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Reviews
February '13 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 01 February 2013 10:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Cabaret
(Warners)
Bob Fosse won the Best Director Oscar for his decidedly adult 1972 adaptation of the classic Kander & Ebb musical about pre-Nazi Germany, as did Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey for their indelible performances. (The film lost Best Picture to a crime drama named The Godfather.)
For its belated 40th anniversary Blu-ray edition, Warners has released a rewarding hi-def transfer with an appropriately dark and grainy look. In addition to a perfect film, the disc includes historian Stephen Tropiano’s commentary and new and vintage featurettes with cast and crew extolling the virtues of director Fosse.
Citadel
(Flatiron)
Ciaran Foy’s routine thriller is set in a run-down apartment complex where a widowed new dad gets revenge for a vicious attack that left his poor (and pregnant) wife with fatal wounds.
With its shadowy darkness, fancy camera angles and standard-issue villains, the movie tries to obscure the less than compelling storyline, acting and thrills: even the explosive finale fizzles. The actors can’t do much with the thin gruel they’ve been fed. The movie looks good in Blu-ray; extras comprise interviews and an on-set featurette.
Pina
(Criterion)
Wim Wenders’ affecting elegy for modern-dance choreographer Pina Bausch (who died in 2009) alternates between reenactments of signature pieces—like a scintillating Rite of Spring—and touching reminiscences from colleagues, a truly international group: German, French, British, Spanish, Russian, Japanese.
Wenders intercuts among Bausch’s dances, staged in a theater and outdoor places ranging from Berlin street corners, public transit and even a picturesque hillside. Shot in 3D—which looks marvelous on the Criterion Collection’s first 3D Blu-ray release—Pina is a lasting memorial from one artist to another. Extras include Wenders’ commentary and interview, deleted scenes with Wenders’ commentary, 45-minute making-of featurette and behind the scenes footage.
Tales of the Night
(New Video)
In this fantastical animated film, director Michel Ocelot tells a series of folk tales set in different cultures and eras—from Tibet to Africa to Medieval Europe—with a stunning, highly original visual style.
The characters’ silhouettes are set against fabulous backdrops that are a riot of color: this is the jumping off point for a memorable trip into several glorious new worlds. Needless to say, on Blu-ray, the movie looks absolutely dazzling; extras are two director interviews.
That Obscure Object of Desire
(Lionsgate)
Luis Bunuel’s final film, from 1977, was among his least interesting, even more so than the overpraised ones that preceded it (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of the Liberty).
The arbitrary surrealism palls early on, and though suave Fernando Rey tries hard as an ambassador who falls hard for a beautiful young woman—played alternately by Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina, an unfunny conceit less amusing and more pointless in execution—this is probably the most forgettable Bunuel film in a storied but checkered career. The Blu-ray image is decent; extras include interviews with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, Bouquet, Molina and director Carlos Saura, and a Bunuel featurette.
DVDs of the Week
Dirty Energy
Dirty Energy
(Cinema Libre)
Bryan D. Hopkins’ documentary startlingly documents the aftermath of the infamous BP Gulf oil spill, and—through interviews with those most affected by the disaster—arrives at the conclusion that there was a massive cover-up.
Based on this film, it seems indisputable that BP’s grievous misdeeds were covered up by a complicit government which did not want the corporation look bad in everybody’s eyes. Extras include an update, Three Years After the Spill, and a gulf shrimp featurette.
Hello I Must Be Going
(Oscilloscope)
Although it often flounders badly, with too many pratfallish scenes of its divorced (and depressed) heroine’s overtly physical responses of her difficulties, Todd Louiso’s portrait of a 30ish woman regaining her self-esteem through an affair with a much younger man—and keeping it from her busybody family—is certainly not the disastrous indie flick it could have been.
In the lead, Melanie Lynskey is frisky and endlessly resourceful, while Blythe Danner is a powerhouse as her overbearing mom. Extras include Louiso and Lynsky interviews.
Seven Psychopaths
(Sony)
Martin McDonough returns with another twisted tale of crazy gangsters, this time with a dollop of dog napping. McDonough’s problem (as in In Bruges) is that what works onstage in his plays (notably A Behanding in Spokane) sits inertly onscreen as various idiots out-mock one another before shooting one another dead.
It’s a yuckfest in both the comic and violent senses that its cast obviously enjoys—in a better movie, Christopher Walken, Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell and Woody Harrelson would not quickly turn annoying, while invaluable Abbie Cornish and Olga Korylenko are mercilessly wasted. Extras include featurettes and interviews.
17 Girls
(Strand)
Based on a true story of a group of Massachusetts high school students who got pregnant around the same time and scandalized their town, sisters Delphine and Muriel Coulin’s debut film relocates to their grubby hometown of Lorient in northern France.
Although Jean-Louis Vialard’s photography gleamingly captures the lives of those stuck in this nothing town, the sisters’ insistence on refusing to take a stance (moral or otherwise) on their naïve teen protagonists prevents 17 Girls from taking flight. Their actresses, led by The Class’ Louise Grinberg, are superb, but they can’t overcome stereotypes.
Whores’ Glory
(Kino)
In this scrupulously non-judgmental examination of prostitutes across several continents and cultures, director Michael Glawogger simply records how these women are treated by johns and madams alongside how they perceive one another outside of work.
Similar to Frederick Wiseman, Glawogger simply sits back and observes, although by film’s end, 120 minutes of much repetitiveness makes the whole much less than the sum of its parts.
CDs of the Week
Britten
(Channel Classics)
This fine recording of a trio of Benjamin Britten’s most enduring compositions—the song cycles Les Illuminations and Serenade and the orchestral Frank Bridge Variations—begins the Britten centenary (he was born in 1913) auspiciously.
Soprano Barbara Hannigan sounds exquisite in the lovely Illuminations, tenor James Gilchrist and horn player Jasper de Waal wax lyrical throughout Serenade, and the Amsterdam Sinfonietta under Candida Thompson’s leadership give the Bridge Variations a great workout. The spacious surround sound underlines Britten’s orchestral writing genius.
Brundibar
(Hyperion)
In the 90s, Entartete musik (degenerate music)—by composers killed or displaced by the Nazis—was in vogue with dozens of welcome recordings: this new CD of works by four of them returns their vital voices to listeners.
Hans Krasa’s delightful suite from his children’s opera Brundibar, Viktor Ullmann’s piercing String Quartet No 3, Gideon Klein’s playful String Trio and Pavel Haas’s absorbing and monumental String Quartet No. 2 are brilliantly played by members of the immensely talented Nash Ensemble, which brings this forgotten music front and center again.
Movie Reviews: 'Hors Satan,' 'Nana' at Anthology Film Archives
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 29 January 2013 05:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Hors Satan
January 18-27, 2013
Nana
January 25-January 31, 2013
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue, New York, NY
anthologyfilmarchives.org
Two dramatically economical French films have their New York premieres at Anthology Film Archives: provocateur extraordinaire Bruno Dumont’s latest, Hors Satan; and writer-director Valerie Massadian’s debut feature, Nana.
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| Bruno Dumont's Hors Satan |
Dumont has made a career of making alternately hypnotic and infuriating dramas about individuals approaching states of grace in their singular ways; in that sense, he’s a legitimate successor to Robert Bresson. Dumont’s best films—Ma Vie de Jesus, Humanite, Hadewijch—find specific locales and situations in which to play out his dissections of spiritual malaise, while his unsuccessful films—Twenty-nine Palms, Flanders, now Hors Satan—find themselves between the Scylla of dime-store psychology and the Charybdis of absurdity.
Satan plays like a straight-faced parody of a Dumont film: I’d say it’s self-parody but Dumont seems incapable of humor. Set in the rough-hewn seaside of northern France—the magnificent, captivating Cinemascope photography is by Yves Cape—the movie follows The Guy (David Dewaele), a mysterious stranger, and The Girl (Alexandre Lematre), who follows him around the countryside as he arbitrarily alternates between Good and Evil: he both heals and kills. He also meets a hitchhiker, with whom—in the most unsettling sequence in a movie filled with them—he has a weird sexual encounter.
Dumont might be saying that The Guy is The Girl’s guardian angel—but then again, he might not. Even in his bizarro-world moments, however—and Hors Satan is packed with them—Dumont makes movies that provoke responses. Despite this confused and inscrutable jumble, one looks forward to his next move: a biography of sculptor Camille Claudel with Juliette Binoche.
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| Lecomte in Massadian's Nana |
Nana is set on a rural French farm, where a grandfather, his daughter and her young daughter Nana live their everyday existence. For 68 minutes, we watch the goings-on in their lives: a pig is slaughtered, granddad and Nana play with piglets in a barn (she presciently calls them “little roasts”), daughter gathers sticks for firewood and later reads a bedtime story to Nana. Then one day, Mommy is gone and Nana is suddenly alone: and nothing much is made of it.
The young girl—survival instincts already firmly in hand—very matter of factly goes about her own business of changing her clothes, starting a fire, bringing home a captured rabbit (she watched her grandfather set the trap in the nearby woods), having milk and cookies, and reading to herself. Red flags go off when she curses like a trucker while re-reading a story her mother earlier read sans expletives: could the swear words she tosses off be her simply parroting exchanges she heard between the adults in her life? The director tantalizingly never obliges us with an explanation.
Massadian’s visual and narrative rhythms are impeccable—the lustrous camerawork comprises long, static, confident takes. But Nana is mainly memorable for the appearance of little Kelyna Lecomte, with whom the director worked for nearly two years: with a lot of improvisation, the barebones of a script giving an broad outline of the story. Young Lecomte responds with a miraculous performance that is less acting than simply existing: and she’s riveting throughout this remarkably honest and stark portrayal of a young girl in a violent and difficult world.
Hors Satan
Directed and written by Bruno Dumont
Nana
Directed and written by Valerie Massadian
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue, New York, NY
January '13 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 25 January 2013 15:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Downton Abbey—Complete Season 3
(PBS)
The masters and servants enter their 3rd season in Julian Fellowes’ savvy Upstairs Downstairs rewrite with high drama in each episode: will the Earl of Grantham lose the estate? Will his daughter Sybil survive childbirth? Will valet Bates be released from jail? Along with the impeccable cast led by Hugh Bonneville, Maggie Smith and Penelope Wilton, Shirley MacLaine arrives as the latest fish out of water: mother of the Earl’s wife, played by Elizabeth McGovern.
The masters and servants enter their 3rd season in Julian Fellowes’ savvy Upstairs Downstairs rewrite with high drama in each episode: will the Earl of Grantham lose the estate? Will his daughter Sybil survive childbirth? Will valet Bates be released from jail? Along with the impeccable cast led by Hugh Bonneville, Maggie Smith and Penelope Wilton, Shirley MacLaine arrives as the latest fish out of water: mother of the Earl’s wife, played by Elizabeth McGovern.
The show sticks to the tried and true, but wonderful production values (highlighted on Blu-ray), superb acting and writing keep it moving. Extras include a 45-minute making-of and featurettes about MacLaine, the show’s men and the year 1920.
Ivan’s Childhood
(Criterion)
Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1962 international breakthrough is a passionate study of a teenage boy dealing with the inhumane and incomprehensible during wartime.
Cinematographer Vadim Yusov’s sparkling B&W compositions—which have incredible detail in the Criterion Collection’s usual high-standard hi-def transfer—present a lion’s den of haunting images. Extras include interviews with historian Vita Johnson, actor Nikolai Burlyaev (who played Ivan as a remarkable 15-year-old) and Yusov.
(Music Box)
Ira Sachs mined his own life for this personal look at a long-term, off-and-on relationship between a documentary filmmaker and a closeted lawyer with a drug problem. Sachs savvily uses Manhattan locations as a backdrop to a volatile love affair, and the fairly explicit sex scenes are not in the least gratuitous.
But what keeps the movie from becoming a memorable character study is the wooden acting of leads Thure Lindhardt and Zachary Booth, who look right but never convey the myriad emotions in Sachs’ and Maricio Zacharias’s impressive script. The Blu-ray image is good and grainy; extras include a Sachs commentary, deleted scenes, a making-of and actors’ screen tests.
(Anchor Bay)
Brian A. Miller’s routine thriller features Stephen Dorff, huffing and puffing as a rogue cop who discovers his crooked chief (a scenery-chewing James Woods) is out to get him.
Dorff always seems winded from straining to emote—luckily, a colorful supporting cast (Woods, Stephen Lang, Annalynne McCord, Elisabeth Rohm) partly compensates, although director Miller can do little with standard cop movie clichés. The Blu-ray image looks fine.
(Fox)
You would think Liam Neeson would make sure that his family would never go abroad again after Taken showed his daughter kidnapped in Paris, where he had to mow down dozens of bad guys in the original. But no: he, his ex-wife and daughter take to the streets of Istanbul for more…and they get it.
There’s enjoyable action from director Olivier Megaton, but the premise is so eye-rolling that it hurts the brain to watch, despite a game trio of Neeson, Famke Janssen (his ex) and Maggie Grace (his daughter). The hi-def transfer looks stellar; extras include deleted scenes, featurettes and an 25-minute alternate ending that’s very different from what we got.
(Fox)
Maggie Gyllenhaal reprises her trashy but spunky single mom from Sherrybaby to play a trashy, spunky single mom who hooks up with disgruntled teachers to start a new Pittsburgh school to help her dyslexic daughter.
Writer-director Daniel Barnz has his bleeding heart in the right place, but despite the best efforts of his actresses—there’s also Viola Davis, Holly Hunter, Rosie Perez and Marianne Jean-Baptiste—his movie lacks substance: and the final spoken word, “hope,” is too naked an Obama reference. The Blu-ray image looks super; extras are deleted scenes, director commentary and featurettes.
The Abolitionists
(PBS)
In this three-hour journey through the often unsung heroes and heroines who guided our country to the abolishment of slavery, the roads—literal and figurative—taken to arrive at the final nail in slavery’s coffin (the Civil War) are interesting to watch even if history buffs will find nothing new here.
And, even though I still have doubts about the effectiveness of the reenactment mania that’s overcome more and more documentaries, it’s used wisely and well.
(Music Box)
Jeffrey Kimball’s affectionate documentary follows individuals dedicated to following the dazzling array of colorful bird species that migrate to and inhabit Central Park, New York’s sprawling but magical urban oasis.
Showing the interrelationship between humans and nature, Kimball is amazingly able to present many people (including author Jonathan Franzen) who adore these winged marvels without condescension—but also not without humor. Extras are additional interviews and a video bird guide.
(Kino)
In actor Karl Markovics’s directorial debut, a lonely teenager who lives in a juvenile detention center begins working at a new job: the local morgue. After he sees a dead body that has his last name, he decides to track down his real mother, with whom he begins a distant but enlightening relationship.
Although Markovics tries too hard to be detached—there are many long, static shots—his protagonist (played by the intense Thomas Schubert) is singular enough to be worth 90 minutes of our time.
(e one)
Those who only know Joan Rivers from her snarky comments about celebrities on TV’s Fashion Police may be shocked to discover that, in her latest stand-up special, she kills it with snarky comments that go way beyond even cable TV.
Rivers enters the blue territory of Redd Foxx with her liberal sprinkling of “F” words and other unapologetically adult material. Rivers is uncensored and irrepressible—but the “shock” of her potty mouth palls before she ends with nastiness about Jennifer Aniston.
(Anchor Bay)
Proving that not only do the French love Jerry Lewis’ juvenile comedy, Gregg Barson’s hagiography gathers comedians—from Carl Reiner to Jerry Seinfeld—to wax eloquently about Lewis’s career from his days with Dean Martin through his series of adroitly physical comedy features.
But it’s Lewis himself, who reminiscences thoughtfully about his life from working with his parents in vaudeville at a young age to his many inspired movie gags, who comes across as a mature, revered comic artist. There are film clips galore, along with glimpses of Lewis still at work onstage with his loving audience.
(Sony)
In this entertaining documentary, director Malik Bendjelloul tracks down Rodriguez, a late 60s/early 70s folk singer with a cult following, especially in South Africa. His music, which fits in with the era’s acoustic singer-songwriters (Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, Don McLean), hit a chord with fans, as witness those who discuss his songs on camera.
His three daughters also speak, and the “mystery” of his supposed death after his disappearance from the industry is also touched on. Extras include Bendjelloul and Rodriguez’s commentary and interview, a making-of featurette and music videos.
Piano Duets—Christina & Michelle Naughton
(Orfeo)
Piano-playing twins Christina and Michelle Naughton are dazzlers in a genre that’s by definition limited: works for piano four-hands and two pianos. This supremely confident recording moves from Mendelssohn’s four-hands Allegro brillant to Mozart’s classic two-piano sonata to a rollicking two-piano version of Ravel’s invigorating La Valse.
Piano-playing twins Christina and Michelle Naughton are dazzlers in a genre that’s by definition limited: works for piano four-hands and two pianos. This supremely confident recording moves from Mendelssohn’s four-hands Allegro brillant to Mozart’s classic two-piano sonata to a rollicking two-piano version of Ravel’s invigorating La Valse.
But it’s the seemingly throwaway pieces—a four-hands version of the First Spanish Dance from Falla’s opera La vida breve and Lutoslawski’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini—where the sisters’ artistry comes to the fore: these short works have the same vitality as their performances of the larger pieces, which is what makes them so thrilling to listen to.
Theater Roundup: 'The Other Place' (Bway), 'Bethany,' 'Water by the Spoonful' (Off-Bway)
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 24 January 2013 10:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The Other Place
Written by Sharr White; directed by Joe Mantello
Performances through March 3, 2013
Bethany
Written by Laura Marks; directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch
Performances through February 17, 2013
Water by the Spoonful
Written by Quiara Alegria Hudes; directed by Davis McCallum
Performances through February 10, 2013
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| Metcalf in The Other Place (photo: Joan Marcus) |
The Other Place, Sharr White’s drama about a woman whose perfectly ordered professional life is destroyed by a creeping psychological disorder, doesn’t do much more than scratch the surface of its heroine’s dementia: but within its proficient dramatics, it makes room for a stirring central performance. As Juliana Smithton—star neurologist (get the irony?) whose presentation at a doctors’ conference at the play’s start triggers her decline—Laurie Metcalf gives a ferociously funny, fiercely committed performance.
Juliana is married to the caring if not always understanding Ian (a likeable Daniel Stern), a doctor who finds a colleague to help her through her uncontrollable mania tied to their teenage daughter’s disappearance some years before. Although White cleverly sets up his central conceit—is Juliana insane or telling the truth about the daughter’s whereabouts?—he never delves deep into its emotional ramifications.
Director Joe Mantello guides things sensitively by giving attention and care to make a 70-minute play seem substantial: although the ending—the identity of a girl in a yellow bikini whom Juliana described at the opening is revealed—is posturing nonsense, Mantello and Metcalf do their best to illuminate an insipid tear-jerking ploy.
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| Segal and Ferrera in Bethany (photo: Carol Rosegg) |
When the housing bubble burst at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, we didn’t hear much about those left homeless because they foreclosed on their mortgages. In her play Bethany, Laura Marks gives faces to forgotten people, showing what they went through in an era of personal and economic crises.
But while Marks get little things right, the bigger picture is muddled, like news reports while the economy was tanking: peripheral questions answered, larger issues remain unresolved. Bright, optimistic Crystal (America Ferrera), who sells cars at a Saturn dealership, enters what appears to be a vacant house only to be confronted by Gary (Tobias Segal), a paranoid squatter who becomes an unlikely confidante by allowing her to stay (happily, electricity and running water are working—for now).
Crystal uses the house to fool social worker Toni when she visits to ensure that Crystal has a steady income and fixed abode before she gets her young daughter Bethany back: homeless Crystal and Bethany were found living in her car, so the girl was given to a foster family for safekeeping. At work, she engages in flirty banter with Charlie, a middle-aged motivational speaker contemplating buying a new set of wheels; her job is commission only, so of course she wants to make the sale to have a steady cash flow. But Charlie has more on his mind, and after he takes her to dinner and drives her home, things get complicated.
Marks presents a disillusioned, delusional country in the midst of a terrible crisis, and these minor characters in a national tragedy are worst off: Saturn itself goes under after the play ends (indeed, Crystal’s annoying supervisor tells her so), costing thousands of jobs. But there’s lazy writing as Marks stacks her dramatic deck: Gary is a clichéd grassroots paranoid whose rants quickly become tiresome, and Crystal is forced into corners from which neither she nor the author can plausibly escape.
Would Crystal fall for Charlie’s transparent “buying” scheme or stoop to using a 2-by-4 on Gary because of her desperation? How easy it is for a young woman to forge a lease realistic enough to trick Social Services? Would Charlie’s obviously intelligent wife really believe Crystal’s implausible story about their relationship and pay her a tidy sum to leave town? And how is a pivotal body hidden from the authorities?
Such gaping plot and characterization holes fatally mar an otherwise earnest, well-intentioned study of those squeezed out amid Wall Street bailouts. Gaye Taylor Upchurch smoothly directs, and America Ferrera’s nicely etched Crystal—beaming smile always at the ready despite overwhelming difficulties—provides some necessary meat on the gristly bones of Bethany.
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| Guevara and Riesco in Water by the Spoonful (photo: Richard Termine) |
Excess gristle mars Water by the Spoonful, Quiara Alegria Hudes’s Pulitzer Prize winning second play in a trilogy about a Puerto Rican-American soldier returning home to his Philadelphia neighborhood from Iraq. Half the play studies how death effects soldier Elliot in a foreign land and at home, along with chronicling his estrangement from a complicated family relationship; unfortunately, there’s the other half, a curiously irksome visualization of internet chat rooms—I kid you not—that, even though eventually merging with the main plot, is never fully integrated into the dramatic fabric. Instead, it tears it to near-shreds.
Because Hudes insistently opens every single one of her characters’ wounds, the chat room bunch gets as much play as Elliot’s far more captivating family. An unconscionably long time is taken up by Orangutan and Chutes and Ladders—just one pair of the internet chatters—as they try out a friendship away from the computer; not only do they belong in another play but they hinder the Elliott and his family’s development.
There’s also an ending which, in its sentimental leap towards spirituality, tries too hard to be “Importance” personified. In director Davis McCallum’s observamt staging, the cast—led by Armando Riesco’s aggressive but tender Elliot and Zabryna Guevara’s appealing Yaz, his level-headed cousin—provides the cohesion needed to keep the Water hurtling forward despite its author’s unnecessary detours.
The Other Place
Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47thStreet, New York, NY
Bethany
Manhattan Theatre Club Stage II, 131 West 55thStreet, New York, NY
Water by the Spoonful
Second Stage Theatre, 307 West 43rdStreet, New York, NY
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