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Grammy CD Presents Hits of the Awards

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts
Category: Reviews
Published on Friday, 31 January 2014 20:20
Written by Lloyd Carroll

One of the inevitabilities of getting older is that it gets a lot harder to keep up with today’s music. Part of the reason for this is that the pop music charts historically have been determined by the tastes of younger listeners and that is by definition going to lead to a disconnect with an older demographic.

Another problem is that unlike when a lot of us were growing and would listen to Top 40 radio stations such as New York powerhouse WABC or Philadelphia’s WFIL you could hear a diverse array of music ranging from adult contemporary (from such artists  as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin or Perry Como), soul, country, and of course, rock. Sadly, so-called programming experts created stringent formats so that the days of a radio station playing a true variety of musical genres went the way of television variety shows.

“The 2014 Grammy Nominees” CD is a terrific primer for those of us who enjoy music but have not followed the pop charts since Casey Kasem used to count them down weekly.

The album opens with arguably the hottest male singer today, Bruno Mars, performing his big hit, “Locked Out Of Heaven.” The NFL clearly knew what they were doing when they gave him their vaunted halftime entertainment spot at this year’s Super Bowl. Mars is adept at a catchy slow ballad, “Nothing On You,” as he is on uptempo tune as “Locked Out Of Heaven.”

Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” is the most controversial song on this album for reasons that had nothing to do with its lyrics but rather because of potential plagiarism. The family of the late legendary singer Marvin Gaye sued Thicke because they felt that “Blurred Lines” crossed the line from being a Gaye inspiration for Thicke to being a reworking of his gigantic 1977 hit, “Got To Give It Up,” thanks to a similar bass line and high pitch background vocals. Last week the Gaye estate and Thicke settled the dispute.

Justin Timberlake took a long sabbatical from recording in order to concentrate on an acting career that has produced both big theatrical hits and stiffs. There was understandably a world of attention given to him when his first single in years came out, “Suit & Tie,” which featured a stylish video with this duet Jay-Z. Even though “Suit & Tie” sold well, it was the follow-up single, “Mirrors,” that got Timberlake a Grammy nomination for best male pop performance.

There is little argument that Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky,” was the catchiest single of 2013 thanks to Pharrell Williams silky smooth vocals and the bass hooks that are played by Nile Edwards of Chic fame. It is difficult to comprehend some of this song’s lyrics. The way Williams sings the tag lyric  “We’re up all night to get lucky” sounds more like “Mexican lucky.”

You can argue until the cows come home over whether Katy Perry or Taylor Swift is the hottest pop singer on the charts today. (Sorry, Miley Cyrus fans.) Both are represented on this Grammy CD.

Perry’s big hit “Roar” is a classic stadium anthem rock tune with Perry nicely referencing the 1983 Survivor hit, “Eye Of The Tiger,” which was used as the theme from the Sylvester Stallone flick, Rocky III.

Taylor Swift has made a career out of writing catchy songs about the flaws of her former paramours. “Begin Again” is another in her litany of tunes in which she makes lyrics out of all the things that the men in her life did wrong.

Sara Bareilles is a throwback to the old school female singer-pianist (think Carole King). In 2007 she had a big hit, “Love Song,” whose upbeat title belied the fact that even though she was as skilled tunesmith she found it hard to write a love song on demand because her own rocky relationships. Bareilles is back with “Brave,” a philosophical tune about not being intimidated by anything.

I knew very little about the hip-hop duo of Macklemore & Ryan Lewis until I saw them perform on a recent “Saturday Night Live.” “Same Love” is a song which shows both their support of gay marriage and expresses the dangers of making assumptions about a person’s sexual preferences.

Country fans can listen to tracks by Kacey Musgraves, Tim McGraw, Blake Shelton and Jason Aldean on this album.

The Grammy Awards are conferred by the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences whose president is Bayside native Neil Portnow.

January '14 Digital Week IV

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts
Category: Reviews
Published on Tuesday, 28 January 2014 04:07
Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week

Bonnie and Clyde

(Sony)
Arthur Penn’s seminal 1967 film with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the infamous gangster-lovers will never be touched, but director Bruce Beresford brings a veteran’s competence to this three-hour TV mini-series that might be short on original touches but has atmosphere and colorful characterizations in spades.
 
Emile Hirsch and especially Holliday Granger make a sexy young team, and there’s excellent support from William Hurt, Holly Hunter and Elizabeth Reaser. The movie’s hi-def transfer looks first-rate on Blu-ray; extras include featurettes and interviews.
 
Benjamin Britten Operas
Gloriana (Opus Arte)
Peter Grimes on Aldeburgh Beach(Arthaus Musik)
The Rape of Lucretia (Opus Arte)
This trio of opera releases makes the end of 2013’s Britten Centenary Celebration anything but anticlimactic. Gloriana, composed for Elizabeth II’s 1953 coronation, is a beautifully constructed historical opera that never forsakes depth for pageantry; last summer’s Royal Opera House staging is somewhat crude but effective.

Peter Grimes, Britten’s first and most famous opera, is set by the sea in the region he was born and lived in; director Margaret Williams's film, shot on the beach at Aldeburgh—where the composer began a music festival that continues to this day—shows the opera’s expressive power, especially as played by the Britten-Pears Orchestra conducted by Steuart Bedford. The problematic  Lucretia is a chamber opera with some of Britten’s most memorably thorny music; the English National Opera makes this demanding work worthwhile. Seeing and hearing these classics on hi-def is a must; extras include interviews.
 
 

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2
(Sony)
This amusing sequel to the original movie and book about an invention that turned water into food which caused weather reports like the title, is cleverer than it should be. The animation and comic riffs are delicious (sorry) and rarely as overbearing as in Disney and Pixar flicks.
 
It’s nothing earthshaking, but well-crafted fun for the family. The Blu-ray looks perfect; extras include four mini-movies, deleted scenes, commentary, music video and featurettes.  
 
Downton Abbey—Complete Season 4
(PBS)
For his smash series’ fourth season, writer-creator Julian Fellowes has gone down an even tragic road (including last season’s shocking killing-off of a main character), and mixing in an unexpected interracial romance with an African-American jazz singer is added spice.
 
As in the previous seasons, the high bar of acting, writing, directing, set design and photography coalesce beautifully; the redoubtable cast includes Hugh Bonneville, Michelle Dockery, Maggie Smith and Penelope Wilton. On Blu-ray, it all looks great; extras include featurettes and interviews.
 
Dracula 3-D
(IFC Midnight)
Italian horror maven Dario Argento, still going strong at age 73, has made a flamboyant but surprisingly entertaining take on the Transylvanian neck biter, with a jokey mix of blood and boobs that keeps the lulls of a bloated 110-minute running time to a minimum (20 minutes cut out would also help).
 
Argento’s crazed eye hasn’t faltered him, and his eye for women—especially the voluptuous Miriam Giovanelli as a country bride turned vampire—is unerring, whether in 3-D or 2-D. The Blu-ray image is terrific; extras are an hour-long making-of featurette and music video.
 
The Postman Always Rings Twice
(Warners)
Bob Rafelson’s remake of the classic noir film (from James Cain’s novel), panned upon release, bombed at the box office as a result. Three decades later, it’s still a mixed bag, but the animal heat on display between Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange—in one of the most primal sex scenes ever in a mainstream movie—is definitely memorable, as is Lange’s first great screen performance.
 
David Mamet’s script is typically spare, while Rafelson’s direction and Sven Nykvist’s photography are striking. The Blu-ray image is good and grainy; lone extra is a Rafelson, Nicholson and Mamet commentary.
 
DVDs of the Week
The African-Americans—Many Rivers to Cross
(PBS)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s thorough multi-part exploration of black men and women in America, from slavery—when they were brought over on African ships—to today, is devastating.
 
The earlier chapters, in which Gates brings their history alive, from early settlements to the Civil War, are more powerfully evocative, but the immediacy of the later chapters (MLK, civil rights, Obama) is also compelling. These six hours of American history are necessary viewing.
 
Borgen—Complete Season 3
(MHZ)
For the third and final season of this exceptionally well-observed drama about the inner machinations of Danish politics and media, the characters are even more sharply drawn and their interactions strike sparks that reverberate far beyond each of the 10 riveting episodes.
 
As in the previous seasons, the two brilliant actresses playing the former prime minister and TV journalist turned political operative—Sidse Babett Knudsen and Birgitte Hjort Sorsensen—are magnificent; but the entire supporting cast is nearly as superb. Don’t wait for the inevitable American TV remake: it will be a major letdown.
 
Concrete Blondes
(Inception Media)
At first, this fast-paced, goofy thriller has fun with its trio of bimbos who find themselves in the middle of a drug war after they steal millions in Canadian money after a drug deal gone wrong becomes a bloodbath.
 
But director/co-writer Nicholas Kalikow overplays his hand, failing to turn the outrageously fake-looking gore and intentionally dumb plot twists and characters into a winning B-movie formula: despite the tongue-in-cheek performances by Carly Pope, Samaire Armstrong and Diora Baird, these Blondes fall flat.
 
Dark Touch
A Perfect Man
(IFC)
In Touch, a turgid little horror movie by director Marina de Van, a young girl is followed by a malevolent being that caused the deaths of her family—and may do more of the same to her newly adopted one. Occasionally eerie, it’s mostly foolish and, by its end, regrettably risible.
 
Likewise, Man wastes Liev Schreiber and especially an underrated Jeanne Tripplehorn in Kees van Oostrum’s self-indulgent drama about a philanderer and the wife who finally wises up after one affair too many. At least Amsterdam looks nice.
 
Forward 13
(Cinema Libre)
When Patrick Lovell lost his home in the 2008 financial crisis, he decided to make a film documenting what’s happened to the American dream for most of us who don’t work on Wall Street.
 
Even though it trods familiar ground, Lovell’s documentary is packed with equal parts anger and honest commentary, so there are intriguing discussions of our banking system, government’s inefficiency and the Occupy movement: all germane to any intelligent 21st century American.
 
Garibaldi’s Lovers
(Film Movement)

Silvio Soldini’s comic drama about modern life in Italy has moments of satiric bulls-eyes, but all too often Soldini takes the easy way out by combining cheap parodic humor and sentimentality into an unsteady brew.

But despite the unevenness—talking statues recur to lessening returns, while the protagonist’s dead wife keeps returning, more and more nonsensically—it’s made more than watchable by levelheaded performances by Valerio Mastandrea and Alba Rohrwacher as alienated people whose lives change when they unexpectedly meet. Lone extra is Anete Melece’s short, The Kiosk, from Switzerland.

CDs of the Week
Philip Glass—
Galileo Galilei
(Orange Mountain Music)
Perhaps to belatedly catch John Adams—who turned President Nixon’s visit to China, the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro and the creation of the atom bomb into viable operatic subjects—Philip Glass has also composed musical theater works on historical subjects, like Appomattox, Kepler, the recent Perfect American (about Walt Disney), and this 2002 opera about revolutionary scientist Galileo.
 
Too bad Glass’s music lacks the forward propulsion needed to give dramatic momentum to an essentially static story. The usual arpeggios and repetitions are in place, but they’re not varied or memorable enough to keep interest for 90 minutes, despite it being well-performed by the Portland Opera Orchestra led by Anne Manson with the strong-voiced Richard Troxell in the title role.
 
Rick Stotijn—Basso Bailando
(Channel Classics)
Dutch double bassist Rick Stotijn shows off his virtuosity and versatility in this imaginative program of works by Astor Piazzolla, Manuel de Falla and Nino Rota, whose irresistible Divertimento Concertanto is the disc’s attractive centerpiece, a splendid concoction that ranks as one of the Italian composer’s most characteristically tuneful works.
 
Rounding out an enticing recording are spirited arrangements for double bass of Piazzolla’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires and Manuel de Falla’s Seven Popular Spanish Songs, where Stotijn’s soulful bass playing is complemented by violinist Malin Broman (Piazzolla) and harpist Lavinia Meijer (Falla).

NYC Theater Reviews: "Beautiful: The Carole King Musical"; Frank Langella in "King Lear"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts
Category: Reviews
Published on Friday, 24 January 2014 22:46
Written by Kevin Filipski
Beautiful
Book by Douglas McGrath; directed by Marc Bruni
Performances through October 5, 2014
 
King Lear
Written by William Shakespeare; directed by Angus Jackson
Performances through February 9, 2014
 
Mueller as King in Beautiful (photo by Joan Marcus)
The new musical about Carole King, Beautiful, is strangely schizophrenic: unwilling (or unable) to commit to King’s own story—as if it wasn’t dramatic or “sexy” enough on its own—book writer Douglas McGrath juggles myriad gimmicks to keep the audience interested. We’re first introduced to Carole (a perfectly cast Jessie Mueller) playing piano and talking to us directly before launching into one of her loveliest heartbreak songs “So Far Away”; then, we see her as a 16-year-old writing songs at home.
 
 Soon, King and lyricist/romantic partner Garry Goffin—whom she meets cutely at school—are writing hit tunes for rock’n’roll’s Tin Pan Alley at 1650 Broadway, led by impresario Don Kirschner. But instead of concentrating on King’s own career, which leads to her writing and recording 1970’s Tapestry, one of the seminal rock-era albums,Beautiful meanders through the ‘60s pop world, giving the duo’s friendly rivals, Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann, an inordinate amount of stage time—including several of their tunes—while turning itself into a semi-jukebox a la Motown: The Musical, which co-opted the great soul singers, by presenting reasonable facsimiles of The Drifters, the Shirelles and Little Eva performing Goffin-King hits like “Some Kind of Wonderful,” “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” and “The Locomotion.”
 
This assembly-line parade of hits—only Neil Sedaka’s brief appearance chirping his mindless hit “Oh Carol” is done cleverly—bespeaks a show desperate to please its baby-boomer audience with recognizable hits rather than creating a compelling story musical. And, after a first act mainly given over to covers of covers of Goffin-King tunes (at least we don’t get fake Beatles doing “Chains” or—after intermission—ersatz Monkees doing “Pleasant Valley Sunday”), the second act hunkers down to tell King’s tale: her divorce from Goffin and eventual emergence from her performing shell to become one of the first high-profile solo singer-songwriters.
 
It all goes over painlessly enough. If set designer Derek McLane relies too heavily on the erector set blueprint of Next to Normal andNewsies, he still uses it adroitly; and if Josh Prince’s choreography is nothing special, Marc Bruni’s direction is adequately unfussy. Of the main performers, Jeb Brown makes an amusingly jaded Kirschner, while Anika Larsen’s Weil and Jarrod Specktor’s Mann are a plucky pair of sparring partners; too bad Jake Epstein (Goffin) and Liz Larsen (Carole’s mother) give platitudinous portrayals.
 
But Jessie Mueller’s Carole—when not on the sideline while others are in the spotlight—is the whole show. Although Mueller is saddled with a heroine simultaneously mousey and brainy, shy and self-deprecatingly witty—she spits out enough one-liners to make Carole a King of standup comedy—her soaring voice is front and center of a compromised musical biography.
 
Langella in King Lear (photo: Johan Persson)
From Carole King to King Lear: Shakespeare’s greatest, bleakest tragedy has been done in New York City often in the past couple decades, but—whether the titular title role is taken by actors as varied as F. Murray Abraham, Kevin Kline, Sam Waterston, Derek Jacobi, even Christopher Plummer—I’ve yet to see a complete performance of one of the most difficult roles in the Shakespearean canon.
  
This is a king with three daughters, whose youngest, Cordelia, is obviously genuinely loving, while older Regan and Goneril are obviously not. But when he decides to divide his kingdom among them and only asks for “proof” of their love to get their share, the other two are phony while Cordelia is guilelessly truthful. Needless to say, Lear rages against her humility and banishes her, setting in motion a chain of events that will end with him and his daughters dead and his kingdom in shambles.
 
Shakespeare has Lear say that he is eighty years old, so the onset of senility is never far from the surface of this story of an old man driven to madness by his destruction of his own family. In Angus Jackson’s solid if unexciting staging, Frank Langella essays the title role, and if much of the time he seems too lucid, too in control to lose his grip on sanity as he nears death, he speaks the poetry clearly and with purpose. There are small touches—like the seemingly inadvertent stumble at the beginning that shows his dottering age—that are an actor’s knowing grace notes.
 
But there’s no sense of overarching tragedy because Langella is never moving, even while pityingly hugging the blinded Gloucester or reciting those five heartrending “nevers” over the body of his dead Cordelia (a wooden, charmless Isabella Laughland). Before that, when Langella literally drags the actress’s limp body to center stage for the death scene, it’s a moment of supreme absurdity: if Langella can’t carry her at his age, that’s fine, but treating the poor girl like a sack of potatoes mutes the poignancy of Lear’s final moments.
 
Supporting cast standouts are Catherine McCormack’s intelligent, elegant Goneril; Harry Melling’s touching, sweet-natured, uncampy Fool; and Denis Conway’s sympathetic Gloucester. Langella also gets to howl during a storm scene while being drenched in an impressive rain shower; it’s the show’s most striking visual effect that’s complemented by Oliver Boustead’s ingenious lighting. But this is another stage Lear that, like its faltering monarch, has only scattered moments of lucidity as it approaches its darker purpose.   
 
Beautiful
Stephen Sondheim Theatre, 124 West 43rd Street, New York, NY
beautifulonbroadway.com
 
King Lear
BAM Harvey Theatre, 651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, NY
bam.org

January '14 Digital Week III

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts
Category: Reviews
Published on Wednesday, 22 January 2014 01:38
Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week

Blue Jasmine

(Sony)
Woody Allen’s latest is a minor drama whose jumping off-point is the Bernie Madoff scandal and looks at a Wall Street crook’s clueless wife who is unable to find solace in her sympathetic sister.
 
Woody’s script crudely carves up the haves and have nots; though there are fine performances—notably Alec Baldwin as the crooked hubby and Louis CK, Peter Sarsgaard and Andrew Dice Clay as various men in her life—Sally Hawkins is merely okay as the dutiful sister while Cate Blanchett as our heroine gives a mannered and frightfully overdone Judy Davis impersonation. (Typically, both got Oscar nominations.) Javier Aguirresarobe’s snazzy photography shimmers on Blu-ray; extras—rare for a Woody disc—comprise interviews and a press conference with the performers.
 
Charlie Countryman
(Millennium)
If watching Shia LaBeouf wander aimlessly around Bucharest is your idea of a good time, then by all means check out Fredrik Bond’s convoluted would-be thriller about a young American getting into trouble in Romania.
 
Otherwise—despite attractively gritty locales and the always persuasive Evan Rachel Wood as a Romanian cellist with a dark side—you’ve been warned: it’s 103 minutes you won’t get back. The hi-def transfer is first-rate; extras are deleted scenes and a behind the scenes featurette.
 
A Chorus Line
(Fox)
Director Richard Attenborough demonstrates that he has little affinity for musicals with this leaden 1985 filmization of the Broadway classic: Michael Bennett’s genius (he created, choreographed and directed the original) is sorely missing, and Marvin Hamlisch’s songs don’t come off well in such a contextless setting.
 
The inner lives of the dancers never come across despite plentiful close-ups: unfortunate ciphers include Michael Douglas, Terrence Mann and Audrey Landers. The Blu-ray transfer looks sharp.
 
The Doors—R-evolution
(Eagle Vision)
Strictly for Doors completists, this 72-minute compendium brings together a grab-bag of live performances, TV appearances and videos that include such staples as “Break on Through,” “Light My Fire” and “L.A. Woman” on programs as varied as American Bandstand and The Smothers Brothers.
 
It’s hilarious when the band lip-synchs “Hello, I Love You” to a bunch of sour foreigners on a German TV show. Jim Morrison worshippers will get more mileage, of course. The video quality varies widely, especially on hi-def; extras comprise a picture-in-picture commentary and additional music clips.
 
Nostalghia
(Kino Lorber)
Andrei Tarkovsky’s penultimate 1983 feature, another example of how this singular Russian director “moves with such naturalness through the room of dreams” (according to Ingmar Bergman), is—as always—saddled with a typically diffuse, and explicitly allegorical, narrative.
 
But—also as always—there are moments of visual poetry that only Tarkovsky (and his trusted cinematographer Giuseppe Lanci) could have conceived and shot, like the stunning climactic sequence of a self-immolation by near a symbolic statue. This important near-masterpiece, finally available in hi-def, looks ravishing on Blu-ray.
 
The Prey
(Cohen Media)
In Eric Valette’s white-knuckle thriller, a bank robber escapes from prison after discovering that his wife and daughter are in danger from a just-released ex-cellmate who might be a serial killer.
 
Plausibility and logic are in short supply, as are the number of on-target gunshots by an obviously inept police force: and don’t get me started on how our hero never is hurt despite death-defying leaps and falls. The cruelty is overdone—did our hero’s wife need to be offed?—but ignore such things and it’s an enjoyable ride. The Blu-ray images look fine; extras are a Valette interview and making-of featurette.
 
La Vie de Boheme
(Criterion Collection)
I’m no fan of Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki, whose combination of sentimentality and deadpan humor rarely jells: still, this bittersweet, comic 1992 film is among his finest. Although it retains his peculiar sensibility, there’s little of his overbearing condescension.
 
Coupled with wonderful B&W images and an engaged cast that sleepwalks less than usual, Boheme is a minor but distinct pleasure. The Blu-ray image is strong; extras are an interview with actor Andre Wilms and an on-set documentary, Where Is Musette?
 
The Year of the Cannibals
(Raro Video)
Forty-five years later, Liliana Cavani’s 1969 socialist allegory reeks of little more than righteous anger: her scenario of a society where hundreds of dead bodies are left to rot by the state, which also closes down efforts by our hero and heroine—named Tiresias and Antigone—to affect change.
 
Giulio Albonico’s routine color cinematography even makes the lovely Britt Ekland’s politically symbolic red hair aesthetically unappealing; Cavani’s ideas and direction are equally mediocre. The Blu-ray restoration looks good; lone extra is a new Cavani interview.
 
DVDs of the Week

Blue Caprice

(IFC)
In their fictionalized account of the Beltway Sniper attacks that terrorized the Washington DC area in 2002, director Alexandre Moors and writer R.F.I. Porto chillingly show how a deranged man and teen killed several people, focusing on a distorted “father-son” relationship that’s brilliantly enacted by Isaiah Washington and Tequan Richmond.
 
The film moves past easy blame to create a complex psychological study of two normal males who turn into monsters. Extras include director/writer commentary, Deauville Film Festival press conference, behind the scenes featurette.
 
Orpheus Descending
The Portrait
(Warner Archive)
In the mid ‘90s, cable network TNT showed play adaptations made by good directors and solid casts, like these titles. Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus, with Vanessa Redgrave and Kevin Anderson in an illicit love affair directed by Sir Peter Hall, was made in 1990; the same trio did the play on Broadway the year before: Redgrave’s performance is less tortured, more free-flowing onscreen.
 
Tina Howe’s masterly 1982 play Painting Churches became 1993’s The Portrait: veteran Arthur Penn ably directs Gregory Peck and Lauren Bacall as a couple whose artist daughter (Gregory’s real life daughter Cecilia Peck) wants to paint them.
 
Rewind This
(Filmbuff)

This amiable journey through memory lane will appeal to film geeks and fanboys who look back wistfully at the glory days of Beta, VHS and the VCR, which changed Hollywood and movie viewing forever.

In a diverting 90 minutes, director Josh Johnson chronicles the video age, which also revolutionized the porn industry—the raincoat crowd could watch it at home—and even started the careers of moviemaking splatter masters and others. Lots of giggle-inducing clips are included, and copious extras include commentary, extra footage, interviews, even a music video.

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