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Reviews
September '19 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 10 September 2019 22:16
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Fists in the Pocket
(Criterion Collection)
Marco Bellocchio’s remarkable and shocking 1965 debut is a fascinatingly repellent study of one of the most dysfunctional families ever presented onscreen. Lou Castel, who chillingly plays the epileptic son of a blind mother whom he loathes, and younger brother to an attractive sister, with whom he carries on an unconsummated, incestuous affair, leads the superb cast. Bellocchio makes the persuasive case that commitment to an ideal, even one as loathsomely anti-social as this young man has chosen, is preferable to sitting idly by.
Bellocchio has returned to that leftist theme and its endless variations of obsessive love affairs or relationships based on the abuse of power, and 50-plus years later is still Italy’s most fearless filmmaker. There’s a new hi-def transfer that makes piercingly clear the shades of gray in this B&W film; extras are 2005 interviews with Bellocchio, Castel, actress Paola Pitagora, editor Silvano Agosti, critic Tullio Kezich, and filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, and a new interview with scholar Stefano Albertini.
Darlin’
(Dark Sky)
“Insane” is too mild a description of this standalone sequel to The Woman about a wild young woman taken to a priest- and nun-run home to be “civilized” after a hospital stint; but when her equally batty, knife-wielding mother shows up, all bets are off.
Director-writer Pollyanna McIntosh, who appears as Mom in this demented if tidy horror entry, has conjured a finale in church that must be seen to be (dis)believed. Lauryn Canny gives a committed performance in the title role. The hi-def transfer is fine; extras are deleted scenes and a making-of featurette.
Echo in the Canyon
(Greenwich Entertainment)
Bob Dylan’s son Jakob—of Wallflowers semi-fame—made this intriguing if frustrating documentary revisiting Southern California’s mid-‘60s music scene by showing its relevance today: we see Jakob, Fiona Apple, Regina Spektor, Norah Jones and Moby record and perform the era’s songs in a tribute concert.
The problem is cutting back and forth between occasionally insightful interviews with Michelle Phillips, Crosby, Stills & Nash—Neil Young is quiet but plays a soaring guitar solo in the studio over the end credits—Roger McGuinn, Eric Clapton, Tom Petty and Ringo Starr and Jakob, et al, singing these touchstone tunes, limiting the scope. Either give us a concert film or a documentary. The Blu-ray’s problem—sound and video are first-rate, of course—is that there are no extras, no additional songs from the concert or additional interviews (it would have been nice to hear what else Petty—in his final recorded interview—had to say).
Jezebel
(Warner Archive)
Bette Davis chews the screen spectacularly in an Oscar-winning performance that dominates William Wyler’s melodramatic 1938 gothic romance as a headstrong Southern belle who vows revenge when her beau returns with a new wife after a year away. Jimmy Stewart is fairly stolid as her man, but Wyler is more interested in Davis’ tantrums anyway; there’s also a pretty grim sequence of yellow fever striking down a southern town, circa 1852.
Ernest Haller’s exquisite, Oscar-winning B&W photography looks splendid on Blu-ray; extras are historian Jeanne Berlinger’s commentary, retrospective featurette, and vintage musical short and cartoon.
Supernatural—Complete 14th Season
(Warner Bros)
Warner Bros. provided me with a free copy of this disc for review.
In what may be this long-running series’ craziest plot line yet, archangel Michael takes possession of Dean—who, along with his brother Sam, has been fighting supernatural beings and other monsters throughout the series’ entire run—which causes even more havoc, culminating with a vengeful God declaring the destruction of the world.
Despite the ludicrousness of the premise, there’s always been a tongue-in-cheek aspect that keeps it from completely cratering. It all look sumptuous on Blu; extras include Supernatural Homecoming: Exploring Episode 300; The Winchester Mythology: The Choices We Make; Supernatural: 2018 Comic-Con Panel; commentaries; deleted scenes; and a gag reel.
DVD of the Week
Montessori—Let the Child Be the Guide
(First Run)
In this beautifully photographed documentary, French father and filmmaker Alexandre Mourot—whose young daughter is enrolled in a local Montessori school—spends more than a year following children’s interactions in a Montessori classroom in order to dramatize founder Maria Montessori’s dictum, immortalized in this film’s title.
By showing these little students working and playing together without adult interference—which allows them to develop at their own pace, another Montessori motto—Mourot’s sublime film is revelatory about the world of children.
CD of the Week
Anne-Sophie Mutter/John Williams—Across the Stars
(Deutsche Grammophon)
This delightful disc of several John Williams film themes—several iconic, others less familiar—is performed by superstar violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, with Williams himself providing sensitive accompaniment leading the Recording Arts Orchestra of Los Angeles. Highlights are Mutter’s lovely renditions of “Nice to Be Around” from Cinderella Liberty (a 1973 romance with Marsha Mason and James Caan) and the theme from the 1995 remake of Sabrina (with Julia Ormond and Harrison Ford).
There are themes from Star Wars movies and Harry Potter, of course; more surprising is that only two Spielberg collaborations are here: The Adventures of Tintin (!) and Schindler’s List, whose sadly emotive theme Mutter plays with impassioned lyricism.
Broadway Review—Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” with Tom Hiddleston
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 06 September 2019 19:36
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Betrayal
Written by Harold Pinter; directed by Jamie Lloyd
Performances through December 8, 2019
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| Charlie Cox, Zawe Ashton and Tom Hiddleston in Betrayal (photo: Marc Brenner) |
Harold Pinter’s Betrayal charts the fallout of an affair between Jerry, a literary agent, and Emma, a gallery owner; Emma is married to Robert, a book publisher and Jerry’s best friend. Pinter’s gimmick is to start with the end: Jerry and Emma meet for a drink a couple of years after their liaison has finished, followed by Jerry and Robert discussing Emma’s assertion that she confessed the affair to Robert the previous evening. Robert says that’s wrong: she admitted it four years ago.
Betrayal then proceeds to dissect the relationships of Jerry, Emma and Robert (Jerry’s wife Judith has been conveniently omitted) as a trio and as two couples. But, as Pinter shows in the opening scenes, not everything said can be taken at face value: things are misremembered or lied about.
It’s too bad that Pinter doesn’t do much with either his reverse-chronology or the intriguing theme of the fallibility (or willful denial) of memory. Instead, Pinter treats his own characters rather contemptuously. Although they spend their time talking about novels and poetry (Yeats most obviously and, after several mentions, eye-rollingly), they are not real artists but only peripheral to them as agent, gallery owner and publisher. There’s even a supremely cynical moment where Pinter has Robert admit to Jerry at a wine-soaked lunch that he hates modern novels, even though it’s his financial bread and butter.
Pinter takes every opportunity to ridicule his characters, and the audience, armed with the knowledge of what’s to come, chortles smugly each time something happens that the threesome doesn’t know about. With such cheap tricks, Pinter is in effect canceling out his own work. Although he’d never be accused of sentiment—indeed, nastiness and cynicism pervade much of his oeuvre—the scene in Betrayal which we are waiting for (when Robert discovers Emma’s infidelities long before Jerry thought he did) is quite effective in Jamie Lloyd’s savvy staging, especially as enacted with sorrowful sympathy by Tom Hiddleston (Robert) and Zawe Ashton (Emma). (The most recent Broadway production, despite the star power of Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz, flubbed this and many other scenes.)
Those moments between the married couple—highlighted, at the performance I attended, by very real spittle draining from Hiddleston’s nose—are rare in Pinter’s oeuvre, since they make us feel for them, and that surprising tenderness makes what happens before and after less genuine.
Although he does not overdo the infamous Pinter pauses, Lloyd’s direction relies on Pinterish gimmicks. Some work quite handily, like having whoever is not in a scene to hover in the background of Soutra Gilmour’s starkly bare set. However, that is turned on its head dramatically in one scene as Hiddleston’s Robert is sitting in a chair as Charlie Cox’s Jerry and Ashton’s Emma get intimate near him. While this device has been done to death, Lloyd shrewdly uses it to hammer home the point that, in an affair, even when only two people are present, the third is, as it were, also there. (But, again, why is Judith left out? Most likely because a ménage à quatre is more unwieldy to dramatize than a ménage à trois.)
Another overused device, the stage turntable, helps to, throughout the intermissionless play’s 90-minute running time, slowly shift both the characters’ places in relation to one another and, by extension, their (and our) perspectives, with the helpful assistance, to be sure, of Jon Clark’s magisterial lighting.
Would that the unnecessary appearance of Emma and Robert’s young daughter, Charlotte, added something to what is, in the end (or the beginning), an attenuated and superficial drama. Despite all that, Hiddleston incisively depicts Robert’s fatuousness and Cox precisely portrays how Jerry is torn between his best friend and said friend’s wife, while a forceful Ashton makes Emma far more complex than Pinter’s script wants her to be.
Betrayal
Jacobs Theatre, 242 West 45th Street, New York, NY
betrayalonbroadway.com
September '19 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 04 September 2019 21:06
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice
(Criterion Collection)
As in most of his films, family disappointments are explored in this achingly exquisite 1952 drama by Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu (1903-63). As a marriage slowly but painfully ends, Ozu—with always estimable tact—spins gold out of what in lesser hands would be mere soap opera, and his formidable cast might even raise the heartbreak level even more.
Criterion’s hi-def transfer brings out the nuances in the finely-detailed B&W photography; extras are Ozu’s 1937 feature, What Did the Lady Forget?; scholar David Bordwell interview; and Daniel Raim’s new documentary, Ozu & Noda: Tateshina Diaries, on Ozu and screenwriter Kogo Noda’s collaboration.
Get Out Your Handkerchiefs
(Cohen Film Collection)
Bertrand Blier won the Oscar for 1978’s Best Foreign Film for this supposed satire, an aimless, coarse exploration of a frigid wife who can’t respond sexually to either her husband or the stud he brings on board—but a callow teenager does the trick.
Despite winning performances by Gerard Depardieu (husband), Carole Laure (wife) and Patrick Dewaere (stud), Blier’s attempt to shock the middle-class audiences out of their complacency—something he did to diminishing returns throughout his career—fails completely. There’s a fine new hi-def transfer; lone extra is an introduction by scholar Richard Pena.
Into the Badlands—Complete 3rd Season
(Lionsgate)
In the final season of this series about a post-apocalyptic civilization that has grown up in the gorgeously barren stretch of the eponymous Dakotas area—an admittedly spectacular backdrop—factions have brought war back, threatening to upend the precarious peace of the entire region.
The impressive martial-arts sequences notwithstanding, the series lurches from one mundane dramatic setup to another, finally arriving at an unsatisfying ending. The hi-def transfer is eye-popping, to say the least.
The Last Black Man in San Francisco
(Lionsgate)
An intensely personal collaboration between writer-director Joe Talbot and star Jimmy Fails, this stirring if occasionally didactic study follows Fails, a young man moving in to what he thinks is his own grandfather’s house in an historic San Francisco neighborhood, only to find that very little—even his relationships—is what it seems.
There’s a lot to admire about this labor of love, but the excessive length dissipates some of its strengths by film’s end. It is all beautifully done, however. There’s a transfixing hi-def transfer; extras are a commentary and making-of.
The Planets
(PBS)
The latest scientific discoveries about the solar system make up this engrossing multi-part Nova series that explores the origins and makeup of celestial bodies from Mercury to Pluto (no longer considered a planet, by the way).
As learned talking heads discuss the illuminating journeys of the space probes Voyager and New Horizons, the series’ exacting and detailed visualizations of the planets, asteroids, moons, etc. in orbit present a thorough if necessarily incomplete portrait of our little slice of the universe. The hi-def transfer is terrific.
Soundgarden—Live from the Artists’ Den
(UMe)
This 2013 PBS concert recording—never before released at its full 2 1/2-hour length—makes the case (if one was still needed) that Soundgarden was one of the best live bands on the planet: the pummeling rhythm section of drummer Matt Cameron and bassist Ben Shepherd anchored the whiplash and original guitar stylings of Kim Thayil and one of the most distinctive and powerful voices in rock, Chris Cornell (RIP).
Along with several hard-hitting songs from its excellent then-new (and, unfortunately, final) album King Animal, the band blasts through some of its greatest tunes, from “Fell on Black Days” to “Black Hole Sun.” Hi-def audio and video are first-rate; extras are interviews with all four band members.
The Witches
(Warner Archive)
Nicolas Roeg made this typically unsubtle 1990 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s novel about a coven of witches turning two boys into mice; helping greatly is Jim Henson’s creature shop, is the real star here: amid much mugging and grimacing by the cast (led by Angelica Huston, Brenda Blethyn, Bill Patterson, Mai Zetterling), the mice are wonderfully anthropomorphic and the witches’ transformations are simultaneously funny and scary.
Like many Roeg films, it’s a mess, but there’s a welcome playfulness behind the usual nastiness. The Blu-ray has a sumptuous hi-def transfer.
DVDs of the Week
The Other Side of Everything
(Icarus Films)
Serbian director Mila Turajlić’s wry, revealing documentary centers around her mother, Srbijanka, an archivist-scholar-opponent of Slobodan Milošević’s oppressive post-Communist regime.
Srbijanka grew up in a home where her family was forced by the government to let strangers live in a couple of rooms: the apartment’s locked doors separating them from these tenants function as a metaphor for life in Serbia during several fractured decades, and Turajlić shines a necessary light on a tangled and traumatizing history.
Young Picasso—Exhibition on Screen
(Seventh Art Productions)
This informative 90-minute overview of Picasso’s early career follows the artist from his hometown of Malaga, Spain, to Barcelona, where he set up shop for a few of his late-teen years; and Paris, where he began to be noticed in the early 1900s as a precocious talent of budding genius.
Conveniently, all three cities have a Picasso Museum, from which many of the paintings displayed in the film come, and the various gallery curators contribute pithy commentary.
CD of the Week
Natasha Paremski—Mussorgsky and Hersch
(Steinway & Sons)
One of today’s most dazzling pianists, Natasha Paremski returns with another superb recording, this time a solo recital. First, she breathes magnificent new life into Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, a Russian warhorse if there ever was one. Her nimble playing makes us hear even the most familiar passages as if for the first time.
But Paremski can also make a new work—in this case, Fred Hersch’s virtuosic Tchaikovsky Variations, composed expressly for her—sound instantly, and intimately, familiar. Her ability to effortlessly juxtapose sensitive and fierce playing is a hallmark of her greatness at the keyboard.
Off-Broadway Review—Bess Wohl’s “Make Believe” with Samantha Mathis
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 29 August 2019 19:43
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Make Believe
Written by Bess Wohl; directed by Michael Greif
Performances through September 22, 2019
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| Susannah Flood and Samantha Mathis in Make Believe (photo: Joan Marcus) |
It’s the rare play that treats preteens with a real understanding. Bess Wohl’s Make Believe does just that—despite some faults, it’s a refreshing change to watch.
For the one-acter’s first half, Wohl introduces four siblings—12-year-old Chris, 10-year-old Kate, 7-year-old Addie and 5-year-old Carl—who return home from school one day, go up to the attic playroom and come to realize that their mother is not coming home. (Dad is on a business trip.) After the kids spend several days playing and getting on one another’s nerves—they don’t go to school, don’t answer the phone or the doorbell, and their only food comes in the occasional bags of groceries Chris brings home—they hear someone coming up the stairs.
Fast-forward 32 years. The next person through the playroom door is the adult Kate, dressed in black, nervously trying to find some time alone at what appears to be a post-funeral get-together. Soon Addie and Carl show up, but a different Chris is present—about half their age, he introduces himself as a co-worker (and lover) of their brother Chris.
The reason for the new Chris is soon explained, which Wohl uses to unpack the adults’ neuroses, directly caused by their childhood traumas. (Chris at one point says, with thickly-laden irony, “We are not even going to remember most of this stuff when we grow up.”) If Wohl and director Michael Greif underline the connections too obviously, Wohl’s writing is often incisive enough to look past such contrivances. Her dialogue has bite, the youngsters’ treatment of one another is grimace-inducing but truthful, and the resulting adult difficulties are plausibly presented.
That said, the play’s 80-minute length is both too much and not enough: the kids’ game-playing, running around covered in sheets as ghosts or listening to the answering machine through the floor (is the floor so paper-thin?), becomes repetitive. And the adults’ personalities are a bit too on the nose: Kate still wants to connect long-gone mommy, Addie unthinkingly fools around with new Chris in the attic playhouse and Carl—who imitated a dog at his older brother’s behest as a young boy—has now become a tech genius.
Happily, it’s for the most part smoothed over by the superlative acting, beginning with the four preteen performers (Ryan Foust, Harrison Fox, Maren Heary and Casey Hilton), all of whom are funny and ultimately touching. Equally thoughtful portrayals come from Samantha Mathis (Kate), Brad Heberlee (Carl) and Susannah Flood (Addie), who nails the emotional final moments, which culminate in an indelible adult-child embrace.
Special mention must be given to David Zinn, whose spectacularly detailed set encompasses so much childhood bric-a-brac that we could spend the entire performance rummaging through everything. Flaws notwithstanding, Make Believe makes a believable portrait of children—and the immature adults they become.
Make Believe
Second Stage Theater, 305 West 43rd Street, New York, NY
2st.com
