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Reviews
September '15 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 15 September 2015 23:46
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Aquarius—Complete 1st Season
(Anchor Bay)
(Anchor Bay)
Set in Los Angeles during the summer of love, 1967, this 13-episode procedural follows Sam Hodiak, a veteran homicide detective whose own investigations lead him to run-ins with a new, bizarre cult led by a charismatic failed singer-songwriter named Charles Manson.
This is one of those high-concept series whose ideas often outpace what's actually accomplished, but knowing about the grisly murders still to come allows viewers to stamp these mysterious goings-on with a greater importance. The era is nicely evoked, even if David Duchovny's Hodiak is more X Files than Helter Skelter. The hi-def transfer is first-rate; extras are webisodes and a brief featurette.
(PBS)
When author Arthur Conan Doyle—the mastermind behind Sherlock Holmes—starts digging into an actual unsolved crime instead of conjuring fictional exploits for his own sleuthing hero, he teams with his own Dr. Watson—his private secretary Alfred Wood—for assistance as he utilizes what he knows from his creation to discover the elusive truth.
This three-part British mini-series, although it stretches its plot a bit thin to for 2-1/2 hours, is good fun; Martin Clunes, as a credible Doyle, leads us through an entertaining thriller. The Blu-ray image looks excellent.
The Beast
Immoral Tales
(Arrow)
(Arrow)
For a brief period in the '70s, Polish director Walerian Borowczyk's pseudo-pornographic meanderings enjoyed a certain cultish vogue on the festival and art house circuit, but Arrow's (admittedly splendid) new Blu-ray releases of his oeuvre shows him to be a pretentious poseur whose work leave a lot to be desired visually, dramatically, erotically and artistically.
1974's Immoral Tales and 1975's The Beast (the latter based on one of the five shorts making up the former) might titillate unfinicky viewers, but despite the many defenses of Borowczyk's filmmaking in the extras—including reminiscences from colleagues and explanations from critics—neither of these films is remotely memorable, not even their most “controversial” aspects. Both films have gotten beautiful hi-def restorations.
(Film Movement Classics)
For her 1989 biographical drama about St. Francis of Assisi, director Liliana Cavani shot on the actual locations where the 13th century saint lived, preached and died, but all of that goes by the wayside because of two fatal errors: Mickey Rourke and Vangelis.
Rourke, although he looks the part, ruins the saint’s humble bearing and teachings whenever he opens his mouth to blurt out wise and familiar sayings in his unmistakably late 20th century voice, while Vangelis' anachronistic synthesized sounds are smeared over much of this slow film's 133 minutes. Helena Bonham Carter's nicely understated portrayal of Francis’s disciple Chiara and a supporting cast of authentic-looking unknowns can’t help Francesco from dying a slow death, with or without stigmata. The film looks good and grainy on Blu; lone extra is Cannes Film Festival press conference.
Homeland—Complete 4th Season
(Showtime/Fox)
In the fourth season of this impressively single-minded terrorist drama series, the new world disorder created by Sept. 11 now finds Carrie as the new CIA station chief, who is preoccupied with hunting down one of the worst of the world's many bad guys.
The high-powered cast, led by Claire Danes, Mandy Patinkin and Laila Robins, combined with shrewdly-paced moments of nail-biting tension, makes this the series' best season yet. The series looks awesome on Blu; extras are deleted scenes, character profiles and "From Script to Screen" featurettes.
Love & Mercy
(Lionsgate)
(Lionsgate)
In Bill Pohlad's absorbing biopic about Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson, Paul Dano and John Cusack alternate playing the musician during his 60s heyday (Dano) and his 80s period of isolation and mental illness (Cusack): the gimmick works perfectly because they are, in essence, two different men dealing with specific problems at specific times.
Oren Moverman and Michael Alan Lerner's incisive script provides the narrative backbone for this honest exploration of art, love, loneliness and healing, with a fabulous Elizabeth Banks providing the emotional center as the woman who rescued Wilson from the diabolical psychiatrist who inserted himself into his life, Dr. Landy (played with a touch of caricature by Paul Giamatti). The film looks wonderful on Blu; extras comprise deleted scenes, Pohlad and Moverman's commentary and featurettes.
DVDs of the Week
The Breach
(Kino Lorber)
(Kino Lorber)
Alaska's Bristol Bay was the last of the big runs for billions of salmon, so when their population began plummeting, fisherman and filmmaker Mark Titus wanted to find out why: the answer isn't simple, and his absorbing documentary lays out the reasons why humans have done so much—sometimes inadvertently, more often deliberately—to destroy the salmon's natural environment.
Although there are annoying bits where the fish “speak” for themselves, such pretentious narration is a minor fault in a film this immediate and important. Extras include time-lapse and aerial footage.
(Strand Releasing)
In Thomas Cailley's engaging romantic comedy, Madeleine and Arnaud meet cute in an army boot camp, then cement their relationship as they realize that the camp is far more punishing than they could have imagined.
What could have been cloying and one-note is instead a richly detailed character study, as Cailley shows a real empathy for his characters, who are embodied by the exceptionally appealing lead performers, Kevin Azais and Adele Haenel.
The Returned
(Lionsgate)
This Americanization of the eerie French TV series Les Revenauts about several people—long thought dead—who return to a small town and its confused denizens is long on style and atmosphere but short on substantive characterization and compelling drama.
With its lack of plausible interaction among characters—even those memorably etched by Sandrine Holt, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and the gifted but grievously little-seen Agnes Bruckner—the series seems like a weak Twilight Zone riff that doesn't justify 10 episodes' worth of supernatural melodrama. Extras are episode summaries and a brief featurette.
(IFC)
In the crime- and drug-ridden East New York section of Brooklyn in the 1980s, a gallery of rogue cops led by Michael Dowd skimmed so much drug money off the top that they became that infamous era's most notorious gangsters; Tiller Russell's documentary pointedly explores how they were lured by the promise of easy money to supplement a meager weekly paycheck.
An unrepentant Dowd (who served 12 years) talks unashamedly, even eagerly, about his exploits, and the men who served with him—both those who joined in and those who didn’t—discuss their part in the case, which still amazes with its unsettling details and brazen illicit activities by those supposedly on the right side of the law.
Soaked in Bleach
(MVD)
When Kurt Cobain died in 1994, there were suspicions that it wasn't a suicide, and a veritable cottage industry sprang up of those who believe that his wife Courtney Love was somehow involved. That was the premise of Nick Broomfield's supremely skeptical 1997 documentary Kurt and Courtney, and that's also where Benjamin Statler, director of this speculative hybrid of docudrama and documentary, stands.
Interviews with Seattle cops, forensics experts, Cobain's friends and private eye Tom Grant—whom Love hired to find her husband days before his death—are interspersed with reenacted sequences featuring an incredible Love lookalike Sarah Scott (we also hear Grant's actual recordings of Love's voice), providing a tantalizing "what-if" about one of rock history's seminal demises.
September '15 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 09 September 2015 23:48
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Aerosmith Rocks Donington 2014
(Eagle Rock)
For Steven Tyler, Joe Perry, Brad Whitford, Tom Hamilton and Joey Kramer, four decades of rocking out comprises the highs of hits and comebacks and lows of drug abuse and arid musical patches: this headlining concert shows the elder statesmen of good ol' American rock'n'roll in fine form despite everything.
Tyler's voice, while not the versatile instrument it once was, is still good and growly on the opening one-two punch of “Train Kept A-Rollin’” and “Eat the Rich,” while Whitford and Perry's dual axe attack remains the envy of air guitarists everywhere on “Toys in the Attic” and the final encore, “Mama Kin.” The pummeling rhythm section of Hamilton and Kramer keeps the band locked in, and the show is a blast despite clunkers like “Cryin’” and “Livin’ on the Edge.” The video image is sharp, the music sounds even sharper.
(Lionsgate)
Talk about typecasting: Blake Lively plays an impossibly beautiful woman who happens to be immortal; since she never ages past her current 29, after living for a century, she makes sure to stay away from getting too close to people (although apparently not pets), until she meets someone and falls in love. When he introduces her to his parents, however, her past comes back to haunt her.
This intriguing drama owes too much to its Twilight Zone-ish premise, but Lively is always watchable, and a fine supporting cast—including Ellen Burstyn as Lively's daughter and Harrison Ford as an old lover—helps things moving along even when the creakiness of director Lee Toland Krieger’s storytelling machinery is obviously visible. The film looks glorious on Blu; extras comprise director's commentary and making-of featurette.
Boulevard
(Anchor Bay)
In his final performance before his suicide last year, Robin Williams gives an intense portrayal of a closeted, conservative middle-aged husband and office manager whose conflicted double life comes to a head when a young hustler becomes his lover then a son surrogate.
Although competently directed by Dito Montiel from Douglas Soesbe's disjointed script, the 88-minute movie doesn't amounts to much despite Williams' pained gravity (and good support by Kathy Baker, Bob Odenkirk and Roberto Aguire), which could even snag the actor a posthumous Oscar nomination. The hi-def image is first-rate.
(Anchor Bay)
This thriller about a routine bank robbery gone wrong doesn't have much originality about it, despite the effectiveness of the acting and some cleverness in Jay Martin’s directing.
Despite his obvious nods to Kubrick's The Killing in the structure of inserting back stories and plot twists to keep suspense percolating during the actual heist, Martin doesn't so much rachet up the tension as stave off the inevitable denouement as long as he can. The hi-def transfer is very good; extras are a featurette and storyboards.
The World According to Garp
(Warner Archive)
John Irving's beloved novel was adapted in 1982 by director George Roy Hill and screenwriter Steve Tesich, and the result—despite the necessary streamlining and abridgement in putting the sprawling book onscreen—is far from a disaster: in fact, Hill and Tesich manage to keep many of Irving's absurdist elements without jettisoning its sentimental heart, confront the cruelties his characters endure without wallowing in nastiness (no mean feat) and add their own lovely humanity, like the priceless opening of a bouncing baby to the Beatles' "When I'm 64."
Although Robin Williams is hampered by his inability to find the subtleties in Garp himself, there are marvelous performances by Oscar nominees John Lithgow and Glenn Close (in her film debut), while Mary Beth Hurt provides the grounding and toughness as Garp's wife to hold an impressively unwieldy movie together.
Banksy Does New York
The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq
(Kino Lorber)
Banksy Does New York, which follows the anonymous street artist's month-long residency in New York—a new site-specific piece appeared daily somewhere in the city as fans and media rushed to see it before it was gone—uses a lot of social-media footage and video, demonstrating how Banksy's witty and socially conscious installations are transforming pop art, pop culture and pop media.
In Kidnapping, director Guillaume Nicloux recreates the noted French intellectual's supposed kidnapping a few years ago, with Houellebec playing himself rather stiffly: although his interactions and interlocutions with his kidnappers are amusing for awhile, this one-note movie fizzles out after about 30 minutes and limps to its end an hour later.
The Chambermaid
(Film Movement)
Director Ingo Haeb's clear-eyed study of a shy, fastidious hotel maid drawn to the private lives of those whose rooms she cleans explores its protagonist (who turns out to be so enamored of an S&M call girl she watches that she begins a sexual relationship with the peroxide-blonde woman) so sympathetically that the story's implausibilities become only minor irritations.
It greatly helps, too, that Haeb's excellent cast depicts fetishistic behavior so realistically; the lack of camp is a welcome respite. The lone extra is a derivative American short, Worlds Within.
(Icarus/Kimstim)
H.R. Giger was best known for his scuzzy, squishy, scarifying monster in Alien, but—as this darkly engrossing documentary about the Swiss artist's long career (he died after the film was finished last year) shows—his unwavering vision encompassed much more than that unforgettable creature.
Director Belinda Sallin gained access to Giger at home and in his studio, where he discussed his work and his life: there's a melancholic strain of resignation that is simultaneously bleak and humanizing, especially when one realizes that these are his final words on himself and his art.
Our Man in Tehran
Braddock, America
(First Run)
Two documentaries tackle recent American history: first, Tehran follows Oscar winner Argo's scenario, an extraordinary true story of heroism and intrigue told from the Canadian side: directors Drew Taylor and Larry Weinstein interview Canada's Iranian ambassador Ken Taylor and cohorts, along with American embassy workers whom they hid until they were smuggled out by CIA man Tony Mendez's daring escapade.
Braddock, a devastating examination of a small Pennsylvania town gutted by the collapse of the steel industry, shows its citizens coping amid difficult living conditions. Tehran extras include a directors' discussion and Toronto Film Festival Q&A.
(Icarus)
In one of the full-length films in Peter Davis’s 1982 PBS series Middletown, directors Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreineshave fashioned an eye-opening, masterly study of teenagers in an ordinary Indiana high school: what makes the movie so memorable (and the real reason it was banned from TV showings) is that it deals frankly and unsentimentally with interracial relationships, as the kids speak to and about one another as actual teens speak, with lots of un-PC epithets thrown about.
It's not a pretty portrait, but it's definitely an honest one: and thirty-plus years later, aside from the Bob Seger hits they listened to, little has changed in the smartphone and Instagram era.
August '15 Digital Week IV
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 28 August 2015 17:50
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
The Hunger
(Warner Archive)
Impossibly stylish and pretentious, Tony Scott's 1983 vampire movie would bore the bejesus out of today's Twilight fans, and its ponderously icy atmosphere and mere poses from glamorous Catherine Deneuve, androgynous David Bowie and confused-looking Susan Sarandon add up to a glitteringly empty experience.
With visual and aural nods to films like The Man Who Fell to Earth, Dressed to Kill and even Barry Lyndon, Scott's movie looks and sounds ravishing, but its portentous and failed attempts at Culture include hilariously inapposite use of music by Schubert and Ravel. The Blu-ray transfer is good but soft; lone extra is a commentary by Sarandon and Scott.
Iris
(Magnolia)
This endearing documentary is a meeting of two of the ultimate veterans in their respective fields: 88-year-old documentarian Albert Maysles training his camera (for the last time; he died after making the film) on 93-year-old New York fashion maven Iris Apfel, a delightfully ornery presence at such an advanced age, who remains a legend in her field.
Maysles' sensitive camera tracks her movements from show to show, at home with her beloved husband and while reminiscing about all those years. The Blu-ray looks spectacular; extras are deleted scenes and an Apfel interview.
Mad Max Fury Road
(Warner Bros)
Director George Miller returns to his franchise with a vengeance, making a kinetic action flick for those who don't care about characterization, plot or dialogue for two hours but would rather see explosions, stunts and non-stop action.
That's just what Miller provides: with a minimum of CGI (which still means that there's plenty), his crack technical crew conjures wall-to-wall car chases, races and hand-to-hand combat; overall, it's bludgeoning and mind-numbing, but there’s a certain rubbernecking fascination to it. Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy and others are mere props, but give them props for keeping their dignity amid the din. The hi-def transfer is first-rate; extras comprise making-of featurettes.
(Alchemy)
Set in Louisiana after the BP oil spill, this turgid political thriller stars Nicolas Cage as a hard-working local politician caught up in an adultery scandal which compromises his ability to assist his constituents against the big business and big oil interests that dominate the political climate.
Cage works hard, sometimes effectively, and there's good support from Wendell Pierce, Sarah Paulson, Connie Nielsen and Ciera Payton, but writer-director Austin Stark never finds an interesting way to tell his topical story without wallowing in clichés. The film looks fine on Blu.
Strangerland
(Alchemy)
In the hinterlands of Australia, a troubled couple's two children go missing during a dust storm, bringing festering emotions to a boil in Kim Farrant's intriguing if overly arty domestic drama: the director even apes shots of the awesome landscapes which Fred Schepisi showed so devastatingly in his 1988 masterpiece A Cry in the Dark.
Still, this tough, adult film only occasionally falls into mawkishness, and there’s sterling acting by Joseph Fiennes and Nicole Kidman as the couple and the equally fine Maddison Brown and Nicholas Hamilton as their children. The film's visuals look stunning on Blu; extras are featurettes and interviews.
Criminal Minds—Complete 10th Season
Elementary—Complete 3rd Season
(CBS/Paramount)
In the 10th season of Criminal Minds, one of the longest-running procedurals on television, the intricately plotted caseholds are held together by from Joe Mantegna, Thomas Gibson and series newcomer Jennifer Love Hewitt.
In the third season of Elementary, the updated Sherlock Holmes for the 21st century, Jonny Lee Miller's Holmes and Lucy Liu's Watson have gotten into a groove; that, coupled with well-chosen NYC locations, keeps this from being just the one-note gimmick it promised to be at the start. Extras include featurettes, deleted scenes, commentaries and gag reels.
Flesh and Bullets
Pulsating Flesh/Super Sex
(Vinegar Syndrome)
Carlos Tobalina was a notable ‘80s adult-film director, and these releases are examples of his uninspired but competent work, starting with 1985's Bullets, which is actually one of his non-hardcore films: it features X-rated stars Mai Lin and Sharon Kelly co-existing alongside Yvonne de Carlo, Cesar Romero and even Cornel Wilde in a tired but watchable retread ofStrangers on a Train.
1987's Pulsating andSuper, on the other hand, are wall-to-wall hardcore porn with flimsy plots, substandard acting and sexual exploits of then-adult superstars Harry Reems, Bunny Blue and Trinity Loren.
(CBS/Paramount)
Here are more twists and turns in the life and career of Alicia Florrick, played with her usual stylish flair by Julianna Margulies, who has steadily grown (from bumpy times on E.R.) into one of the best actresses on television.
She's not alone, however: the supporting cast comprises many well-known names from New York's theater community, from Christine Baranski and Alan Cumming to Chris Noth and Zach Grenier, with David Hyde Pierce, Michael Cerveris and even Michael J. Fox also turning up. Extras featurettes, deleted scenes and a gag reel.
The Riot Club
(IFC)
Based on screenwriter Laura Wade's own play Posh, this excellent comedy-drama about self-entitled male students at Oxford who mistakenly think that their elitist campus club gives them whatever they want—including, after a drunken night, non-punishment for serious crimes—is crammed with top British performers, brilliantly tiptoeing on, but never going over, the line into caricature.
Standouts are Holliday Granger and Jessica Brown Findlay as women brought into these young men’s line of fire. Director Lone Scherig superbly helms a sly cautionary tale that’s light on its feet, even when events spiral out of control in a familiar fashion.
Theater Reviews—Broadway's "Hamilton" and Off-Broadway's "Love & Money"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 25 August 2015 21:06
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Hamilton
Book, music & lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda; directed by Thomas Kail
Performances began July 13, 2015
Love & Money
Written by A.R. Gurney; directed by Mark Lamos
Performances through October 4, 2015
 |
| Renee Elise Goldsberry, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Phillipa Soo in Hamilton (photo: Joan Marcus) |
There is so much that's good about Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda's rollicking musical about one of our least-known Founding Fathers, that it's too bad that the show is not the instant classic so many are touting it as.
Unlike In the Heights, Miranda's breakthrough show—and the "game-changer" for musicals that everyone is belatedly saying Hamilton is—whose hip-hop inflected songs were actual emotional outpourings of its characters, the rapping rhymes of Hamilton, Jefferson, Burr and Washington sit uneasily on their tongues. Admittedly, what Sherman Edwards composed for his Founding Fathers in 1776 wasn't any more authentic, but those men (as portrayed by the likes of William Daniels and Howard da Silva) at least retained their dignity, while the characters in Hamilton sometimes approach parody.
That's especially true of King George III, whose sardonic appearances as, first, the colonies' ruler, later a defeated monarch, and lastly a bemused and amused observer of the new nation puts the show dangerously close to silly Something Rotten territory, however deliciously Jonathan Groff embodies the British tyrant.
Miranda's lyrics are clever—often very clever—but also flirt with the sophomoric: "raise the glass to the four of us/tomorrow there'll be more of us" isn't the most inspiring couplet. Miranda's score mainly soars when the entire cast sings variations of "whoa whoa" and Thomas Kail's extraordinarily savvy directing and Andy Blankenbuehler's astounding choreography come to the rescue.
In fact, the staging and movement in this show are so prominent that there's almost too much of it. There are precious few moments when characters are allowed to just sing without being upstaged by other doings—and the large stage turntables, stairs and a second tier that allow for even more movement throughout—and so the nearly three-hour Hamilton becomes, quite literally, exhausting.
It's too bad: shorn of 20 or so minutes, Hamilton would be the astute and theatrically exciting analysis of our country's complex, multi-hued early history that its being described as. As it is, it's at times exhilarating and always entertaining; even Miranda's stumbling attempts at profundity—the thick irony of "My Shot," the recurring duels, the wedding rewind, the bathetic summing-up finale—work well onstage, thanks to Kail and Blankenbuehler's breathtakingly inventive and cohesive visual structure, upon which Miranda's ambitious if not fully realized musical concept sits.
The indefatigable cast is tremendous, led by Miranda's self-confident Hamilton, Renee Elise Goldsberry's golden-voiced sister-in-law Angelica, Phillipa Soo's gorgeous-sounding wife Eliza, Daveed Diggs's strutting Thomas Jefferson and Leslie Odom, Jr.'s charmingly villainous Aaron Burr, whose own complicated history deserves a show of its own someday.
 |
| Maureen Anderman in Love & Money (photo: Joan Marcus) |
One of his most featherweight works, A.R. Gurney's Love & Moneytouches on this eloquent playwright's pet themes of the foibles of the rich and entitled in such a way that, at a mere 75 minutes, it's a mere blueprint for a more incisive play.
Sharply directed by Mark Lamos, Gurney's comedy introduces Cornelia Cunningham (an excellent Maureen Anderman), an Upper East Side widow about to enter an old folks' home for the affluent—there are even retired professors!—who has decided to give much of her wealth away to many charitable organizations. When her lawyer Harvey Abel (an amusingly flustered Joe Paulik) arrives to go over details of her will and trust (her children are dead and her two grandchildren are, she says, not entitled to much), he also brings her a letter from a young man in Buffalo, who insists he is her long-lost grandson.
A little later, Walker Williams (an unfortunately charmless Gabriel Brown) arrives and, after surprising them with the color of his skin, charms the pants off Cornelia, who acts like she believes his story of being the offspring of an affair between Cornelia's daughter and his father during a trip to Manhattan. Her skeptical lawyer digs up informaton that puts Walker's story under a microscope, while Cornelia's loyal maid Agnes (Pamela Dunlap, typical but funny) is also not fooled by the interloper.
Whether Walker is in fact her grandson or not is not the point—it does get resolved, by the way—instead, the play is an excuse for Gurney to provide jokes and observations about class, race, affluence, education and culture, none very penetrating but amusing at times, summed up by Cornelia's rather pedestrian quip about her lack of interracial romance: "The closest I've ever come to an affair with a black man is to vote for Obama."
Hamilton
Richard Rodgers Theatre, 226 West 46th Street, New York, NY
hamiltonbroadway.com
Love & Money
Signature Theatre, 480 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
signaturetheatre.org
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