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Film and the Arts
April '15 Digital Week IV
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 28 April 2015 21:09
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Blind Woman's Curse
Massacre Gun
(Arrow USA)
1970's Blind Woman's Curse, Teruo Ishii's colorfully choreographed bloodbath, follows dragon-tattooed female yakuzas being tailed by a vengeance-minded victim who skins their tattoos off their backs: it's as lunatic as it sounds, but its relentlessly fast pace keep it moving.
Yasuharu Hasebe's 1967 Massacre Gun, about a mobster who retaliates after he is forced by his employers to execute his girlfriend, is crammed with poetically violent sequences and formidable widescreen B&W photography. Both films have been given striking new Blu-ray transfers; extras include an audio commentary on Curse and interviews on Gun.
(Bel Air Classiques)
La Favorite
(Opus Arte)
Already an Oscar-winning movie, Brokeback Mountain is now an opera, with a libretto by the original story's author, Annie Proulx, and music by composer Charles Wuorinen, whose blocks of unmelodic material aren't exactly tailor-made for this tale of two male sheep herders who fall in love, complicating their increasingly difficult home lives. Generous performances by Daniel Okulitch and Tom Randle, along with Heather Buck as one of their wives, made this sing pleasingly at its 2014 Madrid world premiere.
Gaetano Donizetti's La Favorite, one of the Italian bel canto master's lesser-known operas, has been given a thoroughly impressive 2014 revival in Toulouse, France, starring American mezzo Kate Aldrich in a career-defining performance as the heroine Leonor. Both hi-def transfers and music are excellent; extras comprise backstage interviews.
Cancer—The Emperor of All Maladies
(PBS)
Based on Siddhartha Mukherjee's encyclopedic book, this thoroughly involving three-part Ken Burns-produced mini-series is a simultaneously heartbreaking but heartening journey through centuries of medical, governmental and charitable attempts to attack the disease that humankind still cannot control.
Director Barak Goodman's compiling of interviews, archival footage and an arresting history of the disease and our increasing knowledge of it makes for a riveting six hours; that Edward Herrmann died of brain cancer after completing his narration for the film is but one sadly illuminating back story. On Blu-ray,the film looks fine; extras are additional scenes.
(Warner Bros)
Thomas Pynchon's rambling 2009 novel, nominally a detective yarn set in 1970, is all but unfilmable, with its countless asides and plentiful characters, and Paul Thomas Anderson's exquisitely wrought adaptation hasn't solved those basic problems (but who could?).
A strand of a storyline keeps getting interrupted, just like the book, but in Anderson's hands, it's even more scattershot and jokey, despite strong performances by a mumbling Joaquin Phoenix and revelatory Catherine Waterston, whose leggy beauty and fierce intelligence overwhelm the film and its talented but erratic director. The movie's L.A. location shooting looks sumptuous on Blu-ray; extras are extremely brief featurettes/trailers.
Last Days in Vietnam
(PBS)
Rory Kennedy's incisive, unforgettable documentary returns viewers to the final weeks in 1975 when a mere handful of United States military men and diplomatic envoys had to decide whom to help among their South Vietnamese allies as the enemy made its way unopposed to the capital Saigon.
Using riveting first-hand accounts by those who were in Vietnam and those who were in Washington (including Henry Kissinger), new and archival interviews and stunning video footage and photographs, Kennedy sears an era already familiar to those who lived through it into our collective memory; included are the 100-minute theatrical release and two-hour PBS American Experience version, which is obviously preferable. The hi-def transfer is excellent.
Wolf Hall
(PBS)
Based on Hilary Mantel's acclaimed novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, this absorbing six-hour mini-series chronicles one of history's great dramas: how Oliver Cromwell rose from obscurity to become King Henry VIII's closest confidante during scandals that centered on his marriages to wives Catherine of Algernon and her successor Anne Boleyn.
Intelligently scripted by Peter Straughan, well-directed by Peter Kosminsky and splendidly acted by a large cast led by Mark Rylance (Cromwell), Damian Lewis (Henry) and Claire Foy (Anne), this straightforward but fascinating historical fiction could also serve as a documentary about its era. The Blu-ray transfer is terrifically detailed; extras comprise making-of featurettes and interviews.
DVDs of the Week
Little Accidents
(Anchor Bay)
A small-town mining accident that kills ten men leads to recriminations, threats of lawsuits and the death of the teenage son of the mine's manager and his wife, who ends up finding solace in the arms of the lone survivor of the disaster.
If this all sounds too melodramatic to work, it is: writer-director Sara Colangelo never makes any of her film's relationships plausible, despite suitably authentic performances across the board, with Elizabeth Banks and Chloe Sevigny standouts as mothers dealing with the accident's fallout in differing ways.
(Lionsgate)
Xavier Dolan's passionate character study was shot in a nearly square aspect ratio for much of its length, presenting the clashing but loving relationship between a frustrated widow and her ADHD teenage troublemaker of a son as boxed-in and intimately as possible.
Later, when the son celebrates freedom as the image "stretches" to a more familiar large-screen ratio, it's a gimmicky moment that summarizes this alternately insightful and maddeningly cliched drama, held together by a transcendent performance by Quebecois actress Anne Dorval in the title role.
Music Releases of the Week
The Ides of March—Last Band Standing:
The Definitive 50 Year Anniversary Collection
(Ides of March Records)
This boxed set by a mainly forgotten rock-pop-R&B band from Chicago with one smash hit to its credit (1970's "Vehicle") comprises four CDs with dozens of singles and album tracks, and a DVD that features a 2014 concert from last year that reunited the band at Chicago's House of Blues, along with interviews, vintage television footage from Dick Clark's "American Bandstand" among other shows and a video for the band's new tune "Last Band Standing."
Guest musicians include Steve Cropper and Buddy Guy; the band's leader Jim Peterik went onto '80s fame with schlock-rockers Survivor, whose "Eye of the Tiger" and other hits are performed on the DVD concert, along with songs by .38 Special and Sammy Hagar that Peterik co-wrote.
(Mercury Blu-ray Audio)
The 1977 followup to the Canadian progressive-rock trio's breakthrough 2112 consolidates their sound with epic tracks like the title cut, "Xanadu" and "Cygnus X-1," all-time audience favorite—and first Rush power ballad—"Closer to the Heart," and agreeable filler in the form of "Cinderella Man" and "Madrigal."
The intricate instrumental interplay of drummer Neil Peart, bassist Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson is wonderfully preserved on this Blu-ray Audio disc, whose remixing makes for an enveloping audio experience.
New Broadway Musicals—"Finding Neverland" & "Doctor Zhivago"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 28 April 2015 00:43
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Finding Neverland
Music & lyrics by Gary Barlow & Eliot Kennedy; book by James Graham
Directed by Diane Paulus
Opened on April 15, 2015
Doctor Zhivago
Music by Lucy Simon; lyrics by Michael Korie & Amy Powers; book by Michael Weller
Directed by Des McAnuff
Opened on April 21, 2015
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| Morrison and Grammer in Finding Neverland (photo: Carol Rosegg) |
Broadway musicals based on hit movies are now a cottage industry, and two more (albeit with literary pedigrees as well) have just opened on Broadway.
Dramatizing how playwright J.M. Barrie wrote his classic Peter Panafter being inspired by his unusual friendship with widow Sylvia Llewelyn Davies and her sons (five of them in real life, four in the show), Finding Neverland is based on the 2004 movie with Johnny Depp—itself based on Allan Knee's play The Man Who Was Peter Pan—which was a popular and critical Oscar-winning hit.
The musical, like the movie, is unabashedly sentimental: James Graham's book streamlines Barrie's complex relationship with the Davies family to a series of delightful frolics he has with the boys and Sylvia in Kensington Gardens, and sets them against humorous backstage scenes and domestic friction at Barrie's home. Director Diane Paulus shrewdly stages all of the action with breathtaking inventiveness, which climaxes with a truly stunning coup de theatre at Pan's opening night performance at the Davies' home.
Paulus' theatrical wizardry is made possible by her superb technical cohorts: Scott Pask's cleverly constructed sets are remindful of Barrie's art by looking like children's book illustrations, Kenneth Posner's radiant lighting deftly encompasses the show's mix of reality, fantasy and stage chicanery, and Suttriat Anne Larlarb's apt costumes steer clear of ostentation.
Glee's Matthew Morrison, whose Barrie is appealing to adults and reassuring to children, not only masters a difficult Scottish brogue but also sings with it, an amazing feat. The always welcome Kelsey Grammer, as American impresario Charles Frohman—who financed Barrie's plays—is both touching and funny, even selling a goofy Cheers joke that brings a raucous audience response.
Laura Michelle Kelly's Sylvia has a lovely voice and sweet-natured presence, and as Sylvia's mother, Carolee Caramello showcases her powerful lungs in a part that doesn't allow her to steal any scenes. The four Davies boys are played by the charmingly natural quartet of Alex Dreier, Sawyer Nunes, Christopher Paul Richards and Aidan Gemme, delightful as the real-life Peter.
Finding Neverland, an unapologetically crowd-pleasing entertainment, works almost perfectly, despite Gary Barlow and Eliot Kennedy's lyrics and songs, which are adequate at best, derivative and tuneless at worst. Still, the show takes its willing audiences on a fantastic journey.
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| Barrett and Mutu in Doctor Zhivago (photo: Matthew Murphy) |
Doctor Zhivago, a stillborn musical run-through of the classic 1965 David Lean movie—itself based on Boris Pasternak's novel about the love affair between a married doctor-poet and a radical young woman—slogs through decades of upheaval in early 20th century Russia, from World War I and the Russian Revolution to the civil war between the Reds and Whites.
Director Des McAnuff, book writer Michael Weller, lyricists Michael Korie and Amy Powers and composer Lucy Simon seemed to realize how difficult their task is. The movie clocks in at three hours-plus and the book runs a whopping 600 pages, so to distill those many events, characters and relationships into a workable narrative is problematic. Indeed, onstage the story lurches along stiffly, characters run on and off quickly, the years race by with onstage surtitles to remind us when and where we are. McAnuff's haphazard directing doesn't help matters: there's no flow or fluid pacing, and the musical numbers are particuarly incoherent, like the Act II opener of women cutting down crops in the fields.
As Zhivago, Tam Mutu has the exotic quality Omar Sharif had in Lean's beloved movie but, although he sings well, he never believably inhabits the character. As Lara, the usually delightful Kelli Barrett—here saddled with an unbecoming blonde wig—gives an uncharacteristically weak performance. Her singing voice is still thrilling to hear, but she remains distinctly and contemporarily American, closer to her Sherrie from Rock of Ages than to Pasternak's Russia.
Korie and Powers' lyrics are so trite that it becomes easy to guess what their next rhyme is, while Simon's songs are bland and forgettable: including Maurice Jarre's ultra-hummable "Lara's Theme (Somewhere My Love)" from the movie is a further musical misstep. There are moments when the orchestra promises more operatic sweep than Simon provides, and makes one wonder what Zhivago would sound like if composed by someone like Sergei Prokofiev, who unfortunately died four years before the 1957 novel was published.
Finding Neverland
Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, 205 West 46th Street, New York, NY
findingneverlandthemusical.com
Doctor Zhivago
Broadway Theatre, Broadway and 53rd Street, New York, NY
doctorzhivagobroadway.com
New Broadway Plays—"Hand to God" and Renee Fleming in "Living on Love"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Sunday, 26 April 2015 21:06
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Hand to God
Written by Robert Askins; directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel
Performances through July 26, 2015
Living on Love
Written by Joe DiPietro; directed by Kathleen Marshall
Performances through August 2, 2015
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| Boyer (front center) and cast of Hand to God (photo: Joan Marcus) |
A decent idea for a 10-minute Saturday Night Live skit stretched well past what its meager laughs provide, Robert Askins' play Hand to God goes on for two hours flogging the same dead horse: Bible Belt religious zealots. In a small Texas town, attractive widow Margery occupies her time by leading a hand-puppet class in the local church basement with three teenage misfits: nerdy Jessica, dopey Timothy and Margery's own son Jason. They are awful puppeteers, but it's something for them to do.
After class, Pastor Greg makes his feelings known to Margery under the guise of "comforting" her, but she rebuffs him; meanwhile, lunkheaded Timothy's crude double entrendres improbably attract her to him instead. Shy Jason, who has a crush on Jessica, finds that his puppet Tyrone has a mind—and mouth—of his own, and becomes increasingly vulgar in saying what Jason cannot bring himself to say about the others...and himself. He barricades himself in the basement room with Tyrone, and Pastor Greg tries ending the satanist siege of his church.
If the superior Avenue Q didn't sate your thirst for witnessing puppets curse and simulate sex on a Broadway stage, then Hand to God might prove a slightly diverting time. This infantile play has cartoonish characters whose relationships are implausible from the get-go: would Margery begin having sex with Timothy, becoming so enamored of him that even when her son's puppet situation has gotten serious—Tyrone bites Timothy's ear—she jumps his bones again in Pastor Greg's office, where Jessica, followed by the pastor, would inconveniently walk in on them?
Or, later, when Jason remains in the room with his puppet, why would Jessica climb in through an outside window (she could just walk through the door like everyone else) to engage Jason in a duel with her own voluptuous puppet, seducing Tyrone, which leads to the horny puppets going at it? Even it makes for a cheap laugh, it makes no sense: these teens could barely work their puppets earlier but now complete intricately choreographed movements that might tax even veteran puppeteers.
Askins purports to make some sort of statement about hypocrisy and religion, but aside from a few genuinely funny moments, Hand to God is little more than a string of not very original sketches. Although Beowulf Boritt comes up with a clever set (which, as the curtain lifts on Act II, gets the show's biggest applause when we see what the demonic puppet has wrought), director Moritz von Stuelpnagel pitches his talented cast to remain in hysterical mode throughout.
Stephen Boyer's tricky dual performance is a physical tour de force, as he alternates between Jason and Tyrone's voices effortlessly; Sarah Stiles's Jessica isn't far behind during their dragged-out sex scene. Michael Oberholtzer's Timothy is an amusingly dumb bully, Geneva Carr's Margery is a sympathetic and sexy harried mom and Marc Kudisch 's Pastor Greg is a properly confused clergyman caricature. But Hand to God deserves less than the hand audiences and reviewers are giving it.
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| Fleming and Sills in Living on Love (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Creaky and old-fashioned, Living on Love lurches from one tired joke to the next as it tries—and usually fails—to recapture the luster of the classic comedies of yesteryear. Even when it was first performed in 1985, Garson Kanin's Peccadillo—in which an over-the-hill conductor and his opera singer wife jealously compete at completing their memoirs with help from young, attractive ghostwriters—was a tired throwback, and Joe DiPietro's clumsy adaptation makes it even more rickety.
What saves it from being a complete wash-out is director Kathleen Marshall's adroitness at staging physical comedy on Derek McLane's sparklingly appointed Fifth Avenue townhouse set. Marshall's cast (with the glaring exception of Jerry O'Connell, frantic and unfunny as ghostwriter Robert Samson) is attuned to the needs of such fluffy onstage antics.
As the Maestro, Douglas Sills zanily overplays but is never hammy; his fractured English is funnier than it has any right to be, his comic timing is impeccable, and his hair overacts even more—and even more hilariously—than he does. As ghostwriter Iris Peabody, Anna Chlumsky shows she's as adept as physical comedy as she is with her deadpan line readings in In the Loop and Veep. As the Maestro and Diva's butlers, Blake Hammond and Scott Robertson are good ringmasters, although they are saddled with an annoying plot reveal it shares with, of all things, It Shoulda Been You.
Then there's the Diva herself, Renee Fleming. A famous soprano at the Metropolitan Opera and opera houses around the world for the past 20 years, Fleming makes an auspicious Broadway stage debut as a parody of a diva not far removed from herself. As a veteran singing actress in operas by Strauss and Mozart, she unsurprisingly has got the comic timing and charming ability to work an audience down: she also shows off her still lovely vocals here and there, including a sweetly-sung duet on Irving Berlin's "Always" with Sills.
Hand to God
Booth Theatre, 222 West 45th Street, New York, NY
handtogodbroadway.com
Living on Love
Longacre Theatre, 220 West 48th Street, New York, NY
livingonlovebroadway.com
April '15 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 21 April 2015 20:53
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Echoes
(Anchor Bay)
When a young writer with nightmarish visions brought on by her inability to sleep stays at her boyfriend's glass house in the desert to get needed seclusion, her problem gets worse, as people begin dying...could she be the cause?
This stylishly superficial horror film makes scant sense, but that's part of the fun; there's also a committed lead performance by the excellent actress Kate French, who makes this far more watchable than it deserves to be. The movie looks sharp on Blu-ray.
(Anchor Bay/Radius)
In Joe Lynch's cartoonish action thriller, a steady stream of gun-toting men and women (and the occasional canine) comes to finish off a prostitute after her mobster boss gives the word, and for whom she devises new and ingenious ways to survive their attacks.
Such silliness overstays its welcome even at a scant 90 minutes, but there is literally bloody entertainment for awhile as Salma Hayek—sporting a huge back tattoo like any self-respecting femme fatale—explosively lights up the dozens of bad guys and gals. The Blu-ray transfer is good; extras comprise two commentaries and a music video.
Fortitude
(Sky Vision)
As bleak and cold as its Arctic locale, this multi-part series follows several morose characters tied together by a murder that upsets a quiet, dying title town trying to become economically relevant as a tourist destination. An outside detective brought in to lead the investigation is another thorn, but that's merely the tip of a messy soap-opera iceberg that opens a pandora's box of secrets, to mix metaphors.
A sterling cast, led by Michael Gambon, Christopher Eccleston, Sofie Grabol and a less than usually annoying Stanley Tucci, helps the beautifully shot series become more than just a dramatic oddity. The hi-def transfer is stunning; extras are cast and crew interviews.
Mark of the Devil
Day of Anger
(Arrow USA)
In his 1969 horror flick Mark of the Devil, director Michael Armstrong tackles religious hysteria with schlocky aplomb, and terrifically deadpan actors like Herbert Lom and Udo Kier as witch hunters and voluptuous beauties like Ingeborg Schoner and Oliviera Vico as potential victims keep this blood-spilling, body-burning thriller moving to its predictable but satisfying conclusion.
Too bad 1967's Day of Anger, Tonino Valerii's routine western, becomes more absurd as it goes along, never approaching Devil's "guilty pleasure" status; Valerii's directing is barely competent, and his mostly (dubbed) Italian cast doesn't interact believably with Lee Van Cleef's gunslinger. Both films look superbly grainy on Blu; extras comprise a Devil commentary, as well as featurettes, interviews and deleted scenes.
Mysteries of the Unseen World in 3D
(Virgil Films)
This IMAX movie, plunging us into the midst of an amazing world we can't see with the naked eye, uses both time-lapse and high-speed photography to show the "nanoworld," where insects with dozens of eyes and creatures even tinier than they exist, like strains of bacteria (both beneficial and harmful) that live on our own bodies.
Forrest Whitaker narrates with the right balance of authority and awe; the 40 minutes' worth of incredible footage includes owls flying in slo-mo, grass growing right before our very eyes and God's eye views of the heretofore invisible traces of civilization on earth. The Blu-ray, in both 3D or 2D, looks spectacular; lone extra is a 15-minute making-of featurette.
Living Is Easy with Eyes Closed
(Strand Releasing)
David Trueba's engagingly nostalgic drama set in Spain in 1966 (when John Lennon was on location filming How I Won the War with director Richard Lester) is a subtle critique of the stifling Franco era that smartly plays as a sweet-natured character study.
An exceptional acting trio—Javier Camara as a middle-aged Fab Four-obsessed teacher wanting to meet Lennon, Fransesc Colomer as a teenager running away from his dictatorial dad, and (in the movie's most graceful performance) Natalia de Molina as a pregnant young woman who left her convent—provides endearing grace notes to keep the focus on the film's central relationships. Extras comprise deleted scenes and a featurette on Pat Metheny's acoustic guitar arrangements for the film.
Population Boom
(First Run)
Maker of the documentary Plastic Planet, Austrian director Werner Boote unleashes another provocation, this time bucking conventional wisdom coalesced around the belief that the world is overpopulated, and it's only a matter of time before we its irreversible effects.
Speaking with many experts in their fields from around the globe, Boote questions whether mankind must reduce its seven billion-plus inhabitants or else: will industrialized nations let go of their demand that developing nations stop developing? Whether one agrees or not, Boote raises necessary questions about our very survival.
(Big World Pictures)
The second of French director Eric Rohmer's Tales of the Four Seasons is this slight if sweet-natured 1992 study of a young woman who, five years after a fling (and a daughter), juggles two men while hoping that the father of her child will reappear.
As always with Rohmer's films, the talkiness is less penetrating and interesting than he thinks, while a bad French performance of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale brings the movie to a screeching halt for several minutes. Why Rohmer's women seem borderline dim-witted—the heroine gave the original paramour the wrong address, which is why they are apart—is a quirk others seem to appreciate more than I.
Whitney
(Lionsgate)
Actress Angela Bassett made her directorial debut with this Lifetime Channel biopic about Whitney Houston, who died of a drug overdose in 2012: recounting her problematic relationship with, marriage to and separation from fellow singer Bobby Brown, it's a surprisingly (semi) warts and all portrait.
At 88 minutes, it's nowhere near in-depth, but it's worth seeing thanks to Bassett's sincerity, Yaya DaCosta's canny portrayal of Whitney, and singer Deborah Cox's spot-on renditions of several of the star's biggest hits.
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