"You're Next"
Directed by Adam Wingard
Starring Sharni Vinson, AJ Bowen, Rob Moran, Joe Swanberg, Nicholas Tucci, , Wendy Glenn, Andy Seimetz, Barbara Crampton
Horror, Thriller
94 Mins
R
With last years Cabin in the Woods, screenwriter Joss Whedon and director Drew Goddard subverted the epoch of cabin-based teen slasher films, amalgamating the tropes of the genre in a style that was at once mocking and pedalizing horror. In a way, they reminded us why the genre still mattered and what exactly about it was so much fun. In similar fashion, You're Next employs gleeful violence and sardonic storytelling to solidify the paramount import of the horror's existence. In viscus-smattered effect, it is bloody, simple, unadulterated fun at the movies worthy of strong consideration for any horror buff.
While story elements are certainly borrowed from other home-invasion movie territory, there is nothing explicit in the plot that defines the fun cemented deep into the foundation of this film. Sure, we've seen paramilitary groups armed to the teeth stomp in on helpless, unexpecting families but the ability to gleam such an element of nonstop fun and balls-to-the-wall excitement is a rare feat that You're Next achieves with amateur ease.
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Film and the Arts
Summer Music @ Lincoln Center Festival, Glimmerglass, Bard Summerscape, Encores—Off-Center
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Sunday, 25 August 2013 03:53
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Lincoln Center Festival
Performances from July 6-28, 2013
Lincoln Center, New York, NY
Glimmerglass Festival
Performances from July 6-August 24, 2013
Alice Busch Opera Theatre, Cooperstown, NY
Bard Summerscape
Performances from July 5-August 18, 2013
Fischer Center, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
Encores—Off-Center
Performances from July 10-27, 2013
City Center, 131 West 55th Street, New York, NY
Gone are the days when the summer allowed music lovers to catch their breath: in addition to the long-running Glimmerglass Festival (since 1975) and Lincoln Center Festival (since 1996), there’s also Bard Summerscape (in its 12th summer) and a new off-shoot of City Center’s valuable Encores!, titled Encores—Off-Center, all featuring chance-taking rather than reliably safe performances.
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| Lincoln Center Festival's Michaels Reise um die Erde (photo: Klaus Rudolph) |
German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s magnum opus Licht (Light), which comprises seven operas named after the days of the week, would tax any professional opera company. None of the operas has been seen in its entirety in America, so a staged version of Act II of Donnerstag (Thursday), titled Michael’s Journey around the World (Michaels Reise um die Erde), at Lincoln Center Festival was a coup—but if this festival won’t stage an entire Licht cycle opera, none will.
As usual with Stockhausen’s music, what’s essentially a staged trumpet concerto is much more palatable to view than listen to—if nothing else, the German avant-gardist knew how to maximize the dramatics of his performers. Last summer’s New York Philharmonic performance of Gruppen at the Park Avenue Armory was a blast in the same way as Michael: even when the music becomes redundant and impenetrable (which is often), the players’ amazing physical agility retains interest.
As archangel Michael, trumpeter Marco Blaauw had to maneuver through Stockhausen’s complex, tricky score in a bizarre shiny suit while being strapped to a mobile crane that flipped him around and moved him all over the stage to interact with the other instrumentalists (especially basset hornist Nicola Jurgenson in a wonderfully intimate and passionate duet) and the videos and projections in a too-literal but enjoyable production by Carlus Padrissa, with assistance from Roland Olbeter and Franc Aleu. Conductor Peter Rundel and the Ensemble musikFabrik gave Blaauw the sturdy musical backbone he needed for his remarkable feats of movement and musicmaking.
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| Glimmerglass Festival's Camelot (photo: Karli Cadel) |
Once Glimmerglass Opera, the Glimmerglass Festival has recently added Broadway musicals to its summer offerings at the lovely Alice Busch Opera Theater near bucolic Glimmerglass Lake, just north of Cooperstown. Last summer was The Music Man; next summer will be Carousel. This summer, it was Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot, in a modestly silly staging by Robert Longbottom—a tree made of blades too literally evoked King Arthur’s warring era—helped by a formidable trio in the leads.
David Pittsinger was a sympathetic King Arthur, regal and comic by turns; Andriana Churchman made an alluring and playful Guinevere, while Nathan Gunn was a dashing and irresistible Lancelot. That the musical’s not all seriousness and swordplay is to those of us who expected the target of wicked Monty Python parodies to be eternally dated: but Lerner’s book and lyrics nicely balance drama and humor, Loewe’s songs are always tuneful, and the entire show—even in Longbottom’s lazy staging—still blossomed onstage.
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| Bard Summerscape's Oresteia (photo: Cory Weaver) |
At Bard College’s Summerscape, two hours north of Manhattan, this year’s composer-in-residence (of sorts) was Igor Stravinsky, focus of the two-week Stravinsky and His World, whose orchestral and chamber concerts placed his work in intriguing historical, cultural and musical contexts. A fascinating tangent was the opera Oresteia by fellow Soviet Sergey Taneyev, composed in 1895 and given its American premiere at Bard.
Taneyev’s epic drama—three long acts adding up to nearly four hours from start to finish—set Aeschylus’s trio of classic tragedies to music that’s less than varied, but heroic or tragic by turns. Leon Botstein’s conducting the American Symphony Orchestra left something to be desired, plodding along more than Taneyev’s music warranted. Even less desirable was Thaddeus Strassberger’s production, set in what looked like a dirty basement wing of the Louvre, with paintings, frames and other bric-a-brac needlessly mucking up the works, highlighted by needless gore. Asking a director to clearly and coherently stage a classic drama isn’t so much to ask, is it?
The singers, who could sing their lungs out for a scene or two and then bow out due to a killing or other crime, were on firmer ground. Liuba Sokolova (Clytemnestra), Mikhail Vekua (Orestes) and Maria Litke (Cassandra) were best, giving their all to Taneyev’s stentorian vocal lines, and providing tragic stature to a work that only fitfully approached that goal.
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| Encores! Off-Center's Violet (photo: Joan Marcus) |
The new Encores! summer series, Off-Center, comprised The Cradle Will Rock, Violet and I’m Getting My Act Together…—all unseen (and unheard) for awhile. Composer Jeanine Tesori, also series curator, presented her own chamber folk-opera, Violet, about a hideously disfigured young woman: its country inflections and gospel tunes gave it a superficial veneer of Americana, but it took a true star to help the show take flight, and its one-time-only concert staging got that with the incandescent Sutton Foster.
I missed Getting My Act, but caught The Cradle Will Rock, Marc Blitzstein’s unabashedly pro-socialist agit-prop “play with music” from 1937. This version had its share of star turns, notably silky-voiced Anika Noni Rose, gruffly villainous Danny Burstein and boisterously heroic Raul Esparza. Director Sam Gold contributed nonsensical bits like young Aidan Gemme playing a cop and a professor; but the show remains, appropriately enough for a socialist tract, a true ensemble piece, and the forced parallels between yesterday and today (big business and political figures colluding to keep the little man down) didn’t ruin its pleasurable moments.
Lincoln Center Festival
http://lincolncenterfestival.org
Glimmerglass Festival
http://glimmerglass.org
Bard Summerscape
http://fishercenter.bard.edu
Encores—Off-Center
http://nycitycenter.org
"GMO OMG" Delivers Nutritious Fare
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Saturday, 24 August 2013 21:03
- Written by Laura Blum
The good news about Jeremy Seifert's eco-documentary GMO OMG is that it breezes into your heart as he and his adorable children explore genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The bad news is much of what they uncover and its implications for global health.
Seifert, who previously directed a short about dumpster diving (Dive!), came to his current food-dunnit while probing the Haitian burning of GMOs donated after the 2010 earthquake. "It's a gift to destroy you," says Chavannes Jean-Baptiste of Haiti's Papaye Peasant Movement, about Monsanto Company's 475 tons of hybrid seeds that local farmers preferred to incinerate rather than compromise Haiti's food sovereignty.
America should be so lucky. Here, as in many countries around the world, Monsanto and its agrochemical ilk are tinkering with our food without credible proof that it's safe to consume -- and without labeling that'd let us choose what we put in our bodies.
To cite but two distressing stats, we learn that 93% of our soy is modified, as is 80% of our processed foods. Less appetizing still is the fact that when we eat GMOs, we're literally eating pesticides. If that doesn't give pause, maybe the images of tumor-infested rats fed Monsanto herbicide and altered corn will make us rethink our diets.
Increased risks of cancer, auto-immune disorders, autism -- all this might be fabulously worth it were there truth to the fundamental claim that GMOs are humanity's only hope for feeding its burgeoning population.
According to the Millennium Institute's Hans Rudolf Herren, yields are now double what we need, enough for 14 billion people. More to the point, the proliferation of superbugs and weeds in the wake of GMOs bust the myth that the current bag of bio technology tricks is a sustainable solution.
GMO OMG fires a wakeup call to reclaim what environmental hazards, lab-brewed toxins and the corporate monopolies behind them have shanghaied. The soundtrack is rousing -- Seifert and his band created pulsating, up-tempo grooves -- but not enough to drown out the ticking of the clock to safeguard uncontaminated food sources for humanity and other species on our spinning mud ball.
One of the highlights of the film is Seifert's visit to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on a far-flung archipelago in Norway. No less than the "survival of the planet" is at stake as corporations yield up monocrops and tampered seeds, so it's at least some comfort to see that samplings of the world's unadulterated seeds are being preserved in this priceless repository.
At the core of GMO OMG are a field of questions: Who controls our future sustenance? Can we still have a say? How can we join the global food effort to take back what's ours? Seifert's pacey family road trip shows why anyone with a body ought to, OMG, do so before it's too late.
Film Review: "You're Next"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 23 August 2013 11:52
- Written by Matt Oakes
Film Review: "The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 21 August 2013 12:02
- Written by Matt Oakes
"The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones"
Directed by Harald Zwart
Starring Lily Collins Jamie Campbell Bower, Kevin Zegers, Jemima West, Robert Sheehan, Robert Maillet, Lena Headey, Jared Harris, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Aidan Turner
Action, Adventure, Drama
130 Mins
PG-13
Going to see The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones is like getting a filing from a dentist whose supply of Novocaine has run dry. It's a painful eternity of an experience that hacks and saws at our entertainment-guzzling sensibilities, defying each and every lesson culled from filmmaking 101 and spewing formula like a film-school-dropout on Ipecac. The "talent" both in front of and behind the camera is so raw-dogged and askew that it almost seeks to redefine "so bad, it's good". Needless to say, it misses that mark by a long shot and winds up in its own realm entirely, almost unknowingly. The result is strangely akin to watching a child play in a turd-peppered litter box, mistaking it for the sandbox he knows and loves, helpless to clue the poor thing in on its brown-handed error.
You may find yourself laughing aloud at the twisted excuse for a story as it fumbles over and over but it feels like laughing at a cat chasing after a laser pointer. You feel the cat's pain and its confusion as it bounds around searching for direction, tragically confuzzled when it comes up empty-handed time and time again, but when all is said and done, you're thinking to yourself, "What a dumb cat." In this regard, director Harald Zwart is much like a dumb cat.
Directed by Harald Zwart
Starring Lily Collins Jamie Campbell Bower, Kevin Zegers, Jemima West, Robert Sheehan, Robert Maillet, Lena Headey, Jared Harris, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Aidan Turner
Action, Adventure, Drama
130 Mins
PG-13
You may find yourself laughing aloud at the twisted excuse for a story as it fumbles over and over but it feels like laughing at a cat chasing after a laser pointer. You feel the cat's pain and its confusion as it bounds around searching for direction, tragically confuzzled when it comes up empty-handed time and time again, but when all is said and done, you're thinking to yourself, "What a dumb cat." In this regard, director Harald Zwart is much like a dumb cat.
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