February '12 Digital Week II

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Saturday, 11 February 2012 15:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week
Anonymous
(Sony)
Roland Emmerich’s preposterous “Shakespeare was too dumb to write plays” fantasia is a train wreck that keeps on giving: idiocies to history or common sense occur frequently. That respectable names enact screenwriter John Orloff’s ludicrous tale of Edward de Vere (real author) and the Bard (mere Beard) stems from the fact that some--like Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance--are rabid anti-Stratfordians.

Despite stylish sets and costumes, this risible foolishness will entertain only if you turn your brain off. The Blu-ray image is top-notch; extras are Emmerich and Orloff’s commentary, deleted scenes and featurettes that twist director, writer and cast into pretzels trying (and failing) to legitimize de Vere.

The Big Year
(Fox)
David Frankel’s comedy about obsessive bird-watchers is a pleasant surprise, although how much is due to lowered expectations, I can’t say. But getting Steve Martin, Jack Black and Owen Wilson to underplay is a feat in itself; adding a dry John Cleese as our narrator, solid support from Rashida Jones, Brian Dennehy, Dianne Wiest and JoBeth Williams and beguiling (if often digitized) feathered friends only helps.

The movie lopes along, if uneventfully, at least agreeably. On Blu-ray, the birds look especially dazzling; extras include deleted scenes, gag reel and making-of featurette.

Downton Abbey, Season 2
(PBS)
This series’ dramatic first season is surpassed by the latest installments--still showing on PBS--with compelling storylines and vivid characterizations underscored by the First World War, which touches everyone, male or female, servant or master/mistress.

Maggie Smith, Hugh Bonneville, Elizabeth McGovern, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Iain Glen and Michelle Dockery--among many others--are even more marvelous than they were previously. The stunning physical production looks flawless on the stellar hi-def release. Extras include a full-length Christmas at Downton Abbey, and on-set featurettes.

Fernando Di Leo Crime Collection
(Raro Video)
Italian crime master Fernando Di Leo, a huge influence on Quentin Tarantino, can be forgiven for that: this quartet of exciting, action-packed, unsubtle flicks is a real treat to watch. Caliber 9, The Italian Connection, The Boss (which make up a trilogy) and Rulers of the City show the seamy underbelly of organized crime, as crooks and cops alike end up bullet-riddled or blown apart (lots of car explosions throughout).

On Blu-ray, the films’ images vary, from copious amounts of detail to a softness that probably stems from the source material. Hours of extras include a host of featurettes about Di Leo’s directing style and reminiscences from his casts and crew.

La Jetee/Sans Soleil
(Criterion)
Chris Marker, cinema’s most valuable essayist, sees his best-known and most fully-realized films in hi-def thanks to the Criterion Collection. 1963’s La Jetee--vastly influential on films like 12 Monkeys and even music videos--is a tragic sci-fi tale told entirely through still photographs; 1983’s Sans Soleil, by contrast, is a wide-ranging travelogue of our simultaneously vast and small world. 

Both films’ hi-def transfers are magnificent; the extras--culled from the original 2005 DVD release--include interviews and featurettes that discuss Marker’s influence and legacy as a singular film artist.

The Phantom of the Opera: 25th Anniversary Concert
(Universal)
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s smash hit musical, based on Gaston Leroux’s classic novel, celebrates its 25th anniversary at London’s storied Royal Albert Hall with a lavish staging based on the original production (still running on Broadway). The excellent cast is led by Sierra Boggess, who with Laura Osnes proves that young, talented American stage performers are alive and well.

Webber himself appears for a well-deserved curtain call, as do his original stars, Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman, the latter performing an encore. The Blu-ray transfer is good, the music impressive in surround sound; no extras.

The Rebound
(Fox)
This rote romantic comedy about a middle-aged woman who divorces a cheating husband and finds true love with a younger “manny” babysitting her kids is DOA thanks to a complete lack of chemistry between stolid Catherine Zeta-Jones and game Justin Bartha.

Writer/director Bart Freundlich can’t flesh out his couple with any originality; the result is a dull replay of other rom-coms of years past. The hi-def transfer is decent; extras comprise interviews with Zeta-Jones, Freundlich, Bartha and costars Art Garfunkel and Joanna Gleason (they play Bartha’s parents).

A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas
(Warner Bros)
Another unnecessary sequel in what’s become a comic franchise places our dopey heroes in increasingly ridiculous--and unfunny--situations, including a Russian mobster’s teenage daughter’s party and a Christmas tree store run by stereotypical ghetto dudes.

Director Todd Strauss-Schulson desperately ramps up the farcical elements by turning the movie briefly into claymation and dragging in an always fun Neil Patrick Harris for brutally obvious gay jokes. But it’s all for naught. The movie looks fine on Blu-ray even without 3D effects; extras include deleted/extended scenes and a claymation featurette.

DVDs of the Week
Janie Jones
(Tribeca)
This low-key character study, filled with heartbreaking scenes between an estranged dad and the teenage daughter he never knew about--he’s a fading rock star, she’s the offspring of a trysts--benefits from the honest interplay between Alessandro Nivola (dad) and Abigail Breslin (daughter), well on her way to becoming a major actress.

Wonderful support from Elisabeth Shue (mom), Peter Stormare, Frances Fisher and Frank Whaley helps writer-director David M. Rosenthal keep things percolating between moments of musical and personal intimacy that brim with truth. This small-scale gem has extras comprising interviews and an audio commentary.

The Jazz Singer
(Inception)
Here’s a real curio: Jerry Lewis takes the Al Jolson role in this hour-long adaptation seen only once on TV in 1959. Lewis clowns around too much (no surprise), but he’s quite strong in the dramatic showdown between father and estranged son.

The actors surrounding Lewis are even better: Alan Reed as his dad the Cantor, Molly Picon as his heartbroken mother and sexy Anna Maria Alberghetti as a famous singer who asks Jerry to join her entourage, exacerbating the rift between him and his family. The film can be watched in B&W or color; the lone extra is a look at the restoration by Jerry’s son Chris.

Karen Cries on the Bus (Film Movement)
With an exceptionally moving performance by Colombian actress Angela Carrizosa at its center, Gabriel Rojas Vera’s chronicle of a woman escaping a failed marriage transcends its familiar territory.

The director allows Karen the dignity of beginning a new life and developing a new romance without pity or condescension, and Carrizosa’s amazing performance is shot through with emotion and inner strength. An Australian documentary short, Lessons from the Night, is included.

3
(Strand)
Tom Tykwer’s sprawling melodrama bounces around its characters’ complicated relationships with one another: a woman, her boyfriend, and the man they are each seeing, unbeknownst to the other. To be sure, she becomes pregnant (twins!) and doesn’t know who’s the father: her one-ball beau (he had testicular cancer) or her new stud.

Tykwer’s split screens, multiple narrators and other sleight of hand obscure that 3, while fancy to watch, is pretty superficial underneath; the solid cast can’t overcome the ludicrous roles.

CD of the Week
Paul McCartney, Kisses on the Bottom
(Concord)
Now nearly 70, Paul McCartney pays homage to the songs he grew up with; unlike Run Devil Run, his energetic look back at 50s rock’n’roll, the new CD plumbs even further, to songs his father played that were Paul’s introduction to memorable tunesmiths. Songs by Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser and Harold Arlen bump up against one another in deliberately casual but playful arrangements that might be incorrectly labeled “light jazz”: that pianist Diana Krall and her crack band appear throughout seconds that notion.

But McCartney isn’t merely playing it safe: he’s in exemplary voice, whether in the opening “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter” (which gives the album its cheeky title), the daringly languid “Bye Bye Blackbird” or the straightforward “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive.” Paul’s own contributions--”My Valentine” (with Eric Clapton on guitar) and the closing “Only Our Hearts” (with Stevie Wonder on harmonica)--are of such a piece with the rest that I had to check the liner notes to see which are the originals.

Paul has always had a soft spot for this kind of old-fashioned music, from the Beatles‘ “Your Mother Should Know” and “Honey Pie” to Wings’ “You Gave Me the Answer” and “Baby’s Request,” so it was inevitable he’d make an album of this material. If he was simply coasting like Rod Stewart, I’d be worried; but he’s so natural, unaffected and convincing that it’s just Paul being Paul. Now on to that real rock album he’s promising.

Movies in Brief: In Darkness, Perfect Sense, Windfall

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Friday, 10 February 2012 15:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

In Darkness
Directed by Agnieszka Holland

Perfect Sense
Directed by David Mackenzie

Windfall
Directed by Laura Israel

In her intensely focused new drama, In Darkness, director Agnieszka Holland pulls few punches in her account--based on real events--of a group of Jewish refugees hiding in the sewers beneath the Polish town of Lvov for 14 months during World War II, and the efforts of a local sewer worker, Leopold Socha, to keep them away from Germans and others who would be only too happy to turn them in.

Holland’s film, which owes an enormous debt to Andrzej Wajda’s classic Kanal, unflinchingly shows the horrible conditions these desperate people are forced to survive under, with literally no light until the war ends and they are brought up to face a world they have not laid eyes on for more than a year.

Laced with a bitterly ironic sense of humor--especially in its depiction of the far from saintly Socha (a marvelously multi-shaded Robert Więckiewicz), who despite his heroics is making out financially from his assistance--the film also allows its characters their humanity: what at the beginning seems a group of interchangeable victims gradually becomes clearly delineated individuals, to be the audience and Socha.

That said, the movie is overlong: too many subplots include one about the search for a young woman who ran away from the sewer only to appear in a labor camp, which she refuses to leave. There’s also a climactic rainstorm that turns into a flood, threatening to drown those underground: the fake suspense at their expense reminded me of the shower scene in Schindler’s List.

But Holland has made a taut, piercing film of how people--good, bad or (like most) somewhere in between--deal with extreme situations. Visually, In Darkness is splendidly and believably monochromatic (thanks to Joanta Dylewska’s photography, Michael Czarcecki’s editing and Erwin Prib’s production design), with just enough figurative and literal illumination to show that, for some, there was light at the end of a long tunnel.

Perfect Sense, a portentous romantic allegory by David Mackenzie, is uncomfortably reminiscent of other--and mostly better--films like Bertrand Tavernier’s Death Watch, Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness and Steven Soderbergh’s recent Contagion. As a catastrophic disease robs millions of people of their senses, a dedicated scientist (Eva Green) who’s nursing a broken heart meets a charming restaurant chef (Ewan McGregor), and the two have a brief but intense affair that leaves its mark on them and, possibly, the human race.

Director Mackenzie wallows in visualizing (and literalizing) what the couple’s rocky relationship augurs for a world crumbling around them. Too bad that Green and MacGregor, performers who can be charismatic when called upon, are unable to do more except inject nakedness--emotional and physical--into a movie starving for it.

Wind is the sexy new green energy. The complaint most often heard--“I don’t want those ugly windmills near where I live/vacation/work”--has always sounded simply selfish. So when a movie like the wittily-titled Windfall arrives to methodically destroy nearly every pro-wind argument in a mere 83 minutes, attention must be paid.

Director Laura Israel tells the story of how wind power overtakes the upstate New York hamlet of Meredith, some three hours north of Manhattan. When a resident builds a wind farm on his property, the reality hits everyone, pro and con, square on the head: the mills are monstrosities, are loud, blot out the sun, are expensive, and are backed by a conglomerate that makes massive profits--whether they work or not.

Windfall works remarkably well as a needed educational primer: for Meredith residents, for residents of Tug Hill, a town farther north and farther along in wind farm building, and for viewers, most of whom are assumed to be sympathetic to wind energy--at least in theory. Windfall urgently huffs and puffs…and blows down the whole shebang.

In Darkness
Opens February 10, 2012
Sony Pictures Classics
http://sonyclassics.com

Perfect Sense
Opened February 3, 2012
IFC Films
http://ifcfilms.com

Windfall
Opened February 3, 2012
First Run features
http://firstrunfeatures.com

Off-Broadway Roundup: How the World Began, Professor Bernhardi, Russian Transport, Rx

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 07 February 2012 15:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

How the World Began
Starring Justin Kruger, Adam LeFevre, Heidi Schreck
Written by Catherine Treischmann
Directed by Daniella Topol

Professor Bernhardi
Starring Sam Tsoutsouvas
Written by Arthur Schnitzler
Directed by Lenny Leibowitz

Russian Transport
Starring Janeane Garofalo, Daniel Oreskes, Morgan Spector, Sarah Steele, Raviv Ullman
Written by Erika Sheffer
Directed by Scott Elliott

Rx
Starring Michael Bakkensen, Marylouise Burke, Marin Hinkle, Stephen Kunken, Paul Niebanck, Elizabeth Rich
Written by Kate Fodor
Directed by Ethan McSweeny

Darwin and the Bible butt heads in How the World Began, Catherine Treischmann’s provocative drama set in a Kansas high school about the fallout from an offhand remark made by Susan, a teacher just relocated from New York City, about Creationism that Micah, one of her students, finds offensive to himself and his faith.

Maybe because she agrees with Susan‘s position, Treischmann has made both Micah and his adult guardian Gene more sympathetic than Susan, whose hardheadedness underlines an insensitivity that quickly grates. The playwright also stacks the deck, making Susan pregnant from a failed relationship and allowing the unseen locals to be more stereotypically closed-minded than Micah and Gene (both wonderfully enacted by Justin Kruger and Adam LeFevre). Heidi Schreck’s Susan is intelligent but broken-down emotionally; too bad Treischmann didn’t probe her persona more thoroughly, which would have made How the World Began less propagandistic and more truthful.

The plays of Arthur Schnitzler are rarely seen in New York, unless a gimmick is attached (“See Nicole Kidman naked!” was the come-on for David Hare’s La Ronde adaptation, The Blue Room, on Broadway in 1998). Luckily, enterprising companies like the Mint Theater and the new Marvell Rep mount productions of some Schnitzler masterpieces, so we can see for ourselves their beauty, subtlety and humanity.

Schnitzler’s dense “character comedy” (as he called it) Professor Bernhardi is a shrewdly observed study of morality and religious hypocrisy in 1900 Vienna: a Jewish doctor is thrown in prison for refusing to allow a Catholic priest to give last rites to a dying young woman. This sprawling play (well-translated by G. J. Weinberger) is talky and polemical, but neither is a defect: Schnitzler’s penetrating philosophical, psychological and political insights, fill every minute of its three-hour running time.

The five-act, five-setting, 18-character Bernhardi needs a large-scale production to be truly effective, but the Marvel Rep makes up for its lack of resources (small stage, uneven cast) by presenting the play‘s English-language premiere in New York. Smoothly directed by Lenny Leibowitz, this Bernhardi stars Sam Tsoutsouvas, whose usual blustery stage presence is reined in just the right amount to convey the good doctor’s self-confidence bordering on arrogance.

In Russian Transport, a family of Russian émigrés in Brooklyn has its everyday existence upended when a family member arrives from the home country. Erika Sheffer’s illuminating comedy-drama shows an ordinary family (mother, father, teenage son and daughter) dealing with shady Uncle Alex, and learning that a new life in America might be easier for those who see it as a continuation of the old criminal ways in Russia.

Sheffer’s superbly-etched portraits of the members of this family are neither idealized nor caricatured: the kids are sympathetically drawn, and Alex is a charismatic monster. There’s more than enough real life contained in Sheffer’s writing, Scott Elliott’s persuasive directing, Derek McLane’s apt two-tiered set and Peter Kaczorowski’s skillful lighting. And the superlative acting quintet does wonders making these people come to vivid life: Janeane Garofalo is especially convincing as mom and Morgan Spector gives a hair-raising portrayal of Alex, who unblinkingly casts aside family ties for what he considers upward mobility.

Nothing if not timely, Kate Fodor’s amusing Rx is a smart if superficial satire of the world of Big Pharma and how clinical drug trials line its pockets while causing problems for patients taking still-unapproved drugs. A former journalist who covered the pharmaceutical industry, Fodor knows whereof she speaks, and Rx is filled with cutting humor without coming off too “inside.”

Rx isn’t as substantial as Fodor’s strong previous play, 100 Saints You Should Know, as she introduces melodramatic (cancer) and farcical (Albert Einstein) elements that dilute the play’s comedic thrust. Energetically directed by Ethan McSweeny and acted by a terrific cast led by Marin Hinkle, Stephen Kunken and the always reliable Marylouise Burke, Rx might not be a prescription for all ills, but it does provide temporary comic relief.

How the World Began
Previews began December 28, 2011; opened January 5, 2012; closed January 29
Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 416 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
http://womensproject.org

Professor Bernhardi
Previews began January 31, 2012; opened February 5; closes February 26
Marvell Rep @ TBG Theatre, 312 West 36th Street, New York, NY
http://marvellrep.com

Russian Transport
Previews began January 17, 2012; opened January 30; closes March 24
The New Group @ the Acorn Theatre, 261 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
http://thenewgroup.org

Rx
Previews began January 24, 2012; opened January 7; closes March 3
Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 416 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
http://primarystages.org