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Film and the Arts
"Strands" of Prokofiev With The National Symphony Orchestra
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 20 April 2023 19:41
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Gianandrea Noseda Conducts The National Symphony Orchestra. Photo by Chris Lee
At Carnegie Hall on the evening of Tuesday, April 18th, I had the pleasure of attending an excellent concert presented by the admirable musicians of the National Symphony Orchestra under the superb direction of Gianandrea Noseda.
The program began promisingly with an impeccable performance of George Walker’s impressively orchestrated if dour—its opening is brooding and stormy—Sinfonia No. 4, “Strands,” a piece within the mainstream of High Modernism written in 2012 when the composer was ninety years old and which features music from two African-American spirituals. (Program annotator Peter Laki adds that Walker “won the Pulitzer Prize for his orchestral song cycle Lilacs in 1996.”) The author stated: “I wanted to compose a work that was more than an overture or extended fanfare.” He also said:
The Sinfonia begins with an introduction that consists of several sections before the principal theme is stated. This theme recurs several times. The quotation of the first spiritual provides a pensive relief from the proclamatory nature of the theme that precedes it.
The briefer snippet of the second spiritual is affirmative. The following section consists of a melodic bass line over which fragmented interjections are superimposed. A similar section recurs, combining with the opening phrase of the second spiritual played by the piano during the course of the work. The bass material appears briefly in the coda.
Even better was a remarkable account of Sergei Prokofiev’s challenging, eccentric but engaging—and brilliant in its way—Piano Concerto No. 2, with the renowned Daniil Trifonov as soloist, a piece that is also programmatically modernistic in character. The introduction to the first movement is meditative and strangely Romantic; the rest of the movement is disquieting in its dissonances but attains a stirring climax. The ensuing, brief, propulsiveScherzois appropriately and characteristically playful. The Intermezzo is a queer march that at least approaches parody. The Finale begins manically and excitingly and then becomes introspective, even lyrical, in maybe the concerto’s most beautiful passage; after a number of unexpected divagations, the movement rushes to a surprising conclusion. In response to the enthusiastic applause, Trifonov played a delightful encore (which the artist has also recored): Prokofiev’s Gavotte from Three Pieces from Cinderella, Op. 95.
Most extraordinary of all, however, was the second half of the event: a meticulous reading of Igor Stravinsky’s astonishing score for the ballet,The Firebird, which must be one of the most frequently performed works in the current repertory. After an uncanny introduction, dizzying music accompanies the appearance of the Firebird. Following the haunting emergence of the enchanted princesses, one of the loveliest sections occurs in the garden before Prince Ivan nears the evil sorcerer Kashchei’s castle. The music becomes agitated as “his minions charge the Prince” and becomes more ominous with Kashchei’s arrival. The “Infernal Dance” is thrilling and and anticipates the composer’sThe Rite of Springwhile the bewitchingBerceusemust be the most glorious part of the score. Prince Ivan’s wedding to the most beautiful of the princesses provides a stunning close. The audience rewarded the musicians with a standing ovation.
April '23 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 20 April 2023 00:59
- Written by Kevin Filipski
In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week
The Lost Weekend
(Iconic Events)
When John Lennon went to L.A. without Yoko Ono in 1973, their assistant, 22-year-old May Pang, accompanied him—he ended up staying there partying and recording while he and Pang began a romance that lasted for 18 months, until Ono decided she wanted him back.
Most Lennon fans are familiar with that basic outline, but Eve Brandstein, Richard Kaufman, and Stuart Samuels’ documentary recounts those heady days through the eyes of Pang herself, who narrates her version of events, saying that Lennon was ready to leave Yoko for her, a claim that is seemingly backed by Lennon’s son, Julian, who not only chats engagingly about his dad and his own friendship with Pang, but is also seen, at the end, hugging her and walking down the street arm in arm, a pointed visual about John and May’s relationship if there ever was one.
(Film Movement)
Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi has made his mark with the mammoth character study Happy Hour and last year’s international breakthrough—and Oscar-winning best international film—Drive My Car. That notoriety has led to the release of his 2008 student film, in which the themes and directorial hallmarks of his later films are given rough, choppy form.
Unlike his mature films, where dialogue is meaningful and has its own kind of narrative propulsiveness, here the characters falling in and out of relationships sit around and don’t have much to say that’s memorable. Still, this is an interesting blueprint for what would be (mostly) perfected later.
4K/UHD Releases of the Week
Cool Hand Luke
(Warner Bros)
Stuart Rosenberg’s 1967 chain-gang drama, which has earned its status as an American classic, came out at a time when anti-establishment rebels started appearing in movies and novels; Luke could be a cousin of McMurphy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And like McMurphy, his legend lives on among his fellow prisoners.
Paul Newman as Luke is perfection and George Kennedy indelible in his Oscar-winning turn as compatriot Dragline headline a first-rate cast (including Strother Martin, who gets to say the immortal line, “What we have here is a failure to communicate”). It’s beautifully directed by Rosenberg, grittily photographed by Conrad Hall and satisfyingly scored by Lalo Schifrin. The film looks great in 4K; extras are a commentary by Newman biographer Eric Lax and a vintage making-of featurette.
(Warner Bros)
One of Hollywood’s first—and best—detective stories, with Humphrey Bogart as the immortal private eye Sam Spade, is this 1941 classic directed confidently by John Huston and featuring an unforgettable cast led by Mary Astor as femme fatale Ruth and Peter Lorre as bad guy Joel Cairo.
It’s unbeatable entertainment, and Warner’s UHD transfer gives the B&W photography by Arthur Edeson added luster. Extras on the accompanying Blu-ray are another Eric Lax commentary; “Warner Night at the Movies”; featurettes The Maltese Falcon: One Magnificent Bird and Becoming Attractions: The Trailers of Humphrey Bogart; short Breakdowns of 1941; makeup tests; and three radio broadcasts.
Blu-ray Releases of the Week
Cocaine Bear
(Lionsgate)
The title tells all in this crazy little movie about a bear who downs the drug stash dropped from a plane and ends up tearing several poor suckers to pieces when they happen to cross its path in a Georgia national forest. It’s sort of based on a true story, but director Elizabeth Banks and writer Jimmy Warden have instead turned it into a rollickingly idiotic comedy.
Good sports like Keri Russell, Margo Martindale, Jason Whitlock Jr and (in his last role) Ray Liotta provide the human fodder and make this more entertaining than it has any right to be. There’s a good hi-def transfer; extras are interviews, a gag reel and deleted/extended scenes.
(Warner Bros)
We didn’t really need another Magic Mike movie (although my wife disagrees); still, director Steven Soderbergh finds ways to subvert genre clichés, managing to make Mike’s final go-round if not particularly substantial at least intermittently diverting. Channing Tatum is better at moves than speaking, and he has a perfect partner in Salma Hayek, better at wearing well-tailored clothes than speaking.
There are amusing if old-hat U.S. vs. Britain jokes (it takes place in London), along with sensational dance numbers, including one on a double-decker bus and a drenched pas de deux finale between Tatum and the spectacular Kylie Shea that’s worth sitting through the other 110 minutes for. The film’s saturated look is well-captured on Blu; extras are a making-of featurette and a deleted scene.
DVD Release of the Week
Martin Roumagnac
(Icarus Films)
This 1946 tragic romance stars the great French actor Jean Gabin and international sensation Marlene Dietrich—surprisingly, the only time they ever made a film together even though they were real-life lovers for seven years—as an odd couple separated by class and ultimately united in murder.
Georges Lacombe helmed this sophisticated drama that has pockets of dry wit and a sober view of how snobbery is two sides of the same coin, as the tense trial that serves as the film’s histrionic climax (followed by a rather obvious O. Henry ending) flavorfully shows.
Alfred Schnittke—Psalms of Repentance
(Pentatone)
The music of Russian composer Alfred Schnittke (1934-98) often tended to the spiritual—in addition to his varied film scores, symphonies and chamber music, he composed much religious and choral music, including his lovely Requiem.
This disc tackles one of his most ambitious vocal compositions, a 40-minute, multi-movement work for mixed choir, written in 1988; it’s movingly sung by the choir Cappella Amsterdam, led by Daniel Reuss, in a masterly performance that’s an absolute balm for the soul.
April '23 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 14 April 2023 00:24
- Written by Kevin Filipski
4K/UHD Releases of the Week
The Fisher King
(Criterion Collection)
Terry Gilliam's 1991 fantasy is, despite the bravura lunacy going on around his main characters, his most heartfelt film: the sympathetic portrayals by Robin Williams, Jeff Bridges and Mercedes Ruehl (who won an Oscar) keeps the drama earthbound and personal even when Richard LaGravenese’s scattershot script threatens to really go off the rails.
Gilliam’s dazzling direction juggles the bizarre fantastical stuff and the humanity underneath in a way unlike his other films, while his outlandish visuals look even more spectacular on Criterion's new UHD transfer; extras feature Gilliam’s commentary; interviews with Gilliam, LaGravenese, Bridges, Ruehl and Amanda Plummer from the 2015 Blu-ray release; 2006 Williams interview; and deleted scenes with Gilliam commentary.
(Warner Bros)
When James Dean died at age 24 in a car crash, he had made only three films, all classics: Elia Kazan’s East of Eden (1954), Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and George Stevens’ Giant (1956).
But it was perhaps Ray’s Rebel—which also launched the careers of Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo and Dennis Hopper—that best exemplified how Dean’s magnetic presence could fill the screen. There’s an immaculate 4K transfer; extras comprise an audio commentary, screen and wardrobe tests, deleted scenes, “James Dean Remembered” (1974 TV special) and featurettes “Rebel Without a Cause: Defiant Innocents” and “Dennis Hopper: Memories from the Warner Lot.”
Streaming Release of the Week
Hunt Club
(Latigo Films)
If you lost track of Mena Suvari after her appearances in American Pie and American Beauty, it might be strange to see her headline Elizabeth Blake-Thomas’ feature, ostensibly a straightforward revenge flick but with interesting little blackly comic weirdness going on.
Suvari plays a woman freshly dumped by her girlfriend who agrees to accompany a teenage boy and his dad on a weekend getaway to their “hunt club”—it turns out she (and other unfortunate women) are the hunted. It’s silly and predictable, but Blake-Thomas has a few reversals up her sleeve and Suvari carries herself commandingly as the heroine, upstaging Mickey Rourke and Casper van Dien, who are the main antagonists. It’s a real guilty pleasure for anyone in the mood.
Amnesia
(Cult Epics)
Martin Koolhoven is a name I haven’t encountered before, but his offbeat 2001 drama, resurrected by Cult Epics, shows a writer-director with a talent for engaging and enraging audiences; an unsettling experience, it’s anchored by terrific performances by Fedja van Huet (another name I’m unfamiliar with) and the always explosive Carice van Houten.
The story of a family trying to keep its closely held, deplorable secrets is old-hat, but Koolhoven, van Huet and van Hauten make it come alive with authority. The film looks expressively grainy on Blu; extras are new and vintage interviews and making-of featurettes with the director and his two actors along with a Koolhoven and van Huet commentary. A most welcome second disc includes the director’s TV films, both in a similarly creepy vein: 1999’s Suzy Q, with a brilliant van Houten, and 1997’s Dark Light.
Rick and Morty—Complete 6th Season
(Warner Bros)
For a remarkable six seasons and 61 episodes, this blissfully nutty animated series about mad scientist Rick and gleefully supportive grandson Morty keeps reaching new levels of insanity as its creators keep cramming more visual hijinks and verbal zaniness into the mix.
As these latest 10 episodes aptly demonstrate, the show always threatens viewers with overload, but endless crude jokes and the inventive animation make the pair’s journeys to many alternate realities deliriously entertaining. The sixth season looks dazzlingly colorful on Blu-ray.
(Cohen Film Collection)
Jacques Rivette’s 1995 film is a sweetly entertaining look at a trio of women navigating romance and friendship in Paris; although it’s too long, as most Rivette films are, at least it has some unaffected and simpleminded song-and-dance interludes to fill out the running time.
The three actresses are given co-writing credits, but even if the dialogue and subplots are less than scintillating, Laurence Côte, Christine Laurent and Marianne Denicourt are captivating enough to make it watchable. The hi-def transfer looks quite good; the lone extra is Richard Pena’s commentary.
CD Release of the Week
Edmund Rubbra—The Jade Mountain
(Chandos)
English composer Edmund Rubba (1901-86) and his music are all but unknown in America: I’ve never gotten to hear even one of his works live in concert, despite their masterly quality, especially his cycle of 13 varied but uniformly excellent symphonies. Luckily, much of his orchestral, chamber and choral work is available on disc, and this new recording of a few dozen of his artful songs is a welcome addition to that canon.
The breadth of Rubbra’s elegant songwriting—from his first, “Rosa Mundi” (1921), to his last, “Fly Envious Time” (1974)—is represented here, with the lovely 1962 song cycle The Jade Mountain, beautifully performed by soprano Lucy Crowe and harpist Catrin Finch, especially memorable. Equally fine contributions come from mezzo Claire Barnett-Jones, baritone Marcus Farnsworth, violist Timothy Ridout, and pianist Iain Burnside.
April '23 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 05 April 2023 02:38
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Special Screening of the Week
Hilma
(Juno Films)
Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was a Swedish artist barely appreciated or known in her lifetime; only recently have her unconventional paintings received attention, as writer-director Lasse Hallström shows in his straightforward, intelligent biopic.
Presenting her as a fiercely independent free spirit who was attracted to women, more strikes against her along with being an artist, Hallström sharply defines her as a trailblazer with her own principles who pushed back against those who uncomprehendingly attacked, ignored or belittled her. The director has scored a coup with the title role: the younger Hilma is played by his daughter Tora Hallström, who is guilelessly natural, while the older Hilma is played by Hallström’s wife and Tora’s mother, the formidable Lena Olin.
On April 5, Scandinavia House in Manhattan is hosting the NY premiere including a Q&A with the director and his two stars. (ScandinaviaHouse.org) The film opens at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan and in Los Angeles on April 14.
Warm Water Under a Red Bridge
(Film Movement Classics)
Shohei Imamura’s documentary-like portraits of the underbelly of Japanese society are filled with underdogs who are allowed to display their genuine humanity. His last feature, made in 2001 (Imamura died five years later, at age 80), is of a piece with his other films: shot through with sardonic humor and humane observation, it follows a middle-aged Tokyo office worker who goes to a small village where he meets and has a sexual relationship with a woman who shoots out a geyser of water during sex, whenever she’s “full,” as she tells him.
Simultaneously realistic and symbolic—which the title wittily alludes to—what in lesser hands might have been contrived or stilted becomes a wonderfully offbeat romantic comedy of manners, carried along by Shin'ichirō Ikebe’s inventively boisterous score.
Eight Deadly Shots
(Janus Films)
This five-hour, four-part 1972 Finnish miniseries is a truly remarkable discovery: the heretofore obscure director Mikko Niskanen—who also wrote and stars as the protagonist—has made a stark, illuminating chronicle of ordinary people living ordinary lives as the crushing banality of their existence is underlined by a shocking crime.
Based on a true story, Niskanen’s film provocatively concentrates the weight of its human drama—and the mindnumbing sameness of these lives in a rural village consisting of church, family, manual labor and drinking—into a vortex where the duration of time itself means nothing.
(Neon)
On a remote Cornish island studying a rare flower, a nameless female volunteer begins hallucinating that mold from the plant is also growing on her body along with her seeing other people—or is it all really happening?
Mark Jenkin’s heavyhanded piece of psychological horror has its moments—there’s a crude effectiveness to his one-man operation (he directed, wrote, photographed, and wrote the music)—but it often comes off, deliberately but self-consciously, like a too-clever experiment. The local standing stones on the island provide the evocative title (which is Cornish for “Stone Island”), but this look at a descent into isolation and possible madness never satisfyingly coheres.
Fugue
(Dekanalog)
Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska, whose disturbing debut, 2015’s The Lure, marked her as someone to watch, in 2018 made this equally unsettling study of an amnesiac middle-aged woman who’s returned to her husband and son after a two-year disappearance—she tries desperately to fit (even if she cannot remember if she was ever with them before) but cannot be just a dutiful wife and loving mother.
Smoczyńska dramatizes ugly truths about our memories and relationships in uncomfortable scenes that lead to an unsurprising but still devastating finale; it’s enacted with lancingly truthful subtlety by Gabriela Muskała.
(Ciesla Foundation)
With racist team logos, nicknames and mascots around for decades, some battles that Native Americans have waged against entrenched owners and willfully oblivious fans have been partly won—the Cleveland Indians are now the Guardians and the Washington Redskins are now the Commanders—but there’s still a long way to go, as this informative documentary shows.
Directors Aviva Kempner and Ben West have collected a lot of archival and contemporary material alongside substantive interviews with commentators from all walks of life (most impressive in their perceptiveness are Joely Proudfit and Mary Kathryn Nagle) to tell a still-ongoing struggle, as witness the Atlanta Braves’ tomahawk chop or the Chicago Blackhawks’ logo.
In Viaggio—The Travels of Pope Francis
(Magnolia)
Using archival footage, director Gianfresco Rosi has fashioned an intriguing if somewhat diffuse documentary about Pope Francis’ foreign trips throughout his papacy, from Cuba and Rio to Armenia and Iraq, and how he speaks his truth no matter how difficult for him to say (the priest molestation scandals) or for others to hear (the Turkish government was upset at his remarks on the Armenian genocide).
We glimpse Francis speaking in several languages to appreciative, often adoring audiences and visiting places as diverse as Canada’s indigenous first nation settlements and the urban battlefields of Africa, but Rosi provides little more than glimpses without much context—the footage could have been thrown together in any other order. Even his use of film clips (some from his own singular documentaries) alongside the Pope’s own journeys comes off as arbitrary, almost willfully offbeat.
Plane
(Lionsgate)
Bluntly if boringly titled—why not at least Plane Hit by Lightning?—this by-the-numbers actioner follows a resourceful pilot who, after safely crash-landing his plane on a Philippine island swarming with rebels, teams with a convicted murderer on his flight to free his passengers after they’re kidnaped for ransom.
Director Jean-François Richet makes much of this routine but at other times there’s excitement, while Gerard Butler gives a gruff action-hero performance—it’s a serviceable time waster for those so inclined. It does look terrific in 4K; extras are three on-set featurettes.
CD Release of the Week
Nino Rota—Orchestral Music
(Capriccio)
Last week I reviewed a delightful recording of The Florentine Straw Hat, a comedic opera by Nino Rota (1911-79); this week, it’s a superlative disc of several of Rota’s most attractive orchestral works, played by the excellent WDR Funkhausorchester Köln under the capable batons of Felix Bender and Michael Seal.
The five pieces on the disc show the many sides of this accomplished composer: the lush suite from the 1956 film of War and Peace and a trio of diverting segments from his final score, for his old friend Federico Fellini’s Orchestra Rehearsal, before Rota’s death at age 67; the propulsive Concerto for Strings; and two lovely concertos: the ballade for horn and orchestra (with soloist Marcel Sobol) and concerto for harp and orchestra (with soloist Esther Peristerakis).
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