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Film and the Arts
January '17 Digital Week V
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 01 February 2017 04:21
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Ballers—Complete 2nd Season
(HBO)
This comedy series about a former NFL player turned financial manager hit its stride in its second season, helped not only by more plausible (and funny) storylines but also the strides Dwayne Johnson has made in his acting, especially his comic chops.
There are also plentiful inside jokes about the pro football world and the always hilarious presence of the amazing Rob Corddry as Johnson’s desperate-to-be-hip partner. The ten episodes look fine on Blu; extras are featurettes on each episode.
(Criterion)
Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène made his first feature in 1966, an immensely sympathetic portrait of a young Senegalese woman working for a heartless couple in France.
At a scant 59 minutes, Black Girl is a model of compression and illumination; Criterion’s gleaming hi-def transfer is complemented by several contextualizing extras, including a full-length 1994 documentary Sembène: The Making of African Cinema; Sembène’s 1963 debut short, Borom Sarret; scholar/actor interviews; a French TV segment about Sembène’s Cannes Festival win; and a deleted color sequence.
Black Society Trilogy
(Arrow)
He made his international name with the chilling 1999 vision of horror called Audition, but prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike (90-plus films—and counting, at age 56) made earlier works displaying his wide-ranging talent, as this set comprising three of those features—Shinjuku Triad Society(1995), Rainy Dog (1997) and Ley Lines (1999)—demonstrates.
The films are creepy and absorbing, with Miike’s stylish visuals leading the way. Arrow’s hi-def transfers are impressive; extras include new interviews with Miike and actor Show Aikawa and audio commentaries on all three films.
(Lionsgate)
In Ken Russell’s deliriously silly 1988 adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel about an immortal priestess looking for a sacrifice for a snake god (!), Amanda Donahoe gives a giddily campy but erotic portrayal of a woman irresistible to everyone—to their ultimate (and usually fatal) detriment.
In her wake, solid actors like Hugh Grant and Peter Capaldi end up as mere extras, while Russell’s visual bluster ends up looking diffuse, even if he rouses himself for a bravura—and willfully nonsensical—ending. The film has nicely filmic grain on Blu-ray; extras include a Russell commentary, his wife Lisi’s commentary, interviews with actress Sammi Davis and editor Peter Davies, and a featurette.
Parents
(Lionsgate)
Is ten-year-old Michael really eating human remains which his mom and dad prepare for dinner, or is his hyperactive imagination simply in overdrive? This intriguing satirical concept became a heavy-handed 1989 black comedy by director Bob Balaban, who never balances the horror and humor.
The result is rather pointless and witless, which is too bad, for Randy Quaid and Mary Beth Hurt (parents) and young Bryan Madorsky (Michael) are certainly game. The hi-def transfer is satisfying; extras include interviews with Hurt and cinematographer Robin Vidgeon, Balaban commentary and audio interview with composer Jonathan Elias.
Pinocchio
(Disney Signature Collection)
One of Disney’s most beloved animated features—and its second, following Snow White and the Seven Dwarves—is this 1940 adaptation of an Italian children’s book about a wooden puppet who comes to life, his master Geppetto and his “conscience” Jiminy Cricket: its appearance on Blu-ray (in a good, not spectacular, hi-def transfer) should be a cause for celebration by audiences of all ages.
The movie remains an all-time classic, and Disney has not only ported over extras from earlier DVD editions but has also included brand-new bonus material, including featurettes.
DVDs of the Week
The Battle of Chosin
(PBS)
In what may be the most engrossing episode yet in the celebrated American Experience series, one of the earliest major battles of the often-forgotten Korean War is explored in often harrowing detail.
Newsreels and archival footage, along with interviews with some of the battle’s participants, provide a gripping take on a pivotal time in America’s post-WWII battle against Communist aggression.
(Magnolia)
One of the most original characters to emerge from the rock’n’roll scene, Danny Fields—journalist, publicist, record executive—is the focus of Brendan Toller’s funny and irreverent documentary, which explores Fields’s proximity to seminal events in rock history, from John Lennon’s incendiary “Jesus Christ” quote to the discovery of the Ramones.
Fields himself is an often hilarious, always politically incorrect interview subject—even if he outlandishly claims the Beatles weren’t any good—and the archival footage of the Velvet Underground, Iggy Pop and the Stooges and Patti Smith is priceless. Extras include a Fields post-screening Q&A, additional footage and Toller interview.
CD of the Week
Renee Fleming—Distant Light
(Decca)
Still opera’s reigning soprano, Renee Fleming has always stretched her artistic and vocal wings through excursions into jazz, big-band, rock and pop, which she continues to do on this CD by combining a classic Samuel Barber work with music by contemporary Swedish composer Anders Hillborg and Icelandic diva Bjork.
The results are decidedly mixed: Fleming’s lustrous voice illuminates the gorgeous textures and yearning for the past of Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, and conductor Sakari Oramo and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra come to the forefront with the brittle sounds of Hillborg’s haunting The Strand Settings. However, neither Fleming’s impassioned vocals nor solid orchestral playing can rescue the three stillborn Bjork song arrangements.
Broadway Review: August Wilson's "Jitney"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 30 January 2017 19:25
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Jitney
Written by August Wilson; directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson
Performances through March 12, 2017
 |
| The cast of Jitney (photo: Joan Marcus) |
The magnificence of August Wilson’s “Century Cycle”—ten plays, each set during a different decade of the 20th century, mainly in Pittsburgh—is obvious to anyone familiar with even one of the plays (or movie adaptations, like Fences with Denzel Washington).
All these plays played Broadway except Jitney—until now. Wilson’s captivating drama, set in 1977 at a car service in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, finally makes it to the Great White Way in a triumphant production that’s another feather in the cap of the great playwright (who died in 2005) and his dependable collaborators, who make his singing dialogue and brilliantly realized characters come to eloquent life.
Distinguishing Jitney—along with Wilson’s other plays—is its epic humanity, confident swagger and refusal to condescend to its characters. The three-dimensional people onstage are flawed and hopeful, contradictory and sympathetic, all allowed to speak as real people do: the poetic dialogue that often pours forth in torrents of emotion remains true to each individual but also part of a larger dramatic truth.
Populating the jitney office is a cross-section of the Pittsburgh working class: drivers Youngblood, a Vietnam vet hoping to buy a home for his girlfriend and child; Turnbo, a middle-aged loudmouth who butts into everyone else’s business; Fielding, a lush who tries hiding his drinking; and Doub, a level-headed Korean war vet. There’s also Philmore, a loyal jitney customer; Shealy, a numbers taker who uses the office’s phone for his business; and Becker, the place’s manager, a straight shooter whose son Booster is getting out of prison after serving a 20-year murder sentence.
These men are trying to keep their heads above water financially and personally, and even when an immovable object is thrown in their way—the city is shuttering the whole block and razing the neighborhood’s businesses—they still find the strength to keep going against the odds.
That varies by man (and woman—Youngblood’s girlfriend Rena only appears in two scenes but shows a sturdiness and resolve as strong as the others), but even takes powerful form in Becker’s principled refusal to acknowledge Booster when he returns from jail in a shattering closing first-act scene: “You’re my son. I helped to bring you into this world. But from this moment on…I’m calling the deal off. You ain’t nothing to me boy. Just another n--- off the street.”
This scene and more is enacted with exceptional aliveness and humane truth by sensitive director (and Wilson vet) Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s adroit cast of eight, particularly John Douglas Thompson (Becker), whose stentorian voice has sometimes overwhelmed his dialogue in other plays: but he and Wilson are perfectly matched here, so much so that it’s surprising I haven’t seen him previously perform in other Wilson plays. Maybe that will change.
Jitney
Friedman Theatre,261 West 47th Street, New York NY
manhattantheatreclub.com
January '17 Digital Week IV
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 24 January 2017 14:24
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Bad Day at Black Rock
(Warner Archive)
In John Sturges’ tense 1955 thriller clocking in at a perfectly paced 81 minutes, Spencer Tracy plays a wounded war vet whose arrival in a remote western town sets off the locals in a spirited and ugly campaign to be rid of him.
The widescreen photography by William C. Melor is spectacular, Andre Previn’s effective music matches the nerve-wracking mood, and although Tracy is too old for the lead, it’s hard to imagine anyone else playing his role. There’s a superior hi-def transfer; the lone extra is a commentary by film expert Dana Polan.
(Warner Archive)
The Battle of the Bulge—the final nail in the Nazi war machine’s coffin—was still recent history when William A. Wellman’s searing 1949 dramatic recreation was made, and it remarkably lacks both melodramatics and sentimentality (with barely any music heard and patriotic marches left until the final credits).
Despite the constraints of its era, it remains a tough testament to war’s harshness and the bravery of the men who fight. The B&W film looks luminous on Blu-ray; extras comprise a vintage cartoon and vintage featurette.
Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number!
(Olive)
One of the least inspired of Bob Hope’s vehicles, this weak 1966 comedy concerns a desperate real-estate broker who lucks into prosperity when a runaway Hollywood megastar stays at his lone property.
Hope is game but looks lost, Elke Sommer is beautifully befuddled as the screen queen, and Phyllis Diller ridiculously wasted as Hope’s housekeeper in this frantic but dated attempt to be “with-it.” There’s a fine hi-def transfer.
(Lionsgate)
Writer-director Zack Whedon’s crime drama is an exceedingly slow burn, as our hero searches for his missing girlfriend who he soon discovers was not whom he thought she was: liberally mixing in flashbacks,
Whedon loses his way in a mess of false leads and ends up strangling what might have been an interesting mystery. Attractive lead performances by Aaron Paul and Annabelle Wallis somewhat compensate. The hi-def transfer is excellent; extras include featurette and commentary.
The Light Between Oceans
(Dreamworks/Touchstone)
Derek Cianfrance’s unapologetically grand, old-fashioned tragic romance from M.L. Stedman’s novel about a lighthouse keeper, his wife and the baby that improbably washes ashore in their remote location is greatly enhanced by luminous widescreen compositions awash in natural light.
Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander are perfectly cast as the couple; Rachel Weisz does wonders with the underwritten role as a widow who haunts them. On Blu-ray, Adam Arkapan’s photography comes to ravishing life; extras are Cianfrance’s commentary and two featurettes.
(Lionsgate)
Nicolas Roeg’s inscrutable 1976 sci-fi story hasn’t aged well: if anything, its visual dazzle has been further eclipsed by its thematic and narrative incoherence, along with David Bowie’s zombie-like screen presence.
On Blu-ray, Tony Richmond’s creative camerawork remains the main focus; extras include an archival Bowie interview (from French TV), featurette about the music, interviews with Roeg, Richmond and actress Candy Clark (whose performance is the best in a film that also wastes Rip Torn and Buck Henry), poster and 72-page booklet.
The Men’s Club
(Olive)
This frivolously sexist 1986 drama about a group of men whose whiny get-together is followed by a night of debauchery in a brothel was adapted by Leonard Michaels from his own book without much conviction: the movie is filled with boring monologues, clichéd conservations and implausible relationships.
Peter Medak likewise directs without much distinction; amazingly, his next three films would be top-notch: The Krays, Let Him Have It and Romeo Is Bleeding. Estimable actors—Roy Scheider, Harvey Keitel, Frank Langella, Richard Jordan, David Dukes, Craig Wesson—are outclassed by the women, however badly written their characters are: an uncredited Helen Shaver steals her lone scene, and Penny Baker, Marilyn Jones and Gwen Welles run circles around their male counterparts. There’s a good, grainy transfer.
(Olive)
Barely a feature at 67 minutes, Harold Young’s 1939 espionage drama fails to wring suspense out of its flimsy plot of a plant worker accused of sabotaging work done there, thereby causing the plant’s closure and deaths of three test fliers.
Wooden acting by Charley Grapewin, Gordon Oliver and Arleen Whelan, along with stolid writing and even flimsier directing, relegates this to the realm of the forgettable; with so many older films begging for hi-def release, why put this out?
DVDs of the Week
The Free World
(IFC)
This downbeat drama, which strains for significance but ends up trumpeting its own incoherence and thinness, follows a man just released from prison for murders he didn’t commit: while working at a dog shelter, he befriends a beaten-down wife, whom he helps flee when she kills her abusive policeman husband.
Typical of writer-director Jason Lew’s film is its bludgeoning insistence that being out of his prison as is bad as being in, as well as equating our protagonist with the canines he’s entrusted with. Boyd Holbrook and Elisabeth Moss do what they can to make their characters believable, but are defeated in the end.
(Omnibus/Film Movement)
What begins as an intriguing conceit—a multi-character study of dozens of Queens neighbors, none of whom came to the aid of Kitty Genovese when she was brutally (and fatally) attacked late one night in 1964—soon degenerates into an exploitive mishmash of melodrama and fake climaxes, all of which come to a head during that fateful evening.
Writer-director Puk Grasten builds up “suspense” at the dying woman’s expense, and providing little insight into his characters, whose problems happened to come to a head at the exact time they could have helped a victim in dire need.
CDs of the Week
Mstislav Rostropovich—Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon
One of the foremost cellists of the second half of the last century, Russian Mstislav Rostropovich had a long and winding career that not only encompassed the standard repertoire but also many modern composers who wrote works that he championed. In addition to his characterful cello playing, he was also an accomplished piano accompanist and a sensitive conductor, and this superlative 37-CD boxed set of everything he recorded for Decca, Deutsche Grammophon and Philips from 1950 to 2004 encompasses this renaissance musician’s oeuvre, whether with his bow, at the keyboard or on the podium.
There are recordings of Vivaldi, Handel, Haydn and—lots of—Beethoven, especially the latter’s chamber works; three equally graceful recordings over a period of 10 years of Schubert’s sublime String Quintet; concertos by Schumann, Dvorak, and Brahms; and even two full-length operas he conducted, Puccini’s Tosca and Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades.
But it’s in 20th century music that these discs come to fiery life: Shostakovich and Prokofiev (too little of the latter, but still); Messaien and Bernstein; and, above all, Benjamin Britten, who composed the weighty Cello Symphony for Rostropovich and the latter returns the favor by giving marvelous performances of that, Britten’s Cello Sonata and two cello suites.
Lastly, there are two unusually fine discs of Rostropovich accompanying his wife, soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, in Russian songs from Glinka and Rachmaninov to Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev, closing a terrific-sounding and beautifully-packaged summary of one man’s life filled with music.
Staatskapelle Berlin Plays Classics of Mozart at Carnegie Hall
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 23 January 2017 15:52
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Daniel Barenboim
One of the most imposing highlights of the current season at Carnegie Hall is a complete cycle of the nine symphonies of Anton Bruckner performed by the august Staatskapelle Berlin under the direction of the renowned pianist and conductor, Daniel Barenboim. Almost all of the symphonies are paired with a concert work by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, mostly piano concerti played by Barenboim, conducting from the piano. (Bruckner also completed two early symphonies before his No. 1, a study symphony and the Symphony No. 0; regrettably, neither will be presented in this cycle.)
The series opened auspiciously on the evening of Thursday, January 19th, with a sterling reading of the popular Piano Concerto No. 27, the composer's final work in the genre. The seldom heard, remarkable Symphony No. 1 made an even stronger impression—played here in the original , "Linz" version —and both halves of the concert were rewarded with avid applause.
The music of the following evening began even more arrestingly with a gripping account of the dramatic Piano Concerto No. 20, in one of the most satisfying renditions in recent memory. Also exhilarating was the rarely played Symphony No. 2—presented in the 1877 version edited by Leopold Nowak —surpassing the accomplishment of the previous night. An ardent ovation was a prelude to a noteworthy announcement — that this date marked the sixtieth anniversary of Barenboim's first appearance on the Carnegie Hall stage when he performed at age fourteen with the legendary Leopold Stokowski. The conductor, after recounting an amusing anecdote about the genesis of that event, movingly delivered some impassioned remarks about the necessity to preserve music and the arts in these troubled times— statements which were received with great warmth by the enthusiastic audience.
Barenboim and these musicians were impressively able to match the intensity of that night at the ensuing concert on the following evening, this time with a magnificent reading of the ambitious Piano Concerto No. 24. The program closed triumphantly with an engrossing account of the formidable, stirring, 1878 version of Symphony No. 3, with the passionate applause bringing an exciting weekend to a pleasing conclusion.
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