Kevin's Digital Week 15: Myth and McCarey

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 02 March 2010 05:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-Ray of the Week

The Minotaur
(Opus Arte)
The future is now for opera recordings, as this work by British modernist Harrison Birtwistle, which premiered in London in April 2008, is available only on DVD and Blu-ray, not CD. The Minotaur—a staggeringly powerful work by Birtwistle, whose earlier operas tended toward the obscure, dramatically and musically—is a perfect example of how Blu-ray’s high-definition visuals and surround-sound audio give opera fans the best possible conditions under which to appreciate any work, new or old.

Antonio Pappano conducts the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House and the Royal Opera House Chorus in a superb reading of Birtwistle’s characteristically thorny, spiky score; the performers—led by John Tomlinson’s Minotaur, Johan Reuter’s Theseus and Christine Rice’s Ariadne—handle the fiendishly difficult vocal and dramatic demands. Stephen Langridge’s staging is both direct and metaphorical, the perfect visualization of this Greek myth. The lone extra is a half-hour behind-the-scenes documentary, Myth Is Universal.

DVD of the Week

Make Way for Tomorrow
(Criterion)
Leo McCarey’s 1937 melodrama, one of Hollywood’s supreme tearjerkers, never approaches mere sentimentality. A forerunner of Yasujiro Ozu’s classic Tokyo Story (1953), Make Way explores how a long-married couple is shunted aside by their children in turn after losing their comfortable Manhattan apartment to the local bank. McCarey shows how aging parents can make their grown children so uncomfortable that they prefer not to deal with them—the resulting finale, when the couple goes “on the town” one final time, is memorably poignant.

The film's biggest flaw is a group of one-dimensional actors unable to carry the weight of their acidly-drawn characters; other than that, Make Way for Tomorrow is another DVD triumph for Criterion. The 73-year-old black and white film looks splendid, and the contextual supplements include interviews with Peter Bogdanovich and Gary Giddins, and insightful essays by Tag Gallagher and director Bertrand Tavernier.

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