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Reviews
October '14 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 15 October 2014 02:47
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Boxed Set of the Week
The Wonder Years
(StarVista)
This massive set is the Holy Grail for Wonder Years fans: every episode of the beloved half-hour show, on ABC from 1988 to 1994—that's 115 episodes in all—are housed on 26 discs, so the entire dramatic and comedic arc of this wise and wonderful character study of young baby boomer kids growing up and going to school in the volatile Vietnam era can be enjoyed and savored. There's superlative acting by Fred Savage, Danica McKellar, Olivia d'Abo, Alley Miles and Dan Lauria, while narrator Daniel Stern provides the precise tone of wistful looking back.
Inside a metal locker, the discs fit into two school binders, and there are also booklets and photographs; voluminous extras include commentaries, interviews and featurettes. (One complaint: the discs slide into the binders' pages very tightly, so be careful when pulling them out—several of mine were scratched.)
Finally, the reason this set took so long to arrive on DVD—getting clearances for 285 popular songs from the era—is one of its most salient features: there are classics by Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bob Dylan, Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder and even Joe Cocker, whose brilliant cover of the Beatles' "With a Little Help from My Friends" is the series' perfect title theme.
Chinese Puzzle
(Cohen Media)
The third film in a trilogy about handsome writer Xavier and his relationships with women—after L'Auberge espagnole and Russian Dolls—is the kind of movie that director Cedric Klapisch could make in his sleep: that's not necessarily a criticism, since no one makes such slick, charming but ultimately paper-thin comedies of manners as Klapisch.
His cast is uniformly strong—with Romain Duras, Audrey Tautou, Kelly Reilly and Cecile de France are at their charismatic best—and there are amusing explorations of New York City through the eyes of Frenchman Xavier, but at two hours, Klpaisch ends up repeating himself. The hi-def image looks first rate; a nice complement of extras comprises 35 minutes of interviews and a 50-minute making-of.
Million Dollar Arm
(Disney)
In this entertaining sports picture based on a true story, Jon Hamm plays a sports agent at the end of his professional rope who decides to go to India and find a new pitcher that could crash the majors—and, of course, he does! (Not one, but two, actually: both pitchers are in the Pittsburgh Pirates organziation now.)
This agreeable movie could lose 10-15 minutes with no loss of effectiveness, but Hamm is charming, Lake Bell wonderfully eccentric as his love interest, and the Indian cricket backdrop is nicely rendered. The Blu-ray looks excellent; extras include an alternate ending, deleted scenes, outtakes and featurettes.
(Millennium)
One of the weirdest entries in the bizarro world of conservative filmmaking is this straw-man entry about a world in which religious liberty gives way to a new law forcing all religions to give others equal time, and a famous preacher finds himself facing a trumped-up murder charge when he doesn't go along with a powerful senator who sponsored the legislation. This screed isn't even inept enough to be mocked mercilessly; rather, it's just humorless, strident and boring.
Any movie in which Fox News' bubbleheaded bleach blonde Gretchen Carlson gives the most persuasive performance is seriously lacking in every way. The movie does looks good on Blu; extras (only on the DVD version, for some reason) are a commentary, featurette and interviews.
Sharknado 2—The Second One
(Cinedigm)
Of course, the sequel to a cheesy movie about a hurricane-like storm that rains down killer sharks on an unsuspecting populace would have to be even cheesier and more addle-brained than the original: that said, there's some ludicrously guilty fun to be had, especially the cheerfully idiotic scenes of the Statue of Liberty's severed head rolling down a Manhattan street or sharks chewing up subway riders after a Mets game.
It's nice to see that Viveca Fox and especially Kari Wuhrer still look smashing, but garbage is garbage, even if it doesn't pretend to be anything else. The Blu-ray looks great; a plethora of extras comprises featurettes, deleted scenes, a gag reel and commentaries.
The Honorable Woman
(BBC)
In this timely, sadly relevant eight-part mini-series, Maggie Gyllenhaal is fantastically understated as an Anglo-Israeli entrepreneur trying to secure Middle East peace who finds herself caught in a controlling system (led by American and English spy services) that would prefer to keep the warring factions in place.
Creator-director Hugo Blick's scripting sometimes lacks nuance, but a top supporting cast led by Andrew Buchan, Stephen Rea, Janet McTeer and Lindsay Duncan provides the shades of grey necessary to keep this fast-moving thriller going. Lone extra is a making-of featurette.
To Be Takei
(Anchor Bay)
Star Trek's Sulu, George Takei, turned himself into a remarkably durable celebrity in the 40-plus years since the beloved sci-fi series ended by becoming one of the most inspiring and witty voices for gay rights: hell, even Howard Stern is on his side.
Jennifer M. Kroot's concise documentary follows Takei from his childhood in a WWII Japanese-American internment camp with his family to his early acting days to his breaking down barriers for both Asian and gay actors, all with his trademark grin and extremely likeable personality kept front and center. Lone extras are deleted scenes.
2 Broke Girls—Complete 3rd Season
(Warners)
The appearance of Amber Tamblyn as the Jon Cryer character's niece isn't enough to brighten Two and a Half Men's 11th season; on the contrary, the whole charade smacks of desperation on the part of a sitcom that's been running on fumes since Charlie Sheen left—that this new season is to be its last is certainly no surprise.
On the other hand, the third season of 2 Broke Girls continues a smutty but funny winning streak thanks to the comic chemistry of its stars, Beth Behrs and Kat Dennings, the latter of whom has a way with snarky remarks that are second to none. The lone Men extra is a gag reel; Girls has a gag reel and deleted scenes.
Venus in Fur
(IFC)
David Ives’ witty play is turned by Roman Polanski into an exhilarating romp in many ways superior to what was onstage in New York in 2011. Set in an empty theater, this two-hander features Mathieu Amalric as a playwright-director who auditions Emmanuelle Seigner (real-life Mrs. Polanski) for the sizzling lead role in his new play.
Though too old, Seigner gleefully throws herself into it with abandon as her husband lustfully photographs her from all angles; Amalric holds his own by keeping out of Seigner’s way. Unlike Carnage, his stillborn God of Carnage adaptation, Polanski never allows staginess and talkiness to bog down Venus. Extras are interviews with Polanski, Seigner and Amalric; but why, in 2014, is a film by one of our major directors not on Blu-ray?
(IFC Midnight)
The latest effort by off-kilter Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia is an unsavory brew that mixes a bungled heist, one of the robber's young son who's an accomplice, the boy's understandably upset mother, and a trio of witches—grandmother, mother, daughter—whose house the crooks stumble upon.
For nearly two hours, we are subjected to de la Iglesia's usual stew of cheap jokes, cartoonish gore and ridiculous campiness (a deformed female monster appears); how the director got one of Spanish cinema's grand dames, Carmen Maura, to be in this farrago is anyone's guess. Extras are three short featurettes.
Off-Broadway Review—Tom Stoppard's "Indian Ink"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 13 October 2014 23:17
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Indian Ink
Written by Tom Stoppard; directed by Carey Perloff
Performances through November 30, 2014
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| Bjandi and Garai in Indian Ink (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Tom Stoppard's 1995 drama Indian Ink, which runs along parallel story paths like his 1993 masterpiece Arcadia and his 1997 play about poet A.E. Housman, The Invention of Love, toggles between Flora Crewe, a British poetess visiting India in the 1930s, and Eleanor, Flora's now-elderly younger sister, trying to fend off an American scholar from piecing together, 50 years later, the poetess's mysterious and short life.
Flora, one of Stoppard's most elegant creations, is an attractive, vivacious, free-spirited young woman who arrives in India to find a more agreeable climate to ward off her tuberculosis (which ends up killing her): her natural curiosity and bewitching personality make her irresistible to the men whom she meets, like Indian painter Nirad Das (for whom she poses nude) and British envoy David Durnance (with whom she flirts good-naturedly).
Flora narrates her own Indian adventures through the letters she sends home to Eleanor, whom we see half a century later giving some of them to Eldon Pike, an odious American academic writing a book about Flora who is searching for her correspondence. The letters are written in a way that allows someone like Eldon to misinterpret the events and relationships they cover: Eleanor doesn't bother correcting his misapprehensions, which parallel how the British acted while colonizing India for centuries.
Although at times it feels as if Stoppard is deliberately withholding pertinent information—unlike so many of his other plays, which practically show off their erudition, crammed to the gills as they are with cultural bric-a-brac—Indian Ink is, for the most part, a stimulating journey into Western and Eastern art and history.
Director Carey Perloff, who knows the play intimately (she helmed its 1999 U.S. premiere in San Francisco), provides shimmering stage imagery as both stories play out near-simultaneously on a mostly empty set that's little more than a blue background. But Neil Patel's set becomes less impoverished when complemented by Robert Weirzel's expressive lighting and Candice Donnelly's snazzy period costumes.
As Eleanor, the legendary Rosemary Harris has a formidable presence, while the men in the sisters' lives—Nirad, David, Eldon and Nirad's son Anish, who talks with Eleanor about his father's relationship with her sister—are sketched decently by Firmas Bjandi, Lee Aaron Rosen, Neal Huff and Bhavesh Patel.
Then there's Romola Garai, who gives a wonderfully realized performance that vividly embodies the manifold aspects of Flora—her intense intellect, psychological makeup, curiosity and sexuality—painting a three-dimensional portrait far richer than the pictures of her Eldon fruitlessly searches for.
Indian Ink
Laura pels Theatre, 111 West 46th Street, New York, NY
roundabouttheatre.org
Broadway Review—"You Can't Take It With You"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Saturday, 11 October 2014 04:40
- Written by Kevin Filipski
You Can't Take It With You
Written by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman; directed by Scott Ellis
Performances through January 4, 2015
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| Nielsen, Byrne and Jones in You Can't Take It With You (photo: Joan Marcus) |
You Can't Take It With You, Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's most enduring play, is an hilarious forerunner of the lovably eccentric family TV sitcoms and movies that followed in its wake: debuting on Broadway in 1936, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama the next year and was 1938's Oscar-winning Best Picture, directed by Frank Capra (who also won an Oscar).
For its latest stage incarnation, savvy director Scott Ellis has assembled a juggernaut cast as the Vanderhof family: James Earl Jones as lovable grampa Martin, Kristine Nielsen and Mark Linn-Baker as his daffy daughter Penelope and her equally daft husband Paul, Annaleigh Ashford and Will Brill as their ballet-dancing daughter Essie and her xylophone-playing husband Ed, and Rose Byrne (in a delectable Broadway debut) and Fran Krantz as their semi-normal daughter Alice and Alice's rich boss's son Tony, whom she is dating.
These people deliciously interact with one another and others who find themselves in the family's crammed Manhattan house; thanks to Martin's refusal to pay his income tax and Ed's hobby of printing Communist slogans and passing them around the city, the authorities arrive unannounced for a bust that nets everyone, even Tony and his straitlaced parents, who happen to be visiting one day earlier than Alice had planned.
This material, which precariously teeters between endearing daftness and sentimental cuteness (the latter of which Capra's film unsurprisingly milked to the hilt), needs to be handled precisely to work perfectly, and Ellis corrals his talented cast members to mesh as a cohesive ensemble at the same time they play close to the edge of caricature.
This has the effect of having it both ways, as the goofy behavior never threatens and the family's closeness is never in doubt: there's poignancy in the way the Vanderhofs stick up for one another, however silly it all becomes by play's end.
David Rockwell's colossal set of the interior of the Vanderhof house—which even moves so we can see the lovingly rendered exterior before each act as well as for the briefest of scenes when Alice and Tony return home from a date—scatters around the richly appointed living room so much interesting bric-a-brac in every nook and cranny that one could study it for all 2-1/2 hours of the performance without catching everything. It physicalizes the family's cluttered but coherent existence: everything (and everyone) is in its rightful place.
In an accomplished cast, standouts are the lovely Byrne, who makes Alice irresistible instead of a dullard and Ashford, whose dynamic klutziness and dazzling virtuosity on pointe—she's either spinning or just about to, a whirling dervish or cartoonish Tasmanian Devil—underline her delightful Essie.
There's also wonderful work from performers who play Russians that transform the plot even more outlandishly: Reg Rogers as an hilariously unprofessional dance teacher Boris, and none other than Elizabeth Ashley, who swoops in at the end as former Grand Duchess Olga to, of all things, make blintzes. Yes, blintzes.
You Can't Take It With You
Longacre Theatre, 220 West 48th Street, New York, NY
youcanttakeitwithyoubroadway.com
Concert/CD Review: Robert Plant
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 09 October 2014 18:30
- Written by Kevin Filipski
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| Robert Plant (photo: York Tillyer) |
No one can ever accuse Robert Plant of resting on his laurels.
The former Led Zeppelin singer has steadfastedly ignored calls to re-reunite with Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones after their successful 2007 London reunion show, preferring to concentrate on his own musical endeavors, which stretch from his first solo efforts, the superlative Pictures at Eleven (1982) and even better The Principle of Moments(1983)—still his most memorable post-Zep albums—to his new release, Lullaby...and the Ceaseless Roar, which has gotten some of the strongest notices of his career.
While I don't share the general enthusiasm for the new album—it's yet another Plant exercise in restless musical experimentation, but its ceaseless drone isn't a patch on his best Zep and solo work—I have no complaints about how the new songs sounded when Plant brought his terrific band, the Sensational Space Shifters, to the Brooklyn Academy of Music Opera House recently for two shows that ended a month-long tribute to Nonesuch Records, home of musical innovators from John Adams and the Kronos Quartet to Natalie Merchant and now Plant himself.
The Lullaby songs generated a cumulative power lacking in the studio versions, from the evening's second song "Poor Howard" to the lone encore, "Little Maggie." Especially effective were a raving "Turn It Up," which sounds like a poor cousin to Zeppelin bombast on record but flared to blistering life onstage, along with "A Stolen Kiss," whose quiet strength came across far more persuasively live. Plant's voice, long ago losing its wail and roar that was as much a Zeppelin trademark as Page's guitar or John Bonham's drumming, found a comfortable middle register that snugly fits the new songs.
That said, it's too bad Plant didn't play more solo material: I would have loved to hear him and his band on classics like "Sixes and Sevens," "Big Log" or "Pledge Pin," for starters. Instead, aside from scintillating blues covers "Fixin' to Die" and "No Place to Go," the rest of the 95-minute show comprised songs from Plant's old band.
Surprising to this long-time Plant observer—I've seen him in concert seven times since his first solo tour in 1983—was that his versions of Zep songs were unusually faithful to the originals, from the brooding opener, "No Quarter," and the folksy "Going to California" (about which he quipped after singing it, "pretty profound stuff, huh?") to the psychedelia of "What Is and What Should Never Be" (after which he jokingly railed, "that song's not about fuckin' hobbits!") and the primal blast of "Whole Lotta Love," the main set's closer.
My initial post-show thought: so why doesn't he play these legendary songs with the guys with which he wrote and recorded them, since he's obviously proud of how they still stand up decades later? The answer: playing the 2500-seat BAM Opera House is one thing, but touring with a reformed Led Zeppelin would force him to sing in big hockey arenas or massive football stadiums.
Which is about as far from where Robert Plant is in his element these days.
Robert Plant's U.S. tour ends October 9 in Brooklyn, NY.
robertplant.com
New album Lullaby..and the Ceaseless Roar (Nonesuch Records) is out now.
nonesuch.com
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