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Film and the Arts
August '15 Digital Week IV
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 28 August 2015 17:50
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
The Hunger
(Warner Archive)
Impossibly stylish and pretentious, Tony Scott's 1983 vampire movie would bore the bejesus out of today's Twilight fans, and its ponderously icy atmosphere and mere poses from glamorous Catherine Deneuve, androgynous David Bowie and confused-looking Susan Sarandon add up to a glitteringly empty experience.
With visual and aural nods to films like The Man Who Fell to Earth, Dressed to Kill and even Barry Lyndon, Scott's movie looks and sounds ravishing, but its portentous and failed attempts at Culture include hilariously inapposite use of music by Schubert and Ravel. The Blu-ray transfer is good but soft; lone extra is a commentary by Sarandon and Scott.
Iris
(Magnolia)
This endearing documentary is a meeting of two of the ultimate veterans in their respective fields: 88-year-old documentarian Albert Maysles training his camera (for the last time; he died after making the film) on 93-year-old New York fashion maven Iris Apfel, a delightfully ornery presence at such an advanced age, who remains a legend in her field.
Maysles' sensitive camera tracks her movements from show to show, at home with her beloved husband and while reminiscing about all those years. The Blu-ray looks spectacular; extras are deleted scenes and an Apfel interview.
Mad Max Fury Road
(Warner Bros)
Director George Miller returns to his franchise with a vengeance, making a kinetic action flick for those who don't care about characterization, plot or dialogue for two hours but would rather see explosions, stunts and non-stop action.
That's just what Miller provides: with a minimum of CGI (which still means that there's plenty), his crack technical crew conjures wall-to-wall car chases, races and hand-to-hand combat; overall, it's bludgeoning and mind-numbing, but there’s a certain rubbernecking fascination to it. Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy and others are mere props, but give them props for keeping their dignity amid the din. The hi-def transfer is first-rate; extras comprise making-of featurettes.
(Alchemy)
Set in Louisiana after the BP oil spill, this turgid political thriller stars Nicolas Cage as a hard-working local politician caught up in an adultery scandal which compromises his ability to assist his constituents against the big business and big oil interests that dominate the political climate.
Cage works hard, sometimes effectively, and there's good support from Wendell Pierce, Sarah Paulson, Connie Nielsen and Ciera Payton, but writer-director Austin Stark never finds an interesting way to tell his topical story without wallowing in clichés. The film looks fine on Blu.
Strangerland
(Alchemy)
In the hinterlands of Australia, a troubled couple's two children go missing during a dust storm, bringing festering emotions to a boil in Kim Farrant's intriguing if overly arty domestic drama: the director even apes shots of the awesome landscapes which Fred Schepisi showed so devastatingly in his 1988 masterpiece A Cry in the Dark.
Still, this tough, adult film only occasionally falls into mawkishness, and there’s sterling acting by Joseph Fiennes and Nicole Kidman as the couple and the equally fine Maddison Brown and Nicholas Hamilton as their children. The film's visuals look stunning on Blu; extras are featurettes and interviews.
Criminal Minds—Complete 10th Season
Elementary—Complete 3rd Season
(CBS/Paramount)
In the 10th season of Criminal Minds, one of the longest-running procedurals on television, the intricately plotted caseholds are held together by from Joe Mantegna, Thomas Gibson and series newcomer Jennifer Love Hewitt.
In the third season of Elementary, the updated Sherlock Holmes for the 21st century, Jonny Lee Miller's Holmes and Lucy Liu's Watson have gotten into a groove; that, coupled with well-chosen NYC locations, keeps this from being just the one-note gimmick it promised to be at the start. Extras include featurettes, deleted scenes, commentaries and gag reels.
Flesh and Bullets
Pulsating Flesh/Super Sex
(Vinegar Syndrome)
Carlos Tobalina was a notable ‘80s adult-film director, and these releases are examples of his uninspired but competent work, starting with 1985's Bullets, which is actually one of his non-hardcore films: it features X-rated stars Mai Lin and Sharon Kelly co-existing alongside Yvonne de Carlo, Cesar Romero and even Cornel Wilde in a tired but watchable retread ofStrangers on a Train.
1987's Pulsating andSuper, on the other hand, are wall-to-wall hardcore porn with flimsy plots, substandard acting and sexual exploits of then-adult superstars Harry Reems, Bunny Blue and Trinity Loren.
(CBS/Paramount)
Here are more twists and turns in the life and career of Alicia Florrick, played with her usual stylish flair by Julianna Margulies, who has steadily grown (from bumpy times on E.R.) into one of the best actresses on television.
She's not alone, however: the supporting cast comprises many well-known names from New York's theater community, from Christine Baranski and Alan Cumming to Chris Noth and Zach Grenier, with David Hyde Pierce, Michael Cerveris and even Michael J. Fox also turning up. Extras featurettes, deleted scenes and a gag reel.
The Riot Club
(IFC)
Based on screenwriter Laura Wade's own play Posh, this excellent comedy-drama about self-entitled male students at Oxford who mistakenly think that their elitist campus club gives them whatever they want—including, after a drunken night, non-punishment for serious crimes—is crammed with top British performers, brilliantly tiptoeing on, but never going over, the line into caricature.
Standouts are Holliday Granger and Jessica Brown Findlay as women brought into these young men’s line of fire. Director Lone Scherig superbly helms a sly cautionary tale that’s light on its feet, even when events spiral out of control in a familiar fashion.
Theater Reviews—Broadway's "Hamilton" and Off-Broadway's "Love & Money"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 25 August 2015 21:06
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Hamilton
Book, music & lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda; directed by Thomas Kail
Performances began July 13, 2015
Love & Money
Written by A.R. Gurney; directed by Mark Lamos
Performances through October 4, 2015
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| Renee Elise Goldsberry, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Phillipa Soo in Hamilton (photo: Joan Marcus) |
There is so much that's good about Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda's rollicking musical about one of our least-known Founding Fathers, that it's too bad that the show is not the instant classic so many are touting it as.
Unlike In the Heights, Miranda's breakthrough show—and the "game-changer" for musicals that everyone is belatedly saying Hamilton is—whose hip-hop inflected songs were actual emotional outpourings of its characters, the rapping rhymes of Hamilton, Jefferson, Burr and Washington sit uneasily on their tongues. Admittedly, what Sherman Edwards composed for his Founding Fathers in 1776 wasn't any more authentic, but those men (as portrayed by the likes of William Daniels and Howard da Silva) at least retained their dignity, while the characters in Hamilton sometimes approach parody.
That's especially true of King George III, whose sardonic appearances as, first, the colonies' ruler, later a defeated monarch, and lastly a bemused and amused observer of the new nation puts the show dangerously close to silly Something Rotten territory, however deliciously Jonathan Groff embodies the British tyrant.
Miranda's lyrics are clever—often very clever—but also flirt with the sophomoric: "raise the glass to the four of us/tomorrow there'll be more of us" isn't the most inspiring couplet. Miranda's score mainly soars when the entire cast sings variations of "whoa whoa" and Thomas Kail's extraordinarily savvy directing and Andy Blankenbuehler's astounding choreography come to the rescue.
In fact, the staging and movement in this show are so prominent that there's almost too much of it. There are precious few moments when characters are allowed to just sing without being upstaged by other doings—and the large stage turntables, stairs and a second tier that allow for even more movement throughout—and so the nearly three-hour Hamilton becomes, quite literally, exhausting.
It's too bad: shorn of 20 or so minutes, Hamilton would be the astute and theatrically exciting analysis of our country's complex, multi-hued early history that its being described as. As it is, it's at times exhilarating and always entertaining; even Miranda's stumbling attempts at profundity—the thick irony of "My Shot," the recurring duels, the wedding rewind, the bathetic summing-up finale—work well onstage, thanks to Kail and Blankenbuehler's breathtakingly inventive and cohesive visual structure, upon which Miranda's ambitious if not fully realized musical concept sits.
The indefatigable cast is tremendous, led by Miranda's self-confident Hamilton, Renee Elise Goldsberry's golden-voiced sister-in-law Angelica, Phillipa Soo's gorgeous-sounding wife Eliza, Daveed Diggs's strutting Thomas Jefferson and Leslie Odom, Jr.'s charmingly villainous Aaron Burr, whose own complicated history deserves a show of its own someday.
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| Maureen Anderman in Love & Money (photo: Joan Marcus) |
One of his most featherweight works, A.R. Gurney's Love & Moneytouches on this eloquent playwright's pet themes of the foibles of the rich and entitled in such a way that, at a mere 75 minutes, it's a mere blueprint for a more incisive play.
Sharply directed by Mark Lamos, Gurney's comedy introduces Cornelia Cunningham (an excellent Maureen Anderman), an Upper East Side widow about to enter an old folks' home for the affluent—there are even retired professors!—who has decided to give much of her wealth away to many charitable organizations. When her lawyer Harvey Abel (an amusingly flustered Joe Paulik) arrives to go over details of her will and trust (her children are dead and her two grandchildren are, she says, not entitled to much), he also brings her a letter from a young man in Buffalo, who insists he is her long-lost grandson.
A little later, Walker Williams (an unfortunately charmless Gabriel Brown) arrives and, after surprising them with the color of his skin, charms the pants off Cornelia, who acts like she believes his story of being the offspring of an affair between Cornelia's daughter and his father during a trip to Manhattan. Her skeptical lawyer digs up informaton that puts Walker's story under a microscope, while Cornelia's loyal maid Agnes (Pamela Dunlap, typical but funny) is also not fooled by the interloper.
Whether Walker is in fact her grandson or not is not the point—it does get resolved, by the way—instead, the play is an excuse for Gurney to provide jokes and observations about class, race, affluence, education and culture, none very penetrating but amusing at times, summed up by Cornelia's rather pedestrian quip about her lack of interracial romance: "The closest I've ever come to an affair with a black man is to vote for Obama."
Hamilton
Richard Rodgers Theatre, 226 West 46th Street, New York, NY
hamiltonbroadway.com
Love & Money
Signature Theatre, 480 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
signaturetheatre.org
August '15 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 18 August 2015 22:13
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Day for Night
(Criterion)
Francois Truffaut's tenderly funny valentine to cinema was an award-winning hit in 1973, but today it might be hard to see what the fuss was about, since Truffaut shows the behind-the-scenes machinations, squabbles and love affairs on the set of a commercial movie, which showed how far he’d come from his earlier auteurist works as one of the French New Wave of the ‘60s.
Still, this is accomplished and effective filmmaking, with in-jokes galore and the calm presence of Truffaut himself as the movie-within-movie director: Day for Night also kickstarted the careers of glamorous European actresses Jacqueline Bisset and Nathalie Baye. Criterion's transfer is immaculate; extras include vintage and new interviews, a 2003 documentary and a segment about the Truffaut/Jean-Luc Godard fracas touched off by Godard’s loathing of this film.
(Zeitgeist)
A masterly dissection of the “new” Russia—in which oligarchs outpace the working classes at a rate even greater than the U.S.—Andrey Zvyagintsev’s 2012 drama is best when extraneous details fall away and we are left with the naked pain and desperation of the title character, a former nurse (now married to a gazillionaire) whose own family is ignored by her rich husband.
Too bad Philip Glass’s self-parodic music trashes every scene it’s heard in; sensibly, Zvyagintsev (who more recently made the interesting if fatally flawed Leviathan) builds the most powerful moments—beginning with the evocative opening shot—with silence that speaks volumes more than broken Glass. The movie's immaculate compositions are given new life on Blu-ray; extras are a 30-minute Zvyagintsev interview and 40-minute making-of.
La grande bouffe
(Arrow USA)
Italian provocateur Marco Ferrari's infamous 1973 black comedy purports to satirize Western culture's mass consumerism by chronicling a quartet of middle-aged male friends who decide to eat and screw themselves to death: it's a pretty feeble idea which Ferrari does little with except have the men overindulge in food and women until they give up the ghost one by one.
There's amusement in watching four of Europe's most civilized actors—Philippe Noiret, Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli and Ugo Tognazzi—act brutishly and barbaric, but the 130-minute movie wears out its welcome by repeating itself until it, too, dies an overdue death. The film has been wonderfully restored in hi-def; extras include vintage interviews and featurette and an audio commentary.
(e one)
NCIS—Complete 12th Season
(CBS/Paramount)
For the fourth season of Hell on Wheels, the sturdy Anson Mount as our hero Cullen and colorful Colm Meaney as head of the Union Pacific Railroad make this down-and-dirty depiction of the post-Civil War West worth watching.
In its 12th season, NCIS continues its pursuit of evildoers from international pirates to cyberterrorists with a solid cast led by Mark Harmon, Emily Wickersham and Pauley Perrette. Both series look terrific on Blu; Hell extras are featurettes and interviews, while NCIS extras are featurettes, deleted/extended scenes and audio commentaries (a Best Buy exclusive includes an extra DVD with more bonus features).
La Sapienza
(Kino Lorber)
Eugene Green has been a favorite on the festival circuit for years, but his latest feature demonstrates his empty stylishness: ostensibly a study of two couples—one middle-aged and on the outs, the other young and just starting out—La Sapienza comprises 100 minutes of stilted, vacuous dialogue, stiff, emotionless acting, nicely-photographed exteriors and interiors of sublime Italian buildings (the protagonist is an architect) and Monteverdi vocal music that wells up on the soundtrack to give an air of artiness to the proceedings.
The movie looks luminous on Blu, at least, and could be a travelogue of gorgeous Italian architecture; extras are a Green interview and 2006 Green short, Les Signes, which in 32 minutes makes that usually expressive actor Mathieu Amalric as zombie-like as the rest.
(IFC)
Abel Ferrara has taken the torn-from-sordid-headlines story of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, French presidential hopeful accused of raping a maid at a Manhattan hotel, and turned it into a fierce and even moral drama about a sex-crazed man with power finally being called to account for his actions.
A gigantic Gerard Depardieu (in girth as well as stature) bares all in a commanding performance, while Jacqueline Bisset gives the man's wife a knowingly icy elegance. For once, Ferrara has found a sordid, nasty tale worth telling that he doesn't muck with. The hi-def transfer is impressive.
DVDs of the Week
Bottoms Up
Knifed Up
(Cinedigm)
These 45-minute documentaries are semi-serious glimpses at the ultra-serious American epidemic of plastic surgery—the obsession with, in the first, big butts and, in the second, everything else—which amateurishly use talking heads who alternate one-liners with more cogent observations, and a plethora of video footage and photographs, mostly of celebrities but occasionally of “regular” people who went too far in their quest for physical perfection.
There are a few moments that are genuinely disturbing—as, most notably, when we see a bit too much of a woman's butt enlargement operation—but too much of this is superficial and jokey, their abbreviated running times militating against any in-depth analysis.
(IFC)
In this wish-fulfillment fantasy by writer-director Victor Levin, a 20ish writer meets a gorgeous and oh-so-willing French housewife on Fifth Avenue and begins an affair in which he discovers how the French deal with adultery: unlike puritanical Americans, her husband and children welcome him as a friend of the family.
Although Anton Yelchin is too dull to deserve his character's lucky fate, Bérénice Marlohe is so exquisite, elegant, refined—in other words, so French—that she makes this threadbare 90-minute rom-com seem more substantial than it is. Well-used Manhattan locations (this is also, of course, a Woody Allen homage) are another plus. A short making-of is the lone extra.
It Happened Here
(Cinedigm)
The ongoing discussion of campus rape is not going away, even if shoddy journalism like that in Rolling Stone forced it to unfairly take a hit, since—as this strong documentary shows—male college students continue to rape female college students.
Director Lisa F. Jackson follows several victims who are forthcoming after initial reluctance at sharing their stories, their clear-eyed truth-telling and activism permeate the film, especially when they come up against obvious circling the wagons from clueless institutions like the University of Connecticut, whose (female) president defended the school against their accusations.
Greta Gerwig is "Mistress America"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 17 August 2015 15:56
- Written by Jack Angstreich
On the evening of Thursday, August 13th, the Film Society of Lincoln Center hosted the local premiere of Noah Baumbach's marvelous new work, Mistress America, co-written by and starring the delightful Greta Gerwig, at the Walter Reade Theater. The film opened in Manhattan the following day.
A comedy about a freshman at Barnard College — played by the lovely Lola Kirke in a moving performance — who befriends the daughter of her mother's fiancé — played by Gerwig, in some of her most impressive work to date — Mistress America has screwball elements and, in its use of voiceover, its stylized dialogue and its visual wit, often recalls the films of Baumbach's sometime collaborator, the brilliant Wes Anderson.
Like the director's previous outing, the exhilarating While We're Young, Mistress America has a lighter touch than his three preceding, more agonized works, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg, and Frances Ha. (Amusingly, at the onstage Q & A with Baumbach and Gerwig following this screening, the director was asked if he had any plans to return to the "more brutal" mode of Margot at the Wedding — he promised to do so.) The dialogue in this new film, like that of his last, is consistently hilarious and the comic effect is enhanced by brisk editing.
Having seen all of the narrative features directed by Baumbach, barring the disowned Highball, I'm still not certain whether he is genuinely a stylist, whereas Anderson so manifestly is one — this was undeniable by the time of the latter's excellent Rushmore, if not quite in his remarkable debut, Bottle Rocket — but Baumbach seems to be a more accomplished filmmaker than the exceptionally talented Whit Stillman who, like the director of Mistress America, owes a debt to Woody Allen and Eric Rohmer.
The post-screening Q & A with the director and Gerwig — looking as gorgeous as ever — was moderated by Kent Jones, the New York Film Festival Director, and was not without several pleasurable moments.
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