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Theater Roundup: Shaw Festival 2012

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Saturday, 25 August 2012 15:00; Written by Kevin Filipski

Shaw Festival 2012

French without Tears

Written by Terence Rattigan

Present Laughter

Written by Noel Coward

Misalliance

Written by Bernard Shaw

At Canada’s eminent Shaw Festival, works by three great 20^th century British playwrights are being performed. Bernard Shaw, the festival’s namesake, has two plays onstage. I missed The Millionairess but saw Misalliance, along with one of the inimitable Noel Coward’s signature works, Present Laughter, and Terence Rattigan’s biting satire French Without Tears.

In French Without Tears—which ran for 1000-plus performances during its 1936 London premiere run—Rattigan hilariously targets young British men and women who go to France to learn the language. Instead of simply shooting fish in a barrel, however, Rattigan illuminates these people’s complexities: despite their foibles, they grow believably before our eyes.

In Kate Lynch’s breezy staging, Rattigan’s humor, humility and humanity come through, and the talented cast of ten provides equal amounts laughs and heartache, with the raised eyebrow that was Rattigan at his most formidable.

Present Shaw Noel Coward wrote Present Laughter as a thinly veiled fictionalization of his own crazy celebrity life—matinee idol Garry Essendine is hounded by various men and women while being protected by his ex-wife as he tries to sort out his professional and personal difficulties before embarking on an African safari. Coward’s congenial wit can turn savage at times, but his characters all receive affectionate kicks in the pants, even alter ego Garry, skillfully played by Steven Sutcliffe with the right balance of bitchiness and pathos.

On William Schmuck’s wonderfully detailed set of Garry’s elegant home, director David Schurmann puts his talented cast through its paces admirably: next to Sutcliffe, best is Claire Jullien as Garry’s ex Liz, so sympathetic and levelheaded you wonder why he ever let her go.

A play about marriage, Misalliance also has as convoluted a plot as Misalliance Shaw Shaw ever wrote. One afternoon on a wealthy family’s country estate, a Polish daredevil crashes her plane on the property, causing the men to make several marriage proposals to the various women gathered there. Considering the subject matter, moving time and place from 1909 to 1962 makes little sense except that it’s the year the Shaw Festival began.

Otherwise, Eda Holmes directs with brio on Judith Bowden’s evocative set, and Shaw’s pointed brickbats about socialism, poverty and relationships never pall. Holmes’ ensemble is superb separately and together, with Tara Rosling’s alluring pilot with the “unpronounceable” name, Lina Szczepanowska, and Catherine MacGregor’s tart Mrs. Tarleton standing out. As always at the Shaw Festival, the acting is as superlative as the writing.

Shaw Festival 2012

Performances through October 28, 2012

Niagara on the Lake, Canada

http://shawfest.com

"Total Recall" Remake Is Slick And Without Surprises

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Monday, 20 August 2012 18:10; Written by Marek Ozdoba

total recall poster

Total Recall
Directed by Len Wiseman
Starring Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Pete Cho

So Len Wiseman, director of the Underworld films, has had the chance to remake Total Recall, which I can't believe is over 20 years old. He has apparently done this by saying: Let's make it look like Blade Runner swallowed The Fifth Element.

The first Recall was a sprawling adventure hypertrophic in visuals, casting, and plot, as ultimately directed by Paul Verhoeven (after such figures as David Cronenberg had taken a crack at a more psychologically complex story abandoned by the producers for, as Cronenberg termed it, "Raiders of the Lost Ark on Mars"). CGI barely existed when the first version was made, and many of the innovations of that film consisted of a certain over-the-topness.

Now we have slick effects, and a certain lack of affect goes with that — we just take everything in stride. In this century we're too cool for hysterical eye-popping and too cool to be impressed by special effects, which also means we don't get to see Arnold Schwarzenegger in a ridiculous getup, now that it can be handled electronically. But is this way more fun?

Most of the audience for this film won't remember the nearest available metaphor, the early '80s, when the first video games began their move into the home and there was a debate over simple Atari games and the other kind, which were better-looking in every way... but less popular.

So does the new Total Recall make innovations to the story, if it can't rely on effects? Not really.

It avoids Mars for echoes of The American Nightmare as we live it now: the 1% destroying the common people, an industrial revolution limiting jobs/creating oppression, and terrorism all have more resonance in the present day than they did in 1990, but the characters have no motivations apart from choosing sides. At a running time near two full hours, you'd think some could be crammed in, but most of the movie consists of very loud gun battles.

The film begins with a very loud gun battle — after a crawl (never a good sign) explaining that the world has been destroyed by chemical warfare, except for England and Australia, the former housing what's left of the economy while Down Under is where they keep the Down Underclass, who commute, every day, through the center of the earth in a conveyance the size of an office building.

Writing that down, it seems to me now a more outlandish movie should've resulted, but the thing is played utterly straight. Doug Quaid (Colin Farrell, in for Arnold) awakes from a dream not of distant mysteries or hidden desires, but obvious backstory. It's so unlike a dream it looks like the main action in medias res, to be followed by a flashback. He is comforted by his wife (Kate Beckinsale), then is off to his job, where he even participates in his disfranchisement by building the very police robots who enforce the police state.

Using androids for cannon fodder, adopting the George Lucas copout from the Star Wars prequels to make violence palatable, it first looks like a move to secure the PG-13, in contrast to the original's R rating. But times have changed — there's nearly as much swearing and about as much violence (though less gore). Fear not, Douglas Adams fans, the triple-breasted whore is still here.

But to no purpose, because there are no mutants. In fact, there's no reason for Quaid to go to Rekall, the place that implants memories of adventure in your mind because you can't afford a real vacation since there's nowhere to go because the rest of the planet has been reduced to a chemically ravaged wasteland.

In keeping with this change, Rekall now looks not like a travel agency but an opium den; for some reason Quaid picks the "secret agent" memory but the tech (John Cho) explains that you break your brain if you try a fantasy that's ever been a part of your real life. Then he somehow checks this, and stops the procedure. But it's too late...

Yet this is a major point, because it's objectively obvious the fake-memory thing isn't even in play. The procedure doesn't wake Quaid up to his real self — he discovers he's a badass accidentally. Then everyone else around him turns badass, then he runs a lot, then he gets a message from himself... his other self... but, again, we're never really sure why he went to Rekall, how it "awakened" him, or why he had to be put there in the first place.

Modern audiences, we are told, are so smart, they don't need exposition. But sometimes exposition is also pacing. As in the first film, there's a moment where a man appears to tell Quaid he's dreaming; unlike the first film, it makes no sense.

Verhoeven's excesses always included the audience with a wink, not insisting on their participation but asking for it. Slick entertainment takes itself ultra-seriously, even (especially?) when it's being ridiculous. This makes the older, cartoonier version more engaging, while the new one sort of... happens to you. Neither goes as far as it could with the possibilities of rewritable identity and memory. But by insisting on quicker pacing, modern movies force audiences into a more passive state.

The setting is different but the overall structure is much the same, so fans of the original will encounter few surprises. There's just more shooting, running, krav maga... instead of a fight in an elevator, it's in twenty elevators.

The geopolitical setup is freshly relevant, and uses the old Roman Empire routine of making the overlords British and the sufferers American, but what's left is futurism of a type that looks familiar, from both the visionary films of 30 years ago and the tech we actually have now.

No one is surprised to see a touchscreen. A skyscraper that dives through the earth, maybe. Maglev cars, no. Add Minority Report and Die Hard to the list of references (and Michael Winterbottom's Code 46, which did the dystopia better). The Phil Dick-ian future shown here via killer production design is still a replay of older movies (and even a TV series, Total Recall 2020).

So this film contains one great implication, which is that the time of innovation and imagination is over. All that was done, apparently correctly, in the cheesy '80s. Here in the with-it future, we have nothing to add. Cinema from now on is a matter of rendering only.

August '12 Digital Week III

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Sunday, 19 August 2012 10:00; Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week

Breathless
(Anchor Bay)

Director/co-writer Jesse Baget tries copying a Coen brothers movie like their debut Blood Simple with this bloody, double-crossing crime drama about two women who must get rid of one’s husband’s body after the wife offs him. The unsurprising twists keep coming, and close-ups of body parts and other gore are part of the jokey, bad-taste milieu.

To add insult to injury— and I’m no Coen fan—a game cast dives headfirst into the kind of overdone but undercooked performances typical of Coen movies: Gina Gershon, Ray Liotta, Val Kilmer and Kelly Giddish keep it watchable, however tawdry. The Blu-ray image is very good; extras include a commentary and making-of featurette.

Kill List
(IFC)

Director Ben Wheatley tries too hard to shock with his hard-hitting drama about a hot-headed hit man with personal problems: the film is marred by gleeful visualizations of the man’s anger—in which he beats victims to a literal pulp—and a ridiculous final subplot that’s positively giggle-inducing (with shades of better films like Eyes Wide Shut and The Wicker Man).

That twist is so insanely loopy that it’s actually interesting to watch the movie go off the cliff right before one’s eyes: blame Wheatley and co-writer Amy Jump. The image is flawless; extras are commentaries, interviews and making-of featurettes.

Life and Death of a Porno Gang
(Synapse)

Mladen Djorojevic’s blackly comic drama, while not as nasty as the infamous A Serbian Film, critiques a destroyed Yugoslavia’s scattered shards by showing a group of burned-out playwrights and actors becoming a traveling porno carnival, which soon morphs into “snuff” shows (actual killings).

Theoretically, this theme fits the mentally dead people of a shattered nation following a murderous civil war, but watching it enacted may incense or bore most viewers. The Blu-ray image is fine; extras are a 101-minute film about porn makers, Made in Serbia, making-of featurette and deleted scenes.

Scalene
(Breaking Glass)

Margo Martindale bulldozes her way through this unsubtle, crass study of a strained relationship between a brain-damaged young man, his overprotective mother and the female college student who’s his caretaker. Reining it in would help Martindale’s performance immeasurably—contrarily, Adam Scarimbolo and Hanna Hall are nicely understated as her son and the student.

Director Zack Parker’s conscientious drama is too melodramatic to be much more than a shallow thriller. The hi-def image is first-rate; extras include a 3-1/2 hour making-of documentary (!) and featurettes.

Titanic: 100 Years in 3D
(History)

A century after its sinking by an iceberg—or, if you believe James Cameron, because Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet kissed on the deck—stories of the Titanic show no sign of abating, and this 45-minute documentary chronicles a recent diving expedition to the wreckage, displaying found artifacts as actors narrate survivors’ tales.

Such stories of struggle and survival are compelling; needless to say, the 3-D footage is spectacular.

DVDs of the Week

Art Is the Permanent Revolution
and The Callers
(First Run)

These documentaries provide windows into worlds most people don’t know: Manfred Kirchheimer’s Art Is recounts the fascinating history of draftsmen and women who draw the B&W artworks that geniuses like Rembrandt, Goya and Picasso made famous; Susan Sfarra’s The Callers profiles several auctioneers whose fast talking is their singular achievement.

Despite their brevity, both films feel padded by slow sections, yet are eye-openers anyway. Extras include deleted scenes (Callers) and additional interviews (Art).

The Beatles: Their Golden Age
(MVD)

Yet another Fab Four sentimental journey, this hour-long documentary comprises cobbled-together footage and interviews, strung together by producer-narrator Les Krantz’s narration (which includes such howlers as “comprised of”).

Beatles completists will be enthralled by rarely-seen footage set to a score that riffs on—but doesn’t outright plagiarize—Beatles songs, but overall this is another cash grab in a cycle of never-ending, unauthorized Beatles cash grabs. Extras include additional footage.

Foreign Letters
(Film Movement)

Ela Thier’s sensitive memoir of herself as a pre-teen moving with her Israeli family to the U.S. chronicles her struggles to learn the language, fit in and gain an unlikely best friend: Thuy, daughter of a Vietnamese refugee. Their’s story is told with minimal sappiness and maximum emotion, thanks to young Noa Rotstein and Dalena Thuy-Anh Le’s formidable acting and Thier’s marvelous insights into young people.

Extras include an interview with Thier and her real-life best friend; two deleted scenes; and A Summer Rain, a short that led to Their’s splendid feature.

Jay and Silent Bob Get Old
(Industrial)

Director Kevin Smith and sidekick Jason Mewes head to the British Isles for live shows in front of their raucous fans, and this two DVD set contains their London, Manchester and Edinburgh appearances in their entirety.

As usual with Smith, the shows are crude, sometimes hilarious and mostly redundant, but since Smith and Mewes have real chemistry and the crowd is obviously into every single word they say, there’s an “event” quality despite the specter of Smith’s hi-or-miss movies. Extras include bonus footage.

Mary Marie
(TLA)

This self-indulgent 75-minute feature by director-writer Alexandra Roxo and writer Alana Kearns-Green (both of whom play the leads) shallowly explores two sisters who, after the death of their mother, discover intimate feelings for each other.

There’s plentiful nudity but the relationship remains superficial, as neither actress conveys the needed depth of this difficult emotional situation. Extras include deleted scenes, making-of featurette.

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory
(Docurama)

A remarkable study of human culpability, stupidity and redemption, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s latest documentary follows the West Memphis 3 from their trumped-up trial for killing three young boys to their recent prison release despite proclaiming guilt in exchange for time served.

The film ties together narrative strands from the previous two, creating a landmark study of American justice and religious obsession. It also raises a troubling question: if these men (mere teens when jailed) are innocent, then who’s the killer? Tantalizingly, signs point to a dead boy’s stepfather, but it doesn’t reach Thin Blue Line chillingness. Does anyone still care? Extras include deleted scenes and interviews.

CDs of the Week

Birtwistle: The Triumph of Time
and Stockhausen: Gruppen
(Decca)

Karlheinz Stockhausen’s seminal 1958 Gruppen is better seen than heard—as the New York Philharmonic’s great performance in June proved—but hearing the Berlin Philharmonic and three conductors (Friedrich Goldmann, Claudio Abbado, Marcus Creed) play this unyielding and daunting score so brilliantly is also revelatory. But at only 22 minutes, Gruppen is padded by three Gyorgy Kurtag works, when another Stockhausen piece would make more sense.

Harrison Birtwistle’s equally difficult Triumph of Time (1972)—well performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Ensemble Modern Orchestra under conductors Pierre Boulez and Andrew Davis—is the composer’s defining musical moment, alongside his later opera The Mask of Orpheus.

Schreker: Der Schmdied von Gent
(CPO)

Austrian composer Franz Schreker was known for his luscious, Straussian operas; this valuable recording presents another of his criminally neglected stage works (from 1932), whose typically fantastical story revolves around a blacksmith, fairies, angels, hell and heaven.

The plot is as ludicrous as they come, but the glorious music’s wide-ranging melodic lines give ample opportunities for the singers and a chorus worth their salt. The fine-sounding Robert Schumann Philharmonic is ably conducted by Frank Beermann.

NYC Theater Roundup: Vidal's "Man" Revisited; Foote's "TX"; Harrelson's "Bullet"

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Saturday, 18 August 2012 05:00; Written by Kevin Filipski

Gore Vidal’s The Best Man

Starring James Earl Jones, John Larroquette, Cybill Shepherd, John Stamos, Jefferson Mays, Mark Blum, Angela Lansbury, Kristin Davis

Written by Gore Vidal; directed by Michael Wilson

Harrison, TX

Starring Hallie Foote, Jayne Houdyshell, Devon Abner, Mary Bacon, Jeremy Bobb, Alexander Cendense, Andrea Lynn Green, Evan Jonigkeit, Jenny Dare Paulin

Written by Horton Foote; directed by Pam Mackinnon

Bullet for Adolf

Starring Marsha Stephanie Blake, Brandon Coffey, David Coomber, Shamika Cotton, Shannon Garland, Lee Osorio, Tyler Jacob Rollinson, Nick Wyman

Written by Woody Harrelson and Frankie Hyman; directed by Woody Harrelson

Shepherd, Larroquette in The Best Man (photo: Joan Marcus)

Gore Vidal’s recent death makes seeing his best play, The Best Man, a must during the last weeks of its Broadway run. Despite his reputation as a sardonic, unapologetic liberal (which drove opponents like Norman Mailer and William Buckley batty), The Best Man is a remarkably evenhanded, hilarious and still-relevant political expose that shows how little American electioneering has changed since 1960.

But that’s not the only reason to see Michael Wilson’s superlative staging, which I caught when it opened in the spring. Many of the main roles have new actors who are as good as if not better than the originals. John Stamos, as conservative candidate Senator Joseph Cantwell, has the perfect mix of cocksure smugness to go up against his opponent, John Laroquette’s impeccably decent Secretary of State William Russell. Both candidates’ wives are new: Kristin Davis capably shows that Cantwell’s wife Mabel can be as amusingly bimboish as a brunette as Kerry Butler was as a blonde; Cybill Shepherd has taken over Alice, Russell’s wife, from Candice Bergen, and the result is a wash, the part snugly fitting both of their personas.

As Dick Jensen, Russell’s campaign manager, Mark Blum is less subdued than Michael McKean was, which makes more sense as the tense candidates’ stand-off plays out at the convention. As the scene-stealing Sue-Ellen Gamadge, the women’s organization leader both men are courting, Elizabeth Ashley has a grand old time hamming it up even more boisterously than Angela Lansbury did. And still towering above all is holdover James Earl Jones, whose former President Hockstader shouldn’t work: it’s too oversized a portrayal to fit with what’s essentially a realistic ensemble. But Jones’ unerring instincts make this ex-president appropriately larger than life and at the same time give The Best Man its comic and human pulse.

Green, Foote in Harrison, TX (photo: James Leynse)

Horton Foote, who died in 2009 just shy of his 93^rd birthday, was a genteel gentleman, which shows in his plays: common people are given the decency and respect they deserve. The result, over a huge number of plays in an astonishingly prolific career, might be a certain sameness, but at the same time, the modesty on display has its own reward as a valid artistic purpose.

Harrison, TX, comprising three one-act Foote plays, is a case in point: with each set in the fictional title town that stands in for Foote’s own Texan hometown (Wharton), the format works well for these slight but shrewd portraits of regular folk acting a bit irregularly.

Harrison, TX opens with Blind Date, where an interfering aunt tries to get her visiting young niece to act like a lady when a gentleman caller arrives with amusingly disastrous results; The One-Armed Man is a short, tense drama about a former mill employee who lost his arm in a workplace accident who comes to call, armed with a gun, on his former boss; and The Midnight Caller combines Date’s lightness and Man’s darkness for a tragicomic soap opera about a jilted man who drunkenly screams for his ex-girl outside the boarding house where she lives every night, affecting her friendships with the other boarders and her relationship with a new beau.

Foote’s pen, as always, draws these people assuredly and humanely, resulting in an enervating visit to small-town America sans condescension. Pam Mackinnon directs with sure rhythm and pacing; Marion Williams’ set feels a little cramped, especially in the third play, which needs opening up, but overall it conveys a proper small town atmosphere. The performers are up to the task, especially Foote’s daughter Hallie, who appears in the first and last plays, as does the delightful Andrea Lynn Green. The others fill their roles well (excepting Jayne Houdyshell, who doesn’t fit place or period), and the late master would have been pleased.

Bullet for Adolf (photo: Carol Rosegg)

Bullet for Adolf is one of the biggest onstage fiascos in awhile: co-writers Woody Harrelson (who also directed) and Frankie Hyman mined their own friendship to come up with this ludicrous, disjointed and episodic play that meanders to no discernible point.

The non-story introduces several people over the course of a few summer days in hot Houston in 1983, and when a luger used in a Hitler assassination attempt goes missing (don’t ask), they try to discover who did it. The problem is that the characters are so sketchy that it’s hard to care what happens to them. Although jokes are tossed out—mostly off-color, even intentionally offensive—nothing is very funny, even though Harrelson and Hyman obviously think their offbeat characters are loveable losers.

Harrelson’s chief directorial contribution is to fill time between scenes with loud early 80s pop (Prince, Michael Jackson, Phil Collins) and accompanying video footage—MTV, President Reagan, the space shuttle, Beirut—which makes no commentary on anything happening onstage. The actors, bless their hearts, give it their all, but they can’t make this 2-1/2 hour self-indulgence more than risible.

Gore Vidal’s The Best Man

Performances began March 6, 2012; closes September 9

Schoenfeld Theatre, 236 West 45th Street, New York, NY

http://thebestmanonbroadway.com

Harrison, TX

Performances began July 24, 2012; opened August 14; closes September 15

Primary Stages @ 59 E 59 Theatre, New York, NY

http://primarystages.org

Bullet for Adolf

Performances began July 19, 2012; opened August 8; closes September 9

New World Stages, 340 West 50^th Street; New York, NY

http://bulletforadolf.com

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