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Film and the Arts
February '21 Digital Week IV
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 24 February 2021 23:28
- Written by Kevin Filipski
VOD/Virtual Cinema/Streaming Releases of the Week
The Mauritanian
(SFX Entertainment)
Mohamedou Ould Salahi’s 2015 memoir about his time locked up in Guantanamo accused of recruiting the 9/11 hijackers despite never being charged is memorably if drily dramatized by writer/director Kevin MacDonald.
Tahar Rahim’s powerhouse performance as Salahi, whose humanity never wavers despite being imprisoned and tortured for more than a decade, is complemented by Jodie Foster and Shailene Woodley as the lawyers working on his behalf and Benedict Cumberbatch as the officer who discovers his conscience in this at times devastating exposé of how America conducted the war on terror.
(A24)
Writer-director Lee Isaac Chung’s lovely reminiscence of his Korean family’s difficulties realizing their own American dream skirts—and at times unabashedly embraces—sentimentality while following a father, mother, their two young children and, later, grandmother arriving from Korea to help them out after they move from California to Arkansas to begin anew.
Although he gets far too melodramatic with a series of pitfalls and disasters, especially near the end, Chung has his heart in the right place, and his film is beautifully acted by all, especially Steven Yeun as dad and Youn Yuh-jung as grandma.
Sin
(Corinth Films)
Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky—who’s made his share of duds—has a late-career renaissance underway with 2020’s Dear Comrades and this 2019 biopic of the great artist Michelangelo, made on actual Italian locations in an almost neorealist manner that recalls the Pier Paolo Pasolini’s classic The Gospel According to Matthew and the historical dramas of Roberto Rossellini.
Alberto Testone is a believably protean Michelangelo, which has the effect of making him more authentically human, even when his gargantuan artistic ego causes the death of a worker while a massive block of marble is being moved for one of his outsized sculptures.
(Kino Lorber)
After an evening out with her friend and a couple of men whom they meet at a bar, Renesha awakes in the morning in a strange bed, which is only the beginning of her nightmare in writer-director Shatara Michelle Ford’s provocative if dramatically diffuse exploration of how the inefficient bureaucracies of the health care system and, by extension, law enforcement are a double burden for black women.
If Ford’s rage often blurs her focus, Brittany S. Hall’s electrifying portrayal of Renesha keeps the drama on track, for the most part. It’s too bad that, as Renesha’s boyfriend Mike, Will Brill gives a flat, mannered performance that mitigates the crucial sense of this interracial couple’s slowly shifting relationship despite what he sees as a sympathetic response to her assault.
The United States vs. Billie Holiday
(Hulu)
Director Lee Daniels and screenwriter Suzan-Lori Parks never find the proper tone for their biopic about the great blues singer Billie Holiday, whose controversial lynching song “Strange Fruit” propelled the government to repeatedly go after her for her drug use: so this 130-minute drama fluctuates wildly between intense character study and meandering montages that mute the power of Lady Day’s voice and her story.
Still, all is forgiven when Andra Day’s Billie takes center stage: Day is as captivating as Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues and Audra McDonald in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill were, and is also unafraid to be so emotionally—and physically—naked onscreen, which makes her Billie a uniquely memorable creation.
My Dream Is Yours
On Moonlight Bay
(Warner Archive)
Two of Doris Day’s earliest starring roles in lesser-known musicals are out on Warner Archive. On Moonlight Bay (1951), which finds her as a teenage tomboy in love with a college man (Gordon MacRae), soars when Day sings such tunes as “Cuddle Up a Little Closer” and the title song.
My Dream Is Yours (1949), in which she plays an up-and-coming singer who must decide between an established—but declining—crooner (Lee Bowman) and the agent who steered her to stardom (Jack Carson), is memorable when Day performs the title song and “Someone Like You.” These Technicolor productions looks lovely on Blu; extras are period live-action shorts and cartoons.
Resurrection
(Dynamic)
Italian composer Franco Alfano (1875-1954), best-known for his realization of Puccini’s unfinished opera Turandot, was an accomplished opera composer in his own right: along with his adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac, his 1904 version of Leo Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection makes for a compelling experience, particularly in its bizarre but joyful ending.
This 2020 Florence, Italy, production is kept aloft by Rosetta Cucchi’s spry direction, the excellent leads—soprano Anne Sophie Duprels as the heroine Katyusha and Matthew Vickers as her love Dmitri—and the sparkling musical direction of Francesco Lanzillotta, who leads the orchestra and chorus. The hi-def video and audio are quite good.
(Warner Archive)
If George Sidney’s film of the classic Kern-Hammerstein musical lacks dramatic propulsion due to deracinating the pivotal subplot (this was 1951, after all), there’s still much to enjoy: the dancing duo Marge and Gower Champion hoofing it up, William Warfield’s rendition of “Ol’ Man River” and the delightful Kathryn Grayson as the young and impressionable Magnolia.
The colors look terrific in Warner Archive’s hi-def transfer; extras comprise Sidney’s commentary, audio tracks of Ava Gardner’s own vocals on two songs (in the film, her singing voice was dubbed by Annette Warren), the 1952 radio theater version and the opening sequence from a 1946 stage production.
DVD Releases of the Week
Collective
(Magnolia)
Alexander Nanau’s insightful and engrossing documentary recounts the aftermath of the terrible fire that swept through a Bucharest nightclub in 2015, which killed dozens and severely injured dozens more.
By showing how dogged journalists uncovered how crass and uncaring incompetence on the part of the local government and a pharmaceutical company were responsible, not for the disaster but for the fact that so many of the injured were dying despite supposedly superior medical treatment, Nanau has made a timely tribute to the need for a free and independent press.
(Marco Polo)
German composer Siegfried Wagner (1869-1930) was nowhere near his father Richard Wagner’s equal as a musical dramatist, as his Sonnenflamen (Sun Flames) shows—it has some gorgeous music but much static plotting, which end up canceling each other out, unfortunately.
The most interesting thing about Siegfried’s opera is the production, staged last summer in his father’s famed Bayreuth, Germany, during the Covid lockdown: the barebones set is filled with energetic singers and musicians, who bring this tragic tale of a deserter during the Crusades to fleetingly vivid life.
CD Releases of the Week
British Music for Strings
(Chandos)
It might be a coincidence, but Great Britain has had its share of 20th-century “B” composers who are anything but second-rate. This disc collects music for string orchestra by four of them—in chronological order of composition, Frank Bridge, Arthur Bliss, Benjamin Britten and Lennox Berkeley—the latter three of which are major works, written between 1935 and 1939.
The short, mournful Lament is by Bridge, Britten’s teacher; Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, a tribute to his teacher, is stylish and witty. Both Bliss’ Music for Strings and Berkeley’s Serenade for Strings provide ample opportunities for the players to shine, individually and together; John Wilson leads the Sinfonia of London in idiomatic and attractive readings of these seminal works.
(LSO Live)
After living through the brutality of World War II under the thumb of dictator Joseph Stalin, Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich penned two of his greatest symphonies, the relatively compact but forceful Ninth and the long, languidly powerful Tenth.
Conductor Gianandrea Noseda’s deeply committed performances with the London Symphony Orchestra catch all the subtle nuances in these deeply personal works, from the brutality that’s never far from the surface to the often blackly humorous episodes that permeate these often dynamic scores.
February '21 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 17 February 2021 23:48
- Written by Kevin Filipski
VOD/Virtual Cinema Releases of the Week
Bacurau
(Kino Lorber)
As a follow-up to his strangely compelling if overlong 2016 drama Aquarius, Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho returns—with Juliano Dornelles co-writing and co-directing—for another strangely compelling if overlong film that gleefully jumps around among several genres for a bemusing but sometimes exhilarating mashup.
A small village, which has been erased from Google maps, sees all sorts of weird goings-on after the death of its nonagenarian matriarch, including a ludicrous band of foreign mercenaries and the appearance of flying saucers. Familiarity with Brazil’s current political situation isn’t necessary to enjoy this wild assemblage of often unrelated and absurdist sequences, even though—as Filho did in Aquarius—there’s so much stuffed into 135 minutes that after awhile, the dramatic and comedic returns become more and more meager.
(Screen Forward)
Svetlana Cvetko’s playful look at a menage a trois between an L.A. gal and two guys—one Italian and the other Iranian—is fine when concentrating on the trio’s unself-conscious and open sexuality, but when it digs at deeper truths (like a badly judged dragging-in of an actual terrorist attack), it founders.
Luckily, Cvetko—who also handles the sumptuous B&W photography—is greatly aided by her lead performers: Mattia Minasi, Neyssan Falahi and—most especially—the winning and gifted Cristina Rambaldi make us believe in this most unusual relationship.
The World to Come
(Bleecker Street)
Vanessa Kirby and Katherine Waterston are the main reasons to watch this slow-moving and fairly ordinary study of two women who fall in love on the 19th century American frontier in plain sight of their baffled husbands.
Director Mona Fastvold smartly concentrates on the women but never incisively explores their relationship. The sleepwalking acting of Casey Affleck and Christopher Abbott isn’t especially damaging but, despite Waterston's and Kirby’s persuasive and impassioned portrayals, the movie remains inert.
Baby Doll
(Warner Archive)
Tennessee Williams’ story of a 19-year-old virgin holding out on her frustrated husband until she turns 20 yet is succumbing to the charms of his rival right under hubby’s nose may have been shocking in 1956 (indeed, the Catholic Church condemned it) but today it’s simply a well-written, explosively acted and superbly directed (by Elia Kazan) exploration of the usual Williams characters.
Carroll Baker is revelatory as the title character and Karl Malden (husband) and Eli Wallach (other man) aren’t far behind; Boris Kaufman’s shimmering B&W cinematography looks especially enticing in Warner Archive’s sparkling new hi-def transfer. Lone extra is a short featurette including interviews with the actors.
Fidelio
(Unitel)
Beethoven’s lone opera, 1806’s Fidelio, a flawed masterpiece with crude dramatics but stirring music, was staged by Oscar-winning actor Christoph Waltz in Vienna last year before the pandemic shut everything down: Waltz avoids hammy flourishes but his performers aren’t nuanced enough to compensate, maybe because the curved staircase on which the action occurs (by set designer Barkow Leibinger) has made them tentative: one false move will land someone in the pit face first.
Still, Nicole Chevalier is in fine voice as Leonore, who disguises herself as a man to free her husband from prison, and the Vienna Symphony and Arnold Schoenberg Choir sound splendid under conductor Manfred Honeck. The hi-def video and audio are pristine.
(Criterion Collection)
Legendary Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène’s second feature, this piercing 1968 black comedy based on his own short story follows an ordinary man receiving a money order worth 25,000 francs from a nephew in Paris: once word is out, he discovers who his real friends are as well as those who want to cash in on his supposed windfall.
Sembène’s deadpan amusement and headshaking anger over the corruption of a society damaged by French colonialism remains potent and pertinent. Criterion’s hi-def transfer is magnificent; extras include new interviews with experts discussing the film’s impact and importance; Praise Song, a documentary short comprising interviews with admirers and other experts; Sembène’s 1970 short, Tauw; and a new translation of Sembène’s original short story.
San Francisco
A Tale of Two Cities
(Warner Archive)
Two of the biggest Hollywood spectacles of the ‘30s get new Warner Archive releases. San Francisco’s tale of a tentative romance between a club owner (Clark Gable) and an up-and-coming singer (Jeannette MacDonald) is a pretext to lead into the 1906 earthquake, which is dramatized with primitive but effective visual effects. Gable is always Gable, while MacDonald shows off her beautiful voice in Gounod and Puccini operas in this creaky but entertaining drama.
CD Boxed Set of the Week
Percy Grainger—The Complete Grainger Edition
(Chandos)
Born in Australia and brought up in London before settling down in America for the rest of his life, Percy Grainger (1875-1961) was a fine minor composer who concentrated on miniatures, transcriptions and other smaller works, which probably accounts for his less than stellar reputation. Often eschewing large-scale works like symphonies, concertos, oratorios and operas, Grainger was still comfortable composing works for bigger forces, as this gargantuan and nearly complete 21-disc set demonstrates.
Indeed, several of Grainger’s best are meaty scores like The Warriors, a dazzling virtuosic display for three (!) pianists and orchestra; On a Nordic Princess—written for Grainger’s new wife, who was Swedish—a lovely and melancholy choral tone poem; and the aptly-titled Youthful Suite, a vigorous workout for orchestra. But several chamber works, like the Scandinavian Suite for cello and piano as well as song settings of poems by Rudyard Kipling, Robert Burns and Percy’s wife Ella, are also perfectly realized.
With recordings spanning some two decades, there are superb contributions from many soloists and ensembles, but special mention must be made of the several discs of performances by Richard Hickox, the superbly versatile British conductor who was on the podium for many valuable Chandos recordings of eminent British composers ranging from Bax, Bliss and Britten to Rubbra, Walton and Vaughan Williams, and whose untimely death in 2008 robbed the classical music world of an important interpreter and musician.
February '21 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 11 February 2021 02:50
- Written by Kevin Filipski
VOD/Virtual Cinema Releases of the Week
Falling
(Quiver Distribution)
Viggo Mortensen makes his writing-directing debut with this heartfelt but mostly mundane drama about a gay man who tries coming to terms with his sexist, homophobic, bullying father, who in his old age is succumbing to dementia.
Mortensen writes terrific dialogue for the antagonistic scenes between father (played with piss and vinegar by Lance Hendricksen) and son (played by Mortensen himself) but as a director he too often settles for tried-and-true melodrama, undercutting the emotional strength of his own intimate study.
(Magnolia)
Rodney Ascher’s documentary Room 237 was a playfully rigorous look at the most outlandish explanations of Stanley Kubrick’s classic The Shining, and his latest tries to do the same with something even more outré: that real life is not real but instead part of a computer simulation.
The movie takes as gospel the rantings of author Philip K. Dick and allows several anonymous talking heads—hidden by their video avatars—to spin entertaining bunk about reality vs. virtual reality. It’s interesting for about an hour, then unfortunately spins its wheels for the last 45 minutes; but if glimpses of the original Matrix movie are enough, then this might be the doc for you.
Reunion
(Dark Sky Films)
Julia Ormond voraciously chews the scenery as the ultimate bad mom in a weird gothic horror flick whose antagonist makes Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest seem like an amateur.
Opposite Ormond is Emma Draper, who gives it her all as the pregnant daughter who returns to see her mother and relives her worst childhood moments in a series of increasingly redundant flashbacks. It’s unfortunate that writer/director Jake Mahaffy scuttles the promise of his two leading ladies, instead wallowing in hackneyed horror tropes without much visual or narrative distinction.
(Magnolia)
This tender look at the unbreakable bond between two older women whose loving relationship has been kept secret for years—neighbors in an apartment building, they pass as good friends—is a quietly devastating glimpse at how love can triumph over misunderstanding and even severe physical and mental struggles.
Bolstered by the lovely and subtle performances of Barbara Sukowa and Martine Chevallier in the leads, director Filippo Meneghetti has taken a familiar story and given it a freshness that makes it memorable without being maudlin.
X
(Cinedigm)
An entertaining if overlong erotic thriller about a young woman whose monthly masquerades can’t mask, so to speak, the difficulties in her personal life, X teases viewers with playful intimations of debauchery and voyeurism.
Director Scott J. Ramsey parades his influences—the masked orgies are out of Eyes Wide Shut, the bathroom sex video is out of A Clockwork Orange, to cite two examples—but that’s part of the fun, along with a cast of unknown faces led by the confident Hope Raymond as the protagonist.
The Fiery Angel
(Naxos)
Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev’s powerful opera, based on a novel by Russian author Valery Bryusov, provides a formidable role for its leading actress: Renata, an ordinary young woman beset by visions that cause her to be accused of cavorting with the devil.
In Emma Dante’s strangely potent 2019 production from Rome, Ewa Vesin leads an excellent cast as the disturbed Renata. But with Alejo Perez persuasively conducting the orchestra and chorus, Prokofiev’s intensely dramatic score is the real star of the show. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio.
Good News
The Pajama Game
(Warner Archive)
Two hit Broadway musicals received colorful adaptations a decade apart, beginning with 1947’s Good News, an enjoyable if innocuous college romance with Peter Lawford and an irresistible June Allyson as the jock and the brain who fall for each other even though football is more important than the library on-campus.
And 1957’s The Pajama Game is so exuberant that at times you want it to stop and take a deep breath—but why quibble when there’s Doris Day at her all-American best, Bob Fosse’s dazzling choreography given vivid oomph by dancer Carol Haney in the numbers “Steam Heat” and “Once-a-Year Day,” and songs like “Hey There” and “I’m Not at All in Love” to hum. Both films have sparkling brand-new hi-def transfers; extras are deleted songs and (on Good News) featurettes.
(Cult Epics)
In Just Jaeckin’s 1978 softcore drama, French actress Francoise Fabian plays the infamous Parisian madam—who died in 2015 at age 92—with her usual elegance, grace and intelligence, making this at times slipshod biopic more watchable than it otherwise would have been.
Fabian might be the only actress in the film not to shed her clothes, and for those who like to see ‘70s models in the altogether, there’s Dayle Haddon as the latest of Claude’s “discoveries.” There’s a decent-looking if unspectacular new hi-def transfer; extras are a commentary along with a new interview with Jaeckin, who is also responsible for such glittery ‘70s erotica as Emmanuelle and The Story of O.
Wander Darkly
(Lionsgate)
Writer-director Tara Miele based her script off a serious car crash she and her husband were involved in—but the resulting enigmatic exploration of the intricate mysteries of love, life and death is more often enervating than enlightening. It also doesn’t help that Miele mimics Terrence Malick in her visual style, which keeps us at a further remove from this couple hovering between life and death—or are they?
In the leads, Diego Luna is good, Sienna Miller is (as usual) spectacular, but we never feel for their predicament or relationship—even if Miele heavyhandedly plants a newborn in their lives right before the crash that starts everything in motion. The stunning images look remarkably strong in hi-def; extras are a Miele commentary and making-of featurette.
Plaisirs illuminés
(Alpha Classics)
Taking its title from a surrealist Salvador Dalí painting, Spaniard Francisco Coll’s 2018 double concerto for violin, cello and chamber orchestra, Les plaisirs illuminés, is the ebullient final work on a recording that centers around the great Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, represented by a brief Duo Pizzicato for two violins.
Three of Bartok’s students are also featured: György Ligeti and György Kurtág also have short pieces performed, but Sándor Veress—whose accomplished music is too infrequently programmed and recorded—has a major work, the scintillating Musica concertante for 12 strings, played. Rounding out this marvelous disc is the Concerto for Strings by Argentine master Alberto Ginastera. Chamber ensemble Camerata Bern plays brilliantly on the Coll, Veress and Ginastera works, and esteemed soloists Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin) and Sol Gabetta (cello) make invaluable contributions throughout.
Thinking About The Forefront of Controversy and Crime In A Netflix Doc Series
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 09 February 2021 14:52
- Written by Brad Balfour
An opionion piece.
Once again child abuse is in the news, although this time coming out of the fulsome mouths of such Republican nut cases as newly elected Georgia Congressional representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. The right-wing QAnon conspiracy believer has spoken of the demonic Dems who have a child sex cult consuming the blood of Christian children — ideas right out of the anti-Semitic Protocols of Zion playbook.
In spewing this babble, QAnon followers manage to obscure the actual history of child sexual abuse that has been unveiled in the last several years. From errant priests to Boy Scout leaders, from public school teachers to private tutors, such abuse has often been present and then swept under the rug with disastrous results.
Recently, the brother of a good friend committed suicide in his 40s after his local Catholic Church had stopped paying for his therapy and other expenses. It had been sending checks for over 10 years after he had been allegedly abused by a priest when he was in his teens. He was never able to hold a proper job and, though he married, had not managed his personal life with much success.
Thanks to a visit with friends, I got to binge on the last portion of the seven-part docu-series, The Keepers, veteran director Ryan White’s detailed exploration of a nun’s unsolved murder and the horrific secrets and pain that still linger nearly five decades after her death.
Though I didn’t see every episode, I got the idea. Clearly, the Catholic church had played a profound role in the acquiescence, obfuscation and denial surrounding this tortured tale.
In this true-crime documentary from Netflix (released in May 2017), The Keepers explores the 1969 death of 26-year old Catholic nun and Baltimore schoolteacher Sister Cathy Cesnik and touches on 20 year-old Joyce Malecki‘s murder four days later. Both slayings remain unsolved. The cover-up that followed echoed Spotlight — the 2015 award-winning feature film directed by Tom McCarthy which told the story of the intense investigation of abuse by priests in the Boston area.
Starting a Facebook group in 2014, Gemma Hoskins and Abbie Schaub, two retired 60-something grandmothers and former students of Sister Cathy’s at Archbishop Keough High School, still felt distressed by the almost-half-century-old cold case. Who had savagely beaten and then murdered their beloved teacher Sister Cathy? In reaching out to others to share information about Sister Cathy’s murder, these two seniors -– as intrepid and analytical as Agatha Christie‘s Miss Marple — uncovered a cold case like no other. They found evidence that neither the Baltimore police nor the Catholic Church had dealt with. It pointed to the late Father Joseph Maskell who was accused of abuse and then moved around by the Diocese where he is further accused of molesting his young female students.
As the series ends, many questions and actions are left unanswered. First of all, I bring all this up to praise White — who is getting attention for his latest controversial documentary, Assassins, a feature film about the assassination of Kim Jong-nam, half-brother of the North Korean leader, which premiered to raves at last year’s Sundance Film Festival.
More profoundly, at a time when President Biden spotlights the positive morality he learned from his Catholic education, we are all reminded that any wonderful idea can be twisted out of shape. If we allow that to happen and tolerate those who abuse, either because of fear or intimidation, then we are collaborating in perpetuating these crimes of twisted action or of psychological distortion.
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