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November '14 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 18 November 2014 23:28
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
The Doors—Feast of Friends
(Eagle Rock)
At the peak of their few years of fame, The Doors filmed themselves while on tour in the summer of 1968, and the resulting document, never completed at the time, has been restored and is finally being given a belated release.
Mostly a time-capsule curio in the crowded market of rock group documentaries, the finished product might be manna for Doors fans but less so for the rest of us. The hi-def image looks decent; extras include Feast of Friends: Encore, comprising left-over footage; The Doors Are Open, a British TV documentary; a live performance of "The End" with interviews.
(Warners)
Climate change exacts its just desserts, but unlike Sharknado 1 & 2'stongue-in-cheek campiness (not that I'm defending those ridiculous movies!), this is purely serious and stern-faced melodrama, and the stick figures populating a town inundated with non-stop tornadoes and superstorms are such a dim bunch that it's easy to root for Mother Nature against most of them.
The special effects are quite impressive—like the death of one unfortunate cameraman in a fiery funnel cloud—and it's all wrapped up in a quick 85 minutes, which helps, at least partly. On Blu-ray, the movie's disastrous events play out quite thrillingly; extras are three featurettes.
Pete Kelly's Blues
(Warner Archive)
A monotonous Jack Webb directs and stars as jazz cornetist and band leader Pete Kelly in this alternately tough-as-nails and sentimentalized look at the musician's life on and off stage, dramatizing his battles against a crime boss and his relationships with women, played with vitality by Janet Leigh, Jayne Mansfield and (most impressively) Peggy Lee.
Director Webb smartly peppers his uneven drama with wonderful musical performances, including two Ella Fitzgerald showstoppers, while the movie's color Cinemascope photography comes across richly on Blu-ray. Extras are two period shorts.
(Deutsche Grammophon)
Rusalka
(Euroarts)
Alexander Borodin's intermittently gripping Igor receives a bizarre, messy 2014 Metropolitan Opera revival by director Dmitri Tcherniakov, who ruins the opera's best moments—the famous "Polovtsian Dances"—with an unimaginative poppy field in which the dancers scamper about: Borodin's unexciting music is presented well by conductor Giandrea Noseda, and the title role is given over to the towering Russian bass Ildar Abdrazikov.
Antonin Dvorak's masterly romantic fantasy Rusalka (based on the fairy tale Undine) sounds beautiful thanks to Myrto Papatanasiu's magnetic performance in the title role, but its visual tackiness stems from director Stefan Herheim's wrongheaded concept: Rusalka the mermaid is a hooker in a red light district. Puh-lease. On Blu-ray, video and audio are splendidly realized; extras are interviews.
Worricker—Turks & Caicos
Worricker—Salting the Battlefield
(PBS)
In his trilogy about a British agent battling new-fangled globally destructive forces, writer-director David Hare has an ace in the hole: actor Bill Nighy, whose casual, snarky coolness goes a long way toward validating these films (and the original, 2012's Page Eight) as searing indictments of our post-Sept. 11, post-meltdown world gone amok. Turks follows Nighy's Johnny Worricker on an island paradise, confronting ultra-rich bad guys; Salting finds him on the run before a climactic showdown with his nemesis, the British prime minister.
Helena Bonham Carter, Ralph Fiennes, Christopher Walken and Winona Ryder provide solid support, Hare's dialogue is often snappy and witty, but Nighy himself is the main attraction. The hi-def transfers are superior; extras are making-of featurettes and interviews.
Guns of Darkness
Twilight of Honor
(Warner Archive)
In 1962's Guns of Darkness, neither David Niven nor Leslie Caron—as a couple in a war-torn republic—can do much in a flimsy tale about a coup that turns their brave act of mercy for an ousted leader into treason; that director Anthony Asquith has little affinity for such starkly melodramatic material goes without saying.
1963's Twilight of Honor has a formidable cast that makes its routine courtroom dramatics watchable, despite director Boris Sagal's leaden pacing: there's Richard Chamberlain as an idealistic defense attorney, Claude Rains as his mentor, Joan Blackman as Rains' available daughter, Joey Heatherton as the accused's wife and James Gregory as a pompous district attorney.
K2—Siren of the Himalayas
(First Run)
An illuminating look at the 2009 expedition to scale the world's most dangerous mountain, Dave Ohlson has made a tense, exciting document of a story that's both tragic and triumphant: some climbers failed to ascend K2, but at least they weren't killed—which as many of a quarter are. The film's heroine, Germany's Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner, became the first to scale all mountains 8000 meters or higher; interviews with her and other members of the climb make personal their group's bravery, teamwork and death-defying difficulties.
Ohlson also recaps a 1909 Italian expedition, complete with narration, stills and newsreel footage, which provide an enriching historical perspective. Extras include a deleted scene, updates and more interviews.
Slow Food Story
(Kimstim)
The enterprising label Kimstim's latest intriguing documentaries that otherwise might have escaped notice start with German director Marc Bauders' Masters of the Universe, about the culpability and duplicity of those running (and ruining) the financial system during the 2008 economic collapse; Bauder introduces Rainer Voss, a chatty trader who candidly discusses what happened, why and by (and for) whom.
Stefano Sardo's Slow Food Story is a lively account of how Italian foodie Carlo Petrini became a heavy-hitter in the anti-fast food movement, which emphasizes local, healthy alternatives to the corporate behemoths that control most of the world's (bad) food production.
Next Year Jerusalem
(First Run)
When a group of residents at an old-age home in Columbus, Ohio finally took a long-gestating and unlikely "field trip" to Israel, director David Gaynes was on hand to record a unique, historic and breathtakingly emotional journey that was much more than obviously metaphorical traveling through time and memory.
Among the many people—from the "tourists" and those who came with and filmed them to those whom they met when they arrived in the Holy Land—affected by events presented in this stirring documentary are its viewers. Extras are seven deleted scenes.
(Icarus)
Daniel Schmid—the unconventional Swiss director who died in 2006—made this memorably offbeat 1986 documentary about the first nursing home for retired opera singers, located in Milan, Italy: the film follows the home's residents, who sang arias by the world's great composers, including the man who founded it, Giuseppe Verdi, Italy's (and one of the world's) best opera composers.
The basis for Dustin Hoffman's likable directorial debut, 2012's Quartet, this funny and moving film deserves to be more than just the prelude to a famous actor's first foray behind the camera; happily, now that Hoffman "presents" its restoration and DVD release, it will get more widespread recognition.
November '14 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 11 November 2014 23:28
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Arabella
(Unitel)
A Recital with Renee Fleming
(Arthaus Musik)
One of Richard Strauss's most magically melodic operas, the romantic Arabella is the perfect showcase for the still-ravishing soprano Renee Fleming, whose artistry is complemented by director Florentine Klepper's sumptuous 2014 Salzburg production.
A Recital with Renee Fleming, shot in 2012 in Vienna, presents the singer performing lushly romantic lieder by Germanic composers Gustav Mahler, Hugo Wolf, Arnold Schoenberg, Erich Korngold and, yes, Richard Strauss; pianist Maciej Pulski lends artful support. The Blu-ray image and sound are first-rate.
(Magnolia)
This didactic illegal immigration melodrama—about a wrongful murder rap pinned on a good, no-nonsense border crosser—has authentic location atmosphere courtesy director-co-writer Michael Berry, and a plethora of good performances by Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, Michael Pena (as the accused killer) and Eva Longoria (deglamorized—but still impossibly luminous—as his cruelly abused wife).
But too bad it's all at the service of a heavy-handed, Crash-like examination of a complicated issue, which militates against its getting through to those whom it aims to convert or reinforce those already on its side. The hi-def transfer is spot-on.
Genesis—Three Sides Live
(Eagle Rock)
On Genesis' 1981 Abacab tour, Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks (augmented by concert-only members Chester Thompson and Daryl Stuermer) played hits like "Misunderstanding" and "Turn It on Again" alongside album cuts like "In the Cage," "Afterglow," the current album's epic title track and "Dodo/Lurker."
The 83-minute concert film has a chunk of the show's running time missing: too bad it's never been found, since, with all of the backstage and interview footage included, the actual music is probably a little more than an hour. What we do get, though, is a band at the top of its game. The image is variable, the sound good, extras are audio-only versions of seven songs, including the rarely-performed "Fountain of Salmacis."
(Arthaus Musik)
British minimalist composer Michael Nyman's career is examined through a concert and documentary, Composer in Progress, in which Nyman and his band members discuss his unique music and how difficult it is to perform; surprisingly, although his music is best known from Peter Greenaway and Jane Campion movies, neither is interviewed by director Silvia Beck.
2009's Michael Nyman in Concert, from Halle, Germany, features Nyman's best known compositions, including several from Greenaway's films The Draughtsman's Contract, A Zed and Two Noughts and Prospero's Books, played with precision and enthusiasm by Nyman at the piano and his band. Hi-def transfers are adequate; the sound is solidly presented.
Monty Python Live—One Down, Five to Go
(Eagle Rock)
The British comedy troupe's 2013 reunion at London's O2 Arena was greeted with hosannas from longtime fans, and if the performance itself is more nostalgia than cutting-edge comedy—replays of old skits on a video screen alternate with onstage reenactments of beloved skits like "Dead Parrot" and "Nudge Nudge"—the impression is that of a money grab, however skillful and, yes, funny.
The title, of course, refers to the absence of Graham Chapman, so far the lone Python member to die: the others will, no doubt, eventually follow. The hi-def image is excellent; extras include interviews, featurettes and backstage footage.
(Anchor Bay/Weinstein Co)
Early in this confused sci-fi drama about a shaky married couple whose attempts to repair their relationship is complicated by the appearance of their doppelgangers, the husband tells his wife that it's like The Twilight Zone. Not quite: Rod Serling would have wrapped this up in 30 minutes, not 90, and far more satisfactorily.
Director Charlie McDowell and writer Justin Lader seem pleased with their not that original concept, in the process forgetting to make it dramatically involving; Elizabeth Moss and Mark Duplass's blank caricatures do little to differentiate among the couples. The Blu-ray image is superlative; extras are McDowell and Duplass's commentary and visual effects reel.
Tammy
(Warners)
Melissa McCarthy again plays an obnoxious, crude but oh so lovable slob in a comic misfire that's a major miscalculation by star-cowriter McCarthy and cowriter-costar-director husband Ben Falcone: they desperately try to tug at the heartstrings but never let go of the stereotypes they traffic in from the start.
Along with McCarthy, Susan Sarandon (McCarthy's improbable grandmother) and Allison Janney (McCarthy's improbable mother) do little with such flimsy material. The extended version provides a few extra minutes of would-be laughs and sentiment; the Blu-ray image looks fine, and extras comprise featurettes, gag reel and deleted scenes.
A Five Star Life
(Music Box)
This lighthearted romantic comedy is a terrific showcase for Margherita Buy, one of Italy's most elegant actresses, who beautifully plays Irene, a 40ish woman who visits luxury hotels as a critic, but whose personal life (at least compared with her former fiancee and happily married sister) is a mess.
Director Maria Sole Tognazzi tells her story in a fleet 82 minutes, enough to let us get to know Irene, mainly through Buy's effortless charm; costar Stefano Accorsi's provides strong and humorous support as her ex.
JFK—The Private President
(First Run)
In this 52-minute German documentary from 2013, the enduring legend of Camelot is revived with heretofore unseen home-video footage, returning us to the glamorous (but too brief) era of JFK and Jackie in the international spotlight.
Interviews with brother RFK's sons and insiders like advisor Ted Sorensen provide further access, and those who want still more of anything of even tangential to the inexhaustible fount that is the Kennedys will find it.
(Strand)
What starts as an aimless bromance between middle-aged men sharing ownership of a company shifts gears when one of them disappears and his seemingly clueless wife steps in and makes the remaining one's life a living hell....until they come to discover more about each other and themselves (of course).
Director Daniel Burman doesn't always adroitly handle the film's shifting tones, but the superb lead performances by Ines Estevez and Guillermo Francella provide ample compensation, as does a nicely understated ending.
November '14 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 04 November 2014 20:38
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
America—Imagine the World Without Her
(Lionsgate)
Conservative icon Dinesh D'Souza has made another rambling and incoherent pseudo-documentary that shows how "scary" and "unAmerican" Barack Obama is, tying him to radical leftists presented as if they are mainstream. With no arguments made on their own merit, D'Souza uses straw men and false equivalencies to hammer home his belief that, contrary to those who insist on "shaming" our country, it is absolved of any sins, for the simple reason that everybody else also did it (slavery, genocide, etc.).
D'Souza even brings up his own indictment for breaking campaign finance law, basically admitting, "Yes, I'm guilty, but so are others. So that means Obama is after me!" Fox News viewers will find everything they believe dutifully confirmed; the rest of us will shake our heads and realize that fact-based reality will remain out of their reach. The hi-def image looks good; extras include extended interviews and scenes.
(Millennium)
This gritty little thriller about a dull-witted American couple in London who decide to spend dirty money they find and fall prey to a mobster whose drug cash it is, is mercifully short (90 minutes) and features the always reliable Tom Wilkinson as a relentless detective and Sam Spruell as a casually brutal gangster.
Unfortunately for director Henrik Ruben Genz, he's saddled with James Franco and Kate Hudson, who don't make a credible couple; the movie also wastes the delightful Anna Friel in a nothing role. The Blu-ray transfer is first-rate; lone extra is a brief making-of.
Planes—Fire and Rescue
(Disney)
Although Disney's animated spin-offs are usually routine money grabs, that's not entirely the case with Planes—Fire and Rescue, an amusing adventure that's dedicated to our brave firefighters.
Set in Piston Park National Park, the movie follows a group of aircraft which protects the valuable public land from wildfires: nothing earth-shattering, it's diverting enough, at least for younger kids. The Blu-ray image looks fine; extras are featurettes, deleted scenes, music video and new animated short film.
Yankee Doodle Dandy
(Warner Archive)
The tightly-wound 1947 thriller Possessed—a story of murder and insanity about an unhinged woman convinced that her current husband's dead wife is haunting her, as is an old flame who's marrying her young stepdaughter—is distinguished by Joan Crawford in eye-popping crazed mode.
As George M. Cohan in the exhilarating 1942 biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy, James Cagney sings, dances and acts up a storm as the versatile entertainer who, against all odds, became a beloved American icon. Cagney's joyous Oscar-winning turn and Cohan's terrific tunes are the main reasons to watch. Both films look magnificent in their hi-def restorations; extras include commentaries and featurettes.
Santa Sangre
(Severin)
Maverick director Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1989 hallucinatory drama is, like all of his films (which include the even more lunatic El Topo and The Holy Mountain), a love-it-or-hate-it experience: I hated it, even while conceding the visual imaginativeness at work. But there's no doubt that other viewers' mileage may certainly vary, especially if one has a stronger stomach for Jodorowsky's brand of all-purpose surrealism.
The film looks solid on Blu-ray; extras include Jodorowsky commentary, deleted scenes with commentary, Jodorowsky interviews and short films, featurettes and full-length documentary Forget Everything You Have Ever Seen: The World of Santa Sangre.
DVDs of the Week
Borgen—Complete Series
(MHZ)
This gripping Danish mini-series—which skillfully straddles the line separating politics from personal lives—is finally available in a boxed set of its three seasons, comprising 30 compelling one-hour episodes that follow Birgitte Nyborg, Denmark’s first female prime minister, from obscurity to simultaneous fame and infamy.
The backstabbing and deal making (and deal breaking) of contemporary politics is shown in all its dramatic fascination, and with a peerless cast led by Sidse Babett Knudsen as Birgitte and Birgitte Hjort Sorensen as go-getting journalist Katrine Fonsmark, Borgen is an exceptional drama about the machinations of politics and media that deserves the much-abused label "binge-worthy."
A Coffee in Berlin
(Music Box)
This ramshackle comic drama follows a 20-something slacker (the appealing Tom Schilling) who, after getting tossed from his girlfriend's apartment, spends a fateful day wandering around the German capital running into various people (including a female former classmate who still holds a grudge for him labeling her "Roly Poly Julia" back in the day), until a brush with mortality gives him a new outlook on life.
Director Jan Ole Gerster's low-key, improvisatory style partially compensates for the fact that the movie is, finally, too slight, even with a relatively brief 85-minute running time. Extras include featurettes, deleted scenes and outtakes.
(Kino Lorber)
Italian master Marco Bellocchio's latest provocation, made in 2012, was barely released here, but his thought-provoking exploration of Italy’s own right to life debate (Terri Schiavo was the U.S. equivalent during the infamous Bush years), as usual with Bellocchio, provides no easy answers.
It intelligently informs the personal, professional and religious lives of several characters, played splendidly by Isabelle Huppert, Toni Servillo, Maya Sansa, Alba Rohrwacher and the director’s son Pier Giorgio. But Kino again drops the ball by not releasing a Blu-ray of a major film by a major director, along with no extras; get the hi-def Italian release!
Hugh Hefner
(MVD)
Director Tony Palmer, who made his name with an assortment of enlightening biographies of composers from Henry Purcell to Igor Stravinsky, hits a brick wall with his 1973 glimpse at Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner.
For a vapid hour, Hef and assorted bimbos extol the virtues of the Playboy lifestyle, sounding vacuous and self-absorbed throughout. Adding to the absurdity is Palmer's desperate use of music from Wagner's Ring to underscore shots of Hef's private jet and mansion; any similarity to King Ludwig's pomposity is strictly coincidental.
(Icarus)
I'm no fan of Belgian director Chantal Akerman, whose films are minimalist in all the wrong ways: conception, execution and artistry. But her hour-long 1983 documentary about the wunderkind German modern-dance choreographer Pina Bausch is a watchably straightforward overview of a vital visual artist's work.
Of course, I prefer Wim Wenders' Pina, which was a much more affecting chronicle of Bausch's patented dances, but Akerman's film is nothing to sneeze at either.
New York Theater Reviews—"On the Town," "Lips Together, Teeth Apart," "The Belle of Amherst"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 04 November 2014 01:24
- Written by Kevin Filipski
On the Town
Music by Leonard Bernstein; book & lyrics by Betty Comden & Adolph Green; directed by John Rando
Opened October 16, 2014
Lips Together, Teeth Apart
Written by Terrence McNally; directed by Peter Dubois
Performances through November 23, 2014
The Belle of Amherst
Written by William Luce; directed by Steve Cosson
Performances through January 25, 2015
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| Johnson, Yazbeck and Alves in On the Town (photo: Joan Marcus) |
The fizzily entertaining On the Town earns the sobriquet "old-fashioned musical," thanks to Leonard Bernstein's gloriously hummable songs (like the immortal "New York, New York" and "Lonely Town"), book writers Comden & Green's witty lyrics, and the perfect (if overfamiliar) plot for a feel-good musical: three sailors on leave have 24 hours in the big city to frolic with their newly acquired gals.
Director John Rando, a master of comic pacing, pushes this revival to the giddiest of heights. The ace orchestra, led by James Moore, plays Bernstein's timeless songs with a plushness that's welcome on Broadway. Beowulf Boritt's tongue-in-cheek set design and projections make for an appropriately cartoonish Manhattan. Jess Goldstein's zesty costumes, Jason Lyons' luminous lighting and Joshau Bergasse's colorful choreography (with a nod to Jerome Robbins' original ballet) round out the savory physical trappings.
The cast is mostly top-notch, led by three sailors—Clyde Alves, Jay Armstrong Johnson and especially Tony Yazbeck—who act, sing and dance up a storm as they prowl the city looking for companionship. As their women, Alysha Umphress and Elizabeth Stanley are riotous without excess campiness, and New York City Ballet's Megan Fairchild makes Miss Turnstiles the pure idealization of innocent girlishness, with her chirpy voice and impossibly slender frame twirling, spinning and pirouetting her way into her man's (and the audience's) heart.
If only Rando didn't let Jackie Hoffman mug mercilessly (and, for the most part, unfunnily) in four parts, the undeserving beneficiary of coarse book updates by Robert Cary and Jonathan Tolins, which unsurprisingly—but sadly—get the biggest audience reactions. So thisOn the Town is only four-fifths of a classic musical, as if the city itself had one of its boroughs cut off.
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| Lysy, Chernus, Chimo and Ferrera in Lips Together, Teeth Apart (photo: Joan Marcus) |
When Terrence McNally's Lips Together, Teeth Apart premiered in 1991, the AIDS epidemic was in full rage, and the playwright's anger over the unfathomable loss of so many was palpable. However, the play now comes off as an historical artifact, at least in Peter Dubois' misguidedly staged and cast production that's disjointed and off-kilter throughout; whether it's the direction or writing is difficult to say: likely an unfelicitous combination of both.
Two straight couples—Sally and Sam Truman, and Sam's sister Chloe and John Haddock—spend July 4th weekend at Sally's brother's beach house on Fire Island (the gorgeously appointed set is by Alexander Dodge), which he left to her after dying of AIDS. Their cozy bonhomie is only a facade, since Sally and John (the latter of whom, it is also revealed, has cancer) are having an affair, while Chloe's relentless chirpiness starts to grate on everyone, even Sam. Their conversations, and especially the awkwardly inserted soliloquies, expose their homophobia, sexism and racism in all their incoherence; but neither playwright nor director provides a realistic grounding for the characters' seemingly arbitrary contradictions.
Similarly, many details ring false, like Chloe peppering her conversation with elementary French or her improbably deep knowledge of Broadway musicals, except when she thinks the famousGypsy overture is actually from Annie. And that none of these people will jump into the beach house's beautiful in-ground pool because there's a worry that the water might be tainted with HIV doesn't work on any level: this heavily metaphoric bit of homophobic behavior comes at a time when people were far less frightened by the hysterical pronouncements about how one could catch the deadly disease.
America Ferrera's Sally is pleasantly bland, Michael Chernus' Sam and Austin Lysy's John are even larger blanks, while Tracee Chimo—fresh off her overpraised romp in Bad Jews—goes so far over the top as Chloe that she seems to be in a door-slamming farce that McNally did not write. Maybe she can join the cast of McNally's farce It's Only a Play when this closes.
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| Joely Richardson in The Belle of Amherst (photo: Carol Rosegg) |
Even for those of us who never saw it originally, The Belle of Amherst—William Luce's one-woman play about poet Emily Dickinson—is associated with actress Julie Harris, who turned it into a cottage industry and walked off with the Best Actress Tony in 1976. In Steve Cosson's lucid new staging, Dickinson becomes more coyly coquettish, even mischievous, in the capable hands of Joely Richardson.
If the real Dickinson was somewhere in between the two interpretations, this is, after all, a fictionalization of her life, and she may have been as charming as Richardson's shrewd performance shows her as. There's never an anachronistic sense of making her a proto-feminist, and Richardson—who also recites several of Dickinson's poems in an graceful but conversational manner—is nothing less than commanding throughout her piquant two-hour monologue.
On the Town
Lyric Theatre, 213 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
onthetownbroadway.com
Lips Together, Teeth Apart
Second Stage Theatre, 305 West 43rd Street, New York, NY
2st.com
The Belle of Amherst
Westside Theatre, 407 West 43rd Street, New York, NY
belleofamherstplay.com
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