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January '25 Digital Week I

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 09 January 2025 03:10; Written by Kevin Filipski

4K/UHD Release of the Week

Seven

(Warner Bros)

Although at times quite gruesome, David Fincher’s 1995 serial-killer classic remains an intelligent, witty and unsettling drama 30 years on, eschewing the crassness of many films of its genre. The plot hinges on two cops brushing up on their Dante and Milton to ferret out a “deadly sin” murderer, and Fincher’s impeccably stylish directing keeps things on track until the genuinely—and logically—creepy denouement.

The performances by Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt are authentic and stabilizing, while Kevin Spacey enters in the last act and provides his customarily brilliant portrayal as the killer. Darius Khondji’s spectacularly moody cinematography looks superb in the UHD transfer; extras include four commentaries, deleted scenes, alternate endings and several featurettes.

In-Theater Releases of the Week

The Brutalist

(A24)

In Brady Corbet’s would-be American epic about a Jewish Hungarian architect who emigrates to the U.S. after surviving Dachau, the hero is named László Tóth—which has to be some kind of in-joke, since it’s also the name of the Hungarian geologist who took a hammer to Michelangelo’s Pieta in 1972—and he is put through physical and emotional ringers that leave him as scarred as what he endured in Europe. Corbet and Mona Fastvold’s script is crammed with big gestures, little subtlety and empty platitudes, but Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley’s trusty camera dresses up the outsized dramatic ambition in gorgeous images, albeit often hackneyed or borrowed from better filmmakers.

As Laszlo, Adrien Brody gives a towering performance, and he is sensitively supported by Felicity Jones as his physically frail wife Elszabet. But poor Guy Pearce, who starts out hammily amusing as the antagonist, millionaire Harrison Lee Van Buren, is saddled with the most ludicrous dialogue and character arc, and he wears out his welcome long before the film ends with a ridiculously unnecessary epilogue that risibly sums up the preceding 3-1/2 hours—including intermission.

The Damned

(Vertical)

Director Thordur Palsson’s brooding, slowburn horror film fashions many familiar tropes—isolation, darkness, xenophobia, madness—and into a stew that’s distinctly unnerving but not fully cooked. Set during winter in a cutoff Arctic outpost, the drama builds around a self-sufficient settlement that must deal with the moral issues of intervening when a ship sinks off the coast, knowing there aren’t enough foodstuffs to supply survivors.

While enacted intensely by a cast led by Odessa Young as a widow, Palsson’s film never takes off, leading to a pseudo-Twilight Zone twist ending to cover up its shortcomings.

Hard Truths

(Bleecker Street)

Mike Leigh has been making semi-improvised contemporary character studies for decades but, with a few exceptions (High Hopes, Life Is Sweet), I prefer his historical epics like Topsy Turvy, Mr. Turner and Peterloo. His latest is a disappointingly shallow study of Pansy, a middle-aged wife and mother whose anger—at her husband, son, family members, even store employees and customers—masks deeper psychological issues.

Leigh and actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s second collaboration gets the particulars right but plausibility in characterization and relationships goes out the window whenever Pansy starts yelling…and yelling. The best scene, between Pansy and her loving but exasperated sister Chantelle (a pitch-perfect Michele Austin) at their mother’s gravesite, works beautifully because it is so understated. Too bad Leigh couldn’t maintain that restraint for the rest of the film.

The Last Republican

(MCDC)

Adam Kinzinger, a Republican congressman who voted with Trump 90 percent of the time while both were in office, was lauded by right-thinking people when he joined the January 6 committee and voted for Trump’s impeachment in 2021. Steve Pink’s chummy documentary portrait further humanizes Kinzinger as he and his wife go through her pregnancy while he’s preparing to leave office in 2023 after being primaried by a vengeful Trumpian party.

Pink gives us a sense of how otherwise unbridgeable differences between Kinzinger and, say, Liz Cheney on one side and Democrats on the other are closed by a need to save democracy. But despite such good vibes, we all know how it turned out: Trump is back, and things look worse than ever. So who really won?

Nickel Boys

(Amazon MGM)

Colson Whitehead’s absorbing novel about two Black boys, Elwood and Turner, who met and bonded at a racist Florida boarding school in the early ‘60s has been made into a frustratingly diffuse film by first-time feature director RaMell Ross, who obviously struggled to come up with a visual equivalent to the book’s omniscient narrator and second half plot twist. Using the camera for the pair’s POV works in theory but not dramatically, as it keeps us at a remove from the characters; it also cheats, since camera movements are not the same as a person’s real POV and so several scenes, especially those that are intimate or shocking, play out choppily. When he cuts to one of the boys, now an adult and living in New York City, Ross uses an even more tortured form of POV in a desperate attempt to hide the twist’s inevitable shock.

There are moments of power and emotion, and Ross brings his documentary skills to the fore in the final montages that juxtapose actual history with Elwood and Turner’s lives. Ethan Herisse (Elwood) and Brandon Wilson (Turner) are rarely onscreen, while others—like Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Hattie, Elwood’s beloved grandmother—play to the camera in an unnatural way, something that prods Hamish Linklater to give a cartoonish portrayal of the school’s corrupt and racist administrator.

Czech Philharmonic Performs Dvořák

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Monday, 06 January 2025 14:20; Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Jennifer Taylor

At Stern Auditorium on the night of Tuesday, December 3rd, I had the exceptional pleasure to attend a superb concert presented by Carnegie Hall, featuring the Czech Philharmonic, which was expertly led by its Chief Conductor and Music Director, Semyon Bychkov.

The event started unforgettably with a mesmerizing rendition of Antonín Dvořák’s extraordinary, very beautiful Cello Concerto in B Minor, Op. 104, brilliantly played by the incomparable and renowned Yo-Yo Ma as soloist. In excellent notes for this program, Jack Sullivan provides some useful background on the work:

Though the Cello Concerto contains no explicitly American program, it was written in New York in 1894–1895 and influenced by another New World European: Irish-born Victor Herbert, whose Cello Concerto No. 2 moved Dvořák to try a cello concerto of his own.

Cellist Alwin Schroeder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra assisted Dvořák with the technical aspects of writing a cello concerto; he had further help back in Prague from cellist Hanuš Wihan, who had been pressing Dvořák for a concerto for some time. Indeed, Wihan became too helpful, first editing the cello part, then adding music of his own, until Dvořák finally had to intervene and insist to his publisher that they print the concerto “as I have written it.”

The genesis of the concerto was direct, the composition swift. Dvořák heard Herbert’s concerto at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic and was so moved that he rushed backstage and embraced the composer, after which he wrote his own Cello Concerto in only three months. It is not surprising that he would be so taken with Herbert’s piece. Like Dvořák, Herbert was a European composer with a seemingly inexhaustible melodic gift who loved American culture. His famous operettas were still before him, but he had already composed the orchestral work The Vision of Columbus (later the finale of the Columbus Suite) the year before, his counterpart to Dvořák’s cantata, The American Flag.

Johannes Brahms, a major inspiration for the composer, on encountering the piece said, “Why on earth didn’t I know that a person could write a violoncello concerto like this? If I had only known, I would have written one long ago.”

The initial, Allegro movement—which concludes triumphantly—opens somewhat solemnly, or at least seriously, then quickly becomes dramatic; the lovely second subject—for horn—is song-like and recalls the melodies of American folk music, while the cello line is often virtuosic, although with numerous, more meditative, lyrical interludes. About the magnificent second movement, marked Adagioma non troppo, theannotator comments:

The middle section was written as a musical love letter to Dvořák’s sister-in-law, Josefina Kaunitzova—the secret love of his life—who sent him a letter describing her rapidly disintegrating health just before he began the movement. As a tribute to her, he quoted one of her favorite melodies, “Kéž duch můj sám” (“Leave me alone”), the first of his Four Songs, Op. 82.

Somber and even more lyrical in inspiration than the first movement—and it too has an American sound—it has portentous moments and acquires a considerable intensity, but there are graceful passages as well; it closes quietly and delicately and drew applause. About the last, Allegro moderato movement, the composer explained in a note to his publisher:

The finale closes gradually, diminuendo—like a breath—with reminiscences of the first and second movements; the solo dies away to a pianissimo, then there is a crescendo, and the last measures are taken up by orchestra, ending stormily. That was my idea and from it I cannot recede.

The movement begins suspensefully and then becomes more spirited and affirmative—it is very exciting for most of its length—and it ends dynamically. Exceedingly enthusiastic applause elicited a couple of bewitching encores from the cellist: the traditional "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen" and Dvořák’s "Goin' Home" (after the Largo from his Symphony No. 9, "From the New World,” arranged by Fisher).

The second half of the evening was at least equally remarkable: a sterling realization of the first three works of Bedřich Smetana’s marvelous Má vlast. About these, Sullivancomments:

The six tone poems were originally meant to be separate pieces, but they are frequently performed as a single unit or as excerpts. Smetana began them as he was losing his hearing (like Beethoven, he was unable to hear his final works); they premiered separately between 1875 and 1880, and the entire work was presented in 1882 in Prague.

The first selection, Vyšerad, depicts the castle of that name and has an almost celestial quality at its outset; it then becomes more stirring and, after more agitated episodes, it finishes serenely. The next tone poem, the glorious Vltava, which has an immortal theme andis the most celebrated, is more commonly presented under the title, Die Moldau. The composer summarized its programme as follows:

The composition describes the course of the Vltava, starting from the two small springs, the Studená and Teplá Vltava, to the unification of both streams into a single current, the course of the Vltava through woods and meadows, through landscapes where a farmer’s wedding is celebrated, the round dance of the mermaids in the night’s moonshine: On the nearby rocks loom proud castles, palaces, and ruins aloft. The Vltava swirls into the St. John’s Rapids, then it widens and flows toward Prague, past the Vyšehrad, and then majestically vanishes into the distance, ending at the Elbe.

The piece has a wonderful, more dance-like, central section and much pretty scene-painting, sometimes of a pastoral character, as well as a turbulent episode presumably portraying the rapids; it finishes forcefully.

About the final selection, Šárka, Sullivan says that it “depicts the female warrior of the same name in the Czech legend The Maidens’ War, the violent story of a war between men and women.” Smetana’s encapsulated its narrative thus:

Šárka ties herself to a tree as bait and waits to be saved by the princely knight Ctirad, deceiving him into believing that she is an unwilling captive of the rebelling women. Once released by Ctirad, who has fallen in love with her, Šárka serves him and his comrades with drugged mead, and once they have fallen asleep, she sounds a hunting horn: an agreed signal to the other women. The story ends with the warrior maidens murdering the sleeping men.

It begins tumultuously with a somewhat propulsive rhythm but with lyrical passages; the music then becomes jubilant and ultimately breathless and melodramatic, concluding abruptly. A standing ovation drew forth two more, marvelous encores, both Slavonic Dances by Dvořák: the C Major, Op. 46, No. 1 and the E Minor, Op. 72, No. 2.

Broadway Play Review—“Eureka Day” with Bill Irwin and Amber Gray

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Monday, 06 January 2025 04:20; Written by Kevin Filipski

Eureka Day

Written by Jonathan Spector

Directed by Anna D. Shapiro

Through February 2, 2025

Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47th Street, New York, NY

manhattantheatreclub.com

The cast of Eureka Day (photo: Jeremy Daniel)

Homing in on California antivax parents isn’t Swiftian satire, Jonathan Spector’s play Eureka Day proves despite moments of inspired hilarity.

The setting is the Eureka Day private school in Berkeley, where the school board is dealing with a student’s case of the mumps. The meeting is led by the 60ish Don and includes 30ish parents Eli and Meiko—who are having an affair they think is masked by their children’s playdates—along with longtime board member Suzanne and the newest member, Carina, whose son attends the school.

As the group’s discussions start civilly but turn more argumentative, Spector raises the specter of ultraliberal parents acting selfishly under the guise of “protecting the kids” as well as dangling the threat of fascism due to stringent school rules. While funny, the play often resorts to obviousness, underlined in its most celebrated scene, an online town hall meeting in which the board members—and especially the bumbling Don—try but fail to preserve decorum as comments from parents keep popping up, exploding from mild disagreement to nastiness and conspiracy theories, even dropping the “n” word (Nazi) amid pointing out others’ ignorance.

In Anna D. Shapiro’s lively production, set on Todd Rosenthal’s skillfully decorated school library set, we read the comments scrolling by on a large screen above the five board members, who talk among themselves. It’s certainly amusing, like a decent Saturday Night Live sketch, but goes on too long as Spector tries to one up himself to diminishing returns. (Audiences don’t agree—they were practically falling out of their seats, as if the ushers had passed out laughing gas.) It also points up the fact that these five characters are bland stereotypes who literally fade into the background during this sequence.

A couple of scenes do help humanize them. The first has Eli and Meiko at his son’s hospital room after contracting a severe case of the mumps, likely from Meiko’s daughter, which lays bare the adults’ tangled relationship, as when Meiko shows Eli texts his wife sent her: the word “whore,” over and over. (“She probably just like cut and pasted,” he weakly retorts.) In the second, Suzanne tells Carina about a long-ago family tragedy that forever colored her view of vaccines. It’s a commendable attempt by Spector to give Suzanne—fast becoming the play’s villain—a reason for her rejection of science, but it comes off as too neat and pat.

Shapiro’s savvy direction couches the increasingly surreal lunacy over vaccines in a much needed reality, and she stages Spector’s final, easy jokes—one visual, one verbal—with an economy that helps them land effectively. Too bad the overacting of Bill Irwin (Don), Thomas Middleditch (Eli) and especially Jessica Hecht (Suzanne) undermines the jokes, although it’s always fun seeing Irwin’s physical adroitness get a laugh when Don hesitantly follows Meiko after she storms out of a meeting.

Happily, Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz (Meiko) and especially Amber Gray (Carina) give focused, grounded performances that serve the comedy instead of themselves, keeping Eureka Day afloat.

December '24 Digital Week III

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Tuesday, 31 December 2024 18:05; Written by Kevin Filipski

CD Releases of the Week

Jon Batiste—Beethoven Blues

(Verve/Interscope)

For his latest release, Jon Batiste utilizes his prodigious talent for improvisation with an album filled with mostly short piano pieces that take as their start various works by Beethoven, from the piano sonatas to the mighty symphonies (5, 7 and 9, of course). Batiste takes the seeds of Beethoven’s melodies and over the course of several minutes transforms them through his own unique stylings—as Batiste says in his liner note, Beethoven would have been playing the blues if that was a genre 200 years ago.

The disc’s closing work, Für Elise—Reverie—15 imaginative and always invigorating minutes—is a master class of improv that reminds me of Batiste’s 2022 Carnegie Hall concert I attended where he played exhilarating piano improvisations for 90 thrilling minutes.

Ludwig van Beethoven—The Piano Concertos

(ECM New Series)

In the increasingly crowded pool of complete Beethoven piano concerto recordings, German pianist and conductor Alexander Lonquich dives right in by doing double duty at the keyboard and on the podium, leading the Munich Chamber Orchestra in an impressive traversal of the most imposing concerto cycles ever composed.

In addition to the sensitive orchestral accompaniment, Lonquich also displays his pianistic eloquence throughout, most memorably in the second and fifth (“Emperor”) concertos, which sound urgent and immediate in these fresh-sounding performances.

Benjamin Britten—The Prince of the Pagodas

(Hallé)

Benjamin Britten’s lone full-length ballet score was commissioned by the Royal Ballet and premiered in 1962; it might be the only ballet inspired by both King Lear and Beauty and the Beast in its story of an Asian ruler who gives his kingdom to his bad daughter instead of the good one, with typically unsurprising results.

Britten’s score is endlessly inventive, especially in the use of the Balinese gamelan, an instrument that provides authentic Eastern flavor. This first-rate recording, by the Hallé orchestra, is under the steady baton of conductor Kahchun Wong.

Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra—Contemporary Landscapes

(Beau Fleuve)

JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra (BPO) give more proof—if any were needed—that they are one of the most versatile orchestral ensembles around; this disc’s four premieres, all written in the past five years, were commissioned by the BPO.

The wide-ranging works are Kenneth Fuchs’ Point of Tranquility (2020), inspired by a Morris Louis painting; Russell Platt’s Symphony in Three Movements (2019-20), dedicated to artist Clyfford Still, many of whose works are in the Buffalo AKG Museum; Randall Svane’s Oboe Concerto (2023), featuring the BPO’s excellent principal oboist Henry Ward; and Wang Jie’s The Winter That United Us (2022), which celebrates the city of Buffalo. They’re all performed with authority by Falletta and the orchestra.

Simone Dinnerstein—The Eye Is the First Circle

(Supertrain)

For her latest scintillating solo disc, Simone Dinnerstein tackles a true Everest of the piano repertoire, Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata—45 minutes of impressionistic portraits of four towering American thinkers (Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau)—in her usual inimitable fashion.

The sonata was recorded in 2021 as part of an installation that paired her father Simon’s painting (reproduced in the disc’s jacket) with the music, as Dinnerstein plays with intense concentration throughout, giving Ives’ remarkably dichotomic work clarity and coherence.

Reviews

January '25 Digital Week I

Czech Philharmonic Performs Dvořák

Broadway Play Review—“Eureka Day” with Bill Irwin and Amber Gray

December '24 Digital Week III

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