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Film and the Arts
March '14 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 04 March 2014 21:05
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
The Agony and the Ecstasy
(Fox)
Carol Reed’s stolid adaptation of Irving Stone’s novel about the battle royale between Michelangelo and Pope Julius II over the Sistine Chapel provides scant insight into the artist or Renaissance Vatican politics.
As an actor, Charlton Heston is a bigger granite block than the kind Michelangelo used to sculpt, while Rex Harrison overcompensates with a lot of hamming as the Pope; Reed’s dawdling direction makes the slow-paced movie seem longer than the years it took to paint the actual ceiling. Still, it looks splendid on Blu-ray: the prologue of Michelangelo masterpieces in loving close-up is radiant.
Grace Unplugged
(Lionsgate)
As spiritual uplift goes, this drama about a rebellious teen who inherited the musical talent of her famous father—who chucked fame for God and family—isn’t bad, thanks to performances that raise it above the usual cardboard fare.
AJ Michaela (daughter) and James Denton (dad) are especially good, and there’s fine support from Kevin Pollack as the father’s former manager to whom she reaches out to jumpstart her career. The movie looks good on Blu-ray; extras are a gag reel, deleted scenes and making-of featurette.
The Grandmaster
(Weinstein)
The true story of Ip Man—kung fu master who taught Bruce Lee—is recounted in Wong Kar-Wai’s surprisingly arid dramatization: the ridiculously inventive fight sequences (which involve stars Tony Leung and an otherwise wasted Zhang Ziyi) overwhelm the personal lives of our hero and his family.
Despite the diffuse narrative, the beautiful visuals courtesy of Wong and cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd—which look first-rate on Blu-ray—partially compensate; extras comprise featurettes and interviews.
Last Day on Mars
(Magnet)
In this clever twist on the current zombie movie mania, astronauts on a Mars expedition are given over to shocking physical transformations leading to their deaths, one by one.
The exotic locale and game actors like Olivia Williams, Romola Garai and Liev Schreiber are let down by director Ruiari Robinson’s inability to go past usual horror movie tropes. Still, unfinicky genre lovers may enjoy it, and it sparkles on Blu-ray; extras are making-of featurettes.
DVDs of the Week
Buster Keaton in Free and Easy
The World According to Garp
(Warner Archive)
Buster Keaton’s first talkie Free and Easy (1930) is a hit or miss effort, as singing/dancing interludes butting heads with intermittently funny comedy: Buster never seems at ease playing second fiddle to everything else, while the bonus Spanish version is a curio with more laughs.
John Irving’s unwieldy novel The World According to Garp became a flavorful, entertaining 1982 comedy-drama thanks to the wit of Steve Tesich’s script and George Roy Hill’s direction, right from the opening sequence set to the Beatles’ classic “When I’m 64.” Robin Williams is an OK Garp, and Glenn Close’s Jenny and John Lithgow’s transvestite football player Roberta capture the book’s anarchic spirit.
Deep Roots/Starlet Nights
(Vinegar Syndrome)
Two vintage 1978 adult movies make up this latest “Peekarama” release. Deep Roots is an incredibly amateurish Hollywood spoof with a bunch of no-name non-actors, including a couple of fresh-faced starlets who apparently never appeared in an X-rated movie again.
Starlet Nights, however, is an amusingSnow White update with the always alluring Leslie Bovee, one of the biggest—and best—porn stars of the so-called golden age of the 1970s.
The Iran Job
(Film Movement)
Former NBA player Kevin Sheppard goes to Iran to play basketball and discovers that those he meets (and befriends) are not the Great Satan haters we’ve been conditioned to expect in Till Schauder’s illuminating documentary, which allows Iranians their own individuality and complexity.
It might be a truism to say that Sheppard and these people are changed by their mutual experience, but Schauder shows that even small steps help bridge the gap of misunderstanding. The lone extra is Schauder’s short, City Bomber.
Reportero
(PBS)
First shown on PBS’s seriesPOV, Bernardo Ruiz’s compelling 2012 documentary is a daring piece of reportage on an incendiary topic: the mostly unsolved killings of many brave Mexican reporters digging into the country’s murderous drug trade.
Zeroing in on Zeta, a newsweekly that’s been making waves for 30 years, Ruiz demonstratively shows how the workers keep trying to do their jobs through a literal hail of gunfire: even fatal intimidation and threats fail to stop them….most of them, anyway.
Spiral—Season 3
(MHz Networks)
Laure Berthaud, now a most riveting protagonist in this realistic police procedural, heads a police squad that’s under immense pressure to catch a serial killer preying on young women.
Laure’s private and professional lives are a mess, but she finds ways to get things done, and actress Caroline Proust gives her heroism and heart in this terrifically watchable French TV series comprising 12 hour-long episodes (not 9, as the DVD box has it). The drama spirals into greatness thanks to top-notch writing, location shooting and performances by Proust and a talented cast.
CD of the Week
Schreker—The Stigmatized
(Bridge)
Austrian composer Franz Schreker was a giant of early 20th century opera alongside Richard Strauss, but the Nazi ban on his music probably shortened his life—he died of a stroke two days before turning 56 in 1934—and buried his glorious, sumptuous music, that’s fighting to be revived ever since.
This estimable 2010 Los Angeles Opera recording of the three-hour work—under music director James Conlon’s revitalization project of composers silenced by the Nazis, Recovered Voices—contains Schreker’s signature orchestral sweep and melodies that dominate a meandering melodramatic plot. Sung with grit and muscle by Anja Kampe, Robert Brubaker and Martin Gantner and conducted by Conlon with precision, this overdue release bears comparison with theEnterte musik recording from Decca 20 years ago.
February '14 Digital Week IV
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 26 February 2014 04:21
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
The Films of Lionel Rogosin, Volume II
(Milestone/Oscilloscope)
Lionel Rogosin’s cinema came from the heart, and this release comprises a pair of the maverick director’s historically and culturally important features: 1959’s Come Back, Africais an illuminating snapshot of living under the evils of South African apartheid, and 1970’s Black Rootslooks at beauty and tragedy in America through stories and songs by musicians like Larry Johnson and Wende Smith.
Both films, painstakingly restored, look smashing on Blu-ray, while extras include a Martin Scorsese intro and Rogosin audio interview; Rogosin’s Africamaking-of, An America in Sophiatown; Roots making-of, Bittersweet Stories; and the documentary, Have You Seen Drum Recently?
(Magnolia)
Jaco van Dormael makes few films—only two since his 1991 debut Toto the Hero—but he never skimps on imagination: this at times dazzling, often dizzyingly innocuous exploration of one man’s lengthy life (and the paths he might have taken) is given 155 expansive minutes to tell…well, not much.
Despite solid work by Jared Leto in the title role and Diane Kruger and Juno Temple as women in his life and a splendid visual design, the movie’s a superficial sci-fi mash-up. The hi-def transfer looks superb; extras include deleted scenes, making-of featurettes and the 139-minute 2009 theatrical cut.
Muscle Shoals
(Magnolia)
How a tiny Alabama swamp town was ground zero for some classic recordings of the past several decades is what Greg “Freddy” Camalier’s exquisite music documentary explores.
Groups from the Rolling Stones to the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and singers from Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan to Paul Simon all made classic singles and albums at the unique studio—and interviews with many of those artists, other fans like Bono and Alicia Keys, and the men who ran the place, the Swampers (immortalized on “Sweet Home Alabama”) are on board to discuss the history and influence of the place. The Blu-ray image is top-notch; extras include deleted scenes and interviews.
(Eagle Rock)
After decades of these celebrity-studded comedy shows—with musical interludes—in London, America finally hosted its own in 2012 at Radio City Music Hall, bringing together scattershot stand-up routines and sketches by Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Russell Brand, Eddie Izzard, Sarah Silverman and Paul Rudd, with tunes by Coldplay and Mumford & Sons.
The draggy 135-minute event is punctuated by slightly desperate appearances by some of the former Monty Python troupe, who briefly perk up the entire show. The Blu-ray image is decent; extras include backstage interviews.
You Will Be My Son
(Cohen Media)
Many French films get remade in the U.S., but this insightful dissection of the volatile relationship between a master vineyard owner and the adult son who was never good enough for him will doubtfully get the Hollywood green light. That’s all to the good since powerful performances by Niels Astrup (father), Lorant Deutsch (son), Anne Marivin (son’s wife) and Nicolas Bridet (estate manager’s son, everything the real son is not) would be hard to recreate.
This immersive psychological portrait by co-writer/director Gilles Legrand flirts with thriller territory but never rings false. The Blu-ray image looks terrific; extras include deleted scenes and interviews with Deutsch and Legrand.
American Experience—1964
(PBS)
Beginning just weeks after the JFK assassination—which paralyzed the country—1964 was a pivotal year in American culture and politics, as this entertaining “cliffs notes” PBS program shows.
From the arrival of the Beatles and the ascension of Cassius Clay to the LBJ presidency and Barry Goldwater’s conservative movement, and from the escalating civil rights struggle to the nascent feminist movement, 1964 encapsulates 12 important American months in two hours, with a selection of archival footage and new interviews that complement each other compellingly.
Disco and Atomic War
(Icarus)
During the Cold War, citizens of Tallinn, the capital of the then Soviet republic of Estonia—the closest Iron Curtain city to the “evil” West—were able to watch Finnish television despite their overlords trying to jam the signals. That they could watch American TV shows like Dallas and hear banned rock and disco music helped finish off the Communist state.
Directors Jaak Kilmi and Kiur Aarma, who grew up during those tumultuous times, have made a wacky but perceptive documentary that provides a different viewpoint of those heady days.
(First Run)
Mike Dorsey’s personal glimpse at the stunning Southern California home famed architect Richard Neutra designed and built for the Oyler family may be only 45 minutes long, but its themes of architecture, history, family and natural beauty are brilliantly woven into its structure.
Illuminating interviews with Neutra’s sons, with Richard Oyler—who asked Neutra to build the house in 1959—and with its current occupant, actress Kelly Lynch, are interspersed with gorgeously photographed views of this extraordinary building and its surroundings. Extras include deleted scenes and a house walk-through by Lynch and Oyler.
Search—The Complete Series
(Warner Archive)
This bizarre sci-fi series didn’t last long (1 season, 23 episodes, in 1972-73) but its original premise about probes—robots used by a worldwide surveillance group—can be seen as prescient in a century dominated by the NSA and Edward Snowden.
Starring first-rate TV actors like Burgess Meredith, Hugh O’Brian, Doug McClure and Tony Franciosa, and with special guests like the era’s ubiquitous Bill Bixby, Sebastian Cabot, Stefanie Powers and Barbara Feldon, Search is definitely worth searching for—once you start watching, don’t be surprised if you make your way through all six discs.
(e one)
Sergio Castellito’s heavy-handed drama about how horrific events in the Bosnian civil war forever shattered the lives of even those who were not yet born features gripping performances by Penelope Cruz, Emile Hirsch and Saadet Aksoy, all of whom have to deal with melodramatic flip-flops manufactured by Castellito’s wife, screenwriter Margaret Mazzantini.
This overlong film is hamstrung throughout its length by often ludicrous machinations. Extras are interviews with Castellito, Cruz, Hirsch and Aksoy.
Off-Broadway Reviews: "The Tribute Artist," "Transport"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 25 February 2014 23:35
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The Tribute Artist
Written by Charles Busch, directed by Carl Andress
Performances through March 30, 2014
Transport
Book by Thomas Keneally, music & lyrics by Larry Kirwanh, directed by Tony Walton
Performances through April 6, 2014
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| Halston, Harris and playwright Busch in The Tribute Artist (photo: James Leynse) |
Cross-dresser extraordinaire Charles Busch conjures a clever concept for his latest farce, The Tribute Artist: he plays Jimmy, a drag queen pretending to be his elderly landlady Adriana after the widow unexpectedly dies in her beautifully appointed Greenwich Village apartment, where he is staying. With help from his good friend Rita, a lesbian real-estate agent, Jimmy hopes to sell the place for millions before anyone catches on to the ruse.
But unexpected hijinks ensue. Adriana’s niece Christina, with her transgender teen kid Oliver sin tow, shows up, insisting she’s the rightful heir when her “aunt” dies; they are joined by Rodney, an ex-tryst of Adriana’s whom Oliver finds on Facebook and invites over. And that’s just the tip of a very convoluted iceberg.
Busch is a veteran comic writer whose dialogue often has bite (or at least bark), and the inherent silliness of the situation is always a given. It’s unfortunate, then, that he so often takes the path of least resistance, like a lazy series of jokes about drag queens and desperately alluding to campy old Hollywood movies to increasingly less funny effect.
The clotted plot (which I only summarized) hinders the humor from flowing smoothly; indeed, scenes extend beyond their miniscule life by frantic overexplanations that do nothing but add to the running time, so Busch ends up turns his own play into a drag, if anyone remembers the other meaning of that word.
Anna Louizos’ gorgeous set suggests a multi-million-dollar piece of Village property and Gregory Gale’s costumes are delightful. Carl Andress directs as broadly as Busch writes, and if Busch has done this role countless times, he can still deliver one-liners and double entendres like no one else.
Julie Halston, as Jimmy’s sidekick Rita, hams too much even in this muggable context; contrast her with Mary Bacon’s Christina, a small-town mom trying to handle the Big Apple. Bacon’s skillful, subtle portrayal garners more credible laughs as well as sympathy. Cynthia Harris (Adriana), Keira Keeley (Oliver) and Jonathan Walker (Rodney) round out an ensemble that nearly saves The Tribute Artist from itself.
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| The cast of Transport (photo: Carol Rosegg) |
Thomas Keneally—whose fine books The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and Schindler’s List became classic films directed by Fred Schepisi and Steven Spielberg, respectively—has impeccable credentials as an historian, specializing in his own country, Australia.
So his book for the musical Transport—which follows the travails of mid-19th century Irish women who, convicted of various crimes, were shipped off to the penal colony of New South Wales (not yet Australia) to help propagate the species with male convicts already there—seems a can’t-miss proposition.
But Keneally’s book isn’t up to the task, mainly because a musical isn’t the right form: history book, novel or film—either fiction or documentary—would better encompass such tragedy. Collaborators Keneally, composer Larry Kirwan and director Tony Walton are unable to develop the epic scale of human misery and, conversely, humane uplift with sufficient artistry.
We are left with fragments of a superior show about women banding together to defiantly survive a hellish voyage and a merciless captain’s mistreatment. (Males like a priest and doctor are more sympathetically sketched: but the captain has a last-minute change of heart.) The Irish Rep’s cramped stage allows a sense of the cruel treatment and shoddy conditions to come through, but with only four women to stand in for hundreds onboard, the story’s vast scope is trivialized.
Walton’s savvy direction and set design can’t overcome Kirwan’s songs—blustery ballads, romantic duets and a jig or two to nod toward Irish music—which include platitudinous lyrics of the Moon-June variety. A game septet of actors, especially the intensely focused and beautiful-voiced Jessica Grove, does its best to keep Transport from running aground.
The Tribute Artist
59 E 59 Theatre, 59 East 59th Street, New York, NY
primarystages.org
Transport
Irish Rep, 132 West 22nd Street, New York, NY
irishrep.org
Off-Broadway Review: Donald Margulies' "Dinner with Friends"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Saturday, 22 February 2014 05:37
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Dinner with Friends
Written by Donald Margulies, directed by Pam Mackinnon
Performances through April 13, 2014
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| Pettie, Burns, Shamos and Hinkle in Dinner with Friends (photo: Jeremy Daniel) |
Donald Margulies’ marvelous Dinner with Friends is such a psychologically and dramatically acute play that—despite its 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and rave reviews for its New York premiere—it appears to be less than the sum of its parts. Margulies’ artful construction of his tragicomic drama about how the disintegration of one marriage leads to soul searching in another fits together so smartly that it comes off (to some, anyway) as a mere clever conceit. But this remarkable play is anything but, as the Roundabout’s unmissable revival demonstratively shows.
Married couples Gabe & Karen and Tom & Beth have been best friends for 12 years, since the former couple set up the latter during a Martha’s Vineyard weekend. The play begins as Beth blurts out to her two friends after a scrumptious dinner that Tom—missing since he’s away on business—wants a divorce because he’s screwing a stewardess. (Turns out she’s a travel agent.) After he discovers that Beth spilled the beans without him there to defend himself, Tom goes to their house late that night to tell his side of the story because, as he says, Beth—who spoke first—now has the upper hand: he’s right, as Karen’s disgust at his arrival shows.
The play covers a lot of narrative ground in two hours—even showing that fateful Vineyard introduction to begin Act 2—but its magnificence stems from its covering (and uncovering) fertile psychological terrain in such a natural and unforced way that it might appear facile to the undiscriminating.
The dialogue among these four heartrendingly real people (always a Margulies strength) is penetrating, poignant and often priceless in its humor. Take this tart exchange when Karen reacts negatively to Beth’s news that she is getting remarried…too soon, for Karen’s taste.
KAREN: I spent years trying to get away from my family and my last ten doing everything I could to make a family of my own. I thought if I could choose my family this time, if I could make my friends my family.
BETH: Congratulations. The family you’ve chosen is just as fucked up as the one you were born into.
Or Gabe and Karen discussing Tom’s revelation that Beth was cheating early in their marriage.
KAREN: We saw them practically every weekend in those days, when would she have had time to have an affair?
GABE: I don’t know—during the week?
Margulies’ ability to create three-dimensional characters—also on display in Collected Stories and The Model Apartment to Brooklyn Boyand Time Stands Still—is second to none. And in director Pam Mackinnon’s keenly-observed staging—greatly assisted by Allen Moyer’s superlative sets, whose fragmented look underscores what these two relationships are becoming—the cast is unsurpassable. Darren Pettie’s Tom adroitly treads a fine line between unredeemable and believably contradictory; as Beth, Heather Burns gives a textbook lesson in delicately playing a wife unmoored from her husband: no tics or mannerisms, just a naturalness that’s as becoming as it is affecting.
Marin Hinkle, as Karen, expertly navigates the landmines which appear as her well-ordered world buckles when her friends break up, forcing her to reevaluate her own marriage. And Jeremy Shamos’ Gabe is a subtle psychological portrait of a man who—as Karen tellingly notes—doesn’t say much. Whether silent or speaking, Shamos gives an honest glimpse of a husband who realizes that, while his marriage might not be perfect, it’s his life and he’ll try and make it work.
Donald Margulies is a peerless observer with fresh insight into familiar subjects, and Dinner with Friends is a particularly rich mine of discovery for his characters—and for us.
Dinner with Friends
Laura Pels Theatre, 111 West 46th Street, New York, NY
roundabouttheatre.org
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