it is little more than tear-streaked melodrama.

Despite the cast’s good efforts, Shange’s themes of female self-denial and varieties of sexual guilt don’t ignite. Cat fights between Goldberg and Newton, Goldberg and Thompson are nearly risible, lacking the primacy of the sex-and-religion battles Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie memorably acted out in Carrie. The camera is usually too close to make Newton and Rose’s expressive physicality register properly. Elise disastrously sobs her way through one crisis after another. Macy Gray’s cameo as a crazy abortionist only lacks Mo’Nique’s gutbucket raucousness. Rashad shows wise authority, but her elderly counterpart, Devine, is often a hot mess of jumbled good intentions and weak will.

For colored men, this movie is another scandalous put-down. Perry used to know better when his own movies explored spiritual distress and brought male villains to the altar of forgiveness, as in Diary of a Mad Black Woman. But in true Oprah-mode, these men are mostly bad news. This is where Shange required updating, and Perry needed to confront marketplace hostility to the black male image—a problem bound up in the mainstream’s preference for black female suffering. Demonizing the black male as a separate problem from racism’s effect on black women keeps the denigration going. Janet Jackson’s scenes with Omari Hardwicke as her alpha male husband on the downlow makes this uncomfortably clear. Jackson’s masklike rectitude is way too haughty and solemn; their relationship is a preachy sketch that goes past maudlin to insult. Plus, Jackson’s deprived of any joy or sense of humor (including her bright family smile) that sometimes buoys Perry’s plain talk and moral sincerity. Ironically, Perry’s biggest mistake—and everything he leaves out about black male experience—is condensed in Hardwicke’s short-shrift lament, “I’m sorry for my truth.”

Perry’s quasi-feminist artifice is an Oscar ploy. It eliminates the larger social history that made The Color Purple, Beloved and even the multiracial Mother and Child so powerful. The deprivations of slavery and racism were indispensable to understanding those gender relations (check out Goldberg, Newton, Elise and Washington in those films to see the difference). When Newton laments, “Being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven’t conquered yet,” black female complaint congratulates white liberal guilt. Such outdated pathos makes For Colored Girls’ humanism specious. When empathy and comfort finally arrive in a group hug, the film is too beat-down to feel triumphant. Once again black pathology prevails while black film art suffers—like a battered woman in a Hollywood homeless shelter.
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For Colored Girls
Directed by Tyler Perry
Runtime: 134 min.

Thirty years ago, Every Man For Himself was hailed as Jean-Luc Godard’s comeback. So its revival this week at Film Forum should be viewed as the same. After the confounding, insincere semi-honor from Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a recent front page smear in the New York Times, it is good—and necessary—to contemplate Every Man For Himself and renew our understanding that Godard matters. We need to know more than ever why he is one of the true giants of filmmaking and, perhaps, one of the last thinking, emotionally-engaged humanists.

Jacques Dutronc thinking about Isabelle Huppert.

The desperation expressed by the title Every Man For Himself is felt by three Swiss citizens: Denise (Nathalie Baye), an itinerant novelist who bikes between jobs; Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), a prostitute exploring her options; and Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc), a director at the crossroads between film and video and wavering between fatherhood, an ex-wife and his disenchanted mistress. Each character crosses borders from what they know to searching for the uncertain satisfaction they desire—in love, work and life.

Godard’s French title Sauve Qui Peut/La Vie translates as “Save the Man Who’s Afraid/Life,” contrasting panic and possibility, anxiety and hope. He made the film after a decade in the “wilderness”—creating video experiments that explored his own political consciousness and documenting the social realities of contemporary Europe. This return to cinema demonstrated Godard’s new-found aesthetic: In Every Man For Himself he is more inventive and idiosyncratically witty than ever (though without the glamorous 1960s romanticism that critics prefer, forgetting that Godard was always rigorously conscientious). But here, his imagery acquires a fresh, grave elegance (cosmic nature, not pop art, takes prominence) while staying radically committed to deconstructing movie narrative. Even in the same year as Raging Bull, Melvin and Howard, Dressed to Kill and The Long Riders it was still the freshest, most thrilling movie to behold. Thus, the movie remains as startlingly beautiful—and challenging—as it was 30 years ago.

The film’s British release title is Slow Motion, referring to Godard’s occasional emphasis on retarding the action into increments, especially images of Denise biking across borders through the exquisitely peaceful Swiss countryside (critic Andrew Sarris likened the technique to “instant replay” of sports events). Godard draws attention to what he called “the emotion in motion,” never taking cinema’s visual pleasure and complexity for granted. One motif is highlighting the “invisible” use of background music, even, at a key moment, showing the source of an especially emotive orchestral theme.

Clever as ever, Godard got back into 35mm cinema in 1980, announcing an intense, if somber, flowering of his aesthetic curiosity. His exquisite, openly spiritual films made after this one (Passion, Detective, Hail, Mary, King Lear, Prenom: Carmen and the capstone Nouvelle Vague in 1990) now look like cinema’s last epiphany before video’s take-over. Godard, always a student excited by the poetics of popular art, was responding to cinematic breakthroughs he had missed during his “wilderness” sojourn. In a 1980 interview with Jonathan Cott, Godard praised the slow motion death sequence in DePalma’s 1978 The Fury, and Every Man For Himself repeatedly pays homage to Marguerite Duras’ 1977 Le Camion, emulating its hypnotic shots of trucks and cars on eerily quiet roads. Through these citations, Godard pursued the essence of cinema as the recording of life.

In a scene where Paul (his sardonic alter ego) resists giving a classroom lecture, a formula scrawled on the blackboard proposes CINEMA + VIDEO, CAIN + ABEL. It seemed waggish at the time, but now looks prophetic. Every Man For Himself warns how changing morality and human relations are reflected in artistic technique and modes of communication (long before The Social Network). The infamous scene of Isabelle’s participation in an orgy with a businessman and his lackey plays out the decadent development. Not just a spoof on cruel, brutal, naked capitalist exploitation, this twilight daisy chain also seems to have predicted the upcoming Reagan revolution and particularly its deceptive afterglow—Bill Clinton’s Oval Office debauchery.

During this sequence, Huppert’s impassive face gives the illusion of coolness, but she also conveys Godard’s contemplative manner—observing chaos with humane forbearance. This is wisdom Godard earned from the unsettling exploration of political fractiousness in movies like the 1975 Here and Elsewhere (Ici et Ailleurs)—the one carelessly cited by the New York Times as an example of Godard’s bigotry. Typically brilliant, Godard looks on politics as expressions of human will. Here and Elsewhere is not, in the end, about Palestine or Israel, it’s about Complication. “Very soon you don’t know what to make of the film,” Godard narrates. “Very soon the contradictions explode including you.” He pursues a circle of meaning: images become history, reflection, consequences, politics, humanity.

Maybe Godard is under attack after all these years because his principled filmmaking has always been an attack on the tyranny of bourgeois culture. But get this straight: Here and Elsewhere’s title refers to a spiritual exchange and state of being: Compassion. Godard works in the highest humanist tradition, which is why the current smear campaign against him won’t succeed. See Every Man For Himself: Save the Artist Who Feels/Life.
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Every Man For Himself
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
At Film Forum Nov. 12-25
Runtime: 87 min.

After making Slumdog Millionaire, arguably the worst movie ever to win the Best Picture Oscar, Danny Boyle surprisingly comes up with a not-bad film. 127 Hours, the true-life story of Aron Ralston’s 2003 rock-climbing mishap, makes acceptable use of Boyle’s usually egregious flamboyance. The potentially off-putting facts and limitations of how 28-year-old Ralston spent almost four days pinned by a boulder in Colorado’s Blue John Canyon and had to sever his own right arm to escape demands Boyle’s focus on the dilemma’s surface sentiment.

What would James Franco do if stuck between a rock and a hard place? You can guess.

All of Boyle’s imagination goes into keeping the story’s narrative monotony from being boring. The film’s primary impact comes from cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle’s hyperbolic videography. He shoots the works: highlighting atmosphere, water from a faucet traveling the core of a straw, telescopic scenes of street crowds, microscopic close-ups of Ralston’s contact lenses, split-screen multiplication of Ralston’s mountain-bike excursion, a few clever, triptych representations of the same activity to convey time’s passing and sometimes shots of Ralston from the rocky terrain’s POV.

These montages seem descriptive of life experience, though only superficially. They’re like TV-commercial details but with the extravagance of big-screen technological innovation: the blatant use of pixels and the nearly artificial hard, bright color that digital resolution gives to nature and flesh which, in themselves, becomes a form of entertainment. Boyle doesn’t concentrate on the spiritual crisis of Ralston’s imprisonment as Bresson’s great A Man Escaped pondered the depth of an isolated man’s sense of time and mortality. Boyle lacks depth and so plays to his mettle: turning Ralston’s predicament into a spectacular stunt. That’s why 127 Hours never descends into a vat of manure as Slumdog did aesthetically and literally.

Much of 127 Hours is a test of photographic realism—the latest step in Boyle’s constant play with techno trickery (such as his zombie flicks 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later) that makes him a frivolous Fincher. Aestheticizing Ralston’s calamity animates Boyle’s facile themes of modernity vs. nature, body vs. mind. When Ralston meets two female hikers and they dive into a grotto, the ostentatious splash makes a point of visual pixels, not analytically, as in Godard’s newest video provocation Film Socialisme, yet Boyle’s obvious style announces our contemporary physical and emotional distance from nature. This time, Boyle’s flamboyance is almost rigorous. Even the cheap distraction of a desert thunderstorm that nearly drowns Ralston is at least a distraction (until it briefly becomes a cheap fantasy tease about rescue).

Because Boyle’s subject is Ralston’s middle-class American arrogance regarding his own charm, ability and pleasure, 127 Hours doesn’t raise those embarrassing Slumdog issues of poverty, deprivation and social corruption. His stylistic excess that was so ruinous in the overwrought Slumdog and the equally far-fetched Scottish-junkies movie Trainspotting is relatively contained. It’s not so much that the story’s simplicity mandates narrative discipline (Boyle lacks discipline) but that his flashy fatuousness is uncannily right to convey an adult-kid’s folly—a truth Sean Penn neglected in Into the World. An aspect of Ralston’s situation suggests cosmic comedy; acknowledging dumb fate makes the later, grave family moments seem well measured and never insultingly mawkish like Slumdog.

The movie’s MVP is the ubiquitous James Franco, whose real-life propensity for art-stunts is reflected in Ralston’s recklessness. Franco channels some of the same expressive reserve he displayed in Altman’s The Company, embodying a quiet, always-thinking solitude. He doesn’t turn 127 Hours into a hipster version of Bresson (nor Van Sant’s insufferable desert trek Gerry); rather, he creates a fairly authentic portrait of a sweetly dumb American male loner who fears being stuck existentially
and romantically.

This is blessedly different from how Ryan Reynolds is used to condemn American foreign policy in Buried, the dour, one-man-movie political diatribe. Boyle’s flashbacks work off of Franco’s gift of gentle innocence. Questioning his own solitude—“You didn’t tell anyone?”—he then repeats, “Anyone?” in a good instance of self-critical shame. Boyle’s fancy staging (including a pocket cam’s double-image of Ralston) makes this po-mo moment genuinely thoughtful. Ralston’s memories (including a childhood hide-and-seek game recalled and regretted) aren’t merely mushy: memory and guilt reflect on each other because Franco’s characterization has substance. Despite this era of godless movies, listen to the way Franco says, “Please,” as a modest prayer. And when he does it again, saying, “Thank you,” at the adventure’s end, he could as well be addressing Boyle.
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127 Hours
Directed by Danny Boyle
Runtime: 93 min.

For many people, the term Due Date means expiration for library books. For Todd Phillips and Robert Downey, it means car crashes, scatology and homo-nuttiness. The plot, in which Downey plays tetchy California architect Peter Highman, awaiting the fulfillment of his wife’s pregnancy, barely uses the term’s adult natal significance; it’s strictly juvenile.

Shut your face.

Peter gets stuck with Zack Galifianakis as Ethan Tremblay, a bulbous yet effete Hollywood-bound actor he meets when flying out of Atlanta’s airport. This obnoxious odd couple is forced together on a cross-country road trip that’s actually nothing more than a desperate re-working of Martin Brest’s 1985 Midnight Run, where Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin played mismatched traveling companions. It’s also a poor imitation of John Hughes’ 1989 Planes, Trains and Automobiles, in which Steve Martin and John Candy fleshed out a similar premise, comically illustrating the tension of American male class differences.

Due Date disregards what made those films interesting. It takes a sitcom approach to male class differences and flatters the juvenile behavior that’s become the favorite, indulged subject of comedians and TV writers. Phillips developed his frat-boy, sitcom specialty in Old School, Road Trip and the aggressively foul The Hangover, an unfortunate hit that lowered audience’s perception of social and psychological behavior, reducing Brest and Hughes’ perceptions to rude, gross slapstick. Key moments include: a masturbating bulldog, always reliable Danny McBride as a crippled, angry war vet and Jamie Foxx provid-
ing racial comic relief as Peter’s black best friend.

Foxx’s scenes are never as funny as the ludicrous, unintentionally hilarious The Soloist, his maudlin brotherhood movie co-starring Downey. Phillips misses the opportunity to satirize that film’s screwed-up treatment of racial tension and middle-class guilt. Instead, Due Date goes for absurdity: with white buffoon Galifianakis as Downey’s foil, Phillips uses slob humor to sentimentalize brotherhood and infantilize manhood. Downey displays great vocal precision and physical grace in Peter’s silly exasperation with Ethan, but the supposed teamwork is off—there’s no Oscar/Felix rhythm, just annoyance.

It’s not too soon to address the Galifianakis problem: He lacks John Candy’s exuberance and John Belushi’s impish twinkle. He makes Ethan’s swishy, self-absorbed foolishness unappealing and depressing. Galifianakis acts like Phillips directs—crude and obvious. He represents the further decline of comedy in this Apatow era. Ending with a scene involving TV’s Two and a Half Men is too apt. In Due Date, maturity and intelligence have expired.
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Due Date
Directed by Todd Phillips
Runtime: 95 min.