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Reviews
May '12 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Sunday, 06 May 2012 05:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The movies have been decently transferred to hi-def.
It’s too bad, for Sara Paxton and Pat Healy give solid performances, and there’s a palpable sense of dread—for awhile, at least. A good Blu-ray transfer helps; extras include a making-of featurette and two commentaries.
That he died under mysterious circumstances only adds to the legend of a man whose career is a microcosm of our nation’s foreign policy for the past half-century. Since the movie comprises talking-head interviews, it’s a surprise First Run released it on Blu-ray, but it does look excellent; extras include additional interviews and scenes.
Matthew Rhys (Jasper), Freddie Fox (Edwin), Tamzin Merchant (Rosa) and Rory Kinnear (the Reverend) all jump off the page onto the screen, how persuasively they nestle in director Diarmuid Lawrence’s sumptuous Victorian-era setting, splendidly recreated on Blu-ray, while the multi-layered story (adapted by Gwyneth Jones) has been equally well-realized.
Despite its cast—led by a bevy of actresses from Michelle Pfeiffer and Halle Berry to Jessica Biel and Lea Michele—the movie has little humor and even less romance, as stars and director go through the motions. Pfeiffer’s role is particularly embarrassing; this resourceful actress can do little with it. Manhattan glistens, however, on Blu-ray; extras include a gag reel, deleted scenes and interviews.
The Criterion Collection edition, while skimpy on extras (Monicelli’s 2006 introduction predates his death in 2010 at age 95), gives the black and white film its due with a superlative, grainy hi-def transfer.
Despite a few scenes of frisky sexuality and black humor, Tree has none of the unsettling horror of Man, and the brief appearance of Christopher Lee is a sad reminder of what’s missing from the new film. The picturesque Scottish locations are enticing on Blu-ray; extras include a making-of featurette and deleted scenes.
Working from his and novelist Ivica Djikic’s script, Tanovic has created a pungent metaphor for how quickly tiny frictions blow up into outright killing and the worst atrocities since Hitler. The title refers to a local “circus”—more a cheap amusement park with beat-up children’s rides—whose temporary youthful idyll is replaced by the sight and sound of shells exploding as the war finally arrives.
With true chemistry between leads Filippo Timi and Ksenia Rappoport, the movie moves through many twists and turns, and if Capotondi loses his way (devolving into a semi-twist ending), his movie retains its adultness and interest. Extras include a making-of featurette and deleted scenes.
Akerman’s directorial eye is better than her ear, as there are precious few piercing truths about her subjects that we haven’t heard before.
A second disc houses Collins’ 1996 Montreux concert, a big band affair in which his crack band plays revamped versions of his songs and even “The Los Endos Suite” by Genesis; he welcomes special guest stars Tony Bennett, saxophonist David Sanborn and conductor Quincy Jones.
Included in this two-disc set’s eight episodes are Vanessa Williams, Kim Cattrall, Gwyneth Paltrow, Lionel Richie, Tim McGraw, Rosie O’Donnell, Ashley Judd and Steve Buscemi, all reduced to silence and even tears at the revelations they discover.
Two other cycles—Ravel’s Sheherazade (1904) and Messaien’s Poemes pour mi (1936)—are also excitingly performed by Fleming and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, led by Alan Gilbert, and Orchestre National de France, led by Seiji Ozawa.
The quartets’ juxtaposition of real emotion and bitter sarcasm needs to balance the bombast and subtlety, and the Pacifica’s members come through in spades. Rounding out this excellent set is fellow Soviet master Sergei Prokofiev’s second quartet, sounding as personal and painful as Shostakovich.
On Broadway: New Musicals 'Ghost,' 'Leap of Faith,' 'Nice Work If You Can Get It'
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 03 May 2012 06:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Lyrics by Glenn Slater; music by Alan Menken
Book by Joe DiPietro
Choreographed and directed by Kathleen Marshall
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| Ghost The Musical (photo by Shawn Ebsworth Barnes) |
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| Raul Esparza (center) in Leap of Faith (photo by Joan Marcus) |
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| O'Hara and Broderick in Nice Work If You Can Get It (photo by Joan Marcus) |
April '12 Digital Week IV
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Saturday, 28 April 2012 10:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Birdsong
(PBS)
Sebastian Faulks' panoramic novel about the doomed relationship between a British soldier and married French woman during World War I becomes another sophisticated "Masterpiece" entry from PBS, but without the book's framing device, taking place 70 years after these events; that omission loses what made Faulks' story compelling and touching.
Still, this sumptuous production has fine lovers in Eddie Redmayne and Clemence Poesy, and the equally good Marie-Josee Croze as her sister. The nearly three-hour film's nude scenes aren't typical PBS fare, so if that's what you're after, by all means watch. The excellent-looking Blu-ray includes three making-of featurettes.
Camelot
(Warners)
One of the clunkiest movie musicals ever made, this three-hour behemoth of Lerner & Loewe's Broadway hit stars two unlikely stars: Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave, both out of their element as a singing Arthur and Lady Guenevere.
But their discomfort is the least of it: the movie's visual dullness (which the added clarity of Blu-ray accentuates even more) and L&L's routine songs drag the whole thing down. We do get to hear the prelude, entr'acte and end music, which is nice; extras include vintage featurettes.
Contraband
(Universal)
Mark Wahlberg has been in too many mediocre action movies like this tired chase flick about a retired smuggler roped into a last dangerous job to help his sad-sack brother-in-law. Unorthodox setting of a container ship at port notwithstanding, the movie's reduced to laughably "tense" scenes as when Marky Mark and a sidekick must close the container doors before they're spotted. Whew!
Kate Beckinsale is completely wasted as Mark's wife, while Giovanni Ribisi makes a standard-issue crook. The film looks decent on Blu-ray; extras include commentary, deleted scenes and making-of featurettes.
Dark Tide
(Lionsgate)
How the mighty have fallen: Oscar winner Halle Berry is reduced to this lukewarm Jaws rip-off about a shark expert who, after a colleague is killed by a great white on her watch, hangs up her flippers, then is talked into a last dangerous—but lucrative—dive.
Despite amazing underwater photography and shark footage (and Halle in a bikini top), John Stockwell's drama features characters whom you don't care if the get eaten. On Blu-ray, the ocean sequences positively glisten; no extras.
The Fields
(Breaking Glass)
Writer Harrison Smith and directors Tom Mattera and David Mazzoni have made an unsettling thriller about a boy haunted by what may be lurking in the fields near his home.
With a wonderful performance by young Joshua Ormond in a deceptively difficult role, The Fields even has nuanced acting from Cloris Leachman (grandmother) and even Tara Reid (mother). The genuinely creepy movie—nothing is overdone—works even better on hi-def; extras include on-set featurettes, footage and interviews.
The Red House
(HD Cinema Classics)
Delmer Daves—a proficient director of entertaining genre movies in the '40s and '50s like 3:10 to Yuma—made this decently acted, technically sound but forgettable thriller.
Edward G. Robinson is surprisingly subdued as a man leery of his daughter's new beau, but this abandoned-house-in-the-woods tale is too stale to be in any way absorbing. The 1947 B&W film looks good on Blu-ray; the lone extra is a commentary.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
(Acorn)
Alec Guinness' performance as George Smiley, Cold War spy extraordinaire, is unforgettable precisely due to its understatement (contrarily, in the current movie version Gary Oldman works too hard for it to be effortless). Watching John Irvin's six-hour masterpiece—which may be even better than John Le Carre's original novel—in hi-def is a treat.
While the 1979 British mini-series doesn't look appreciably better on Blu-ray, the format's added clarity fits the cerebral story. Included are the same extras as on the DVD (Irvin and LeCarre interviews, deleted scenes).
Titanic
(MPI)
Written by Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park and more recently Downton Abbey), this dutiful three-hour reenactment of the legendary ship's demise concentrates on how the boat's class system may have contributed to many needless deaths. The crowded cast, which comprises mainly character actors, features good work by Linus Roache and Maria Doyle Kennedy.
While far better than James Cameron's white whale, this four-part mini-series is not nearly as memorable as the 1958 classic A Night to Remember. The superior production design and special effects nearly jump off the screen on Blu-ray; extras are several featurettes and a commentary.
DVDs of the Week
Eclipse 32: Pearls of the Czech New Wave
(Criterion)
The six films in this essential box set are only the tip of a large iceberg making up the legendary if undervalued Czech New Wave cinema of the late '60s. Although the most famous title, Vera Chytilova's Daisies, is a dated curio easily surpassed by its maker's later films, the others are unimpeachably superlative.
The omnibus Pearls of the Deep combines humor and horror as only Soviet-era Eastern European cinema can, and the others must-watch features (Jan Nemec's A Report on the Party and Guests, Jiri Menzel's Capricious Summer, Jaromil Jires' The Joke, Evald Schorm's Return of the Prodigal Son) brilliantly explore the rigid Communist system with wit and bravery.
The Man on the Train
(Tribeca)
This unnecessary remake of Patrice Leconte's equally vapid crime drama with Johnny Hallyday and Jean Rochefort pairs a past-his-prime Donald Sutherland and U2 drummer Larry Mullen as a dying professor and a tough-guy bank robber who form an unlikely bond. Mullen provides an atmospheric score, which outclasses his acting.
Writer/director Mary McGuckian's low-key style is fatal for a film that has little in the way of surprises or nuance. The lone extra is a deleted scene.
Miss Bala and The Hidden Face
(Fox World Cinema)
These stylish Spanish-language thrillers approach their horrors in opposing ways. Gerardo Naranjo's Miss Bala thrusts its unwitting heroine—a beauty pageant contestant, no less—into the midst of Mexico's extreme gang-related violence, while Andi Baiz's The Hidden Face twists itself into a pretzel keeping a hoary cliché afloat for 95 minutes, when The Twilight Zone could have done it in a third of the time.
The women are each in her own way compelling: Stephanie Sigman in Miss Bala is especially one to watch.
Return
(e one)
Linda Cardellini's poignant portrayal of a wife and mother whose return home from Iraq is more disastrous than the time she spent there—she falls into boozing, neglecting her husband and kids, even sleeping with a Vietnam vet whom she feels a kinship with—is the main reason to see writer-director Liza Johnson's disjointed character study.
There's not much tragic thrust because Johnson is too coy about her protagonist's plight, but Cardellini and the supporting cast (Michael Shannon, John Slattery, Rosie Benton) provide enough dramatic fireworks. Extras include a director/cinematographer commentary and deleted scenes.
Stony Island
(Cinema Libre)
Sixteen years before his hit remake of The Fugitive in 1993, director Andrew Davis made this gritty if slight slice of life among denizens on Chicago's south side.
Despite a game cast—including a newcomer named Dennis Franz and lovely teenagers named Rae Dawn Chong and Susanna Hoffs, future Bangle and daughter of the movie's co-writer, Tamara Simon Hoffs—the movie meanders for 95 minutes and ends where it began: nowhere. Extras include a making-of retrospective and alternate ending.
Strange Fruit: The Beatles' Apple Records
(MVD)
Although the Beatles' Apple label has gotten plenty of ink in the 44 years since it was created (only to implode due to mismanagement a few years later), this informative two-plus hour documentary summarizes how its idealistic communism caused its demise.
Through interviews with journalists and artists from the label (including members of Badfinger, one of its bigger successes) and archival footage of young Apple artists like James Taylor and Mary Hopkin, this doc illuminates one of the Beatles' few failures.
CD of the Week
Peter Gabriel: Live Blood
(Real World)
When I saw Peter Gabriel on his 2010 orchestral tour, the concert's first half comprised cover songs from his album Scratch My Back, followed by a set of Gabriel's own songs. But the concerts recorded (in 2011) for this immaculate-sounding live CD feature an artist who heavily reduced the covers (only 4 of the original 12 are heard) and added more of his own songs, which is what most Gabriel fans want anyway.
His take on Lou Reed's "The Power of the Heart" is achingly personal, but new interpretations of his own classics like "Wallflower," "San Jacinto" and "Biko" are stunningly direct. The New Blood Orchestra, conducted by Ben Foster, sounds magnificent; Gabriel's own daughter Melanie sings beautifully with her father on "Mercy Street" and "Blood of Eden."
April '12 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 23 April 2012 10:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
America Revealed
Host Yul Kwon takes what initially seems a mash-up of themes about America in the 21st century--food, transportation, electricity, manufacturing--and, with the help of stunning aerial and HD photography, makes it compelling, necessary viewing.
The technological advances shown are staggering to see and contemplate; the four episodes’ extraordinary footage from coast to coast looks particularly amazing on Blu-ray. Twenty minutes of bonus footage is composed of a featurette for each episode.
St. Louis Cardinals third baseman David Freese’s dramatic HR in the bottom of the 11th to clinch last fall’s World Series in six games gave the team (and town) its second championship in six seasons.
Anyone who’s even remotely a Cardinals fan will want to pick this up to re-live that immediate classic again and again. Even if you watched the Series on your HDTV, be prepared for more astounding clarity on Blu-ray.
In her solid documentary about actress Charlotte Rampling, Angelina Maccarone employs an ingenious structure that avoids her movie becoming a mere career chronology: there are nine sections (with title cards like “Exposure” and “Love”), each with Rampling interacting with artist friends like author Paul Auster and photographer Peter Lindbergh, or her son, director Barnaby Southcombe.
Maccarone also intercuts excerpts from some of Rampling’s many films to further illustrate her themes. The movie comprises mainly interviews and film clips, so the Blu-ray transfer is adequate without being stunning.
“The earth is ending again, ho-hum”: my thought while watching Xavier Gens’ stylish but repetitive and fatally overlong apocalyptic nightmare.
Armageddon stereotypes are present and accounted for, and Gens relies on shock and mayhem, which fails, as witness the lovely final shots that seem out of another, more philosophically rich movie. But Gens isn’t Andrei Tarkovsky. The hi-def image, especially the darks and blacks, is first-rate; the lone extra is Gens’ and actors’ audio commentary.
Late Spring
(Criterion)One of Yasujiro Ozu’s greatest films is this moving but slyly amusing 1949 tale of a widower who decides that his only daughter should marry. Ozu’s masterly restraint, which remains his singular trademark, is complemented by the touchingly effortless performances by his regular stars Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara.
The first of Ozu’s timeless classics to arrive on Blu-ray has noticeable wear and tear, but since these were the best elements available, it’s a stunning-looking 63-year-old movie. Extras include NY Film Festival head Richard Pena’s commentary and 90-minute Tokyo-Ga, Wim Wenders' 1985 documentary paean to Ozu.
Robert Rodriguez has always made flying-by-the-seat-of-his-pants flicks, and this 1994 made-for-cable road movie is one of his least memorable. It doesn’t help that the blank David Arquette is the leading man, and Salma Hayek--gorgeous, as always--is nearly as wooden.
Even the action scenes and music interludes feel off, making this seem like Rodriguez’s most amateurish effort in a career littered with them. The movie receives a decent but unspectacular hi-def transfer; there’s a Rodriguez commentary and his 10-Minute Film School, both more fun than the movie.
Steve McQueen’s studied, stylized soap opera ruins the serious subject of sex addiction. A successful Wall Street dude jerks off at home and at work, hires hookers, picks up women at bars, and even hooks up for anonymous gay sex! But at least he’s a cultured pervert who enjoys Bach’s Goldberg Variations.
This hysterically unconvincing melodrama even burdens the poor guy with a needy sister who stays at his apartment and walks in on him while he’s masturbating in the bathroom. Shame, indeed! Michael Fassbinder and Carey Mulligan are excellent in a less than hard-hitting character study. A ravishing, dream-like Manhattan still looks that way on Blu-ray; extras are five inconsequential featurettes.
Being Elmo
Kevin Clash’s life story makes a fascinating documentary, and Constance Marks gets it right with her doc about how a kid from Baltimore who grew up loving puppets ended up rubbing shoulders with Jim Henson and turned the “Red Grover” into the most beloved Muppet.
There’s lots of vintage footage--who was around to record some of these things before Clash became famous?--and interviews that shows that, sometimes, good guys can finish first. Extras include additional footage, interviews and a Sundance Q&A.
In the mid-90s, lobbyist extraordinaire Jack Abramoff’s dealings lined his pockets and the coffers of friendly Republicans in Congress with millions in stolen cash. Bill Moyers and his team’s hard-hitting expose shines a light on this sordid story of corruption, showing once again how the Republican party has become synonymous with hypocrisy.
A bonus disc comprises Buying the War, an 83-minute expose of the Bush administration’s case for invading Iraq and the media’s complicity in it, along with interviews with historian Andrew J. Bacevich and Mother Jones magazine’s Kevin Drum and David Corn.
Structured as a real-life thriller, Edmon Roch’s documentary tells the bizarre story of the ingenious double agent whose adventures--including a network of fake agents throughout Europe--fooled the Germans into thinking D-Day would happen on a different day and at a different location.
Cleverly intercutting old spy movie footage with informative new interviews, Roch comes up aces. Extras include a half-hour interview with spy expert Nigel West and 27-minute WWII training film Sonic Deception.
Bruce Beresford’s beautifully realized adaptation of the classic Aussie novel by Henry Handel Richardson is among the underrated director’s very best films, a heartfelt yet humorous look at a young woman from the country (the magnificent Susannah Fowle) who refuses to become a proper Victorian lady.
Don McAlpine’s exquisite photography gleams in this new transfer; a wonderful bonus is an hour-long documentary about the making of the film, including interviews with Beresford, Fowle, McAlpine and others.
Director Jonathan Lee re-introduces an important figure in radical political history in this illuminating bio-doc of the unapologetic intellectual who might have been too brilliant for his--or any--time.
Hearing his espousal of ideas that made the likes of William F. Buckley squirm--and watching their priceless exchange on Buckley‘s Firing Line program about American education--is worth the price of admission in itself. Interviews with family, friends and colleagues illuminate a towering figure of the American left. Extras include a Lee interview, deleted scenes and readings of Goodman’s poetry.
The clandestine--and largely successful--war against the Nazis by the British spy agency SOE (Special Operations Executive) is rivetingly recounted in 13 episodes on four discs.
Among many others, there’s the group of heroic Norwegians who risked life and limb to destroy the building that was instrumental in developing an atomic bomb, there’s Hardy Amies, who later became a fashion designer following the war; there’s Polish super-agent Christine Granville, who came to bad end after surviving five dangerous war years; and there’s a French triple agent whose allegiance was continually called into question.
Debussy/Ravel: Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra
Hearing another recording of this trio of early 20th century masterworks--Debussy’s La Mer and Ravel’s La Mere l’Oye and La Valse--might be a yawn for listeners, since there are plenty of worthy discs out there already.
But these warhorses are also magnificent orchestral showcases, and conductor Myung-Whun Chung leads the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra in energetic performances. The strings might sound thin at times, but overall the players acquit themselves well enough to wonder why this 54-minute CD doesn’t include another piece that the ensemble could flex its muscles with.
