Kevin’s Digital Week 30: A Riot of Colors

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Sunday, 01 August 2010 05:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week

Black Narcissus
(Criterion)
The Red Shoes
(Criterion)
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger — who teamed up for several of the most memorable movies of the 1940s (I Know Where I'm Going, A Matter of Life and Death, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp) — reached their career peaks with 1947's Black Narcissus and 1948's The Red Shoes, two of the most ravishing color films ever made, thanks to the incomparable Jack Cardiff's cinematography. Black Narcissus, which takes place in a Himalayan convent, is the subtlest of horror films, while the ballet-set The Red Shoes is a glorious portrait of artists working together.

Criterion's new Blu-ray releases come from a recent restoration, and the results are so spectacular that you may find yourself freeze-framing constantly during each film to savor the results. That's fine; works of art like these two films deserve to be studied over and over. Of the new extras (the rest come from the original Criterion releases), the best is French director Bertrand Tavernier's insightful comments about Powell's style on the Black Narcissus disc and an interview with Powell's widow, Thelma Schoonmaker, on the Red Shoes disc.  

DVDs of the Week

The Art of the Steal
(IFC)
Director Don Argott’s documentary about how the Barnes Foundation—which owns arguably the world’s greatest collection of post-Impressionist and modern-art paintings—has been torn down systematically since the death of its founder, Albert Barnes, in 1951, is an impressive cultural detective yarn with heroes and villains galore. What could have been a dry, academic exercise about art experts and politicians fighting over a collection worth billions becomes in Argott’s sensitive hands an intelligent exploration of the complex clashes between art and commerce, politicians and their constituents, foundations and trusts, and the law and what’s right.

Argott crams a wealth of information, insight and analysis into 105 minutes—it’s obvious that he sides with those trying to preserve Barnes’ wishes and legacy, but allows the other side its story, however selfishly (but profitably) motivated. While it’s unfortunate that IFC didn’t include any supplements—additional interviews, updates, director commentary—Argott’s film is persuasively argued enough to stand on its own.

The Most Dangerous Man in America
(First Run)
For their study of how Daniel Ellsberg became Nixon’s Public Enemy No. 1 after leaking the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, directors Judith Erlich and Rick Goldsmith have made a standard talking-heads documentary dressed up by canny use of archival material such as photographs, video footage and priceless snippets from the Nixon tapes, particularly when the president laments (in his view) Ellsberg’s treason and the press aiding and abetting it. (And we thought that this kind of White House paranoia and name-calling began after September 11!) The filmmakers’ ace in the hole is Ellsberg himself, who narrates the film. The filmmakers also interview his wife Patricia, former Rand colleagues and journalists; even Nixon administration honcho John Dean chimes in.

Why so many documentaries now show re-enactments of pivotal events (i.e., when Ellsberg and his children are nearly busted by L.A. police while copying classified materials) is mystifying; shoehorned in here, they threaten to drag the film down to the level of a melodramatic History Channel program. However, The Most Dangerous Man in America is a movie that all Americans should see: its hero is the real definition of patriotism. Extras include interviews with Woody Harrelson and Naomi Klein, and audio highlights from the Nixon rapes.


CDs of the Week

Billy Squier: Don’t Say No — 30th Anniversary Edition
(Shout Factory)
Rocker Squier may have made better albums — Emotions in Motion, Signs of Life — but Don't Say No was both his breakout record and his biggest-seller, so it's a no-brainer that this 1981 recording gets the “special” treatment ahead of his later albums. (Actually, it's only the 29th anniversary, but why quibble?) Any record that opens with the 1-2-3 punch of “In the Dark,” “The Stroke” and “My Kinda Lover” is destined for cock-rock greatness; throw in “Lonely Is the Night,” “Too Daze Gone,” and “Whaddya Want from Me,” and you've got a guitar record for the ages.

Squier has since been unfairly lumped into the “crappy 80s music” bin, but at his best, he combined energy, irresistible hooks and a versatile verbal facility into a hard-rocking package that has unfortunately gone completely out of fashion. Shout Factory's re-issue amps up Mack & Billy's original spacious production, and tacks on live cuts of “My Kinda Lover” and “The Stroke” from two 2009 concerts.

Leoncavallo: I Medici
(Deutsche Grammophon)  
That he's only known for his tragic first opera, I Pagliacci, makes Italian composer Ruggero Leoncavallo a one-hit wonder. But this splendid, first-ever recording of Leoncavallo's second opera, I Medici, gives us a chance to hear a more obscure work in the signature verismo style which he helped make famous, this time attached to the gruesome true story of the Pazzi Conspiracy, an assassination plot against the Medicis, rulers of Tuscany in the 15th century, which claimed the life of Giuliano, brother of co-ruler Lorenzo (who was merely wounded).

Leoncavallo's libretto is filled with melodramatic excess, particularly in the tragically romantic subplots that include adultery and an illegitimate child. But his music is sufficiently dramatic to keep us interested until the bloody end, in which the legacy of the Medicis is cemented with a promise from Lorenzo to his dying brother. Alberto Veronesi conducts the Orchestra and Chorus of Florence's Maggio Musicale in an authoritative reading, along with an arresting cast of singers led by Placido Domingo (Giuliano), Carlos Alvarez (Lorenzo), Eric Owens (conspirator Monteseco) and Daniela Dessi (Giuliano's beloved, Simonetta).

Film Review: Hugh Hefner, A Stand-up Citizen

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 27 July 2010 13:05

Written by Laura Blum

Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel
directed by Brigitte Berman
starring Hugh Hefner, Dick Gregory, Tony Bennett, James Caan, Jenny McCarthy, Shannon Tweed, Susan Brownmiller, etc.

"You can do many things to insure that your libido works properly until you're in your 90s," wrote sex therapist Ruth Westheimer in her book, Dr. Ruth's Sex After 50: Revving up the Romance, Passion & Excitement! And it's safe to say that octogenarian Playboy empire founder Hugh M. Hefner has done all of them.

The new documentary, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, however, is less concerned with his romps between the bed sheets than with the social and political freedoms his magazine has stood up for in racist, puritanical and homophobic America. That's just one of the numerous reasons to catch director Brigitte Berman's latest film when it opens.

A more voluptuous portrait of the civil rights era may be hard to find. Footage from Playboy's Penthouse and other pioneering TV shows reveal "Hef" as a ballsy impresario of desegregation, hosting club-shunned acts from Count Basie to Dick Gregory.

His crusade "against censorship and for the individual’s right to freedom of expression on all fronts" led him to book blacklisted performers at the height of McCarthyism and, during the Vietnam War, to welcome protest songs from the likes of Country Joe and the Fish.

Hefner's particular lust for blues and jazz led him to produce the Playboy Jazz Festival. It seems he was so taken with Berman's documentary about jazz great Bix Beiderbecker, Bix: Ain't None of Them Play Like Him -- and with Berman -- that they struck up a friendship. Years later, when she requested access to his personal albums and archives, he ushered her into his mansion.

The Oscar-winning filmmaker plays these materials against engaging tête-à-têtes with Hef, his pals and his commentators, including singer Tony Bennett, Kiss frontman Gene Simmons, and actor James Caan; Playmates Jenny McCarthy and Shannon Tweed; feminist Susan Brownmiller; and the aforementioned Dr. Ruth.

But it doesn't take a shrink to suspect that the hug-deprived-lad-turned-lothario isn’t as thrilled chasing bunnies as one might think. Not only does he come off as depleted by his own orgasmic Olympics, but so does his place in history as a major champion of progressive causes, as a person of integrity and as an original contributor to the country's intellectual life.

Though the jury is still out over his credentials as a liberator of female sexuality or as a self-enriching sexist (why the compulsive vamping of the Barbie bod?), Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel makes a strong case for honoring the silk-pajama'd sybarite as an upright citizen -- and for not dismissing him as a "dirty man."

Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel
Opens Friday, July 30, 2010
Angelica
18 West Houston Street
New York

Kevin’s Digital Week 29: Zoe and Buster and Others

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Saturday, 24 July 2010 21:02

Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week

The Losers
(Warner Brothers)
Loud, bombastic action pictures are a dime a dozen, and The Losers, despite clever touches, is no exception: a group of CIA black ops, stuck in Bolivia, finds themselves battling various thugs and underworld criminals while being helped by a femme fatale to end all femme fatales. Sylvain White’s flick has the requisite shootouts and rote violent sequences--including a badly-done CGI explosion that mars the slam-bang finale--but it has, among a mainly interchangeable cast of male actors, the indispensable Zoe Saldana.

Freed from her hideous blue colorings in Avatar, the gorgeous Saldana shows enough gumption guts to ignite the fantasies of the James Cameron fan boys. She might actually have the goods to make a female-based action franchise succeed (especially if Angelina Jolie in Salt fizzles out). The Losers gets a top-notch hi-def transfer, good news for a movie about guns and hardware. Extras include the usual bombast about its making and fun with the cast, including a featurette about Saldana joining--and outclassing--the boys’ club.

Steamboat Bill Jr.
(Kino)
Arguments about whether Buster Keaton was “greater” than Charlie Chaplin are moot: I would side with Chaplin, but happily, we don’t have to choose. In any case, Keaton’s slapstick films rank among the funniest ever. Although Steamboat Bill Jr. ambles along for 45 minutes, the pay-off sequences late in the movie, in which Keaton is caught in a hurricane and a flood, are so stunning in their sheer audacious hilarity (high winds blow Keaton around and houses crumble around him, all expertly done by the star himself, of course--no stunt doubles or CGI) that you watch the final 20 minutes with your jaw on the floor.

Kino’s new hi-definition transfer is the best-looking Steamboat Bill, Jr. I’ve yet seen, although not on the level of their earlier Blu-ray of Keaton’s The General. Extras include an alternate cut of the film, a short retrospective documentary, even two music videos (!!). It’s too bad that, on the back of the box, the illiterate phrase “comprised of” is used not once, but twice.

DVDs of the Week

Entre Nos 
(IndiePix)
This valentine to co-director/star Paolo Mendoza’s mother showcases, without sentimentality, how a new immigrant living in Queens with her husband and two young kids learns to survive after hubby leaves for Miami and a better job and never returns. In this heartwarming drama, Mariana discovers that she can raise her children even in the most difficult of circumstances. 

Mendoza’s lovely and utterly natural acting as her own mother makes it very easy to fall in with this low-key and unassuming movie, even as it smoothes over some hardships the family faces. Special features include a directors’ commentary, Mendoza’s short film Still Standing, a behind-the-scenes featurette and another one about making empanadas (the movie will explain!). 

A Town Called Panic
(Zeitgeist)
This Belgian stop-motion animated feature is, in a word, wacky. The introduction of the denizens of the panicky place in which the movie’s set is gutbustingly funny, as they--to a man (or animal)--are supremely on edge. After the first, transcendently creative half--as the tiny plastic figures are made to do things so insane (and inane) that the filmmakers who actually thought it all up deserve our endless thanks--gags start getting repetitive, jokes get staler and the movie comes apart at the seams, limping to the homestretch.

Still, it deserves applause for what it attempts, if not what it achieves, and for doing it in a very original way. Zeitgeist’s disc includes interviews with directors Vincent Patar and Stephane Aubier, deleted scenes, Le Fabrique de Panique (a 52-min. making-of doc) and a bizarre short, Obsessive Compulsive, chosen by the directors as the winner of the company’s Stop-Motion Animation Contest to accompany this film on DVD.

CDs of the Week

Tribute to Frederic Chopin by Irena Portenko
(Blue Griffin Recording)
Victoria Mushkatkol Plays Bach and Chopin
(Fantasy Records)
In this bicentennial year of Frederic Chopin’s birth, it’s only natural that we are getting inundated with many Chopin CD releases. The Polish composer’s reputation rests almost entirely on his solo piano music, even though he wrote concertos and other orchestra works; and it is that formidable array of compositions that these new releases are leaning on, including these excellent new discs by pianists Irena Portenko and Victoria Mushkatkol.

Portenko’s disc focuses on two dozen of Chopin’s glorious Etudes, 12 each of Op. 10 and Op. 25. Hearing these short but substantial pieces--most no more than two to three minutes long--might make one think that Chopin was a master of miniatures; even the meatier works Portenko plays on this enticing collection (Etudes, Op. 10, No.3, and Op. 25, No. 7) are less than six minutes long.

Mushkatkol’s more substantive two-CD set opens strongly with Bach’s French Overture before settling into Chopin’s larger keyboard pieces, among them several Ballades, scherzos, and mazurkas, along with an opening Barcarole. Both women play Chopin as if their lives depended on it—which, being pianists, they obviously do.