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Film and the Arts
Film Review: "Last Vegas"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 01 November 2013 00:10
- Written by Matt Oakes
"Last Vegas"
Directed by Jon Turteltaub
Starring Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman, Robert De Niro, Kevin Kline, Mary Steenburgen, Jerry Ferrara, Romany Malco
Comedy
105 Mins
PG-13
A kind of Expendables for Viagra-popping retirees, Last Vegas throws Hollywood golden boys Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman, Robert De Niro, and, to a lesser extent, Kevin Kline at the screen amongst a scourge of dilapidated "We're old now" jokes. But instead of slipping in old catchphrases and nods to their former glory, the narrative hones in on a periodic nostalgia existing outside of the collective careers of these (re)tired bunch of 70-odds.
Arguably better than it has any right to be, Last Vegas dodges expectations of "phoning it in"with half-heartfelt performances from these behemoths of the silver screen. But try as hard as Douglas and crew do to make something with surface-level sincerity, cheese-ball direction from Jon Turteltaub preaches to the lowest common denominator of moviegoers as the ill-conceived script from Dan Fogelman begs for laughs like a dog for scraps. Like a spritz of water to your furry friend's face or aged bowels spontaneously releasing themselves, it's often embarrassing to behold.
October '13 Digital Week IV
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 28 October 2013 00:06
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Embrace of the Vampire
(Anchor Bay)
This isn’t the original 1995 cult “classic” with Alyssa Milano in her nude glory—instead, this loose remake stars equally attractive Sharon Hinnendael as the virginal teen caught up in sexual and violent shenanigans.
It’s as dumb as the original without Milano’s freshness, even if Hinnendael’s beauty also turns a few heads. What’s most problematic is the amateurish acting by much of the cast, which makes the original movie seem much better in retrospect…relatively speaking, of course. The Blu-ray transfer is solid.
(Vivendi)
In this dragged-out TV movie (an extended version of the original shown last month on Starz), it takes three hours to sort out a plodding sci-fi plot about the imminent destruction of the earth by a solar flare caused by a spaceship with the First Lady aboard.
As we watch a do-gooder in Afghanistan (Julia Ormond seems bemused by her thankless role), the president and his young daughter, and the renegade scientist who might be the planet’s only hope, all I can say is….zzzzzzzz. The hi-def images look fine.
I Married a Witch
(Criterion)
Although this 1942 fantasy demonstrates director Rene Clair’s droll comedic touch, it’s a resplendent Veronica Lake—a movie star who looks ravishing—who makes this humorous but slight comedy about a reincarnated Salem witch a true classic. Frederic March is perfect as Lake’s straight man, but it’s her show all the way.
The Criterion Collection’s Blu-ray includes a stellar hi-def transfer, while the extras are seriously skimpy for a Criterion release: there’s a Clair audio interview, and that’s it.
(Vinegar Syndrome)
In this disposable 1986 flick, segments from three unfinished films are cobbled together, which feature dismemberment, Russian roulette and other horrors, as God and Satan sit on a train discussing the characters’ fates. Although non-finicky gore fans might say otherwise, for most viewers, this will be a colossal waste of 90 minutes of precious time.
The Blu-ray looks OK despite the quality of the transfer; extras comprise a commentary, interviews with director/producer Jay Schlossberg-Cohen and editor Wayne Schmidt and a bonus film, Gretta, on the DVD.
Nikita—Complete 3rd Season
(Warners)
In a tense showdown, trained assassin Nikita Mears confronts the Division’s renegade Amanda after she blackmails her into attempting to assassinate the president of the U.S.
As always, the series’ plots are far-fetched, but when it’s been made with such slickness—and does anyone fill out a tight body suit while performing her own stunts like Maggie Q as Nikita?—then we have another successful 22-episode season. The Blu-ray looks terrific; extras include deleted scenes and gag reel.
(Doppleganger)
This bloody Australian comedy is shockingly empty at its core: although director-writers Colin and Cameron Cairnes think the over-the-top violence and sex is hilarious, the sad truth is, it’s not.
And that’s too bad, because at the center of this mess is an impressive and natural performance by Aussie actress Anna McGahan, who happily isn’t in the Naomi Watts-Nicole Kidman mold; instead, she’s more like Abbie Cornish, a chameleon who’s also a devastatingly understated and accomplished actress. The hi-def transfer is quite good; extras include featurettes.
Only God Forgives
(Anchor Bay)
After his overwrought Drive, director Nicolas Winding Refn returns with an insipid drama starring a nearly mute Ryan Gosling that makes the earlier film a model of restraint. In 90 minutes of unrelievedly violent scenes, Refn rips off everyone: Kubrick, Michael Mann, Malick, John Woo and Scorsese.
Even Cliff Martinez’s eclectic score, taken from Penderecki and Tangerine Dream, evokes Mann and Kubrick movies. The only reason to watch is Kristin Scott Thomas’s hammy turn as Gosling’s profane mom—but even her one-note acting palls quickly. The Blu-ray looks gorgeous; extras are Refn commentary and interview, making-of featurette and Martinez interview.
(Syfy)
From the creators of Primeval comes another series in which extinct creatures, mainly dinosaurs, travel through time and appear in Canada, where they are able to tear apart unsuspecting, defenseless humans.
The special effects are quite good, but a dull cast and uninspired plots make this hit-or-miss, even for sci-fi fanatics. The hi-def transfer looks great, even if this is no Jurassic Park; extras include interviews and 13 making-of featurettes—one for each episode.
DVDs of the Week
Call Me Kuchu
(Cinedigm)
This documentary could make a difference in a 24/7 world in which important issues fall through the cracks, showing how Uganda’s anti-gay crusade reached its zenith with a bill that made being gay a crime punishable by death.
Directors Katharine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall evenhandedly allow both sides to talk, but their overwhelming sympathy is with those on the right side of history; the senseless killing of gay rights advocate David Kato, which solidified international outrage against Ugandan homophobia, may have helped turn the tide. Extras are deleted scenes.
(Warner Archive)
Club Med, Bob Giraldi’s 1986 dud, finds little chemistry between Linda Hamilton and Jack Scalia as its romantic leads, but Hamilton’s frizzy hairdo is worth a chuckle, and an embarrassingly unfunny bit role for then-standup comic Bill Maher—yes, that Bill Maher some.
1993’s Fatal Deception, a TV movie starring Helena Bonham Carter as Lee Harvey Oswald’s Russian wife Marina, is worth seeing for her excellent performance and a chilling Frank Whaley as the assassin.
(available through WarnerArchive.com)
Dirty Wars
(Sundance Selects)
In his valuable reporting for The Nation magazine, Jeremy Scahill uncovers the covert operations of America’s military and intelligence forces—and this film, from his book of the same name, is 85 minutes of eyewitness accounts of the innocent victims of our ongoing “dirty war.”
As pertinent as this is, there are problems: Scahill, narrator and onscreen surveyor, is a blank, and the movie is simplistic and rather manipulative. Perhaps the book puts it all in context. The lone extra is a making-of featurette.
Virgin and the Lover and Lustful Feelings
(Vinegar Syndrome)
1970s B-movie resurrections continue with a pair of actual hard-core porn flicks: but in these days of easy-to-get internet porn, does anyone feel nostalgic for indifferently acted attempts to tell actual stories loaded with sexual activity?
Virgin and the Lover is a deadly mix of soft- and hardcore footage, but Lustful Feelings at least has Leslie Bovee, one of the sexiest of the vintage porn actresses. Bovee fans out there should pick this up immediately.
The Fall—Series 1
(Acorn)
This decidedly unglamorous police procedural features Gillian Anderson’s forceful portrayal of a British detective in Belfast tracking down a killer—and there’s also a persuasive performance by Jamie Dorman as the psychopath, as well as John Lynch and Archie Panjabi as colleagues.
The atmosphere conjured by director Jakob Verbruggen and writer Allan Cubitt helps make this five-episode mini-series the television equivalent of a page-turning novel. Extras include a behind the scenes featurette.
(First Run)
A century of the environmental movement, which began with John Muir against moneyed interests trying to make the Grand Canyon a playground for the rich and powerful, is surveyed in this educational overview, from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Love Canal to Greenpeace and the Kyoto Protocol.
Split into five sections, and narrated by Robert Redford, Ashley Judd, Van Jones, Isabel Allende and Meryl Streep, Mark Kitchell’s documentary is a call to action in this dangerous era of climate change denial.
Hart of Dixie—Complete 2nd Season
(Warners)
This series would probably be more accurately called “Pretty People”: Zoe (the always adorable Rachel Bilson), the Northeast doctor now acclimated to the small southern town to which she moved to open a practice, goes back and forth between George and Wade (played by the equally handsome Wilson Bethel and Scott Porter).
This 22-episode soap opera isn’t much as a drama or comedy, but it’s eye candy of the first order—and did I mention that Jaime King is also around?
(BBC Home Entertainment)
This long-running BBC sitcom about a group of longtime friends was filming its 27th season in 1999 when one of its stars, Bill Owen, sadly died: episodes had to be rewritten and reshot in order to continue as many storylines as possible.
It’s too bad that the series is basically foolish nonsense despite the solid comic actors involved, like Peter Sallis, Frank Thonton, Owen and his son Tom. Long-time creator Roy Clarke strains to find much invention or humor, but it seems that such humor doesn’t translate well crossing the pond. Or maybe it’s me.
Out in Theaters: "Bad Grandpa"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 25 October 2013 12:54
- Written by Evan Pearson
“Bad Grandpa”
Directed by Jeff Tremaine
Starring Johnny Knoxville, Jackson Nicoll, Greg Harris, Georgina Cates, Kamber Hejlik, and Spike Jonze.
Comedy
92 Mins
R
Oh Jackass, your combination of filthy jokes, raunchy slapstick, and hidden-camera non-sequiturs are as amusing as they are tasteless. This mixture is the defining factor and key draw for Jackass fans since the days of the TV show that gave the franchise it’s start. Bad Grandpa has this sophomoric concoction in spades, and for those who are willing to suspend their seriousness and not scrutinize the themes to closely, it’s great entertainment. Unlike previous Jackass incarnations though, Bad Grandpa is not a jumbled collection of skits: it has a plot line and defined characters, and dare I say, more depth than any of its predecessors.
NYC Theater Roundup: “The Glass Menagerie,” “Bad Jews,” “The Model Apartment”
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 24 October 2013 22:16
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The Glass Menagerie
Written by Tennessee Williams; directed by John Tiffany
Performances through February 23, 2014
Bad Jews
Written by Joshua Harmon; directed by Daniel Aukin
Performances through December 22, 2013
The Model Apartment
Written by Donald Margulies; directed by Evan Cabnet
Performances through November 1, 2013
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| Jones and Quinto in The Glass Menagerie (photo: Michael J. Lutch) |
As any bored high school student knows, Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie is filled with symbols right from its title collection of fragile figurines. So for director John Tiffany to cram his new production with visual markers is to make a familiar play obvious. Far from illuminating a classic, he does the opposite: it’s Glass Menagerie for Dummies.
Tiffany wants to shake the cobwebs out of this overfamiliar play, but he’s done what a group of clever high school seniors would do in theater class. Tom’s opening monologue declares off the bat that this is a memory play, so sister Laura comes out of the sofa and mother Amanda appears from behind a dressing screen to reenact these memories. The Wingfield family is stuck in its own self-deluded existence, so their home floats on a sea of black, showing how separated they are from the real world. Since they are unable to break free from that insular world, a fire escape rising to infinity shows that no one sees an obvious exit.
Laura’s menagerie has been reduced to a lone unicorn, making something tangible simply symbolic. A “little silver slipper of a moon” hangs to our left throughout; when Amanda mentions it, we wonder why it took so long to notice. The characters—mainly Tom—make occasional herky-jerky motions that apparently trigger flashbacks, courtesy movement director Steven Hoggett. Nico Muhly’s music, while understated, too often unnecessarily underlines the drama.
So what’s left? When Tiffany isn’t trying to replace Williams’ vision with his own, there are affecting moments like the scene between The Gentleman Caller and Laura, one of the play’s foolproof scenes pretty much done as written. Brian J. Smith and Celia Keenan-Bolger, both quite good in that scene, manage to escape the director’s heavy hand, but otherwise the actors must do double duty to Williams and Tiffany. So Cherry Jones (Amanda) and Zachary Quinto (Tom) are severely hamstrung, and their portrayals suffer in a frustratingly uneven Glass Menagerie.
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| The cast of Bad Jews (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Joshua Harmon’s comedy Bad Jews is as blunt as its title. Of its four characters, two matter: cousins Daphna and Liam, she a devoutly traditional Jew and he proudly modern, dating shiksas like his latest blonde Melody, whom he brings to his brother Jonah’s apartment after missing their beloved Poppy’s (grandfather’s) funeral. Daphna is personally offended that Liam didn’t get back in time for Poppy’s ceremony because he lost his phone on the Aspen slopes with his ski bunny, and much of the play consists of the two cousins going at it—sometimes hilariously and devastatingly, more often stridently and redundantly—while Melody, content to look at her smartphone, and a nearly catatonic Jonah sit idly by.
Harmon writes funny lines, although some are too witty to be believable, as when Daphna nails Melody as someone “who dresses like she was conceived and live-water birthed in a Talbot’s.” The main problem is that these characters exist to show off Harmon’s cleverness. Melody talks about majoring in opera (hence her name, ha ha), but when she opens her mouth, she sounds worse than Katy Perry sans autotune. After Daphna explains why Jews can’t have tattoos, Melody arrives with an ugly, huge cleft note inked on her calf. (Jonah’s final revelation to Daphna of his own tattoo tribute to Poppy is a desperate twist of fake dramatic irony.)
As the play progresses, Daphna seems so delusional and sociopathic that the more measured Liam wins our sympathy by default, even if he disingenuously claims Poppy wanted him to give Poppy’s own heirloom, the precious chai (which he improbably hid in his mouth from the Nazis) to Melody. Despite Daniel Aukin’s slick directing and good actors, the balance is fatally off. As centered as Michael Zegen’s Liam is, Tracee Chimo’s Daphna is so borderline unhinged from the start, she has nowhere interesting to go. But Chimo’s head of bushy hair, which deserves a credit of its own—Harmon script description is that it’s “Hair that screams: Jew”—is a case of a character’s appearance saying more than the writer and performer.
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| Davis and Grody in The Model Apartment (photo: James Leynse) |
Like Bad Jews, Donald Margulies’ The Model Apartment is unafraid to let fly with potentially offensive invective that might alienate its core audience. Although Margulies’ play is superior, it too is tripped up by unwelcome contrivances. First, we are to believe that Lola and Max, an elderly Brooklyn couple, would get into their car and drive all the way to Florida overnight, only to find their new condo not yet ready: so they are put into a smaller apartment to tide them over. Second, we are to believe that their flaky daughter Debby—after discovering they left, obviously to get away from her—tracks them down to their temporary place. Third, we are to believe that Debby’s young boyfriend Neil also ends up at her surprised parents’ place.
Of course, this is a play of dreams, nightmares and heightened reality, but such gimmickry casts a pall over an intelligent exploration of Jewish guilt over surviving the Holocaust. Max, who lost his first wife and young daughter Deborah to the Nazis, met Lola in a concentration camp; they came to America to start anew and had Debby, who becomes the living, breathing embodiment of their guilt. This incredibly obese loose cannon’s neediness, hypermanic behavior and constant barrage of nasty anti-Semitic putdowns are a metaphor for Max and Lola’s own difficulties putting their horrific past behind them.
Although the Debby/Deborah pairing is a mite precious—a grown-up Deborah appears in Max’s dreams and her appearance at the end suggests he’s happy to live out his years with a fantasy Deborah rather than a real Debby—Margulies creates such psychologically acute characterizations and dialogue that his play is devastating despite its flaws.
Evan Cabnet’s lucid staging on Lauren Helpern’s unerringly accurate antiseptic condo set features outstanding acting by Mark Blum and Kathryn Grody as the harried couple hoping for peace and quiet away from their monstrous creation. But Diane Davis’s tour de force as Debby/Deborah is the production’s centerpiece. Her quick changes from huge Debby to slim Deborah and back are only obvious physical manifestations; this gifted actress also nails the emotional arcs of both women as remarkably as Margulies does.
The Glass Menagerie
Booth Theatre, 222 West 45th Street, New York, NY
theglassmenageriebroadway.com
Bad Jews
Laura Pels Theatre, 111 West 46th Street, New York, NY
roundabouttheatre.org
The Model Apartment
Primary Stages, 59 East 59th Street, New York, NY
primarystages.org
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