Kevin's Digital Week 16: Wild Things Galore

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 11 March 2010 05:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-Ray of the Week

Where the Wild Things Are
(Warners)
Spike Jonze long wanted to bring Maurice Sendak’s children’s book Where the Wild Things Are to life, and he does—to an extent. Some sequences in Jonze’s film are as magically childlike in their simplicity as anything in Sendak’s illustrated classic. Then there’s the rest of the movie, which overstays its welcome—what Sendak sketched brilliantly as a short-lived but lasting fantasy is bludgeoned to death by Jonze early on, and soon falls apart from the repeated (and cloying) showdowns between the boy Max and the monsters he befriends. Those creatures are further undermined by the cutesy voices of various Hollywood celebrities, which are too gimmicky by half—and help arrest the story’s dramatic momentum, along with our sympathy for poor Max, played by the charming Max Records.

Visually, Where the Wild Things Are is often dazzling: on Blu-ray, the stunning contrast between the bright and the pitch-black sequences are demonstration quality. Too bad the score is an ungainly hybrid of kids’ tunes and alternative rock—Oliver Knussen’s score from his one-act opera would have worked, but I doubt that Jonze knows it exists. The extras comprise interviews with Sendak, Jonze, cast and crew.

DVD of the Week

Bitch Slap
(Fox)
With a title like that, you know what you’re getting: and you’d be mostly right. Rick Jacobson’s paean to trashy movies of yore—especially those starring B-movie queen Claudia Jennings like The Great Texas Dynamite Chase—isn’t very clever (although Jacobson thinks it is), but it does have what those movies had in spades: gorgeous women pounding the hell out of men…and each other.

Jacobson certainly has an eye for the ladies: Julia Voth, Erin Cummings and especially America Olivo are a pleasure to watch as they battle the bad guys (with the occasional cat fight thrown in for good measure) while wearing very little for no discernible reason. Bitch Slap could have been an irresistibly trashy entertainment if Jacobson wasn’t such a dull director. His fancy attempts to make this overlong movie “substantial”—slow-motion, jumbled chronology, ridiculous plot twists—fail miserably. Happily, though, with the three gals having a great time, Bitch Slap is a bloody hoot. The DVD’s lone extra is a thorough, 90-minute making-of documentary that includes on-set interviews with the filmmakers and the game cast.

"A View from the Bridge": It's Miller Time

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 09 March 2010 20:44

Written by Lucy Komisar

Written by Arthur Miller
Directed by Gregory Mosher
Starring Liev Schreiber, Scarlett Johansson, Jessica Hecht

Arthur Miller's story of the betrayal that tears apart a longshore family in Brooklyn was a metaphor for the treachery of the people who "named names" in the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s. Miller was particularly angry at director Elia Kazan, with whom he had worked. In 1956, Miller was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee and cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to identify writers he had met at one of two communist writers' meetings he had attended years before. That same year, A View From the Bridge opened on Broadway.

In this powerful revival directed by Gregory Mosher, we witness the inexorable downfall of Eddie Carbone (Liev Schreiber), a longshoreman, who forgets the sense of honor and loyalty that is the glue that holds together the hard-working Italian community in Red Hook, on the Brooklyn waterfront, where he and his wife Beatrice (Jessica Hecht) live. His self-interest is not the careerism of the film and theater people who betrayed colleagues to HUAC, but jealousy ignited by the illicit passion he feels for his niece Catherine (Scarlett Johansson).

Catherine has lived with them since the death of her mother, Beatrice's sister, but the child is now 17 and nubile. Eddie tries to keep her at home so that she can't meet young men. He says he's looking out for her. But there's something else going on. Beatrice warns Catherine that it's not proper anymore to sit on the bathtub in her slip while Eddie is shaving.

The impending crisis is ignited by the arrival of Beatrice's two cousins, illegal immigrants from Sicily, who have come to find work. Such immigrants, known as "submarines," were supported by the Italian community, which found jobs for them on the docks. Marco (Corey Stoll) is stolid and serious; he has come to earn money to support his family, particularly to buy medicine for his children.

His brother Rodolpho (Morgan Spector) is a charmer, blonde, a singer, and single. Catherine immediately falls for him. Eddie's hostility to Rodolpho reveals the depth of his obsession with his niece which keeps him from sleeping with his own wife. The lawyer, Alfieri (Michael Cristofer), advises Eddie, "Somebody had to come for her."

Schreiber, one of the best actors appearing on the stage today, exhibits a cool surface that slowly disintegrates to reveal the conflagration building below. When he picks on Rodolpho for singing and cooking and making dresses, he explains, "The guy aint right." It's Miller's way of saying "homosexual" for "communist," a ready target.

Jessica Hecht and Michael Cristofer, with strong Brooklyn accents that enforce their sense of place, of belonging to Red Hook and its culture, are brilliant in their roles. Cristofer speaks in a slow sometimes staccato voice as befits the local wise man, or perhaps oracle.

Johansson does well as the naïve Catherine, girlish and unaware of the effect she has. Spector and Solli are excellent as Rodolpho and Marco, the first light-hearted at the life possibilities before him, the other dark and troubled, weighed down by his responsibilities in Sicily.

Designer John Lee Beatty recreates the dreary world of the Carbones in their non-descript living room with  light brown walls, a round wood table and chairs, and a fake fireplace.

The bridge in the title is the Brooklyn Bridge, visible to the north, connecting Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights. In a work that Miller meant to be allegorical, it can be a bridge to and from the rest of the world. Some productions have put the waterfront and distant bridge in the set. Beatty doesn't. He creates a line of rich brown brick tenements, which represents the family's self-enclosed limited world and community.

"I want my respect," Eddie declares, but as people from the neighborhood gather around him in the final scene, he appears to have forgotten what their code for earning respect entails.

A View From the Bridge
Cort Theatre
138 West 48th Street
New York, NY
212-239-6200
Opened January 24, 2010, Closes April 4, 2010.

For more by Lucy Komisar:TheKomisarScoop.com

Photo credit: Joan Marcus

"Brooklyn’s Finest" Is Just Okay

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 03 March 2010 22:58

Written by Lloyd Carroll

Brooklyn’s Finest
directed by Antoine Fuqua
starring Don Cheadle, Wesley Snipes, Richard Gere, Will Patton, Ellen Barkin and Ethan Hawke  

The New York City cop drama was once a staple in both television (Naked City, NYPD Blue, and the sadly underwatched Life On Mars) and on film (Internal Affairs, Serpico, The French Connection and Fort Apache). In recent years there has not been that much in the genre probably because the cost of filming in New York is not cheap, particularly in light of the recent repeal of certain New York State tax credits, and because audiences are too sophisticated to have film studios try to pass off Toronto or Vancouver for the Big Apple.

Brooklyn’s Finest is a decent attempt to revive the gritty urban crime drama and features a highly respected cast. Shot in an economical 41 days, most of the action in Brooklyn’s Finest takes place in Brownsville. Astute observers will recognize Brighton Beach’s Oceania Theater while an uncredited Rego Park is the exterior for the small house where officer Sal Procida (Hawke) and his large family live.

Pittsburgh native Fuqua, who directed 2001's Training Day, clearly knows his way around New York. He wisely keeps scenes from dragging but for some reason refuses to allow levity in any of them. A few laughs would not have added, rather than detracted, from this police drama.

The film follows the complicated lives of three officers, the about-to-retire Eddie Dugan (Gere); Clarence “Tango” Butler (Cheadle) who has been an undercover cop so long that he is actually friends with a drug kingpin named Caz (Snipes) who he met in prison when he was establishing his false identity; and finally, the aforementioned Sal Procida, a narcotics officer who feels that he has to become dirty in order to be able to give his ever-growing family a better life.

There is almost no interaction between the three policemen lead characters as their stories are told in separate arcs. The easiest to follow is Sal, who for all of his gruffness and willingness to break the law, is a determined family man who is overwhelmed by his wife’s chronic health problems and his guilt over not giving his kids a better life. It is impossible not to root for him even as he is bending and overtly breaking the law.

Tango is a bit more complex. He is a guy who knows right from wrong despite hobnobbing with drug dealers and pimps but is only motivated by moving up in the law enforcement ranks. His goal is to be a lieutenant and wear a suit to work a la his NYPD mentor, Bill (Patton).

As expected, the hardest character to figure out is Gere’s Dugan. We met Eddie as he wakes up alone in his dingy apartment with a bottle of booze next to his bed. He also seems a bit too fond of Russian Roulette. Despite these unmistakable signs of depression, Eddie exhibits an almost Zen-like calm during his shift. Avoiding drama and needlessly sticking one’s neck out have been his modus operandi for putting in his time to get his pension. Eddie is a loner whose female companionship consists of a prostitute that he fantasizes will leave “the life” and live with him in his Connecticut cottage when he retires.

The acting by nearly everyone is superb with the exception of Barkin who plays a tough-talking higher up in the NYPD who is more concerned with the department’s public relations than with justice. It is sad to watch this once respected actress chew up scenery in a rather obnoxious and hard-to-watch manner.

The entire film is shot in depressing earth tones and the ending is anything but uplifting. There is also an anachronistic feel to Brooklyn’s Finest. The level of drug-related violent crime in housing projects is more fitting with 1991's New Jack City than with 2010 New York City. Not a bad movie by any means but if you really want to see Brooklyn’s Finest then wait for the DVD or even when it's on cable.