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Reviews
December '21 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 15 December 2021 22:49
- Written by Kevin Filipski
4K/UHD Releases of the Week
The Red Shoes
(Criterion Collection)
British directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger—who teamed on many memorable movies in the 1940s, from I Know Where I'm Going and A Matter of Life and Death to The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp—reached their peak with this gloriously tragic 1948 portrait of art and love…and one of the most ravishing color films ever made, thanks to the incomparable Jack Cardiff's cinematography. Criterion's new UHD upgrade comes from the 2009 restoration, which might give one pause: but the results are so spectacular that you may find yourself freeze-framing constantly while watching the film to savor the results.
Extras include a commentary; restoration demo with Martin Scorsese; the 2000 documentary, A Profile of ‘The Red Shoes’; an interview with Powell's widow, Thelma Schoonmaker; an audio recording of Jeremy Irons reading excerpts from the creators’ own novelization; and the featurette The ‘Red Shoes’ Sketches.
Damnation
(Arbelos Films)
Béla Tarr made several interesting pictures about Hungarian life under the Communist regime in the 1980s, but after discovering Profundity with his exasperating seven-hour Satantango, he became the Hungarian David Lean (whose best films were also the earlier, shorter ones).
Case in point: this glacially paced but magnificently photographed 1988 film about a depressive, in love with a married singer, whose machinations get her husband out of the way. Gábor Medvigy’s B&W photography—his first of three collaborations with Tarr—shimmers on Blu-ray; extras comprise new interviews with Tarr, composer Mihály Víg, and lead actor Miklós Székely B.
Angels with Dirty Faces
(Warner Archive)
One of the pivotal crime dramas of 1930s Hollywood, Michael Curtiz’ good guy-bad guy study of lifelong friends—Rocky Sullivan, who becomes a crime boss, and Jerry Connolly, who becomes a priest—pivots on a group of boys (played by the Dead End Kids) that might either become delinquent or law-abiding. James Cagney (Rocky) and Pat O’Brien (Father Connolly) give powerhouse portrayals; Ann Sheridan and Humphrey Bogart are nearly as good in support.
The gritty B&W images look splendid on Blu; extras are Warner Night at the Movies 1938, hosted by Leonard Maltin, with a newsreel, music short and cartoon; featurette Whaddya Say? Whaddya Say?; radio version with Cagney and O’Brien; and a commentary by film historian Dana Polan.
(Dark Sky Films)
Writers Phil Drinkwater and Tim Woodalland along with director Jacob Gentry’s intriguing idea—their protagonist finds hidden messages in the mysterious broadcast signals he discovers while working on videotapes, circa 1999—stays afloat for over an hour but it begins to unravel in its final third.
Gentry has learned the lessons well of paranoiac ’70s dramas from The Conversation to All the President’s Men, his own visual palette effectively if derivatively aping those washed-out visual palettes. There’s a fine hi-def transfer; lone extra is a commentary by Gentry and lead actor Harry Shum Jr.
Cry Macho
(Warner Bros)
Now a frail 91, Clint Eastwood keeps regularly churning out movies, but for every modest but effective entertainment like The Mule, there are less proficient items like The 15:17 to Paris, Richard Jewell and now Cry Macho, which stretches its barebones plot—a craggy old man does a favor for a longtime friend and goes to Mexico to retrieve the friend’s young son, encountering a few bumps in the road—as thinly as possible over 100 minutes.
Eastwood still has a nice laidback charm, but the rest of his movie is painfully amateurish. The film looks excellent on Blu; extras are two making-of featurettes.
(Warner Bros)
This animated series about a mad scientist and his grandson seems to have reached a new level of insanity during the pandemic, as its creators cram even more visual imagination and verbal zaniness into the mix than usual, which threatens viewers with overload. But the crude humor and eye-popping animation make granddad Rick and grandson Morty’s journeys to alternate realities an entertaining 10-episode trip.
The entire season looks colorfully dazzling on Blu-ray; extras include Fighting Gravity, a making-of feature; 10 Inside the Episode featurettes; and creator/crew interviews.
CD Release of the Week
In the Bleak Midwinter—Christmas Carols from King’s
(King’s College, Cambridge)
This lovely recording from the 2020 Christmas Eve service at King’s College in Cambridge, England, includes 19 holiday carols sung by the renowned Choir of King’s College, which celebrates the famous Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols each Christmas season, and was founded in 1441 by King Henry VI.
In addition to gorgeous renditions of familiar classics “O Come All Ye Faithful” and “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” there are also more specifically English carols—the ravishing “Sussex Carol,” arranged by Vaughan Williams, and two versions of the glorious “In the Bleak Midwinter”—all beautifully sung, of course.
Broadway Play Review—“Clyde’s” by Lynn Nottage
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 13 December 2021 00:49
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Clyde’s
Written by Lynn Nottage
Directed by Kate Whoriskey
Performances through January 16, 2022
Hayes Theatre, 240 West 44th Street, NYC
2st.com
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| Uzo Aduba and Ron Cephas Jones in Lynn Nottage's Clyde's |
Lynn Nottage’s plays demonstrate not only sympathy for her characters but also an ability to write about those usually not given a stage, so to speak, to address their hopes, dreams, aspirations and grievances. Her last play, the 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner Sweat, was an unflinching look at residents of Reading, Pennsylvania, where poverty was off the charts—unsurprisingly, Nottage never patronized nor condescended to these people.
The same obtains in her new play, Clyde’s, as Nottage again paints complicated portraits of characters usually ignored by most of us in our everyday lives. The setting is a run-down greasy spoon again in rural Pennsylvania, where Clyde, the imposing owner who never suffers fools, hires ex-convicts to work in her kitchen to make sandwiches for her trucker clientele wanting quick, cheap, tasty food.
Clyde (a fierce, funny Uzo Aduba) is relentless in keeping her employees on their toes and making what her revolving door of customers wants, even if they think it’ll ruin their carefully crafted creations. There’s energetic Letitia, who has a youngster at home and an untrustworthy ex; boisterous Rafael, who’s trying to stay off drugs and who has an (mostly) unrequited crush on Letitia; the new guy with the racist face tattoos, Jason, recently out of prison; and Montrellous, the veteran the others look up to, who keeps their spirits up by describing the perfect sandwiches he would make if he could.
Clyde’s often moves like a superior sitcom, with fast-talking, ever-quipping diner employees (the perfectly greasy set by Takeshi Kata gets an illuminating assist from Chirstopher Akerlund’s lighting). But in this seemingly thin setup, Nottage and ace director Kate Whoriskey provide a wealth of, observation, insight and drama that’s leavened by dollops of humor.
Everyone is individualized sufficiently, and the rest of the cast comes to the fore, led by Ron Cephas Jones as a marvelous Montrellous, a beguiling mixture of zen-master and elder statesman. Scarcely behind him are the robust performances by Kara Young (Letitia), Reza Salazar (Rafael) and Edmund Donovan (Jason), making Clyde’s a place—and a play—worth visiting.
December '21 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 08 December 2021 20:17
- Written by Kevin Filipski
In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week
Drive My Car
(Janus Films)
Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s latest film, richly novelistic in structure and texture, follows a theater actor and director planning a new staging of Uncle Vanya while dealing with the sudden death of his wife and the unexpected closeness between him and his young female driver while he’s in Hiroshima working on the play.
It’s too bad that Hamaguchi leans so hard on Chekhov, especially at the end, because letting Vanya do the heavy lifting takes away from the film’s own insights into and pertinent observations about these damaged but not destroyed characters. The parallels to Chekhov’s melancholy masterpiece are already there without pushing so hard to underline them.
(Magnolia)
Arthur Ashe, who became the first star black tennis player after winning the inaugural U.S. Open at Forest Hills in 1968, was the complete opposite of the brash, in-your-face Muhammad Ali with a cerebral, calm temperament.
Ashe’s career on and off the court and his too-short life as an important spokesman for civil rights (he died in 1993 of AIDS, from a tainted blood transfusion) is recounted intelligently by directors Rex Miller and Sam Pollard, who also use copious vintage tennis footage, Ashe’s own interviews over the years and new commentary by his widow, Jeanne, and other sports, media and political personalities.
France
(Kino Lorber)
For his latest provocation, French director Bruno Dumont pivots once again: after a couple of films about Joan of Arc as a young girl (including a musical) and two deadpan TV miniseries about aliens and unexplained killings, Dumont sets his sights on the media and celebrity in the form of a famous TV personality named (unsubtly, of course) France, who seemingly has everything—talent, popularity, beauty, a husband and son—but whose career and private life start spiraling after a minor car accident.
As France, Lea Seydoux has a radiant star presence; as France deals with adversity for the first time, Dumont smartly keeps Seydoux onscreen for pretty much all 133 minutes, helpfully obscuring some of the deficiencies in his writing and directing.
(Focus Features)
In spite of her best efforts, writer-director Nathalie Biancheri has made an utter mess of an intriguing premise about inmates of a clinic whose emotional fragility makes them believe they are animals in human bodies.
The film bounces back and forth between stark simplicity and florid expressionism, and such jarring tonal shifts do Biancheri’s vision no favors. There are fascinating physical performances by George MacKay as the eponymous protagonist and Lily-Rose Depp who, as Wildcat, is attracted to him. But the sequences of treatment by the institution’s head (an obvious Paddy Considine) are often risible, and Biancheri’s film never rises above a nice try, despite Michal Dymek’s luminous photography.
Blu-ray Releases of the Week
Malignant
(Warner Bros)
James Wan’s latest bonkers thriller conjures the most outlandish twist to explain the murders that the heroine—a young woman who’s a surviving twin and is terrorized by her imaginary childhood friend—believes she is imagining but that are actually happening.
For all its teeth-rattling (if predictable) jump-scares, Wan has made a rather wan—sorry!—horror flick whose inexplicable and, ultimately, laughable denouement might actually be the best advertisement for giving it a go. The film looks very good in hi-def; lone extra is a making-of featurette.
(Warner Archive)
In Nicholas Ray’s entertaining if generic gangster romance, Cyd Charisse plays a nightclub dancer (her two torrid dance scenes, the best parts of the film, were not helmed by Ray) who falls for a lawyer (Robert Taylor) trying to get away from the Chicago underworld.
The frenzied activity in clubs, saloons and private rooms is for the most part indifferently handled by Ray, leaving it up to Charisse and Taylor to make it all watchable, as their plan to escape runs into a brick wall in the form of mob boss Rico, played by Lee J. Cobb as an unhinged Al Capone-esque hood. The hi-def Technicolor transfer is a knockout.
CD Release of the Week
Florence Price—Symphony No. 3
(Naxos)
African-American composer Florence Price (1887-1953), whose music has happily been resurrected, has a trio of her most authoritative works from the Great Depression era on this recording, which maps her singular journey through Black America’s history and culture.
Ethiopia’s Shadow in America—a world premiere recording—vividly evokes the dispiriting shackles of slavery, while The Mississippi River suite uses spirituals like “Go Down, Moses” to starkly dramatize post-Reconstruction Black migration away from the South. And her Symphony No. 3 is a truly triumphant achievement, splendidly performed by the ORF Vienna radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by John Jeter.
Haunting & Beautiful Orchestration of the Juilliard Orchestra
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 06 December 2021 17:38
- Written by Jack Angstreich
At Alice Tully Hall on the evening of Monday, November 15th, I attended a rewarding concert given by the fine Juilliard Orchestra under the distinguished direction of a guest conductor, the eminent Antonio Pappano. The program opened memorably with the remarkable, rarely heard Ballade in A minor, Op.33, of the underrated 19th-century British composer—whose father was West African—Samuel-Coleridege-Taylor, which begins thrillingly before taking a more introspective—if exalted—turn followed by a highly dramatic interlude, succeeded by other compelling elaborations, and concluding on a triumphant note.
Nicholas Swensen then took the stage as the effective solo performer in a confident account of William Walton’s exceptional Viola Concerto, a work within the mainstream of musical modernism and that bears the influence of Paul Hindemith who premiered the piece as soloist. The initialAndante comodocontained numerous beautiful passages; the ensuingVivowas brisk, often breathless, while the Allegro served as a satisfying—indeed wonderful—and at times lyrical finale. The second half of the evening was devoted to an excellent rendition of Richard Strauss’s outstanding tone-poem,Ein Heldenleben,which achieved maybe its most glorious expression in the “Des Helden Gefährtin” section and concluded marvelously.
At the same venue and night the following week, I saw this ensemble in another splendid event, conducted by the celebrated American composer, John Adams, which opened with a well-executed reading of Three Movements, a characteristic opus by fellow minimalist, Steve Reich. The piece is somewhat austere—eschewing the lushness of many of the compositions of the parallel figure of Philip Glass—and is consistently propulsive even in the slower second movement. Notably, Reich was able to receive the audience’s acclaim in person.
Even better was Bela Bartok’s famous Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, which begins with an eerie Andante tranquillo that grows in power before diminishing in intensity. More dramatic was theAllegrothat followed, although its inspiration in Hungarian and other regional folk music is not obvious, while theAdagiowas also uncanny in effect, but the amazingAllegro moltofinale was most exciting of all.
Before the final work in the program, Adams received the Columbia University Distinguished Conducting Award. The evening concluded magnificently with a lovely realization of the fabulous First Symphony of Jean Sibelius. The opening movement was grand and stirring, its ardent Romanticism starkly contrasting with the first two works in the concert, and was succeeded by a gorgeous Andante. The Scherzo was vibrant, with a more subdued Trio section, while the extraordinary Finale (quasi una fantasia) featured some of the most haunting passages. I hope to attend more performances by these accomplished musicians in the coming year.
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