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Reviews
August '15 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 18 August 2015 22:13
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Day for Night
(Criterion)
Francois Truffaut's tenderly funny valentine to cinema was an award-winning hit in 1973, but today it might be hard to see what the fuss was about, since Truffaut shows the behind-the-scenes machinations, squabbles and love affairs on the set of a commercial movie, which showed how far he’d come from his earlier auteurist works as one of the French New Wave of the ‘60s.
Still, this is accomplished and effective filmmaking, with in-jokes galore and the calm presence of Truffaut himself as the movie-within-movie director: Day for Night also kickstarted the careers of glamorous European actresses Jacqueline Bisset and Nathalie Baye. Criterion's transfer is immaculate; extras include vintage and new interviews, a 2003 documentary and a segment about the Truffaut/Jean-Luc Godard fracas touched off by Godard’s loathing of this film.
(Zeitgeist)
A masterly dissection of the “new” Russia—in which oligarchs outpace the working classes at a rate even greater than the U.S.—Andrey Zvyagintsev’s 2012 drama is best when extraneous details fall away and we are left with the naked pain and desperation of the title character, a former nurse (now married to a gazillionaire) whose own family is ignored by her rich husband.
Too bad Philip Glass’s self-parodic music trashes every scene it’s heard in; sensibly, Zvyagintsev (who more recently made the interesting if fatally flawed Leviathan) builds the most powerful moments—beginning with the evocative opening shot—with silence that speaks volumes more than broken Glass. The movie's immaculate compositions are given new life on Blu-ray; extras are a 30-minute Zvyagintsev interview and 40-minute making-of.
La grande bouffe
(Arrow USA)
Italian provocateur Marco Ferrari's infamous 1973 black comedy purports to satirize Western culture's mass consumerism by chronicling a quartet of middle-aged male friends who decide to eat and screw themselves to death: it's a pretty feeble idea which Ferrari does little with except have the men overindulge in food and women until they give up the ghost one by one.
There's amusement in watching four of Europe's most civilized actors—Philippe Noiret, Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli and Ugo Tognazzi—act brutishly and barbaric, but the 130-minute movie wears out its welcome by repeating itself until it, too, dies an overdue death. The film has been wonderfully restored in hi-def; extras include vintage interviews and featurette and an audio commentary.
(e one)
NCIS—Complete 12th Season
(CBS/Paramount)
For the fourth season of Hell on Wheels, the sturdy Anson Mount as our hero Cullen and colorful Colm Meaney as head of the Union Pacific Railroad make this down-and-dirty depiction of the post-Civil War West worth watching.
In its 12th season, NCIS continues its pursuit of evildoers from international pirates to cyberterrorists with a solid cast led by Mark Harmon, Emily Wickersham and Pauley Perrette. Both series look terrific on Blu; Hell extras are featurettes and interviews, while NCIS extras are featurettes, deleted/extended scenes and audio commentaries (a Best Buy exclusive includes an extra DVD with more bonus features).
La Sapienza
(Kino Lorber)
Eugene Green has been a favorite on the festival circuit for years, but his latest feature demonstrates his empty stylishness: ostensibly a study of two couples—one middle-aged and on the outs, the other young and just starting out—La Sapienza comprises 100 minutes of stilted, vacuous dialogue, stiff, emotionless acting, nicely-photographed exteriors and interiors of sublime Italian buildings (the protagonist is an architect) and Monteverdi vocal music that wells up on the soundtrack to give an air of artiness to the proceedings.
The movie looks luminous on Blu, at least, and could be a travelogue of gorgeous Italian architecture; extras are a Green interview and 2006 Green short, Les Signes, which in 32 minutes makes that usually expressive actor Mathieu Amalric as zombie-like as the rest.
(IFC)
Abel Ferrara has taken the torn-from-sordid-headlines story of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, French presidential hopeful accused of raping a maid at a Manhattan hotel, and turned it into a fierce and even moral drama about a sex-crazed man with power finally being called to account for his actions.
A gigantic Gerard Depardieu (in girth as well as stature) bares all in a commanding performance, while Jacqueline Bisset gives the man's wife a knowingly icy elegance. For once, Ferrara has found a sordid, nasty tale worth telling that he doesn't muck with. The hi-def transfer is impressive.
DVDs of the Week
Bottoms Up
Knifed Up
(Cinedigm)
These 45-minute documentaries are semi-serious glimpses at the ultra-serious American epidemic of plastic surgery—the obsession with, in the first, big butts and, in the second, everything else—which amateurishly use talking heads who alternate one-liners with more cogent observations, and a plethora of video footage and photographs, mostly of celebrities but occasionally of “regular” people who went too far in their quest for physical perfection.
There are a few moments that are genuinely disturbing—as, most notably, when we see a bit too much of a woman's butt enlargement operation—but too much of this is superficial and jokey, their abbreviated running times militating against any in-depth analysis.
(IFC)
In this wish-fulfillment fantasy by writer-director Victor Levin, a 20ish writer meets a gorgeous and oh-so-willing French housewife on Fifth Avenue and begins an affair in which he discovers how the French deal with adultery: unlike puritanical Americans, her husband and children welcome him as a friend of the family.
Although Anton Yelchin is too dull to deserve his character's lucky fate, Bérénice Marlohe is so exquisite, elegant, refined—in other words, so French—that she makes this threadbare 90-minute rom-com seem more substantial than it is. Well-used Manhattan locations (this is also, of course, a Woody Allen homage) are another plus. A short making-of is the lone extra.
It Happened Here
(Cinedigm)
The ongoing discussion of campus rape is not going away, even if shoddy journalism like that in Rolling Stone forced it to unfairly take a hit, since—as this strong documentary shows—male college students continue to rape female college students.
Director Lisa F. Jackson follows several victims who are forthcoming after initial reluctance at sharing their stories, their clear-eyed truth-telling and activism permeate the film, especially when they come up against obvious circling the wagons from clueless institutions like the University of Connecticut, whose (female) president defended the school against their accusations.
Greta Gerwig is "Mistress America"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 17 August 2015 15:56
- Written by Jack Angstreich
On the evening of Thursday, August 13th, the Film Society of Lincoln Center hosted the local premiere of Noah Baumbach's marvelous new work, Mistress America, co-written by and starring the delightful Greta Gerwig, at the Walter Reade Theater. The film opened in Manhattan the following day.
A comedy about a freshman at Barnard College — played by the lovely Lola Kirke in a moving performance — who befriends the daughter of her mother's fiancé — played by Gerwig, in some of her most impressive work to date — Mistress America has screwball elements and, in its use of voiceover, its stylized dialogue and its visual wit, often recalls the films of Baumbach's sometime collaborator, the brilliant Wes Anderson.
Like the director's previous outing, the exhilarating While We're Young, Mistress America has a lighter touch than his three preceding, more agonized works, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg, and Frances Ha. (Amusingly, at the onstage Q & A with Baumbach and Gerwig following this screening, the director was asked if he had any plans to return to the "more brutal" mode of Margot at the Wedding — he promised to do so.) The dialogue in this new film, like that of his last, is consistently hilarious and the comic effect is enhanced by brisk editing.
Having seen all of the narrative features directed by Baumbach, barring the disowned Highball, I'm still not certain whether he is genuinely a stylist, whereas Anderson so manifestly is one — this was undeniable by the time of the latter's excellent Rushmore, if not quite in his remarkable debut, Bottle Rocket — but Baumbach seems to be a more accomplished filmmaker than the exceptionally talented Whit Stillman who, like the director of Mistress America, owes a debt to Woody Allen and Eric Rohmer.
The post-screening Q & A with the director and Gerwig — looking as gorgeous as ever — was moderated by Kent Jones, the New York Film Festival Director, and was not without several pleasurable moments.
2015 Summer Festivals—Shaw Festival, Caramoor, Bard Summerscape
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 17 August 2015 00:08
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Shaw Festival
Performances through November 1, 2015
Caramoor Summer Music Festival
Performances through August 2, 2015
Bard Summerscape
Performances through August 16, 2015
Canada's Shaw Festival continues to be the premier summer theater destination, not only for its lovely lakeside location (whose cool breezes and usually moderate temperatures are the opposite of New York's sultry weather) but for its mostly superior productions of plays by Shaw and his contemporaries and—straying from the festival's original mandate—classic musicals and new plays by writers influenced by Bernard Shaw.
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| Julie Martell (center) in Sweet Charity (photo: Emily Cooper) |
This summer's musical, Sweet Charity, has two long shadows: it's based on Federico Fellini's classic 1956 film, The Nights of Cabiria,starring his beloved wife Giulietta Masina; and the original Broadway production, by Bob Fosse, starred his beloved wife Gwen Verdon. So that's four legends of film and theater towering over any production of this musical, which has a beguilingly tuneful score by Cy Coleman and an amusingly sassy book by Neil Simon.
Happily, multifaceted singer-dancer-actress Julie Martell brings her own mix of lovable naivete and hard-as-nails New York toughness to the lead role of Charity, and a large and merry cast surrounds her. Ken MacDonald's nicely evocative '60s New York sets, Cameron Davis's astute projections, Bonnie Beecher's lively lighting and Charlotte Dean's dead-on costumes complement the boisterous choreography of Parker Esse and solid direction by Morris Panych, which combine to make this Charity sweet indeed.
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| Harveen Sandhu (center) and Patrick McManus (right) in Pygmalion (photo: Emily Cooper) |
The same cannot be said for a new production of Pygmalion, one of Bernard Shaw's supreme masterpieces that's best known as the basis of the beloved musical My Fair Lady. Shaw's biting satire of class warfare has been pointlessly updated to the present day by director Peter Hinton (who did similar damage to Oscar Wilde's Lady Windemere's Fan a couple of summers back), in the hopes that everyone "gets" that Shaw's 100-year-old play is still relevant today.
Well, of course it is, and we don't need Hinton's sledgehammer introductions of pontificating TV talking heads and other video footage, an extraneous fashion show—yes, you read that right— and lousy contemporary songs to alert us to that fact. (When Vaughan Williams' elegaic Tallis Fantasia is heard during a scene, the effect in this confused context is of sheer irrationality.)
And, contrary to his published director's note, Hinton has "modernized" more than just dialogue about financial matters in order to push stodgy old Shaw into the 21st century. Whereas in the original, Eliza Doolittle famously used the expletive "bloody" to shock Shaw's upper-crust phonies, now she uses a more infamous F-word. It's good for an easy laugh—and feigned shock from an audience desensitized to hearing it by now—but little more.
In such a farrago, the actors don't stand a chance: even experienced Shaw Fest vets like Patrick McManus and Mary Haney as Henry Higgins and his mother are defeated by their director; poor McManus even has to fight off a collapsing chair in a painfully unfunny bit of slapstick. For her part, Harveen Sandhu is everything you would want in an Eliza: maybe she'll get to play her again in a more felicitous production of Pygmalion.
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| Dialogues des Carmélites: Jennifer Cheek, conductor Will Crutchfield, Alisa Jordheim (photo: Gabe Palacio) |
From Canada to two musical oases north of the city, each staging opera this summer. Caramoor, an estate in Katonah, 45 minutes north of Manhattan, hosts a music festival each summer that includes classical, jazz and folk, along with two operas in the "Bel Canto at Caramoor" series. However, this summer—in addition to Donzietti's bel canto La Favorite—a mid-20th century masterpiece was performed: Francis Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites.
It was a wise choice for the outdoor Venetian Theater: Poulenc's extraordinarily moving drama about a group of martyred nuns during the French Revolution was given a forceful reading by conductor Will Crutchfield and his skilled orchestral forces, choir and singers, led by the formidable Jennifer Cheek's young nun Blanche and Alisa Jordheim's breakout performance as the novice nun Constance.
Directed adroitly if minimally on the cramped stage by Victoria Crutchfield (the conductor's talented daughter), this Carmelites was involving musical drama of the highest order.
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| A scene from The Wreckers (photo: Cory Weaver) |
Would that I could say the same about Ethel Smyth's middling The Wreckers, this summer's operatic offering at the annual must-attendBard Summerscape, on Bard College's campus two hours north of New York. Smyth was a contemporary of Mexican composer Carlos Chavez, the subject of this summer's Bard Music Festival, which is why her 1908 opera—never before staged in America—was chosen, but a sketchy libretto and long, arid stretches of uninspired music drag it down.
Smyth's melodies are remindful of Wagner, Strauss and particularly Bizet and Carmen, but without reaching the emotional or dramatic heights of those masters. And director Thaddeus Strassberger forced the poor performers to navigate what looked like a precarious setup of crates that could at any moment send them tumbling into the orchestra pit. As it is, only soprano Sky Ingram made any vocal or dramatic impression in a cast that might have been more capable in more sympathetic circumstances.
Leon Botstein ably conducted the American Symphony Orchestra, but the end result was indifference toward an operatic oddity with little to recommend it. Perhaps Chavez's only opera, The Visitors, should have been staged instead.
Shaw Festival
Niagara on the Lake, Ontario, Canada
shawfest.com
Caramoor Summer Music Festival
Katonah, NY
caramoor.org
Bard Summerscape
Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
fishercenter.bard.edu
NYC Theater Review—'Cymbeline' in Central Park
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 13 August 2015 19:29
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Cymbeline
Written by William Shakespeare; directed by Daniel Sullivan
Performances through August 23, 2015
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| Lily Rabe and Raul Esparza in Cymbeline (photo: Carol Rosegg) |
That Shakespeare jumped the shark with Cymbeline, a late-career romance that includes so many wild plot twists and crazy final-act revelations and reversals it's as if the Bard had decided to send up his entire playwriting career in one fell swoop, is pretty indisputable.
So it's not surprising that director Daniel Sullivan plays fast and loose with its many eccentricities for his Central Park staging, jettisoning the ancient Britain and Renaissance Rome settings, doing the usual Delacorte dumbing down by making things cruder and more farcical, and excising one of Shakespeare's most famous dream sequences: the appearance of the god Jupiter on an eagle.
The problem with this approach is that Cymbeline, for all its inconsistencies (literary luminaries Bernard Shaw and Samuel Johnson famously hated it), is a carefully constructed and ultimately moving exploration of love, death and reconciliation. By treating it as a string of entertaining scenes with added song and dance interludes, Sullivan ends up merely skimming the surface of Shakespeare's deep, dark, often sorrowful text.
His fast-paced three hour production thrives on audience participation, a desperate strategem for any director: the performers get to play to and ackowledge a few dozen spectactors sitting in several rows placed on either side of the stage, which makes for fun but unnecessary interaction. There's also much bric-a-brac at the sides of the stage (which looks salvaged from earlier Delacorte productions), including piles of crates—not to be confused with the trunk featured in the famous bedroom scene—on which are stampedKing Lear and Hamlet and, unaccountably, oversized cutouts of Napoleon on horseback and an armored tank.
None of this really adds anything, but doesn't really detract either. What does detract are the mediocre performances of the Delacorte's current "it" couple, Lily Rabe and Hamish Linklater, whose inflated reputations as top-flight Shakespeareans continues to mystify. Rabe, whose Imogen never reaches the poetic heights of one of Shakespeare's most sympathetically drawn females, fleetingly rises to the occasion when disguised as a boy, while Linklater fails to impress in not one but two roles (nine performers enact some two dozen roles throughout). As both the heroic Posthumous and the idiotic Cloten, Linklater falls equally flat.
Others fare better. Kate Burton makes a gleefully evil stepmother as the Queen and doubles amusingly as banished old man Belarius, whose "sons" are integral to the convoluted plot revelations, while Patrick Page is a well-spoken and quietly elegant King Cymbeline. Best of all is the villainous Iachimo of Raul Esparza, whose charismatic performance works despite Sullivan making him a Rat Pack-era Sinatra.
Esparza beautifully sings "Come, thou monarch of the vine," lifted from Anthony and Cleopatra (the not inapposite music is by Tom Kitt), dances sinuously when given the chance, and is the lone cast member who sounds like he understands what he's saying, especially in the bedroom scene, when he takes the measure of the sleeping Imogen to gather proof that he slept with her to win a bet with Posthumous.
If only Sullivan had given Esparza more Shakespearean songs to sing, I wouldn't have minded that his Cymbeline isn't really Cymbeline at all.
Cymbeline
Delacorte Theater, Central Park, New York, NY
shakespeareinthepark.org
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