the traveler's resource guide to festivals & films
a FestivalTravelNetwork.com site
part of Insider Media llc.

Connect with us:
FacebookTwitterYouTubeRSS
You are here: Home Film & Arts Reviews

Reviews

Stage Reviews: Britten's 'Billy Budd' at BAM; 'After Midnight' on Broadway

  • Print
Details
Parent Category: Film and the Arts
Category: Reviews
Published on Wednesday, 12 February 2014 14:43
Written by Kevin Filipski

Billy Budd

Composed by Benjamin Britten; directed by Michael Grandage
Performances February 7, 9, 11, 13, 2014
 
After Midnight
Directed and choreographed by Warren Carlyle
Tickets on sale through August 31, 2014
 
Britten's Billy Budd (photo: Richard Hubert Smith)
Aside from the Met Opera’s revival of A Midsummer Night’s Dream,the Benjamin Britten Centenary in New York barely took notice of what was, along with works by Richard Strauss and Hans Werner Henze, the greatest opera oeuvre of the 20th century. But the Brooklyn Academy of Music partially rectified that situation—albeit a month late—by welcoming England’s Glyndebourne Opera, whose electrifying Billy Budd again proves beyond doubt Britten’s theatrical and dramatic mastery.
 
No Britten stage work (with the possible exception of his final operatic masterpiece, Death in Venice) so brilliantly explores the composer’s recurring theme of the destruction of innocence as Billy Budd, which was adapted from Herman Melville’s novella about an angelic midshipman fated to his tragic demise when he clashes with the inscrutably evil Claggart on board the British warship Indomitable, helmed by the benevolent Captain Vere.
 
It’s Vere who is the emotional center of any Billy Budd, since Britten originally wrote the role for his lover and best interpreter, velvet-voiced tenor Peter Pears. Happily, director Michael Grandage’s gripping production boasts an indelible Vere in the form of tenor Mark Padmore, whose nuanced portrait of a proud man fiercely torn between military duty and morality is unforgettably moving. Jacques Imbrailo, as Billy, sings with great beauty and intelligence: his final mournful aria has rarely sounded so poignant. Claggart might be evil incarnate, but Brindley Sherratt sings the part with the requisite nuance to develop the character’s ambiguities.
 
The men of the Glyndebourne Chorus—which has a major role in this all-male opera—sound majestic throughout, particularly in the thrilling pre-battle scene that’s as exciting as anything Britten ever wrote. It’s all been skillfully conducted by Sir Mark Elder on Christopher Oram’s gigantic unit set, a cross-section of the ship that makes palpable the claustrophobia overwhelming the characters and their story. Would that this Billy Budd could run for more than a mere four BAM performances: it deserves to weigh anchor in New York City awhile longer.
 *****
I saw a scintillating show called Cotton Club Parade in 2011 as part of City Center’s Encores. Now rebranded After Midnight for an open-ended Broadway run, the show is as good as—maybe even better than—I remembered.
 
This spectacular revue, set in Harlem of the early 1930s, recreates a typical Cotton Club show of that era with the amazing Jazz at Lincoln Center All-stars performing tunes of Duke Ellington (who led the Cotton Club house band back then), Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, among others,; terrific dancers filling the stage with their wondrous art; and the wonderful singers—several doubling as dancers—whose vocal stylings bring a glorious musical age to vivid life.
 
With the onstage band often acting as foil to the performers, After Midnight rolls out its 26 musical numbers, tumbling in one after another, each a mesmerizing set piece for dance, song or both, from the explosive Ellington opener, “Daybreak Express,” to the joyous Ellington finale, “Cotton Club Parade.”
 
Dule Hill, our debonair guide for the evening (speaking texts by Langston Hughes), sings and dances with infectious enthusiasm; the redoubtable Adriane Lenox brings down the house—twice!—with boozily hilarious versions of “Women Be Wise” and “Go Back Where You Stayed Last Night”; Phillip Attamore and Daniel J. Watts are tap dancers of amazing variety; and American Idol alum Fantasia Barrino—whose last appearance was February 9—soulfully performs standards “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” and “Stormy Weather”. (K.D. Lang replaced her starting tonight, and Babyface and Toni Braxton will do the honors in March.)
 
The music, in Duke Ellington’s original arrangements, can’t be beat, while director Warren Carlyle’s inventive choreography keeps everything moving—but it’s the performers whose singing and dancing make After Midnight essential Broadway entertainment.
 
Billy Budd
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn, New York, NY
bam.org
 
After Midnight
Brooks Atkinson Theatre, 256 West 47th Street, New York, NY
aftermidnightbroadway.com

February '14 Digital Week II

  • Print
Details
Parent Category: Film and the Arts
Category: Reviews
Published on Tuesday, 11 February 2014 02:08
Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
The Artist and the Model 
(Cohen Media)
In Francesco Trueba’s wistful drama—similar in story to the recent French film Renoir, about the last days of the French impressionist—a French sculptor’s late career gets a boost by an unexpected arrival: a nubile young model. 
 
Jean Rochefort’s sly, understated portrayal of an elderly artist whose entrenched ideas of art and life are unbalanced by a new girl is complemented by Aida Folch’s sultry muse; Italian screen siren Claudia Cardinale gives strong support as his sympathetic wife. Trueba’s unerring eye and Daniel Vilar’s luminous B&W photography are illuminated by an exemplary hi-def transfer. Lone extra is a short Trueba interview.
 
Austenland
(Sony)
This mildly appealing comedy parodies Jane Austen fandom in the guise of Jane Hayes (always adorable Keri Russell), so smitten with her favorite author, her heroes and heroines that she leaves everything behind in America to visit England and live out her fantasy: it doesn’t go as planned, obviously. 
 
Diverting but incredibly lightweight, this trifle breezes by on Russell’s natural winningness; too bad it also relies on Jennifer Coolidge’s bull-in-a-china-shop persona. The Blu-ray looks very good; extras include a commentary and cast Q&A.
 
Diana 
(e one)
This biopic is, almost unavoidably, chintzy soap opera, even if director Oliver Hirschbiegel tries taking the high road and avoid the tabloid gutter. The problem is that Princess Di’s sad story is tabloid fodder no matter how you tell it. 
 
Naomi Watts gives an honorable performance even if she’s never quite able to show us the inside of Diana’s obviously tortured psyche. The hi-def transfer is fine; extras comprise cast/crew interviews and fashion booklet.
 
The Jungle Book
(Disney)
The last Disney feature made while Walt was still alive, this wondrous 1967 adaptation of Rudyard Kipling book about the orphan boy Mowgli is a rare instance in which everything—the dazzling animation, the immensely hummable songs, even the Disney-fying of Kipling’s dark story—coalesces into a family friendly classic. 
 
And on Blu-ray—in a terrific hi-def transfer—one of Disney’s true classics looks as good as ever. Extras include commentary, interviews, alternate ending and intros.
 
Scorned 
(Anchor Bay)
Annalynne McCord, as a vengeful girlfriend getting back at her man and best friend—who’ve been carrying on behind her back—gives an explosive performance that goes so gleefully over the top that director/cowriter Mark Jones or cowriter Sadie Katz’s crude revenge picture seems better than it is. 
 
Viva Bianca makes an appealing other woman, Billy Zane is a blank as the adulterer, but McCord gives her all and keeps things watchable even as it careens further into ludicrousness. The Blu-ray looks good.
 
Successive Slidings of Pleasure
Trans-Europ-Express
(Redemption/Kino)
The films of Alain Robbe-Grillet—an experimental novelist best known for his screenplay for Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad—are interesting more for their narrative games-playing than any psychological or dramatic coherence; 1966’s Expressand 1974’s Slidings are the first of his films to be released on Blu-ray. 
 
Although some find depth in them, mainly they are attractive-looking, self-referential larks helped by the presence of Jean-Louis Trintignant and the gorgeous actresses Marie-France Pisier, Olga Georges-Picot and Anicee Alvina. The hi-def transfers are splendid; extras are amusing Robbe-Grillet interviews.
 
The White Queen 
(Anchor Bay)
Although this handsome production about the internecine 15th century Wars of the Roses copies what distinguished series like The Tudorsand The Borgias—including plentiful sex and royal intrigue—it pales in comparison to those. 
 
An accomplished cast that includes Rebecca Ferguson, Amanda Hale and Janet McTeer works hard and often effectively, but often at the service of subpar storytelling: it’s a pity, considering the drama inherent in the source material. The hi-def images look spectacular; extras include behind the scenes and background featurettes.
 
DVDs of the Week
Dallas—Complete Season 2
(Warners)
The second season of this seminal evening soap opera’s reboot had to deal with the death of Larry Hagman, who created the venerable villain JR Ewing. 
 
But the writers wrangled an intriguing plot out of Hagman’s (and JR’s) death, and the result is an entertaining guilty pleasure, even if holdovers like Linda Gray and Patrick Duffy are better at this sort of thing than newcomers like Josh Henderson and Jesse Metcalfe. Extras include commentary, extended episode, deleted scenes, featurettes and Hagman/JR appreciation.
 
Miss You Can Do It  
(HBO)
A beauty pageant in Kewanee, Illinois, which features young girls who have physical disabilities, was created by Miss Iowa 2008 Abbey Curran to allow those with special needs (like Curran) to be appreciated for themselves. 
 
Ron Davis’s heartwarming documentary gets up close and personal with Curran, several pageant contestants and those who love and support them; despite its laudable lack of sentimentality, it will bring a tear to the eye of anyone who sees it.
 
Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight
(HBO)
Stephen Frears’ docudrama about Muhammad Ali’s four-year battle to avoid going to Vietnam, which went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1971, matter-of-factly dramatizes how eight white justices (the lone black judge, Harry Blackmun, recused himself for non-racial reasons) dealt with this controversial and symbolic case. 
 
Frears smartly shows the real Ali in interwoven film clips, and the story itself is reenacted persuasively by the likes of Frank Langella, Christopher Plummer, Harris Yulin and Fritz Weaver. It’s not earthshattering but shows us an important piece of our recent history.
 
The Summit 
(IFC)
K2 mountain has attracted fearless mountain climbers precisely because it’s so dangerous to conquer—and this impressively mounted documentary explores how and why some survived (or didn’t) a particularly trying climb in 2008: 18 climbers reached the summit but only 7 survived to tell their stories. 
 
Director Nick Ryan and writer Mark Monroe inventively juggle archival footage, emotional interviews and even hair-raising reenactments—that last is always a dicey proposition—to create a profound, even moving exploration of why certain people risk their own (and others’) lives for a thrill.
 
CD of the Week
Ottorino Respighi—Violin Sonatas
(Brilliant Classics)
Famous for his hugely popular Roman orchestral tone poems—The Fountains of Rome, The Pines of Rome and the Roman Festivals—Italian composer Ottorino Respighi also composed attractive chamber music, and this disc displays the melodic gracefulness that Respighi had in his bones. 
 
His two youthful sonatas and six pieces for violin and piano, all sheerly pleasurable works, are performed by violinist Fabio Paggioro and pianist Massimiliano Ferrati with finesse and muscle.

Off-Broadway Review: The New Group's "Intimacy"

  • Print
Details
Parent Category: Film and the Arts
Category: Reviews
Published on Sunday, 09 February 2014 20:13
Written by Kevin Filipski
Intimacy
Written by Thomas Bradshaw, directed by Scott Elliott
Performances through March 8, 2014
 
Austin Cauldwell, Ella Dershowitz and Daniel Gerroll in Intimacy 
(photo: Monique Carboni)
In the world of playwright Thomas Bradshaw, perversions lurk just beneath the dullness of quotidian life, like David Lynch’s specious Blue Velvet. But, as in Lynch’s film, there are scant insights, along with tedious reenactments of perversions that don't resonate and, even more damagingly, don't penetrate—in either sense.
 
Bradshaw’s latest, Intimacy, outdoes his previous play, Burning, by upping the ante; the earlier play preoccupied itself with anal sex, while Intimacy encompasses that and much more: vomiting, defecation, flatulence, two ejaculations, and sexual activities from self-stimulation to frottage, or dry humping, are all in a wisp of a plot linking three suburban families and pornography.
 
Matthew—a smart 17-year-old whose dad James grieves his wife’s death in a car accident by finding religion—spies on his hot next-door neighbor, 18-year-old high school senior and porn actress Janet. While her mother Pat knows about (and approves of) her activities, her father Jerry (despite his liberal attitudes) doesn’t know, at least until James shows him a magazine she’s in, which freaks him out. Meanwhile, Matthew begins hooking up with virginal schoolmate Sarah—whose bisexual father Fred works as a handyman at James’ house—and they start having sex without any penetration.
 
Bradshaw renders these relationships cartoonishly, especially at the end, when the play completely drops the pretense of any kind of reality (or surreality) and collapses under the combined weight of the playwright’s desperation and crudeness. The first act sets up the linkings among the characters, building climactically to Matthew’s decision to make a porn film and not only have Janet star but also, improbably, his dad (who’s funding it), her parents and Sarah’s dad. The second act pretty much comprises the scenes making up said porn film—titled, apparently without any irony, Intimacy—with a tacked-on coda that provides a tacky happy ending for its newly liberated and paired-off characters.
 
Perhaps Bradshaw felt that his play would work better by foregoing attempts at insight or psychological consistency, since he caricatures his septet of characters mercilessly. What we end up with is a septet speaking in banalities when not spouting platitudes, and given to ill-considered outbursts as when Pat ticks off what Janet calls “abstract statistics” about gun ownership: why would she have so much knowledge at her fingertips? Bradshaw never makes it a plausible part of her being, instead using it to get cheap laughs from a knowing liberal audience.
 
Then there are the many facile, easy ironies, like Pat discussing feminism while cleaning the toilet after Jerry has her look at his latest defecation because he thinks he might be physically ill, or when Jerry talks about porn and James starts in with a heartfelt prayer. Such toothless reminders that there’s never plumbing of any depths show that tactlessness and unsubtlety are the rule, which some audience members clearly appreciate: there are laughs galore for even the laziest piece of dialogue or dredged-up bit of plotting.
 
Not helping matters is how flatly, even indifferently enacted this all is by performers asked to literally bare themselves onstage—physically far more than psychologically. Even the incredibly brave (if foolhardy) Ella Dershowitz’s Janet, who walks around in the altogether, has her entirely bare body the subject of her dad’s Freudian fantasy as she keeps mentioning her “shaved pussy”: although we see the body part in question, the character herself isn’t laid bare in any meaningful way. And Scott Elliott’s smooth direction relies too much on visual "shocks" like snippets of actual porn shown on TV (including a clip of Deep Throat) and various bodily fluids flying everywhere.
 
In sum, Intimacy—though wallowing in scatology, obscenity, racism and pornography—remains, plentiful nudity notwithstanding, disappointingly impersonal—and skin deep.
 
Intimacy
Acorn Theatre, 410 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
thenewgroup.org

Film Review: "The Monuments Men" is a Mess

  • Print
Details
Parent Category: Film and the Arts
Category: Reviews
Published on Thursday, 06 February 2014 23:30
Written by Matt Oakes

George Clooney's The Monument's Men is a monumess. A sloppily assembled patchwork of scenes, it's a great story with no backbone that flops from event to event like a fish out of water. Without the propulsion of any kind of momentum, the tale sags, leaving us dulled to the story's eventual important moments. With all the talent involved and Clooney behind the camera, we expect something with panache, wit and style and instead are served up this goofy slop of events thrown at the stage with all the disheveled precision of a pie-in-the-face. However intriguing the "true story" behind the film, it is apparently best left in books or relayed in insightful anecdotes as Clooney has all but snuffed the life out of what ought to be a monumental account. As Roger Ebert famously said, "Movies are not about what they are about, but how they are about it." Here, Clooney's how looks a lot like wingin' it.

As mentioned above, the biggest problem holding The Monuments Men back from glory is how frumpily the series of events are organized. Scenes flow into each other like class five rapids, positively clashing and jarring any sense of time or place. Tacking a scene set in France onto one in Germany or America, we never have a foothold on where we are or when exactly anything is taking place. Clooney throws date on the screen but they will hop to another moment in time and another character whose location and significance we can only guess. Only when Clooney's voiceover cuts through are we informed of the context of the content; a sure sign of narrative failure. When you're tasked with explaining to the audience what they're seeing, you know you're taken a wrong turn off the successful storytelling highway.

So as the film crashes from one scene to another, we're left trying to hold onto some semblence of structure and even the characters give us little to grasp onto. With the likes of Bill Murray, John Goodman, Matt Damon, Jean Dujardin and Bob Balaban assembled, one would expect stirring ensemble work but, for the most part, Clooney shies away from satisfying character development or captivating ensemble work. The only time he stops to really try and delve into characters are when they face death. What he fails to understand is that we already need to be invested at that point. You can't kill someone off and then try and make them important posthumously. These "oh wait" moments ring a clear signal of his inability to save the unfocused screenplay from itself and a blinding sign of his desperate attempts to course correct too late in the game.

Even with all these missteps, there are a number of intriguing and poignant scenes interspersed throughout but even they come across as too clunkily set and architecturally inorganic to propel the audience into a suspended state of caring. We want to know who these characters are but we rarely do. Goodman is just kind of there, Dujardin plays up his irresistible French charm and Balaban has some nice material to work his mousey persona on but none really amount to much more than appreciators of art. When Murray is given a dramatic moment to break down in the shower, he puts in some solid work but it makes no sense in the context surrounding that moment. It's like watching wrestling at the nail salon. It just doesn't gel.

Where Monuments Men's biggest disappointment is its squandered use of a killer cast. I will give credit to Cate Winslet, who will soon likely be an Academy Award winner, for her work as a Parisian art aficionado as her work is more notable than any of the gentlemen with whom she shares the screen.

And if you thought War Horse was old-fashion wait until you get a load of this. From the hokey John Williams-wannabe score (courtesy of Alexandre Desplat) to the almost played-for-laughs Nazi presence, it's just one long page in the book of cinematic taboo. While this may have worked better in 1965, it certainly doesn't fit 2014. Clooney has been able to manipulate time periods to his liking in the past but his attempt to do a period piece told in dated fashion works about as well as telling the Rwanda Genocide as a rom-com.

One thing is abundantly clear at this junction, Clooney's art junkie project was certainly not moved from its original release date to "fix up the effects." Columbia must have know they had little more than a hodgepodge of scenes and didn't know how to piece them together. The resulting papier mâchéd clunker of a wartime dramedy is a futile effort at grasping at straws. Worse yet, it's boring.

C-

Follow Matt Oakes on Facebook
Follow Matt Oakes on Twitter

More Articles...

  1. February '14 Digital Week I
  2. Broadway Review: John Patrick Shanley's "Outside Mullingar"
  3. Film Review: "That Awkward Moment"

Newsletter Sign Up

Upcoming Events

No Calendar Events Found or Calendar not set to Public.

Tweets!