The drought has taken a toll on the city’s cultural scene, evident in this year’s relocation of the ATLANTA DOGWOOD FESTIVAL from Piedmont Park to Lenox Square. The 72-year-old festival, beginning Fri., APRIL 4, may have a hard time convincing Atlantans to celebrate the arrival of spring at the mall, but if the weather turns dismal, everyone can shop! And it’s close to MARTA! There will be the proverbial child-crack of inflatables, music and a large artists’ market where you can purchase art, and if the price is right, maybe an actual artist. Interestingly enough, the festival was originally conceived by Rich’s department store head Walter Rich as a way to lift Atlantans’ mood during the Depression, so perhaps this year’s festival can serve a similar purpose in our post-Bear Stearns economic slump. Through April 6. Free. Fri., noon-9 p.m.; Sat., 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sun., noon-6 p.m. 3393 Peachtree Road. 404-817-6642. www.dogwood.org.

Continue reading Speakeasy.

Movie fans know that some of the most haunting 20th-century filmmaking has come from Japan. Films such as Rashomon (1950), Onibaba (1964), and Woman in the Dunes (1964) have the kind of impact that lingers for decades. Georgia Tech suggests that the national cinema continues to both enchant and get under our skin with its mini-film festival GHOSTS, LEGENDS, AND TECHNOLOGY IN JAPANESE CINEMA, beginning Tues., MARCH 25. The series features four notable Japanese films centered on folk tales, ghosts and the country’s unique dreamy surreality. The mini-festival opens with Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953), one of Japanese film’s masterpieces known for its visual beauty and progressive gender politics. The series also features Kwaidan (1964) and Kairo (2001, pictured), a Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard award winner, which unites themes of ghosts and technology for the 21st century. Through March 31. Free. 7 p.m. Student Success Center, Press Rooms A and B, 2R Level, 219 Uncle Heinie Way. 404-365-9239. www.lcc.gatech.edu.

Here’s the trailer for Kwaidan, directed by Masaki Kobayashi…

Continue reading Culture Surfing.

Continue reading Culture Surfing.

If you thought Michael Haneke’s 1997 Austrian feature Funny Games was an exercise in sadism, then you should check out the ad campaign associated with his current Hollywood remake of the film starring Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and Michael Pitt centered on a vacationing family tortured by a pair of privileged teenagers reminiscent of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. In a certifiably sick movie tie-in, viewers can go to the Funny Games website:

Click on “Play the Game.”

Go ahead. I dare you.

Customize an e-mail message and a phone message using the name of a friend or loved one and receive a message for your friend delivered in the voices of the film’s killers. It’s an incredibly creepy promotional gimmick.

It’s strange to see this diabolical device used to promote a film by this exceedingly smart, subversive director. Does Haneke know? If I had his e-mail address and phone number, I might have to customize one for him.

I have written about Haneke a number of times and his brilliant cinema of contemporary dis-ease. Like other admirers of his work, I was a bit put off by the notion of him remaking Funny Games, a film so thoroughly disturbing it haunted me for weeks following my first viewing. Fans of Haneke’s work won’t be able to stay away from his virtual shot-by-shot American remake of Funny Games, though it will probably feel less creepy and shocking the second time around, as local filmmaker Mike Brune, who attended a press screening, noted.

But the American version seems to have fulfilled the director’s mission to assault desensitized Americans with their taste for violence as entertainment. The couple seated in front of me had all of the usual horror-movie reactions to the movie: “Get out of the house!” “Why is he eating, now!?” but by film’s end seemed to have been lulled into a creeped-out stupor. We’ll see if the film reaches beyond the art-house crowd or is perversely embraced as “ironic” by the same thrill seekers who sing the praises of amoral gore hound Tarantino.

Many, as my editor noted, will think of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange when they see Funny Games. There are so many shared elements: the cold, ironic teenage killers, the white outfits, the home invasion, the dispassionate sadism. But as Haneke noted in a 2007 profile in the New York Times, Kubrick’s use of violence in Clockwork was in some ways an ugly affirmation of sadism’s dark allure. I think Haneke is coming from a far more solidly moral, subversive place, where Kubrick’s approach to violence was more about his delight in a remarkable story and the apparatus of cinema. According to Haneke, Kubrick was disgusted by how the ultra-violence was received. I personally love Kubrick. His influence on film (and the art world, too) is immeasurable. But the way he handled violence, especially sexual violence, in this film still repulses me.

There is a slick, tantalizing element to the anti-social cruelty meted out by Alex (Malcolm McDowell) and his droogs. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that teenage boys from probably every generation since have dressed up as these characters for Halloween. And I won’t even get into the many literal and metaphorical rape scenes in Clockwork, including the one set to the strains of “Singing in the Rain.” It has an ugly, erotic element not unlike the rape scene with Susan George in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (She likes it! She really likes it!), and in some ways seems to illustrate how directors in the ’70s (both films were released in 1971) were dealing with the sexual revolution and the subsequent rise of women’s rights in a not altogether pleasant way.

Watch for my review of Funny Games in the March 12 issue of Creative Loafing.

(Photo Joeff Davis)

I wrote about the wacky/cool global sensation that’s sweeping the nation, the salon/show-and-tell Pecha Kucha, in this week’s CL.

This Sunday is the fourth installment of Pecha Kucha and the organizers have just released the list of participants, who skew heavily on the architectural side of things.

VOLUME FOUR
March 9, 2008, 6:40 p.m.
Octane Coffee Lounge
109 Marietta St.

Danielle Glasky
An American Barista in Japan

David Sweeney
Dynamic Dish

Gavin Holmes
Anatomy of a 30 Second Spot

Jennifer Smith
Recent Favorites or My Mom

Mark Cottle
My You Tube

Merrill Elam
Buckhead Branch Library

Robert Cheatham
Public Domain, Inc.: Past, Present

Ruth Dusseault
I hoed beans

Ryan Gravel
20 Moments On the Belt-Line

Scott Ingram
Art and Architecture

“Doc Melhorn and the Pearly Gates A,” Norman Rockwell, 1938

(Photo: Collection of Pfizer Inc./© 1938 SEPS: Licensed by Curtis Publishing, Indianapolis)

Did you miss Norman Rockwell’s homespun assault on Atlanta in 1999 for the High Museum’s Americana blockbuster Pictures for the American People? No worries: A selection of 11 Rockwell paintings (along with the work of contemporary medical illustrators) depicting members of the medical profession are on view through June 4 at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. You heard me right: The CDC is also an art hot zone.

Seeing art at the CDC’s Global Health Odyssey exhibition space on Clifton Road is fun, because you get to feel like a character out of a Tom Clancy thriller as your trunk is searched. If you’re lucky, they’ll make you pop your hood and show them your engine. Maybe if real museums took these precautions, the wackos wouldn’t be stealing and slashing artworks.

Usually by the time I make it through security, I am all primed to see guys in biohazard gear leisurely strolling around, looking at art. I am generally disappointed on this front.

Talk about a retro flashback. When was the last time doctors were treated with such reverence, a virtual halo perched on their caring heads? Doctors today are so harried, filling out insurance-company paperwork and dealing with onion-peel bureaucracy, a contemporary Rockwell would probably feature a stressed-out lady doctor eating lunch at her desk.

– Sally Mann speaking to Creative Loafing in 2004 about her photo project What Remains. Excerpts from What Remains and Self-Portraits appear March 7-April 26 at Jackson Fine Art in Buckhead.