Kevin's March '11 Digital Week II

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 14 March 2011 05:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week
Au Revoir Les Enfants
(Criterion)
Louis Malle’s best film is a beautifully observed 1988 drama of friendship and betrayal in a French Catholic boarding school during the Nazi occupation: young boys enjoy true bonding until the inevitable occurs. Often, Malle’s choice of material drove whether the film was successful: here, every frame is suffused with emotion but no trace of sentimentality. The splendid young actors are a testament to Malle’s subtle handling of performers.

The muted visuals, in keeping with the melancholy, eventually tragic subject matter, are precisely rendered in Criterion’s estimable hi-def treatment; the extras, from Criterion’s Malle boxed set, include interviews with Malle’s widow Candice Bergen and his biographer Pierre Billard, a profile of the character of Joseph, a 1988 Malle audio interview, and Chaplin’s classic short The Immigrant (seen in the film).

Excalibur
(Warners)
John Boorman’s personal adaptation of the legend of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table finally made it to the screen in 1981. While visually impressive, with shots and entire sequences of the most exquisitely articulated grandeur (helped by Wagner’s music from The Ring and Parsifal, no doubt), much of the film is dramatically remote, even inert at times.

This despite a classy cast comprising Nigel Terry, Helen Mirren, Cherie Lunghi, Nicol Williamson and youngsters Gabriel Byrne and Liam Neeson. For its 30th anniversary, Warners has treated Excalibur to a fine hi-def transfer, although the lone extra is Boorman’s chatty, informative and quite comprehensive audio commentary.

The Next Three Days
(LionsGate)
Russell Crowe plays an ordinary college professor whose life is turned upside down when his wife (the always charming Elizabeth Banks) is arrested for murder in this standard thriller with plot holes the size of the SUV its star drives. Writer-director Paul Haggis leaves far too much dangling, sacrificing credible tension for nonsensical excitement that’s typified by a head-scratching climax.

It’s all faintly ludicrous, with the furrow-browed Crowe outshined by Banks, the fine Ty Simpkins as their son and Olivia Wilde, who brightens the stock part of a young mother who helps (but doesn’t sleep with) Crowe in his time of need. The movie receives an excellent hi-def transfer, while the extras include an audio commentary, making-of featurettes, and deleted and extended scenes.

DVDs of the Week
The Clowns
(Raro Video)
Federico Fellini’s homage to the circus of his youth was made for Italian TV in 1970, which may be why it never got a DVD release in the U.S. until now: for that, thank the Italian company Raro Video, making its stateside debut as a home video distributor. Self-indulgent, impish and nostalgic by turns, this is Fellini at his most innocuous…but even second-tier Fellini has its magical moments.

Raro has added enticing extras to the mix, since the print of the film (although supposedly restored) looks only somewhat better than a VHS tape: there’s an early Fellini short, 1953’s The Marriage Agency; a visual essay by Adriano Apra, Fellini’s Circus, 42 minutes of alternating interesting and redundant info; and a superb 50-page booklet that includes Fellini’s own notes and delightful drawings.

A Film Unfinished
(Oscilloscope)
Yael Hersonski’s documentary may be the last word in Holocaust films, since it utilizes raw footage shot by the Nazis in 1942 of the infamous Warsaw Ghetto. This footage was first thought authentic when first uncovered, but is now seen as mostly staged for propaganda purposes; the film goes through a tangled mass of multiple meanings to sort out truth from fiction. We also see reactions of survivors who were no more than children then and are in their 80s now, ranging from horror to sorrow and everything in between.

This important historical and artistic document is reinforced by contextual extras: interviews with Holocaust researcher Adrian Wood and Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum, and Death Mills, a 1945 film shot by Billy Wilder and distributed by the U.S. government to show Germans the realities of the concentration camps.

Paula-Paula
The Sinister Eyes of Dr. Orloff
(Intervision)
Spanish director Jess Franco’s soft-core forays into murder and madness have earned him a cult following as a master of Euro-sleaze, and these two films show that not much has changed in his lengthy career: 1973’s Sinister Eyes is a ludicrous horror movie about a cripple young woman at the mercy of the nutty title doctor, while 2010’s Paula-Paula is a nearly plotless erotic fantasy that consists mostly of two nubile young woman dancing and pawing each other in front of the camera for our (and Franco’s) amusement.

If you like this sort of thing, you already know you‘re going to watch: if you’re even the tiniest bit unsure, you should probably stay away. Both releases include interviews with Franco.

CD of the Week
Strauss: Orchestral Lieder
(Virgin Classics)
In this aural embarrassment of riches, Diana Damrau wraps her lovely soprano voice around 22 songs by Richard Strauss accompanied by the first-rate Munich Philharmonic under the sensitive direction of conductor Christian Thielemann. We already know from his operas that Strauss was a master of the orchestra, as the swelling, sobbing, melting and emotional sound worlds of Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Daphne, and Capriccio, among others, has proven.

Here, we hear some of his best and most gorgeous songs, from “Morgen!” and “Cacilie” to all six of the Brentano-Lieder, given the voluptuous deluxe treatment by the orchestra and Damrau, whose impassioned interpretations are something special.

Film Review: The Rite

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 09 March 2011 03:17

Written by Lloyd Carroll

Directed by: Mikael Håfström
Written by: Michael Petroni, Matt Baglio
Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Colin O’Donoghue, Ciaran Hinds, Toby Jones, Rutger Hauer, Alice Braga

One of the most famous film genres of the Seventies was devil-themed movies, with the most famous being 1973's The Exorcist. The popularity of The Exorcist and its sequels helped spawn the Chucky, Friday The 13th and Alien franchises. It has been awhile since we’ve had an old school exorcism film, so there is nothing wrong with trying to revive this horror genre. Unfortunately The Rite is a lousy film.

Michael Kovaks (Colin O’Donoghue) is a Chicago teen whose dad is a mortician (Rutger Hauer). He admits that he is not the most spiritual person in the world. But he applies for seminary school after receiving his high school diploma because, as he tells his best friend, “In my family you either become a priest or a mortician. I can graduate from seminary school and not take my final vows.”

He does well studying for the priesthood, but he resigns before committing to it -- much to the chagrin of his university mentor, Father Matthew (Toby Jones). Father Matthew informs Michael that the seminary has the right to change his scholarship to a student loan if he doesn’t become a priest. But Father Matthew says that out of frustration because he feels that Michael would be terrific at serving the church and the community.

Knowing his interest in psychology, Father Matthew tells Michael that the Vatican is offering a new program to train exorcists. Michael doesn’t believe in devil possession and thinks that those claiming demonic spirits in them are mentally disturbed. He is persuaded by Father Matthew’s key selling point, “What’s so bad about spending two months in Rome?”

While at the Vatican, one of Michael’s professors, Father Xavier (Ciaran Hinds), who has enjoyed debating with him about whether devils and demons do exist, sends him to an unorthodox priest, Father Lucas (Anthony Hopkins), who performs exorcisms. Father Lucas isn’t bothered by the fact that Michael has his doubts about what he does. “You remind me of myself at your age,” he tells him.

Father Lucas, who is also a medical doctor, takes Michael to two patients that he is treating. The first patient is a teenager who may have been raped by her father and speaks in foreign tongues, cursing at him even though she only knows Italian. The second is a young boy who has dreams that a mule is attacking him and actually has hoof marks all over his body.

As one can guess, eyeballs roll to the back of the patients’ heads and there is lots of screaming and yelling. The plot has little coherence. Things really get laughingly awful, however, in the final twenty minutes when Father Lucas is attacked by the devil and it is up to Michael to save the priest's soul. Hopkins, whose character is a model of equanimity throughout the film, suddenly becomes Hannibal Lechter. Of course, a film audience will always identify Anthony Hopkins in that role and the filmmakers may just be having some fun with that fact.

One bizarre and disturbing sequence is when Michael’s father invites his young son to watch him working on a beautiful corpse, which happens to be his mom. Whether this actually happened in his life or is just a nightmare is never explained. In either case it is gratuitous and disturbing.

Anthony Hopkins, even when he is mugging for the camera, is fun to watch. The lead role of Michael, is played by Irish actor Colin O’Donoghue, who is making his screen debut. O’Donoghue does a good job of mastering an American accent, but he seems ill at ease on the big screen. Of course even the best actors can’t do much with a terrible script.

If you waste good money on this film, please don’t blame the devil.

Theatre Review: Tennessee Williams' Milk Train

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 08 March 2011 22:43

Written by Lucy Komisar

The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
Written by Tennessee Williams
Directed by Michael Wilson
Sets by Jeff Cowie, Lighting by Rui Rita
Starring Olympia Dukakis, Maggie Lacey, Darren Pettie, Edward Hibbert, Elisa Bocanegra, Curtis Billings

The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore is Williams’ turgid Southern Gothic view of death

There’s a touch of the Southern Gothic in many of Tennessee Williams’ plays, and it is usually seasoning in a pungent stew about human relationships, desires, and failings. But The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore is overwhelmed by Southern Gothic until it becomes a potboiler, a parody of a melodrama. There are frequent sounds of sea gulls and a lot of turgid prose. Director Michael Wilson’s over-the-top staging seems to tell us it’s camp and not to take it seriously.

Flora Goforth (Olympia Dukakis), whom Williams burdens with a Dickensian name, was a showgirl whose first husband made her a millionaire. She proceeded to marry three others, but loved only the last, a young poet who, driving the red sports car she gave him, crashed and died on the Corniche from Monte Carlo.

Now in her sixties, still with her American southern accent, she lives near Naples in a villa atop a cliff on the Amalfi coast overlooking the sea. It’s 1962. She is dictating her memoirs, mostly about her lovers and social life among the international set, to Frances “Blackie” Black (Maggie Lacey), a rather prim and conventional young woman (from a good women’s college) whose husband recently died.  

Flora spends a lot of time in a nightdress lolling on a round bed under a skylight, frequently buzzing to summon Blackie to take notes. She is a woman who expects people to jump to her orders. She refuses to face up to her own mortality, though she takes morphine for her “neuralgia.” In fact, she is a paean to life, glorying in her past.

She is visited by a gay friend (Edward Hibbert), known as the Witch of Capri, a fey blonde fellow who seems overdressed for the island. However, he fits into the weird mood, although I could not figure out why he could not pronounce Capri (accent on the first syllable), while Flora could. The full costumed kabuki dance she puts on for him is a show stopper.

Into that somewhat bizarre scene comes a strange man, Christopher Flanders (Darren Pettie), age 39, who makes mobiles and supports himself by attaching himself to rich elderly ladies. (The kindness of strangers?) Given their ages and conditions, the women all die, which has given him the name “angel of death.” Yes, this play is unsubtly about death.

Chris has climbed up a goat path and breached a fence to trespass on the grounds. Flora directs him to a cottage, and you wonder what each has in store for the other.

She is challenged by Chris. Attempting to maintain control, she refuses to let him eat. She declares, “I give away nothing, I sell and I buy.” In fact, they both want to use each other. He will wait her out.

This production is saved by the extraordinary performance of Olympia Dukakis, whose portrayal of the garish, bullying, self-centered Flora Goforth takes fire and pulls you in until you feel part of the conflagration.

Pettie as Chris and Lacey as Blackie do their best to bring their characters to life, though they seem uncomfortable in the setting, which gets more surreal as the play goes on. Hibbert simpers too much.

This play was finished in 1963, the year Williams’ long-time lover died. It is almost a satire of the writer’s best works of the 1940s and 1950s, and has only historical interest.

The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
Roundabout Theatre Company
at Laura Pels Theatre
111 West 46th Street
New York City
(212) 719-1300
Opened January 30, 2011; closes April 10, 2011.

www.roundabouttheatre.org

For more by Lucy Komisar: http://thekomisarscoop.com.