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Film and the Arts
June '12 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 18 June 2012 01:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Demoted
(Anchor Bay)
Since the guys behind American Pie are behind Demoted, it’s no surprise that the new movie fails to reach that film’s gross-out heights of humor. Not coincidentally, it also fails to find any cleverness in its work situations as did Office Space. Do we really need to see a naked Robert Klein cavorting with strippers?
The cast is definitely able, but the material is just not there, and comedic desperation sets in early and never leaves. At least there’s a decent hi-def transfer; no extras.
(Sony)
Since Nicolas Cage has pretty much surrendered his career to bizarre script choices, this sequel actually seems less crazy than it should be. The pluses of this ludicrously plotted movie are that directors Neveldine/ Taylor throw caution to the wind and concentrate on superb set pieces that make one forget—at least momentarily—the lunacy of what’s happening onscreen.
Unfortunately, the ending promises another sequel, which is definitely unnecessary. The overly digitized action has a less-than-warm look on Blu-ray; extras include featurettes and interviews.
The Gold Rush 
(Criterion)
One of Charlie Chaplin’s immortal comedies is as humane and affecting as his other classics The Circus, Modern Times and City Lights. The set pieces—the dance of the rolls, the Tramp eating his shoe—are as ingenious as ever; the only quibble is that Chaplin’s inferior, re-edited 1942 talkie version is now considered definite.
Luckily, The Criterion Collection includes both versions on this invaluable release, which are quite stupendous-looking on Blu-ray; extras include Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance commentary, interviews with Vance and historian Kevin Brownlow about restoring the 1925 version; and a 2002 featurette about the film’s importance and legacy.
In Darkness
(Sony)
Director Agnieszka Holland pulls few punches in her real-life account of WWII Jewish refugees hiding in sewers under the Polish town of Lvov and a sewer worker keeping them from the Nazis. The film unflinchingly shows the awful conditions under which these desperate people survived; laced with bitter humor—especially its depiction of an unsaintly hero (a marvelous Robert Więckiewicz)—it also allows characters their humanity.
The film is splendidly monochromatic (thanks to Joanta Dylewska’s photography, Michael Czarcecki’s editing and Erwin Prib’s production design); on Blu-ray, this brilliantly muted color scheme remains illuminated. Extras include a Holland interview and discussion between Holland and one of the real-life survivors.
Lina Wertmuller Collection: The Seduction of Mimi, Love and Anarchy, All Screwed Up
(Kino Classics)
It’s hard to believe, but in the mid-‘70s, Italian director Lina Wertmuller was considered among the world’s great filmmakers, culminating in her being the first woman nominated for a Best Director Oscar for her 1976 masterpiece, Seven Beauties. Too bad that brilliant, one-of-a-kind classic isn’t in this set (neither is her intelligent battle of the sexes comedy, 1975’s Swept Away…), but these three films give a good overview of this gifted artist’s singularly feminist point of view.
The Seduction of Mimi (1972) and Love and Anarchy (1973)—starring her favorite screen couple, the extraordinary versatile Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato—are superior, blackly comic dramas; 1974’s All Screwed Up is much less interesting but still a worthy comedy. All three movies, despite less-than-optimal materials, have authentically film-like grain; unfortunately, no extras.
(Fox)
Gerard Butler’s committed portrayal of Sam Childers, a biker and criminal who becomes a preacher selflessly helping children in the dangerous areas of Sudan is reason enough to see Marc Forster’s compelling if preachy melodrama based on a true story. Accomplished turns by Michelle Monaghan (wife) and Michael Shannon (friend) back up Butler’s first-rate star turn.
On Blu-ray, the movie looks stunning, particularly the African sequences; extras include a Forster interview, making-of featurette and video of Chris Cornell’s closing-credits song, “The Seeker.”
(Lionsgate)
Bill Murray’s film debut, this cornball 1979 comedy was shot as he was making it big on Saturday Night Live. Ivan Reitman’s sketchy humor shows throughout the goofy summer camp story, while Murray does what he can: but even he hadn’t fully formed his onscreen persona, so the movie is heavy-going even for his biggest fans.
The Blu-ray transfer, while soft, has a decent amount of grain; the lone extra is Reitman and writer Dan Goldberg’s commentary.
A Game of Shadows
(Warners)
Guy Ritchie’s redundant sequel to his unnecessary—but profitable—reboot of the British detective franchise consolidates Holmes as a superhero, moving so far from whom Arthur Conan Doyle created and the rest of us envisioned that it’s no use getting upset over such a cynical film series this is becoming.
Robert Downey and Jude Law keep their dignity, and it’s fun to see Noomi Rapace and Rachel McAdams, however ill-used; but Ritchie’s routine action sequences kill his stars’ momentum. The Blu-ray image is excellent; extras are Downey’s video commentary and on-set featurettes.
(Unitel Classica)
Leos Janacek’s masterly opera is a weird sci-fi tale about 300-year-old Emilia Marty—one of opera’s great soprano roles, here superbly enacted and sung by German soprano Angela Denoke—nearing the end of what should have been immortality. The knotty but affecting music is dramatically played by the Vienna Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen’s graceful baton.
But Christoph Marthaler’s 2011 Salzburg staging pointlessly adds to Janacek’s terse libretto, bloating its taut structure. Still, Denoke, Salonen and Janacek ultimately triumph. The hi-def transfer gives added visual definition, while surround sound gives Janacek’s extraordinary music the breathing space it deserves.
Desire
(Strand)
This French soft-core feature has naked bodies and body parts galore: but when it comes to relationships, the clinical filmmaking is anything but triumphant. Laurent Bouhnik’s film attempts to explore the active sexuality of young men and—especially—women, but since he’s a trite psychological director, there’s lots of nudity and simulated sex but little else.
Of course, the cast is terrifically attractive—particularly leads Déborah Révy and Helene Zimmer—but they don’t get to do much other than shed their clothes and inhibitions: the characters themselves remain wooden.
(Tribeca)
What might have been a clever slasher movie parody instead is, in novice director Vincent D’Onofrio’s hands, lumbering and obvious. A rock band goes to the woods to write new material—we hear their new songs in between being terrorized by a killer—and that’s about it. At 83 minutes, the movie is barely credulous, and Sam Bisbee’s songs are derivative and humorless, the opposite of what’s needed to make this a memorable parody.
The young cast seems camera-shy, and D’Onofrio doesn’t distinguish himself behind the camera. Extras include a D’Onofrio interview and making-of featurette.
(Film Movement)
This relentlessly cutesy rom-com-cum-musical is the brainchild of writer-director-star Julie Donzelli, a capable actress but less than thrilling filmmaker. She also cast her-then boyfriend, the lumpish actor Jeremie Elkaim—playing not one but four of the heroine’s boyfriends—and none of the performers is able to carry off this subtle feat very well, and the film soon turns leaden instead of whimsical, and fey rather than charming.
The bonus short, Luis and Marta Work Together, made in the United Kingdom, is in Portuguese.
Alfredo Casella:
Orchestral Works
Orchestral Works
(Chandos)
Another unsung 20th century Italian composer (alongside Lidebrando Pizzetti and Luigi Dellapiccola), Alfredo Casella was a master at atmospheric, colorful orchestral works, as this superlative disc—wonderfully performed by the BBC Philharmonic under Gianandrea Noseda—shows.
The premiere recording of the solidly tuneful Concerto for Orchestra leads things off, followed by a piano concerto in all but name, A note alta, with scintillating soloist Martin Rosoce. Rounding out this satisfying foray into Casella’s music are two series of Symphonic Fragments from 'La donna serpent,' a Casella opera.
(Virgin Classics)
Jake Heggie’s first opera, which premiered in San Francisco in 2000, receives an emotional recording by Houston Grand Opera from 2011. Based on Sister Helen Prejean’s book (adapted by Tim Robbins for his 1995 Oscar-winning film), Heggie’s opera adroitly uses spirituals, gospel numbers and other American musical genres.
With a formidable cast led by Joyce DiDonato as Prejean and Philip Cutlip as death-row inmate Joseph De Rocher, the tragic work—ably conducted by Patrick Summers—makes its case as a top American opera of the past 20 years.
Off-Broadway Roundup: Kahane's "February House"; Lonergan's "Medieval Play"; Gionfriddo's "Rapture"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 13 June 2012 20:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
February House
Starring Stanley Bahorek, Ken Barnett, Ken Clark, Julian Fleisher, Stephanie Hayes, Erik Lochtefeld, Kacie Sheik, A.J. Shively, Kristen Sieh
Music and lyrics by Gabriel Kahane; book by Seth Bockley
Directed by Davis McCallum
Performances began May 8, 2012; opened May 22; closes June 17
Directed by Davis McCallum
Performances began May 8, 2012; opened May 22; closes June 17
Medieval Play
Starring Anthony Arkin, Heather Burns, Tate Donovan, Kevin Geer, Josh Hamilton, Halley Feiffer, John Pankow, C.J. Wilson
Written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan
Previews began May 15, 2012; opened June 7; closes June 24
Rapture, Blister, Burn
Starring Amy Brenneman, Beth Dixon, Virginia Kull, Kellie Overbey, Lee Tergesen
Written by Gina Gionfriddo; directed by Peter Dubois
Previews began May 18, 2012; opened June 12; closes June 24
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| February House (photo: Joan Marcus) |
The ingredients are in place for a mature, serious musical: a fascinating story of colorful (and real) celebrities living in a Brooklyn boarding house during World War II. But February House, despite its pedigree, meanders when it should be tautly focused.
The frustrating result has a culprit: Seth Bockley’s book, which strains for significance, but is a cut and paste job that brings together the house’s inhabitants—editor George Davis, authors Carson McCullers and W. H. Auden, composer Benjamin Britten and his lover, tenor Peter Pears—and reduces them to uninteresting caricatures, none of whom get enough stage time to be anything more than cartoon versions of the actual people.
It’s a shame that two other famous occupants of the house, author/composer Paul Bowles and his wife, writer Jane Bowles, have been erased from the show: they’re as worthy as the others. If the objection is that the Bowleses would have made the onstage population too crowded: since the characterizations are superficial anyway, what’s another two?
Gabriel Kahane’s music, while accomplished, only occasionally lives up to the drama’s and characters’ demands. That Kahane isn’t in Britten’s league—even the “young” Britten (or Benjy, as he’s called)—is obvious; perhaps that’s another reason why Bowles was omitted: two superior composers onstage are too much for Kahane to go up against.
The performers don’t get a chance to create real characters, although Kristen Sieh’s McCullers and Erik Lochtefeld’s Auden come closest. And too bad that Britten and Pears are reduced to a Laurel and Hardy tag team by Stanley Bahorek and Ken Barnett, including a badly misconceived Act II curtain raiser, the unfunny “A Certain Itch,” concerning an infestation of bedbugs.
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| Medieval Play (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Kenneth Lonergan’s messy but affecting character-driven explorations of contemporary individuals—which have populated his plays (This Is Our Youth, Lobby Hero, The Starry Messenger) and movies (You Can Count on Me, Margaret)—are jettisoned for his latest stage work, Medieval Play.
This amusing but overlong farce has some good moments, but there are too many stretches where Lonergan simply treads water. It opens as two knights discuss their part in the ongoing Hundred Years War, with profanity and modern observations butting heads with a farcical attitude, and the rest of the play follows suit.
Zany, sometimes funny horseplay, even zanier and sometimes very funny dialogue, and enough wall-to-wall anachronisms to make one think that Lonergan overdosed on Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Love and Death and real old Saturday Night Live sketches.
Lonergan overplays his hand by too often having his characters talk about the absurdity and insanity of war, obviously mirroring our own era: even if he allows the delightful Heather Burns to narrate with winks to the audience about how hugely inconsequential the whole thing is, it starts to wear thin long before the curtain comes down.
As director, Lonergan (who stages the physical comedy quite effectively) has smartly cast real actors as his lead knights: Josh Hamilton and Tate Donovan never ham it up as, say, Nathan Kane or David Hyde Pierce would, all the better for the comedy to percolate. Walt Spangler’s cartoonish sets, Michael Krass’ cute costumes and Jason Lyons’ clever lighting keep Medieval Play on the right path when its author wanders far afield.
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| Rapture, Blister, Burn (photo: Carol Rosegg) |
Gina Gionfriddo—whose last play was the unwieldy dark comedy Becky Shaw—returns with Rapture, Blister, Burn, which has the same strengths and weaknesses, although its characters’ motivations are somewhat more believable.
Catherine and Gwen, now in their mid-40s, had gone their separate ways after grad school: Gwen married Catherine’s boyfriend Don and is raising two sons; Catherine became a feminist writer and theorist famous enough to appear on Bill Maher.
Catherine has returned home to care for her mother, who had a heart attack, and when she, Gwen and Don start catching up, it’s obvious nobody’s happy: homemaker Gwen finds her porn-watching husband—dean of a local high school—insufferably lazy, while Catherine feels that maybe she wrongly let Don go to Gwen many years ago.
Gionfriddo definitely has the pulse of her female characters’ shattered hopes and dreams, demonstratively shown in the Act I scene where Catherine, Gwen, Avery—Gwen and Don’s 21-year-old fired babysitter—and Alice, Catherine’s mom, talk about feminist and anti-feminist writings of the past few decades. But what begins as a shrewdly written and bitingly intelligent scene of women pointedly discussing intellectual matters soon degenerates into academic speechifying.
So it’s worrying that Gionfriddo actually lets her polar-opposite women switch places in Act II: Gwen goes to New York with her theater-loving teenage son and lives in Catherine’s apartment, while Catherine and Don start carrying on as if the two decades since their breakup never happened.
It’s not that these people wouldn’t behave like that—although they probably wouldn’t—but that Gionfriddo never makes it believable that they would. Similar to her haphazard plotting and characterization in Becky Shaw, the people in Rapture, Blister, Burn are mere author’s pawns, lessening their dramatic—and comedic—impact.
Glaringly obvious too is Lee Tergesen’s turgid Don: sure, he’s supposed to be anything but a catch now, but there must be something in this unambitious and plainly exhausted man that causes a spark in his old girlfriend. But Tergesen plays Don so flatly it’s impossible to see what either Gwen or Catherine ever saw in him.
Happily compensating are Amy Brenneman’s Catherine, a shrewdly expert mix of heady intellect and emotional messiness; Kellie Overbey’s Gwen, a level-headed, extraordinarily ordinary woman; and Virginia Kull’s Avery, the playwright’s hilariously catty mouthpiece.
Peter DuBois efficiently directs on Alexander Dodge’s sharply defined set, but Rapture, Blister, Burn—a discordant title that paraphrases a Courtney Love lyric—ends tepidly rather than searingly.
February House
Performances began May 8, 2012; opened May 22; closes June 17
Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, New York, NY
Medieval Play
Previews began May 15, 2012; opened June 7; closes June 24
Signature Theatre, 480 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
Rapture, Blister, Burn
Previews began May 18, 2012; opened June 12; closes June 24
Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
Concert Review: Lindsey Buckingham
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 12 June 2012 05:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Lindsey Buckingham in Concert
Tarrytown Music Hall
Tarrytown, NY
June 9, 2012
During his June 9 performance at Tarrytown Music Hall, Lindsey Buckingham, Fleetwood Mac guitarist since 1974, explained that he tries to find a balance between what he calls the “Big Machine” (the multi-million-selling rock group) and the “Small Machine” (his far less lucrative solo career).
That balance was on display, if sometimes precariously, throughout his 13-song, 75-minute solo set, in which Buckingham exchanged guitars with his roadie after every song and used foot pedals to trigger drum loops and other programming that backed his scintillating guitar playing and strong singing.
Opening with “Cast Away Dreams,” an ethereal acoustic number from his 2006 album Under the Skin, Buckingham tore through a few obscurities—at least to those who came hoping to hear the “Big Machine” hits—including Mac album cuts “Bleed to Love Her” and “Come,” an old Buckingham/Nicks tune, “Stephanie,” and solo songs “Not Too Late” and “Shut Us Down.”
Buckingham’s singular finger-picking style runs the gamut from soft strumming to straight-out hard rock. The dynamic range he gets out of six strings and his voice is astonishing, and was stunningly shown during revamps of his 1984 solo hit “Go Insane”—nearly transformed into a dirge—and the 1987 Mac hit “Big Love,” which Buckingham shrieked and jammed his way through.
The concert climaxed with a slew of Mac favorites—“Never Going Back Again, “Big Love,” “I’m So Afraid” and “Go Your Own Way”—that found Buckingham shredding his guitar, especially in the latter pair’s dynamite solos, which were gestures to the arena rock he regularly performs with the “Big Machine.”
For his lone encore, Buckingham calmed things down with nicely unadorned versions of his first solo hit, 1981’s “Trouble,” and the title track from last year’s Seeds We Sow. If the abbreviated show lacked true deep cuts—tracks like “Walk a Thin Line,” “That’s All for Everyone” and “Save Me a Place” from Tusk would have been most welcome—the sated audience didn’t seem to mind.
Upcoming tour dates:
June 12 – Washington, DC
June 14 – Baltimore, MD
June 15 – Munhall, PA
June 16 – Columbus, OH
New Docs: Pink Ribbons Inc & Patagonia Rising
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 11 June 2012 15:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
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| Pink Ribbons, Inc. |
French-Canadian director Lea Pool’s lacerating documentary Pink Ribbons, Inc.,examines just where the money raised (through the famous pink ribbon campaign and other merchandise tie-ins) for breast cancer research goes—and it’s not surprising to discover that very little of it goes where it’s supposed to.
Pool persuasively argues that, despite all the good will engendered by the likes of the NFL—when their players wear pink sneakers, etc. to raise awareness—fundraising actually works against the interest of women fighting this deadly disease because it lines the corporation’s pockets more than anything else.
By interviewing breast cancer survivors like writer Barbara Ehrenreich—who speaks compellingly about the need to tone down the rhetoric about there being a “war” on cancer—Pool touchingly personalizes the issue; that the corporations also make enormous amounts of money by selling items that contain cancer-causing carcinogens while paying lip service to fighting these diseases is just one many sad ironies the film addresses.
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| Patagonia Rising |
Equally revelatory is Patagonia Rising,Brian Lilla’s urgent expose of a massive dam project that threatens many communities throughout the Patagonia region of Chile.
The project, comprising five dams along the pristine fresh-water Baker and Pascua rivers, purports to help millions receive desperately needed electricity, but many experts insist that it will destroy one of the most fragile of the world’s eco-systems, and that alternative forms of energy would do the job just as well and with a lot less possible damage.
Lilla methodically covers both sides of this battle, even though it’s obvious whose side he’s on. The project’s PR mouthpiece comes off slick and rehearsed, but more troubling are sincere but naive comments from people who live in nearby Santiago, who feel that the dams are needed for their own well-being (needless to say, most of these are from the younger generation).
A clarion wake-up call, Patagonia Rising—like Pink Ribbons, Inc.—is cinematic advocacy at its most intelligent.
Pink Ribbons, Inc.
Directed by Lea Pool
Opened June 1, 2012
Patagonia Rising
Directed by Brian Lilla
Opened June 8, 2012
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