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Reviews
May '15 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 19 May 2015 22:12
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
American Sniper
(Warner Brothers)
With this biopic about Chris Kyle, the lethal sniper who terrorized insurgents during his four tours of duty in Iraq, Clint Eastwood has made a surprisingly conventional war movie, flattening out any moral ambiguity by making Kyle a surprisingly one-dimensional hero whose inner struggles are dramatized on the level of a Lifetime Channel movie.
It's effective for what it is but could have been much more, especially considering the tremendous acting of Bradley Cooper as Kyle and the equally stunning Sienna Miller as his wife Tyla. The movie looks good on Blu; extras are two featurettes.
(Shout Factory)
This bumpy 1991 action flick, which pairs Don Johnson and Mickey Rourke as a modern-day cowboy and his biker buddy, has a ramshackle story over which director Simon Wincer displays little control, ultimately turning to desperate outbursts of cartoonish and realistic violence.
Rourke is already becoming a self-parody, Johnson gets points by playing it straight, and Vanessa Williams pops up to sing a couple of silky numbers in a nothing role. The hi-def transfer looks fine; lone extra is a vintage featurette.
Ladyhawke
(Warner Archive)
Richard Donner's 1985 medieval adventure yarn about cursed lovers transformed into a hawk by day (her) and a wolf by night (him) soars whenever Giuseppe Rotunno's glistening photography shows off incredible Italian locales and sunsets, but falls down whenever Matthew Broderick's utterly—and wrongly—contemporary petty thief is onscreen.
On the plus side, Michelle Pfeiffer has never looked more enchantingly lovely in Rotunno's golden-hued lighting, and the movie does work its spell for those in an unfinicky romantic mood. The Blu-ray transfer is first-rate.
(Arrow USA)
This brash, sardonic 1969 yakuza thriller follows a mobster just out of prison who finds that, with his boss near death and his gang broken up, there's a deadly rival for both a young woman and his very life.
Director Yasuharu Hasebe's widescreen black and white compositions allow this epic story to play out on an equally expansive canvas, and his unflagging pace glosses over any holes in plotting and flimsy character development. The hi-def transfer is excellent; extras include interviews.
The River
(Criterion)
In 1951, French director Jean Renoir traveled to India for his first color film, a visually opulent but dramatically inert adaptation of Rumer Godden's book about three sisters in Calcutta. Although Renoir's painterly eye—like his artist father's—was impeccable, The River lacks the narrative propulsion and wisdom about human behavior of his all-time masterpieces The Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion.
Still, this ravishing film looks even more exquisite on Criterion's Blu-ray release, whose plethora of extras includes Renoir and Martin Scorsese intros, a video essay and a documentary, Around The River, on Renoir and the film.
CPO Sharkey—Complete 1st Season
(Time-Life)
It's hard to believe, but in 1976, when his insult humor ("you hockey puck" was one of his few inoffensive lines) was in vogue and he was a Tonight Show regular, Don Rickles actually starred in this alternately amusing and cringeworrthy sitcom as a long-time navy officer dealing with recruits who are bumpkins and ne'er-do-wells.
The first season, comprising 15 episodes, has decent laughs, most of them—and the warning on the box bears this out—instances of his usual sense of humor that is too politically incorrect for today's audiences. The lone extra is a hilarious bit on Carson in which, for once, Rickles himself is the butt of the joke.
Every Little Crook and Nanny
(Warner Archive)
Evan Hunter's rollicking farcical novel about a resourceful nanny pitted against a group of underworld criminals was turned into a plodding 1972 movie by director Cy Howard that fatally lacks the book's unsubtle but skewed humor.
Despite a formidable cast that includes Victor Mature, Lynn Redgrave, Dom DeLuise, Isabel Sanford, Pat Morita and Austin Pendleton, the pedestrian movie plods along for 100 minutes without ever settling into a comic groove.
(Seventh Art)
The recent exhibit Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs—showcasing the French master's final decade, when he created a startling series of richly colored paper cut-outs that underscored his dazzling creativity and originality—was a smash at London's Tate Modern and New York's Museum of Modern Art.
This smart but sober 90-minute documentary overview comprises close-up views of its many highlights, informative interviews with curators and experts, well-chosen excerpts of Matisse's own words and glimpses at his storied career.
A Year in Champagne
(First Run)
This stimulating documentary about the region of France where the original bubbly is made entertainingly explores the background of the world-renowned sparkling wine itself, including visits to some estates that have made the beloved stuff for centuries.
But director David Kennard also gives a valuable primer on the history of the hardscrabble land where grapes are grown, which is drenched with the blood of both World Wars. Extras are additional scenes and short films.
May '15 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 12 May 2015 22:41
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
The Firebird
(Euroarts)
Jiri Kylian—The Choreographer
(Arthaus Musik)
The excellent 2003 Canadian film of Igor Stravinsky's classic ballet The Firebird—which features two supreme dancers, Greta Hodgkinson and Aleksandar Antonijevic, showing off James Kudelka's spectacular choreography—also includes the Kirov Orchestra under the great Russian conductor Valery Gergiev performing Stravinsky's irresistible music.
In the 1991 documentary portrait Jiri Kylian—The Choreographer, the Czech master discusses his storied career from the former Czechoslovakia to Europe and America, alongside ample glimpses of his ballet work, making this a must for aficionados of dance.
(PBS)
In the third season of this series about the American entrepreneur whose innovative department store changed the face of London in the early 1900s, Selfridge has lost his beloved wife and throws himself into memoralizing her with a scheme to open a home for returning soldiers from the recently completed Great War.
The storylines, which better integrate Selfridge's grown children and his employees in often intriguing subplots, take the weight off the too-contemporary performance by Jeremy Piven in the title role; the rest of the ensemble picks up the slack considerably. The hi-def transfer is excellent; extras comprise behind-the-scenes footage.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne
(Arrow USA)
Polish director Walerian Borowczyk has a fervid cult following, but I've never acquired a taste for his hysterical dramas that mingle the horrific and quotidian in obvious ways, like this risible 1981 riff on Robert Louis Stephenson's Jekyll/Hyde story.
In the title roles, Udo Kier and Marina Pierro are both inapposite, he too feminine, she far less so, while several pointless hardcore inserts add little to Borowczyk's shrill, cartoonish vision. The movie looks sharp on Blu-ray; extras include an audio commentary, short films and interviews.
Winter Sleep
(Adopt/Kino)
Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan has distinguished himself as a master of deliberate character studies in which psychological insights are slowly unveiled by characters' meandering conversations, like this 195-minute dissection of a middle-aged hotel owner who lords his arrogance over everyone—his young wife, his tenants, his neighbors, his colleagues.
The penetrating dialogue and landscapes that are astonishing in their emptiness underscore the frayed relationships in this overlong but worthwhile drama. The hi-def transfer is first rate; too bad the 140-minute making-of documentary, available on other Blu-ray releases, wasn't included.
DVDs of the Week
Blood on the Vine—Complete 3rd Season
(MHZ Networks)
In this breezily entertaining TV series, veteran French actor Pierre Arditi is a wine expert who becomes an unofficial detective looking into the murders of people related to vineyards throughout France.
Despite the inherent absurdity of the premise, Arditti has the right amount of vigor and amusement bordering on bemuseument, and the locales (Alsace, Burgandy, the Champagne region) are perfectly chosen for the dastardly deeds which are always solved, like Ellery Queen or Quincy, by each episode's end.
Sagrada—The Mystery of Creation
(First Run)
In The Dance Goodbye, director Ron Steinman chronicles New York City Ballet star Merrill Ashley after her 1997 retirement following 31 years dancing with the company: a bright, articulate but restless woman, Ashley looks for her place in life once her career ends, and there are plentiful clips from her brilliant career that complement interviews with Ashley herself.
Sagrada, Stefan Haupt's documentary about the great Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi's marvelous—and perpetually unfinished—cathedral soaring above his beloved Barcelona, brings together those working on this gigantic structure for decades since Gaudi's death and those who knew him personally and professionally to create an illuminating portrait of a genius whose belief in both God and the brilliance of man was his enduring legacy. Sagrada extras are additional scenes.
Horizon 6
(RCO Live)
In this DVD/CD release of new compositions performed by the Royal Concertgebuow Orchestra at its musical home in Amsterdam, Holland, the best of the batch is Mysterien by Louis Andriessen, one of the most high-profile of modernist Dutch composers; his first orchestral work since 1967 is played with verve by the musicians led by conductor Mariss Jansons, shown live in performance on the DVD.
The CD comprises five other works, variable in quality, by other leading contemporary Dutch composers: the Violin Concerto by Michel van der Aa, given a scintillating performance by soloist Janine Jansen, is by far the most memorable of these.
(Film Movement)
In this straightforward adaptation of Diderot's classic novel, actress Pauline Etienne gives a quiet but virtuosic portrayal of the eponymous 18th century nun who believes her calling is not the church and who withstands heresy, hypocrisy, physical and mental degradation and even lesbian overtures from a mother superior (played by Isabelle Huppert) to, she hopes, finally be free to decide for herself about her own life.
There is also Guillaume Nikloux's restrained direction, which provides the necessary understanding and honesty to his heroine's story, which is slow-moving but ultimately shattering.
May '15 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 05 May 2015 21:20
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Accidental Love
(Millennium)
The back story to this feeble attempt at a political farce is more interesting than what's onscreen: it was made in 2008 as Nailed, directed by David O. Russell and with rising young stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Jessica Biel in the leads. For various reasons (but primarily because it was so bad), Russell quit, and the movie has been in limbo until now.
Directing credit goes to pseudonymous Stephen Greene, while Gyllenhaal (who looks like a kid) and a trove of familiar supporting faces like Kirstie Alley, James Brolin, Katherine Keener, James Marsden and Tracy Morgan are undermined by the material. Biel actually shows a flair for light comedy; too bad it's wasted on this embarrassing addition to the resumes of all involved. The hi-def transfer is OK.
(PBS)
This stylish mini-series set in 1930s London engrossingly captures the behind the scenes and onstage drama that occurs when a rising black jazz ensemble makes it big among the aristocracy and upper-class audiences.
Although the storylines filling five 90-minute episodes and a 60-minute finale start to resemble soap operas and trashy novels, wonderful musicmaking, strong acting (from Chiwetel Ejiofor, Matthew Goode, Jacqueline Bisset, Janet Montgomery and John Goodman) and director Stephen Poliakoff's credible era atmosphere more than compensate. The Blu-ray transfer is first-rate; extras include cast and crew interviews.
42nd Street
(Warner Archive)
In this splashy 1933 musical, Broadway music and dancing merge for a beautifully done last 20 minutes: unfortunately, there's that first hour-plus, which laboriously puts the movie's wooden characters through their routine paces.
No matter: what Lloyd Bacon's direction lacks in precision, it makes up for with panache, helped by tunes like "Shuffle Off to Buffalo" and the title song, set to Busby Berkeley's smart production numbers: that's entertainment, indeed. On Blu-ray, the restored film sparkles; extras are featurettes and two vintage cartoons, including Shuffle Off to Buffalo, which has a warning label about its era's ethnic stereotyping.
(Warner Brothers)
In honor of the 100th anniversary of Frank Sinatra's birth, this five-disc set collects some of his best and most popular onscreen roles, from his early musical appearances in 1945's Anchors Weigh, 1949's On the Town and 1955's Guys and Dolls; to the fun but sluggish gangster movies Oceans 11 (1960) and Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964).
The vivid color and ebullient musical scores of Town and Dolls make them the pick of the litter, and Sinatra has fun duking it out with Gene Kelly, Ann Miller, Marlon Brando and Jean Simmons. The Blu-ray transfers of all five films are excellent; extras include a 32-page photo book, vintage cartoons, featurettes, commentaries and a Tonight Show segment with Sinatra as guest host.
GoodFellas
(Warner Brothers)
Martin Scorsese's 1990 drama about mobster Nick Pileggi is considered one of the great gangster films and, although Scorsese's direction and Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta's acting are stupendous, there's a sense that it is all too much, that Scorsese rubs our noses in the bad guys' gleefully violent lives.
Still, such superior cinematic craft is exciting to watch, and this may be the final truly accomplished and memorable film of Scorsese's career (despite later entries as Casino, The Aviator and the Oscar-winning The Departed). This 25th anniversary set features an improved hi-def transfer, 36-page photo book and new 30-minute documentary; older extras include two commentaries, featurettes and interviews.
Mr. Turner
(Sony Classics)
Director Mike Leigh smartly chose his collaborators for his impressively mounted 2-1/2 hour drama about the last 25 years of the great but controversial 19th century British artist J.M.W. Turner: cinematographer Dick Pope and actor Timothy Spall.
Pope's luminous photography suggests but doesn't ape Turner's rough-and-tumble canvases of striking beauty, while Spall's miraculous portrayal of the cantankerous genius avoids caricature and hamminess: even his growl, which in lesser hands would be an affectation, is a natural manifestation of the artist's personality. The superb hi-def transfer allows further appreciation of the film's visual luster; extras comprise Leigh's commentary, a deleted scene and behind the scenes featurettes.
DVDs of the Week
The Legacy
(MHZ Networks)
In this gripping high-class Danish soap opera, renowned artist Veronika Gronnegaard inconveniently dies after telling a family friend that she is Veronika's real daughter to whom she's bequeathing her mansion, to the consternation of her three "official" grown children.
The infighting among these squabbling siblings—whose emotional ebbs and flows never wane, whether the battles are legal or personal—is dramatized with blood and guts by the tremendous cast (which includes two performers familiar to eagle-eyed foreign-film fans, Trine Dryholm and Jesper Christiansen), which carries this bingeworthy 10-hour drama enough to keep us waiting with bated breath for the second season, already showing on Danish television.
(Icarus)
For centuries, cities sprung up at the confluence of rivers and over time, those rivers were buried underground as cities grew and the waters became more polluted and disease-ridden; as Caroline Bacle's timely and relevant documentary shows, reclaiming the rivers is the prudent and environmentally sound thing to do.
Places as far-flung as Toronto, Yonkers and London are working through the difficulties of bureaucratic red tape and natural barriers to make their original waterways more accessible to the public, with varying (but on the whole satisfactory) results so far. Extras comprise 14 additional scenes.
Miss Julie
(Lionsgate)
Liv Ullmann's restrained adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's tragic drama has the passion and complexity the director obviously learned from her mentor Ingmar Bergman, and features a thoroughly believable Samantha Morton as the housekeeper. Too bad that Jessica Chastain as Miss Julie and Colin Farrell as her aristocratic father's valet are too contemporary to disappear into their period roles, despite valiant attempts.
Ullmann's directorial efforts have been sadly overlooked on disc, especially her best films Private Confessions(not on DVD or Blu-ray) and Faithless (not on Blu-ray). Extras are Chastain and Ullmann interviews.
(Anchor Bay)
The seamy underbelly of suburbia has been done to death, and director Gillian Greene and writers Christian Magalhes and Robert Snow have little new or fresh to say in this scattershot black comedy triggered by the killing of a nerdy momma's boy's feline friend.
As a showcase for Blythe Danner, recent Oscar winner J.K. Simmons, Greg Kinnear and underrated Nikki Reed, it's watchable, but the movie is never as smart, funny or edgy as it pretends to be.
My Mistress
(Film Movement)
This unsatisfying taboo drama about a 16-year-old who befriends an unhappily married—and improbably sexy—neighbor who happens to be not only a gorgeous Frenchwoman but also an S&M expert provides few answers to why Emmanuelle Beart went to Australia to make it.
She and Harrison Gilbertson do what they can with Gerard Lee and director Stephen Lance's flimsy script, but their relationship, in and out of bed, is never made plausible. Beart looks stunning in her various latex outfits, at least. Extras comprise interviews, but—contrary to the box cover—there was no Beart interview on my copy.
New Broadway Musicals—"The Visit" and "Something Rotten"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 04 May 2015 23:54
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The Visit
Book by Terrence McNally; music & lyrics by John Kander & Fred Ebb
Directed by John Doyle
Opened April 23, 2015
Something Rotten
Book by Karey Kirkpatrick & John O'Farrell; lyrics by Karey & Wayne Kirkpatrick; music by Wayne Kirkpatrick
Directed & choreographed by Casey Nicholaw
Opened April 22, 2015
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| Chita Rivera, left, and cast of The Visit (photo: Thom Kaine) |
That the ageless Chita Rivera is a living legend is beyond dispute, and that composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb have created challenging Broadway musicals like Cabaret, Chicago, Kiss of the Spider Woman (which starred a Tony-winning Rivera) and The Scottsboro Boys is unquestioned. But the trio's latest—and final—collaboration, The Visit, shows that even the greatest artists have off days.
Based on the classic The Visit of the Old Lady by German playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt, The Visit follows Claire Zachanassian, the world's richest woman, who returns to her dreary backwater hometown with revenge on her mind, offering billions to the town and its poor inhabitants if local merchant Anton Schell—her first lover who impregnanted the teenage Claire, abandoned and rigged a paternity trial against her, forcing her into a sordid life of prostitution and several wealthy husbands—is killed.
At first, everyone is aghast, since all assumed Claire returned with charity in mind to help the downtrodden town back to its feet. However, the denizens—including Anton's wife and children—slowly decide that money is far better than morality, and they start availing themselves of pricey items on credit. From there, Durrenmatt's play (and Gottfried von Einem's expressive 1971 opera based on it, which I saw in 1997 at New York City Opera in a less than felicitous production) becomes a shocking and blackly comic expose of hypocrisy and greed.
What the Kander & Ebb Visit originally was I don't know, since I missed previous productions. But it seems obvious that its two-act structure with 23 songs gave the story ample time to work out its deliberate and inexorable march from morality to mortality. But Terrence McNally's book crudely squeezes everything into a lone 95-minute act, offering characters so perfunctorily sketched that they border on caricature, and whose motivation is all but non-existent.
McNally's book does have a nicely inventive touch. The young lovers Clare and Anton, embodied by two dancers, move around and among the others (the efficient choreography is by Graciela Daniele), joining the aged couple in several striking tableaux. As embodied by the personable John Riddle and exquisite Michelle Veintimilla, they are the best members of a supporting cast that makes a powerful chorus but whose individual performances are one-note.
Kander and Ebb's songs, while not their best, manage to convey the lost love, abandonment, vengeance and dishonesty that accompanies these dark lives...and deaths. Having the blind eunuchs employed as Clare's footmen sing in falsetto (the voices belong to the talented Matthew Deming and Chris Newcomer) provides appropriately off-putting vocals that nod to Einem's more successful operatic adaptation.
Playing Claire, a woman of hard-won wisdom after a difficult lifetime of experience, allows the 82-years-young Rivera to sing, dance and act with unsurpassed skill. But director John Doyle unaccountably underuses her, letting her wander in and out of the set when she should be front and center throughout.
Doyle also has the townspeople dress in rags and heavy, dark eye makeup, which makes them look like rejects from a high school production of The Threepenny Opera. Doyle's staging consists almost entirely of moving the suitcases and coffin for Anton that Claire brought with her around the stage continuously; later, the color yellow, because it's in the script and the title of one of the songs, becomes an arresting but hollow visual motif against the dreary monochrome backdrop.
Doyle's original gimmick was staging Sondheim musicals with performers playing their own musical instruments; now that he's branched out, his limitations have become sorely evident, especially in his bland stagings of Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes, Stephen Sondheim's Passion and now this unenthralling The Visit.
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| Brian d'Arcy James and Christian Borle in Something Rotten (photo: Joan Marcus) |
There's something to be said for a Broadway musical that takes 20 minutes' worth of solid material and stretches it out to 2-1/2 hours, which is what the 10-time Tony nominated Something Rotten does. While its hokey, anachronistic songs and juvenile humor were anticipated by Spamalot, The Producers and even The Book of Mormon, and its eagerness to please its audience (which duly responds in kind) seems desperate, there's undeniable, if disposable, fun to be had.
Twin brothers Nigel and Nick Bottom are playwrights in 1595 London, just as Shakespeare hits his stride with his latest, Romeo and Juliet. To finally surpass the Bard, Nick visits a soothsayer to try and steal William S.'s biggest future hit; Nick is told that something called a musical will become all the rage onstage, so the brothers go ahead and write the world's first: Omelette (said soothsayer misheard Hamlet).
And that's it. Those who laugh themselves to tears whenever Shakespeare plays are parodied or even mentioned—the show is awash in lines from the Bard's oeuvre, greeted with applause or laughter depending on how many audience members recognize them—or when Shakespeare himself (an agreeably hammy Christian Borle) struts onstage as the world's first rock star will find Something Rotten irresistible. The rest of us will find a fitfully amusing and exasperating musical.
There are solid comic turns from Brian d'Arcy James, who sings, dances and cracks wise as Nick; Brad Oscar, who's feverishly funny as the soothsayer Nostradamus; and Brooks Ashmanskas as Brother Jeremiah, a puritan whose endless double entendres are marred only by the actor's milking every single joke for maximum audience approval.
The book, lyrics and music by Wayne Kirkpatrick, Karey Kirkpatrick and John O'Farrell are pastiches of pastiches, some of which work while others mostly cause groans. Savvy director Casey Nicholaw's clever choreography winks at its audience with allusions to countless other shows, especially during the rousing but dragged-out showstopper "A Musical," which perfectly summarizes the unapologetically over-the-top Something Rotten.
The Visit
Lyceum Theatre, 149 West 45th Street, New York, NY
thevisitmusical.com
Something Rotten
St. James Theatre, 246 West 44th Street, New York, NY
rottenbroadway.com
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