Kevin's July '11 Digital Week V

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Sunday, 31 July 2011 20:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week

Four Weddings and a Funeral and Be Cool (MGM)

A new line of mid-price MGM Blu-rays includes Four Weddings and a Funeral, the sleeper hit comedy of 1994 that thrust Hugh Grant into stardom (and didn't do too badly by Kristin Scott Thomas and Andie McDowell either), and Be Cool, the sleepy 2005 sequel to Get Shorty, with John Travolta reprising his gangster turned Hollywood mogul to lesser effect, although Christina Milian was a real find as his sexy singing (and swinging) sidekick.

The movies receive good if not overly impressive hi-def transfers; Be Cool extras include gag reel, music videos, cast interviews, deleted scenes and making-of featurette; Weddings extras include filmmakers' commentary, deleted scenes, on-set featurettes and making-of documentary.

High and Low (Criterion)

One of Akira Kurosawa's towering masterpieces is this nailbiting 1963 thriller pitting the haves versus the have-nots in a tense game of cat and mouse. Approaching true Shakespearean pathos by its end, this lengthy but always absorbing and never dull crime drama features uniformly excellent performances (especially by Toshiro Mifune in the lead), the razor-sharp B&W photography and editing and Kurosawa's inspired direction combine for a truly unique film.

Criterion's Blu-ray, as good as advertised, makes a great film look even greater; extras include Kurosawa expert Stephen Prince commentary, vintage Mifune interview and a making-of documentary that's part of Kurosawa's It's Wonderful to Create series.

Leon Morin, Priest (Criterion)

Although a young, dashing Jean Paul Belmondo plays the title character in Jean Pierre Melville's 1961 chamber drama set in Nazi-occupied France, the movie is stolen by an always riveting Emmanuelle Riva, best known for Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour.

A young woman of loose morals finds herself irresistibly drawn to a handsome priest, and Melville shows their relationship as a strange, forbidding but platonic courtship that is climaxed by his most honestly downbeat ending. The clean and sharp Blu-ray image is another Criterion winner; extras include vintage Melville and Belmondo interviews, deleted scenes and selected-scene commentary by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau.

Monamour (Cult Epics)

Italian soft-core auteur Tinto Brass could never be accused of modesty, and this 2006 adventure for an unhappily married couple featuring extramarital sex, including simulated fellatio sequences, is one of his most recent titillating provocations. On a second disc is Kick the Cock or The New Maid, a 15-minute short starring the stunning Angelita Franco, the latest Brass discovery, in an amusing tease that shows Brass himself furiously masturbating to Franco's gorgeous (and naked) figure.

This supremely monomaniacal silliness, on Blu-ray at least, has clear imagery that provides fun to some in the audience. Extras include a making-of featurette for each film.

Priest of Love and The Romantic Englishwoman (Kino Lorber)

These nearly forgotten British films arrive on DVD/Blu-ray for the first time. 1981's Priest of Love, a standard D.H. Lawrence biopic, stars Ian McKellen in one of his first major roles and Janet Suzman as his wife Frieda. 1975's Romantic Englishwoman, one of Joseph Losey's weakest melodramas, has Glenda Jackson and Michael Caine as an unhappily married couple and Helmut Berger as a poet with whom she may be having an affair.

Although both movies are basically unmemorable they register strongly on Blu-ray, thanks to appropriately grainy transfers. No Englishwoman extras; Priest extras comprise a making-of documentary, interviews and deleted scenes with director Christopher Miles' commentary.

Shark Week (Discovery Channel)

Discovery Channel's biggest annual ratings blockbuster is Shark Week, and this two-disc set collects six programs chronicling the ocean's most perfect killing machine, from a recent spate of shark attacks to an amazing airborne fish that's been nicknamed "Air Jaws."

The photography (both on land and underwater) is crystal-clear and looks vivid and vibrantly stunning on Blu-ray; the extras comprise three additional programs: Sharks: Are They Hunting Us?; Man vs. Fish: Tiger Shark; and Man vs. Fish: Mako Shark.

Take Me Home Tonight (Fox)

This nearly laughless comedy sat on the shelf for awhile, which may be why it's surprising to see Anna Faris in a muted role as the sister of hero Topher Grace, who finds little humor as a video-store loser who pretends to be a stockbroker to impress (and bed down) the girl on whom he had a crush in high school.

There are foolish, unfunny sequences of characters acting like idiots, and even if that stuff clicked with audiences in The Hangover and Bridesmaids, moviegoers ignored this, which means all hope is not lost. The Blu-ray image is decent; the extras include deleted scenes and a music video.

DVDs of the Week

The Conqueror (e one)

Legendary Ukrainian warrior Taras Bulba, born in the great novella by Nikolai Gogol, was also the subject of an opera, a Janacek orchestral work and films. But this 2009 adaptation by Ukrainian director Vladimir Bortko returns one of Russian literature's most celebrated historical characters to the screen with an undoubtedly huge budget that was paid for by the Russian Ministry of Culture.

The result is an epically-scaled adventure with gory, rousing and prolonged battle scenes interspersed with reflective and romantic moments. The result is fun but superficial, thanks to unsubtle acting and Bortko's recycled effects, particularly close-up bludgeoning that gets stale fast.

Dumbstruck (Magnolia)

Director Mark Goffman takes a subject which could have been turned into a freak show by a less sympathetic director and fashions an entertaining and heartening study of several talented ventriloquists.

The director's obvious affection for these people shows in how he burrows into their personal and professional lives without condescension and, along with the usual white male subjects, Goffman shows the community's diversity by including a white teenage boy (with a black dummy!) and a young woman. Extras include Goffman and crew members' commentary, deleted scenes and additional interviews.

Selma Jezková (Dacapo)

Danish composer Poul Ruders' latest opera distills the drama of Lars von Trier's relentlessly downbeat film, Dancer in the Dark, starring Bjork, who also composed trite songs, into 70 taut, excruciating minutes. Ruders shrewdly omits her tunes, supplying his own thorny soundtrack instead, and smartly focusing on Selma, sung by the amazing soprano Tiva Kihlberg in a fully committed portrayal.

Copenhagen's stark staging does von Trier one better, and Ruders' music is formidably played by the Danish Opera Orchestra under Michael Schonwandt's baton. A 45-minute making-of featurette includes interviews with Ruders and Kihlberg.

CDs of the Week

Delius, Ibert, Milhaud (EMI)

This trio of two-disc sets, part of EMI's 20th Century Classics series of releases, is a superb way to discover three of the most unsung but inventive classical composers in affordable editions that contain first-class performances. The Frederick Delius set smartly programs all of the Britisher's atmospheric and brilliantly orchestrated tone poems (such as Sleigh Ride, Brigg Fair and Florida Suite) in versions are led by conductor Thomas Beecham, Delius' most visible advocate.

The Jacques Ibert set includes the Frenchman's wonderful Flute Concerto with Emmanuel Pahud as soloist, and the Darius Milhaud set features the Frenchman's Flute Sonata, also played by Pahud, and the underrated First Cello Concerto, performed by the legendary Jonas Starker.

Movie Review: Paskaljevic's Sardonic "Optimists"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Saturday, 30 July 2011 15:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

The Optimists
Directed by Goran Paskaljevic

In 2008, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City showed a retrospective of films by Serbian director Goran Paskaljevic, whose black-comic sensibility is filled with sardonic insights into the complex intertwining of the personal and political still haunting the former Yugoslavia.

Best-known for the powerful Bosnian War allegory The Powder Keg (or Cabaret Balkan), Paskaljevic blends narrative strands that straddle realism and absurdism to regretfully consider the insane nationalism that swept across the director's beloved, broken country. His most recent film, 2009's Honeymoons, was shown at MOMA last summer. This week, his 2006 comic drama The Optimists gets a MOMA slot.

Based loosely on the ironically cheerful refrain in Voltaire's Candide, "all's for the best in this best of all possible worlds," The Optimists chronicles several characters desperate to, against all odds, hold onto what becomes an increasingly ridiculous optimism in a world mirroring recent Balkan (and European, and American, and Asian....) history.

Even the film's obviously metaphorical vignette -- a brutal rape that comes out of nowhere -- has a genuinely queasy power, especially when the attacker turns the tables on his victim after she fights back. Saying that he's the real victim of an overly excited sexual partner, the rapist could stand in for Serbian President Milosevic and his minions, who decried destructive NATO bombings even as they annihilated thousands of Bosnian Muslims.

The film's final sequence presents disabled and ill bus passengers finding themselves abandoned in a desolate area after being taken for a literal ride by a con man promising them a magical, healing spring. As they convince themselves that all is well despite their predicament, splashing around in muddy water, the final shots display a cynicism and a sympathy that catches the Catch-22 of modern life.

We could all use "I laugh to keep from crying" as our comically hopeful refrain, as those trapped in The Optimists surely do.

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street
New York, NY
www.moma.org
Screening July 28-August 3, 2011

Off-Broadway Summer: "All New People," "The Shoemaker," "Death Takes a Holiday"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 28 July 2011 15:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

All New People
Written by Zach Braff
Directed by Peter Dubois
Starring David Wilson Barnes, Justin Bartha, Anna Camp, Krysten Ritter

The Shoemaker
Written by Susan Charlotte
Directed by Antony Marsellis
Starring Danny Aiello, Alma Cuervo, Lucy DeVito, Michael Twaine

Death Takes a Holiday
Book by Peter Stone and Thomas Meehan; based on the play by Alberto Casella
Music and lyrics by Maury Yeston
Directed by Doug Hughes
Starring Matt Cavenaugh, Mara Davi, Simon Jones, Rebecca Luker, Julian Ovenden, Jill Paice

Although the long-delayed Spiderman and the national tour of Hair recently opened on Broadway, summer belongs to new off-Broadway shows.

But only Zach Braff’s All New People is truly new; The Shoemaker was originally a one-act and Death Takes a Holiday, originally from Alberto Casella’s play, became a movie in 1934 with Frederic March.

All New People, the first play by Zach Braff, shows the earmarks of someone who spent a lot of time working on sitcoms. When Charlie, on his 35th birthday, is caught trying to kill himself in a South Jersey beach house by Emma, who’s renting the place out, he ends up hosting her, her firefighter/drug dealer friend Myron and Manhattan high-priced escort Kim, who was sent to Charlie by the house’s owner in the hopes that she’ll cheer him up.

The quartet goes through emotional turmoil of the superficial sort found on a TV show like Scrubs, which Braff starred in, or a movie like Garden State, which Braff wrote, directed and starred in. The play’s lively if self-conscious dialogue furiously flies out of the characters’ mouths and zooms past the audience members’ heads. At one point, Charlie complains that Myron always has an obnoxious quip at the ready, but since each one tosses them out interchangeably, why poor Myron is singled out isn’t clear.

Braff, playing it safe, has his characters parrot many pop culture references, like The Lion King, Home Alone, Beverly Hills Cop and The Ten Commandments, TV shows like Fantasy Island, music artists like Sarah MacLachlan, Usher and Steely Dan, and even Riverdance, which is the music Charlie has on when Emma first walks in on him.

Braff’s clever but slight writing is marred by his characters’ unearned epiphanies, especially when Charlie’s claim of being responsible for six people’s deaths turns out to be true: that heavy-duty plot twist that has no business among such frivolity. There’s also a quartet of diverting film sequences to help flesh out the characters, while Peter DuBois’ engaging direction, which smoothes over the rough patches, keeps a brisk pace.

The comedy percolates thanks to Krysten Ritter (Emma), David Wilson Barnes (Myron) and Justin Bartha (Charlie), but they pale next to Anna Camp’s hilarious Kim. Breathing new life into a stock blonde bimbo part, Camp (featured in season 2 of HBO’s True Blood) never camps it up in an enchanting performance as the sexy, unwittingly wise hooker prone to malapropisms. Camp effortlessly turns the routine into something special: so when will she get her much deserved Born Yesterday moment on Broadway?

Susan Charlotte’s well-intentioned but impossibly naïve The Shoemaker not only treads the ground of September 11, but adds the Holocaust into its ungainly mix. A Hell’s Kitchen shoe repairer, who closed his store following the attacks, meets Hilary, a breathless woman with a hole in her sole after walking uptown for miles once the Twin Towers collapsed.

After he agrees to fix her shoe, he tells her about Louise, a young woman who hasn’t yet returned to pick up her pair of fancy shoes. The worried shoemaker, an Italian Jew who escaped the Fascists, also speaks with his dead father, who never made it out of Italy alive, for which his son still feels shame and anger.

Charlotte’s play has been expanded from a one-act version which omitted the Holocaust. The added second act makes a clunky play even more lumbering. Originally dealing with the immense loss of human life on September 11, the play has now become a disjointed and creaky melodrama which reeks of insufferable sentimentality.

Charlotte’s pretentious symbolism ("sole/soul" puns, for starters) makes it impossible to respond to rationally, and Anthony Marsellis’s blatant directing follows suit. If Alma Cuervo’s shrill Hilary and Lucy DeVito’s barely-there Louise are cardboard caricatures, at least Danny Aiello’s sympathetic shoemaker deserves plaudits for finding an emotional connection to the material.

If The Shoemaker was staged in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, it might have played successfully on our frayed nerves; a decade later, more substance is needed.

In Death Takes a Holiday, the title character takes a weekend off, ostensibly because he’s weary of dealing with so many corpses (it’s 1921, and World War I had him working overtime). But really it's because he’s fallen for Grazia, beautiful daughter of the Duke and Duchess Lamberti, whose grand villa is where Death spends his time disguised as a Russian prince whom Grazia promptly falls for, her impending nuptials notwithstanding. 

Casella’s play touched on the tragedy of young men dying in war, but little of that melancholy survives in the musical, with its by-the-numbers Thomas Meehan and Peter Stone book and Maury Yeston’s hummably forgettable score. Although "Losing Roberto," in which the Duchess mourns her son’s wartime death, is the most memorable number, it’s mostly thanks to Rebecca Luker’s heartfelt singing.

Derek McLane’s attractive but cramped set and Catherine Zuber’s routine period costumes don’t help matters, and director Doug Hughes is unable to move his large cast around the small stage area with graceful ease. Leads Jill Paice, a sweet-voiced Grazia, and Julian Ovenden, a powerfully-sung Death, have little chemistry together, which keeps this old-fashioned, overlong crowd-pleaser from being much more than a nostalgia piece.

All New People
Second Stage Theater
375 West 43rd Street
New York City
2st.com
Opened July 26; closes August 14, 2011

The Shoemaker
Acorn Theatre
410 West 42nd Street
New York City
causecelebre.info
Opened July 24; closes August 14, 2011

Death Takes a Holiday
Laura Pels Theatre
111 West 46th Street
New York City
roundabouttheatre.org
Opened July 21; closes September 4, 2011