Kevin's May '11 Digital Week III

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Sunday, 22 May 2011 15:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week
Black Death
(Magnet)
Christopher Smith’s exploration of the plague that killed millions in medieval Europe certainly looks stylish, and its story of a town that’s somehow remained untouched by the black death is intriguing. Although more concerned with building an atmosphere filled with dread and parallels to modern religious zealotry, Black Death remains watchable thanks to the acting of Sean Bean, Eddie Redmayne and that fabulous Dutch actress Carice von Houten. This splendid recreation of a medieval world not far removed from our own looks terrific on Blu-ray; extras include behind-the-scenes footage and a making-of featurette.

Cougars Inc.
(Lionsgate)
It's unsurprising that this R-rated comedy is little more than a cruder American Pie knockoff. There are a few laughs scattered throughout this second-rate raunch-fest about a teenager who starts an escort service so he and his friends can satisfy an assortment of older women; but aside from Denise Richards’ hilariously unhinged portrayal of a horny MILF, the movie ends up distressingly tame when it should let itself go. Oh well. The good-looking cast looks even better on Blu-ray; extras include a commentary, deleted scene and Cougars 101 featurette.

Daydream Nation
(Anchor Bay)
Writer-director Mike Goldbach’s study of alienated but oh-so sarcastic teens is another routine post-Juno comedy where there’s never a moment where you believe that any of these people, from the high school kids to their parents to their teachers, are believable. But Goldbach was smart enough to cast in the lead Kat Dennings, who takes over the screen so completely and charismatically that you pretty much forget about the rest of the movie just to bask in her dazzling onscreen presence. Although the movie isn't visually compelling in any way, it certainly looks good on Blu-ray; the lone extra is a behind-the-scenes featurette.

Diabolique
(Criterion)
Don’t confuse Henri-Georges Clouzot’s razor-sharp, tense thriller from 1955 with the tepid remake, made 40 years later with Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani. Henri-Georges Clouzot's classic turns the screws so tightly telling its startlingly original tale of adultery, murder and double-crossing that ends with one of the most extraordinary twists in movie history. With excellent portrayals by Paul Meurisse as a hateful husband, Vera Clouzot (the director’s wife) as his sickly wife and Simone Signoret as his mistress, Diabolique casts an indelible spell. Criterion's Blu-ray includes a first-rate restored transfer; extras include a commentary and video introduction.

Mao’s Last Dancer
(Fox)
Bruce Beresford's supremely disappointing drama trivializes the extraordinary true story of the first Chinese ballet dancer to defect to the United States. The sequences showing  the young boy before leaving China are sweepingly epic; when he gets to the U.S., Beresford can’t overcome cliched melodramatics, and the director is further hampered by a hammy Bruce Greenwood as the head of the Houston Ballet, and wooden portrayals by Chi Cao in the title role and Amanda Schull as his first American wife. This visually impressive film is worth watching on Blu-ray, but beware: it’s a two-hour soap opera. The lone extra is a making-of featurette.

The Scent of Green Papaya
(Lorber)
Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung's 1995 debut feature introduced an expressive visual stylist: though it takes place in 1951 Saigon, the exquisite beauties of this scrupulously detailed world were created on a soundstage in Paris. While there’s a whiff of mere decorativeness at times, and keeping the characters at arm’s length does the film no favors, those flaws are not fatal: and when the film has been restored as well as this one has for its Blu-ray debut, then The Scent of Green Papaya in hi-def is a no-brainer. The lone extra is a behind-the-scenes featurette.

Something Wild
(Criterion)
Jonathan Demme’s comedy-turned-thriller flopped 25 years ago because audiences couldn’t deal with its shift from frivolity to shock. But Demme (helped by E. Max Frye's clever script) prepares the groundwork slowly but surely, and with knockout performances by Jeff Daniels, Melanie Griffith and Ray Liotta, Something Wild lives up to its title as a dizzying journey into the strangeness bubbling under the world of normalcy, doing it more subtly and intriguingly than Blue Velvet. Criterion’s Blu-ray transfer is superb, as always, but the lone extras are new Demme and Frye interviews—where’s the featurette on the bizarrely sublime music, for example?

The Twilight Zone: Complete Season 4
(Image)
All 18 episodes from the 1963 season of The Twilight Zone—in which Rod Serling’s brilliant sci-fi/horror series was stretched from 30 to 60 minutes—are included on this five-disc set. And if quality sometimes suffers by padding each episode to an hour, there are still enough highlights (In His Image, Miniature, Printer's Devil, The Bard) to make this set worth re-watching. Stars include Robert Duvall, Burgess Meredith, James Whitmore, Martin Balsam, and a young Burt Reynolds. Anyone who’s watched the series on TV will be happily surprised by the pristine condition of the episodes thanks to the hi-def upgrade; extras include audio commentaries, video interviews, radio broadcasts, isolated music tracks, promos, bloopers and even a TV ad for Genesee beer with Serling.

DVD of the Week
The Beautiful Person
(IFC)
Christoph Honore’s modern take on the classic French novel The Princess of Cleves by Mademoiselle de Chartes (whose short story The Princess of Montpensier became Bertrand Tavernier’s superlative new film) has sophistication and ennui in spades. This introspective drama takes the measure of a group of men wooing the same woman, with ultimately tragic results. Honore’s stylishly unkempt actors are led by Louis Garrel as a womanizing Italian teacher and Lea Seydoux as the object of every male's affection. La Belle Personne, the original French title, sounds more evocative than the blunt English translation.

CD of the Week
Philip Glass: Complete String Quartets
(Orange Mountain Music)
It’s not easy to play the compositions of Philip Glass—which, for better or worse, share a similar rhythmic texture—and make them sound like entirely distinct pieces, but the dynamic quartet Brooklyn Rider has done just that in this recording of Glass’s music for string quartet. The works vary in structure from the relatively short movements in the Suite from Bent and Quartets 2, 3 and 5 to the longer movements of Quartets 1 and 4. The members of Brooklyn Rider give such enthusiastic, committed performances that even a Glass skeptic might hear these works anew. Well, almost.

Theater Review: Dad-to-Be Blues in "Knickerbocker"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Saturday, 21 May 2011 05:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

 KnickerbockerWritten by Jonathan Marc Sherman
Directed by Pippin Parker
Starring Mia Barron, Alexander Chaplin, Bob Dishy, Christina Kirk, Drew Madland, Zak Orth, Ben Shenkman

In Jonathan Marc Sherman’s agreeably slight Knickerbocker, impending fatherhood haunts 40-year-old Jerry (Alexander Chaplin), whose anxiety contrasts with wife Pauline’s (Mia Barron) levelheadedness. The first of seven scenes introduces the couple, with Pauline three months into her pregnancy, showing them good-naturedly picking a name for their peach-sized unborn son.

Six more scenes follow in the six months counting down to the big day in October, all set in Jerry’s favorite restaurant in the neighborhood near the Public Theater. 

After Pauline’s first appearance (she returns in July and October), there’s his best friend, straight-shooting Melvin (Ben Shenkman); his former but still flirty girlfriend, Tara (Christina Kirk); his other best friend, unrepentant stoner Chester (Zak Orth); and his father, Raymond (Bob Dishy).

Knickerbocker is a series of vignettes, some funny, some not, but none probing all that deeply, thanks to Sherman’s labored dialogue. The best moments come during Jerry’s rather touching talk with his dad, which goes for sentiment instead of the easy laughs sprinkled throughout the rest of the play.

(Do we really need to hear Jerry and Tara discuss how his sperm tastes or her taking her shirt off at a Who concert, or Charles being happily oblivious to maturity or responsibility?)

It’s unfortunate that Sherman ends Knickerbocker with one final Jerry-Pauline scene the day before she enters the hospital for her C-section, because it spoils the gentle poignance of Jerry reminiscing with his father.

Mia Barron makes an engaging Pauline. Christina Kirk and Zak Orth overdo their admittedly caricatured parts. Ben Shenkman is a nicely restrained Melvin and Bob Dishy an amusingly flustered Raymond. Alexander Chaplin, the lone actor onstage for the entire play, amiably plays off the rest of the cast.

Pippin Parker’s efficient staging, which uses one semi-circular restaurant table for all the scenes, doesn’t solve a big sightline problem: the back of one performer’s head often faces certain members of the audience. (The titles that introduce each scene are also not visible to some viewers.) 

Knickerbocker, finally, has too few insights to compensate for its over-reliance on a quirkiness that first amuses then sags.

Knickerbocker
Public Theater
425 Lafayette Street
New York City
212-967-7555
publictheater.org
Opens May 19, 2011; closes May 29, 2011

For more by Kevin Filipski, go to The Flip Side blog at http://flipsidereviews.blogspot.com

Theater Review: "Flight" - A Staged Reading

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 19 May 2011 05:00

Written by Marion DS Dreyfus

Written by Jacqueline Wolf-Enrione
Directed by Peter Von Berg
Read by Tony Newfield, Elizabeth Keefe, Stephen Innocenzi, Michael Citriniti, Leslie Alexander, Sherry Skinker

Interweaving research, news history, fact-based hypotheses and conjecture, playwright Jackie Wolf-Enrione has created an entertaining, multivariate drama with great drafts of adventure, suspense, romance -- even dawning horror -- from the inexplicable explosion of an American aircraft in the mid-1990s. Flight 800 "exploded" for no discernible reason.

While opinions vary as to causology, the playwright has stitched together a plausible theoretical rationale that suggests malfeasance by government -- a reasonable option -- or foreign malign influence, an even more likely scenario.

Pilot error? Testing misadventure? Secret government experiments? Foreign influence? Terror misfire? Deliberate missile strike? We are taken along the ride of the doughty protagonist-reporter as she penetrates the baffles and barriers erected to keep John Q Public from discovering which of these caused the explosion.

Like a charged lift from a Tom Clancy novel, Wolf-Enrione peoples her script with a determined, incredibly persistent investigative journalist, sundry government functionaries, a host of witnesses and electrifying ‘ordinary people’ (pained parents, mourning children) who are, fortunately for audiences, cleverer and more articulate than average folks are. The script is a constant delight, witty repartée alternating with probing dialogue that advances the process of unpacking what looks to be a gigantic cover-up.

Where the artist picks up from the factual evidences available (all too fleetingly to the public-at-large), and adds her own strong military and journalistic suppositions, is aligned with the kind of story-making of All the President’s Men (1976), The Insider (1999) and similar ratiocinative entrées.

Wolf’s familiarity with military jargon, technical explosives and weaponry is impressive, handled with terse deftness by her dramatis personae, many of whom -- like Leon Panetta and others from that era to this -- are real government appointees of the past through to the present.

She also serves up a slim, useful romance to swing the audience acclimated to love pairings into narratives of this type -- first, realms of buddy commitment, and then love. But the focus is scarcely deflected beyond the emerging themes of whitewashing and cover-up on a dark, uncomfortably splashy level.

Ironically, with such tales becoming daily fodder, SEALS downing the terror mastermind in Abbottabad, and Christian ministers predicting the end of the world within the month from unpremeditated end-of-the-world "earthquakes," Wolf-Enrione is not bandying the fanciful or rhetorical.

We are quite likely being served similar unreconstructed schemes and ploys on a daily basis, the which might emerge into ‛transparency‛ only a decade or more hence. Or maybe never.

Wolf-Enrione has crafted a provocative, plausible and nagging theoretical device that reminds us never to sit back and just nod our heads in bovine acquiescence to events that strike us as peculiar, illogical, irrational or possibly dangerous. Even if some government flack mumbles on a stack of affidavits what he thinks we are liable to accept.

The scaffolding Wolf-Enrione builds upon, while not yet in its ultimate crystallization, is all too real. It is up to the viewer to discern and decide what he or she can see beyond the bureaucratic persiflage that cloaks so much of what citizens are perhaps entitled to.

Marion DS Dreyfus
©2011