Film Review: How to Live Forever

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Friday, 06 May 2011 05:00

Written by Marion DS Dreyfus

How to Live Forever
Directed by Mark Wexler
Written by Mark Wexler and Robert DeMaio

With the new documentary How to Live Forever, director Mark Wexler examines what it takes to live a long and fulfilling life -- physically, mentally, and spiritually. The one-two punch experiences of the death of his painter-mother and the arrival of his AARP card were the seeds of his filmic research, in which he explored the most fundamental of human connections to life.

As a Southern California native, Mark’s natural instinct was to live longer and, as Botox, surfing and "Hollyweird" attests, younger. In this film, he embarks on a global trek to investigate what it means to grow old and what it could mean to really live "forever." But whose advice should he take?

Does 94-year-old exercise guru Jack LaLanne have all the answers, or does British Buster, a now-103-year-old grizzled, chain-smoking, ale-guzzling marathoner? What about futurist Ray Kurzweil, or 90-year-old sci-fi guru Ray Bradbury, a "laughter yoga" maven?

What about an unassuming 74-year-old New Age Japanese recent porn-stud celeb, who chuckles, "I‛ve made what I think are 200 films since I became a porn star." Amazing clips of some of his starring vehicles expand the average viewer’s mental apparatus on what constitutes the upper regions of sexuality. (He is part of the growing industry of older porn that is apparently taking the Far East by storm.

Wexler explores the viewpoints of piquantly unusual characters, alongside those of health, fitness, and life-extension experts in this engaging doc, which by the final credits challenges our notions of youth and aging with sometimes-dour if often comic poignancy.

Begun as a study in life-extension -- studying beauty contests for the AARP-aged, wandering to Las Vegas for connubial ceremonies for the first-time married octogenarian set, then to cryogenic facilities for preservation of bodies ($150,000 a year) and "neurologies" (heads alone, a bargain $80,000/year) until medicine finds a way to re-vivify these preserves in their jet-age stainless steel cylinders -- Live Forever evolves into a thought-provoking examination of what gives life meaning.

One amusing sequence has Wexler confronting pierced and tatted teens through flinty centenarians, "If you had a pill that extended your life 500 years, would you take it?" Shades of the new sci-fi film Limitless, which energetically explores a similar concept, except expanding the brain’s capabilities to its maximal level.

As many people say no to the 5-century-pill offer, interestingly, as say yes. Even the quite young think a beat, then often say that life gets its seasoning from being limited.

One couple in their 80s is asked. The husband immediately assents to the idea: "Sure!" He agrees -- lots of things to do, learn, experience. His wife looks on, unperturbed. At her turn, she answers, "Why would I want to stay married [to him] another 500 years? No, please!"

In addition to Jack LaLanne (a year before his recent death at 95) and futurologist Kurzweil, the film also features zesty interviews with writer Ray Bradbury, the still hysterical (in both senses) Phyllis Diller, newsman/interviewer Willard Scott, exercise doyenne Suzanne Somers, and writer Pico Iyer (a former colleague from when we both worked at Time).

One physician, a surgeon, is still practicing surgery daily at 94. (He doesn’t look it.) He shares the amusing nugget that he "doesn’t often tell colleagues how old [he] is." He’s thinking of leaving the office next year, but enjoys the camaraderie of the "superior people" he encounters in his field, and regrets having to stop work, when and if.

Clearly, Wexler finds elderly who are both sensate and compos mentis in addition to being up there in moon count. It’s no great shakes being older than the galaxy if you aren’t also full of the life that could make use of the increasing years.

He dismisses the claims of many in exotic climes who stake their ages to high triple digits because they offer no proof, and suggests they are motivated by competition, cultural tendrils and other aspects of society to claim older years than they are entitled to by the clock.

The people Wexler does find -- among them, a 122-year-old who seems unsurprised and unimpressed by the news she is the world’s oldest person -- offer a mix of advice for staying alive: From "Get yourself good parents and genes" to "Drink a coupla glasses of vodka, eat lots of chocolate and meat every day" and "smoke yourself a pack or two of fags" just to stay in the game.

Some gerontologists might disagree -- but then again, how many of them can offer competing digits along with their advice and bromides to the longest lived?

For more information, visit www.liveforevermovie.com.

Marion DS Dreyfus
©2011

Kevin's May '11 Digital Week I

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Friday, 06 May 2011 05:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week
Blow Out 
(Criterion)
Brian DePalma’s 1981 thriller about a movie sound man’s accidental recording of a presidential candidate’s death owes much to Blow-Up but lacks Antonioni’s elegant construction and subtlety. DePalma is all surface, and Blow Out has too many sophomoric recreations of cheesy slasher movies; that the final punch line is an unfunny joke at its heroine’s expense is typical of this director.

John Travolta is a charismatic hero and John Lithgow a properly creepy villain, but Nancy Allen is a poor femme fatale. Although DePalma’s usual visual slickness helps, the big car chase is as ludicrous as they come. As always, Criterion has given the film a loving hi-def upgrade; extras include new DePalma, Allen and Steadicam operator Garrett Brown interviews and DePalma’s 1967 experimental film, Murder a la Mod.

Glee Encore
(Fox)
If you’re a Gleek who can’t get enough of the hit TV show’s alternately tongue-in-cheek and painfully earnest cover versions of various pop songs, then this 77-minute compilation (with 35 song-and-dance routines) is definitely for you.

For those who find Glee mainly an irritant can treasure the enormous vocal gifts and stage presence of Lea Michele and Matthew Morrison, both Broadway veterans who can even make goofy renditions of “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” “Somebody to Love,” and various forgettable Journey and Madonna anthems momentarily pleasurable. The Blu-ray upgrade makes the show look sharper than before; there are no extras.

The Green Hornet
(Sony)

Michel Gondry’s big-screen take on the latest superhero has an appropriately silly attitude toward its subject, the least likely superhero imaginable, and Gondry has a skewed visual sense that doesn’t take itself too seriously either. But there’s a big “but”: Seth Rogen is an absolute disaster in the lead, a non-actor who thinks that snarling his dialogue makes him seem tough.

The supporting cast is on Gondry’s wavelength, but with such a black (green?) hole at the center, The Green Hornet doesn’t have much sting. Sony’s top-notch Blu-ray release has several extras: making-of featurettes, deleted scenes, a gag reel and Gondry’s commentary.

The Holy Mountain and El Topo
(Anchor Bay)
Cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s entire reputation is based on his 1989 Santa Sangre and these two films, from 1973 and 1970, respectively. In both, the director himself plays the strange anti-hero, first The Alchemist and then a gunslinger. Besides being bizarre dramas in their own right, these nearly inscrutable movies are also the ultimate head trips, with surreal sequences and symbolic imagery butting heads throughout.

Anchor Bay’s superb transfers give both movies an extra colorful “pop,” so even if you don’t know (or care) what the hell’s going on, you can still savor the outlandish visuals. Extras include Jodorowsky commentaries, interviews and deleted scenes.

Rabbit Hole
(LionsGate)
John Cameron Mitchell’s film of David Lindsay-Abaire’s overrated Pulitzer Prize-winning play about marrieds Becca and Howie coping with their son’s death consists of scenes like dumb bombs trained on single targets, exploding after making their point. Mitchell’s subdued sledgehammer direction uses soft lighting to make the movie look like an episode of “Army Wives” and slow motion after Becca’s flashback to the fatal accident.

Nicole Kidman’s somnambulant Becca pales next to Aaron Eckhart’s intense Howie, and the other actors—Dianne Wiest, Tammy Blanchard, Miles Teller and Sandra Oh—are given scant opportunity to become three-dimensional in a flimsy psychological study that makes a foolproof dramatic subject maudlin. While the hi-def image is excellent, the flimsy extras comprise Mitchell‘s commentary and two deleted scenes.

DVDs of the Week
Marwencol
(Cinema Guild)
Mark Hogancamp’s ingenious, self-administered therapy after a vicious beating left him in a coma has been documented by director Jeff Malmberg in a startling portrait of a man living two lives, both in Kingston, NY and Marwencol, the fictional Belgian town he recreated in his backyard. The movie asks a probably unanswerable question: which town is Hogancamp’s “reality”? 

Hogancamp might have been turned into a kind of freak by a filmmaker with less sympathy, so Malmberg must be commended for exhaustively recording the steps that to mark Hogancamp’s painful recovery process. With impressive journalistic evenhandedness, Marwencol the movie transforms Marwencol the fictional town into a multi-layered real-life adventure. Extras include featurettes and deleted scenes.

Stonewall Uprising
(PBS)
In this engrossing documentary, several of the participants in the seminal June 28, 1969 riot of gays at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, following systemic targeting by the police, recount the events that led to this breaking open of the dam of equal rights for homosexuals.

Directors Kate Davis and David Heilbroner include interviews with men who were in Manhattan to find an atmosphere more amenable to their lifestyle, only to discover that they were still considered lawbreakers (homosexuality was still illegal), along with then-city councilman Ed Koch, journalists and a retired detective. Interspersed with archival footage that places us front and center in that historic era, Stonewall Uprising is another informative chronicle from PBS’s American Experience.

20th Century with Mike Wallace: America at War
(Athena)
Taken from the 1995 “History Channel” series, this three-disc set collects reporter Mike Wallace’s incisive episodes about America’s involvement in 20th century wars, primarily Vietnam, which takes up all four episodes of disc one, with classic footage like Wallace’s own incursions into enemy territory and Morley Safer’s damning on-location shoot that showed uncaring U.S. soldiers ill-treating Vietcong civilians and interviews with U.S. officials and authors like Neil Sheehan, who wrote the ultimate Vietnam book A Bright Shining Lie.

The other two discs include episodes on Korea, the first Gulf War, women in the military, America‘s elite forces and military debacles. This set is a memorably evenhanded journalistic approach to how wars were waged and covered in an era when everything could be (and was) caught on film.

CDs of the Week
Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique/Cleopatre
(BIS)
Although we don’t need another recording of the Symphonie fantastique, there’s much to recommend this disc. First, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra alternates power and finesse under Yannick Nezet-Seguin’s sturdy baton, even making familiar passages like the final movement’s “Dies Irae” sound fresh.

Second, there’s another Berlioz work, the lyrical scene Cleopatre, 20 minutes of shimmering beauty sung by soprano Anna Caterina Antonacci. And third, it’s been released on a splendid-sounding Super Audio CD on the BIS label, which continues its commitment to first-rate audio in an age of MP3s.

Stockhausen: Piano Music
(Scandinavian Classics)
This re-release of a 1999 recording by a fine contemporary music interpreter, Hungarian pianist Elisabeth Klein (who died in 2004 at age 93!), spotlights the piano music of Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Although famous (or infamous) for his groundbreaking and demanding orchestral and stage works, Stockhausen also composed equally revelatory keyboard works, which Klein demonstrates in her strategically-chosen program, from the opening Tierkreis to two separate versions of the seminal Klavierstuck XI, one of which closes this epic recital.

Theater Review--Raging "Heart"

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 05 May 2011 05:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

The Normal Heart
Written by Larry Kramer
Starring John Benjamin Hickey, Joe Mantello, Ellen Barkin, Lee Pace, Jim Parsons, Patrick Breen, Luke Macfarlane, Mark Harelik, Richard Topol
Directed by Joel Grey and George C. Wolfe

Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, which premiered in 1985 (two years before President Reagan even said the word “AIDS”), has still-timely rage in every single line as it decries the various states of denial leading to the disease spreading so quickly and lethally.

The play’s nominal hero is Ned Weeks, a tireless if gratingly obnoxious advocate for gay rights, who tries to get the attention of the New York mayor (nameless, but obviously Ed Koch) and the local homosexual community in his effort to combat a new, fatal disease targeting gay men. Strident, standoffish and difficult to like or appreciate, Ned founds a new gay organization (based on Gay Men’s Health Crisis), remains distant from his straight lawyer brother, and falls in love with Felix Turner, a closeted New York Times fashion editor who soon comes down the disease.

By presenting Ned’s personal and professional strife in the context of the beginnings of a disease still killing people 30 years later, The Normal Heart personalizes a tragic true story that, unfortunately, so far needs re-telling. Kramer, always the provocateur, doesn’t mince words or pull punches when aiming at the willful ignorance of his fellow advocates, who cringe at the idea of telling other gay men that they can no longer have unprotected sex (or any sex at all, for that matter), or the institutionalized homophobia of The New York Times, which mentioned Legionnaire’s Disease and the Tylenol scare more often than AIDS in the disease’s early years.

Kramer also unflinchingly takes on the government and medical establishment, which treated the crisis with kid gloves until it was too late. In the character of polio-stricken, wheelchair-bound Dr. Emma Brookner, Kramer shows how desperately futile the fight was for individual doctors without any support from the Centers for Disease Control.

Even if Ned is a thinly-veiled autobiographical character, Kramer doesn’t put himself on a  pedestal. Although fighting the good fight against insurmountable odds from within (fellow gays) and without (everybody else), Ned is also a shrill, shameless self-promoter  unable to connect emotionally with anyone—at least until he meets Felix, which makes him even more inconsolable when his lover is fatally stricken. It’s the dovetailing of the personal and the political that gives Kramer’s play its heartbreaking power, its few instances of dated dialogue or shrill speechifying aside.

David Rockwell’s impressively minimalist set consists of white walls on which are inscribed quotes and factoids from the disease’s history, and occasionally—and all the more effectively for it—are projected the names of the victims as it progresses, until the intensely moving finale, when the walls of the theater are filled with scores of names. David Weiner’s lighting, David van Tieghem’s music and Martin Pakledinaz’s costumes persuasively give these events a specific time and place while remaining timeless.

Joel Grey and George C. Wolfe’s understated direction, which states Kramer’s case starkly and straightforwardly, shrewdly uses the production’s nine actors to haunt the later scenes when they‘re not performing, sitting and watching the increasingly emotional proceedings with the audience.

The redoubtable acting begins with Jim Parsons, Lee Pace, Patrick Breen, Mark Harelik,  Luke Macfarlane, Richard Topol and Wayne Alan Wilcox, all investing pivotal supporting roles with vivid humaneness. Ellen Barkin, by barking her lines, gives weight to the life-or-death pronouncements of Dr. Brookner, whose big scene—her excoriation of the CDC for playing politics—receives a prolonged ovation that’s been all too rare in my decades of play-going.

John Benjamin Hickey’s Felix is a beautifully shaded portrait of enormous warmth and empathy, and Felix’s wasting away from AIDS is magically pulled off by the actor without any obvious makeup or stage tricks: Hickey shows us the sad frailty of a dying man with a big heart. The superb Ned is Joe Mantello, a former actor who’s been collecting awards as a director for 15 years: he might not grab us by the throat as Raul Esparza so memorably did in the 2004 revival, but he does something equally valuable, making Ned more sympathetic by being less forceful and more physically fragile.

Mantello’s devastating performance is the beating heart of The Normal Heart.

The Normal Heart
Performances through July 10, 2011
Golden Theatre,  252 West 45th Street, New York, NY
thenormalheartbroadway.com

Photo: Mantello and Hickey in The Normal Heart (photo by Joan Marcus)