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Film Review: "Populaire"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 19 September 2013 08:21
- Written by Matt Oakes
"Populaire"
Directed by Régis Roinsard
Starring Déborah François, Romain Duris, Bérénice Bejo and Shaun Benson
Foreign, Comedy
111 Mins
R
Filmed in the whimsy stylings of French New Wave, Populaire jars the bay window open and lets the breezy charm waft in and take the helm. Tackling the inconspicuous topic of typing competitions in 1959, directorRégis Roinsardturns what should have been bland and academic into an exciting match of athleticism, fueled by a cheery performance from Déborah François.
Living in a small French village, young Rose Pamphyle (François) dreams of a fanciful life filled with big wigs, hot locales and travel, travel, travel. Her father though, has other plans for Rose and has promised her hand to the son of the local mechanic. In the dead of night, Rose lives out a silent fantasy of a grander life, sneaking away to the one typewriter her father keeps at his store and hacking away at it.
September '13 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 16 September 2013 21:35
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Friday the 13th—The Complete Collection
(Warners)
Have there really been a dozen Friday the 13th movies made since the 1980 original introduced Jason to a screaming audience? Three decades’ worth of unassuming and bloody trash, cleverly packaged—and repackaged—throughout (3D, Freddy Krueger tie-in, “final chapters”): there’s an audience for it, obviously, so on it goes.
This set comprises 12 films on 9 discs, along with a bonus disc of featurettes old and new; there’s also a 40-page collectible book and a counselor camp patch (for “real” fans, I guess). The hi-def images look good enough.
Love Is All You Need
(Sony Classics)
Susanne Bier’s tragicomic soap plumbs the depths of sentimentality as a hairdresser just finishing chemotherapy loses her lunkheaded husband to a young bimbo. She’s thrown together with the widowed father of her daughter’s fiancée at their idyllic wedding in Italy….it’s not hard to see where it’s heading.
Still, Bier’s ability to throw curveballs, coupled with the immense charm of Pierce Brosnan and Trine Dyrholm, make this less irritating than one might think. Too bad its original title, The Bald-Headed Hairdresser, was dropped. The movie looks spectacular on Blu-ray; extras include a Brosnan/Bier commentary and Brosnan/Bier/Dyrholm interviews.
Sisters & Brothers
(Anchor Bay)
The claim to fame of this shallow relationship comedy is the presence of Cory Monteith, who recently died of a drug overdose.
The late Glee star’s presence overshadows the movie itself, which is a good thing, since director Carl Bessai doesn’t do anything interesting with his material (about pairs of siblings trying to make their way through adulthood). The Blu-ray image looks quite good.
(Decca)
Giuseppe Verdi’s stirring Requiem mass—his biggest non-operatic hit—is given an exciting rendition by Milan’s La Scala orchestra and chorus, superbly conducted by Daniel Barenboim.
Both the chorus and the soloists (mezzo Elina Garanca, soprano Anja Harteros, bass Rene Pape and tenor Jonas Kaufman) sound exquisite, separately and together. The hi-def image is clear; the music is crystalline in surround sound.
Walking Dead—Complete 3rd Season
(Anchor Bay)
What began as a drama about survivors of an apocalypse fighting zombies has morphed bumpily into a drama about survivors being harassed by the undead and the living. It’s all done on a rather impressive scale, but the performers are let down by writing that’s underwhelming: television programs’ need to remain both clever and one step ahead of their audience forces viewers to swallow all sorts of improbabilities, even in a genre that thrives on such strangeness.
The Blu-ray image is excellent; extras include commentaries, featurettes and deleted scenes.
Aftermath—An Inspector Banks Mystery
(BBC Home Entertainment)
British TV cop shows far outstrip their American counterparts’ dramas, as witness the Inspector Banks mysteries, of which Aftermath is one of the most compelling.
In this bizarre murder mystery, Inspector Banks and his new partner, Detective Sergeant Annie Cabot, solve a series of brutal crimes while also learning to deal with each other while on the job: the acting of Stephen Thompkinson and Andrea Lowe as the detectives is dead-on while, as one of the suspects, Charlotte Riley is riveting.
Army Wives—Complete 7th Season
(ABC)
For its latest season, the patriotic soap opera has pretty much finished jettisoning the remainder of its original cast—the main survivor is the always amazing Catherine Bell—and has shored up the wives with newbies played by Brooke Shields, Ashanti and Elle McLemore, among others.
The result is fairly seamless, as the predictable show continues on an unapologetically sentimental path made palatable by likeable performances. Extras include deleted scenes and bloopers.
and Targets
(Warner Archive)
Two forgettable thrillers show low-budget filmmaking at its most creatively stifled. 1971’s Jessica wants to be a subtle haunted house/psychological horror flick, but director John Hancock is unable to come to grips with handling his low-key story satisfyingly.
Peter Bogdanovich’s 1968 debut Targets transforms a valid subject—a disturbed young man turns sniper at a drive-in—into a trashy genre film that wastes one of Boris Karloff’s final screen appearances. Targets include a Bogdanovich intro and commentary.
The Substance—Albert Hofmann’s LSD
(Icarus)
When Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann discovered LSD in 1943, the powerful drug was soon overtaken by side trips, so to speak, from the medical and military professions.
In Martin Witz’s compelling documentary, a final interview with Hofmann (he died in 2008 at age 102) is interspersed with fantastic clips of early LSD use (in army videos) and other talking heads to create a fascinating glimpse at a drug that’s been shunned and celebrated over the decades. The lone extra is a Witz interview.
(Film Movement)
In Catherine Corsini’s hard-nosed exploration of morality in our messy modern world, an affluent young man involved in a hit-and-run, a pregnant woman who witnessed the event and the unfortunate victim’s wife are thrown together in a movie that reaches melodramatic highs and lows, sometimes in the same sequence.
If the characters don’t act plausibly (the driver and witness have an improbable fling), at least Corsini puts it all on the screen, and her formidable cast—led by Raphael Personnaz (driver), Arta Dobroshi (wife) and Clotilde Hesme (witness)—make it persuasive if not entirely believable. The lone extra is a well-turned, quietly creepy short, The Piano Tuner.
The Unspeakable Act
(Cinema Guild)
Dan Sallitt’s drama about a deep brother-sister bond is never exploitative, but the straightforwardness with which he shows Matthew and Jackie’s closeness is mitigated by Sky Hirschkron’s and Tallie Medel’s stiff acting that never probes their characters in any depth.
The movie’s close observation of awkward teenage sexuality is commendable, in any case. Extras are shorts by Sallitt and Hirschkron, alternate takes and clips of Medel in the web series where Sallitt discovered her.
NYC Theater Roundup: Publicworks at Central Park, “Stop. Reset." and "Old Friends” at the Signature
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Sunday, 15 September 2013 03:03
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The Tempest
Written by William Shakespeare; songs by Todd Almond; directed by Lear DeBessonet
Performances September 6-8, 2013
Stop. Reset.
The Old Friends
Signature Theatre Company, Pershing Square Signature Center
480 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
signaturetheatre.org
Since summer’s unofficial end is Labor Day weekend, the premiere of two off-Broadway plays and the first presentation of the Public Theatre’s ambitious Publicworks initiative in Central Park herald the beginning of the fall theater season.
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| Benanti as the Goddess in The Tempest (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Publicworks includes several organizations from the five boroughs to create theater as much about participation as spectatorship. This was especially obvious in the Delacorte Theatre’s The Tempest, which kept Shakespeare’s framework but junked much of his dialogue—much to the show’s detriment, obviously—and added mediocre songs by Todd Arnold, also an obnoxious presence as the spirit Ariel: his jokey, snide asides both to his master, the magician Prospero, and the audience ruined the cathartic effect that Ariel’s freedom should bring at play’s end.
The Ariel mess highlighted Lear DeBessonet’s problematic staging: whenever there was a sense that Shakespeare’s original might not play to the masses, the Bard got jettisoned. Aside from the farcical drunken scenes of the monster Taliban and shipwrecked plotters, Trinculo and Stephano, nothing was played straight: the entire effect was that of a high school production where everyone from each class gets to be onstage (there were over 200 performers). DeBessonet even borrowed from Julie Taymor’s lackluster sex-change Tempest film that had Helen Mirren as Prospera: Alonzo became Alonsa and Sebastian became Sebastia, to no discernible point.
The organizations pressed into service—Brownsville Recreation Center, Children’s Aid Society, Domestic Workers United, Dreamyard Project, Fortune Society—provided entertaining dances or diversions, shoehorned into the more fantastical sequences of The Tempest. Amateur performers like Atiya Taylor (Miranda) and Xavier Pacheco (Ferdinand) were sadly—if only metaphorically—lost at sea; Norm Lewis declaimed and sang powerfully as Prospero, and a radiant Laura Benanti (playing, appropriately, a goddess) stole the show with a single song: why wasn’t she of all people given more to do? The ovations throughout notwithstanding, “helping” Shakespeare become more audience-pleasing isn’t how theater becomes more democratic.
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| Lumbly and Cordova in Stop. Reset. (photo: Joan Marcus) |
By far the lesser of the two world premieres beginning the Signature Theatre’s new season is Stop. Reset., a confused fantasy-drama by Regina Taylor about a veteran publisher of African-American literature who must make the hard decision to enter the 21st century of e-books and other daunting digital technologies or continue the old-fashioned way.
Taylor, who also directs with a shaky hand, has hit on an obviously relevant subject: a world in which new things make everything else superfluous seemingly every few minutes. But she doesn’t seem to trust her own material: the early scenes of a publishing house a-flutter because the employees don’t know if they will be retained or fired in this digital world are amusing and believable. But once a mysterious custodian, J., enters the office to spin the story into ever stranger areas like time-travel and avatars, it’s obvious that Taylor’s loss of proportion has given way to desperate stratagems.
The visually fractured look of Neil Patel’s set—sleek panels that show videos, photos and endless verbiage, sometimes relevant but mostly not—captures better than Taylor’s dialogue and dramatics the fast-moving and on-going corruption of our culture. As publisher Alexander Ames, Carl Lumbly is commanding in a sketchily written role; likewise, as J., Israel Cruz Cordova nearly makes a coherent character out of authorial incoherence.
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| Foote and Buckley in The Old Friends (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Playwright Horton Foote, who died in 2009, seems as busy as ever: The Trip to Bountiful, currently being revived on Broadway, won a Tony for Cicely Tyson’s magnetic performance, and a posthumous play, The Old Friends—originally written by Foote in the ‘60s, the same time it’s set—has its world premiere at the Signature. Like much of Foote’s work, it’s both reassuringly modest and tough as nails.
Set again in his fictional hometown of Harrison, Texas, The Old Friends deals with Foote’s old themes: fractured relationships, death changing family dynamics and the possibility (however slight) of starting anew. If the outline seems familiar, there’s a startlingly modern gloss to how Foote gently chides but has enormous affection for these people, rich or poor, sober or drunk, faithful or adulterous, honest or scheming: in this small town in Texas, Foote’s small cross-section of humanity is as singular as the more expansive Zola—or Shakespeare.
On Jeff Cowie’s beautifully detailed sets, Foote regular Michael Wilson directs a typically rich cast. Lois Smith, Cotter Smith, Veanne Cox and Adam LeFevre give full-bodied, thoughtful portrayals, but the standouts are Hallie Foote, typecast in her father’s plays (I doubt I’ve seen her in anything else), but bringing a sympathetically bruised quality to the perpetually disappointed Sybil; and Betty Buckley, whose drunken Gertrude is anything but a caricatured alcoholic. The Old Friends is (yet another) lovely epitaph for Horton Foote.
Signature Theatre Company, Pershing Square Signature Center
The Tempest
Delacorte Theatre, Central Park, New York, NY
shakespeareinthepark.org
Stop. Reset.
The Old FriendsSignature Theatre Company, Pershing Square Signature Center
480 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
signaturetheatre.org
Film Review: "Insidious: Chapter 2"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 13 September 2013 09:29
- Written by Matt Oakes
"Insidious: Chapter 2"
Directed by James Wan
Starring Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Barbara Hershey, Leigh Whannell, Angus Sampson, Steve Coulter
Horror, Thriller
105 Mins
PG-13
Back in grade school, we learn about the five paragraph essay. It starts with an intriguing hook to invite readers into the text. Following from the content of the opening segment, we're supposed to know what to expect for the remainder of the work. We then have three body paragraphs basically giving some meat to the text before we wrap it all up with a conclusion that summarizes events while making some overarching statement tying together the various strands of the piece. Be it a subjective opinion or an objective truth, a paper has to say something or else, what's the point? A similar blueprint can be expected for film. Surely there are cases that call for deviation but when you fail to understand the most basic structure of story, there is no hope for transcendence nor is there any respite from piss poor narrative decisions. This is the case with Insidious: Chapter 2 - a half-witted, inconsistent mess of a horror sequel.
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