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Reviews
May '16 Digital Week V
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 31 May 2016 12:37
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
The Beggar’s Opera
(Opus Arte)
In this 1983 TV production of this seminal 1728 piece of musical theater—forerunner of Weill and Brecht’s far more subversiveThreepenny Opera—The Who lead singer Roger Daltrey plays MacHeath, and though in fine voice, he conveys little of his attraction to women and penchant for crime.
So director Jonathan Miller smartly surrounds Daltrey with a veteran cast, led by Patricia Routledge as Mrs. Peachum, Carol Hall as her beguiling daughter Polly and Bob Hoskins as a sardonic choir of sorts who frames the action (which concludes with Macheath’s hanging, rather than his being freed). John Eliot Gardiner leads the English Baroque Soloists in a robust reading of the score, even if there’s no “Mack the Knife” within earshot. Hi-def audio and video are decent.
(Arrow USA)
The Terror
(The Film Detective)
Roger Corman churned out low-budget quickies short on sophistication but with occasional thrills. Arrow’s two-disc Blood Bath set is typically well put together, but four versions of the same 1966 film—variously titled Operation Titian, Portrait in Terror, Blood Bath and Track of the Vampire—that’s difficult to sit through in even one version is too much of a mediocre thing. 1963’s The Terror featured Boris Karloff in one of his last lead roles and a young actor named Jack Nicholson as our hero, but Corman does little with the ghostly story and authentic locations. There are compensations for fans: Blood includes all four versions, ranging from 62 to 95 minutes, in hi-def, along with interviews and featurettes; The Terror, well-preserved on Blu, has no extras.
(Cohen Film Collection)
One of Federico Fellini’s most nakedly symbolic dramas, this 1980 extravaganza stars old friend Marcello Mastroianni as a middle-aged man who falls asleep on a train and finds himself in a hotel filled with female, some alluring, others grotesque: there are set pieces as glorious—and ghastly—as anything the maestro ever filmed, and if it all seems like déjà vu, it’s always interesting to watch Fellini attempt to psychoanalyze himself—and his cinematic alter ego—onscreen, however variable the results.
Cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno’s boisterous colors have been lovingly restored for this Blu-ray release; extras are a 30-minute featurette and interviews with production designer Dante Ferretti and fellow filmmaker and Fellini friend Tinto Brass.
Dark Passage
(Warner Archive)
Delmer Davies’ tense 1947 film noir reteamed Bogie and Bacall—the third of their four films together—with a twist: Bogart isn’t seen until after the hour mark, when the bandages covering his face post-plastic surgery are removed (the convoluted plot concerns an escaped prisoner framed for his wife’s murder who puts on a new face to start again with a new identity).
Bacall’s smoldering presence is what the term “femme fatale” was made for, Bogart is always formidable and the San Francisco locations are put to gritty use by Davies. The restored transfer is excellent; extras comprise a vintage featurette and a Bugs Bunny cartoon from the same era.
(Decca)
Although Handel’s music isn’t high on my listening list—especially four–plus hours of it, as in this opera—this 2012 Salzburg Festival performance compensates with an impressively starry cast and eloquent musicmaking under Giovanni Antonini’s baton.
Cecilia Bartoli steals the show as Cleopatra, but Anne Sofie von Otter isn’t far behind as Cornelia, and countertenor Andreas Scholl makes a kingly Caesar. Too bad Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s Eurotrash production sets the whole thing in a no-man’s land of mindless modernity. Hi-def audio and video are first-rate.
Killer Dames
(Arrow USA)
Two of Italian giallo director Emilio P. Miraglia’s most representative entries—1971’s The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave and 1972’s The Red Queen Kills Seven Times—can’t hope to compete with their floridly descriptive titles, but they are trashy fun, especially Evelyn,which brings to the screen a young Sibyl Danning, who later made a bigger impression in 1980s B movies.
Both films have good, grainy new transfers, along with an option to watch in the original Italian or an English dub (which was how American viewers in the ‘70s would have seen them in theaters); extras include interviews, featurettes, commentaries and introductions.
A Married Woman
(Cohen Film Collection)
Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 study of a wife unhappily juggling relationships with her husband and her lover features an actress, Macha Meril, who scorches the screen unlike most of Godard’s usual performers.
Godard’s usual fragmented anti-narrative takes a back seat to a mature, frank look at how morality and politics affects private and public lives that takes its rightful place among the director’s greatest films:W eekend, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Hail Mary andNouvelle Vague. The hi-def transfer beautifully shows off Raoul Coutard’s exquisite B&W photography; extras are interviews with Meril, filmmaker Agnes B. and film scholar Antoine de Baecque.
The Sum of Us
(Olive Films)
Adapted by David Stevens from his own play that perceptively explored the close relationship between a macho widower and his gay adult son—both of whom are looking for love—this 1994 drama is directed with extreme tact by Kevin Dowling and Geoff Burton.
The acting could not be bettered: Jack Thompson plays the father with his usual blend of ruggedness and sensitivity, while a then-unknown Russell Crowe tackles the trickier part of the son with a nuanced portrayal beyond what one might have expected. It veers too much into soap-opera territory in its final third, but remains a tough yet tender family portrait. The hi-def transfer is impeccable.
May '16 Digital Week IV
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 25 May 2016 01:19
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Antonia’s Line
(Film Movement Classics)
(Film Movement Classics)
This 1995 Oscar-winning Best Foreign Film has lost little of its charm, even if Dutch director Marleen Gorliss’s often amusing feminist melodrama feels less like the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and more like the heroic sentimentality of John Irving novels. With an immensely likeable cast and a remarkably light directorial touch, Antonia remains serious fun, although it’s anything but frivolous.
Lone extra is a vintage Gorliss interview; the booklet essay by Thelma Adams is notable for discussing female director milestones but somehow omits Lina Wertmuller, the first woman nominated for a Best Director Oscar for her 1976 masterpiece Seven Beauties. The film has a good Blu-ray transfer.
(Lionsgate)
Robert DeNiro is definitely enjoying spouting profanities, flirting with nubile young actresses, even doing a Karaoke rap on “It Was a Good Day” (complete with mic drop): he’s having a better time than anyone watching this crass, forgettable comedy that pits deNiro’s eponymous old man against Zac Efron’s straight-laced, about-to-be-married lawyer.
Zoey Deutch (Lea Thompson’s daughter) is charming, and Aubrey Plaza has a real way with raunch that even outpaces DeNiro, so there are a few oases amid the comedic desert we’re saddled with. There’s a top-notch hi-def transfer; extras include a commentary, gag reel and featurettes.
Father of the Bride
(Warner Archive)
This harmless 1950 comedy won’t go down as one of director Vincente Minnelli and star Spencer Tracy’s stellar achievements, but it has its distinct pleasures, most notably Tracy’s effortless charm, the young Elizabeth Taylor’s effortless beauty, and a quick pace that helps this sturdy and short (90 minutes) comedy move from A to B satisfyingly. Warner Archive’s hi-def transfer is superb; extras are two brief newsreels, neither with sound: a glimpse at Taylor’s real wedding and another of President and Mrs. Truman appearing at the movie’s premiere.
(Disney)
Rather like The Perfect Storm, director Craig Gillespie’s absorbingly old-fashioned sea-tossed drama recreates the incredible rescue of 32 sailors on a sinking tanker in a huge storm off the Massachusetts coast by a single coast guard lifeboat in 1951.
But unlike Storm, there’s a happy ending for everybody at sea and, especially, the worried fiancée of our hero who’s stuck onshore (and who’s played beautifully by underused British actress Holliday Grainger). The movie looks smashingly good on Blu-ray; extras comprise featurettes and deleted scenes.
How to Be Single
(Warner Bros)
Dakota Johnson and Alison Brie make sweetly endearing klutzes desperately looking for love in all the wrong places in this lackluster rom-com that balances those assets with the always one-note Leslie Mann as Johnson’s sister and one-trick pony Rebel Wilson, who gives her usual bull-in-a-china shop performance as the snarky friend.
Moments where this could have become something more memorable are snuffed out by a stolid Mann and over-the-top Wilson. There’s a high-quality high-def transfer; extras include featurettes, outtakes, a gag reel and deleted scenes.
(Olive Films)
Greek director Michael Cacoyannis made his commercial (and Oscar-nominated) splash in 1964 with Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek,but he was best known for his trilogy of adaptations of plays by the ancient dramatist Euripides, which began with Electra and The Trojan Women.
In the last, 1977’s Iphigenia—which was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar—the director dramatizes without much urgency, and even less poetry and insight, one of the playwright’s most shattering tragedies. Even the authentic Greek cast, which features no less than Irene Papas as Agamemnon’s wronged wife, Clytemnestra, cannot save this stillborn adaptation. The film looks decent if unspectacular on Blu.
The Naked Island
(Criterion)
(Criterion)
Kaneto Shindo’s 1960 quasi-documentary is extraordinary in every sense: from its shimmering black and white photography and Hikaru Hayashi’s modernist score to its seemingly unstaged scenes of the unspeaking denizens of an isolated island in the Japanese archipelago.
This classic is far away as possible from Shindo’s later horror masterpieces Onibaba and Kurenko, but is undoubtedly the work of the same directorial vision. Criterion’s new hi-def transfer is as astonishing as the film; extras comprise a Shindo introduction, Shindo and Hayashi commentary, Benecio del Toro appreciation and scholar Akira Mizuta Lippit interview.
(Olive Films)
Even George Sanders (who provides his usual urbane suavity as our cad of a hero) and actresses ranging from Angela Lansbury to Ann Dvorak are unable to lift it out of the doldrums. Neither does a brief color insert of Max Ernst’s painting The Temptation of St. Anthony. The movie looks fine on Blu.
Off-Broadway Reviews—“Daphne’s Dive" and "A Better Place”
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Sunday, 22 May 2016 18:32
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Daphne’s Dive
Written by Quiara Alegría Hudes; directed by Thomas Kail
Performances through June 12, 2016
A Better Place
Written by Wendy Beckett; directed by Evan Bergman
Performances through June 11, 2016
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| Samira Wiley in Daphne's Dive (photo: Joan Marcus) |
In her sometimes affecting but mostly scattershot Daphne’s Dive, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes follows the denizens of a local Philly bar over the course of 18 years, but their lives, loves, and even deaths have little resonance or dramatized with scant insight, despite flashes of wit and humor.
We meet Daphne, hard-working owner-proprietor of the eponymous bar; her flaunting, successful sister Inez and her husband, rising local politician Acosta; three regulars, provocative performance artist Jenn, painter Pablo and ancient biker Rey; and Ruby, an 11-year-old black girl adopted by Daphne after she was (literally) found in a dumpster after jumping out a window to escape her family’s eviction.
The play jumps forward through the years—Ruby intones, “I am 15,” “I am 20,” etc., to situate where we are—and the lives of this septet become ever more fractured, complicated, even loving (Daphne and Jenn begin an unlikely romance). But Hudes too often cuts corners: after a tender scene between Daphne and Jenn, for example, the latter’s disappearance from the play is handed so clumsily that it hovers over the rest of the drama, to its ultimate detriment.
More foolhardy is what feels like a tacked-on epilogue: a flashback to when Ruby was 11 and she and Daphne say what might have been their final goodbye (before Daphne adopts her). Its stiltedness is more the playwright’s fault than two characters searching for things to say. That ever-resourceful director Thomas Kail is unable to fully join the disparate strands of this memory play together, even as it’s enacted on Donyale Werle’s wonderfully dingy bar set and acted with forcefulness by the entire cast, especially Vanessa Aspillaga, who makes an intensely sympathetic Daphne, and Samira Wiley, whose Ruby is wounded but beautifully alive.
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| Jessica DiGiovanni in A Better Place (photo: Jenny Anderson) |
Apartment envy is a fact of life in Manhattan, and Wendy Beckett’s A Better Place tackles it with all the finesse of a ‘70s sitcom filled with caricatures, however funny and accurate parts of it are.
Gay couple Les and Sel live in a rent-controlled one-bedroom, and Les is transfixed by the ultra-rich, seemingly perfect family in their modern, airy apartment across the street: he always watches what’s going on, which includes mom Mary, dad John and daughter Carol, who brings home real-estate brokers for sex laden with brokerage verbiage to get her off.
This is all OK as far as it goes, and Beckett finds plentiful, if easy, humor in these absurd situations, especially when it comes out that the one-percenters are not really as affluent as they seem—both financially and personally; but how the two sides finally get together is brought about in such a painfully contrived way that the final scenes come across as rather desperate in their attempt to join belly laughs and deeper meaning.
The performances are smartly pitched just this side of parody by director Evan Bergman, who otherwise has problems reining in the play’s episodic nature as it jumps back and forth between apartments: best in a game cast is Jessica DiGiovanni, who provides an amusingly flirtatious portrait of a millennial bimbo who needs to hear ever more florid descriptions of pricey apartments to have an orgasm.
The stunning set is by David L. Arsenault: the two apartments are shown in all their realistic glory on either side of the stage, with a metaphorical chasm in between: the lived-in, rent-controlled brownstone is dark and stuffy; and the modern multi-million dollar one all bright and airy. That more is said through the set than through the characters ends up dragging A Better Place down.
Daphne’s Dive
Signature Theatre, Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
signaturetheatre.org
A Better Place
Duke on 42nd Street, 229 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
abetterplaceplay.com
"Sylvia" Dances Across Lincoln Center
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 20 May 2016 02:25
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Photot by Gene Schiavone
The new season of the superb American Ballet Theater at Lincoln Center opened with one of the strongest works in its repertory, the Frederick Ashton’s masterwork, Sylvia, from 1952, set to the magnificent and famous score — greatly esteemed by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky — by Léo Delibes, the composer of the delightful ballet Coppélia (also in the company's repertory but not presented this season) as well as the gorgeous opera Lakmé. Ashton is arguably the greatest choreographer of the 20th century (along with George Balanchine) and the company is to be commended for devoting a week each to Sylvia as well as to one of his other full-length ballets, La Fille mal gardée. Other highlights of this season include six one-act ballets — three of which are set to scores by Dmitri Shostakovich — by artist-in-residence extraordinaire, Alexei Ratmansky, possibly the finest choreographer of his generation, including one world premiere (with music by Leonard Bernstein), as well as his 2015 production of Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty, choreographed in 1890 by Marius Petipa.
The performance of Sylvia on the evening of Friday, May 13th, featured an outstanding cast headed by the exquisite Russian ballerina, Maria Kochetkova, whose grace and precision were unfailingly dazzling in the title role. Her partner, in the role of Aminta, Herman Cornejo, one of the most brilliant dancers in the company, was equally riveting. My only caveat with respect to these two leads were limitations in the performances from an actorly viewpoint — I would have liked to see more emotional conviction.
This reservation did not apply to the marvelous Daniil Simkin, the best character player in the company, in the role of Orion — the dancer's performance was delightfully hammy as well as choreographically arresting. Excellent support was given by the other featured players — Arron Scott as Eros and Christine Shevchenko as Diana — while the other thrilling dancers, especially in thedivertissements,were too numerous to mentions. (Thecorps de balletwas also in fine form.)
My only significant criticism of this production is that it requires a strong directorial vision — elements of the scenography and lighting and some of the costumes are lovely and effective but as a whole the staging lives only in the dancing whereas it could — and should — be a complete spectacle. Still, any opportunity to see Ashton's endlessly creative choreography so vividly realized should not be missed by any connoisseur.
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