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Film and the Arts
April '15 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 14 April 2015 22:29
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Big Eyes
(Anchor Bay/Weinstein Co)
In Tim Burton's most fully realized film since 2004's Big Fish, the stranger-than-fiction true story of Margaret Keane, who ghostpainted a series of popular (and infamous) works in the '50s and '60s, is brought to vividly outlandish life, helped by a solid script by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (veterans of the equally weird biopics Ed Wood—Burton's best film—and The People vs. Larry Flynt).
Although Christoph Waltz is typically hammy as husband Walter Keane, who took credit for the paintings, Amy Adams sympathetically plays Margaret in a subtle characterization that fuels Burton's engrossing exploration of art, pseudo-art and popular culture. The colorful visuals look terrific on Blu; extras include a making-of featurette and Q&As with Burton, Adams, Margaret Keane and others.
(Alchemy)
A riveting real-life tale, director Daniel Alfredson's fast-paced, involving thriller recreates the kidnapping of a Heineken beer company heir in Amsterdam in 1983, when he and his driver were held for 23 days by a group of criminals who were paid $35 million in ransom; although all the men were eventually caught, very little of the money was recovered.
Anthony Hopkins makes a perfectly bemused Heineken, and Jim Sturgess and Sam Worthington are convincing as the gang's leaders. The hi-def transfer is immaculate; extras are deleted scenes.
Mad as Hell
(Oscilloscope)
The Young Turks is an internet phenomenon that's spawned a massive online presence and popularity, and its frank-talking founder Cenk Uygur is profiled in director Andrew Napier's examination of how politics and the media intersect in the 21st century.
With uncontrolled rage, Uygur goes after Republicans and Democrats indiscriminately, as he speaks truth to power online and on TV, where he had brief runs as host on both MSNBC and Current TV. The movie, primarily television/internet footage and talking-head interviews, looks decent enough on Blu; extras comprise several featurettes.
(Anchor Bay/Starz)
This tightly-wound eight-episode mystery drama recounts the unbearable pain and anger brought on husband Tony and wife Emily when their five-year-old Oliver disappears while on vacation in France (the series was shot on location in Belgium).
With menace in the air, The Missing slowly moves toward its shocking denouement, following the glacial pace of investigations and simultaneous deterioration of the relationship of the grieving Tony and Emily, played impeccably by James Nesbitt and Frances O'Connor. The hi-def transfer is excellent; extras are short featurettes.
The Voices
(Lionsgate)
This almost jaw-dropping fiasco, which follows the adventures of an cheerful serial killer who has conversations with his cat and dog and, eventually, the severed heads of female co-workers whom he butchers, does nearly everything wrong.
Director Marjane Satrapi has an insistently strident tone (is she really the maker of Persepolisand Chicken with Plums?), Michael R. Perry has delivered a ham-fisted script and, most depressingly of all, several fine actors are called on to do their worst work, from Ryan Reynolds as the lovable anti-hero to the usually adorable Gemma Arterton and Anna Kendrick as two of his victims. The Blu-ray at least looks good; extras include featurettes. extended and deleted scenes.
(Icarus)
Considered the "merry pranksters of contemporary art," Peter Fischli and David Weiss collaborated on elaborately-scaled, dementedly crafted chaos that included an exquisitely wrought contraption that was filmed for posterity in 1987 for this endlessly entrancing 30-minute feature.
In an astonishing domino effect, the artists built up a 100-foot-long structure, comprising household and tool-shed items like tires, kettles, and pieces of wood that affect one another in a painstaking chain reaction of self-destruction that is worth watching again and again if only to continue asking yourself, "How (and why) did they do that?" The Blu-ray looks adequate, considering the source material (a DVD is also included).
DVDs of the Week
The Book of Negroes
(e one)
Based on a novel by Lawrence Hill, this extraordinarily detailed, often tough to watch mini-series might be seen as a Rootsfor a new generation, but after all, the sorrowful history of American slavery has literally thousands of individual stories, and Aunjanue Ellis's is as valid and as drama-worthy as any.
She was kidnapped by African slave traders as a young girl, taken to America and sold to South Carolina masters; years later, she ends up in England, where she becomes a leading proponent of abolition of the slave trade. Striking production values and superb acting—especially by Aunjanue Ellis as our valiant heroine—this mini-series is a must-watch. Extras include deleted scenes, interviews and a featurette.
Happy Valley
(Music Box)
The shameful Penn State scandal, in which beloved football coach Joe Paterno was excoriated then fired when he did the barest minimum when confronted with evidence that one of his long-time assistants, Jerry Sandusky, was a serial pedophile, is exasperatingly recounted by evenhanded director Amir Bar-Lev.
Everyone has his say, from those who defended Paterno and Penn State, like the coach's widow, to those, like Sandusky's adopted son, who first defends his father then admits to being molested and joins the other accusers. This is a chilling firsthand account of how a closely-knit community was torn apart and how it continues to deal with such heinous crimes. The lone extra is a director interview.
(First Run)
Audrey Tautou's eternal cuteness becomes a tragic mask for a severely damaged protagonist in writer-director Laetitia Colombani's unsettling, blackly comic thriller (from 2003) about an unhinged young woman, Angelique, in love with a doctor, Loic (Samuel Le Bihan), who has a pregnant wife (Isabelle Carre) whom Angelique feels is in the way of their happiness.
Colombani smartly balances Angelique's buoyant but clueless happiness with Loic's matter-of-fact uneasiness in a boldly unconventional drama that only missteps at the very end, when the mental-health profession is called into question in a cavalier way for the sake of a "shock" ending.
One Step Beyond
(Film Chest)
Even though it debuted on television a few months before the more celebrated Twilight Zone, One Step Beyond carved out its own niche with spellbinding half-hour stories of strange goings-on that ran the gamut from vaguely supernatural to outright inexplicable.
Narrator/host John Newland took on the Rod Serling role here, and sharp viewers will track down many stars just starting out or at the tail end of their careers, from Warren beatty, Suzanne Pleshette and Yvette Mimieux to Joan Fontaine and Norman Lloyd. The six discs contain 70 episodes of the series.
Broadway Reviews—Vanessa Hudgens in "Gigi" and the Gershwins' "An American in Paris"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 13 April 2015 21:25
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Gigi
Book/lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner; adapted by Heidi Thomas; music by Frederick Loewe
Choreographed by Joshua Bergasse; directed by Eric Schaeffer
An American in Paris
Book by Craig Lucas; lyrics by Ira Gershwin; music by George Gershwin
Choreographed and directed by Christopher Wheeldon
It's only a coincidence, but two musicals opening on Broadway were once '50s movie musicals directed by Vincente Minnelli: the six-time Oscar-winning An American in Paris (1951) and nine-time Oscar-winning Gigi (1958).
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| Cott and Hudgens in Gigi (photo: Margot Schulman) |
Gigi was once a Broadway flop in 1973, when book writer-lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe expanded the original movie into a stage version with additional songs. The new Gigi has an adaptation by Heidi Thomas that de-fangs the premise from French novelist Colette's 1944 story: the idea of a 15-year-old girl being prepped as a courtesan for rich older men won't fly in 2015, so it's been entirely flattened, its bubblyness excised, and the result, while entertaining, is like drinking sparkling cider, not Moet et Chandon, on New Year's Eve.
The retooling of Gigi was obviously done with an eye on the box office: it would be unseemly for preteens and teens to see High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens onstage and their parents having to explain lecherous oldsters ogling her. So Gigi has become a quite independent (and legal) 18 and is wooed by a Gaston barely a few years older; this makes for a cute rom-com a la High School Musical but destroys Gigi's going up against a society that allows its young women to become men's playthings.
More damagaing is director Eric Schaeffer's production, which is about as French as Starbucks coffee: although Derek McLane's belle epoque sets dazzle and Catherine Zuber's elegant costumes catch the eye, the hard-working cast huffs and puffs without ever finding that certain je ne sais quoi that should never be so strained. To start from the bottom, steely-voiced Corey Cott's Gaston is so whiny and charisma-starved that it's impossible to believe him as Paris's most eligible bachelor.
Likewise, Howard McGillin is too bland as his uncle Honore; he has none of Maurice Chevalier's effortless urbanity in the movie. In his defense, McGillin doesn't get to sing the movie Honore's signature song, "Thank Heaven for Little Girls," which has been given instead to Gigi's conniving grandmother Mamita and Aunt Alicia so the old man is no longer seen as a charming pedophile. The irrepressible Victoria Clark and Dee Hoty give much needed oomph and humor to Mamita and Alicia, even if Hoty overplays a bit too much.
How is Hudgens as Gigi? She's pretty, perky, plucky, polished and professional. She sings well, moves stylishly, looks sumptuous in her gorgeous gowns, and even does an impressive cartwheel in one of choreographer Joshua Bergasse's too-busy dance numbers. It's not her fault that she plays the watered-down 21st century Gigi perfectly: her fans will love it, while those partial to Lerner & Loewe (even though most of these songs are second-rate, especially coming soon after their classic My Fair Lady) probably won't.
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| A scene from An American in Paris (photo: Matthew Murphy) |
Far more satisfying is An American in Paris, which has staggeringly inventive choreography by the show's director, Christopher Wheeldon. Like Minnelli's movie, which starred Gene Kelly in the story of former American GI Jerry Mulligan—who stays in the French capital after World War II to be a painter, fall in love and dance to Gershwin music—Wheeldon's Paris is a vivacious delight from the start.
Craig Lucas's book retains the outlines of the movie's plot. Jerry falls for the lovely Lise, a shop clerk who here wants to be a ballet dancer—as does Adam Hochberg, an American expatriate tasked with composing a short dance work for Lise at the behest of Milo Davenport, a young American woman with money to throw at French culture, and who has own designs on Jerry's talent. Then there's Henri Baurel, whom the two American men befriend, who's trying to launch a song-and-dance career without his highbrow parents noticing, and who is (unbeknownst to both Jerry and Adam) kinda sorta engaged to Lise.
Lucas' book is far more overstuffed than it needs to be, but luckily Wheeldon covers the stage with so many visual and dancing delights that it doesn't really matter. It all starts with Bob Crowley's freewheeling and mobile set designs, an endless variety of panels and mirrors that are rolled, pulled and pushed around the stage, morphing into various Parisian landmarks and, with the help of 59 Productions' animated, impressionistic projections and Natasha Katz's resourceful lighting, can at one remove stand in for a romantic walk along the Seine or, in the musical's disturbing opening, the end of the Nazi occupation and the return of a free Paris.
Throughout all of this visual ingenuity—which runs dry in the second act, most likely to concentrate on the climactic ballet of the title—Wheeldon does not skimp on the dancing. His incredibly busy but always original choreography rarely comes up for air, especially in such exciting set pieces as the moody opening number set to Gershwin's Concerto in F or the first act's closing number to Gershwin's boisterous Second Rhapsody and Cuban Overture, not to mention the beautifully structured final ballet that smartly avoids what Gene Kelly did so sensationally in the movie.
Likewise, the many song interludes, which include such Gershwin staples as "S'Wonderful," "The Man I Love" and "Shall We Dance?" are staged stylishly, and are greatly helped by the intoxicating arrangements by Rob Fisher.
The large and talented supporting cast comprises such first-rate performers as Brandon Urbanowitz as self-deprecating narrator Adam, Jill Paice as Milo, Max von Essen as Henri, and a scene-stealing Veanne Cox as Henri's snooty mom. But, as good as they are, the leads are even better.
Robert Fairchild from the New York City Ballet plays Jerry and Leanne Cope from London's Royal Ballet plays Lise: that they are both phenomenal dancers is no surprise; that they are also exceptionally good singers and gifted actors is the icing on the very tasty cake that is An American in Paris.
Gigi
Performances through October 4, 2015
Neil Simon Theatre, 250 West 52nd Street, New York, NY
gigionbroadway.com
An American in Paris
Performances through November 22, 2015
Palace Theatre, Broadway & 47th Street, New York, NY
anamericaninparisbroadway.com
April '15 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 07 April 2015 21:19
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Grantchester
(PBS)
In this slow but absorbing PBS Mystery series, small-town vicar Sidney Chambers (discovering that most people will talk to a priest) aids skeptically hard-nosed detective Geordie Keating in criminal investigations plaguing the countryside, and showing a seamier side of early 1950s rural England.
In the leads, James Norton (Chambers) and Robson Green (Keating) have a pleasing rapport, while an expert supporting cast and well-honed scripts make these six hour-long episodes irresistible. The Blu-ray transfer is impeccable; extras include a making-of featurette, behind the scenes footage, cast interviews.
The Immigrant
(Anchor Bay/Weinstein Co.)
Is there nothing Marion Cotillard can't do? Sure, the French actress was Oscar-nominated for her amazing performance in Two Days, One Night (that she lost is another reason why the Oscars are a joke), but she should have also been nominated for her powerful portrayal of an early 20th century Polish immigrant who becomes a prostitute as she tries to survive in her new country.
Writer-director James Gray's potent drama has shrill moments (mainly involving the cliched men in her life, played by Joaquin Phoenix and Jeremy Renner), but whenever Cotillard is onscreen, bathed in the glow of Darius Khondji's luminous photography, it's magical. The hi-def transfer is first-rate; extras are Gray's illuminating commentary and a brief feaurette.
Manh(a)ttan—Complete 1st Season
(Lionsgate)
This ambitious new series explores the lives of the scientists of the infamous Manhattan Project, who moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico with their families to create the atomic bomb and, by extension, all the moral and political fallout that came with it.
Although at times it overreaches, the fine acting of John Benjamin Hickey as one of the lead scientists and Olivia Williams as his wife and the overriding theme of secrecy on the governmental and personal level, compensates. The hi-def transfer is good; extras are commentaries and featurettes.
(Eagle Rock)
For her return to performing—after an exile of eight years due to a vocal problem, during which she got divorced and remarried (to the ex of the woman whose affair with her husband prompted Twain's breakup)—the Canadian country-pop superstar did a residency in Las Vegas that was a 90-minute greatest hits show.
Starring alongside Twain are her spectacular costumes and hairdos, dancers and backup singers, an elaborate stage set including a horse she rides in on, and a bunch of (mostly) bombastic hit tunes; still, it's the singer's ingratiating personality that helps it go down so smoothly. Hi-def visuals and audio are excellent; extra is an hour-long tour feature, directed by Twain's husband.
Singles
(Warner Bros)
Cameron Crowe's 1992 followup to his directorial debut Say Anything, which follows self-conscious 20-somethings looking for love in Seattle during the early '90s grunge scene, now plays like a time capsule of when grunge exploded: there are concert sequences of Soundgarden and Alice in Chains and members of Pearl Jam, including lead singer Eddie Vedder, in supporting roles.
Aside from its great soundtrack, Singles is notable for giving Bridget Fonda, one of the most natural and alluring Hollywood actresses ever, one of her best roles: where has she gone? The hi-def transfer looks quite good; extras include many deleted scenes, a gag reel and concert footage.
(Fox)
In Jean-Marc Vallee's middling adaptation of the awfully named Cheryl Strayed's memoir about her long wilderness trek after her mother's death, Reese Witherspoon gives an energetic but bland performance as a woman trying to set a new course in life after some soul-searching.
Vallee, who made the far better Dallas Buyers Club, is unable to invest this film with the same kind of emotional immediacy, even with Thomas Sadoski as her ex and Laura Dern as her dying mom lending gravity that's otherwise lacking in Witherspoon's surface portrayal. The film looks great on Blu; extras are a commentary, deleted scenes and featurettes.
DVDs of the Week
Gunned Down—The Power of the NRA
(PBS)
This hard-hitting episode ofFrontline explores the history of the National Rifle Association, and how it morphed from a sportsman's club to a powerful Washington lobby, dead set against any gun control legislation, no matter how incremental.
Led by the conscienceless Wayne Lapierre, the increasingly radical organization has become so intensely disengenuous in its public pronouncements and hypocritical in its arguments about the right to bear arms that there seems no way back to the conservative (in both senses) group it once was.
(Film Movement)
A long and stable marriage is put to the test when, during a hike in the woods, wife Pomme decides to stay while husband Pierre returns to their comfortable middle-class life; a week apart forces both to question their roles in a relationship that may or may not have run its course.
Writer-director Sophie Fillieres and her extraordinary actors, Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric, have created a richly adult tale that, although it nearly loses its balance toward the end, is kept from tottering over the edge by sheer force of talent. Extras comprise director and actors' interviews.
Pelican Dreams
(Cinedigm)
In this gentle but wise documentary, director Judy Irving follows the journey of Gigi, a California brown pelican captured on the Golden Gate Bridge, as a jumping-off point to explore these magnificent creatures, which the director calls "flying dinosaurs" because of their link to ancient animals.
The superb footage of the birds living in the natural habitat of the Channel Islands off the coast of California gives way to a touching denouement, when Gigi finally flies away back to nature. Extras are deleted scenes and mini-movies.
(Docurama)
This invaluable 11-documentary boxed set, which provides a wide-ranging spectrum of Jewish history and the unavoidable shadow of the Holocaust, includes two excellent Oscar-winning Best Documentaries: 1982's Genocide and 1997's The Long Way Home.
Even though all of the films are worthwhile, those most worth exploring are a trio of more recent films by director Richard Trank: 2007's I Have Never Forgotten You, about Nazi-hunter Wiesenthal himself; 2010's Winston Churchill: Walking with Destiny, and 2013's The Prime Ministers, a history of the early years of the state of Israel.
Song One
(Cinedigm)
In writer-director Kate Barker-Froyland's syrupy romantic melodrama, Anne Hathaway plays Franny, the sister of Brooklyn musician Henry who sits at his bedside after he's seriously injured in an accident: she soon ends up falling for James Forester, the popular singer-songwriter who was Henry's idol.
Though well-acted by Hathaway and Mary Steenburgen as her mother, the 88-minute movie bogs down with the same-sounding songs of Johnny Flynn, who plays the supposedly charismatic James without much conviction. Extras comprise deleted scenes and soundtrack featurette.
New York Theater Reviews—"The Heidi Chronicles" and "Placebo"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 02 April 2015 21:50
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The Heidi Chronicles
Written by Wendy Wasserstein; directed by Pam MacKinnon
Performances through August 9, 2015
Placebo
Written by Melissa James Gibson; directed by Daniel Aukin
Performances through April 5, 2015
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| Elisabeth Moss and Jason Biggs in The Heidi Chronicles (photo: Joan Marcus) |
When Wendy Wasserstein won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for Best Play for The Heidi Chronicles, she became the first—and so far only—female American playwright to win the Tony. Wasserstein went on to write two more substantial plays (1992's wondrously warmThe Sisters Rosensweig and 1997's political character study, An American Daughter) before her untimely 2006 death at age 55 of lymphoma.
The semi-autobiographical Heidi Chronicles covers a quarter-century in the life of Heidi Holland, a feminist art historian whom we meet giving a 1989 lecture about obscure female artists through the ages. From there, we jump back to several pinpoint, razor-sharp scenes between 1965 and 1989, as Heidi moves from naive co-ed to grad student to independent career woman, always dealing with her fraught relationships with the men in her life: Peter, whom she meets cute at a 1965 dance and who remains her backbone (and who is, she later discovers, gay); and Scoop, the self-confident letch who seduces Heidi at a 1968 New Hampshire Humphrey campaign headquarters and becomes her sometime lover until he finally marries another woman.
Several women are semi-constants in Heidi's ever-changing life, but—as the bittersweet but optimistic ending shows—she remains on her own: even the momentous decision (which foreshadows Wasserstein's own a decade later) that closes the play is made alone.
Wasserstein's episodic play, which comprises 13 scenes set during a 24-year period, takes the pulse of the playwright's generation socially, culturally and politically. The otherwise adroit director Pam MacKinnon has turned this entertaining revival into a time capsule, as each scene change is accompanied by a hit song from its era by Janis Joplin, John Lennon, Fleetwood Mac, Hall & Oates, etc. And many projections on John Lee Beatty's agile set design display momentous events or celebrities like the failure of the ERA amendment and Presidents Nixon, Carter and Reagan. Unmerited complaints thatHeidi is dated stem from MacKinnon spoonfeeding her audience.
Wasserstein mixes humor and heartbreak with a touch of the sentimental, but her zippy one-liners hit with equal force and finesse, and Heidi herself remains an endearing combination of self-empowerment and naivete. In the original production, Joan Allen gave a magnificent portrayal shot through with humanity and tenderness. Although Elisabeth Moss does well as Heidi—she nails the great monologue scene where Heidi confesses her own disappointments and failures in what was supposed to be a celebratory speech—she lacks Allen's effortless charm, a crucial component of the character.
With the stark exception of Tracee Chimo—who plays several supporting roles with an unnecessary brashness that's the actress's stock-in-trade—MacKinnon has fashioned a fine supporting ensemble, led by Bryce Pickham's ever-loyal Peter and Jason Biggs' often disloyal Scoop. A strain of melancholy pervades at the end, as we realize that this talented playwright, who worked out her neuroses and frailities for all to see, is no longer here to chart where we're headed in the 21st century. Maybe more Wasserstein revivals will further remind us what we're missing.
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| Carrie Coon and Alex Hurt in Placebo (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Like its namesake, Placebo seems an impersonation of a play, and the main problem is that writer Melissa James Gibson seems to care very little about the four characters she's put onstage, making them pawns for her to move around at will, not caring how implausible or downright deranged their actions and dialogue become.
Louise, a lab researcher who keeps tabs on women taking a new drug for their lack of libido (a sort of female viagra) checks on a 40-ish patient, Mary, who may have been given a placebo instead. Louise, who's also getting flirty with another researcher, Tom, whom she meets in the laboratory break room, has a home life in shambles: her live-in boyfriend, Jonathan, has hit a wall writing his dissertation on Pliny the Elder, while her 59-year-old (unseen) mother is on an oxygen machine.
Though too-familiar territory, it's fertile enough for any good writer. Instead, Gibson ignores her own content and context and allows the characters to go off on tangents, endlessly parsing nearly everything they say, like discussing the correct pronunciation of "Pliny" or "bogeyman" or punning on "needing" and "kneading" and on "oral" and "aural."
Consider this bit of dialogue:
LOUISE: But it's not insurmountable.
JONATHAN: Well, depends on your definition of mountable.
Would a supposedly intelligent PhD candidate not know that "surmountable" is the correct word? In any case, it doesn't matter, as long as Gibson gets a cheap laugh.
Later sequences become even more irritating, as when Louise and Tom listen to a recording of patients loudly having sex, then repeat what they've heard. Or when Louise and Tom sprint back and forth to the break room candy machine for minutes on end, choosing items but never taking them out of the machine. Or, in the final scene, Louise and Jonathan, who are about to break up, toss their apartment keys back and forth, since Louise commented on Jonathan's inability to do so. None of this makes any pertient or intelligent commentary on relationships, but Gibson (who wrote scripts for the current House of Cards season, by far its weakest) seems most interested in getting momentary reactions from the audience, no matter how little her play and its characters cohere narratively and psychologically.
Carrie Coon is an incisive actress but, although she has her moments as Louise, even she can't create a sympathetic character out of such disparate, self-contradictory fragments. Likewise, director Daniel Aukin, who fashions a clever mise-en-scene that overlaps the play's various settings, can do little else, lost as he is in Gibson's meanderings.
The Heidi Chronicles
Music Box Theatre, 239 West 45th Street, New York, NY
theheidichroniclesonbroadway.com
Placebo
Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
playwrightshorizons.org
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