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Film and the Arts
November '14 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 04 November 2014 20:38
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
America—Imagine the World Without Her
(Lionsgate)
Conservative icon Dinesh D'Souza has made another rambling and incoherent pseudo-documentary that shows how "scary" and "unAmerican" Barack Obama is, tying him to radical leftists presented as if they are mainstream. With no arguments made on their own merit, D'Souza uses straw men and false equivalencies to hammer home his belief that, contrary to those who insist on "shaming" our country, it is absolved of any sins, for the simple reason that everybody else also did it (slavery, genocide, etc.).
D'Souza even brings up his own indictment for breaking campaign finance law, basically admitting, "Yes, I'm guilty, but so are others. So that means Obama is after me!" Fox News viewers will find everything they believe dutifully confirmed; the rest of us will shake our heads and realize that fact-based reality will remain out of their reach. The hi-def image looks good; extras include extended interviews and scenes.
(Millennium)
This gritty little thriller about a dull-witted American couple in London who decide to spend dirty money they find and fall prey to a mobster whose drug cash it is, is mercifully short (90 minutes) and features the always reliable Tom Wilkinson as a relentless detective and Sam Spruell as a casually brutal gangster.
Unfortunately for director Henrik Ruben Genz, he's saddled with James Franco and Kate Hudson, who don't make a credible couple; the movie also wastes the delightful Anna Friel in a nothing role. The Blu-ray transfer is first-rate; lone extra is a brief making-of.
Planes—Fire and Rescue
(Disney)
Although Disney's animated spin-offs are usually routine money grabs, that's not entirely the case with Planes—Fire and Rescue, an amusing adventure that's dedicated to our brave firefighters.
Set in Piston Park National Park, the movie follows a group of aircraft which protects the valuable public land from wildfires: nothing earth-shattering, it's diverting enough, at least for younger kids. The Blu-ray image looks fine; extras are featurettes, deleted scenes, music video and new animated short film.
Yankee Doodle Dandy
(Warner Archive)
The tightly-wound 1947 thriller Possessed—a story of murder and insanity about an unhinged woman convinced that her current husband's dead wife is haunting her, as is an old flame who's marrying her young stepdaughter—is distinguished by Joan Crawford in eye-popping crazed mode.
As George M. Cohan in the exhilarating 1942 biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy, James Cagney sings, dances and acts up a storm as the versatile entertainer who, against all odds, became a beloved American icon. Cagney's joyous Oscar-winning turn and Cohan's terrific tunes are the main reasons to watch. Both films look magnificent in their hi-def restorations; extras include commentaries and featurettes.
Santa Sangre
(Severin)
Maverick director Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1989 hallucinatory drama is, like all of his films (which include the even more lunatic El Topo and The Holy Mountain), a love-it-or-hate-it experience: I hated it, even while conceding the visual imaginativeness at work. But there's no doubt that other viewers' mileage may certainly vary, especially if one has a stronger stomach for Jodorowsky's brand of all-purpose surrealism.
The film looks solid on Blu-ray; extras include Jodorowsky commentary, deleted scenes with commentary, Jodorowsky interviews and short films, featurettes and full-length documentary Forget Everything You Have Ever Seen: The World of Santa Sangre.
DVDs of the Week
Borgen—Complete Series
(MHZ)
This gripping Danish mini-series—which skillfully straddles the line separating politics from personal lives—is finally available in a boxed set of its three seasons, comprising 30 compelling one-hour episodes that follow Birgitte Nyborg, Denmark’s first female prime minister, from obscurity to simultaneous fame and infamy.
The backstabbing and deal making (and deal breaking) of contemporary politics is shown in all its dramatic fascination, and with a peerless cast led by Sidse Babett Knudsen as Birgitte and Birgitte Hjort Sorensen as go-getting journalist Katrine Fonsmark, Borgen is an exceptional drama about the machinations of politics and media that deserves the much-abused label "binge-worthy."
A Coffee in Berlin
(Music Box)
This ramshackle comic drama follows a 20-something slacker (the appealing Tom Schilling) who, after getting tossed from his girlfriend's apartment, spends a fateful day wandering around the German capital running into various people (including a female former classmate who still holds a grudge for him labeling her "Roly Poly Julia" back in the day), until a brush with mortality gives him a new outlook on life.
Director Jan Ole Gerster's low-key, improvisatory style partially compensates for the fact that the movie is, finally, too slight, even with a relatively brief 85-minute running time. Extras include featurettes, deleted scenes and outtakes.
(Kino Lorber)
Italian master Marco Bellocchio's latest provocation, made in 2012, was barely released here, but his thought-provoking exploration of Italy’s own right to life debate (Terri Schiavo was the U.S. equivalent during the infamous Bush years), as usual with Bellocchio, provides no easy answers.
It intelligently informs the personal, professional and religious lives of several characters, played splendidly by Isabelle Huppert, Toni Servillo, Maya Sansa, Alba Rohrwacher and the director’s son Pier Giorgio. But Kino again drops the ball by not releasing a Blu-ray of a major film by a major director, along with no extras; get the hi-def Italian release!
Hugh Hefner
(MVD)
Director Tony Palmer, who made his name with an assortment of enlightening biographies of composers from Henry Purcell to Igor Stravinsky, hits a brick wall with his 1973 glimpse at Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner.
For a vapid hour, Hef and assorted bimbos extol the virtues of the Playboy lifestyle, sounding vacuous and self-absorbed throughout. Adding to the absurdity is Palmer's desperate use of music from Wagner's Ring to underscore shots of Hef's private jet and mansion; any similarity to King Ludwig's pomposity is strictly coincidental.
(Icarus)
I'm no fan of Belgian director Chantal Akerman, whose films are minimalist in all the wrong ways: conception, execution and artistry. But her hour-long 1983 documentary about the wunderkind German modern-dance choreographer Pina Bausch is a watchably straightforward overview of a vital visual artist's work.
Of course, I prefer Wim Wenders' Pina, which was a much more affecting chronicle of Bausch's patented dances, but Akerman's film is nothing to sneeze at either.
New York Theater Reviews—"On the Town," "Lips Together, Teeth Apart," "The Belle of Amherst"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 04 November 2014 01:24
- Written by Kevin Filipski
On the Town
Music by Leonard Bernstein; book & lyrics by Betty Comden & Adolph Green; directed by John Rando
Opened October 16, 2014
Lips Together, Teeth Apart
Written by Terrence McNally; directed by Peter Dubois
Performances through November 23, 2014
The Belle of Amherst
Written by William Luce; directed by Steve Cosson
Performances through January 25, 2015
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| Johnson, Yazbeck and Alves in On the Town (photo: Joan Marcus) |
The fizzily entertaining On the Town earns the sobriquet "old-fashioned musical," thanks to Leonard Bernstein's gloriously hummable songs (like the immortal "New York, New York" and "Lonely Town"), book writers Comden & Green's witty lyrics, and the perfect (if overfamiliar) plot for a feel-good musical: three sailors on leave have 24 hours in the big city to frolic with their newly acquired gals.
Director John Rando, a master of comic pacing, pushes this revival to the giddiest of heights. The ace orchestra, led by James Moore, plays Bernstein's timeless songs with a plushness that's welcome on Broadway. Beowulf Boritt's tongue-in-cheek set design and projections make for an appropriately cartoonish Manhattan. Jess Goldstein's zesty costumes, Jason Lyons' luminous lighting and Joshau Bergasse's colorful choreography (with a nod to Jerome Robbins' original ballet) round out the savory physical trappings.
The cast is mostly top-notch, led by three sailors—Clyde Alves, Jay Armstrong Johnson and especially Tony Yazbeck—who act, sing and dance up a storm as they prowl the city looking for companionship. As their women, Alysha Umphress and Elizabeth Stanley are riotous without excess campiness, and New York City Ballet's Megan Fairchild makes Miss Turnstiles the pure idealization of innocent girlishness, with her chirpy voice and impossibly slender frame twirling, spinning and pirouetting her way into her man's (and the audience's) heart.
If only Rando didn't let Jackie Hoffman mug mercilessly (and, for the most part, unfunnily) in four parts, the undeserving beneficiary of coarse book updates by Robert Cary and Jonathan Tolins, which unsurprisingly—but sadly—get the biggest audience reactions. So thisOn the Town is only four-fifths of a classic musical, as if the city itself had one of its boroughs cut off.
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| Lysy, Chernus, Chimo and Ferrera in Lips Together, Teeth Apart (photo: Joan Marcus) |
When Terrence McNally's Lips Together, Teeth Apart premiered in 1991, the AIDS epidemic was in full rage, and the playwright's anger over the unfathomable loss of so many was palpable. However, the play now comes off as an historical artifact, at least in Peter Dubois' misguidedly staged and cast production that's disjointed and off-kilter throughout; whether it's the direction or writing is difficult to say: likely an unfelicitous combination of both.
Two straight couples—Sally and Sam Truman, and Sam's sister Chloe and John Haddock—spend July 4th weekend at Sally's brother's beach house on Fire Island (the gorgeously appointed set is by Alexander Dodge), which he left to her after dying of AIDS. Their cozy bonhomie is only a facade, since Sally and John (the latter of whom, it is also revealed, has cancer) are having an affair, while Chloe's relentless chirpiness starts to grate on everyone, even Sam. Their conversations, and especially the awkwardly inserted soliloquies, expose their homophobia, sexism and racism in all their incoherence; but neither playwright nor director provides a realistic grounding for the characters' seemingly arbitrary contradictions.
Similarly, many details ring false, like Chloe peppering her conversation with elementary French or her improbably deep knowledge of Broadway musicals, except when she thinks the famousGypsy overture is actually from Annie. And that none of these people will jump into the beach house's beautiful in-ground pool because there's a worry that the water might be tainted with HIV doesn't work on any level: this heavily metaphoric bit of homophobic behavior comes at a time when people were far less frightened by the hysterical pronouncements about how one could catch the deadly disease.
America Ferrera's Sally is pleasantly bland, Michael Chernus' Sam and Austin Lysy's John are even larger blanks, while Tracee Chimo—fresh off her overpraised romp in Bad Jews—goes so far over the top as Chloe that she seems to be in a door-slamming farce that McNally did not write. Maybe she can join the cast of McNally's farce It's Only a Play when this closes.
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| Joely Richardson in The Belle of Amherst (photo: Carol Rosegg) |
Even for those of us who never saw it originally, The Belle of Amherst—William Luce's one-woman play about poet Emily Dickinson—is associated with actress Julie Harris, who turned it into a cottage industry and walked off with the Best Actress Tony in 1976. In Steve Cosson's lucid new staging, Dickinson becomes more coyly coquettish, even mischievous, in the capable hands of Joely Richardson.
If the real Dickinson was somewhere in between the two interpretations, this is, after all, a fictionalization of her life, and she may have been as charming as Richardson's shrewd performance shows her as. There's never an anachronistic sense of making her a proto-feminist, and Richardson—who also recites several of Dickinson's poems in an graceful but conversational manner—is nothing less than commanding throughout her piquant two-hour monologue.
On the Town
Lyric Theatre, 213 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
onthetownbroadway.com
Lips Together, Teeth Apart
Second Stage Theatre, 305 West 43rd Street, New York, NY
2st.com
The Belle of Amherst
Westside Theatre, 407 West 43rd Street, New York, NY
belleofamherstplay.com
Broadway Review—Sting's Musical "The Last Ship"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 31 October 2014 04:18
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The Last Ship
Music & lyrics by Sting, book by John Logan & Brian Yorkey
Directed by Joe Mantello
Performances began September 29, 2014
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| The Last Ship (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Sting's best solo album, 1991's The Soul Cages, was crammed with his most personal songs, referencing his life growing up in England's shipbuilding region and taking the measure of his grief and anger over his father's death. The opener, "Island of Souls," a lyrically elegant dirge, distills— in a mere six-plus minutes—the plot of Sting's new Broadway musical The Last Ship, about a young man who returns to his small seaside hometown after years on the ocean.
The concise, powerful imagery of "Island of Souls" echoes throughout the 2-1/2 hour The Last Ship which, though superbly staged and acted—the show might even provoke a tear or two from its audience's eyes—has little sense of real drama, let alone tragedy, while the title ship is built; instead it hits on every imaginable dramatic cliche.
Unsurprisingly, the haunting "Island of Souls" opens the show, its lyrics changed, as it introduces Gideon Fletcher—not Billy as in the original song—as the hero. Sting's own hometown Wallsend is the setting for the tired plot that's been concocted by book writers John Logan and Brian Yorkey. Gideon (the sympathetic Michael Esper) comes back home from his 15 years at sea and expects both his father Joe (a ship riveter who disowned Gideon when he left) and his first love Meg (the lively, lissome Rachel Tucker) to remain where he left them so long ago.
But he's too late: Dad recently died and Meg has a teenage son Tom (the scrappy Collin Kelly-Sordelet) and a lover, Arthur (the strong-voiced Aaron Lazar), the only smart local working to salvage scrap from the town's beloved—but shuttered—shipyard.
The rest of the men, now unemployed, spend their time drinking in the pub where Meg works and bemoaning their fate: cheaper labor in Asia has made them expendable. Leave it to jolly old Father O'Brien (Fred Applegate, having great fun with the cliched drunken Irish priest character) to have an idea—and the capital—for the men to take over the yard to build one last ship, which will be launched....but to where? This naggingly important question is never answered, making The Last Ship more heavily symbolic than it need be and keeping it from reaching its tragic-dramatic potential.
David Zinn's set, comprising the shipyard's dingy steel girders and catwalks, bleeds authenticity, but since other shows have used these visuals it seems instantly passe, however harrowingly lit by the talented Christopher Akerlind.
Joe Mantello's direction provides as much variety as one can squeeze out of a show set in a shipyard and a pub, while Stephen Hoggett's repetitive choreography, consisting of his increasingly familiar odd gestures and foot-stomping, is indistinguishable from his work on the musical Once.
Sting's new songs, dragged down by a certain sameness on his own recording last year, are enthusiastically fleshed out onstage by the rock-steady cast and Rob Mathes' striking arrangements; still, the four older Sting tunes ("Island of Souls," "All This Time," "When We Dance" and "Ghost Story") are far superior to the batch composed for the show.
The Last Ship is a worthy, serious musical—no Disneyfied Synchronicity The Jukebox Musical for Sting—but it's also been torpedoed by its book of banalities.
The Last Ship
Neil Simon Theatre, 250 West 52nd Street, New York, NY
thelastship.com
October '14 Digital Week IV
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 28 October 2014 21:44
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Begin Again
(Anchor Bay/Weinstein Co)
In John Carney's belated follow-up to his overrated romance Once, Mark Ruffalo and Keira Knightley totally outclass their material as a washed-up music exec and jilted young singer who hit it off professionally during a song-filled Manhattan summer.
The indefatigable Ruffalo and ultra-charming Knightley (and tremendously affecting Hailee Steinfeld as Ruffalo's teenage daughter) partly compensate for a cutesy premise, Carney's cheesy melodramatics and lifeless Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine as a pop star who dumps Knightley. The authentic New York location shooting—the movie's most salient feature—looks splendid on Blu-ray; extras are a making-of featurette and music videos.
(PBS)
Miss Marple—Volume One
(BBC)
The three-hour mini-series Death Comes to Pemberley is a slow-moving adaptation of P.D. James's clever mystery novel based on the characters in Pride and Prejudice; despite ravishing costumes and locations and a fine cast led by Matthew Rhys as Darcy and Anna Maxwell Martin as Elizabeth, Death unfortunately founders.
The first Blu-ray release of Miss Marple, an adaptation of Agatha Christie's sleuth, features four one-hour episodes that showcase Joan Hickson's low-key but witty performance as the no-nonsense detective. Both shows look OK on hi-def; Marple extras are a featurette and A Very British Murder, Part 1, the beginning of a three-part series about British interest in murder mysteries.
Moebius
(Ram)
South Korean director Kim Ki-Duk's grandiosely yucky horror movie follows a family dragged into depravity and possible insanity after the actions of a philandering father and vengeful mother. In a movie with no dialogue, it becomes absurd after awhile that absolutely no one would be talking about what is going on, especially as it escalates further into outright lunacy.
Under the creepy circumstances, actress Lee Eun-Woo—who plays the grandmother, the mother and the father's and teenage son's lover—deserves some kind of medal for bravery. The Blu-ray transfer is top-notch; extras comprise interviews and a post-premiere Q&A.
The Vanishing
(Criterion)
George Sluizer's unnerving 1988 chiller is one of the scariest movies ever made, and that it's done with such an economy of means—nary a drop of blood is spilled, and the horrifying ending leaves one shaken for awhile afterward—is a testament to the director's artistry. (That his own misguided 1993 American remake had an absurdly happy ending tacked on, proves that.)
On Criterion's Blu-ray release, the film looks better than ever; extras comprise interviews with Sluizer (who recently died) and actress Johanna ter Steege, whose memorable—if necessarily brief—debut this was.
Whitey—United States of America vs. James J. Bulger
(Magnolia)
In his latest revealing documentary, director Joe Berlinger recounts how the FBI made Boston mob boss James "Whitey" Bulger into an informant, in the process allowing him to kill or have killed whomever he wanted without any blowback: he always had cover thanks to his relationships with certain agents.
For decades, Bulger terrorized Boston neighborhoods, offing dozens of mostly innocent people, and Berlinger makes a compelling (and scary) case that the government is as guilty of his crimes as he is. The Blu-ray image looks fine; extras include deleted scenes and Sundance Film Festival interviews.
Behaving Badly
(Vertical)
In director Tim Garrick's raunchy misadaptation of Ric Browde's book While I'm Dead...Feed the Dog (written by Garrick and Scott Russell), teenager Rick Stevens must juggle dealing with an alcoholic mother, his best friend's horny mom, the hot classmate he wants to date and her angry ex-boyfriend, among others.
Although it's hit or miss all the way, parts of it are very funny, and there are finely tuned comic performances by Natt Wolff as Rick, Mary Louise Parker as his mom, a still gorgeous Elisabeth Shue as his friend's sexy mom and Selena Gomez as the girl of his dreams.
Cannibal
(Film Movement)
Do we really need a movie about a respected tailor named Carlos who kills unsuspecting women and eats them, only to find himself falling for Nina, sister of a woman whom he killed and ate earlier? The answer is not really, even if actors Antonio de la Torre (Carlos) and Olimpia Melinte (Nina) make their bizarre characters semi-believable.
The problem is that despite director Manuel Martin Cuenca keeping actual gore to a minimum, his premise itself is so grisly that no matter how well done—or, more likely, despite that—Cannibal can't shake a nagging feeling of an unholy alliance between elegant filmmaking and ugly plotting. Lone extra is Ogre, a French short.
Level Five
On Strike!
(Icarus)
Avant-garde French director Chris Marker (who died in 2012 at age 91) made Level Five in 1996, a typically playful but dense sci-fi film that both predates and anticipates the digital and virtual culture we've since become accustomed to.
Far more interesting, however, is On Strike!, a compilation of two documentaries, 1968's Be Seeing You, chronicling a French strike and factory takeover, and 1969's Class of Struggle, a portrait of a young woman at a watch factory and her own radicalization. The lone extra, La Charniere, is a 13-minute audio recording of a post-screening debate among the workers shown in Be Seeing You.
(Midair Rose)
When Vincenzo Peruggia stole the "Mona Lisa" from the Louvre in 1911, he kept it hidden in plain sight for over two years before it was finally seized when he attempted to sell it to Italian authorities hoping to return it to what he thought was its homeland, as director Joe Medeiros shows in his highly entertaining, often lighthearted look at the theft and its aftermath.
A surprising amount of extras include 12 featurettes, deleted scenes, outtakes, an alternate ending and a director's commentary that's as fun as the movie itself.
The Wild Geese
(Severin)
This uneven 1978 action flick stars Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Roger Moore and Hardy Kruger as semi-retired mercenaries who get back together to train a band of commandos to go into an unnamed African country to spring a corrupt leader from jail. Director Andrew V. McLaglen does the bare minimum, falling back on lazy scriptwriting (by Reginald Rose) and acting that could charitably be called competent.
There's occasional bloody fun (in both senses), but two-plus hours is far too long for such meager dramatics. Extras include audio commentary with Moore, McLaglen interview and featurettes.
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