January '12 Digital Week III

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Sunday, 22 January 2012 15:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week
Age of Heroes
(e one)
This crackerjack World War II adventure has a familiar story of heroic soldiers taking risks to defeat Hitler’s army, whose melodramatics take over, especially in the climactic battle scenes. Still, with a swarm of good actors and dazzling location shooting, the movie comes across as authentic, which is enough.

The Blu-ray transfer delivers a solid visual experience; extras include cast and director interviews, deleted scenes, bloopers and bonus footage.

The Black Hills and the Badlands
and The Everglades (Mill Creek)
The awesome and--for now--unspoiled beauty of America’s National Parks is shown on these releases, which showcase the varied terrain and wildlife within two of our most remarkable park areas.

The Black Hills and the Badlands features the distinctive landscapes that have filled visitors with awe for more than a century; The Everglades looks at the subtropical paradise that lives on in the state of Florida. Of course, both of these parks look amazing in hi-def, even if that’s no substitute for actually visiting them.

Carmen
(Teatro Real)
The art of flamenco is displayed in masterly fashion in dance maven Antonio Gades’ and film director Carlos Saura’s stylish production, which is visually reminiscent of classic Spanish painters Goya and Velázquez.

Vanesa Vento is a vivacious and vibrant Carmen, the gypsy whose love for two men leads to her inevitable death; alongside Bizet’s familiar music, there’s much rhythmic flamenco music by various Spanish composers. The entire staging looks spectacular on Blu-ray; the lone extra is a short making-of featurette.

Dead Poets Society and
Good Morning Vietnam (Touchstone)
Two of Robin Williams’ Oscar-nominated performances are the calling card of these hi-def releases: Good Morning Vietnam features “funny Robin” as an outlandish DJ entertaining U.S. troops in Barry Levinson’s slight 1987 comedy; “serious Robin” appears in Dead Poets Society, the much-loved but pretentious 1989 Peter Weir drama.

Both movies look excellent on Blu-ray; Vietnam extras include a production diary and uncut Williams monologues; Poets extras include a retrospective featurette with interviews (no Williams, however), featurettes and commentary featuring Weir, writer Tom Schulman and cinematographer John Seale.

Division III
(Image)
If you’ve ever wanted to see comedian Andy Dick as a hard-nosed, tough-guy college football coach, then here’s your chance. Be warned, however: the negligible movie’s attempts at humor are even less convincing than Dick himself in the lead. The football team’s nickname is the Blue Cocks, and the comedy goes downhill from there.

There’s a good Blu-ray transfer; extras include a Dick and director Marshall Cook commentary, outtakes and deleted scenes.

George Gently, Series 1
(Acorn)
This absorbing crime drama stars a rock-solid Martin Shaw as a hard-bitten London detective (and widower) who begins work in the hardscrabble northeastern part of England during the volatile 60s, and begins butting heads with colleagues as well as criminals. 

With lovely locations and a fine supporting ensemble, George Gently is a must-see for anyone interested in these rapidly proliferating--and mostly superior--British crime series. The Blu-ray image is splendid; no extras.

Traffic
(Criterion)
Steven Soderbergh won a Best Director Oscar for this multi-layered 2000 dramatization of the Herculean task of fighting the drug war: we watch multiple plots about smugglers, users, sellers and law-enforcement officials. A superlative ensemble featuring Michael Douglas, Erika Christensen, Benecio del Toro, Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman give the movie needed realism, but it’s Soderbergh's guiding hand that builds the stories so powerfully.

The color-drenched visual palette can be savored on the Criterion Collection’s Blu-ray; extras include three commentaries, 25 deleted scenes with commentary, unused footage and demonstrations of editing, dialogue editing and film processing.

DVDs of the Week
Bombay Beach
(e one)
Alma Har’el’s fascinating non-fiction study of the dead community now surrounding California’s Salton Sea--which was once a promise of America’s unparalleled greatness in the 1950s--goes beyond the bounds of documentaries.

Her gracefully structured film includes much dance-like movement (choreographed wonderfully by Paula Present) and an eye for details that go a long way toward telling the story of lost souls living their lives far from the American dream. Extras include selected scene commentary, Har’el’s music videos and deleted scenes.

Dirty Girl
(Anchor Bay)
Writer-director Abe Sylvia’s sentimental tale of a sexually confused teenage boy and a sexually promiscuous girl from his high school is shallow and lazy filmmaking. Needless to say, opposites attract, as they help each other out of their varied (and myriad) difficulties. Still, despite the lameness of the humor and 1980s song cues, the movie’s worth watching for the acting of newcomer Jeremy Dozier and Juno Temple, who create an unlikely but lively pair.

Support by Mary Steenburgen, Dwight Yoakam, Tim McGraw and Milla Jovovich also helps, even if Sylvia’s apparently autobiographical portrait remains uninspiring. Extras include Sylvia’s commentary and deleted/extended scenes.

Night and Day
(Zeitgeist/KimStim)
Korean director Hong Sang-soo has made an impressively sober but lightly comic drama about a Korean artist who, after a breakup, goes to Paris without knowing anything of the language and eventually befriends two younger expatriate Korean women.

Leisurely paced at two hours and 24 minutes, Hong’s film nevertheless has a bracing balance of talk and immaculate silences, a remarkable drama that has sympathy, eroticism and insight in abundance.

Special Treatment
(First Run)
In this not very interesting S&M drama by director Jeanne Labrune, Isabelle Huppert plays a high-class call girl whose professional life has an emotional wrench thrown into it when she begins an offbeat relationship with her psychotherapist.

That their professions are, in some ways, similar gives the movie its singular kick, but Labrune does very little with what could have been a probing psychological study. Even Huppert, who gives it her all, cannot overcome the thinness of the premise and its lack of resolution.

CD of the Week
Beatlesmania
(Naive)
Although the Beatles’ songs never received better performances than their own, there are many superb cover versions, and this two-disc set from France compiles some of them on the first disc: classic renditions like Stevie Wonder’s “We Can Work It Out,” Earth Wind & Fire’s “Got to Get You into My Life,” Ella Fitzgerald’s “Can’t Buy Me Love” and Al Green’s “I Want to Hold Your Hand” are wonderful interpretations.

The second disc, however, comprises newer takes on the Beatles’ catalog by 20 artists whose techno versions sound similar--but inferior--to Paul McCartney’s own forays into experimental electronica. If nothing else, hearing Tamara Kaboutchek’s “Sun King,” Studio Paradise’s “I Am the Walrus” or others shows that, even if their covers are unmemorable, the Fab Four’s musical influence is widespread and enduring.

Musical Short Cuts: Terezin, Lang Lang, Aimee Mann, Wagner

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Saturday, 21 January 2012 20:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Will to Create, Will to Live: The Music of Terezin
January 9-February 16, 2012
92nd Street Y, Lexington Avenue and 92nd Street, New York, NY
http://92y.org

In Will to Create, Will to Live: The Music of Terezin, the multi-disciplinary series at the 92nd Street Y, the many talented composers murdered by the Nazis in concentration camps following their internment at Terezin in the former Czechoslovakia are represented by their woefully underrated music, which has unfortunately been ghettoized and not heard as often as it deserves. (There have been various recordings, notably Decca’s valuable “Entartete Musik” series from the 1990s, but rarely is this music heard in concerts.)

And the centerpiece of the series--which features a film, a symposium and other events--is a quartet of chamber music recitals featuring baritone Wolfgang Holzmair and the enterprising Nash Ensemble, whose members perform on these programs music by (for starters), Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, Hans Krasa and Erwin Schulhoff, whose intensely personal works are played alongside music by Smetana and Janacek, two Czech composers held in high esteem by these men and often performed by them while at Terezin.

During the January 19th concert, Holzmair powerfully sang songs by Krasa and Ullmann, while the Nash members played Ullmann’s expressive String Quartet No. 3 and the endearing suite from Krasa’s children’s opera Bundibar, famously played dozens of times by the camp inmates. The series’ final concert on January 23 features Mahler songs, Debussy piano music and Holzmair and pianist Shai Wosner performing Ullmann’s brilliant musicalization of Rilke’s famous The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke, for speaker and piano.

New York Philharmonic: Lang Lang, Bartok and Prokofiev
January 18-21, 2012
Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, New York, NY
http://nyphil.org

One of the best New York Philharmonic concerts in recent memory, the pairing of rock star pianist Lang Lang and Bartok’s scintillating Piano Concerto No. 2 gave Avery Fisher Hall an excited vibe it rarely has during most classical concerts. Lang Lang played with a fiery aliveness, hitting all of the notes (well, most of them--one infamous passage in the second movement need three hands to be played correctly) and meshing beautifully with conductor Alan Gilbert to create a dazzling interpretation of Bartok’s masterly concerto.

The concert began with Feria, a forgettable curtain-raiser by Magnus Lindberg, which at least had the distinction of allowing the entire orchestra to show off. But a far better platform for the orchestra’s brilliance was the evening’s final work, Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5, the Russian master’s longest, most thematically compact and musically diverse symphonic work, which Gilbert and his charges brilliantly built up, layer by layer, until the inevitable and volatile climax.

Aimee Mann
January 28, 2012
Zankel Hall, Seventh Avenue between 56th & 57th Streets, New York, NY
http://carnegiehall.org

One of our most literate pop songwriters for more than a quarter-century (was “Voices Carry” really that long ago?), Aimee Mann graduated from the slick mid-80s hit machine ‘Til Tuesday to the brave new singer-songwriter world, which began in 1993 with her superb Whatever. She followed up with I’m with Stupid, Bachelor No. 2 (which includes tunes from the film Magnolia like the Oscar-nominated “Save Me”) and other solid discs.

Before her latest CD Charmer is released this summer, Mann is doing solo gigs that include her appearance at Zankel Hall on January 28. Mann has a always had an offbeat charm in a live setting, so be prepared for top-notch musicianship, impeccably crafted songs--she probably won’t admit it, but she’s definitely been influenced by the pinpoint melodic precision of Paul McCartney’s composing--and an off-the-cuff, slightly ditzy onstage personality.

Opera Orchestra of New York
Wagner’s Rienzi
January 29, 2012
Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, New York, NY
http://operaorchestrany.org

One of the city’s musical treasures, the Opera Orchestra of New York has returned from the ashes this season. Founder Eve Queler, at age 80, takes to the podium for a concert performance of Wagner’s first successful grand opera, Rienzi, at Avery Fisher Hall January 29.

My first time hearing Queler and OONY was at Carnegie Hall 15 years ago for a wonderfully paced account of Wagner’s glorious Tristan und Isolde. Does Queler still have the stamina to lead her orchestra in another lengthy Wagner opera? That’s why I’ll be there to find out. Singing the leading roles are tenor Ian Storey, soprano Elisabete Matos and mezzo Geraldine Chauvet.

Theater Review: Spacey's Shakespeare

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 18 January 2012 05:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Richard III
Starring Kevin Spacey
Written by William Shakespeare
Directed by Sam Mendes

In Sam Mendes’ distressingly uneven production of Richard III, featuring Shakespeare’s most charismatic and evil villain, Kevin Spacey portrays the self-hating murderer with flamboyant verbal and physical tics that telegraph the Duke of Gloucester’s horrible behavior--he woos and weds a new widow, kills or turns the machinery that kills various other candidates in line to become king, among other dastardly deeds--as repulsive and attractive to the audience, just as Shakespeare wanted.

Richard’s opening soliloquy--“Now is the winter of our discontent”--is accompanied by so many winks and nods to remind the audience that it’s complicit in his connivance that it could just as well be the “Bard for Dummies” approach seen in Central Park each summer.

The talented Spacey overplays Richard’s “performing” throughout, looking to the audience conspiratorially or breaking character to comment--usually by gesture or eyebrow-raising, but once even imitating Groucho Marx--on his superiority to the others onstage. Some of this works, as we are supposed to go along for the ride against our will, but Spacey goes too far, and ends up beating to death Richard’s grotesquely roguish charm until it means nothing.

The volatility extends to the physical aspect of Spacey’s characterization. With a brace on his left leg, he walks with such a pronounced limp and twisted, even contorted movement that it’s painful to watch him stalk the stage. His tendency to bellow many of his lines (I’d say 75% of his dialogue is shouted) lessens the dramatic impact of his speeches, notably the final “My kingdom for a horse” speech, uttered so loudly he might as well be talking about how hoarse he is after a performance.

Spacey enunciates Shakespeare’s language so that it’s intelligible; his perfect diction helps in our being seduced by Richard’s words, especially in that amazing scene that only Shakespeare could pull off: Richard  proceeds to beat down Lady Anne’s defenses and successfully woo her while her dead husband’s still-warm corpse is in the room. Annabel Scholey impressively keeps up with Spacey’s breakneck pace, even while demonstrating that not shouting can make Shakespeare’s poetry equally compelling.

Sam Mendes’ direction, swinging from the bravura to the mundane, never finds a proper tone or pace for a nearly 3-½ hour long evening. The two-hour long first act bounces around erratically, and even the second act’s swiftness doesn’t exonerate Mendes, who switches gears arbitrarily from realism to expressionism to surrealism in the final sequences with little forward thrust toward the inevitable catharsis. Even such gimmicks as Richard watching a grainy B&W movie at the beginning--he uses a remote to pause it before launching into his opening speech--or Richard on a giant video screen accepting the crown are never integrated into this modern-dress staging, but instead are left dangling on their own, like the desperate stratagem of projecting titles (“Elizabeth,“ “Richmond”) to help the audience keep characters straight.

Aside from Scholey’s Lady Anne, the forgettable supporting cast includes Haydn Gwynne’s nicely understated (but not underplayed) Queen Elizabeth. And Mark Bennett’s music--mostly drumming by ghostly cast members, with two side musicians doing double duty on more percussion--pounds away pointlessly, except maybe to drown out Spacey’s shouting.

Richard III
Previews began January 10, 2012; opened January 18; closes March 4
BAM Harvey Theatre, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY
http://bam.org