![]() Recently, he has created several powerful works – installations, video and a documentary – on the refugee crisis. Early in his career, he made a photo series of himself dropping a splendid, 2,000-year-old Han dynasty urn. Two years later, he filled the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern with 100m handmade and painted porcelain sunflower seeds. In 2008, he was the artistic consultant for the Olympic Stadium in Beijing, the Bird’s Nest. I’m working all the time.” His face crinkles into a smile: “I love work.”Īi’s output is prolific and diverse. I can leave, of course, but since 2015, I have stayed here, never had a holiday or weekends. So for me, it’s a shelter – a shelter not so different from refugees in the camps that gradually build up. “When I’m here, it’s like my home,” says Ai, who wears a blue hoodie and comfortable shoes, his beard less unruly than it appears in photographs. But, since Ai fled China five years ago, this has been his main place of work – and, given that the 62-year-old artist and activist is almost always working, more besides. The space was originally, back in the mid-19th century, the cooling warehouses for the Bavarian brewer Joseph Pfeffer. You immediately descend two flights of very steep stone stairs before emerging, blinking for light, into a vast, brick-lined cavern that has the proportions of a church. ![]() Still, it’s better than “Waltz With Bashir.Ai Weiwei’s studio can be found behind unmarked, black metal doors in a grand square in the old east Berlin. Directors Ali Samadi Ahadi and Ken Jacobs needed to do a better job of contextualizing individual events into a coherent history. There are some highly powerful stories in “The Green Wave,” but they tend to bleed together. Over subsequent weeks, dozens of protesters and innocent bystanders would be killed and brutally injured in a show of force aimed at forestalling any thought of insurrection. That night, the dream of meaningful political freedom in Iran died for a generation. Until, that is, military forces loyal to the regime stormed the election offices, shutting them down and forging ballots to produce a preposterous result: Though observers reported you couldn’t find an Ahmadinejad voter in many precincts, state TV announced he had won with 69% of the vote. Opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s victory at the polls was so decisive that even one of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s cabi net secretaries congratulated him. “The Green Wave” combines Twitter and blog postings, still photography, live video and animated reenactments to tell the story of the suppression of the nascent democratic movement in Iran in 2009. Its fundamental lesson is that bicyclists are as much a scourge and a plague in New York as they are here. He’s obviously gotten himself in great shape for this picture (homeboy looks fiiine), but the most enjoyable moments in “Premium Rush” involve watching his cheeks (all four). ![]() The leading player, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, still hasn’t found his star vehicle. The time has come for him to rein it in, to find a quality role of nuance and subtlety. Shannon’s a talented actor, but he’s overdone it with the goggle-eyed nutbags. The dialogue is mostly perfunctory, but some of what’s given to Michael Shannon to read borders on embarrassing. ![]() Having thoroughly enjoyed “Run Lola Run” and the similar Japanese import “Non-Stop,” I was surprised how little excitement this particular chase gene rated. The bike-messenger race-against-time movie “Premium Rush” isn’t very premium – it gets every action movie cliché and stereotype stuck in its spokes – and doesn’t provide much of a rush. ![]()
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