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Reviews
June '16 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 21 June 2016 04:13
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Cornbread, Earl and Me
If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium
I’ll Take Sweden
(Olive Films)
A low-key drama and two farcical travelogues are on deck this month, starting with 1974’s Cornbread, a sober study of mistaken identity transforming lives in a black Chicago neighborhood forever; the film gains immeasurably by quietly powerful acting by Moses Gunn, Laurence Fishburne and Rosalind Cash.
In 1969’s Belgium and 1965’s Sweden, various stars are touring the Old World: Belgium, featuring European Ian McShane, Senta Berger and Joan Collins, has a lovely performance by American Suzanne Pleshette, while Sweden—a middling Bob Hope vehicle—has a young Tuesday Weld as her most appealing. The films look better than ever on Blu-ray.
London Has Fallen
(Universal)
This action-packed sequel to Olympus Has Fallen reteams Aaron Eckhart as President and Gerard Butler as his most trusted secret service agent: now they are among world leaders overrun by a group of diabolical—and murderous—terrorists at a the British prime minister funeral in London.
Explosions and gunplay take up an inordinate amount of the movie’s 91-minute running time, but anyone in the mood for mindless action and a granite-like Butler—the rest of the cast, which includes Angela Bassett and Morgan Freeman, is largely wasted—then this will provide a brief thrill. The film looks superb on Blu; extras are two featurettes.
Midnight Special
(Warner Bros)
Writer-director Jeff Nichols’ sci-fi drama about a boy with supernatural powers and his father’s desperate attempts to keep him away from the authorities starts out intriguingly, but after a ridiculous scene in which the boy is kidnaped by thugs, the movie veers off the road and never recovers.
Soon Nichols completely loses control, culminating in a CGI-powered finale that’s staggering in its incoherence. Even the cast seems cowed: Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Sam Shepard, Kirsten Dunst and little Jaeden Lieberher give performances that look like they’re in different movies. The hi-def transfer is first-rate; extras are featurettes and interviews.
Power—Complete 2nd Season
(Starz/Anchor Bay)
The trappings and allure of legal and illicit power are on display throughout the unsubtle but entertaining second season of this 50 Cent-produced series, which follows its characters through the worlds of hip-hop, entertainment, illegal drugs and law enforcement with an increasingly jaundiced, even bemused eye.
Of course, there’s always time for a romp or two in bed, which the performers have become increasingly adept at, and blood is spilled at ever more regular intervals. The series’ 10 episodes have stellar high-def transfers; extras include several featurettes.
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
They Were Expendable
(Warner Archive)
This pair of films starring John Wayne and directed by John Ford represented the high-water mark of their collaborations, which extended from 1939’s Stagecoach to 1963’s Donovan’s Reef. 1945’s Expendable has Wayne as one of several seamen who fought the Japanese in the pacific following Pearl Harbor; though overlong, it brings to life the heroism of the everyday sailor.
1949’s Yellow Ribbon, by contrast, is one of the director-star combo’s most effective westerns, shot in picturesque Monument Valley and starring Wayne as a cavalry officer winding down his long and distinguished career. Both the B&W Expendable and color Yellow Ribbon (which won the Best Cinematography Oscar) have great hi-def transfers; Ribbon extras are Ford’s home movies.
DVDs of the Week
Fear of 13
We Monsters
(First Run)
In Fear of 13, convicted killer Nick Yarris makes what for him is a sane, rational decision: to get off death row and be executed. Utilizing Errol Morris’s well-worn devices of reenactments and interviews, director David Sington nevertheless creates a chilling study of mortality.
German director Sebastian Ko examines morality in We Monsters, as divorced parents of a teenage girl—who insists she killed the friend who disappeared when they were alone—decide to protect her at all costs. This frighteningly realistic scenario is acted to perfection by Mehdi Nebbou (dad), Ulrike C. Tscharre (mom) and Janina Fautz (daughter) under Ko’s persuasive direction. The lone extra on 13 is Sington and Yarris’s Q&A.
Going Away
(Cohen Media Group)
French actress Louise Bourgoin sinks her teeth into one of those meaty but messy roles actresses love: a tattooed, independent single mother with sundry problems who will do anything for her young son. Her chemistry with Pierre Rochefort as the teacher who finds himself watching over the boy—and, by extension, the mother—one weekend, keeps Nicole Garcia’s otherwise routine 2013 romance afloat; young Mathias Brezot also contributes nicely as the son.
Off-Broadway Reviews—“Indian Summer,” “Radiant Vermin”
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 16 June 2016 11:15
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Indian Summer
Written by Gregory S. Moss; directed by Carolyn Cantor
Performances through June 26, 2016
Radiant Vermin
Written by Philip Ridley; directed by David Mercatali
Performances through July 3, 2016
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| Owen Campbell and Elise Kibler in Indian Summer (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Of course Indian Summer is set on a beach: that it’s a beach on Rhode Island, the smallest of our 50 states, is Gregory S. Moss’s conceit. Our teenage hero is Daniel, one of the “summer people” staying with his widowed grandfather George for the summer—or until his erstwhile mother returns from wherever she went after dropping him off. He is befriended by cute 17-year-old local girl Izzy—after initially insulting her Sicilian heritage; Izzy’s 27-year-old boyfriend Jeremy is not only the personification of “musclehead” but also a man desperate to hold onto his girl by any means necessary.
Despite his lunkheadedness, Jeremy notices that Daniel and Izzy are becoming quite friendly and compatible, despite their initial antagonism. If Moss can’t quite make his almost love triangle plausible, he has a knack for gentle observation and the occasional wistful moment, like the lovely scene that opens Act II: Daniel and Izzy, after spending the entire night (platonically) on the beach, sit in the sand and discuss what they would say if they ran into each other here ten years from now.
The next scene, of Jeremy pathetically enlisting Daniel to help him plan to propose to Izzy—which Daniel goes along with because he’s absolutely sure Izzy will turn Jeremy down flat—also adeptly blends equal parts humor, heartbreak and sentiment. But the elephant in the room is George our erstwhile narrator, who late in the play has Izzy wear his dead wife’s dress and talk to him as if she were his wife. The resulting scene, unlike the two preceding it, isn’t memorably melancholic or sweet, but instead downright creepy.
Still, Moss writes nicely turned conversational dialogue and Carolyn Cantor directs straightforwardly on Dane Laffrey’s sandbox of a set in which the actors frolic for 90 minutes. Jonathan Hadary might be a bit too obvious as George, but Joe Tippett brings feeling to Jeremy’s ripped abs and Owen Campbell makes a properly pimply and confused Daniel.
But Elise Kibler carries the play on her shoulders as Izzy, a tough yet tender, raw but romantic young heroine. Playing the only character interacting with the others, Kibler gives a nuanced and persuasive performance that elevates Indian Summer past its sentimental leanings to achieve an overarching melancholy like watching the last sunset on the beach at the end of summer.
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| Scarlett Alice Johnson and Sean Michael Verey in Radiant Vermin (photo: Carol Rosegg) |
With Radiant Vermin, Philip Ridley has made an fitfully amusing black comedy that acidly looks at the new normal: middle-class couple Ollie and Jill—in their attempt at upward mobility in a society that no longer easily allows it—discovers a sure-fire way to become and remain affluent: (gulp) murder.
Ridley has gleeful fun with how his couple goes about its diabolical plan, which takes on greater urgency when Jill gets pregnant. But there’s not much underneath the surface, and introducing a mysterious real estate agent who may have something to do with their doings is something intriguing that’s been left unexplored.
Despite the shrillness—one ridiculously overwrought sequence has the couple acting out a dinner party from hell that seems to last forever, and with few chuckles—the actors do their very best to keep it afloat. Sean Michael Verey, an amusingly hangdog Ollie, has thick glasses framing a rubbery face of sheer ingenuity, while Scarlett Alice Johnson makes an absolutely winning Jill: she more than complements her costar by bringing needed heart to the proceedings, of which director David Mercatali should have made better use.
Indian Summer
Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
playwrightshorizons.org
Radiant Vermin
Brits Off Broadway, 59 East 59th Street, NY
59e59.org
June '16 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 14 June 2016 00:08
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Le Amiche
(Criterion)
Although one of his lesser works, this 1955 melodrama was an important stepping stone for Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni on his way to cinematic maturity: this study of young women and their relationship troubles hints at his later mastery in L’Avventura and L’Eclisse, for example.
Unsurprisingly, Criterion’s transfer of this brooding black-and-white drama is stellar, but its extras are lacking: there’s a relatively mundane conversation on Antonioni between two scholars and a slightly more informative interview with another scholar.
(Intervision)
Director Francisco Lara Polop’s 1984 soft-core flick, while it has a certain cache among that era’s B-movie cognoscenti, is merely a competently made, indifferently acted tale of an comely heiress who’s been kidnapped by a band of lesbian terrorists.
Nice location shooting and Jewel Shepard’s endearing pseudo-Marilyn Monroe bimbo as our eponymous heroine make it watchable, along with ample—but by no means explicit—nudity and sex scenes. There’s a decent hi-def transfer.
Every Thing Will Be Fine
(IFC)
German director Wim Wenders has made some clunkers, but his latest, impossibly pretentious exercise in dramatic ponderousness leaps to the top of that list. James Franco sleepwalks through the movie as a writer whose life is altered by a fatal car accident, while Rachel McAdams, Marie-Josee Croze and ever-sullen Charlotte Gainsbourg suffer quietly at his side.
It seems like Terrence Malick-lite, but even Malick’s failures like To the Wonder (also with poor McAdams) had lustrous visuals and eclectic music on the soundtrack to compensate. Not so Wenders: Alexandre Desplat’s diverting score notwithstanding, Wenders’ usual impeccable control deserts him, shooting this in 3D for no discernable reason. It all looks fine on Blu; extras are interviews with cast (but not Franco) and Wenders and behind-the-scenes footage.
(PBS)
In the second season of this offbeat detective series, Reverend Sidney Chambers and inspector Geordie Keating consolidate their personal and professional relationships as they investigate another bizarre series of crimes.
If the plots are less than original, it doesn’t matter because the real reason to watch is the chemistry between James Norton and Robson Green, who invest their parts with as much authenticity and even humor as possible under the circumstances. The hi-def transfer is quite good; extras include featurettes and interviews.
Under the Sun of Satan
(Cohen Film Collection)
Maurice Pialat’s magnificent 1987 chamber film is an intimate character study of a failing priest with a dark side and the young woman who may be his salvation—or damnation.
Based on a novel by Georges Bernardos (whose work was also the basis of Robert Bresson’s Mouchette and Diary of a Country Priest), Pialat’s masterpiece has absorbing performances by Gerard Depardieu, Sandrine Bonnaire and Pialat himself as an older priest who gives Depardieu guidance. The film’s grainy hi-def transfer is illuminating; substantial extras—a second disc’s worth—comprise new and vintage interviews, along with an hour of deleted scenes and on-set footage.
(Magnolia)
In Tobias Lindholm’s powerful drama, parts of a Danish soldier’s life are shown in straightforward yet subtle detail: as he leads his men through horrible firefights, his absence from his family back home forces his wife to raise their children alone; later, he is put before a civilian tribunal after he is accused of war crimes for calling an air strike that kills innocent children. Not in the least didactic,
Lindholm’s film is a raging inferno of emotion and adrenaline, culminating in a courtroom sequence remarkable for its nuanced and compelling view of all sides. Pilou Asbæk—so good in the TV series Borgen—is brilliant as our hero, and Tuva Novotny matches him scene for scene as his wife. The hi-def transfer is first-rate; the paucity of extras includes brief servicemen and -women’s reactions, short making-of and Lindholm interview.
DVDs of the Week
A French Village—Complete 3rdSeason
(MHZ)
With the war on for several years now, the inhabitants of the Nazi-controlled village of Villeneuve must contend with a new wrinkle: the rounding up of Jews in the local school.
The endless greys of wartime have rarely been examined so thoroughly and even entertainingly as in this series, and the cumulative dramatic impact of its third season is enormous. Once again, the acting is superlative from top to bottom, with standouts Robin Renucci as the town’s decent mayor and Audrey Fleurot as his unfaithful wife.
(Icarus)
Belgian director Chantal Akerman’s suicide last fall came directly following the death of her beloved mother, and her poignant if meandering final documentary explores that relationship in depth. Natalia was a Holocaust survivor who was always Chantal’s reservoir of strength, shown in the many conversations between them, whether in person or via Skype.
Although the film, like so many others of Akerman, wears out its welcome before it ends, its tragic real-life epilogue gives it a gravitas missing from much of her oeuvre.
June '16 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 08 June 2016 12:33
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
The Best Intentions
(Film Movement Classics)
Bille August made this 1992 masterpiece from Ingmar Bergman’s script which recounts how his mother and father met, married and started a family—not the most original story, but when filmed with such artistry, written with such insight and acted with such forcefulness by Pernilla August and Samuel Froler as Ingmar’s parents and other great Swedish actors like Max von Sydow and Ghita Norby, it becomes three gripping hours that simply fly by.
In fact, it’s too bad that the original six-hour Swedish TV version isn’t included as an extra, because more of this family’s saga would always be welcome. The film looks absolutely splendid on Blu; the lone extra is Bergman’s extraordinary 1984 short, Karin’s Face, comprising only pictures of his mother as Bergman explores his family history with his usual mastery.
Gods of Egypt
(Lionsgate)
Clive Owen and Jaeden Lieberher make a nice pair as an estranged dad and his young son in Bob Nelson’s understated drama The Confirmation; Maria Bello is wonderfully real as Owen’s ex and Lieberher’s mom, but the contrivances that Nelson builds up in the movie’s second half nearly destroys whatever sympathy was earned earlier.
In Gods of Egypt, director Alex Proyas has made another movie that swallows up his actors with over-the-top CGI: these tales beg for a campy, Clash of the Titans treatment, but instead the likes of Gerard Butler and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau are reduced to cardboard by the visual miasma that fills the screen. Both films have excellent hi-def transfers; Confirmation extras comprise two featurettes, Gods extras are storyboards, featurettes and interviews.
King and Country—Shakespeare’s Great Cycle of Kings
(Opus Arte)
The Royal Shakespeare Company’s decision to perform Shakespeare’s classic tetraology of history plays—Richard II, Henry IV 1 & 2 and Henry V—was an inspired one under Gregory Doran’s accomplished direction and the flawless acting of David Tennant as Richard, Antony Sher as Falstaff and Alex Hassell as Prince Hal, later Henry V. All four plays have been given superlative productions: costumes, sets and lighting are peerless, supporting casts are magnificent and Doran’s pacing is perfect.
For those unable to get to the RSC’s Stratford-upon-Avon home, this set is the next best thing: the filmed performances look first-rate, with extras including Doran’s commentary on all four plays and interviews with historians, scholars, actors and creative team and crew.
(Universal)
This black comedy about a hitman who falls for a young woman desperate for any sort of relationship is often wrongheaded and hits many sour notes as it attempts to balance rom-com deconstruction with gleeful Tarantino-lite violence.
Despite that, director Paco Cabezas has smartly cast Sam Rockwell as the hitman and Anna Kendrick as his girl, and their tart, tongue-in-cheek performances give the movie more amusement and staying power than it deserves. It looks good on Blu; the lone extra is a making-of featurette.
Rolling Stones—Totally Stripped
(Eagle Rock)
During its 1995 tour, the Rolling Stones played a trio of semi-acoustic shows at smaller venues and even re-recorded some re-arranged songs in the studio, and the resulting 91-minute film glimpses not only some of the performances but also the interplay among band members during the studio sessions.
The best performances are of warhorses like “Gimme Shelter” and “Let It Bleed” and lesser-known but still worthwhile cuts like “Faraway Eyes” and “Dead Flowers.” The documentary has good if not overwhelming hi-def audio and video; the accompanying CD includes 14 songs from those fabled Amsterdam, Paris and London shows.
(HBO)
Martin Scorsese directed the two-hour pilot episode of this new HBO series about machinations at a record company in the 1970s, which was the best two hours of the series so far: all of the usual melodramatics are present and accounted for, including lame “appearances” by actors aping David Bowie, Led Zeppelin etc.
It ultimately—and disappointingly—adds up to little that’s compelling or interesting, even if it is well-acted by a top cast that’s led by Bobby Cannavalle as the head honcho and a revelatory Olivia Wilde as his wife. The hi-def transfer is quite good; extras include features and commentaries.
Zootopia
(Disney)
Another visually arresting and hugely popular animated Disney feature, this spoof of buddy pictures has its share of laughs and tugging at the heartstrings—especially with the anthropomorphic animals at the heart of its success—but the constant punning, sight gags and pop-culture references become enervating after awhile, especially when everything’s dragged out to an overlong 108 minutes.
The computer-generated animation has a flawless Blu-ray transfer; extras include featurettes, deleted scenes and characters, Easter eggs and a Shakira music video.
Casual Encounters
(Lionsgate)
Taran Killan is not my idea of a leading man, but he’s better at anchoring flimsy indie comedies than fellow former SNLer Jason Sudekis: still, Killan’s limited acting skills tend to show the same face over and over again. But at least he’s a believable ordinary schlub whose girlfriend leaves him publicly after his latest screw-up.
More surprising is Brooklyn Decker as Killan’s nerdy co-worker who helps guide him through his post-breakup malaise. Director Zackary Adler does little new with his material, but there are scattered laughs throughout mercifully brief running time. Extras include featurettes and music video.
One More Time
(Anchor Bay)
Yes, Amber Heard can act—and not just in her Instagram photos: she demonstrates real chops in this low-key, semi-satisfying broken family comic drama about an aspiring singer who visits her famous crooner father’s Montauk house to mend fences with him and others in her screwed-up family.
Christopher Walken as dad and Heard make a formidable team, whether singing or sparring, and a fine supporting cast (Ann Magnuson, Kelli Garner, Oliver Platt, even Hamish Linklater) keeps Robert Edwards’ film from dragging its feet.
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