Cinefantastique Spotlight: Thor

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 09 May 2011 14:39

Written by Daniel Persons

Most Mother’s Days, loving children show their gratitude with flowers and breakfast in bed. This Mother’s Day, the kids had the option of taking Mom to the multiplex, where she could drool over the handsomely chiseled Thor in the newest, big-screen adventure out of the Marvel stable. Is Thor — directed by Kenneth Branagh, starring Chris Hemsworth as the mighty-thewed (thewed?) God of Thunder,  Natalie Portman as his potential love-interest, and Anthony Hopkins as Big Daddy Odin, with a special guest appearance by Gort’s younger, more ambitious brother — the film that will bring a Shakespearean gravitas to comic book drama, or is it just so much table setting for the impending The Avengers movie? Join The Chronic Rift’s John Drew and Cinefantastique Online’s Dan Persons as they discuss the movie behind the myth.

{mp3remote}http://media.blubrry.com/mightymoviepodcast/m.podshow.com/download_media/26081/episodes/280079/mightymovie-280079-05-09-2011.mp3{/mp3remote}

Theater Review: Unkingly "Lear"

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 09 May 2011 05:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

King Lear
Written by William Shakespeare
Directed by Michael Grandage
Starring Derek Jacobi, Gina McKee, Justine Mitchell, Pippa Bennett-Warner, Ron Cook, Alec Newman, Paul Jesson, Gwilym Lee, Gideon Turner, Tom Beard, Michael Hadley

King Lear, probably William Shakespeare’s greatest, most towering tragedy, has minefields galore for a director and actor hardy (or heedless) enough to undertake it.

First and foremost, it needs absolute balance between high drama and low comedy to become the unbearably moving tragedy that the playwright’s psychologically penetrating poetry points toward.

That Michael Grandage’s production, imported from London’s Donmar Warehouse to Brooklyn, is only intermittently satisfying is due to many things, but mainly because of Derek Jacobi’s Lear.

Obviously an accomplished Shakespearean, Jacobi curiously plays the king in an off-puttingly over-the-top manner, as if he can't believe that he lucked into this gig and so uses every trick at his disposal to show that he’s worthy of enacting Shakespeare’s most indelible tragic character.

From the start, when Lear enters pitting his daughters against one another in an egomaniacal bit of game-playing that foreshadows his madness, Jacobi makes odd acting choices. His exaggerated, cutesy mannerisms -- like pointing to his cheek to make sure eldest daughter Goneril (Gina McKee) plants a kiss there before saying how much she loves him -- grate from the get-go.

He puts inappropriate emphases while speaking famous lines. After saying "Let me wipe it first" as an obvious laugh line, he follows with, "It smells....of mortality`," his ill-timed pause ruining the overwhelming emotion of the scene. He also uses a weirdly high-pitched voice, and never physically degenerates when madness starts to unwind the king. 

Other lesser Lears I've seen (Christopher Plummer, Kevin Kline and F. Murray Abraham, to name three who also came a cropper in this role) managed to allow Lear's physical state to mirror his lost grasp of sanity.

By contrast, Jacobi, except for torn stockings and a crown made of twigs, remains refined and with no hair out of place, seeming singularly unaffected by the experience.

Jacobi does speak Shakespeare's language with clarity. He manages to howl with rage in the final scene, finding beautiful-sounding music in those five shattering "nevers" with which he climaxes his strangulated mourning over the body of his youngest and most beloved daughter Cordelia (Pippa Bennett-Warner). And in Lear’s final breath, he gives the most horrifying exhalation of air I’ve heard. Jacobi isn't a bad Lear, but that he's not a great one is maddening.

Jacobi's frustrating portrayal throws into sharp relief the rest of the cast. Gina McKee's Goneril and Justine Mitchell's Regan make formidable adversaries who look smashing in their elegant finery. Pippa Bennett-Warner‛s Cordelia is unimpressive.

Ron Cook's delightful Fool is perfectly situated between wisdom and lunacy, and Alec Newman's Edmund, though a tad obvious as the bastard villain, dashingly dispatches his devilishness against his father Gloucester, played by Paul Jesson with weighty world-weariness, and half-brother Edgar, played by a strong, articulate Gwilym Lee. If Gideon Turner’s Cornwall doesn't inspire much passion, Tom Beard's Albany and Michael Hadley’s Kent exude true goodness without resorting to clichés.

Brandage's direction of this swift-moving tragedy of broken families and psychological and physical casualties does nothing particularly egregious or outstanding. Hampered by Christopher Oram's unit set of whitewashed wooden planks that stand in for everything from Lear's and his daughter’s castles to the stormy heath and bloody battlefields, along with Oram’s monochromatic costumes of black, grey and white, the director makes Shakespeare’s all-encompassing tragedy a simple domestic melodrama.

Although we do get to hear Shakespeare's glorious language -- which becomes knottier and more labyrinthine as the play continues -- by superb-sounding British actors, it’s ultimately not enough to make this Lear more dynamic and compelling.

King Lear
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton Street
Brooklyn, NY
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
Opened May 4, 2011; closes June 5, 2011

Film Review: How to Live Forever

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Friday, 06 May 2011 05:00

Written by Marion DS Dreyfus

How to Live Forever
Directed by Mark Wexler
Written by Mark Wexler and Robert DeMaio

With the new documentary How to Live Forever, director Mark Wexler examines what it takes to live a long and fulfilling life -- physically, mentally, and spiritually. The one-two punch experiences of the death of his painter-mother and the arrival of his AARP card were the seeds of his filmic research, in which he explored the most fundamental of human connections to life.

As a Southern California native, Mark’s natural instinct was to live longer and, as Botox, surfing and "Hollyweird" attests, younger. In this film, he embarks on a global trek to investigate what it means to grow old and what it could mean to really live "forever." But whose advice should he take?

Does 94-year-old exercise guru Jack LaLanne have all the answers, or does British Buster, a now-103-year-old grizzled, chain-smoking, ale-guzzling marathoner? What about futurist Ray Kurzweil, or 90-year-old sci-fi guru Ray Bradbury, a "laughter yoga" maven?

What about an unassuming 74-year-old New Age Japanese recent porn-stud celeb, who chuckles, "I‛ve made what I think are 200 films since I became a porn star." Amazing clips of some of his starring vehicles expand the average viewer’s mental apparatus on what constitutes the upper regions of sexuality. (He is part of the growing industry of older porn that is apparently taking the Far East by storm.

Wexler explores the viewpoints of piquantly unusual characters, alongside those of health, fitness, and life-extension experts in this engaging doc, which by the final credits challenges our notions of youth and aging with sometimes-dour if often comic poignancy.

Begun as a study in life-extension -- studying beauty contests for the AARP-aged, wandering to Las Vegas for connubial ceremonies for the first-time married octogenarian set, then to cryogenic facilities for preservation of bodies ($150,000 a year) and "neurologies" (heads alone, a bargain $80,000/year) until medicine finds a way to re-vivify these preserves in their jet-age stainless steel cylinders -- Live Forever evolves into a thought-provoking examination of what gives life meaning.

One amusing sequence has Wexler confronting pierced and tatted teens through flinty centenarians, "If you had a pill that extended your life 500 years, would you take it?" Shades of the new sci-fi film Limitless, which energetically explores a similar concept, except expanding the brain’s capabilities to its maximal level.

As many people say no to the 5-century-pill offer, interestingly, as say yes. Even the quite young think a beat, then often say that life gets its seasoning from being limited.

One couple in their 80s is asked. The husband immediately assents to the idea: "Sure!" He agrees -- lots of things to do, learn, experience. His wife looks on, unperturbed. At her turn, she answers, "Why would I want to stay married [to him] another 500 years? No, please!"

In addition to Jack LaLanne (a year before his recent death at 95) and futurologist Kurzweil, the film also features zesty interviews with writer Ray Bradbury, the still hysterical (in both senses) Phyllis Diller, newsman/interviewer Willard Scott, exercise doyenne Suzanne Somers, and writer Pico Iyer (a former colleague from when we both worked at Time).

One physician, a surgeon, is still practicing surgery daily at 94. (He doesn’t look it.) He shares the amusing nugget that he "doesn’t often tell colleagues how old [he] is." He’s thinking of leaving the office next year, but enjoys the camaraderie of the "superior people" he encounters in his field, and regrets having to stop work, when and if.

Clearly, Wexler finds elderly who are both sensate and compos mentis in addition to being up there in moon count. It’s no great shakes being older than the galaxy if you aren’t also full of the life that could make use of the increasing years.

He dismisses the claims of many in exotic climes who stake their ages to high triple digits because they offer no proof, and suggests they are motivated by competition, cultural tendrils and other aspects of society to claim older years than they are entitled to by the clock.

The people Wexler does find -- among them, a 122-year-old who seems unsurprised and unimpressed by the news she is the world’s oldest person -- offer a mix of advice for staying alive: From "Get yourself good parents and genes" to "Drink a coupla glasses of vodka, eat lots of chocolate and meat every day" and "smoke yourself a pack or two of fags" just to stay in the game.

Some gerontologists might disagree -- but then again, how many of them can offer competing digits along with their advice and bromides to the longest lived?

For more information, visit www.liveforevermovie.com.

Marion DS Dreyfus
©2011