Kevin's August '11 Digital Week III

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 23 August 2011 11:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week

Bambi II (Disney)

Even contemplating a sequel to one of Walt Disney's all-time classics reeks of heresy, which is probably why 2006's Bambi II, which follows the motherless fawn after a rocky reunion with his father The Great Prince, seems so casual and effortlessly winning. While a mere gloss on the original, it works nicely on its own terms, and at 72 minutes, doesn't overstay its welcome.

The animation for this direct-to-video movie, which is reminiscent of without slavishly imitating the classic look of Bambi, looks better on Blu-ray than last week's Fox and the Hound II, and the extras include a deleted song, making-of featurette and interactive games.

The Bang Bang Club (e one)

Based on real accounts, Steven Silver's tense drama follows a quartet of photographers who are recording for posterity the volatile end of apartheid in South Africa. Their exciting but dangerous exploits are front and center in a film that persuasively explores their moral dilemmas of interfering when people's lives are at stake.

Good performances by Ryan Philippe, Taylor Kitsch, Frank Rautenbach and Neels Van Jaarsveld as the men and Malin Akerman as their editor are key to this honest, dramatic expose. The movie has a first-rate hi-def transfer; extras comprise Silver's commentary, deleted scenes, making-of featurette and cast/crew interviews.

Cul-de-Sac (Criterion)

One of Roman Polanski's most diabolical features, his 1966 follow-up to Repulsion stars Catherine Deneuve's sister, the late, lamented and gorgeous Francoise Dorleac in the lead role in another twisted tale of the self-destructive physical and mental injuries that an unlikely trio commits together and to one another.

Filled with typical Polanski black humor, the movie doesn't hang together but deserves a look. The Criterion Collection's superb-looking Blu-ray edition has extras comprising Two Gangsters and an Island, a documentary about the film's making; and a 1967 Polanski television interview.

A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More (Fox/MGM)

Sergio Leone's Spaghetti westerns propelled Clint Eastwood to stardom as the stoic gunfighter, "The Man with No Name." The 1964 original Fistful introduced the quiet hero in a fast-paced western, while 1965's follow-up Dollars consolidated his characterization with more contemplation in between the gunplay.

Both movies have received a good Blu-ray transfer, with adequate grain present throughout. There are many extras on both discs including commentaries, interviews, featurettes and deleted scenes.

The Killing (Criterion)

Stanley Kubrick's first mature film, this cracklingly good 1956 heist picture pioneered the fractured narrative structure that Quentin Tarantino somehow got credit for nearly 40 years later with his overrated Pulp Fiction. Kubrick's splendid pacing, hair-trigger editing and excellent cast (Sterling Hayden, Joe Turkel, Elisha Cook Jr., Timothy Carey) make for a formally innovative and viscerally entertaining thriller, which helped pave the way for Kubrick's controversial and uncompromising directorial careers.

The Criterion Collection's excellent Blu-ray package includes a top-notch digital transfer of The Killing and Killers' Kiss, Kubrick's minor 1955 film noir, interviews, reminiscences and video analysis.

Mars Needs Moms (Disney)

Based on The Far Side's Berkeley Breathed's book, this badly misfiring and unfunny adaptation was among Disney's biggest flops at the box office.

The tired motion-capture technique isn't to blame, and neither is the clever visual imagination (which transfers well to Blu-ray); however, the repetitive jokiness and utter predictability of characters and storyline equal a fruitless attempt to make a hip animated film that will appeal to both parents and their children. Extras include interviews and on-set featurettes.

Meet Monica Velour (Anchor Bay)

With Kim Cattrall as an over-the-hill porn star making ends meet by stripping, I was hoping this would be an appealingly sleazy B movie. Although Cattrall gives a strong portrayal of a middle-aged woman hoping to stave off the inevitable (she's a white-trash version of Sex and the City's Samantha), the movie spends too much time with its pimply, geeky protagonist (Dustin Ingram) and shortchanges Monica herself.

The Blu-ray image is sharp; extras include Cattrall and writer-director Keith Bearden's commentary and deleted scenes.

Priest (Sony)

This graphic-novel adaptation's kick-ass 90 minutes are gone through with all the subtlety of a lead pipe smashing a car window: if you don't stop to think about the gaping plot holes and the idiotic (or non-existent) characterizations, you might have an unfinicky good time watching it.

Fans of the genre will lap this up, especially on Blu-ray with its flashy sci-fi visuals and pulse-pounding soundtrack taking things to the next level. Extras include a commentary, deleted and extended scenes and making-of featurettes.

DVDs of the Week

Dear Uncle Adolf and The Wrong Side of the Bus (First Run)

These fascinating documentaries chronicle two of the most loathsome and hated regimes in modern history. Adolf shows vintage Nazi-era clips as letters of love and affection from ordinary German citizens to the Fuhrer are read, pointedly showing how much his racist ideology permeated "normal" citizens.

The equally powerful Bus introduces a Jewish doctor from Australia who returns to South Africa, where he grew up, with his son to see first hand how apartheid's legacy is still hurtful and haunting to those it affected.

Robert Plant's Blue Note (Sexy Intellectual)

From his Led Zeppelin days to his popular collaboration with country babe Allison Krauss, Robert Plant has always confounded musical expectations. This comprehensive documentary includes nicely chosen video clips to showcase all phases of his pre- and post-Zep career, including his first three solo albums with inventive guitarist Robbie Blunt, interviewed along with journalists and his late 80s/early 90s songwriting partner, Phil Johnstone.

Plant also speaks in various interview clips in a satisfying glimpse at one of rock's renaissance men, with a bonus featurette on Plant's debt to Leadbelly's music.

CDs of the Week

Julia Fischer: Poeme (Deutsche Grammophon)

Julia Fischer has never been a show-offy violinist, which her vibrant new disc of orchestral works proves. Aside from Vaughan Williams' soaringly ecstatic The Lark Ascending, the other works are more contemplative but equally technically difficult.

Ernest Chausson's lyrical Poeme, Josef Suk's bristling D-minor Fantasy and Ottorino Respighi's lovely Poema autunnale are all putty in Fischer's musical hands, which bring a poetic quality to each and every piece for her favored instrument.

Krenek: Symphony No. 4 (CPO)

Ernest Krenek's career can be divided between Germany and, after fleeing the Nazis, the U.S. The prolific composer (who died in 1991 at age 90) wrote works ranging from solo piano music to grand operas, and the pairing on this disc (which continues CPO's traversal of Krenek's symphonies) comes from both eras.

The neo-baroque Concerto Grosso No. 2 (1924) is effervescent and instantly hummable; the darker Fourth Symphony (1947), on the other hand, is full of the atonality that was characteristic of post-war music, but with a much freer, expressive hand than that label implies. Both works are beautifully played by the NDR Radio Philharmonic of Hanover, Germany under the baton of Alun Francis.

Mostly Mozart Festival - Week 1

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 23 August 2011 05:00

Written by Jack Angstreich

This year's Mostly Mozart Festival began with a special free, one-hour preview concert of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra under the spirited direction of maestro Louis Langrée at Avery Fischer Hall on Saturday, July 30th.

After a brief introduction by the artistic director of Lincoln Center, Jane Moss, and another by Langrée, the music began with that perennial plum, the Overture to The Marriage of Figaro -- played again at the all-Mozart opening night concert on Tuesday and at the repeat program on Wednesday -- and here conducted with a delightful briskness.

In commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the death of the modernist titan Igor Stravinsky, this year's festival will have a special focus on the works of that composer who, especially in his celebrated Neoclassical phase, bears an intriguing relationship to his illustrious forebear.

As a foretaste of this component of the festival, the program continued with Stravinsky's crystalline Symphony in C, here performed with marvelous clarity.

The evening concluded with a conservative but gratifying reading of Mozart's elegant "Linz" Symphony, repeated at the Tuesday and Wednesday concerts. Those programs were graced by some exciting additions.

The eminent violinist Christian Tetzlaff was joined by violist Antoine Tamestit for a bold rendition of the Sinfonia Concertante in E flat, while the sensational young soprano, Susanna Phillips, triumphed with the aria "Non mi dir" from Don Giovanni and was also strong in the concert aria "Bella mia fiamma ... Resta, o cara".

The whole of Don Giovanni could be seen and heard on Thursday, August 4th at the Rose Theater, in a rewarding staged concert version both conducted and directed by the magnificent Iván Fischer, with the extraordinary Budapest Festival Orchestra.

Nothing in this production was more impressive than the Overture, which set a standard in musicianship for the Festival that will be difficult to equal, although another young soprano, Sunhae Im as Zerlina, was a splendid discovery. Fischer was characteristically witty and erudite in an engaging public talk with Moss about the production, given on Saturday the 6th.

On the evening of Friday, August 5th, the orchestral program was preceded by a sterling pre-concert recital of the beautiful Mozart String Quartet in D minor, K. 421, given by the Ariel Quartet.

The evening concert proper, featuring the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra under the scintillating direction of the now ascendant Pablo Heras-Casado, opened with an engrossing performance of the magisterial Orchestral Suite No. 4 by Johann Sebastian Bach.

The orchestral forces were enlarged to modern dimensions for the melodic Romantic favorite, the First Violin Concerto of Max Bruch. A specialty of the still boyish Joshua Bell, the evening's accomplished and enduringly popular soloist achieved an enthralling balance of warmth and virtuosity at this performance.

Heras-Casado brought the evening to a thrilling close with a breathless, unexpectedly fresh account of another traditional favorite, the exalting Mozart Symphony No. 40 in G minor, KV 550.

At the intimate setting of the Kaplan Penthouse, the estimable Takacs Quartet gave a gripping one-hour concert in the late evening of Saturday, August 6th, opening with a lustrous performance of the exquisite Franz Schubert single-movement fragment, the Quartettsatz.

The ensemble concluded the program -- and an exciting first week of this Festival -- with an intense, absorbing account of some of the most challenging music heard in the previous days. The eccentric, monumental String Quartet in C sharp minor, Op. 131 of Ludwig van Beethoven is a work which exemplifies the difficulties of the composer's pathbreaking late style as perfectly as any, but these remarkable musicians proved equal to the task.

Avery Fisher Hall
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
132 W. 65th St.
New York City
212-875-5030
Runs August 2 - 27, 2011

Film Review: Cha$ing Madoff

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Saturday, 20 August 2011 05:02

Written by Marion DS Dreyfus

Directed by Jeff ProssermanWritten by Jeff Prosserman, Harry Markopolos
Based on the book No One Would Listen by Harry Markopolos

Bernard Madoff made off with over $50 Billion in funds tendered him for investment over the past two decades and counting. The billions came from other hedge fund brokers, financial people, huge charities, schools, synagogues, and average working Americans.

He had no actual investments, as it turned out, because he worked the classic Ponzi scheme: He continually brought in new dupes, fresh money, and paid off older investors with the proceeds of his newer pigeons.

His white-collar predators included bankers, international lieutenants, and sundry henchmen, all of whom "fed" clients to the steely mastermind who heisted a larger sum than any single such dealer in history.

When Madoff, at the end of his machinations and available new marks, surrendered to the authorities in December of 2008, thousands of investors, big and little alike, suffered devastating losses -- often, in fact, their entire lifetime savings.

One persistent investigator tried matching the vaunted Madoff figures way back in 1999, and they made no sense. Harry Markopolos, a one-time Boston securities analyst, made it his quest to expose the clearly fraudulent dealings of this highly public, highly venerated "investor," Bernard Madoff.

Markopolos acquired a team that worked with him doggedly as he amassed mountains of documentation against the venerated, avuncular silver-maned guy with the seemingly magic touch.

The team -- Marcopolos, Jeff Sackman, Randy Manis and Anton Nadler, with the legal help of lawyer Gaytri Kachroo, dubbed The Foxhounds -- pursued their quarry relentlessly. For years.

The documentary makes frequent allusions -- maybe too many -- to the Eliot Ness/Al Capone pas de deux in the mid-century. Chicago’s Capone was a known criminal, and Madoff’s Manhattan machinations remained shrouded and mostly unsuspected until his public arrest.

Strangely, after submitting piles of documentation, Markopolos found that no one would touch the story. Forbes turned him down. The SEC ignored his repeated efforts to get their response to the ongoing fraud. Wouldn’t touch it. Wouldn’t return his calls.

Markopolos became (understandably) frightened for his own safety, and that of his wife and adorable young twins. In the end, if it does not mar the film’s unspooling too much, these cute 6-year-olds think their dad is their "hero," thinking he has "stopped a bank robber." (But they admire Spider-Man just slightly more.)

The tracery of the past decade of the team’s effort makes this a compelling story. Interviews, personal recollections, plus highly stylized mise en scene presents as a slightly overblown thriller that raises the ultimate questions:

Can ethics exist under capitalism? Can greatness be achieved morally? Whom can we really trust?

The average Joe cannot do the due diligence needed to unearth the likes of this mega-operation by a swindler who headed up NASDAQ. He seemed unimpeachable. The SEC seemed to be going about its bounden duties. Why did people fall for Madoff’s charm, scheme, whatever?

Getting into the game, when everyone was told "he has a closed shop," made surmounting the fence even more alluring. Who doesn’t relish the idea of being the last one to scoot under the wire before they clang down the No More mesh grating sign?

If Madoff accepted you, you never seemed to lose. Your earnings accreted month after month, nary a dip or a blip in the chart. And his unreal returns spoke louder than rationality.

It happened. And Madoff is not the last of the predators by a long shot, though he is serving a 150-year sentence. There are still the unscrupulous, of course, and many hundreds who aided and abetted Madoff are still at large -- according to the titles, 300 or so.

The SEC, now peopled by new faces, witnessed the testimony, and many of the guilty resigned. But that is scant comfort to those who lost everything, and at age 75 or 80 had to go back to a McJob to pay their monthly rent.

Marion DS Dreyfus
©2011