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March '14 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 11 March 2014 20:21
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Big History
(Lionsgate)
Bryan Cranston narrates this immersively offbeat mini-series on nature and civilization’s inexorable linkage that shows, through an innovative blend of science and history, how events on our earth billions of years ago still marks our present-day survival. Each half-hour episode uncovers relationships among historical events like the sinking of the Titanic and today’s ubiquitous cell phones, or explores mysteries like ancient empires, with nothing in common, built shrines in the shape of pyramids.
Dazzling special effects and animation give the programs cutting-edge visuals to complement the heady ideas. The Blu-ray imagery looks fantastic; extras include bonus footage. (Release date: March 11)
Eugene Onegin
(Deutsche Grammophon)
Peter Tchaikovsky’s 1879 masterpiece remains the greatest Russian opera ever—elegant and emotive without being shamelessly sentimental—and Russian conductor Valery Gergiev leads the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus in a splendidly romantic reading of the glorious score.
Peter Tchaikovsky’s 1879 masterpiece remains the greatest Russian opera ever—elegant and emotive without being shamelessly sentimental—and Russian conductor Valery Gergiev leads the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus in a splendidly romantic reading of the glorious score.
Deborah Warner’s mediocre but not disastrous staging is sparklingly sung by its stars, Polish baritone Mariusz Kwiecien (Onegin) and Russian soprano Anna Netrebko (Tatiana, his lost love). The Blu-ray has a high-quality sheen and the music sounds amazingly clear; extras include between-acts interviews. (Release date: March 11)
In Fear
(Anchor Bay)
A couple driving through the rural Irish countryside is terrorized by a merciless and shadowy specter in Jeremy Lovering’s tightly-constructed but increasingly preposterous horror movie.
Despite good use of cramped quarters and eerie darkness, Lovering loses control when the story spirals away from him: if you have no qualms with the silly, copout ending, then you may enjoy the whole thing. The Blu-ray image looks sharp; lone extra is a behind the scenes featurette.(Release date: March 11)
Iron Sky—Director’s Cut
(e one)
This lunatic sci-fi fantasy—which imagines a Sarah Palin-alike in the Oval Office who starts a war with Nazis living on the moon since WWII—is even more demented now that it’s longer via director Timo Vuorensola’s extended cut.
The plethora of easy Hitler and Palin jokes is partly offset by a relatively restrained performance by blonde bombshell Julia Dietze as an idealistic Nazi. The Blu-ray transfer looks tremendous; lone extra is a making-of featurette. (Release date: March 11)
Mademoiselle C
(Cohen Media)
Watching Carine Roitfeld quit FrenchVogue to start her own fashion magazine isn’t exactly scintillating drama, but the engaging 57-year-old editor has none of the egotistic self-love of, say, Anna Wintour, so Fabien Constant’s fly-on-the-wall documentary is never less than entertaining.
Among the so-called beautiful people of New York, Paris and London, Roitfeld comes off self-aware, intelligent and unpretentious; an end title tells us that she’s back in the fashion world, now working at Harper’s Bazaar. The hi-def transfer is stunning; lone extra is Paris premiere footage. (Release date: March 11)
The Who—Sensation: The Story of ‘Tommy’
(Eagle Rock)
Pete Townshend, always engagingly chatty, pulls no punches discussing the genesis of and reaction to the Who’s seminal 1969 double-album rock opera in this straightforward look back at a true rock classic.
There’s input from Roger Daltrey, producers Kit Lambert and Glyn Johns, and—via archival footage—John Entwistle and Keith Moon, but Townshend’s integrity and honesty is at this documentary’s core. Bonus footage of a 1969 performance of Tommy songs is included; the Blu-ray image and sound are first-rate. (Release date: March 11)
DVDs of the Week
Crimes of Passion
(MHz Networks)
Based on crime novels by popular Swedish author Maria Lang, this engrossing mini-series follows a literature student, her fiancée and their detective friend embroiled in mysterious murder plots in what seems to be bucolic small-town Sweden.
Set in a beautiful postwar countryside, these six 90-minute films comprise flavorful characterizations and simmering, Ellery Queen-type mysteries. Tuva Novotny, Linus Wahlgren and Ola Rapace make a formidable investigative trio. (Release date: February 25)
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young—Fifty by Four
(Pride)
Eric Clapton—the 1970s Review
(Sexy Intellectual)
These unauthorized biographies, combining vintage footage and new interviews with (mainly) peripheral players, present solid 2-1/2 hour overviews of these rock legends’ careers.
The CSNY doc covers the several decades-long, off-and-on musical reunions of the legendary harmony trio (and occasional quartet); the Clapton one—examining his solo career after stints in supergroups Cream, Blind Faith and Derek and the Dominos—chronicles a superstar’s nearly fatal slide into drugs and irrelevance. (Release date: March 11)
The FBI—Complete 7th Season
(Warner Archive)
The 1971-72 season of this popular TV drama (comprising 26 episodes) follows Bureau agents Efram Zimbalist Jr., William Reynolds and Philip Abbott pursuing criminals of all stripes, from robbers and kidnappers to attempted assassins.
As always with such “classic” series, the guest-star roster is even more impressive than the shows themselves: everyone from then-unknowns like Lindsay Wagner, Meg Foster and Martin Sheen to established veterans like Bradford Dillman, Dabney Coleman and Vic Tayback show up. (Release date: February 25)
Inside Llewyn Davis
(Sony)
Unerring recreation of the early ‘60s folk scene notwithstanding, the Coens’ comedy-drama about a cynical, anti-social singer who may or may not change how he lives his life—he’s beaten up at the beginning and end of the film—is another crudely constructed bit of obviousness that fails to find any complexity in its typical Coen anti-hero.
Bruno Delbonnel’s burnished photography, the finely-detailed set design and a delightful cat far outweigh 100 minutes of cleverness posing as insight. The lone extra is a 50-minute making-of. (Release date: March 11)
The Patience Stone
(Sony Classics)
As she says in the making-of featurette, the excellent actress Golshifteh Farahani endured her own psychological hardship enacting the difficult role of a young Middle Eastern woman, standing watch over her comatose older husband, who confesses to hidden secrets—including one that makes us reexamine their relationship—in front of his prone body.
Director Atiq Rahimi (who adapted his own novel with Jean-Claude Carriere) subtly transforms the story’s confined spaces into a powerful metaphor for his heroine’s mental anguish. (Release date: March 18)
Theater Reviews: 'A Doll’s House' at BAM; 'Ode to Joy' Off-Broadway
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 07 March 2014 23:55
- Written by Kevin Filipski
A Doll’s House
Written by Henrik Ibsen, English version by Simon Stephens; directed by Carrie Cracknell
Performances through March 23, 2014
Ode to Joy
Written and directed by Craig Lucas
Performances through March 30, 2014
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| Morahan and Rowan in Ibsen's A Doll's House (photo: Richard Hubert Smith) |
Now considered conventional, Henrik Ibsen’s masterpiece A Doll’s House was controversial, even shocking in its day: one can imagine its reception in 1879 by its initial audiences—and critics—who were taken aback by heroine Nora Helmer leaving her home, her husband Torvald and her three young children to begin anew in a world to which she has never conformed.
Carrie Cracknell’s production, for the most part intelligent and lucid, takes the play at face value and assumes that the audience does too: there’s little tampering done with the familiar story and characters, with the exception of Nora herself—that famous bundle of contradictions—whom Cracknell and leading lady Hallie Morahan turn into an unfortunate barrelful of tics and mannerisms, the likes of which haven’t been seen on BAM’s stage since Cate Blanchett’s irritating Hedda Gabler some years back.
In an effort to encompass Nora as both shrewd, proto-feminist manipulator and flitting, subordinate “hamster” (in Simon Stephens’ English version), Morahan acts up a storm, never standing or sitting still, hands and arms constantly aflutter, signaling her distress by theatrically lowering her voice. Regrettably, her jumbled assemblage of individually brilliant moments never coheres.
What truly distinguishes this Doll’s House is designer Ian McNeil’s magnificent rotating set, which not only spatially lays out the Helmer house but also places Nora’s to-ing and fro-ing in what looks uncannily like a life-size doll house, providing reverberations that, if they don’t always illuminate the play, at least they never obscure it.
Dominic Rowan’s excellent Torvald never becomes the cardboard character he’s often presented as, making a formidable and believable man of his times. Since she has physicalized Nora so much, Morahan appears most at ease as a whirling dervish doing the heavily symbolic tarantella at Act I’s end; if the play itself doesn’t end on a subtler grace note than Nora’s final door slamming, it still retains its power 135 years after it was written.
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| Hope and Erbe in Ode to Joy (Photo: Sandra Coudert) |
In Ode to Joy, playwright Craig Lucas works through intense personal demons through his heroine, Adele, an artist whose addictions—physical, emotional and artistic—are overwhelming her. Lucas, whose recent works have been diffuse and overstuffed, here takes the opposite tack: there’s a nagging sense that he’s hacked at his play until it is merely dramatic and psychological shards, typified by Adele telling her story in fragmented flashbacks.
We meet her today, then return to 2007 when she cutely meets Bill, a cardiac surgeon who recently lost his own wife, in a deserted Village bar. They quickly fall in lust, then apparently love, spending several years together on and off (mainly off, it seems). We then backtrack another nine years to Adele meeting Mala, who comes to her apartment to buy a painting. That intense relationship lasts more than a year, until a blowup over Adele’s worsening drug addiction during the Y2K scare at New Year’s 2000.
Adele’s relationships with Bill and Mala are less organic than designed to map her travels of self-discovery—a final scene which brings all three characters together for a semi-happy ending is the play’s weakest—but, despite not being as contrived as Lucas’s lackluster, cluttered Prayer for My Enemy and The Singing Forest, there’s an opportunity missed because Lucas obviously has affection for her.
But much of what would make Adele fascinating is elided or omitted outright: at the end, Adele mentions almost in passing that she and Bill married, divorced, remarried, redivorced, and have a young son Justin. Why do such obviously important events go undramatized? That Adele’s relationships and art are never probed too deeply keeps things frustratingly on the surface, particularly when the characters speak in risible greeting-card platitudes (Adele actually says to Bill right after they meet, “I like that you cried. That’s attractive to me.”)
Lucas—who directs with a sure hand—is helped immeasurably by Arliss Howard, who makes Bill more real onstage than on the page; Roxanna Hope, who unerringly navigates churning waters of the underwritten Mala; and, most especially, the quietly forceful yet winning Kathryn Erbe, who humanizes Adele—that trove of addictive self-loathing—while enacting her painful and bemusing journey.
A Doll’s House
BAM Harvey Theatre, 651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, NY
bam.org
Ode to Joy
Cherry Lane Theatre, 38 Commerce Street, New York, NY
rattlestick.org
March '14 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 04 March 2014 21:05
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
The Agony and the Ecstasy
(Fox)
Carol Reed’s stolid adaptation of Irving Stone’s novel about the battle royale between Michelangelo and Pope Julius II over the Sistine Chapel provides scant insight into the artist or Renaissance Vatican politics.
As an actor, Charlton Heston is a bigger granite block than the kind Michelangelo used to sculpt, while Rex Harrison overcompensates with a lot of hamming as the Pope; Reed’s dawdling direction makes the slow-paced movie seem longer than the years it took to paint the actual ceiling. Still, it looks splendid on Blu-ray: the prologue of Michelangelo masterpieces in loving close-up is radiant.
Grace Unplugged
(Lionsgate)
As spiritual uplift goes, this drama about a rebellious teen who inherited the musical talent of her famous father—who chucked fame for God and family—isn’t bad, thanks to performances that raise it above the usual cardboard fare.
AJ Michaela (daughter) and James Denton (dad) are especially good, and there’s fine support from Kevin Pollack as the father’s former manager to whom she reaches out to jumpstart her career. The movie looks good on Blu-ray; extras are a gag reel, deleted scenes and making-of featurette.
The Grandmaster
(Weinstein)
The true story of Ip Man—kung fu master who taught Bruce Lee—is recounted in Wong Kar-Wai’s surprisingly arid dramatization: the ridiculously inventive fight sequences (which involve stars Tony Leung and an otherwise wasted Zhang Ziyi) overwhelm the personal lives of our hero and his family.
Despite the diffuse narrative, the beautiful visuals courtesy of Wong and cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd—which look first-rate on Blu-ray—partially compensate; extras comprise featurettes and interviews.
Last Day on Mars
(Magnet)
In this clever twist on the current zombie movie mania, astronauts on a Mars expedition are given over to shocking physical transformations leading to their deaths, one by one.
The exotic locale and game actors like Olivia Williams, Romola Garai and Liev Schreiber are let down by director Ruiari Robinson’s inability to go past usual horror movie tropes. Still, unfinicky genre lovers may enjoy it, and it sparkles on Blu-ray; extras are making-of featurettes.
DVDs of the Week
Buster Keaton in Free and Easy
The World According to Garp
(Warner Archive)
Buster Keaton’s first talkie Free and Easy (1930) is a hit or miss effort, as singing/dancing interludes butting heads with intermittently funny comedy: Buster never seems at ease playing second fiddle to everything else, while the bonus Spanish version is a curio with more laughs.
John Irving’s unwieldy novel The World According to Garp became a flavorful, entertaining 1982 comedy-drama thanks to the wit of Steve Tesich’s script and George Roy Hill’s direction, right from the opening sequence set to the Beatles’ classic “When I’m 64.” Robin Williams is an OK Garp, and Glenn Close’s Jenny and John Lithgow’s transvestite football player Roberta capture the book’s anarchic spirit.
Deep Roots/Starlet Nights
(Vinegar Syndrome)
Two vintage 1978 adult movies make up this latest “Peekarama” release. Deep Roots is an incredibly amateurish Hollywood spoof with a bunch of no-name non-actors, including a couple of fresh-faced starlets who apparently never appeared in an X-rated movie again.
Starlet Nights, however, is an amusingSnow White update with the always alluring Leslie Bovee, one of the biggest—and best—porn stars of the so-called golden age of the 1970s.
The Iran Job
(Film Movement)
Former NBA player Kevin Sheppard goes to Iran to play basketball and discovers that those he meets (and befriends) are not the Great Satan haters we’ve been conditioned to expect in Till Schauder’s illuminating documentary, which allows Iranians their own individuality and complexity.
It might be a truism to say that Sheppard and these people are changed by their mutual experience, but Schauder shows that even small steps help bridge the gap of misunderstanding. The lone extra is Schauder’s short, City Bomber.
Reportero
(PBS)
First shown on PBS’s seriesPOV, Bernardo Ruiz’s compelling 2012 documentary is a daring piece of reportage on an incendiary topic: the mostly unsolved killings of many brave Mexican reporters digging into the country’s murderous drug trade.
Zeroing in on Zeta, a newsweekly that’s been making waves for 30 years, Ruiz demonstratively shows how the workers keep trying to do their jobs through a literal hail of gunfire: even fatal intimidation and threats fail to stop them….most of them, anyway.
Spiral—Season 3
(MHz Networks)
Laure Berthaud, now a most riveting protagonist in this realistic police procedural, heads a police squad that’s under immense pressure to catch a serial killer preying on young women.
Laure’s private and professional lives are a mess, but she finds ways to get things done, and actress Caroline Proust gives her heroism and heart in this terrifically watchable French TV series comprising 12 hour-long episodes (not 9, as the DVD box has it). The drama spirals into greatness thanks to top-notch writing, location shooting and performances by Proust and a talented cast.
CD of the Week
Schreker—The Stigmatized
(Bridge)
Austrian composer Franz Schreker was a giant of early 20th century opera alongside Richard Strauss, but the Nazi ban on his music probably shortened his life—he died of a stroke two days before turning 56 in 1934—and buried his glorious, sumptuous music, that’s fighting to be revived ever since.
This estimable 2010 Los Angeles Opera recording of the three-hour work—under music director James Conlon’s revitalization project of composers silenced by the Nazis, Recovered Voices—contains Schreker’s signature orchestral sweep and melodies that dominate a meandering melodramatic plot. Sung with grit and muscle by Anja Kampe, Robert Brubaker and Martin Gantner and conducted by Conlon with precision, this overdue release bears comparison with theEnterte musik recording from Decca 20 years ago.
February '14 Digital Week IV
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 26 February 2014 04:21
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
The Films of Lionel Rogosin, Volume II
(Milestone/Oscilloscope)
Lionel Rogosin’s cinema came from the heart, and this release comprises a pair of the maverick director’s historically and culturally important features: 1959’s Come Back, Africais an illuminating snapshot of living under the evils of South African apartheid, and 1970’s Black Rootslooks at beauty and tragedy in America through stories and songs by musicians like Larry Johnson and Wende Smith.
Both films, painstakingly restored, look smashing on Blu-ray, while extras include a Martin Scorsese intro and Rogosin audio interview; Rogosin’s Africamaking-of, An America in Sophiatown; Roots making-of, Bittersweet Stories; and the documentary, Have You Seen Drum Recently?
(Magnolia)
Jaco van Dormael makes few films—only two since his 1991 debut Toto the Hero—but he never skimps on imagination: this at times dazzling, often dizzyingly innocuous exploration of one man’s lengthy life (and the paths he might have taken) is given 155 expansive minutes to tell…well, not much.
Despite solid work by Jared Leto in the title role and Diane Kruger and Juno Temple as women in his life and a splendid visual design, the movie’s a superficial sci-fi mash-up. The hi-def transfer looks superb; extras include deleted scenes, making-of featurettes and the 139-minute 2009 theatrical cut.
Muscle Shoals
(Magnolia)
How a tiny Alabama swamp town was ground zero for some classic recordings of the past several decades is what Greg “Freddy” Camalier’s exquisite music documentary explores.
Groups from the Rolling Stones to the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and singers from Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan to Paul Simon all made classic singles and albums at the unique studio—and interviews with many of those artists, other fans like Bono and Alicia Keys, and the men who ran the place, the Swampers (immortalized on “Sweet Home Alabama”) are on board to discuss the history and influence of the place. The Blu-ray image is top-notch; extras include deleted scenes and interviews.
(Eagle Rock)
After decades of these celebrity-studded comedy shows—with musical interludes—in London, America finally hosted its own in 2012 at Radio City Music Hall, bringing together scattershot stand-up routines and sketches by Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Russell Brand, Eddie Izzard, Sarah Silverman and Paul Rudd, with tunes by Coldplay and Mumford & Sons.
The draggy 135-minute event is punctuated by slightly desperate appearances by some of the former Monty Python troupe, who briefly perk up the entire show. The Blu-ray image is decent; extras include backstage interviews.
You Will Be My Son
(Cohen Media)
Many French films get remade in the U.S., but this insightful dissection of the volatile relationship between a master vineyard owner and the adult son who was never good enough for him will doubtfully get the Hollywood green light. That’s all to the good since powerful performances by Niels Astrup (father), Lorant Deutsch (son), Anne Marivin (son’s wife) and Nicolas Bridet (estate manager’s son, everything the real son is not) would be hard to recreate.
This immersive psychological portrait by co-writer/director Gilles Legrand flirts with thriller territory but never rings false. The Blu-ray image looks terrific; extras include deleted scenes and interviews with Deutsch and Legrand.
American Experience—1964
(PBS)
Beginning just weeks after the JFK assassination—which paralyzed the country—1964 was a pivotal year in American culture and politics, as this entertaining “cliffs notes” PBS program shows.
From the arrival of the Beatles and the ascension of Cassius Clay to the LBJ presidency and Barry Goldwater’s conservative movement, and from the escalating civil rights struggle to the nascent feminist movement, 1964 encapsulates 12 important American months in two hours, with a selection of archival footage and new interviews that complement each other compellingly.
Disco and Atomic War
(Icarus)
During the Cold War, citizens of Tallinn, the capital of the then Soviet republic of Estonia—the closest Iron Curtain city to the “evil” West—were able to watch Finnish television despite their overlords trying to jam the signals. That they could watch American TV shows like Dallas and hear banned rock and disco music helped finish off the Communist state.
Directors Jaak Kilmi and Kiur Aarma, who grew up during those tumultuous times, have made a wacky but perceptive documentary that provides a different viewpoint of those heady days.
(First Run)
Mike Dorsey’s personal glimpse at the stunning Southern California home famed architect Richard Neutra designed and built for the Oyler family may be only 45 minutes long, but its themes of architecture, history, family and natural beauty are brilliantly woven into its structure.
Illuminating interviews with Neutra’s sons, with Richard Oyler—who asked Neutra to build the house in 1959—and with its current occupant, actress Kelly Lynch, are interspersed with gorgeously photographed views of this extraordinary building and its surroundings. Extras include deleted scenes and a house walk-through by Lynch and Oyler.
Search—The Complete Series
(Warner Archive)
This bizarre sci-fi series didn’t last long (1 season, 23 episodes, in 1972-73) but its original premise about probes—robots used by a worldwide surveillance group—can be seen as prescient in a century dominated by the NSA and Edward Snowden.
Starring first-rate TV actors like Burgess Meredith, Hugh O’Brian, Doug McClure and Tony Franciosa, and with special guests like the era’s ubiquitous Bill Bixby, Sebastian Cabot, Stefanie Powers and Barbara Feldon, Search is definitely worth searching for—once you start watching, don’t be surprised if you make your way through all six discs.
(e one)
Sergio Castellito’s heavy-handed drama about how horrific events in the Bosnian civil war forever shattered the lives of even those who were not yet born features gripping performances by Penelope Cruz, Emile Hirsch and Saadet Aksoy, all of whom have to deal with melodramatic flip-flops manufactured by Castellito’s wife, screenwriter Margaret Mazzantini.
This overlong film is hamstrung throughout its length by often ludicrous machinations. Extras are interviews with Castellito, Cruz, Hirsch and Aksoy.
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