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July '24 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 24 July 2024 19:28
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Streaming Release of the Week
Fresh Kills
(Quiver Distribution)
Who knew that actress Jennifer Esposito—heretofore best known for supporting roles in movies and recurring roles in TV series like Spin City and Blue Bloods—would write and direct a richly authentic slice of Italian-American life, from the point of view of two daughters growing up in a Staten Island household with a father who happens to be a Mafioso?
Esposito obviously knew, and her film keeps the organized crime clichés at bay while treating the women in this milieu with freshness and zesty humor. Esposito is also winning as the girls’ mother Francine, as is Annabella Sciorra as her antagonistic sister Christine, while Odessa A’zion and Emily Bader, as daughters Connie and Rose, give breakout performances.
Rocky—Ultimate Knockout Collection
(Warner Bros)
The original Rocky, winner of the 1976 best picture Oscar and directed with precision by John G. Avildsen, remains the ultimate rags to (almost) riches fairy tale nearly a half-century later. Too bad the sequels got progressively more gimmicky, from II’s perfectly plausible rematch with Apollo Creed to III’s comic version of fighting Mr. T (as Clubber Lang) to IV’s “us vs. them” Cold War battle with Russian Ivan Drago. At least Avildsen returned for V, which had some of the original’s grit, but number 6 (Rocky Balboa) had Stallone at the helm for the series’ dullest entry.
Stallone becomes less appealing with each successive movie and Talia Shire—heartbreaking in the original—has little to do as the stories progress (and Adrian was killed off for Balboa), but there are the always exciting boxing sequences. This set brings together all six films—and the director’s cuts of IV and Balboa—which look superlatively grainy throughout. An extra Blu-ray disc collects the extras, mostly from the original movie but also an hour-long Making of Rocky vs. Drago: Keep Punching, with Stallone himself as our guide. The Balboa disc also includes a Stallone commentary, deleted scenes and various on-set featurettes.
Blu-ray Releases of the Week
Anselm
(Janus Contemporaries)
German director Wim Wenders returns to the 3D format that worked well for his documentary Pina, about choreographer Pina Bausch, which showed dancers gracefully moving in space; but Anselm, displaying German artist Anselm Keifer’s paintings, installations and sculptures, only intermittently suggests the impressive spaciousness of his works.
The rest of the 90-minute doc is a decent primer on the artist’s life and art, both controversial in his native country, where he has been accused of being a Nazi sympathizer and a Nazi. Wenders’ eye, of course, is unerring; but for all the 3D segments showing Keifer’s works’ sheer monumentality, seeing the artist riding around on his bike or a tree branch glistening with snow isn’t the most essential use of the technology. The hi-def image is vividly rendered whether on the 3D or basic Blu-ray disc; lone extra is a 15-minute Wenders interview.
(Dynamic)
Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti—famed for classic operas like L’elisir d’amore, Lucrezia Borgia and Lucia di Lammermoor—had a huge failure with this music drama about the ninth-century Alfred the King, who led the Saxons in what is now England.
After its 1823 premiere, the opera took two centuries to be restaged, in this 2023 production from Bergamo, Italy; director Stefano Simone Pintor gives it the heft of an historical epic, but the music and characterizations often lack drama or depth. Still, the playing by the Orchestra Donizetti Opera and Coro della Radio Ungherese under conductor Corrado Rovaris and the lead performances of Antonino Siragusa (Alfredo) and Gilda Fiume (Amalia) help somewhat. There’s a first-rate audio and video transfer.
Have You Got It Yet?—The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd
(Eagle Rock)
Syd Barrett’s shadow loomed large over Pink Floyd since the late ’60s—while only in the band a short time, his colorful personality and mental illness informed its best works: The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall. In Roddy Bogawa and Storm Thorgerson’s enlightening documentary about his life, death, and legacy, the legend of Barrett “the mad genius” is put into context; the directors they never lose sight of Barrett the person, troubled soul, friend, colleague, lover and brother.
Among those who discuss Barrett are his Floyd mates Roger Waters and David Gilmour, both obviously still affected by his demise, while psychological experts explain the vagaries of mental illness and how drugs like LSD can warp one’s mind. Bogawa and Thorgerson explore Barrett’s decline tactfully, thoughtfully, and sympathetically. There’s a first-rate hi-def transfer; extras include a commentary, Bogawa interview, featurettes on Barrett’s’s art and lyrics, and two Gilmour concert performances of the tune “Arnold Layne.”
(Warner Bros)
After a couple of dud seasons, this detective series returned to, if not quite the heights of the first season, at least watchability, as creator Issa López smartly—if unoriginally—sets the show in Alaska, in darkness literal and metaphorical. The plot weirdly melds horror and sci-fi about unexplained deaths at a remote base.
The explanation is ultimately unsatisfying, the atmosphere is vaguely sinister, but it’s held together by formidable acting by Jodie Foster and Kali Reis as the investigators. There’s a good Blu-ray transfer; extras are several making-of featurettes.
DVD Release of the Week
All Your Faces
(Icarus Films)
In France, restorative justice brings together victims and perpetrators for therapy sessions that theoretically help both parties. Writer-director Jeanne Herry ruthlessly explores how these justice workers set up such important face-to-face meetings as well as their effect on the lives of everyone involved. With two cases as the centerpieces—victims meeting convicted felons and Chloé wanting closure with the estranged brother who sexually abused her as a child—Herry’s very talky film remains involving for two hours thanks to unsentimental writing and precise direction.
In a large cast that’s riveting, realistic and often moving (there’s Leïla Bekhti, Élodie Bouchez, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Gilles Lellouche and Denis Podalydès, for starters), the standouts are Miou-Miou—Herry’s real-life mother—as Sabine, horribly shaken after her mugging, and Adèle Exarchopoulos, who deservedly won the Cesar for best supporting actress for her remarkably assured yet emotionally vulnerable Chloé.
Beethoven—Triple Concerto
(Decca)
Beethoven’s imposing concerto for violin, cello and piano has always attracted superstar soloists, and when the stars themselves align—as they do for this recording that features the wonderful stylings of violinist Nicola Benedetti, cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason and pianist Benjamin Grosvenor, who sound transcendent together and apart—the musical results are simply magical, with Santtu-Matias Rouvali and the Philharmonia Orchestra providing sensitive accompaniment.
Rounding out this first-rate disc are eloquent readings by the trio of several Beethoven folk song arrangements (with bass-baritone Gerald Finley) and the Kreislers’ evocative “Londonderry Air.”
The Film “Twisters” Whips the Summer Season into a Climatic Frenzy Of Life and Death
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 18 July 2024 19:40
- Written by Brad Balfour
Film: Twisters
Director: Lee Isaac Chung
Cast: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Brandon Perea, Maura Tierney, Sasha Lane
With this summer season of intense weather and a vast array of tornadoes touching down in state after state, there’s no better timing than now to release this film, “Twisters.” It’s a sort of sequel to its 28-year-old predecessor, “Twister” — directed by Jan De Bont. The now 80-year old Dutchman is a retired cinematographer, director and film producer. He’s best known for directing 1994’s “Speed” and then “Twister” which were part of the rise of blockbusters such as “Die Hard," “The Hunt for Red October” and “Lethal Weapon.” He was the cinematographer of "Die Hard" and "Lethal Weapon 3." He also was cinematographer of "Red October," the first of the Jack Ryan series.
Chock full of dramatic moments we can all relate to, both films are terrifying. The various scenes of destruction are blood curdling. And given that a twister is far more fearsome than any creature fabrication like Frankenstein's Monster— since storms are far less easy to reason with — the film resonates. As innovative as the original was, this edition explores all the investment in special effects to give audiences a truly close up look at what people have actually experienced when this weather phenomena destroys homes and sweeps people away into deathly oblivion.
But these films, especially the latest as directed by Lee Isaac Chung, aren’t merely fictionalized documentaries. There is a rich and fully rounded narrative of love lost and gained here. Most of that’s thanks to the fine casting of Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell — who now seem to be the go-to guy for actors who display naturalistic grit and charisma.
As weather scientist Kate, Britisher Edgar-Jones provides a reasonable facsimile of a midwesterner obsessed with coming up with a Tornado-killer solution. The film opens as she is working with fellow students and friends to test a chemical solution to contain tornadoes. All goes awry and three of her team are swept away to their deaths.
Five years later, the other survivor, Javi (Anthony Ramos), comes to NYC to ask Kate to help him with a new project, a 3D tornado mapping system which has — as audiences realize later — insidious implications. They head to Oklahoma where they clash, at first, with tornado wrangler Tyler Owens (Powell), a high-energy social media sensation. Initially, the two teams compete but Kate eventually bonds with him and discovers that he has the scientific acumen to help her along the way.
As they wend their way to the film’s conclusion — repeatedly surviving death-dealing twisters — both find love and scientific solutions to quell the impact of these mega-death machines. It also opens the door to possible sequels, ones to be produced in a shorter time than nearly three decades.
In addition to the sheer drama of the various set pieces constructed here, “Twisters” is also loaded with trenchant political, scientific and sociological notions. The ecological implications are obvious. There have been so many hyper-powerful tornadoes happening now in our real world. Are they due to authorities ignoring the cause of the surge?
For various reasons too complicated to go into here, greed and irrational climate deniers have made it harder to address the long term solutions necessary to make life in tornado alley more bearable. This film may have a touch of fanciful science built into it but it also provokes audiences to think of the implications of weather change and man-made global warming. “Twisters” may not make your summer more soothing but it does provoke more than just sheer terror.
July '24 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 18 July 2024 02:35
- Written by Kevin Filipski
4K/UHD Releases of the Week
The Boy and the Heron
(GKids/Studio Ghibli)
After the sublime 2013 memory piece The Wind Rises, the great animator Hayao Miyazaki announced his retirement; but 10 years later, along comes this often inscrutable, heavily symbolic but tremendously affecting feature—don’t hold its Oscar for best animated feature against it! During WWII, young Mahito’s mother, a nurse, dies in a hospital fire—after his father marries her sister and they move to her country estate, Mahito’s grief and guilt are embodied in a talking heron, who takes him to an anthropomorphic world where he must fight for survival—and for closure with his mother.
Only Miyazaki could make something so sentimental and borderline risible and make it funny, touching and trenchant simultaneously. Needless to say, the animation looks amazing in 4K; the accompanying Blu-ray’s extras comprise storyboards, music video for the song “Spinning Globe” and interviews with composer Joe Hisaishi, producer Toshio Suzuki and supervising animator Takeshi Honda. There’s also an English-dubbed version with the voices of Robert Pattinson, Christian Bale, Florence Pugh, Willem Dafoe and Mark Hamill; stick with the original Japanese for authenticity.
(Warner Bros)
This silly but watchable 1996 disaster thriller pits tornado chasers vs. Mother Nature—and, more often than not, nature wins: director Jan de Bont and writers Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin (Crichton’s then wife) for the most part lose, especially when it comes to such howlers in the dialogue as, when a twister barrels down toward them, one character yells out, “Let’s run for it!” Well, duh. The $100 million budget obviously went to the vast array of technical effects, well-done but not overwhelmingly impressive (especially now, where some seams show in 30-year old technology). Actors like Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Jami Gertz, Todd Field, Cary Elwes, Lois Smith and Philip Seymour Hoffman try their best but are defeated by ridiculous plotting and the twisty effects.
The 4K image looks quite detailed; extras include a new retrospective featurette and bonuses from earlier releases: three on-set featurettes, music video for Van Halen’s song “Humans Being” (Eddie and Alex also contribute a moody instrumental, “Respect the Wind”) and a commentary by du Bont and effects supervisor Stefen Fangmeier.
Blu-ray Releases of the Week
Challengers
(Warner Bros)
If a menage a trois among a female tennis player turned coach and the male tennis pros in her life, each on opposing career trajectories, sounds like fun, director Luca Guadagnino and writer Justin Kuritzkes make sure to scuttle that possibility. This impossibly cutesy rom-com is crammed with flashbacks within flashbacks to try and present some variety, but even Guadagnino knows it doesn’t help, since he uses a surfeit of camera tricks and ridiculous angles to keep things bouncing. Then there’s the awful use of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ pounding electronic score, always beginning or ending at the wrong time, as if the music cues are slightly off.
The threesome enacted by Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist is more authentic on the court (they all look and move like tennis players) than off, where the trio is saddled with stilted dialogue and must deal with desperate symbolism like a windstorm of Biblical proportions that actually happens twice. It’s all about as sexy as a celebrity doubles match. The hi-def image looks excellent but, as with so many new releases, there are no extras.
(Cohen Media)
The latest film by the world’s greatest living director, 84-year-old Italian master Marco Bellocchio, is yet another of his gripping and operatic dissections of historical subjects that touch on politics and religion—this time he tells the horrific but true story of a six-year-old Jewish boy torn from his parents’ grasp because a former housekeeper said she baptized him when she thought he was dying as an infant. With his usual sweeping flair and acute observation, Bellocchio fills the screen with indelible images that not only cast a wide net on anti-Semitic mid-19th century Italian (read: Catholic) society but also the excruciating pain and loss felt by the Mortara family as their beloved son and brother remains forever out of their reach.
Bellocchio builds his film on two towering performances—by Barbara Ronchi as the boy’s mother and Enea Sala as the young Edgardo, one of the strongest child performances I’ve ever seen. Supremely well-chosen music by Rachmaninoff and Pärt complement a superb original score by Fabio Massimo Capogrosso. The haunting but gorgeous final shot of mother and son is as unforgettable as the rest of this masterpiece; Francesco Di Giacomo’s glistening cinematography is accentuated beautifully on Blu-ray. Extras are a short Bellocchio intro and 20-minute director interview.
The Last Stop in Yuma County
(Well Go USA)
I’ve never been a fan of the real Coen brothers’ films, so warmed-over Coens—which is what this aggressively, even nonsensically nihilistic drama about a bunch of nonentities who end up offing one another (along with several unfortunate bystanders) at a rate even the brothers wouldn’t countenance—comes off even more contrived.
Too bad writer-director Francis Galluppi is more concerned with getting these people together and letting bad luck take care of them until it doesn’t matter who’s standing at the end. The film looks fine on Blu; lone extra is a making-of featurette.
Eno
(Film First)
In his eminently watchable documentary about legendary music producer Brian Eno, Gary Hustwit borrows Eno’s own way of creating for the film’s structure, as certain ideas, visuals or bits of music lead to other, sometimes not entirely successful tangents. Eno talks quite engagingly and candidly about his life, career and thoughts about the importance of art to nourish the human brain, both in new footage as well as vintage interviews.
There’s also priceless footage of Eno at work, both alone doing his ambient music (like the original Windows 95 “jingle”) and with some of his biggest collaborators, from Roxy Music and David Bowie to U2 and the Talking Heads. One gimmick is that the film—at least in its first run at Film Forum in NYC—will never be the same twice, rearranged and completely different footage making a “new” film each time, a fitting metaphor for its enigmatic, endlessly fascinating subject.
The Blue Rose
(Dark Sky)
Anyone with fond—or not so fond—memories of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, in which two women sleepwalk through a surreal Hollywood, will relive that film during every minute of George Baron’s unabashed copy, which the director makes no bones about, even referencing Lynch in his discussions of his own film.
The difference is that Lynch’s fully developed visual sense can make such dicey material work at times, whereas the best Baron can do is emerge as an instant epigone aping the Lynchian style without any substance.
Janet Planet
(A24)
Annie Baker, who has won awards for her (overrated) plays, makes her screen writing and directing debut with this at times insightful but mainly insufferable exploration of the relationship between Janet, a hippie-ish single mom, and Lacy, her restless 12-year-old daughter. As in her plays, Baker writes clever dialogue that’s not as meaningful as she intends; her assiduously oddish characters often claw at stretches of meaninglessness, whether in their words or silence.
As a director, she alternates establishing shots and glaring closeups to snippets of music from Laurie Anderson to Bach that populate her eclectic soundtrack. Her distaff cast, comprising Julianne Nicholson, Zoe Ziegler and Sophie Okenedo, performs sensitively, while the men, embodied by Bill Paxton and Elias Koteas, are pretty much ciphers.
CD Release of the Week
Czech Songs—Magdalena Kožená
(Pentatone)
Czech mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená, who has this music in her very bones, beautifully sings a smartly programmed recital disc of vocal works composed by her compatriots. As usual, she sounds natural and focused while performing cycles by the great but underappreciated Bohuslav Martinů and the great but more appreciated Antonin Dvořák, alongside a welcome taste of the unjustly obscure Hans Krása and Gideon Klein (who were both murdered in Nazi camps).
Tastefully accompanying the always elegant Kožená is the Czech Philharmonic, under the baton of her husband, Simon Rattle.
July '24 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 10 July 2024 17:04
- Written by Kevin Filipski
4K/UHD Release of the Week
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
(Criterion)
Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 western about the fateful relationship between lawman Pat Garrett (James Coburn) and outlaw Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson) was savaged upon release by the studio and critics, the former ripping Peckinpah’s cut to shreds—six editors worked on the film. But the 50th-anniversary release—11 minutes longer than what came out a half-century ago—and the even longer preview cut makes one realize the film is for the most part unsalvageable in any version, despite sporadic directorial brilliance.
The biggest liability is Bob Dylan, who contributes a score of mediocre songs (except for his classic “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”) and a scandalous non-performance as a ridiculous character named Alias, itself a brazen steal from Lincoln Kerstein’s story for Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid ballet. As always, Criterion does a thorough job of contextualizing of the film’s fraught history: two UHD discs and two Blu-rays include all three cuts; there’s a commentary on the “new” version, an archival Coburn interview and new featurettes Dylan in Durango and Passion & Poetry: Peckinpah’s Last Western.
Mother, Couch
(Film Movement)
With a cast of heavyweights like Ellen Burstyn, Ewan McGregor, Rys Ifyns, Lara Flynn Boyle and F. Murray Abraham, Niclas Larsson’s film about an elderly woman (Burstyn) whose decision to stay on the sofa at a furniture store brings her three estranged children from different fathers (McGregor, Ifyns and Flynn Boyle) together for a chance to patch things up surprisingly never becomes the intriguingly offbeat comedy-drama it wants to be.
It begins as unfunny, warmed-over Luis Buñuel and never goes anywhere, thanks to Larsson’s scattershot script. The cast gives its all, especially Burstyn and Taylor Russell as the young store employee who catches McGregor’s eye, but nothing ends up cohering.
The Nature of Love
(Music Box)
French-Canadian writer-director Monia Chokri’s occasionally trenchant comic study follows the emotional and sexual relationship of heady college professor Sophia and working-class guy Sylvain, who meet cute when he gives her an estimate to restore a decrepit cottage she owns.
Too often, Chokri’s writing and directing rub our noses in the couple’s obvious differences—her intellectual crowd and his earthy, of the soil clan—while her copout ending insists there’s no way Sophia and Sylvain can stay together, although we’ve watched them do just that for most of the movie. Holding it all together are terrific performances by Pierre-Yves Cardinal (Sylvain) and Magalie Lépine-Blondeau (Sophia), who make a maturely sexy couple.
Abigail
(Universal)
Armed with a healthy sense of humor, directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett take Stephen Shields and Guy Busick’s troublesome script about a preteen vampire who toys with a group of inept criminals that abducted her for ransom and make it a watchable gore fest.
Amid the risible plotting and exploding bodies, there are fun moments and tongue-in-cheek performances, topped by Melissa Barrera, fast becoming our reigning scream queen after Scream, Scream VI and this harmless but efficient dark comedy. The film looks good on Blu; extras include a commentary, deleted/extended scenes, gag reel and on-set featurettes.
Danza Macabra, Volume 3—The Spanish Gothic Collection
(Severin)
For the third set in Severin Films’ collection of foreign horror flicks, a quartet of early-mid ’70s features from Spain—Necrophagous (1971), Cake of Blood (1971), Cross of the Devil (1975) and The Night of the Walking Dead (1975)—have been resurrected and given new shelf life. These films were made near the end of Spanish dictator Franco’s repressive reign, hiding transgressive ideas within the genre of Gothic horror.
Best is the atmospheric vampire shocker The Night of the Walking Dead—with the wonderful Emma Cohen as the heroine—while the least successful is the arty and self-indulgent omnibus Cake of Blood. Each film has received a good transfer; extras are led by commentaries on each film and interviews with actors, writers and critics.
(Dark Sky Films)
Director-writer Adam Green made his low-budget horror movie, Hatchet, in 2006—it’s not that much more distinguished than other slasher flicks populating the B-movie landscape over the past few decades, but he’s parlayed that home-movie ethos into three sequels (from 2010, 2013 and 2017) that are each less interesting and watchable than the previous one.
Now all four Hatchets have been brought together for diehard fans in a set that includes first-rate hi-def transfers of the films, with extras comprising gag reels, interviews, on-set featurettes and a bonus disc, Hatchet: Swamp Tales.
Sherlock Holmes
(Severin)
Peter Cushing and Sherlock Holmes are an uncomfortable fit in this 1968 British TV series—short-lived, unsurprisingly—six episodes of which are all that has survived and included in this two-disc set.
The picture quality is pretty negligible—at times, it’s like watching an old VHS tape—but the main problem is the stories themselves, which are rendered unexciting and routine, with the partial exception of the two-part Hound of the Baskervilles: even Cushing looks bored at times. Extras include commentaries on all six episodes and on missing episode clips; audio interview with Cushing; and BBC’s countdown clock for each episode.
(Severin)
Christopher Lee’s lone starring role as the great detective created by Arthur Conan Doyle came in this German-made drama—it was shot in Berlin—directed competently by Terence Fisher, with Holmes and his sidekick Dr. Watson (Nigel Stock) taking center stage.
Senta Berger contributes a nice bit, but Lee and Stock’s chatty chemistry isn’t enough to overcome a by-the-numbers storyline. The hi-def image looks decent enough; extras are a commentary, Fisher interview and Fisher featurette.
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