The News: Haneke Does Mozart in NYC

By S.T. VanAirsdale

Some of today's movie news of note from around New York:

--I apologize for the sluggishness coming from Reeler HQ, where I've been deep in New Directors/New Films previews all week and preparing for a kind of dramatic site transition to take place starting Monday. I also spent much of Wednesday in the hospital recovering from the hole I scratched in my head after hearing the news that Michael Haneke will direct Mozart's Così fan tutte for the New York City Opera in 2012. The filmmaker, more conspicuously in the news this week for his American remake of his own Funny Games, first directed Mozart in 2006, when he handled Don Giovanni for the Paris Opera. Expect an HD simulcast at an adjacent theater, where Haneke's vile, chronology-fucking video rewind trick will make far more sense than it does onstage.

--The Reeler wishes all the best to Ray Privett, who will next month leave his post as programmer at the Pioneer Theater. As the venue's spiritual and technical head for four years, Privett consistently fought the good fight on behalf of independent, no-budget, genre and foreign titles for whom New York has proven an increasingly inhospitable wilderness; he was also one of this site's first and most continually supportive readers. Privett will join Lower East Side arts guru Rob Prichard and others in developing the Queensbridge Theater, a new performing-arts space in Long Island City, as well as continue to pursue his film distribution and consulting interests under the label Cinema Purgatorio. Godspeed, kind sir; you will be missed on East 3rd Street.

--The new site Stream holds its close-up on the overlap between film and new media, this week inviting one-man-band extraordinaire Jamie Stuart into the fold for a regular column, The Accidental Auteur.

--That whole racket about Robert De Niro falsifying health claims before his prostate cancer diagnosis that delayed production on Hide and Seek -- thus triggering a insurance payoff -- in 2003? Yeah, not so much.

Posted at March 13, 2008 5:58 AM