February '12 Digital Week IV

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Sunday, 26 February 2012 20:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week
Anatomy of a Murder
(Criterion)
Otto Preminger’s methodical adaptation of Robert Traver’s novel raised hackles in 1959 due to its racy subject matter: despite talkiness and visual monotony, estimable actors like Jimmy Stewart, George C. Scott, Ben Gazarra and Lee Remick (an underrated actress and sex symbol) make the movie a gripping drama.

The Criterion Collection again outdoes itself with a superb hi-def transfer of exacting clarity; terrific extras include new interviews, on-set footage, Firing Line excerpts with Preminger and William F. Buckley, behind the scenes photographs, and still-unfinished making-of, Anatomy of ‘Anatomy.’

Blank City
(Kino Lorber)
Celine Dahnier’s exhilarating chronicle of the “No Wave” New York film scene in the ‘70s and ‘80s not only interviews virtually everyone of consequence from that time--directors Jim Jarmusch and Amos Poe and performers Lydia Lunch, Ann Magnuson and Deborah Harry, for starters--but is also a valuable time capsule of an artistically freewheeling era.

The exceedingly grainy footage is greatly enhanced on Blu-ray; extras include a Dahnier interview, deleted and extended scenes and interview outtakes.

5 Star Day
(Breaking Glass)
Writer-director Danny Buday’s clever idea--a skeptic (played by Cam Gigandet) discovers the wonders of the horoscope--could have been a decent short, but here it’s stretched to an interminable 95 minutes.

The protagonist meets people born on the same date and at the same place as he, in order to understand fate: the story grows stale, even with attractive support by Jena Malone and Brooklyn Sudano. The Blu-ray image is quite good; extras include a Buday short and commentary, making-of featurette and deleted scenes.

J. Edgar
(Warners)
Clint Eastwood’s sepia-toned biopic, from Dustin Lance Black’s uneven script, is dominated by Leonardo DiCaprio’s fiercely committed performance as the man who built the FBI into what it is today over a span of a half-century. DiCaprio’s remarkably full account of Hoover the man and myth overshadows Eastwood and Black, who sweat the minor details and lose panoramic focus.

Still, this unconventionally conventional biography has muted visuals--by cinematographer Tom Stern--that look superb on Blu-ray. Too bad the lone extra is a brief making-of featurette.

London Boulevard
(Sony)
This gritty actioner might not win awards like writer-director William Manaham’s last major project, The Departed, for which he won a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar--but his thugs’ machinations are shown with an eye toward authenticity, not condescension.

The cast, including Colin Farrell, Ray Winstone and Ben Chaplin to Keira Knightley and Anna Friel, is top-notch; London locations are splendidly utilized. The movie looks especially exciting on Blu-ray; the lone extra is a making-of featurette.

The Son of No One
(Anchor Bay)
Dito Montiel’s twisty cop film, set on authentic Queens and Staten Island locations, has a story--cover-ups and rogue cops--that’s too familiar to solidly score. There’s a good cast: Channing Tatum as the righteous cop, Katie Holmes as his wife, Al Pacino and Ray Liotta as corrupt head officers, Juliette Binoche as a muckraking reporter and Tracy Morgan in a rare dramatic role. But it all feels underwhelmingly slight.

Perhaps some deleted scenes could have been edited back in to pad the 93-minute running time. The movie looks sharp on Blu-ray; there’s a commentary by Montiel and his editor.

A Star Is Born
(Kino Classics)
The original--and in many ways--best version of the classic “she’s on the way up and he’s on the way down” tale, William A. Wellman’s 1937 romance features Janet Gaynor and Frederic March as star-crossed lovers. Although supremely melodramatic, it at least avoids the 1951 remake’s bombast and the megalomania of Barbra Streisand’s 1976 version.

This early example of Technicolor has a solid hi-def transfer that shows the limitations of available elements; the lone extra is a brief costume test.

DVDs of the Week
American Teacher
and Pianomania
(First Run)
American Teacher, narrated by Matt Damon, documents the difficulties for today’s teachers who put together lesson plans, balance home lives and do what’s right for kids in the classroom while under enormous pressure; facts and figures of the state of education in America prop up this intimate look at dedicated professionals.

The documentary Pianomania introduces Stefan Knupfer, master tuner for Steinway pianos in Vienna, who deals with world-class musicians’ quirks as he ensures tip-top tuning and playing quality of these enormous instruments. Teacher extras include additional interviews.

The Long Walk of Nelson Mandela and
Reconciliation: Mandela’s Miracle
(PBS)
The remarkable journey of Nelson Mandela--from outlaw to prisoner to president of South Africa--is chronicled in these two superb PBS documentaries. Long Walk is a riveting portrait from his days as a radical to his arrival as elder statesman, including interviews with friends and enemies of various stripes.

Reconciliation shows the pivotal moments leading to the beginning of a peaceful and fair democracy in South Africa. Both films are perfect commemorations of Black History Month.

Slavery by Another Name
(PBS)
Sam Pollard’s engrossing documentary, based on Douglas A. Blackmon’s groundbreaking book of the same name, gives voice to post-American Civil War blacks sentenced to involuntary servitude for (usually trumped-up) charges well into the 20th century.

Narrated by Laurence Fishburne and featuring scholars, historians and descendants of many people--white and black--who were involved in this intolerable practice after slavery supposedly ended, the film is a necessary reminder of our not always sterling history. Extras include a Blackmon interview and making-of featurette.

The Woman with the 5 Elephants
(Cinema Guild)
This documentary about an 85-year-old Ukrainian woman--the most important contemporary translator of Russian literature--is riveting, thanks to director Vadim Jendreyko’s empathy and intelligence. The pachyderms making up the film’s title are five of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s classic novels, difficult works dominating Svetlana Geier’s life for the past 20 years.

Jendreyko subtly transforms his documentary from an engaging look at an indomitable spirit plying her trade into an illuminating treatment of a life deeply affected by sadness and tragedy. Extras include deleted scenes and a short film, Portrait.

Woody Allen: A Documentary
(Docurama)
Robert Weide’s three-hour documentary about America’s greatest comic writer/director holds no surprises or revelations for anyone who’s followed Woody’s career since he began stand up in the ‘60s.

Despite its familiarity, there’s plenty to enjoy, from classic clips to interviews with co-stars, collaborators and family members and discussions with the notoriously camera-shy Allen, who reminisces about his life and career. Bonus features include more interviews, a director Weide interview and 12 questions for Woody.

CDs of the Week
Granados, Goyescas
(Hyperion and Mirare)
Enrique Granados’ piano masterpiece Goyescas, from 1911--an amazingly picturesque tribute to the ultimate Spanish artist, Francisco Goya--appears on new discs in equally compelling performances by Garrick Ohlsson (on Hyperion) and Luis Fernando Perez (on Mirare).

Perez--who also plays the Intermezzo from Granados’ opera about Goya (also called Goyescas) as part of the cycle--takes a slower tempo on most movements than Ohlsson, but both pianists convey the shining artistry of painter and composer. Ohlsson also performs two short Granados works, while Perez tackles the dreamy Valses Poeticos.

Rota, Cello Concertos
(Ars)
Known for his Fellini scores and music from The Godfather, Nino Rota was also a prolific orchestral composer: his two cello concertos show a mastery of form and memorable melodies, along with an admirable balance of solo instruments and orchestral players.

Cellist Friedrich Kjleinhapl, who takes the solo part, alternates between intensity and levity; Dirk Kaftan ably conducts the Augsburg Philharmonic Orchestra, which also performs Rota’s beguiling orchestral suite, Ballabili.

Theater Roundup: Sondheim's 'Merrily We Roll Along'; McKinley's 'CQ/CX'; Fugard's 'Blood Knot'

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 22 February 2012 10:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Merrily We Roll Along
Starring Colin Donnell, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Elizabeth Stanley, Betsy Wolfe
Book by George Furth; music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Directed by James Lapine

CQ/CX
Starring Larry Bryggman, Peter Jay Fernandez, Tim Hopper, Arliss Howard, Kobi Libii, David Pittu, Steve Rosen, Sheila Tapia
Written by Gabe McKinley; directed by David Leveaux

Blood Knot
Starring Colman Domingo, Scott Shepherd
Written and directed by Athol Fugard

The 1981 Broadway flop Merrily We Roll Along, a huge failure for Stephen Sondheim after a string of hits like Follies, Company and Sweeney Todd, got an agreeably merry Encores! staging. The storyline--which follows composer Frank Shepard’s troubled relationships with his lyricist partner Charley Kringas and their needy writer friend Mary Flynn backward 20 years until their first meeting in 1957--is the main reason why the musical never caught on with audiences.

At Encores!, James Lapine’s zippy directing--bolstered by Wendall K. Harrington’s savvy projections, giving a sense of the eras the show spans--streamlined some (not all) plot holes; the gimmicky reverse timeline is far from inspired, and the musical theater world is too jokily handled in George Furth’s book. Sondheim’s songs, while not his best, include such gems as “Old Friends,” “Not a Day Goes By” and the patter classic “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” Unfortunately, they all appear in the first act, making Merry much lopsided (“Day” returns in Act II).

Rob Berman’s Encores! Orchestra’s splendid playing gave a full, lush sound to Jonathan Tunick’s excellent orchestrations. Colin Donnell’s charming Frank, Celia Keenan-Bolger’s irritant Mary and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s caustic Charley are the satisfying  leads;  a famously bumpy ride, this Merrily eventually does roll along.

CQ/CX, named for newspaper editors’ terms for fact checking and correction, is Gabe McKinley’s thinly veiled fiction of the Jayson Blair plagiarism case, which embarrassed the New York Times several years ago.

The play, though intelligent and well-paced, tries to do too much: it shows Jay Bennett at his job as a Times intern (later reporter), spending leisure time with fellow interns Jacob and Monica, dealing with his increasingly skeptical editor Ben and Times elder statesman Frank and being mentored by Gerald, long-time Times editor who’s the right-hand man of new editor-in-chief Hal Martin, whose regime and the paper’s reputation are destroyed when Jay’s plagiarism comes to light.

McKinley writes precisely about the culture that enabled Jay’s plagiarism, but for those who remember the real case’s details--and who in New York doesn’t?--there’s little that’s new or fresh. Still, under David Leveaux’s fast-paced direction--greatly helped by David Rockwell’s dazzling sets and Ben Stanton’s shrewd lighting, which slyly evoke the Times’ workplace--a persuasive ensemble of eight is led by Arliss Howard’s smart, scenery-chewing Hal and Tim Hopper’s professionally leery Ben.

There’s no doubting the sincerity of Athol Fugard’s plays, which dramatize how the evils of South Africa’s racist Apartheid system affected the citizens of his beloved country. In his 1961 two-hander Blood Knot (which had its New York premiere three years later), two brothers--one light-skinned, one much darker--deal with the ramifications of their mixed blood and their dissimilar physical appearance.

In his adept staging at the Signature Theatre’s new three-theater complex, Fugard channels Beckett’s Endgame as the brothers constantly banter on a post-nuclear apocalyptic set (by Christopher H. Barreca) that stands in for their shack in “colored” section of Port Elizabeth. With their lives stuck in neutral, Morris offers to write a letter to Zachariah’s new pen pal--who turns out to be an 18-year-old white girl who wants to meet him--and the impossibility of happiness for the brothers is thrown into sharp relief.

Exceedingly pale Scott Shepherd and dark-skinned Colman Domingo don’t physically convince as brothers with different fathers, but Shepherd’s strong, sturdy Morris complements Domingo’s shrill Zachariah. The actors click convincingly in the final scenes, when the brothers’ fantasy role-playing comes to a powerfully racially-charged head, giving Fugard’s character study a much needed catharsis.

Merrily We Roll Along
Performances February 8-19, 2012
City Center, 151 West 55th Street, New York, NY
http://nycitycenter.org

CQ/CX
Previews began January 25, 2012; opened February 15; closes March 11
The New Group @ the Acorn Theatre, 261 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
http://atlantictheater.org

Blood Knot
Previews began January 31, 2012; opened February 16; closes March 11
Signature Theater, 480 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
http://signaturetheatre.org

February '12 Digital Week III

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Sunday, 19 February 2012 15:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week
America in Primetime
(PBS)
This informative four-part PBS series comprises episodes that deal with archetypal characters that have been part and parcel of television sitcoms and dramas since the beginning: Man of the House, The Independent Woman, The Misfit and The Crusader.

Alongside classic clips from seminal shows like The Honeymooners and The Mary Tyler Moore Show to more recent specimens of supposed TV ingenuity like The Sopranos and Nurse Jackie, this thorough series includes interviews with show creators like Tom Fontana, Diane English, Norman Lear and Carl Reiner to the stars like Edie Falco, Julianna Margulies, Larry David and Felicity Huffman. The hi-def image, consisting of new interviews and vintage footage, is quite good; no extras.

The Dead
(Anchor Bay)
This zombie movie distinguishes itself by setting an apocalyptic story in a new place: equatorial Africa, where the hot sun, endless deserts and dangerous landscapes are as difficult to navigate as the hordes of the undead.

The Ford Brothers, who wrote and directed, inventively place new obstacles in front of their targeted human protagonists, including a pulse-pounding pair of finales set among craggy rocks and inside the humans’ last resort of survival. The extremes of sun and nighttime are beautifully accentuated on Blu-ray; extras include a deleted scenes and making-of featurette.

The Human Centipede II: Full Sequence
(IFC Midnight)
Beware, for auteur Tom Six returns with an even grosser gross-out about a copy-cat sicko that makes the original seem like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. We must thank the inept and turgid Six for shooting II in black and white, a simple act of human mercy that prevents it from being the most repellent movie ever made.

As it stands, II is an unnecessary horror/gore contraption, even for the undiscriminating teens who groove on its ilk. The Blu-ray image is, unfortunately, excellent; extras include Six’s commentary and interview, deleted scenes and making-of featurette.

The Interrupters
(PBS)
A year in the life of gang violence-ridden Chicago is chronicled in Steve James’ principled and idealistic documentary, which follows people who join forces in a concerted effort to rid the city of gang-related violence and present more positive values as an alternative to such a fatalistic mind-set.

There are shocking moments of real-life killings, but these are justified by the context of showing what these good--but not sainted!--individuals are up against. The Blu-ray image is good; extras include an hour of deleted scenes and featurette on the musical score.

Nude Nuns with Big Guns
(Image)
With a fantastic title like this, who cares if the movie’s a botch? And that’s pretty much what we get here, as the provocative--but misleading--title (there’s a lone nude nun) masks a series of dull set pieces that combine sexual exploitation and extreme violence to no discernable end.

At the beginning, the eye-filling rape scenes are unexpected, but soon a pall spreads over the proceedings, as the filmmakers have obviously run out of meager ideas and resort to the kitchen sink. There’s a certain visual panache in hi-def; the original four-minute short of the same name (the lone extra) has it all over the movie.

Three Outlaw Samurai
(Criterion)
Hideo Gosha’s samurai spectacular, which quickly builds to a fantastic climax, is 93 minutes of purely economical plotting and characterization alongside superbly paced and choreographed sword fighting.

Even though he is no Kurosawa or Kobayashi, Gosha is a superior craftsman whose sense of visual proportion (and B&W camerawork) is often dazzling. The Criterion Collection, which presents this as one of its barebones titles--there are no supplements--gets the hi-def transfer right, as always.

Tiny Furniture
(Criterion)
One of the most polarizing of all of the Criterion Collection titles is this bland, shallow and unfunny “comic” portrait of a college graduate drifting through life with an unspoken sense of upper-class entitlement, who returns home to live with her mom and teen sister.

Lena Dunham, who wrote, directed and stars, has little talent for writing, directing or acting; the few decent one-liners are swallowed up by her derivative mocking of and affection for entitled 20-somethings. Criterion’s hi-def transfer is fine; extras include a Dunham interview with Nora Ephron and Paul Schrader appreciation (talk about gilding by association), four Dunham shorts and her first feature, Creative Nonfiction.

DVDs of the Week
The Debt
(MPI)
The original 2007 Israeli thriller is more tense and gripping than the 2011 remake--a solid action flick with Helen Mirren and Jessica Chastain--helped by a tighter, tauter pace. In a fleet 97 minutes, parallel storylines are kept spinning, action percolate and moral dilemmas unwind.

It doesn’t hurt Assaf Bernstein’s film that authentic Germans and Israelis speak their own languages, and an accomplished cast’s anonymity greatly contributes to its plausibility. An intriguing 24-minute making-of featurette is the lone extra.

Ethos
(Cinema Libre)
Woody Harrelson narrates Pete McGrain’s diffuse documentary about making meaningful--and positive--change in a corrupt society led by government machinery that’s complicit in letting the one percent rule us economically.

Interview snippets include the usual suspects from Noam Chomsky to Howard Zinn; if the finished product is less than the sum of its “make a difference” parts, moments of true insight about how the process has been ruined are numerous. Too bad those who would benefit from watching this--namely, the titans in industry and their enablers in Washington--won’t bother.

Far from the Madding Crowd
(PBS)
This 1998 British television adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s classic romantic novel isn’t as visually memorable as John Schlesinger’s 1967 film, since it lacks both Nicolas Roeg's splendid cinematography and Julie Christie’s unique beauty.

Still, at 3-½ hours, Nicholas Renton’s version is far more faithful to Hardy’s story of a woman who chooses wrongly among a trio of men, and has a solid cast: Paloma Baeza as Bathsheba and Nathaniel Parker, Nigel Terry and Jonathan Firth as the men in her life.

Take Shelter
(Sony)
Although Michael Shannon received deserved accolades for his forceful performance as a man who feels that his world is literally crumbling around him, Jessica Chastain, in an affecting portrayal of his sad and confused wife, is the emotional anchor of Jeff Nichols’ incisive character study.

Although the movie crumbles at the end by literalizing the metaphorical horror, it remains the rare American movie that handles an adult subject with, for the most part, maturity and tact. Extras include Nichols and Shannon’s commentary, interviews, making-of featurette and deleted scenes.

CDs of the Week
Danielle De Niese, Beauty of the Baroque
(Decca)
The Australian-by-way-of-New Jersey soprano scintillatingly sings a set of baroque arias ranging from John Dowland and Monteverdi to Bach and Handel. Throughout, De Niese sings with dramatic purpose and a beguiling clarity: Henry Purcell’s mournful Dido’s Lament has rarely been sung with such emotional directness.

There are a few cameo appearances by countertenor Andreas Scholl, while conductor Harry Bicket and the musicians of The English Concert are the accompanying calm to De Niese’s vocal storm.

Nicola Benedetti, Italia!
(Decca)
It’s no surprise Nicola Benedetti decided to record Italian baroque pieces since so many of them (Vivaldi, Tartini) are already violin showstoppers. She utilizes her formidable technique to bow brilliantly through show-off showcases like Tartini’s Devil’s Trill and Vivaldi’s Summer section from The Four Seasons.

Now that she’s gotten it out of her immensely talented system, let’s hope she performs 20th century Italian works that need advocacy like those by Respighi, Casella and Rota. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra and conductor Christian Curnyn are up to the task of following Benedetti’s shimmering lead.