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Film and the Arts
December '15 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 17 December 2015 20:36
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Extant—Complete 2nd Season
(Paramount/CBS)
The second season of this sci-fi series about humans, aliens and humaniches (human-like robots), filled with an unholy mix of intrigue and sentimentality, remains distant, respectable, occasionally exciting if rarely gripping.
Even though Halle Berry's star presence gives it a glossy sheen, the rest of the cast—led by Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Grace Gummer, Meryl Streep's even less talented actress daughter—is only passable which, along with convoluted storylines, leads to diminishing dramatic returns by series' end. It all looks pretty spectacular in hi-def; extras include featurettes and a gag reel.
(Arthaus Musik)
Two decades ago, Polish composer Henryk Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs surprisingly caught on with the public to become one of the best-selling classical CDs ever: its languid and slow music, coupled with Dawn Upshaw's emotive singing, made it resonate even with those who don't listen to serious music.
Too bad, then, that Tony Palmer's 1993 documentary isn't up to his usual standard; there's an illuminating Gorecki interview and a vivid performance of the symphony by Upshaw, London Sinfonietta and conductor David Zinman, but Palmer crassly rubs our noses in what inspired the work by showing superfluous footage of piles of dead Holocaust victims and equally emaciated starving Africans. The early '90s video looks merely adequate, as is the stereo sound.
Jaco
(MVD/Iron Horse)
One of the most influential bass players of his time, Jaco Pastorius had a meteoric rise and troubling fall that are the focus of this wrenching documentary by Paul Marchand and Stephen Kijak, who tell the musical story of the man who reinvented the bass guitar in the fusion band Weather Report among other collaborations before his untimely death in 1986 at age 35. We hear from Jaco's friends and colleagues, all admirers and many of them bassists (Bootsy Collins, Sting, Flea, Geddy Lee, Metallica's Robert Trujillo, the film's co-producer), while others like Joni Mitchell talk of how his musicianship affected their own performances.
A sad story of a father, husband and artist who burned out instead of fading away gives Jaco its extra emotional kick. The film looks decent on Blu; a full disc of extras features many additional interviews.
(Weinstein Co/Anchor Bay)
In this entertaining dramatization of the adventures of one of the first European explorers to reach the East, the 13th century Italian finds himself amidst clashes of the political, personal, cultural and even sexual kind during his stay in China.
Whether much of the drama, out in the open or behind closed doors, is based on fact is problematic, but it's done with as much fidelity to the characters and their era as is possible. The 10-episode first season looks ravishing on Blu-ray; extras are a documentary, featurettes, deleted scenes and a gag reel.
Speedy
(Criterion)
Not as well-known, Harold Lloyd nevertheless equaled Buster Keaton with brilliantly orchestrated, high-flying stunt work that made his films something special; even if 1928's Speedy isn't up to Keaton's Sherlock Jr. or Lloyd's own romps Safety Last and The Freshman, it still has his characteristic physical comedy in hilarious abundance.
The latest in the Criterion Collection's excellent Lloyd releases has another luminous hi-def restoration and transfer, while extras include composer Carl Davis' musical score, commentary, featurette, archival footage of Babe Ruth, video essay, Lloyd's home movies and short Bumping into Broadway.
Georges Enescu—Complete Works for Solo Piano
(Hanssler Classic)
Romanian composer Georges Enescu was a prodigy rather like Mozart, and his large-scale orchestral works—namely his symphonies and his lone opera Oedipe—are the best examples of his heroic but in many ways tragic style. His solo piano works are not as well known (he actually made his name as a virtuoso violinist), which makes this three-CD set of the complete extant works a godsend.
Fellow Romanian Raluca Stirbat's affinity for Enescu's highly original music is obvious on these substantial works, especially in the two sonatas, which alternate between intimacy and muscularity, all while making the case for Enescu as a composer of genius in whatever genre he worked.
Carl Nielsen—Maskarade
(Dacapo)
Denmark's Carl Nielsen is, thanks to his powerful symphonies, thought of as a rather dour Scandinavian composer (his best-known opera, the dramatic if erratic Saul and David, also makes that point). But Maskarade is an amusing but darkly comic romp with a lot of memorable music to go with it, right from its delectable Overture, one of Nielsen's most popular concert pieces.
This excellent recording, by the stalwart Danish National Symphony Orchestra and Choir under Michael Schonwandt's baton, makes a great impression and brings up the question: why won't anyone put it on a New York stage? (The Bronx Opera Company performed it back in 1983.).
(Capriccio)
One of the great Russian composers, Alfred Schnittke’s eclecticism served him well when writing scores for some of the renowned directors of his time: his ease at moving from classical pastiche to dissonant modernism enabled him to create music that worked perfectly for films as disparate as the satirical Adventures of a Dentist, the animated Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and the hauntingly tragic The Ascent.
The four discs that make up this first-rate boxed set amount to excerpts from 10 different scores, which doesn't include everything he did for the cinema (he composed 17 scores in all), but conductor Fran Strobel, who ably leads the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, has chosen well, and the music stands on its own, unaccompanied by visual images.
Will Todd—Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
(Signum Classics)
Creating a successful opera aimed at children can't be the easiest thing in the world, but composer Will Todd (and librettist Maggie Gottlieb) has managed it with his streamlined but effective adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic fantasy books.
Tunefully engaging, Todd’s work combines wit and charm in equal measure, even finding sonic equivalents for Carroll’s lyrical flights of literary fancy, along with beguiling melodies, all played soaringly by an ensemble of 11 players under conductor Matthew Waldren, and sung beautifully by a first-rate cast, led by Fflur Wyn as Alice.
Off-Broadway Roundup—'Dada Woof Papa Hot,' 'Hir,' 'Night Is a Room'
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 15 December 2015 22:53
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Dada Woof Papa Hot
Written by Peter Parnell; directed by Scott Ellis
Performances through January 3, 2016
Hir
Written by Taylor Mac; directed by Niegel Smith
Performances through January 3, 2016
Night Is a Room
Written by Naomi Wallace; directed by Bill Rauch
Performances through December 20, 2015
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| John Benjamin Hickey and Patrick Breen in Dada Woof Papa Hot (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Peter Parnell's Dada Woof Papa Hot, which takes a snapshot of gay and straight couples in today’s Manhattan, doesn’t try to provide a comprehensive canvas (what snapshot could?), but it does engagingly work its way through laughs, tears and the occasional insight.
A longtime couple, therapist Rob and journalist Alan have a young daughter who favors the former over the latter, which exacerbates Alan's own feelings of inadequacy, especially when the men befriend a younger, more successful couple, nerdy Scott and hunky Jason, the latter of whom Alan finds himself attracted to. Meanwhile, the men’s straight friend, TV producer Michael, admits to cheating on his own wife Serena by having an affair with Julia, a married actress.
Adultery is not exclusive to gays or straights, Parnell not surprisingly notes, and although the play’s situations, conversations, arguments, power plays, etc., are nothing if not familiar, Parnell’s lively dialogue keeps things crackling, and Scott Ellis provides his usual sensitive direction on John Lee Beatty's terrific set, which unfolds its various locations playfully and with a real sense of these very specific New York people.
The very good cast inhabits its characters fully, especially Patrick Breen (Rob), John Pankow (Michael), Kellie Overbey (Serena) and Tammy Blanchard (Julia), but special mention must be made of John Benjamin Hickey, whose Alan is a forcefully realized bundle of flaws and damaged feelings. Hickey powerfully invests the play’s final scene—Alan speaking to his beloved daughter on the phone, finally secure in the knowledge she loves him as much as she does Rob—with the most emotional moments in the entire 100 minutes. It's worth the wait.
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| Cameron Scoggins and Kristine Nielsen in Hir (photo: Joan Marcus) |
There's a thin line between absurdism and absurdity that Taylor Mac'sHir crosses repeatedly and haphazardly while taking on gender identity, patriarchy and whatever else deemed worthy of this spirited but confused farrago. When soldier Isaac returns home "from the wars," he finds house and home in staggering disarray: his beloved teenage sister is now brother Max, his macho father Arnold has been reduced post-stroke to a gurgling, dress-wearing infant, and his mother Paige has usurped the throne, establishing her own matriarchy.
Although Mac has energy and invention to spare, his critical portrait of the ultimate dysfunctional family wallows needlessly in an almost casual crudeness: at varying moments, Mom bleeds, Isaac barfs and Dad wets himself, a trifecta of bodily fluids and excretions that happily precludes further discharges. The characters are so superficially drawn as to be mere symbols: of what, it's not entirely clear. Because Mac wants them to be so many things, however contrarily and implausibly, only sporadically does his satirical targeting hit a bull's-eye.
Niegel Smith's brisk direction can't harness the disparate (and desperate) strands of Mac's agenda, and the cast, while accomplished—Cameron Scoggins makes a sympathetic Isaac and the always hammy Kristine Nielsen manages to find the kernel of an unwelcome truth in Paige—is painted into a corner by Mac’s forcefully told but preachy script.
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| Bill Heck and Dagmara Dominczyk in Night Is a Room (photo: T. Charles Erickson) |
In her banal Night Is a Room, Naomi Wallace explores how a seemingly strong relationship falls apart: Liana, a happily married woman with a college-age daughter, decides to bring together her husband Marcus and his birth mother Doré, who gave him up for adoption when she was 15. For Liana, the reunion is disastrous: she and Marcus soon divorce. Act II is another reunion of sorts, with the two women meeting after several years and discussing what happened in everyone’s lives since they last saw one another.
Without giving anything away about the relationship of Marcus and Doré which causes his marriage to dissolve, I must report that Wallace avoids dealing head-on with a monster of her own making. The crucial mother-son reunion scene, necessary to give this story any shred of psychological and emotional credibility, is never shown; instead we get after effects that are far less affecting.
Wallace does provide coarse, explicit sex talk and activity—at one point, Marcus fingers Liana to orgasm in a matter of seconds—and bodily fluids a la Hir, as Doré pees in her pants and Liana wipes herself dry post-orgasm, throwing the damp towel at her husband. Instead of exploring a serious (if taboo) subject, Wallace keeps her distance by putting into her characters’ mouths pseudo-poetic dialogue, which sounds particularly ridiculous coming from the working-class Doré.
Bill Heck (Marcus) and Ann Dowd (Doré) are persuasive, but elegant Dagmara Dominczyk is something else entirely: her Liana is riveting, even thrilling as she thrashes about in a personal tragedy of her own making. It’s too bad such compelling acting is at the service of another platitudinous Naomi Wallace play that borrows its title from someone else’s superior art, this time William Carlos Williams' poemComplaint gets the gilding by association treatment. It doesn't help.
Dada Woof Papa Hot
Mitzi Newhouse Theatre, 150 West 65th Street, New York, NY
lct.org
Hir
Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
playwrightshorizons.org
Night Is a Room
Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
signaturetheatre.org
Music Review—New York Festival of Song's "Schubert/Beatles"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Saturday, 12 December 2015 21:41
- Written by Kevin Filipski
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| Charles Yang, Theo Hoffman and Sari Gruber perform "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" (photo: Cherylynn Tsushima) |
The enduring greatness of the Beatles has many contributing factors, including their being in the right place at the right time or their pairing with producer George Martin in the studio to create their profoundly influential recordings.
But the main reason is the songwriting genius of John Lennon and Paul McCartney (and, to a lesser extent, George Harrison). No less an authority than Tony Palmer, then critic of The Observer, in his review of the "White Album" in 1968 called John and Paul the best songwriters since Schubert. Steven Blier, artistic director of New York Festival of Song, appeared to take Palmer at his word for his latest program, pairing the Beatles with Franz Schubert for a performance on December 8th, the 35th anniversary of John Lennon's murder.
I wouldn't envy Blier sifting through so many songs by such prolific composers: Schubert wrote 613 (the current agreed-upon number) before he died at age 31, while the Beatles wrote and recorded 212 or so. For Schubert/Beatles, Blier programmed nine Schubert lieder and twelve Lennon-McCartney (or Harrison) songs, pairing them by a—sometimes arcane or tenuous—link, like the opening salvo of the Beatles' "The Word" and Schubert's "Licht und Liebe" ("Light and Love"). These songs about love were an amusing way to begin, especially when the evening's four singers launched into a joyous singalong of Lennon's final line, "Say the word: love."
Onstage were soprano Sari Gruber, tenor Paul Appleby, baritones Andrew Garland and Theo Hoffman, virtuoso violinist Charles Yang and pianists Blier and partner Michael Barrett, all performing tunes by an early 19th century genius and mid/late 20th century geniuses, the latter heard in Blier’s inventive arrangements for piano and occasional violin or guitar.
Creative juxtapositions—which Blier engagingly discussed onstage between numbers—included Schubert’s “Im Walde” (“In the Forest”) with the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood,” and the final pairing of Schubert's last song “Dien Taubenpost” ("The Pigeon-post") and Lennon’s own summing-up (at age 25!), “In My Life.”
Musical highlights were many. Appleby found the tender longing in Lennon’s “Julia” as Yang alternated between plucking his violin like a guitar and traditional bowing; Appleby did the same on McCartney’s exquisitely sad “For No One” as Yang tastefully fiddled the famous French horn solo. Gruber made “Norwegian Wood” her own as a classic torch song, although the switching the genders in Lennon’s original lyrics killed his punning line, “this bird had flown."
Appleby and Garland ended their elegantly harmonized duet on “If I Fell”—nearly equaling John and Paul on the original recording—with a cute holding of hands to signal a hidden attraction between singers, while Gruber and Garland alternated verses on “She’s Leaving Home” to expertly convey the simultaneous yearning and generation-gap chiding of the Beatles’ original. Mention must also be made of Yang’s solo tour-de-force, an instrumental “Blackbird” consisting entirely of his own multi-tracked electric violin with heavy use of pedals, sometimes obscuring McCartney’s gorgeous melody and other times enhancing it.
The concert's ultimate highlight juxtaposed Schubert’s “Du bist die Ruh” (“You Are Repose”), played haltingly and achingly by Theo Hoffman with only his plaintive acoustic guitar, and a stark version of George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” emotionally sung by Hoffman and Gruber, with Hoffman’s guitar, Blier’s piano and Yang’s plucked violin making it sound remarkably like Harrison’s own demo on The Beatles' Anthology 3.
I don’t want to slight the other Schubert songs, all beautifully sung and featuring Barrett’s sensitive piano accompaniment. But this was a Beatles night—the very date marked it as such—and it showed that Blier could program a Schubert/Beatles night every season and not run out of material for years. There aren't many other master composers one can say that about.
New York Festival of Song
December 8, 2015
Merkin Concert Hall, New York, NY
nyfos.org
December '15 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 08 December 2015 20:23
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Jerusalem
(Filmbuff)
(Filmbuff)
In this 45-minute IMAX film about the Holy Land’s most sacred city—which lays claim to being the origin point of the world's three most popular religions—hi-def cameras display the natural and man-made wonders awaiting anyone who visits or lives there, from the Great Mosque to the Wailing Wall to the great city's breathtaking surroundings, along with introducing a trio of teenagers (Christian, Jew and Muslim) calling it home.
Benedict Cumberbatch narrates this focused, visually sumptuous portrait whose imagery, in both 2D and 3D on Blu-ray, is sublime; extras comprise two commentaries, deleted scenes, featurettes and interviews.
(Lionsgate)
Gamblers befriending each other and joining up together has been a movie staple for decades—Robert Altman’s 1974 California Split was a memorable example—and directors-writers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s own drama is, while hardly original, a quality entry in the genre, aided by complementarily satisfying portrayals by Ben Mendelssohn and Ryan Reynolds.
If the movie meanders for too long (its last act is contrived sentimentality of the worst sort), its engaging leads and stellar support from Sienna Miller (who's taken to playing American women in her last several appearances) make this highly recommended. The Blu-ray has a sharp transfer; lone extra is a making-of featurette.
Mistress America
(Fox)
The pairing of director Noah Baumbach and his paramour, actress Great Gerwig, reaches its artistic nadir with this labored chronicle—which both wrote—of two young women in Manhattan who are future stepsisters: the older (Gerwig) has the younger (Lola Kirke) under her sway: or does she?
Baumbach's directorial crudeness is equaled only by his inability to have anything interesting to say, and Gerwig is not gifted enough to plausibly bring off her character’s ridiculously arbitrary behavioral swings. The film looks fine in hi-def; extras are short featurettes.
(Anchor Bay)
She was a Bond girl in Quantum of Solace, but Ukrainian-French babe Olga Kurylenko now gets her own starring vehicle as a criminal who avenges the demise of her gang at the hands of a criminal mastermind and his henchmen (and woman) in this fast-paced if astonishingly illogical thriller by first-time director Stephen Campanelli.
While the script does itself no favors by giving us the dumbest five-year-old in movie history among other inanities, the violent endings of everyone else at the hands of Kurylenko (who's photographed lasciviously while wearing little, which shows that pulchritude in movies is alive and well) make this worth it for some 007 fans out there. There’s a solid hi-def transfer; lone extra is making-of featurette.
The Passenger
(Arthaus Musik)
Polish-Russian composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s shattering 1968 opera about the Holocaust’s devastating emotional fallout among survivors received an excellent 2010 production at Austria’s Bregenz Festival, as Weinberg’s rawly dramatic music exposes the post-war wounds of precisely rendered characters taken from Zofia Posmysz’s novella (also the basis of Polish director Andrzej Munk’s last film, which he left incomplete upon his death in 1961).
David Poutney’s stealthy staging intercuts camp flashbacks with the present; video director Felix Breisach cleverly renders the visuals for Blu-ray, while the playing and singing are equally top-notch. Included is a half-hour documentary, In der Fremde, about Weinberg and his opera.
(Eagle Rock)
This two-part, four-hour documentary about the most famous singer to come from Hoboken, New Jersey celebrates the legendary singer's 100th birthday (he died in 1998 at age 82) by adroitly marrying voluminous biographical details—many heard in Frank’s own voice—with vintage footage of him both onstage singing and on screen acting.
There's also a plethora of talking heads, admirers, contemporaries, colleagues, showbiz friends and showbiz historians, all of whom give him pride of place in 20th century America's cultural firmament. The hi-def transfer looks great; extras include additional interviews.
Under the Dome—Complete 3rd Season
(CBS/Paramount)
I never thought this cheesy adaptation of a less than original Stephen King story idea (which showed up in The Simpsons Movie first, for what it's worth) would ever be a television hit, let alone make it through three seasons' worth of episodes, but here we are.
This show may be the ultimate in guilty pleasures, or even in hate-watching, but it's admittedly entertaining in a car-wreck kind of way, at least for a few episodes anyway. There's an excellent Blu-ray transfer; extras include featurettes, deleted scenes and a gag reel.
Blind
(Kimstim)
(Kimstim)
In screenwriter Eskil Vogt's gutsy directorial debut, a blind young woman is shown in all her emotional and physical nakedness, from her dismal relationships to her increasingly fertile fantasy life, smartly blended so that there’s often a question about what’s real and what’s imagined.
Although Vogt doesn't keep up his precarious balancing act for the entire film, he raises interesting questions about perception, privacy and—well—blindness, and actress Ellen Dorrit Pettersen's fearless performance keeps it watchable whenever it threatens to become risible.
An En Vogue Christmas
(Lionsgate)
Here's a holiday movie no one ever thought they needed: a reunion of the ‘90s soul group, En Vogue, in a contrived piece of holiday baggage about a club about to be shuttered until the gals get together to keep it alive.
It's fluff, to be sure, but the spunky trio—only two of the original four, Terry Ellis and Cindy Herron, remain, and newcomer Rhona Bennett fills in nicely—does a few hits, while David Alan Grier is properly cranky as the semi-villain of the piece. It's not that Christmassy when all is said and done, but it's harmless enough.
(Wolfe Video)
We haven't heard much from Mika Kaurismaki, brother of Finnish wunderkind director Aki Kaurismaki, in awhile, but here he is with a new biographical epic about Queen Kristina, Sweden's 17th century monarch who assumed the throne at age six and reigned for 22 years (she died at age 63 while still a virgin).
It's crammed with the usual biopic clichés, especially the sin of cramming far too much into a two-hour running time, which gives short shrift to a game multilingual cast: there are fine performances by Malin Buska as Kristina, Michael Nykvist as her duplicitous right-hand man and Sarah Gadon as the surprising object of the Queen’s affection, and even if Kaurismaki's direction is heavyhanded, this is a commendable attempt to resurrect the costume drama.
CDs of the Week
Henri Dutilleux—Tout un monde lontain
(Harmonia Mundi)
(Harmonia Mundi)
Dutilleux—Metaboles, etc.
(Seattle Symphony Media)
(Seattle Symphony Media)
One of the great composers of the 20th—and 21st—century, Frenchman Henri Dutilleux (who died in 2013 at age 97) had a style of emotionally refined modernism, and these two discs feature some of his most characteristic works. First, cellist Emmanuelle Bertrand torridly plays the spare Trois Strophes for solo cello and the amazing cello concerto, a work whose rigor is richly underscored by conductor James Gaffigan and the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra. (Debussy's Cello Sonata, with pianist Pascal Amoyel, admirably rounds out this valuable disc.)
On the second disc, the Seattle Symphony, under the steady baton of Ludovic Morlot, performs a trio of Dutilleux's most flavorful and dazzling large-scale works—Metaboles; the Violin Concerto, L'abre des songes (with sensational soloist Augustin Hadelich); and the exceptional Second Symphony, entitled Le double, and one of the great post-war symphonic statements—on the ensemble’s second formidable foray into a composer whose music exudes its own kind of beauty and poetry.
Penderecki—A sea of dreams did breathe on me
(Naxos)
(Naxos)
For an avant-garde composer, Krzysztof Penderecki composes a lot of religious music, but that’s not too surprising, considering he's a Polish Catholic: these two Naxos discs are thick with his often brilliant, occasionally banal (and utterly unorthodox) vocal writing, especially the first disc's juxtaposition of the strikingly guttural voices on the 1973-4 Magnificat and the more recent (2009), more romantic-era Kadisz.
The second disc, comprising the hour-long 2010 vocal and orchestral work, A sea of dreams..., set to Polish poetry, is in Penderecki's gentler mode; despite arid patches, it excitingly moves from fierceness to gentle serenity. Antoni Wit ably conducts the Warsaw Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra and the singers are excellent across the board.
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