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February '21 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 17 February 2021 23:48
- Written by Kevin Filipski
VOD/Virtual Cinema Releases of the Week
Bacurau
(Kino Lorber)
As a follow-up to his strangely compelling if overlong 2016 drama Aquarius, Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho returns—with Juliano Dornelles co-writing and co-directing—for another strangely compelling if overlong film that gleefully jumps around among several genres for a bemusing but sometimes exhilarating mashup.
A small village, which has been erased from Google maps, sees all sorts of weird goings-on after the death of its nonagenarian matriarch, including a ludicrous band of foreign mercenaries and the appearance of flying saucers. Familiarity with Brazil’s current political situation isn’t necessary to enjoy this wild assemblage of often unrelated and absurdist sequences, even though—as Filho did in Aquarius—there’s so much stuffed into 135 minutes that after awhile, the dramatic and comedic returns become more and more meager.
(Screen Forward)
Svetlana Cvetko’s playful look at a menage a trois between an L.A. gal and two guys—one Italian and the other Iranian—is fine when concentrating on the trio’s unself-conscious and open sexuality, but when it digs at deeper truths (like a badly judged dragging-in of an actual terrorist attack), it founders.
Luckily, Cvetko—who also handles the sumptuous B&W photography—is greatly aided by her lead performers: Mattia Minasi, Neyssan Falahi and—most especially—the winning and gifted Cristina Rambaldi make us believe in this most unusual relationship.
The World to Come
(Bleecker Street)
Vanessa Kirby and Katherine Waterston are the main reasons to watch this slow-moving and fairly ordinary study of two women who fall in love on the 19th century American frontier in plain sight of their baffled husbands.
Director Mona Fastvold smartly concentrates on the women but never incisively explores their relationship. The sleepwalking acting of Casey Affleck and Christopher Abbott isn’t especially damaging but, despite Waterston's and Kirby’s persuasive and impassioned portrayals, the movie remains inert.
Baby Doll
(Warner Archive)
Tennessee Williams’ story of a 19-year-old virgin holding out on her frustrated husband until she turns 20 yet is succumbing to the charms of his rival right under hubby’s nose may have been shocking in 1956 (indeed, the Catholic Church condemned it) but today it’s simply a well-written, explosively acted and superbly directed (by Elia Kazan) exploration of the usual Williams characters.
Carroll Baker is revelatory as the title character and Karl Malden (husband) and Eli Wallach (other man) aren’t far behind; Boris Kaufman’s shimmering B&W cinematography looks especially enticing in Warner Archive’s sparkling new hi-def transfer. Lone extra is a short featurette including interviews with the actors.
Fidelio
(Unitel)
Beethoven’s lone opera, 1806’s Fidelio, a flawed masterpiece with crude dramatics but stirring music, was staged by Oscar-winning actor Christoph Waltz in Vienna last year before the pandemic shut everything down: Waltz avoids hammy flourishes but his performers aren’t nuanced enough to compensate, maybe because the curved staircase on which the action occurs (by set designer Barkow Leibinger) has made them tentative: one false move will land someone in the pit face first.
Still, Nicole Chevalier is in fine voice as Leonore, who disguises herself as a man to free her husband from prison, and the Vienna Symphony and Arnold Schoenberg Choir sound splendid under conductor Manfred Honeck. The hi-def video and audio are pristine.
(Criterion Collection)
Legendary Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène’s second feature, this piercing 1968 black comedy based on his own short story follows an ordinary man receiving a money order worth 25,000 francs from a nephew in Paris: once word is out, he discovers who his real friends are as well as those who want to cash in on his supposed windfall.
Sembène’s deadpan amusement and headshaking anger over the corruption of a society damaged by French colonialism remains potent and pertinent. Criterion’s hi-def transfer is magnificent; extras include new interviews with experts discussing the film’s impact and importance; Praise Song, a documentary short comprising interviews with admirers and other experts; Sembène’s 1970 short, Tauw; and a new translation of Sembène’s original short story.
San Francisco
A Tale of Two Cities
(Warner Archive)
Two of the biggest Hollywood spectacles of the ‘30s get new Warner Archive releases. San Francisco’s tale of a tentative romance between a club owner (Clark Gable) and an up-and-coming singer (Jeannette MacDonald) is a pretext to lead into the 1906 earthquake, which is dramatized with primitive but effective visual effects. Gable is always Gable, while MacDonald shows off her beautiful voice in Gounod and Puccini operas in this creaky but entertaining drama.
CD Boxed Set of the Week
Percy Grainger—The Complete Grainger Edition
(Chandos)
Born in Australia and brought up in London before settling down in America for the rest of his life, Percy Grainger (1875-1961) was a fine minor composer who concentrated on miniatures, transcriptions and other smaller works, which probably accounts for his less than stellar reputation. Often eschewing large-scale works like symphonies, concertos, oratorios and operas, Grainger was still comfortable composing works for bigger forces, as this gargantuan and nearly complete 21-disc set demonstrates.
Indeed, several of Grainger’s best are meaty scores like The Warriors, a dazzling virtuosic display for three (!) pianists and orchestra; On a Nordic Princess—written for Grainger’s new wife, who was Swedish—a lovely and melancholy choral tone poem; and the aptly-titled Youthful Suite, a vigorous workout for orchestra. But several chamber works, like the Scandinavian Suite for cello and piano as well as song settings of poems by Rudyard Kipling, Robert Burns and Percy’s wife Ella, are also perfectly realized.
With recordings spanning some two decades, there are superb contributions from many soloists and ensembles, but special mention must be made of the several discs of performances by Richard Hickox, the superbly versatile British conductor who was on the podium for many valuable Chandos recordings of eminent British composers ranging from Bax, Bliss and Britten to Rubbra, Walton and Vaughan Williams, and whose untimely death in 2008 robbed the classical music world of an important interpreter and musician.
February '21 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 11 February 2021 02:50
- Written by Kevin Filipski
VOD/Virtual Cinema Releases of the Week
Falling
(Quiver Distribution)
Viggo Mortensen makes his writing-directing debut with this heartfelt but mostly mundane drama about a gay man who tries coming to terms with his sexist, homophobic, bullying father, who in his old age is succumbing to dementia.
Mortensen writes terrific dialogue for the antagonistic scenes between father (played with piss and vinegar by Lance Hendricksen) and son (played by Mortensen himself) but as a director he too often settles for tried-and-true melodrama, undercutting the emotional strength of his own intimate study.
(Magnolia)
Rodney Ascher’s documentary Room 237 was a playfully rigorous look at the most outlandish explanations of Stanley Kubrick’s classic The Shining, and his latest tries to do the same with something even more outré: that real life is not real but instead part of a computer simulation.
The movie takes as gospel the rantings of author Philip K. Dick and allows several anonymous talking heads—hidden by their video avatars—to spin entertaining bunk about reality vs. virtual reality. It’s interesting for about an hour, then unfortunately spins its wheels for the last 45 minutes; but if glimpses of the original Matrix movie are enough, then this might be the doc for you.
Reunion
(Dark Sky Films)
Julia Ormond voraciously chews the scenery as the ultimate bad mom in a weird gothic horror flick whose antagonist makes Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest seem like an amateur.
Opposite Ormond is Emma Draper, who gives it her all as the pregnant daughter who returns to see her mother and relives her worst childhood moments in a series of increasingly redundant flashbacks. It’s unfortunate that writer/director Jake Mahaffy scuttles the promise of his two leading ladies, instead wallowing in hackneyed horror tropes without much visual or narrative distinction.
(Magnolia)
This tender look at the unbreakable bond between two older women whose loving relationship has been kept secret for years—neighbors in an apartment building, they pass as good friends—is a quietly devastating glimpse at how love can triumph over misunderstanding and even severe physical and mental struggles.
Bolstered by the lovely and subtle performances of Barbara Sukowa and Martine Chevallier in the leads, director Filippo Meneghetti has taken a familiar story and given it a freshness that makes it memorable without being maudlin.
X
(Cinedigm)
An entertaining if overlong erotic thriller about a young woman whose monthly masquerades can’t mask, so to speak, the difficulties in her personal life, X teases viewers with playful intimations of debauchery and voyeurism.
Director Scott J. Ramsey parades his influences—the masked orgies are out of Eyes Wide Shut, the bathroom sex video is out of A Clockwork Orange, to cite two examples—but that’s part of the fun, along with a cast of unknown faces led by the confident Hope Raymond as the protagonist.
The Fiery Angel
(Naxos)
Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev’s powerful opera, based on a novel by Russian author Valery Bryusov, provides a formidable role for its leading actress: Renata, an ordinary young woman beset by visions that cause her to be accused of cavorting with the devil.
In Emma Dante’s strangely potent 2019 production from Rome, Ewa Vesin leads an excellent cast as the disturbed Renata. But with Alejo Perez persuasively conducting the orchestra and chorus, Prokofiev’s intensely dramatic score is the real star of the show. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio.
Good News
The Pajama Game
(Warner Archive)
Two hit Broadway musicals received colorful adaptations a decade apart, beginning with 1947’s Good News, an enjoyable if innocuous college romance with Peter Lawford and an irresistible June Allyson as the jock and the brain who fall for each other even though football is more important than the library on-campus.
And 1957’s The Pajama Game is so exuberant that at times you want it to stop and take a deep breath—but why quibble when there’s Doris Day at her all-American best, Bob Fosse’s dazzling choreography given vivid oomph by dancer Carol Haney in the numbers “Steam Heat” and “Once-a-Year Day,” and songs like “Hey There” and “I’m Not at All in Love” to hum. Both films have sparkling brand-new hi-def transfers; extras are deleted songs and (on Good News) featurettes.
(Cult Epics)
In Just Jaeckin’s 1978 softcore drama, French actress Francoise Fabian plays the infamous Parisian madam—who died in 2015 at age 92—with her usual elegance, grace and intelligence, making this at times slipshod biopic more watchable than it otherwise would have been.
Fabian might be the only actress in the film not to shed her clothes, and for those who like to see ‘70s models in the altogether, there’s Dayle Haddon as the latest of Claude’s “discoveries.” There’s a decent-looking if unspectacular new hi-def transfer; extras are a commentary along with a new interview with Jaeckin, who is also responsible for such glittery ‘70s erotica as Emmanuelle and The Story of O.
Wander Darkly
(Lionsgate)
Writer-director Tara Miele based her script off a serious car crash she and her husband were involved in—but the resulting enigmatic exploration of the intricate mysteries of love, life and death is more often enervating than enlightening. It also doesn’t help that Miele mimics Terrence Malick in her visual style, which keeps us at a further remove from this couple hovering between life and death—or are they?
In the leads, Diego Luna is good, Sienna Miller is (as usual) spectacular, but we never feel for their predicament or relationship—even if Miele heavyhandedly plants a newborn in their lives right before the crash that starts everything in motion. The stunning images look remarkably strong in hi-def; extras are a Miele commentary and making-of featurette.
Plaisirs illuminés
(Alpha Classics)
Taking its title from a surrealist Salvador Dalí painting, Spaniard Francisco Coll’s 2018 double concerto for violin, cello and chamber orchestra, Les plaisirs illuminés, is the ebullient final work on a recording that centers around the great Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, represented by a brief Duo Pizzicato for two violins.
Three of Bartok’s students are also featured: György Ligeti and György Kurtág also have short pieces performed, but Sándor Veress—whose accomplished music is too infrequently programmed and recorded—has a major work, the scintillating Musica concertante for 12 strings, played. Rounding out this marvelous disc is the Concerto for Strings by Argentine master Alberto Ginastera. Chamber ensemble Camerata Bern plays brilliantly on the Coll, Veress and Ginastera works, and esteemed soloists Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin) and Sol Gabetta (cello) make invaluable contributions throughout.
Thinking About The Forefront of Controversy and Crime In A Netflix Doc Series
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 09 February 2021 14:52
- Written by Brad Balfour
An opionion piece.
Once again child abuse is in the news, although this time coming out of the fulsome mouths of such Republican nut cases as newly elected Georgia Congressional representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. The right-wing QAnon conspiracy believer has spoken of the demonic Dems who have a child sex cult consuming the blood of Christian children — ideas right out of the anti-Semitic Protocols of Zion playbook.
In spewing this babble, QAnon followers manage to obscure the actual history of child sexual abuse that has been unveiled in the last several years. From errant priests to Boy Scout leaders, from public school teachers to private tutors, such abuse has often been present and then swept under the rug with disastrous results.
Recently, the brother of a good friend committed suicide in his 40s after his local Catholic Church had stopped paying for his therapy and other expenses. It had been sending checks for over 10 years after he had been allegedly abused by a priest when he was in his teens. He was never able to hold a proper job and, though he married, had not managed his personal life with much success.
Thanks to a visit with friends, I got to binge on the last portion of the seven-part docu-series, The Keepers, veteran director Ryan White’s detailed exploration of a nun’s unsolved murder and the horrific secrets and pain that still linger nearly five decades after her death.
Though I didn’t see every episode, I got the idea. Clearly, the Catholic church had played a profound role in the acquiescence, obfuscation and denial surrounding this tortured tale.
In this true-crime documentary from Netflix (released in May 2017), The Keepers explores the 1969 death of 26-year old Catholic nun and Baltimore schoolteacher Sister Cathy Cesnik and touches on 20 year-old Joyce Malecki‘s murder four days later. Both slayings remain unsolved. The cover-up that followed echoed Spotlight — the 2015 award-winning feature film directed by Tom McCarthy which told the story of the intense investigation of abuse by priests in the Boston area.
Starting a Facebook group in 2014, Gemma Hoskins and Abbie Schaub, two retired 60-something grandmothers and former students of Sister Cathy’s at Archbishop Keough High School, still felt distressed by the almost-half-century-old cold case. Who had savagely beaten and then murdered their beloved teacher Sister Cathy? In reaching out to others to share information about Sister Cathy’s murder, these two seniors -– as intrepid and analytical as Agatha Christie‘s Miss Marple — uncovered a cold case like no other. They found evidence that neither the Baltimore police nor the Catholic Church had dealt with. It pointed to the late Father Joseph Maskell who was accused of abuse and then moved around by the Diocese where he is further accused of molesting his young female students.
As the series ends, many questions and actions are left unanswered. First of all, I bring all this up to praise White — who is getting attention for his latest controversial documentary, Assassins, a feature film about the assassination of Kim Jong-nam, half-brother of the North Korean leader, which premiered to raves at last year’s Sundance Film Festival.
More profoundly, at a time when President Biden spotlights the positive morality he learned from his Catholic education, we are all reminded that any wonderful idea can be twisted out of shape. If we allow that to happen and tolerate those who abuse, either because of fear or intimidation, then we are collaborating in perpetuating these crimes of twisted action or of psychological distortion.
February '21 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 03 February 2021 19:59
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-ray Releases of the Week
The Ascent
(Criterion Collection)
The talented Russian director Larisa Shepitko died three years after making this masterly 1976 war film about Soviet soldiers fighting in World War II. Shepitko potently dramatizes a series of desultory skirmishes fought in the bitter cold, which becomes a jumping-off point for an explicitly Christian allegory replete with cross imagery. Crammed with unforgettable B&W images and suffused with Shepitko’s honesty and humanism, The Ascent points toward where her artistry would have headed if she had lived to make more accomplished films.
Criterion’s hi-def transfer looks luminous; plentiful extras which contextualize Shepitko’s life and career comprise an introduction by Anton Klimov, son of Shepitko and director Elem Klimov; new interview with actress Lyudmila Polyakova; Shepitko’s 1967 feature, The Homeland of Electricity; Elem Klimov’s 1980 tribute short to his wife, Larisa; two 2012 documentaries about Shepitko; a 1999 TV program with an archival Shepitko interview; and an audio commentary.
Room for One More
(Warner Archive)
William Powell and Myrna Loy are delightful as intrepid sleuths Nick and Nora Charles in After the Thin Man, W.S. Van Dyke’s 1936 sequel to the original Thin Man that’s equally entertaining; with a spiffy script based on a Dashiell Hammett story, the duo (and the delectable dog Asta) solves a murder mystery that has a quite surprising denouement.
Norman Taurog’s 1952 Room for One More is a tug-at-the-heartstrings dramedy about a couple with three kids who adopt two more—a lonely young girl and a physically handicapped boy—starring Cary Grant, suave as ever, interacting breezily and believably with the children, as well as Grant’s then wife, Betsy Drake. Both B&W films have first-rate hi-def transfers; Thin Man extras are a classic short, classic cartoon and a radio show with Powell and Loy, while Room extras are two classic cartoons.
Doom Patrol—Complete 2nd Season
(Warner Bros)
As the ragtag troupe of super heroes regroups following the events that ended the first season, they must deal with a new dilemma: the arrival of the Chief’s daughter, Dorothy, who has the unfortunate ability to bring her invisible friends to life, compromising their ongoing efforts to save the world from evil.
The series’ protagonists are a combination of mushiness and black humor, and that toggling back and forth keeps this from becoming either too melodramatic or too self-parodic. The series’ nine episodes look stunning in hi-def; extras comprise two featurettes.
Dear Comrades
(Neon)
Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky is still going strong at age 83, as his latest, a critical dissection of the Soviet Union, searingly shows.
Based on a true incident—the killing of several strikers in the town of Novocherkassk by local officials in 1962—Dear Comrades chronicles the awakening of Lyudmila, a loyal party worker who witnesses the inhumane cruelty behind the façade of Communism and searches for her teenage daughter when she goes missing. As Lyudmila, Julia Vysotskaya burns a hole through the screen with her incendiary and emotionally resonant performance.
Notturno
(Neon)
The unrelenting brutality of war dominates Gianfranco Rosi’s latest documentary, which explores with images of inhumanity that nonetheless have an unreal beauty how people who have been subjected to unspeakable atrocities attempt to pick up the shards of their ruined lives while living in Middle East war zones.
Shooting on location in some of the most war-ravaged countries on earth—Lebanon, Syria, Kurdistan and Iraq—Rosi artfully shows that horrific loss can coexist with resilience in the face of impending annihilation, although the lack of context somewhat blunts, if not outright undercuts, its lasting power.
(Greenwich Entertainment)
Director Lili Horvát’s sophomore feature follows Márta, a Hungarian expatriate returned from America who begins working in a Budapest hospital as a brain surgeon and successfully operates on a man whose young son shows his interest in her, but wants to rekindle her affair with another doctor, whom she was with in the States.
Based on a stanza of a Sylvia Plath poem, Horvát’s film incisively makes psychological inroads into the brain expert’s heart even as it tries too hard to be enigmatic and abstract, like its final perfunctory image straining to be symbolic. Still, Natasa Stork’s performance as Márta is never less than wonderfully realized, which makes her often convoluted journey one worth taking.
True Mothers
(Film Movement)
In Naomi Kawase’s intimate and moving drama, the opposite lives of two mothers—a teenager who gave up her baby for adoption and a middle-class wife who adopted him—are illustrated by the inevitable difficulties that crop up when the young mom wants to be part of her child’s life followed by the unexpected and bittersweet resolution.
Kawase walks a tightrope of sentimentality and contrived plotting, but her characterizations are dead-on and honest, transforming this far above the soap opera it might have been. Kudos also to the immeasurably strong acting by the leads, Hiromi Nagasaku (the adopted mother) and Aju Makita (the real mother), who embody these women with am unaffected naturalness that’s astonishing to watch.
Night Shift
(Distrib Films US)
France’s Anne Fontaine has proven herself a director of versatility and insight in such films as How I Killed My Father (2001), Coco Before Chanel (2009) and The Innocents (2016)—her latest, a police procedural (its actual French title is simply Police), studies events through the eyes of three cops, two men and one woman, juxtaposing their messy personal lives with their demanding and violent professional work, culminating in a complicated moral decision.
Although it seems overly familiar, Fontaine directs tautly, greatly assisted by veteran Yves Angelo’s gritty cinematography and her three stars—Omar Sy, Grgeory Gadebois and Virginie Efira—who give realistic portrayals of these anything but heroic but anything but ordinary protagonists.
CD Release of the Week
Elmas—Piano Concertos
(Hyperion)
This disc, the 82nd volume in Hyperion’s valuable “The Romantic Piano Concerto” series, presents two appealing works by the scarcely known Albanian composer Stéphan Elmas (1862-1937), whose concertos are big, splashy pieces that owe a debt to Mozart and Chopin’s piano music, but not slavishly so.
These attractive performances, by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra under conductor Howard Shelley—who also does double duty as the excellent soloist—provide many pleasing moments that give these derivative but enjoyable works an undeniable charm.
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