Film Review: The Rite

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 09 March 2011 03:17

Written by Lloyd Carroll

Directed by: Mikael Håfström
Written by: Michael Petroni, Matt Baglio
Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Colin O’Donoghue, Ciaran Hinds, Toby Jones, Rutger Hauer, Alice Braga

One of the most famous film genres of the Seventies was devil-themed movies, with the most famous being 1973's The Exorcist. The popularity of The Exorcist and its sequels helped spawn the Chucky, Friday The 13th and Alien franchises. It has been awhile since we’ve had an old school exorcism film, so there is nothing wrong with trying to revive this horror genre. Unfortunately The Rite is a lousy film.

Michael Kovaks (Colin O’Donoghue) is a Chicago teen whose dad is a mortician (Rutger Hauer). He admits that he is not the most spiritual person in the world. But he applies for seminary school after receiving his high school diploma because, as he tells his best friend, “In my family you either become a priest or a mortician. I can graduate from seminary school and not take my final vows.”

He does well studying for the priesthood, but he resigns before committing to it -- much to the chagrin of his university mentor, Father Matthew (Toby Jones). Father Matthew informs Michael that the seminary has the right to change his scholarship to a student loan if he doesn’t become a priest. But Father Matthew says that out of frustration because he feels that Michael would be terrific at serving the church and the community.

Knowing his interest in psychology, Father Matthew tells Michael that the Vatican is offering a new program to train exorcists. Michael doesn’t believe in devil possession and thinks that those claiming demonic spirits in them are mentally disturbed. He is persuaded by Father Matthew’s key selling point, “What’s so bad about spending two months in Rome?”

While at the Vatican, one of Michael’s professors, Father Xavier (Ciaran Hinds), who has enjoyed debating with him about whether devils and demons do exist, sends him to an unorthodox priest, Father Lucas (Anthony Hopkins), who performs exorcisms. Father Lucas isn’t bothered by the fact that Michael has his doubts about what he does. “You remind me of myself at your age,” he tells him.

Father Lucas, who is also a medical doctor, takes Michael to two patients that he is treating. The first patient is a teenager who may have been raped by her father and speaks in foreign tongues, cursing at him even though she only knows Italian. The second is a young boy who has dreams that a mule is attacking him and actually has hoof marks all over his body.

As one can guess, eyeballs roll to the back of the patients’ heads and there is lots of screaming and yelling. The plot has little coherence. Things really get laughingly awful, however, in the final twenty minutes when Father Lucas is attacked by the devil and it is up to Michael to save the priest's soul. Hopkins, whose character is a model of equanimity throughout the film, suddenly becomes Hannibal Lechter. Of course, a film audience will always identify Anthony Hopkins in that role and the filmmakers may just be having some fun with that fact.

One bizarre and disturbing sequence is when Michael’s father invites his young son to watch him working on a beautiful corpse, which happens to be his mom. Whether this actually happened in his life or is just a nightmare is never explained. In either case it is gratuitous and disturbing.

Anthony Hopkins, even when he is mugging for the camera, is fun to watch. The lead role of Michael, is played by Irish actor Colin O’Donoghue, who is making his screen debut. O’Donoghue does a good job of mastering an American accent, but he seems ill at ease on the big screen. Of course even the best actors can’t do much with a terrible script.

If you waste good money on this film, please don’t blame the devil.

Theatre Review: Tennessee Williams' Milk Train

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 08 March 2011 22:43

Written by Lucy Komisar

The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
Written by Tennessee Williams
Directed by Michael Wilson
Sets by Jeff Cowie, Lighting by Rui Rita
Starring Olympia Dukakis, Maggie Lacey, Darren Pettie, Edward Hibbert, Elisa Bocanegra, Curtis Billings

The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore is Williams’ turgid Southern Gothic view of death

There’s a touch of the Southern Gothic in many of Tennessee Williams’ plays, and it is usually seasoning in a pungent stew about human relationships, desires, and failings. But The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore is overwhelmed by Southern Gothic until it becomes a potboiler, a parody of a melodrama. There are frequent sounds of sea gulls and a lot of turgid prose. Director Michael Wilson’s over-the-top staging seems to tell us it’s camp and not to take it seriously.

Flora Goforth (Olympia Dukakis), whom Williams burdens with a Dickensian name, was a showgirl whose first husband made her a millionaire. She proceeded to marry three others, but loved only the last, a young poet who, driving the red sports car she gave him, crashed and died on the Corniche from Monte Carlo.

Now in her sixties, still with her American southern accent, she lives near Naples in a villa atop a cliff on the Amalfi coast overlooking the sea. It’s 1962. She is dictating her memoirs, mostly about her lovers and social life among the international set, to Frances “Blackie” Black (Maggie Lacey), a rather prim and conventional young woman (from a good women’s college) whose husband recently died.  

Flora spends a lot of time in a nightdress lolling on a round bed under a skylight, frequently buzzing to summon Blackie to take notes. She is a woman who expects people to jump to her orders. She refuses to face up to her own mortality, though she takes morphine for her “neuralgia.” In fact, she is a paean to life, glorying in her past.

She is visited by a gay friend (Edward Hibbert), known as the Witch of Capri, a fey blonde fellow who seems overdressed for the island. However, he fits into the weird mood, although I could not figure out why he could not pronounce Capri (accent on the first syllable), while Flora could. The full costumed kabuki dance she puts on for him is a show stopper.

Into that somewhat bizarre scene comes a strange man, Christopher Flanders (Darren Pettie), age 39, who makes mobiles and supports himself by attaching himself to rich elderly ladies. (The kindness of strangers?) Given their ages and conditions, the women all die, which has given him the name “angel of death.” Yes, this play is unsubtly about death.

Chris has climbed up a goat path and breached a fence to trespass on the grounds. Flora directs him to a cottage, and you wonder what each has in store for the other.

She is challenged by Chris. Attempting to maintain control, she refuses to let him eat. She declares, “I give away nothing, I sell and I buy.” In fact, they both want to use each other. He will wait her out.

This production is saved by the extraordinary performance of Olympia Dukakis, whose portrayal of the garish, bullying, self-centered Flora Goforth takes fire and pulls you in until you feel part of the conflagration.

Pettie as Chris and Lacey as Blackie do their best to bring their characters to life, though they seem uncomfortable in the setting, which gets more surreal as the play goes on. Hibbert simpers too much.

This play was finished in 1963, the year Williams’ long-time lover died. It is almost a satire of the writer’s best works of the 1940s and 1950s, and has only historical interest.

The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
Roundabout Theatre Company
at Laura Pels Theatre
111 West 46th Street
New York City
(212) 719-1300
Opened January 30, 2011; closes April 10, 2011.

www.roundabouttheatre.org

For more by Lucy Komisar: http://thekomisarscoop.com.

Kevin's March '11 Digital Week I

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 08 March 2011 05:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week

Bambi
(Disney)
One of Walt Disney’s most celebrated animated classics, Bambi was made in 1942, but in its new and sparkling Blu-ray transfer, it looks like it’s from 2011. At a mere 70 minutes, Bambi also demonstrates how masterly Disney was at the economy of its storytelling, a far cry from the padded characters and sequences of today’s overrated computer cartoons, especially the Pixar movies that everyone loves.

The breathtaking simplicity of the tale, the animation and the use of music and sound is still remarkable nearly 70 years later. Extras include an introduction by Diane Disney Miller (Walt’s daughter), two deleted scenes, the deleted song “Twitterpated” (which would obviously have a different meaning today), Inside Walt’s Story Meetings and bonus features from the original DVD release.

Burlesque
(Fox)
I hate to use the word “disappointing” about Burlesque, but I admit I was hoping for something like Showgirls, a “so bad it’s good” flick. The dance rivalries in Burlesque, by contrast, are deadly dull, with Cher rotely playing Cher, Christina Aguilera showing basic competence as a performer, and the big musical set pieces resembling Christina’s videos on a loop.

There’s scenery-chewing by Alan Cumming and Peter Gallagher, while Kristen Bell and Julianne Hough barely register as rival dancers. Writer-director Steven Antin has neither distinguished nor embarrassed himself. On Blu-ray, the movie has a sheen that has its appeal; extras include a director’s commentary, alternate opening, blooper reel, complete song performances and five making-of featurettes.

Genius Within: Glenn Gould
(Lorber)
This revealing documentary of the mercurial Canadian pianist shows a man more complex than the usual “tortured artist” stereotype: he was a warm individual whose eccentricities eventually overtook him. The movie humanizes Glenn Gould through vintage footage in which, relaxed and chatty, he discusses his art near his beloved Ontario lake house, a quiet oasis to which he’d escape after grueling tours.

Cornelia Foss — wife of composer Lukas Foss—talks about how she fell in love with Gould, left Foss and moved to Toronto with her kids. Illuminating insights into Gould’s artistry — explaining his unorthodox technique or Leonard Bernstein telling how, even though he didn’t agree with Gould’s interpretation of a Brahms concerto, he’d conduct it anyway — reinforce the impression of Gould as a singular artist and forceful personality. The Blu-ray image is first-rate; extras include several deleted scenes and interview snippets.

Love and Other Drugs
(Fox)
This unsatisfying romantic drama gets its schizophrenia from director Ed Zwick fusing two seemingly incompatible storylines: one based on a book about a Viagra salesman, the other about a young man’s relationship with a woman who has early-onset Parkinson’s. Although Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal make a terrific twosome (and kudos to Hathaway for doing the unthinkable in a mainstream American movie: getting naked), their director hasn’t figured out the tone for his movie, veering from semi-slapstick (drug selling and early sex scenes) to near-tragedy.

There’s also the unfortunate presence of Josh Gadd in the Jack Black sidekick role; entirely out of place, Gadd seems another desperate move by Zwick to keep things “funny.” As always with Zwick, Love and Other Drugs has a slick look, which the Blu-ray transfer captures. Extras include deleted scenes, making-of footage and interviews with Zwick, Hathaway and Gyllenhaal.

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
(Disney)
Beloved anime director Hayao Miyazaki, who made his considerable name with such masterpieces as Spirited Away, Ponyo and Princess Mononoke, made Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind early in his career. Beautifully animated, as all his films are (and looking absolutely terrific on Blu-ray), Nausicaa also carries Miyazaki’s typically heartfelt environmental message inside of a strangely affecting tale about a post-nuclear war civilization.

There are many debts, both visually and story-wise, to Rene Laloux’s animated classic Fantastic Planet, a film that Miyazaki has said is among his biggest influences. Extras include the interactive featurette The World of Ghibli, original Japanese storyboards, the Behind the Microphone featurette and The Birth Story of Studio Ghibli featurette.

127 Hours
(Fox)
Overkill is the forte of Danny Boyle, Oscar-winning director of obnoxious Best Picture winner Slumdog Millionaire; he repeats his tricks telling hiker Aron Ralston’s incredible true story of amputating his own arm in a last-ditch effort to survive. Overdone split screens, grotesque close-ups, tilted camera angles, speeded-up motion, God’s-eye view shots, over-the-top sound effects and relentlessly swelling music underline Boyle’s misguided notion that this amazing tale needs goosing for its audience.

What saves it are the power of Ralston’s survival story and the intensely physical performance of James Franco, onscreen for nearly the entire movie, who makes Ralston a goofy, likable egoist to cheer on as he slices through his own nerves to save himself. The movie looks spectacular on Blu-ray, and extras include commentary by Boyle and others, deleted scenes and two futurities about Ralston’s story and Franco and Boyle on-set.

DVDs of the Week
Four Lions
(Magnolia)
A group of inept Jahidists based in London keeps failing at suicide-bomb martyrdom in this fitfully inspired but too often low-key satire. Reminiscent of In the Loop, which presented outrageous behavior among politicians deciding to go to war with Iraq as normal and hence worth our derisive laughter, Four Lions goes after terrorism with pointed humor that’s short-circuited by the story’s repetition and characters’ lack of differentiation. Director Chris Morris (who co-wrote the script with Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain) uses the same semi-documentary detachment that served In the Loop well, but with diminishing returns: by the end, the movie simply peters out. Substantial extras include behind-the-scenes footage, deleted scenes, background material and interviews.

Napoleon & Love, The Norman Conquests
(Acorn Media)
These two excellent titles are the latest in Acorn Media’s valuable British TV catalog releases. Napoleon & Love is an entertaining 1974 mini-series starring Ian Holm as the legendary emperor and Billie Whitelaw as Josephine; for eight hours we are privy to Napoleon’s machinations away from the battlefields with which he gained infamy, instead concentrating on his bedroom conquests.

The Norman Conquests, one of playwright Alan Ayckbourn’s grandest creations, comprises three separate full-length plays about a wild weekend for three couples, each set in a different part of the house where it takes place. Although the TV version loses much of the specific settings that work so sublimely in the theater, Ayckbourn’s peerless wit and believably befuddled characters, along with a superlative sextet of Tom Conti (as Norman), Richard Briers, Penelope Keith, Penelope Wilton, David Troughton and Fiona Walker, make this an hilarious and thoughtful five-hour epic about the human comedy.

CD of the Week
Walton: Balthazar’s Feast, Symphony No. 1
(LSO Live)
These blistering live recordings showcase the London Symphony Orchestra under conductor Sir Colin Davis performing two of William Walton’s greatest works. Hearing Walton’s First Symphony, one of the most inventive and propulsive of any century, not just the 20th, is always a treat: this 2005 performance is one of the best I have ever heard.

The symphony has been coupled with an equally mesmerizing 2008 performance of Belshazzar’s Feast, one of the towering choral masterworks of the past 100 years, with powerful contributions by the London Symphony Chorus and baritone Peter Coleman-Wright. This hybrid SACD, with its brilliantly crystal clear surround sound, can also be played on regular CD players.