Friday Night in Kips Bay: Parks Outdoor Summer Movies presents "How to Train Your Dragon" at Bellevue South Park

Tonight we didn't feel like going too far, so we took the L train two stops to First Avenue and walked up the dozen blocks to East 26th Street and halfway up the block to Bellevue South Park to see the animated film, How to Train Your Dragon, which some of the animation majors we teach writing and literature at the fabulous School of Visual Arts recommended we watch. They were right.

We got to the little park, stretching mid-block between 26th and 28th, just after 8 p.m. They had chairs set up, and we found seats in the second row just as they were putting up the screen. Soon after things were set up, Lisa, the park groundskeeper and greeter, introduced what was the last Friday night movie of the summer.

There were kids and adults, probably mostly from the neighborhood. We enjoyed the film a great deal. It's got a plot we've seen in different forms in countless films, and in some ways it's pretty ordinary, but it's also sweet and simple and excels in its exhilarating airborne sequences and its use of silence between the protagonist and the dragon he forms a bond with.

Writing in the New York Times, A.O. Scott called the film "a shrewd blend of conventional pop-culture pandering and exalted cinematic artistry. . .

The way the dragons look, the way they move, the way they catch the light, dissolve in the mist, somersault through the air and dive toward the ground — all of this is likely to make you forget the uninspired plot and the shopworn lessons, even as you are reminded of some of the basic, ecstatic reasons you go to the movies in the first place."

Bellevue South Park was a nice setting with a real small-town feel in the middle of Manhattan, just west (not south) of Bellevue Hospital Center.

As the Parks Department website explains:

The misleading name stems from the fact that the original Bellevue Urban Renewal Area was located at Kips Bay Plaza on East 30th Street, and this park lies just to the south of that site. The Bellevue South Urban Renewal Project, which began in 1959, dramatically changed the face of a 17-block area on Manhattan’s East Side, running from 23rd to 30th Streets between First and Second Avenues. This project was a source of much controversy among area residents, some of whom desired rehabilitation of older structures, rather than complete razing and rebuilding. Ultimately, tenements and old factory buildings gave way to a new, vibrant community centered on a complex of eight mixed-income apartment buildings known as Phipps Plaza.

Bellevue South Park was mapped in 1966, a welcomed green space for the increasingly residential neighborhood. The park fell victim to New York City’s severe fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s and was left undeveloped for some time. In the late 1970s, the city agreed to pay for the construction of the park after Community Board Six and residents of the neighborhood promised to cover all of the expenses needed for its maintenance. The park opened in November 1979, and the Better Bellevue Association saw to its maintenance for the next seven years. . .

The city took control of the park after the worst of the fiscal crisis had passed, and Parks assumed jurisdiction over Bellevue South Park in 1986. A $2 million renovation sponsored by Councilman Antonio Pagan was completed in 1997, transforming the park into its current shape.

It's a really nice little oasis. For the past few years, we've been working just five blocks south on Second Avenue and before tonight, we never knew this park existed. We're grateful we finally got to enjoy it and How to Train Your Dragon.

Thursday Night in Williamsburg: Summer Starz movie "Wall-E" at East River State Park with music by The Backroad

On a hot and humid night, we stayed in the neighborhood and are happy about that after seeing (for the first time) Wall-E at the kid-friendly SummerStarz Thursday evening film series at East River State Park.

We arrived a little after 7 p.m. and got to hear The Backroad, or anyway two the members of this Pennsylvania experimental/folk rock/jam band. Their set was a really pleasant way to watch the sun set over Manhattan and try to catch any breeze. We're predisposed to like anyone from the Harrisburg area (in Autumn in Brooklyn, our forthcoming book that takes place in 1978, there's a lot of back-and-forth between Brooklyn and Harrisburg) but The Backroad were really good.

It's not the high-profile, cutting edge of the Pool Parties, but at SummerStarz, the park becomes an intimate space by virtue of the much sparser, more-spread-out crowds and the family-oriented atmosphere. We actually spotted more elderly people at last Sunday's pool party, but there were a good number of young single couples here for a free date night. On the way out we walked with some twentysomething bikers from the Southside who apparently discovered the movie and the park while riding by, and actually heard one tell the other (all dialogue guaranteed verbatim), "Dude, this place is fantastic."

Little kids were running around a lot, oblivious to the sultry weather, and families spread down blankets, as did some young couples. Evidently they loosen the rules about bringing bottles into the park that are present during the pool parties because we saw families with water and soda bottles as well as picnic food.

The Backroad duo reminded us a little of Simon & Garfunkel and one song was clearly a tribute to Paul and Art. We've been thinking a lot of the summer of 1969 this summer - the 40th anniversaries of Stonewall, the moon landing, Woodstock - and we vividly recall from August 1969 driving up the old West Side Highway in the West Village and Chelsea four years before it collapsed. We were in the Mustang of a new umfriend from Marine Park we met from the East Village Other personals as he took us to the Cloisters for the first time (he'd later become a Catholic priest).

When "Scarborough Fair" came on the radio, he said, "I have a Simon and Garfunkel obsession." Then, when "Lay Lady Lay" came on, he said, "I have a Dylan obsession." We were only 18 then and liked obsessives. Anyway, some of The Backroad's songs - we particularly liked "Gone to Ohio" - made us feel 18 again for a little while. There were faint old-school Dylan echoes in some of The Backroad's songs, and a little Leonard Cohen too.

We think the two members of The Backroad whose music we got to hear tonight were Kyle Morgan and Alex B. Smith. Anyway, we're grateful they came. When their set ended and we were encouraged to give them a big Brooklyn sendoff, we watched them load the Alex's drums and other equipment into their van with a couple of friends, take some pics of the skyline, and start the drive back to PA.

Neil Diamond singing at a July 4 celebration on CBS was used as a sound check for the new sound system, we were told, and this sound was a big improvement over the old one, as we heard everything very clearly. (Admittedly, Wall-E goes for a long time without any dialogue. . .)

Susan Alexander of Town Square came on briefly to tell something about the series, about Town Square, to thank The Edge and the other sponsors of SummerStarz, etc. Tonight would have been the last night, but the first two weeks were rained out, so next Thursday, August 27, they'll show Babe and the following Thursday, September 3, Nim's Island. Sounds good to us.

There's not much we can add to what other people have said about Wall-E,
which won last year's Oscar for best animated feature and should have been nominated in the best film category (it would have been, too, if the Academy had gone to the new ten-nominees rule in 2008).

Hey, as one of at least three boys at Meyer Levin Junior High in the early 1960s who sat listening to Jerry Herman musicals in their parents' "finished" basements - our favorite's still Milk and Honey, which we saw on Broadway with Molly Picon in '62 - we're really easy to please.

We enjoyed the evening a lot and are thankful for SummerStarz. As we end our long vacation, it was a really pleasant interlude and as it cooled off slightly with nighttime East River breezes (thankfully, no storms), a nice respite from the current dog days. A few people stopped for ice cream on the way home.

Wednesday Night in Long Island City: Outdoor Cinema 2009 presents "Waltz with Bashir" at Socrates Sculpture Park

Since we got an afternoon email saying that Summerscreen's McCarren Park showing of Fame had been canceled due to "inclement weather," we went east to Long Island City tonight for clearer skies and the 2008 Israeli film Waltz with Bashir (ואלס עם באשיר‎) at Socrates Sculpture Park.

We don't really think it rained anywhere in the city tonight, but the early forecasts were pretty ominous. By 6 p.m. we observed that Outdoor Cinema 2009 had tweeted
Outdoor Cinema is on! Scattered showers are possible, but we will not stop rolling unless it rains. Pack an umbrella and take your chances! so we headed for Long Island City.

The G train we got on wasn't very cool, and we were schvitzing, so we got off at Greenpoint Avenue and caught the chilly B24 bus at its first stop, taking it across Greenpoint Avenue to Sunnyside. There we walked a couple of blocks and caught the Q104 for its entire route, which took us on a nice ride up Broadway through Steinway and Astoria to Vernon Boulevard, where the Socrates Sculplture Park is.

For those who don't know, it's a gorgeous park filled with fun and thought-provoking art. Lori wrote on the informative SiteBits:

Until 1986, the site of the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens, was an illegal riverside landfill, abandoned and ugly. A group of local artists [led by Mark Di Suvero] got together and decided to turn the area into a park and outdoor museum.

In the summer, Socrates hosts a a free outdoor cinema featuring international films and sometimes live music. All are invited to bring a picnic and a blanket, and watch the film starting at dusk. Also throughout the summer, Socrates offers sculpture and art classes for all ages, tai chi and yoga on Saturday mornings until September 30 (all which are also free).

The park foundation awards several artists a residency each year. They may work on site, and have the opportunity to display extremely large scale work, the only location like it in New York. The sculptures change about every 6 months. Visitors are invited to look, play, climb, learn, photograph and let their dogs run around the sculptures and park.

The stats aside, the park is totally amazing. Not only is it an actual grassy space with trees, but it has a breathtaking view of the Manhattan skyline and East River. There are a few meandering paths and river overlooks that SOME people might deem "romantic" (yes, there are stupid kissing couples everywhere). [Lots of dogs, too!] A walk through the park really creates a sense of detachment from the hustle and bustle of New York. The sea smells like the sea, the trees are thick in areas and private, the space is open and lush. How can this be New York?

Not to mention the amazing sculptures!

We walked around for a while, looking at the sculpture and wandering the gentle slopes around the waterfront.

The skyline looked so beautiful as the sun set.

The crowd was mixture of all kinds of people and, like the animated film being shown, featured more dogs than little kids.

In its eleventh year, Outdoor Cinema at Socrates Sculpture Park is an international film festival in cooperation with The Museum of the Moving Image, which is always worth a trip to Astoria (we've been there twice in recent years). There's also international music, dance and food, "celebrating the cultural diversity of Queens."

So tonight Naomi's Kosher Pizza and Israel Falafel from Flushing were being enjoyed by the people around us, including several guys with yarmulkes and women with hijabs.

The music by Israeli cellist Yoed Nir was sublime.


Here's a sample, from a 2007 concert in New York (he lives here now):

The movie began after Sean Leonardo, Socrates Sculpture Park's events director, welcomed us to the park and asked people to donate $5 to support the programming and get a glow-in-the-dark bracelet and after a speaker from the Museum of the Moving Image introduced Waltz with Bashir, a 2008 animated film by Ari Folman, who also is one of the writers on the TV show In Therapy.

We found the movie gripping, hauntingly beautiful and mesmerizing from its opening scene with a pack of wild dogs in a recurring dream.

A.O. Scott, reviewing Waltz with Bashir in the New York Times, called it

a memoir, a history lesson, a combat picture, a piece of investigative journalism and an altogether amazing film.

Directed by Ari Folman, an Israeli filmmaker whose struggle to make sense of his experience as a soldier in the Lebanon war of 1982 shapes its story, “Waltz” is by no means the world’s only animated documentary. . . But Mr. Folman has gone further, creating something that is not only unique but also exemplary, a work of astonishing aesthetic integrity and searing moral power.

Tired of sitting cross-legged, we stood up for the final 20 minutes of this hallucinatory film. There were tears in our eyes most of the time as it moved to its unspeakably horrific conclusion, the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Lebanese Phalangist fighters which Israeli leaders let happen.

It ends switching from animation to the graphic, horrifying images of real dead bodies and screaming, mourning Palestinian women which will always be seared into our consciousness from that summer of 1982.

That year, along with others, we signed a petition opposing the Lebanon war that appeared in a Jewish weekly.

A few months later, at our Davie, Florida address, we received a letter from a rabbi in Lynn, Massachusetts, informing us that because of that ad, we'd been excommunicated by a rabbinical court.

We hadn't known that Judaism even had such a thing as excommunication, but it looked pretty official - so that's how we became Episcopalian.

The film ended around 9:40 p.m. and we got home to Williamsburg over an hour later by taking the Q104 and then the N and 7 trains for one stop each and the G train from Court Square home to Metropolitan Avenue.

It was a great evening, and we're grateful for Socrates Sculpture Park and the Museum of the Moving Image for making available such a terrific movie for us tonight.

Thursday Night in Williamsburg: SummerStarz movie "The Incredibles" at East River State Park

Tonight we stayed in Williamsburg and walked over to East River State Park for the Summer Starz free movie, The Incredibles.

There was a surprisingly small audience of families with kids, young couples, a few hipsters (including mommies and daddies) and a few of us oldsters. But as the sun set and the river breezes cooled us off, it was a really nice, intimate, pleasant way to while away a midsummer night.

The movies that they're showing at Summer Starz are all kid-friendly, from animated ones like tonight's The Incredibles or Babe or Wall-E. Next Thursday is Bend It Like Beckham. According to the postcard we picked up one morning at the Greenpoint Starbucks, the Thursday events start with a children's hour at 6 p.m. (tonight, for example, Rock City Theatrics, a Williamsburg kids' theater workshop, was scheduled) and then live music at 7 p.m. (tonight a Staten Island band Fenix Down, which we've seen described as red-state hard rock with a video game feel) but we didn't get to the park until after 8 p.m., just a few minutes before the movie started.

There were some families at picnic tables, and the kids near us came back to the table with hot dogs, telling their parents, "They're free!" There was free popcorn as well. We moved around a little but mostly sat on one of those little concrete parts, maybe 18 inches high around the perimeter of the concrete. Some families were watching from picnic blankets on the grass to the side.

SummerStarz 2009 is sponsored by Town Square, which says on its website that it's

a volunteer community-based 501(c)(3) organization in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, two neighborhoods experiencing dynamic changes. Founded in 2005, our mission is to build a vibrant community and enrich the quality of our lives through activities that inspire creativity and imagination, teach respect and cooperation, and celebrate the joy around us.

This is the fifth year of SummerStarz, which was previously held in McCarren Park. The big sponsor is The Edge, and the woman introducing the evening's film gestured to the towers looming over the south side of the park. Before the movie, we got to see this ad for the condo on Kent Avenue:

We first saw The Incredibles soon after it opened, on the weekend after the 2004 election when John Kerry lost to President Bush and we lost our race against Florida Republican Congressman Ander Crenshaw. We were living in Davie, Broward County, Florida, and we saw it near our apartment at the AMC Ridge Plaza 8 on State Road 84 off I-595. It made us feel better than and we enjoyed it tonight. A.O. Scott, putting it on his ten best list for 2004, called it "[a]n almost-great movie about the dangers of mediocrity, and a drama of midlife frustration cleverly dressed up as kid-pleasing action fantasy."

The generator on the truck to the side made some noise, but we could hear the action (whenever there were words or subtitles - from a French-speaking villain in the movie, there were Spanish subtitles). The film stopped dead once - "a small glitch, also known as an 'oops,'" said one of the presenters - but it started up where it left off after about seven minutes. (Still, a bunch of families with sleepy kids took that time to leave.)

It was a pleasant evening, and the view of the river, the skyline, the planes and boast going by, made for a nice atmosphere.

Back when we lived in Florida, we went to the movies nearly once every weekend for a matinee back when it cost us six dollars. There were some great theaters in Broward County, mostly the Gateway in Fort Lauderdale and the Sunrise 11 closer to where we lived in West Broward, that then played lots of art, indie, foreign and gay-themed films.

Here in New York the last three years, because of the high prices and our more limited income, we have only gone to regular movies twice. We miss it, but New York offers us other pleasures, and we get to go to a bunch of free screenings from the wonderful School of Visual Arts, where we teach writing and literature to photography and animation major.

We miss going to first-run movies.

(Painting by Mikayla Butchart)

On Monday evening at the amazingly excellent McNally Jackson bookstore in Soho, we'll be reading our piece "The Forgotten Movie Screens of Broward County" from the recently-published anthology Life As We Show It: Writing on Film, co-edited by Brian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn.

Joining us will be Masha and Donal Mosher, the talented Portland-based writer/filmmaker/photographer, who will read from his essay on the making of October Country, which he co-directed with Michael Palmieri and which just had its international premiere at the Locarno Film Festival.

October Country, which documents the multi-generational story of Donal's working-class family - won the SILVERDOCS Sterling Award for best US Feature last month. “We have chosen a film that has resonated with us long after we viewed it,” the Sterling Award Jury said of October in a statement. “It is a film that is subtle and intuitively creative while presenting important social issues in a surprising way.”

We hope you can come to hear us read at McNally Jackson on Monday at 7 p.m.