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Film and the Arts
December '12 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Sunday, 09 December 2012 05:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Ai Weiwei—Never Sorry
(Sundance Selects)
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei—the compelling subject of Alison Klayman’s smart, incisive documentary—is not placed on a pedestal but shown as an actual person (with a family) who causes consternation among Chinese officials. There’s an enormous amount of revealing footage of him both in and out of China: when he disappears for awhile at the hands of the authorities, real life usurps art.
Never Sorry aptly illuminates how our wired 21st century world is helping to buckle the last remaining Communist regime. The Blu-ray image shimmers beautifully; extras are a commentary, deleted scenes and interviews.
Brazil
(The Criterion Collection)
Terry Gilliam’s dystopian vision was made in 1985, but its bleak look at a society crushed by an oppressive government is as relevant today. Despite its subject matter—our hero is literally crushed like the bug at the beginning that sets everything in motion—the movie is awash with the brilliantly original visuals that made Gilliam one of our premier cinematic stylists.
The hi-def image is superlative looking, and the three-disc Criterion Collection Blu-ray ported over numerous extras from the 1999 DVD set: Gilliam’s sparkling commentary; on-set documentary What Is Brazil?; The Battle of Brazil, a one-hour documentary about the friction between Gilliam and Universal Studios; and Universal’s 94-minute, mercilessly butchered “Love Conquers All” version of the film.
Butter
(Anchor Bay)
Like the classic Smile and frivolous American Dreamz, Butter shows America in microcosm: here, it’s a small town butter-carving contest. Too bad the satire’s obvious with characters not drawn sharply enough to draw blood—just a few nicks.
A game cast (Jennifer Garner, Rob Corddry, Ty Burrell, Alicia Silverstone) trails two wonderfully drawn portraits: Yara Shahidi’s 10-year-old butter-carving prodigy symbolically named Destiny, and Olivia Wilde’s stripper wanting $600 a cheating husband owes her. The Blu-ray image looks decent; extras include deleted scenes, extended scenes and a gag reel.
The Dark Knight Rises
(Warners)
In his third overstuffed but underwhelming Batman film, Christopher Nolan again tries to raise a comic book movie to art but ends up with a 165-minute farrago littered with yawn-inducing action sequences, flimsy characterizations and a sense of humor that, when not simply juvenile, becomes infantile.
Christian Bale is a blanker slate than Michael Keaton or George Clooney, Anne Hathaway—as Catwoman—is no Michelle Pfeiffer, and Michael Caine, Matthew Modine, Gary Oldman and Marion Cotillard look embarrassed. The Blu-ray image is first-rate; an extra disc has on-set featurettes.
Godzilla vs. Biollante
(Echo Bridge)
This 1992 sci-fi entry—pitting the terrifying giant lizard against, of all things, a massive but peaceful plant created from Godzilla cells (don’t ask)—is as silly as the series’ other films, so your mileage may vary depending on your tolerance for cheap-looking Japanese monster movies.
Too often, it comes off like outtakes from Woody Allen’s satirical What’s Up Tiger Lily, and far less entertaining. The movie looks equally cheesy in hi-def, which might be a good thing here; extras are two making-of featurettes.
Hope Springs
(Sony)
This familiar but likable comedy about a long-term couple perking up their marriage through counseling works, thanks to Tommy Lee Jones and Meryl Streep, both slumming but enjoying themselves.
Less good is Steve Carell in the rather bland role of their “genius” counselor. But since it’s Meryl and Tommy’s show, Carell’s dullness doesn’t hurt. The Blu-ray image looks excellent; extras include director David Frankel’s commentary, featurette and gag reel.
Lady Antebellum—Own the Night World Tour
(Eagle Vision)
America’s hottest country band not only has top-charting hits and albums and a handful of Grammy Awards but also sells out arenas worldwide.
This 90-minute performance—of the final show of its 2011 tour in Little Rock, Arkansas—shows the trio on top of its game, as well as offstage glimpses of the members’ humble demeanor with fans and the concept of mega-fame. The hi-def footage is top-notch; extras include bonus song selections and offstage/backstage footage.
Watchmen
(Warner Bros)
The ultimate edition of Zach Snyder’s 2009 adaptation of the famous graphic novel, on special edition Blu-ray, should please the movie’s fans: Malin Akerman and Carla Gugino’s appearances should please others too.
The set comprises the directors’ cut on Blu-ray (215 minutes), an hour of extra features on Blu-ray, and theatrical cut on DVD. There’s also a stunning hardcover of the original graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Gibbons. The Blu-ray image seamlessly combines live-action and animated footage.
World Without End
(Sony)
Director Michael Caton-Jones’ six-hour sequel to the successful The Pillar of the Earth, based on another massive Ken Follett novel, is less involving only because of the truism that sequels are inferior to the original.
The cast—Cynthia Nixon, Miranda Richardson, Ben Chaplin and Charlotte Riley—is fine, as are the set design and costumes; all are shown to their best advantage on Blu-ray. The lone extra is a making-of featurette.
DVDs of the Week
Alps
(Kino Lorber)
Greek director Yorgos Yanthimos, who garnered undeserved praise for his attitudinizing Dogtooth in 2009, returns with another pretentious drama about people who help grieving family members by assuming the personalities of their dead loved ones.
The intriguing premise, as in Dogtooth, is ruined by a horribly inconsistent technique, stiffly inept acting and a willful obscurantism that ill-serves the plot’s allegorical aspects.
Beasts of the Southern Wild
(Fox)
Novice director Benh Zeitlin—who wrote the script with the original play’s author, Lucy Alibar—has his heart in the right place, but his fantasy about a spirited young girl living in the bayou with her sickly but domineering father is ruined by his condescension and sledgehammer directing.
Still, Zeitlin deserves praise for casting five-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis in the lead: she responds with a natural, winning portrayal that towers over the movie. The lone extra is a making-of featurette.
Unforgivable
(Strand)
Another Andre Téchiné film of interlocking stories dramatizing life’s unavoidable messiness, this drama convincingly dissects a middle-aged couple’s seemingly perfect relationship. Téchiné, exploring society’s moral compass through a cross-section of characters, has a technique that—as in his best films My Favorite Season and Strayed—subtly serves his complex, involving characterizations.
His masterly direction—subtly elliptical editing compressing long periods of time, camerawork evocatively fading to white during moments of emotional intensity, and effectively sparing use of Max Richter’s chamber music—makes the script’s symbolic coincidence organic.
CDs of the Week
Carter and Elgar Cello Concertos
(Decca)
Composed 82 years apart in vastly different musical eras and cultures, these masterly concertos are, as played by the remarkably talented cellist Alisa Weilerstein, undeniably powerful and even emotionally gripping.
Although the Elgar concerto is an overplayed warhorse, its haunting themes resonate in Weilerstein’s hands (and bow); Carter wrote his concerto at age 92 in 2001, and its technical difficulties are smoothed out by Weilerstein and the Berlin Staatskapelle, conducted by Daniel Barenboim.
Hitchcock—Original Soundtrack
(Sony Classical)
Danny Elfman’s score for Sacha Gervasi’s biopic of the great director is a patchwork quilt resembling the music that propelled the Master of Suspense’s classic films.
The pastiche of Elfman tunes on the soundtrack nicks the sounds of Bernard Herrmann, Hitch’s most formidable composer. Overall, this brief CD is neither here nor there: it’s pleasant enough, but you’re better off listening to—and watching—the real thing.
NYC Theater Roundup: 'Dead Accounts,' 'Anarchist' on Bway; 'Good Mother,' 'Civil War' off-Bway
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 06 December 2012 10:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Dead Accounts
Written by Theresa Rebeck; directed by Jack O’Brien
Performances through February 24, 2013
The Anarchist
Written and directed by David Mamet
Performances through December 16, 2012
The Good Mother
Written by Francine Volpe; directed by Scott Elliott
Performances through December 22, 2012
A Civil War Christmas
Written by Paula Vogel; directed by Tina Landau
Performances through December 30, 2012
The fall theater season in full swing on and off Broadway includes superstars like Al Pacino (selling out nightly in Glengarry Glen Ross), along with several “name” actresses and even a dead president.
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| Butz and Holmes in Dead Accounts (photo: Joan Marcus) |
When Katie Holmes signed on for Theresa Rebeck’s Dead Accounts, it was seen as a move by the former Mrs. Tom Cruise to return to the limelight on her own terms. She made a decent Broadway debut in 2008 in All My Sons; but here, playing Lorna, spinster sister of Jack, who returns to his boyhood home in Cincinnati while on the run from his wealthy wife, spiteful in-laws and federal investigators for his financial shenanigans, Holmes is little more than window dressing in a shrill comedy that thinks broadsides aimed at Midwesterners and Manhattanites are hilarious revelations at this late date.
But aside from Norbert Leo Butz—who plays Jack with a manic energy reined in enough to avoid suggesting he’s a straightjacket candidate—none of the able performers does much with Rebeck’s sitcom-flimsy dialogue and characterizations. Judy Greer (Jack’s estranged wife Jenny) cannot overcome a one-note role with her goofy charm, Josh Hamilton (Jack’s childhood friend Phil) has a thankless part that has him awkwardly wooing Lorna in a misconceived rom-com subplot, and Jayne Houdyshell can’t make Barbara, Jack and Lorna’s loving, religious mother, less cardboard.
Holmes’s essential sweetness serves her well, but the entire supporting cast is forced to watch Butz chew scenery (and assorted Cincinnati foods) on David Rockwell’s serviceably bland suburban kitchen set. Director Jack O’Brien tries to spiff things up with between-scene blackouts and Mark Bennett’s moody, out-of-place music which would work better in a tense thriller, not this slight comedy that evaporates as soon as it ends.
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| Lupone and Winger in The Anarchist (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Evaporating even faster is The Anarchist, David Mamet’s new two-hander that is closing on Broadway barely a week after opening, which may be a quick-disappearance record for the veteran playwright. Unfortunately, this 70-minute non-play—devoid of tension, depth and feeling, and wasting powerhouse actresses Patti Lupone and, in her belated Broadway debut, Debra Winger, struggling mightily to create characters out of thin air—fully deserves its fate.
Lupone plays Ann, in prison for 35 years for her role in a Weather Underground-type group’s bloody bank robbery; Winger is Cathy, a prison officer deciding whether Ann will be paroled. The women’s abstruse discussion comprises topics such as Reason, Revenge, Forgiveness, and the Foolishness of Being Young and Ignorant. The Mametian language they speak includes no profanity but much needless repetition. (If the repeated dialogue was excised, the show would end in a half-hour.) Inadvertently, The Anarchist—a play of ideas whose writer-director has no idea how to explicate them—gives its audience a good idea of what it’s like to be trapped in prison for three-plus decades.
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| Mol in The Good Mother (photo: Monique Carboni) |
Gretchen Mol never became the big-screen star some predicted in the late ‘90s in films like Rounders and Donnie Brasco. But she proved an able stage actress in Neil Labute’s The Shape of Things with Paul Rudd and Rachel Weisz, and singing and dancing in Chicago. However, in Francine Volpe’s thuddingly obvious thriller The Good Mother, even the resourceful Mol as Larissa, a single mother of an autistic four-year-old daughter who may have been abused by Angus, a gay, goth, teen babysitter, can’t overcome pedestrian writing.
This is the kind of play where the heroine has her precious girl watched by a relative stranger because she wants to hook up with truck driver Jonathan, whom she brings home, fools around and smokes with even though the girl’s condition is serious, and leaves Jonathan’s loaded gun in a nearby drawer even though she’s shocked when she first sees it. Subplots involving Angus and his father Joel—a psychiatrist who may have taken sexual advantage of high-school age patients, Larissa among them—are awkwardly integrated as Volpe piles on mysterious behavior for sheer effect without cause.
Scott Elliott directs with his usual briskness which fatally backfires here. The lovely and talented Mol and a cast comprising good actors like Mark Blum as Joel simply bang their heads against a proverbial wall for 90 minutes.
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| Stillman in A Civil War Christmas (photo: Carol Rosegg) |
With Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln the serious movie of the moment, it’s unsurprising that Abe would also center a stage play. But the ungainly hybrid A Civil War Christmas by Paula Vogel—Pulitzer Prize winner for How I Learned to Drive—not only has Abe but holiday and period songs and sentimental story threads more appropriate for a Lifetime Channel movie than this sketchy effort by Vogel and her inventive director Tina Landau.
The show has the feel of a high school basement pageant, with a nearly bare stage that stands in for the White House and locales along the Potomac, a lone piano off stage to the left of the audience and an energetic cast of 11 that plays a mix of actual and non-factual folks from Generals Lee and Grant to nameless soldiers, free and slave blacks. Abe and wife Mary Todd are enacted by Bob Stillman and Alice Ripley, both of whom look and sound right, but whose portrayals are continuously diluted by them playing other roles.
There’s a kernel of an idea here: that Christmas 1864 was the last in which the Civil War still raged: peace is around the corner. But it can’t sustain a 2-1/2 hour show, despite Landau’s clever staging and an energetic cast. Of course, the Christmas carols sound beautiful—notably Ripley’s heartrending “Silent Night” as Mary Todd serenades a dying Union soldier in a D.C. hospital—but this dubious pageant shows off Vogel’s historical research at the expense of engaging audiences.
Dead Accounts
Music Box Theatre, 249 West 45thStreet, New York, NY
The Anarchist
Golden Theatre, 252 West 45thStreet, New York, NY
The Good Mother
The New Group, 410 West 42ndStreet, New York, NY
A Civil War Christmas
New York Theater Workshop, 79 East 4thStreet, New York, NY
DVD Review: My Time in the Thick Brick Cult
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 06 December 2012 05:00
- Written by Renzo Adler
A mention of Troma Entertainment elicits one of two reactions: quizzical looks, or rampant enthusiasm. Troma is best known as the house that gave birth to The Toxic Avenger, a gory and raunchy series of films that filled video stores, and for a brief period in the early 90’s was also a poorly conceived children’s cartoon. Troma is also where I used to work.
When I started out there as a wee intern, I was approached by Justin Martell and Travis Campbell to help out on a movie. Not the new Toxie, or a sequel to Surf Nazis Must Die, but something called Mr. Bricks: A Heavy Metal Murder Musical. Oh yeah, and they also had to make the movie on the side while juggling a full time job (more on that later).
Mr. Bricks as a film really doesn’t fit in with the majority of low/no budget shock flicks you see these days. No slasher clichés drenched with winks and nods to validate their inadequacies. No nouveau-gothic abandoned hospitals or asylums. Just stark, barren, industrial grey Queens and Long Island City provide the backdrop of this sordid tale.
Eugene 'Mr. Bricks' Hicks (Tim Dax) tries to re-call the events of a previous night after he wakes up in a hovel with a woman’s shoe in his hands, a bullet lodged in his head, and two men trying to dispose of him. He crosses paths with Officer Dukes (Vito Trigo) and Officer Scarlett Morretti (kinda-scream queen Nicola Fiore) as he spirals further down searching for the truth.
Bricks is played by tattooed muscle man, dancer, and fixture of many music videos, Tim Dax.
If I had to describe Dax’s performance in a single word, it would be “enthusiastic.” Dax doesn’t just brood or stand and look tough, he jumps, he swaggers, he screams, he cries, he’s all over the place! Dax’s flare is a little comic-booky, but it keeps the character interesting.
Mr. Bricks is a difficult film to categorize. Simply calling it a musical would be gross over-simplification, while calling it a horror flick doesn’t fit either since the horror is more about inner turmoil rather than dead bodies (don’t get me wrong though, there are still plenty of dead bodies in this movie).
The songs, while not exactly created by Meatloaf maestro Jim Steinman, are a melodic version of metal with some clearly enunciated lyrics so you can actually get an impression of what the characters are singing about. The lyrics are what you would expect in metal fare, but there is enough humor and flare in them to keep them interesting. Besides, who can’t agree that “love is murder”?
You could call it an exploitation film, but thankfully, Mr. Bricks doesn’t indulge in obnoxious faux-1980’s flares that you see in movies that use the moniker “exploitation” these days. And while Mr. Bricks is not the most polished film you will see, it is a truly earnest effort by filmmakers that embodies Troma’s history of films that defy categorization.
The earnestness of this production can be seen in the making of documentary on the DVD, Brick By Brick, where we see how Travis Campbell (Writer and Director) and Justin Martell (Producer) created this film with a shoe-string budget while also working full time jobs at Troma, drenching the production in espionage. I’m also in Brick by Brick, since I was working at Troma when Bricks was being made, so I won’t lie when I say there is a personal tie that I have with this film and the tortures and triumphs the people working on it went through.
At the end of the day, Mr. Bricks is simply a film unlike any other. It might be a little rough around the edges, but it bravely traverses territory few have done before by making a gritty musical.
Mr. Bricks A Heavy Metal Murder Musical is out on DVD December 11, 2012.
DVD Interview: "Paradise Lost" Director Joe Berlinger
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 04 December 2012 15:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
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Director Joe Berlinger (photo: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images North America) |
Paradise Lost Trilogy—Collectors’ Edition (4 DVDs)
Available from Docurama
Although it wasn’t until celebrities like Johnny Depp and Eddie Vedder got involved that the plight of the wrongly accused “West Memphis 3”—innocent teenagers sentenced for the grisly murders of three young boys in Arkansas—became national news, it was Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost films that first brought attention to the miscarriage of justice.
Now, nearly two decades after the crimes were committed and a year after the men were finally set free in a bizarre “Alford Plea” deal in which they left prison even if evidence suggested guilt, the three films—Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations and Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory—are being released in a four-disc DVD set that includes bonus materials like additional interviews with the principals, Berlinger discusses the long period of filming the ever-shifting story and advocating for the “West Memphis 3.”
Kevin Filipski: After 20 years working on three films about the same charged subject, how does it feel to have finished the trilogy?
Joe Berlinger: Three films over nearly two decades—obviously we didn’t film every day, so I managed to do other things like raise a family and work on other projects. I was 30 when we started and 50 now. The reason we did the trilogy with all the bonus material on DVD is because it’s a great way to wrap the series in a bow: but there will be no Paradise Lost 4.
It’s now a crowded marketplace: Johnny Depp optioned Damien Echols’ memoir, Atom Egoyan is making a film, and there’s a new documentary, West of Memphis. It was an emotional and psychological journey to stick with this story for so long, and we felt an obligation to them until they got out of prison. I feel good about what we accomplished, and it’s time to move on.
KF: Can you explain how you felt about the case when you first began filming and how long it took for you to believe that the “West Memphis Three” were actually innocent?
JB: It’s ironic that we originally went to Arkansas thinking we were making a film about guilty teenagers: the first reports had it as “open and shut.” After months of digging into evidence and meeting the accused, we knew something was definitely wrong and were convinced of their innocence before the trial started. We were the contrarian voices: that everyone else was against them is an understatement. The press called for blood, and one story after another polluted the jury pool. But Paradise Lost didn’t come out right away—after we edited 150 hours of footage, it premiered at Sundance two years after they were put in prison in 1994. We agonized over their rotting in prison for two years—little did we know!
The film created a slow spark—we won awards but felt guilty getting pats on the back knowing they were in prison. Nobody did anything until Kathy Bakken, who worked for an ad agency doing the poster for Paradise Lost, saw it and started the website wm3.org. The long editing period helped the case in the long run: the internet was becoming a useful social media tool and her site attracted worldwide attention that exploded interest in the case, and many held protests to keep the case alive.
JB: It’s horrifying and extremely cowardly but—in a perverse way—a fitting conclusion. This story’s about the dark side of American justice and best and worst in human behavior. There’s overwhelming evidence that some involved in the case were more interested in protecting careers than acknowledging mistakes.
Jason Baldwin did not want to accept the plea but to save Damien’s life—he was on death row and in failing health—Jason went against his principles: he felt they’d be cleared but he accepted this bitter pill due to Echols’ predicament. Gross malfeasance went on in this case, along with a selfish justice system worried more about careers than the truth. Not only is it a moral injustice, it avoids prosecutorial liability and any unlawful conviction lawsuits. There’s no accountability and no financial resources were given to the men upon release, which is wrong.
KF: This case is still unsolved. How do you feel about that?
JB: One horrible result is that Arkansas is telling the victims’ families they are not finding the real killer. In the second film—the most flawed because it was advocacy in search of a story—we followed suspicions against Mark Byers (father of one of the boys), and the last film follows Terry Hobbs (stepfather of one of the boys), but we’re not saying anyone is the killer, only that authorities should investigate. I am certain, and the entire series speaks about, that these guys did not commit the crime and received a grossly unfair, imbalanced trial.
The biggest lesson for me is the utter immorality of the death penalty: not the usual argument about the state taking a life, but that the justice system is run by extremely fallible human beings who are subject to prejudices that make it impossible to apply it fairly. Clearly, without our films, Echols would be dead because he ran out of appeals: but in 2001, Arkansas passed a DNA statute which allowed him another chance. But it was extremely costly, and if he hadn’t had supporters, he would not have been able to mount an appeal. If a death penalty puts one innocent person to death, you can’t have it.
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