Blu-rays of the Week

Made in 2006 but just getting released for obvious reasons, Jonathan Levine’s film begins as a teenage psychodrama but soon reveals itself as another slasher flick with a lame twist.

 

The early atmosphere of dread as high school cliques are dramatized realistically gives way to generic horror; but, as long as the ultra-photogenic Amber Heard is onscreen, Mandy Lane (the movie and the character) is never less than watchable. The Blu-ray image looks fine; Levine’s commentary is the lone extra.

 

Big—25^th Anniversary Edition

Tom Hanks’ smart comic performance (which earned him his first—and most deserved—Oscar nom) anchors Penny Marshall’s cutesy, one-note 1988 comedy about a young boy who morphs into an adult and must deal with the grownup world with just a pre-teen brain.

 

This clever but thin conceit is helped by, along with Hanks, a delicious comic turn by Robert Loggia and the wonderful presence of Elizabeth Perkins, who somehow was never a huge star. The Blu-ray image is excellent; extras include a documentary, featurettes, interviews and deleted scenes with Marshall intros.

 

Drinking Buddies

Mumblecore purveyor Joe Swanberg hits the big time, sorta: the low-budget writer-director of vapid millennial chronicles graduates to (almost) stars with his vapid rom-com about a young woman, working with men at a beer plant, who’s interested in a co-worker as her own relationship fails.

 

It’s as dull as it sounds: not even a delightful Olivia Wilde as the heroine can save it, while sleepwalking costars Anna Kendrick and Ron Livingston and an expressionless Jake Johnson drag her down further. The hi-def transfer looks good; extras comprise interviews, featurettes, deleted scenes/outtakes and commentary.

 

Futurama—Volume 8

The latest release of Matt Groening’s dementedly futuristic animated series comprises 13 episodes, and if the show’s humor remains hit-or-miss, its audacious visual imagination is always something to enjoy—which is unsurprising from the creator of The Simpsons.

 

The hi-def imagery is crisp and clear; extras include episode commentaries; three-part animation featurette, Futurama University; and a writing featurette, Inside Futurama.

 

The Hunt

Thomas Vinterberg can be an intelligent and provocative filmmaker, but his story of a beloved schoolteacher whose career and life are ruined when a young girl in his class says that he molested her begins realistically before degenerating into outright implausibility as characters act more and more stupidly.

 

Despite an increasingly imbecile script, Vinterberg directs persuasively and Mads Mikkelsen gives an impassioned portrayal of the wronged man; but it’s ultimately for naught. The Blu-ray transfer is luminous; extras are a making-of featurette, deleted/extended scenes and alternate ending.

 

OK, so Disney jumped the gun (the original release was 1964), but this is a true classic: the immortal Julie Andrews’ original supernnany swoops in and makes everything better—with a spoonful of sugar, natch—arrives on Blu-ray in fine style, its beloved tale and classic Sherman Brothers’ songs intact.

 

Of course, this being Disney, there’s cross-marketing: a neglible interview featurette with Richard Sherman by that non-actor Jason Schwartzman, who plays him in the new movie Saving Mr. Banks. Other extras include a making-of, interviews and a deleted song; it all looks fantastic on Blu-ray.

 

Touchy Feely

Clever title aside, Lynn Shelton’s restrained comedy about a masseuse who suddenly can’t stand the touch of other people plods along seemingly content with its one-idea story: a subplot about her dentist brother and fellow masseuse just clutter the movie with less than scintillating padding.

 

The acting saves it, sort of: Rosemary Dewitt as the heroine, Ellen Page as her sister, Allison Janney as the fellow masseuse and Josh Pais as her brother. The hi-def transfer looks great; extras include outtakes, interviews, making-of featurette and commentary.

 

DVDs of the Week

This paranoiac post-9/11 drama follows its homegrown title character who goes to New York to do his deadly deed, but writer-director Eric Trenkamp disappointingly falls back on a hackneyed faux-documentary structure with unimpressive actors intoning about the antagonist.

 

Michael C. Freeland’s bomber is pretty much a blank slate, which may be the point, but it doesn’t make him any more credible or intriguing; Rebekah Nelson’s love interest is endearing, and if she had had more to do, the movie might have been more engrossing. Extras include post-screening Q&A, director commentary and outtakes.

 

The Deflowering of Eva van End

Dutch director Michiel ten Horn’s absurdist comedy follows the eponymous young girl whose life—at home and at school—is a typical pre-teen shambles.

 

At times uncomfortably reminiscent of Welcome to the Dollhouse, ten Horn’s film has its own point of view, and a skewed but sympathetic perspective—coupled with deliriously surreal performances by Vivian Dierickx (Eva) and Jacqueline Blom (Mom)—makes this worth a look. Extras include a ten Horn interview and two shorts, Basta and Arie.

 

Men at Lunch

It’s a legendary photo: 11 construction workers, blithely sitting on a steel beam 80 stories above Manhattan, having lunch as if on a Central Park bench. That photo is one of the most studied and talked-about ever, but questions persist: is it genuine? Who took it? Who are the men?

 

Sean O’Cualain’s to-the-point 65-minute documentary actually digs up two of the workers, who were immigrants from Shanaglish, Ireland, a place whose people are proud of their larger- (and higher-) than-life native sons. Narrated by Fionnula Flanagan, O’Cualain’s slice of history uncovers a couple of the mysteries attached to the pic since it was taken in 1932. Extras include featurettes.

 

You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet

91-year-old director Alain Resnais’ continued vitality is shown in this deeply personal take on the cinematic tug of war between reality and artifice: a dozen performers come together for an offbeat version of Jean Anouilh’s play Eurydice,with three couples portraying the lovers Orpheus and Eurydice.

 

At first, the triplings seem sterile actors’ exercises, but Resnais’ peculiar rhythms soon find their footing and become a showman’s percolating display of the art of acting (Anne Consigny and Lambert Wilson), underacting (Michel Piccoli and Hippolyte Girardot) and overacting (Resnais’ wife Sabine Azema and Pierre Arditi). As rugs are pulled out from under the viewer, Resnais’ 60-year cinematic sleight of hand still astonishes. It’s too bad there’s no Blu-ray release.

 

CDs of the Week

Britten’s stirring 1962 masterwork combines the Latin Requiem Mass, Wilfred Owen’s WWI poems, consecration of a new Coventry Cathedral after the original was destroyed in a WWII bombing raid and the composer’s pacifist stance into a sprawling 80-minute oratorio that, especially in this forceful performance, is physically and emotionally draining.

 

Britten himself ably conducts, and his extraordinary trio of soloists—his partner Peter Pears, Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya and German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau—provide a vivid vocal presence alongside the men’s, women’s and boys chorus. This remastered re-release of the original Decca recording sounds gorgeous and full, especially on the Blu-ray audio disc; a bonus CD contains illuminating rehearsal excerpts that give fascinating glimpses of Britten in the studio conducting his own work.

 

Bebe Neuwirth—Stories…in NYC

Two Broadway leading ladies—one a veteran force of nature and the other a rising superstar—display varied talents on CDs recorded at the Theater District’s intimate 54 Below. Bebe Neuwirth (Lilith in Frasierand scene-stealer in Chicago) sings an enjoyable program of story songs by Irving Berlin, Kurt Weill, Kander and Ebb and Tom Waits and provides engaging commentary along the way.

 

The sparkling-voiced Sierra Boggess displays an easy charm and beguiling stage manner while showing off an astonishing vocal range in songs from her first Broadway show The Little Mermaid through an hilarious mash up of Andrew Lloyd Webber tunes—as if they were sung by overbearing pop and opera divas—to two La Boheme arias, and sounding radiant on everything.

 

The Sound of Music

 

 

 

 

 

In his stylish, excitingly visceral Macbeth, director Jack O’Brien has pulled out all the stops with the help of his brilliant collaborators: Japhy Weideman’s dazzling lighting, Catherine Zuber’s flashy costumes and Scott Pask’s sleek sets combine to create a literally and physically dark physical production. O’Brien’s virtuosic visual approach to Shakespeare’s tragedy of the ambitious Scottish king and bloodthirsty queen dominates, indeed overwhelms, the actors themselves; the director’s revisions don’t exactly obscure the play, but neither do they illuminate it, despite a certain craftiness to the execution.

 

It’s no problem that the three witches are played by men—Banquo says to them “you should be women,/And yet your beards forbid me to interpret/That you are so”—but that O’Brien should have reined in the campiness of Byron Jennings, Malcolm Gets and especially John Glover, who struts and frets his time upon the stage with little regard for the text. And when Glover takes on the comic relief of the porter, complete with a knock knock joke for the audience, it becomes eye-rollingly silly. O’Brien also, somewhat pointlessly, expands the role of the goddess of witchcraft Hecate—she only appears briefly in the text—who’s not only onstage with the witches but is there with the doctor during Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene. Still, O’Brien varies the visual wonderment with quick, movie-like cuts between scenes that keep the action percolating.

 

Anne-Marie Duff’s well-spoken Lady Macbeth is too shrill and unthreatening to believably spur her husband to greater evil. As the great Thane, Ethan Hawke is (mostly) out of his depth: he speaks the poetry with little feeling and less comprehension, rattling off his lines as if he can’t wait to finish and let someone else talk. He begins decently as Glamis, but Cawdor and King are beyond his reach—his entire second act performance comprises yelling at the top of his lungs, truly “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

 

The Commons of Pensacola, charming actress Amanda Peet’s first play, was written (she says) to give herself a juicy role: but upon completing it, she thought a more famous actress should play Becca, the daughter of Judith, who’s living in disgrace in a Florida condo after her Bernie Madoff-type husband went to prison for bilking investors.

 

So it’s Sarah Jessica Parker who gives a wounded, believable portrayal of Becca, a struggling actress frustrated by her career and her mother’s inability to come clean about anything in her life. Blythe Danner, that eternally disarming actress, plays Judith; Danner and Parker present a united front of mother-daughter disunity, which helps director Lynne Meadow in an ultimately failed attempt to transform Peet’s flimsy 80-minute dramedy—a term I hate but it fits here—into something that satisfyingly coheres.

 

Peet’s cardboard types—Becca’s foul-mouthed teenage niece, ethically and morally corrupt boyfriend, and uncaring sister—awkwardly substitute for plausible characterizations, and she drags in such desperate stratagems as flatulence jokes and an underage sex scene that marks Becca’s boyfriend is a total jerk best gotten rid of (which Judith says from the start). Despite Meadow’s proficient direction and her two stars’ presence (on Santo Loquasto’s marvelously ugly condo set), The Commons of Pensacola—in which a torrential rainstorm features prominently—is all wet.

 

Little Miss Sunshine was a cleverly manipulative Oscar-winning movie. In the current mania for turning hit movies into stage musicals, Sunshine has been transformed into a musical with songs by William Finn and book and direction by James Lapine. For those unfamiliar with the movie, it might be pleasantly diverting, but others may feel it’s an unnecessary musicalization that merely intersperses the movie’s plot points with routine songs.

 

The story follows the Hoover family taking seven-year-old daughter Olive from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach, California, for a beauty contest. The Hoovers—comprising Olive, dad Richard, mom Sheryl, gay Uncle Frank (who just attempted suicide), Grandpa (who choreographed Olive’s routine), and teenage son Dwayne (who won’t talk until realizing his dream of flying)—jam into Richard’s VW bus for the trip to Cali. After the vehicle craps out and personal problems surface, the family barely arrives in time to enter Olive in the pageant.

 

The movie had an original if cutesy point of view, with the oddball family members playing off one another often hilariously if not always believably. Still, Michael Arndt’s script got viewers to fall in with this motley crew. The musical apes the movie in every respect, interjecting songs that, rather than illuminate relationships and psyches, more often stop the show dead in its tracks: unadorned dialogue rather than musical interludes would work as well or better.

 

Finn’s pleasantly bland songs, Lapine’s slickly inventive direction, and an accomplished cast—especially Stephane J. Block’s harried Sheryl and David Rasche’s Grandpa (for which the movie’s Alan Arkin won an Oscar)—provide a time-wasting journey that immediately evaporates when it ends.

 

In the genteel, civilized world of A.R. Gurney, adultery or premarital sex has the effect of an explosive device, and doubly so in the 1950s, the era of his latest Buffalo-set play, Family Furniture. This is the story of an upper-class Buffalo clan which—like all such affluent families—summers on the Canadian side of Lake Erie: parents Russell and Claire and their children, son Nick (who goes to Williams College) and daughter Peggy (who attends Vassar).

 

The year is 1953 in the straitlaced Eisenhower era, where affairs and sex before marriage are forbidden. That’s exactly what happens to Claire—who it’s rumored is carrying on with Howard Baldwin, neighbor and avid tennis player—and Peggy, dating Marco (a lower class Italian from Buffalo’s west side, which doesn’t endear him to her father), who finds that she’s pregnant after returning from a European trip where she met someone new. While all this is going on, Nick is frustrated trying to find alone time with his Jewish girlfriend Betsy.

 

If nothing is earth-shattering, Gurney is writing (again) about characters that he is very familiar with (I’m curious whether it’s autobiographical—Nick is certainly in Gurney’s age range for the time and place): they speak intelligently and articulately about themselves, although there’s too much “dated” talk about a new movie, High Noon, and the #3 song on the Hit Parade, “That’s Amore.” Two strong scenes stand out, both with Peter Scolari as Russell and Ismenia Mendes as Peggy, one on a boat on the lake, the other in her bedroom: these skillfully constructed, literately written and beautifully acted scenes got profuse applause at the performance I attended.

 

On a nearly bare set of chairs and benches, director Thomas Kail keeps the focus on the characters and their foibles, and along with Scolari and Mendes, Carolyn McCormick (Claire), Andrew Keenan-Bolger (Nick) and Molly Nordin (Betsy) make a wonderful ensemble in this familiar but enlightening trip through Gurney’s past.

 

Terrence McNally’s world premiere And Away We Go—a love letter to theater and the playwrights, actors and crew who have created the art of the stage for two millennia—takes place in a cluttered backstage area (the detailed work is by set designer Sandra Goldmark) where actors and production staff get ready for live performances.

 

Even though McNally’s paean to his chosen profession has its share of sly observation, his conceit—six actors and actresses play various performers, playwrights and backstage workers from the ancient Greeks to a 1956 Florida performance of Waiting for Godot with Bert Lahr—doesn’t allow for anyone but the most hardened theatergoer to enter his rarefied world. Though they have some good lines (the best is a shot at Edward Albee’s ego), the game cast has so many quick character and era changes that they end up playing much too broadly; you can’t blame them, for their love of performing live shines through. But as McNally moves from Aeschylus and Shakespeare through Moliere to Chekhov and Beckett in the space of 100 minutes, the opportunities for hamminess are too tempting, and the result is an enjoyable but slight mishmash.