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Reviews

July '23 Digital Week III

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Wednesday, 26 July 2023 12:39; Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

The Last of Us—Complete 1st Season

(Warner Bros)

The first HBO series based on a video game (for what it’s worth), this dystopian thriller isn’t very original—the visuals of this post-pandemic world are awfully familiar, as are the zombie-like victims of a fungal infection that’s destroyed civilization as we know it—but it gets by on clever writing and sympathetic acting, which makes the characters more human than usual in this genre.

Led by Pedro Pascal, there are also formidable performances by Bella Ramsey, Nico Parker and Anna Torv: but there’s a sense that, after nine one-hour episodes—and a second season to come— the redundancy will take over soon. The hi-def transfer looks good; extras comprise several making-of featurettes, interviews and on-set footage.

Deadstream

(Shudder)

I don’t think we need another found-footage horror flick at this late date, but at least writers/directors Vanessa and Joseph Winter’s foray into the genre, about a disgraced YouTuber (is there any other kind?) who goes to a supposedly haunted house, has a sense of humor about itself that sustains it for at least the first half before it ends up repeating itself to death, so to speak.

The film looks quite good in hi-def; extras include several featurettes, bloopers, deleted and alternate scenes, interviews, on-set footage and a commentary.

Fool’s Paradise

(Lionsgate)

Writer-director-star Charlie Day (best known for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) has delivered a fool’s errand with this completely hamfisted Hollywood satire about a mute just released from a mental hospital, a dead ringer for a famous actor, who gets into the movie business almost accidentally.

It’s an ungodly mix of Being There and Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, and Day is not a good enough actor—or writer or director—to pull it off successfully, let alone competently. Even good actors like Edie Falco and Kate Beckinsale are unable to overcome the soggy script and middling direction, and one-dimensional performers like Jason Sudekis fall back onto their usual tricks. The film looks decent on Blu.

Kandahar

(Universal/Open Road)

Gerard Butler gives another solid if unexceptional performance in his second 2023 action thriller, but unlike the faceless Plane, Ric Roman Waugh’s film has a bit more bite for a timely excursion into the murderous world of Middle Eastern double-dealing and revenge.

Although there’s nothing new here and it goes on too long, Kandahar does have its share of tense sequences, and Butler’s stoic heroism is well-suited to the role of a CIA operative desperate to save his Afghan translator and get home to his own teenage daughter. There’s a terrific hi-def transfer.

Persian Lessons

(Cohen Media)

In the most contrived way possible, director Vadim Perelman has made a Holocaust film in which his protagonist Gilles, a Belgian Jew, poses as a Farsi speaker with an Iranian background in order to survive: luckily for him, the camp commandant wants to learn Farsi so he can go to Teheran and live with his brother.

The ludicrousness of the premise aside—Lina Wertmuller made a masterpiece out of a similar storyline with Seven Beauties, in which the survival-at-all-cost antihero had sex with the obese female commandant of a concentration camp to stay alive—Perelman and writer Ilya Tsofin’s creaky plotting militates against our complete sympathy, despite the very fine performances by Nahuel Pérez Biscayart as Gilles and Lars Eidinger as the commandant. There’s a first-rate Blu-ray transfer.

Robot Monster

(Bayview)

One of those all-time inept “bad movies” along the lines of Plan Nine from Outer Space and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, this 1953 grade-Z sci-fi flick by Phil Tucker has virtually little to recommend it—unless, of course, you’re one of those gluttons who seeks out and devours junk like this.

That’s, of course, what this 70th anniversary special edition is all about: not only do we get the amateurish B&W film in all its anti-glory in 2D and 3D versions, but there are also many contextual extras, including featurettes in both 2D and 3D and an entertaining commentary featuring the last surviving cast member, Greg Moffett.

Sisu

(Lionsgate)

Another Nazi-fueled fantasy in which the underdogs have it all over the German monsters, Jalmari Helander’s relentlessly grim film never reaches the giddily masturbatory heights of Quentin Tarantino’s egregious Inglorious Basterds, where French and American civilians and soldiers murder Hitler.

Sisu and its “immortal” fighter, who has killed hundreds of Russians, takes on an entire Nazi squadron in the wilds of the Lapland region in occupied Finland with the help of truckful of women prisoners and finishes off the whole lot in spectacular fashion, is the epitome of a guilty pleasure, especially as played with single-minded viciousness by Jorma Tommila as the mainly silent title character. The hi-def transfer is excellent.

Off-Broadway Play Review—Tennessee Williams’ “Orpheus Descending”

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 20:30; Written by Kevin Filipski

Orpheus Descending

Written by Tennessee Williams; directed by Erica Schmidt

Performances through August 6, 2023

Theatre for a New Audience, 262 Ashland Avenue, Brooklyn, NY

tfana.org

Pico Alexander and Maggie Siff in Orpheus Descending (photo: Hollis King)

On Broadway in 1989, director Peter Hall bemusedly helmed Tennessee Williams’ messy 1957 play Orpheus Descending, a crude melodrama crammed with specious symbolism and idle imagery. Despite Williams’ endless tinkering with it, Orpheus never reaches the poetic heights of The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; instead, its overwrought dialogue and contrived relationships make it seem like a bizarre parody of a Williams play.

Now, Orpheus Descending returns, directed by Erica Schmidt, who wholeheartedly embraces its excessiveness, for better or (often) worse. Young drifter Valentine Xavier (i.e., “Savior”) arrives in a small Southern town that could be the setting for a bad Jason Aldean song. Guitar in hand, Valentine descends into this hell to, it turns out, rescue Lady Torrance, the unhappily married proprietor of the local dry-goods store, whose mortally ill elderly husband—an unrepentant redneck—spends most of his time upstairs, attended to by a nurse.

Handsome and charming, Valentine finds himself the target of other local women, including rich good-time girl Carol Cutrere, who loves to go “juking” at night, as well as other chattering gossipers who frequent the store. As they spend time together working in the store, Valentine and Lady start a steamy but dangerous affair that will end with two dead bodies and the community’s stalwart backwardness reinforced.

Schmidt dives headfirst into these characters’ desperation and inability to pull themselves free of their unfortunate fates, which is the only way to stage Orpheus and make it watchable—if not particularly illuminating. It’s unfortunate that Amy Rubin’s constricted set of the Torrances’ store leaves so much stage acreage available, and Schmidt utilizes it awkwardly, with some scenes played in front or at the sides of the store, including florid monologues and periodic appearances of the heavily—and fuzzily—symbolic “conjure-man.” The sound and lighting effects are adroitly handled by, respectively, Justin Ellington and David Weiner, and Ellington’s own acoustic guitar music is used sparingly but effectively.

Many speeches, where Williams lets his metaphors fly—like the footless bird that must always remain airborne a particular favorite to which he keeps returning—come off as sketches for the more luminous language the playwright would perfect in his masterpieces. Schmidt’s cast is sometimes able to untangle itself from such extravagances to find a bit of sorely needed humanity, although there are too many characters milling around that have little to do with the story, merely providing more samples of the overheated atmosphere.

Pico Alexander, as Valentine, is attractively animalistic and makes a more magnetic (and musical) martyr than Kevin Anderson did opposite Redgrave. A born scene-stealer, Julia McDermott makes Carol sadly but compellingly pathetic, spitting out her awful torrents of Williams’ pregnant metaphorical dialogue to flail around amid the misogynistic environment she’s been brought up in with commanding flair.

In the 1989 Broadway staging, Vanessa Redgrave played Lady Torrance: she was a spectacular car crash, giving a thrilling exercise in technique that never felt true or authentic. Conversely, Maggie Siff—who’s magnificent as Wendy Rhoades in the Showtime series Billions—mostly underplays Lady, cutting straight to the heart of this grievously wounded but proud woman. Siff even gives a piercingly emotional reading of Lady’s final overripe speech about remembering a barren fig tree while a child.

But Siff plays Lady with an accent that’s less Southern Italian than Eastern European, which is headscratching. (Weirdly, Redgrave had also played Lady with an offbeat accent—sing-song Italian, which at least was theoretically closer to the target.) But why not just play Lady with a regional southern accent? After all, she’s lived her entire life in the South, not Sicily.

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Closes Out Summer Evening Concert Series

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Saturday, 22 July 2023 20:41; Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Da Ping Luo.

At Lincoln Center, on the evening of Tuesday, July 18th, I had the pleasure of attending a fine concert—the final one in its Summer Evenings series—presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

The event began promisingly with an accomplished account of Joseph Haydn’s wonderful Trio in E-flat major of 1797, here played by the admirable recitalist and virtuoso, Juho Pohjonen, on piano, with violinist Stella Chen and cellist Sihao He. The initial movement , marked Poco allegretto, is a model of elegance; its main body is charming but it possesses a more serious, minor-key interlude. The slow movement is brief and lyrical but with some dramatic intensity, while the finale, which centers upon a Ländler melody, is animated and sparkling.

The musicians were then joined by violinist Danbi Um and violist Beth Guterman Chu for an excellent rendition of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s marvelous Concerto No. 12 in A major for Piano and String Quartet, K. 414, from 1782. Program annotator Jack Slavin provides some useful background on the work:

Between 1782 and 1783, Mozart wrote three piano concertos that were published as a set, though it is unclear whether he intended for them to be one. His style was evolving considerably throughout this transitional time; the early Viennese concertos are often seen as a bridge between the Salzburg concertos and those of his mature period starting in the mid-1780s. With Mozart’s own blessing, these three pieces can be performed a quattro, or with string quartet accompaniment instead of full orchestra.

Already with the opening Allegro it seemed that one was encountering something even more remarkable than the Haydn Trio; in it, surprising depths can be found beneath a delightful surface. The introspective Andante—the main theme is a quotation from the Andante from the overture to the opera La calamita de’ cuori by Johann Christian Bach, the composer’s former teacher—has much of the beauty of the celebrated slow movements of the more famous of Mozart’s piano concertos and the piece closes with an exuberant Allegretto finale.

The concert concluded impressively with a compelling reading of Gabriel Fauré’s memorable Piano Quartet No. 1 in C minor, Op. 15, completed in 1879 and performed here by Pohjonen, Um, Guterman Chu, and He. The first movement, marked Allegro molto moderato, is passionate, turbulent, and full-blown in its Romanticism, although with some song-like passages, while the ensuing Scherzo is not unexpectedly playful and more eccentric—its ingenious Trio is especially striking. The Adagio that follows is solemn but not unrelievedly so and the Allegro molto finale is complex and absorbing, pervaded by a powerful emotionalism and ends affirmatively.

The artists deservedly received enthusiastic applause, ending a superb series.

Romeo and Juliet at the Met Opera House

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Saturday, 22 July 2023 20:13; Written by Jack Angstreich

Isabella Boylston and Daniel Camargo in Romeo and Juliet. Photo: Rosalie O’Connor.

At the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center on the evening of Wednesday, July 19th, I had the exceptional pleasure to attend a superb performance of American Ballet Theater’s excellent production of Romeo and Juliet.

The marvelous choreography is by Sir Kenneth MacMillan—who, after George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton, was one of the finest twentieth-century choreographers. It is set to the glorious score—one of the greatest in the repertory, here expertly conducted by David LaMarche—by Sergei Prokofiev. The attractive scenery and costumes were designed by Nicholas Georgiadis and the effective lighting is by Thomas Skelton.

The title roles were fabulously danced by principals Daniel Camargo—who is relatively new to this company— and Isabella Boylston. At least equally impressive, in a scene-stealing part, was Jonathan Klein as Mercutio. The secondary cast was also remarkable: Patrick Frenette, here replacing Sung Woo Han, was delightful as Mercutio and Tybalt was played by Roman Zhurbin; the wonderful Three Harlots were danced by Isadora Loyola, Scout Forsythe, and Betsy McBride. The main non-dancing roles included Eric Tamm as Paris, Luciana Paris and Alexei Agoudine as Lady and Lord Capulet, Carlos Lopez as Escalus, Prince of Verona and as Friar Laurence, Courtney Lavine as Rosaline, Nancy Raffa—here replacing Susan Jones—as the Nurse, and Chloe Misseldine and Clinton Luckett as Lady and Lord Montague. The extraordinary corps de ballet was characteristically brilliant.

Performances of this production close Ballet Theater’s indelible—if all too brief—summer season.

Reviews

July '23 Digital Week III

Off-Broadway Play Review—Tennessee Williams’ “Orpheus Descending”

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Closes Out Summer Evening Concert Series

Romeo and Juliet at the Met Opera House

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