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April '24 Digital Week IV

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Wednesday, 24 April 2024 20:09; Written by Kevin Filipski

In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week

Civil War

(Neon)

In Alex Garland’s dystopian nightmare, the U.S. has degenerated into war pitting rebel forces from Texas and California—now there’s an unlikely alliance!—against remnants of federal troops that are disintegrating, as several intrepid journalists record the actual breakdown of America in real time. Garland gets the particulars right, from the intense opening of a suicide bomber on a Manhattan street to the final, prolonged shootout as the rebels storm the White House and root out a cowering president.

But there’s no overarching theme or point, while visually and narratively, much is borrowed from Full Metal Jacket, with reporters and photographers following the fighting to the documentary-like visuals: one of the photographers even falls into a pit filled with dead bodies, a seeming homage to Kubrick’s classic. Although filmed and edited for maximum tension—and with good performances topped by the peerless Stephen McKinley Henderson as a veteran NY Times reporter on his last legs—Civil War is ultimately less than the sum of its parts.

Kim’s Video

(Drafthouse Films)

The legendary lower Manhattan video store closed shop in 2009, and directors David Redmon and Ashley Sabin—the former a particularly gregarious fan of the store’s legacy and cinema history—track down the collection to, of all places, a rural Italian town in this engagingly messy documentary.

On visiting the collection, Redmon gets into a bit of trouble with the authorities, before teaming with the small chain’s owner, Youngkin Kim, to return the discs and tapes to their rightful place in New York. It’s breezy and clunky in equal measure, but by padding the narrative with clips from dozens of movies Redmon alludes to throughout ironically moves the focus away from Kim’s Video and its legacy, making for a strangely unsatisfying film.

LaRoy, Texas

(Brainstorm Media)

I’ve never been a fan of the Coen brothers, but their most pernicious influence may be the copycats who have tried to remake, say, Miller’s Crossing or No Country for Old Men, blackly comic tales of revenge and murder. The latest wannabe, writer/director Shane Atkinson, checks all the familiar boxes—at times, it’s as if an overeager novice got his hands on the first draft of a Coen script and decided to film it.

The twists, the turns and the relationships all come across as arch and forced, while the occasionally biting dialogue is more often than not crude. The acting follows suit, so that even good actors like Dylan Baker and Megan Stevenson can’t create plausible characterizations.

Sweet Dreams

(Dekanalog)

This parable about the perils of colonialism, written and directed by Bosnian Ena Sendijarevic, is a witty look at a family that owns a Dutch East Indian plantation: when patriarch Jan dies suddenly, his widow Agathe, their son Cornelius and pregnant daughter-in-law Josefin hope to keep the estate in the family—but Jan’s beloved servant Siti bore him a son, who’s been named the lone inheritor.

Shot in perfectly boxy Academy ratio, Sendijarevic’s deadpan satire might lose its grip at times but remains an intelligent exploration of how history’s horrors keep reverberating.

4K/UHD Releases of the Week

Butcher Baker Nightmare Maker

(Severin)

A true horror relic, this risible but occasionally entertaining 1981 flick follows the Oedipal relationship of high-school student Billy (Jimmy McNichol) and his overprotective aunt Cheryl (Susan Tyrell), whom he’s lived with since his parents died when he was young (we, of course, get to see the gruesomely fatal car crash).

The plot involves dead bodies, a gay basketball coach (Steve Eastin), a homophobic detective (Bo Svenson) and student Julia (Julia Duffy), whom Billy is dating; if director William Asher and three (!) writers can’t make this more than a serviceable genre exercise, it never reaches the depths of its ungainly title. There’s a fine UHD transfer; extras include three audio commentaries, new and archival interviews with cast and crew, including McNichol, Tyrell and Svenson.

Cathy’s Curse

(Severin)

In the vein of The Exorcist, The Omen and It’s Alive, this crudely made 1976 Canadian entry into the “evil child” genre doesn’t even try very hard as young, seemingly possessed Cathy causes her nanny’s demise out of a second-floor window and makes things dangerous for her parents, especially her weak mother.

Director Eddy Matalon can barely muster the energy to make his movie competent-looking, and is further defeated by laconic performances and truly lazy writing. There’s a decent 4K transfer; extras include an audio commentary and interviews.

The Departed

(Warner Bros)

Martin Scorsese won his lone best director Oscar for this 2006 crime drama (which also won best picture), set in Boston among the Irish underworld and crooked cops—it might not be one of his best films but it has Scorsese’s essential traits in, if anything, overabundance.

There are the well-placed rock tunes, opening with the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter”; the closely observed world of crime and punishment; the vicious and sudden violence—even the final image is an obvious if nasty joke. It’s brilliantly done, with spectacular performances by Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio and even mark Wahlberg, even if there’s a sense of déjà vu after 2-1/2 hours. The film looks magnificent in UHD; extras include a new featurette with a new Scorsese interview, along with two featurettes and deleted scenes (with the director’s intro) from previous releases.

Motley Crue—The End

(Mercury/Universal)

Once upon a time, you couldn't turn on MTV without seeing and hearing Motley Crue in heavy rotation. For those still-loyal fans, this concert in the group’s hometown of L.A. on New Year’s Eve 2015—billed as The End, even though the Crue has since reformed—brings back those good old days, hitting on every phase of the band’s career: they began as a Kiss wannabe, became huge arena-rockers, then stumbled through new singers and drummers before returning to the original lineup.

No true fan will be disappointed with this hit list, including much time-capsule material: “Looks That Kill,” “Girls Girls Girls,” “Dr. Feelgood” and “Home Sweet Home” all contain big hair, makeup, tight pants—from the band and their sleek female dancer-singers. The 4K video and surround sound, are crisp and clear; extras include band interviews and closeup footage of the flame-throwing bass and drum rig.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

The Doom Patrol—Complete Final Season

(Warner Bros)

In the final season of this weird but always watchable superhero series, the disposable, deplorable outcasts once again take on the mantle of being simultaneous saviors and survivors, battling adversaries from without and within.

The terrific ensemble, led by April Bowlby, Brendan Fraser and Dianne Guerrero, stays on the edge of being tongue-in-cheek and unabashedly sentimental throughout, and this unlikely blend prevents it all from becoming too sappy or satirical. This season’s dozen episodes look remarkable in hi-def; extras include three featurettes.

Drive-Away Dolls

(Lionsgate)

I had just watched LaRoy, Texas, the latest Coen brothers’ rip-off, when I encounter a new movie by one Coen brother (Ethan) and his wife (Tricia Cooke)—it’s so cartoonish and insistent on being a piece of blackly comic juvenilia that it has the feel of something from the early Coen years a la Blood Simple or Raising Arizona.

It’s also no better than those two films, with annoying characters acting annoyingly while spewing offbeat, deadpan, obnoxious lines of dialogue. On the plus side, Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan make an amusing pair of lesbian friends on the run with some inept crooks’ stash in their trunk of their rental car, and the movie’s only 84 minutes long. It has a very good Blu-ray transfer; extras comprise three making-of featurettes.

Monolith

(Well Go USA)

The nameless protagonist tries to resurrect her flailing career by hosting a podcast about conspiracy theories—and is soon caught up in an insane alien conspiracy that she realizes she is also intimately involved with.

Matt Vesely’s initially taut thriller unfortunately loses it about two-thirds through, but Vesely and writer Lucy Campbell’s portrait of conspiracist thinking hinges on Lily Sullivan, the only person onscreen (there are voices on phone calls), and she responds with a brilliantly crazed portrayal. There’s a fine hi-def transfer; lone extra is a behind the scenes featurette.

CD Releases of the Week

Frederick Delius—Hassan

(Chandos)

English composer Frederick Delius (1862-1934) wrote music of great variety, from the tone poems In a Summer Garden and A Song of Summer to the operas A Village Romeo and Juliet and Fennimore and Gerda and the choral works Sea Drift and A Mass of Life.

His incidental music for the prose play Hassan comprises about an hour’s worth of a colorful if at times meandering musical atmosphere that’s heightened when accompanied by a chorus or, in its most memorable moments, the haunting tenor voice in the melancholy final scene. This estimable recording combines the stellar singing of the Britten Sinfonia Voices, the first-rate narrator Zeb Soanes, and the fine playing of the Britten Sinfonia, all led by the adept conducting of Jamie Phillips.

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich—Symphony No. 5 and Orchestral Works

(BMOP/Sound)

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s music is full of bountiful imagination, and this disc, comprising one of her very best works and three other orchestral pieces, shows her at the pinnacle of her artistry. The centerpiece of this superb recording is her Symphony No. 5, which I was fortunate to hear at its 2008 Carnegie Hall world-premiere performance by the Juilliard Orchestra. It’s an inventive, zesty, vital achievement, buoyed by Zwilich’s brilliance at writing melodically and vigorously for the orchestra as both an ensemble and a group of first-rate soloists.

The other works on this disc range from the effervescent opener, the perfectly titled Upbeat!, to the subtle coloring of two concertos: Concerto Elegia for flute and orchestra and Commedia dell’arte for solo violin and string orchestra. Flutist Sarah Brady and violinist Gabriela Diaz are perfection in their showcase works, while Gil Rose skillfully leads the Boston Modern Orchestra Project throughout.

Philadelphia Orchestra Plays Mahler

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Wednesday, 24 April 2024 14:40; Written by Jack Angstreich

Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra. Photo by Chris Lee.

At Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium on the evening of Friday, April 12th, I had the immense pleasure of attending a fabulous concert presented by the extraordinary musicians of the Philadelphia Orchestra under the inspired direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

The marvelous first half of the program was a superb selection of songs by Alma Mahler—the first four of her Fünf Lieder, beautifully orchestrated by Colin and David Matthews—gloriously performed by the outstanding mezzo-soprano, Karen Cargill. The first of these, “The Silent Town,” is set to a poem by Richard Dehmel; it begins lugubriously, but is ultimately exalting. The second, “In My Father’s Garden,” to a lyric by Otto Erich Hartleben, has a charming, even carefree ethos. The third song, “Warm Summer Night,” conveys intimations of rapture, and the final one, “With You I Feel at Ease,” after a text by Rainer Maria Rilke, is quietly enchanting. The artists—and the singer especially—received enthusiastic applause.

At least equally memorable was the second half of the event, an amazing rendition of Gustav Mahler’s magnificent, seldom played, Symphony No. 7. In a letter, the composer described it as “my best work and predominantly of a cheerful character.” The Adagio introduction to the first movement, with its brass fanfares, has a Wagnerian quality; the main body of the movement, marked Allegro risoluto, ma non troppo, which accelerates to an almost frantic pace at times, closes joyously and triumphantly. The first “Night Music” movement that follows, an Allegro moderato, becomes march-like and then dance-like; there are pastoral elements here and it ends softly but unexpectedly. The ensuing Scherzo, marked Shadowy, displays a queerer sensibility, with a brisk, propulsive rhythm; it has an almost exaggerated character and also finishes abruptly. The second “Night Music” movement that succeeds it, an Andante amoroso, is more subdued; nonetheless, it seems moderately playful, even eccentric, and contains some of the loveliest passages in the score, as well as some passionate moments, and it concludes gently, even ethereally. The Rondo-Finale is exuberant and exhilarating, although with some more restrained interludes, and it closes stunningly and exultantly. The audience deservedly rewarded the ensemble with a standing ovation.

The Philadelphia Orchestra will return to Carnegie Hall on April 30th.

Off-Broadway Play Review—Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Sally & Tom”

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Monday, 22 April 2024 18:32; Written by Kevin Filipski

Sally & Tom

Written by Suzan-Lori Parks; directed by Steve H. Broadnax III

Performances through May 12, 2024

Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, NYC

publictheater.org

Sheria Irving and Gabriel Ebert in Sally & Tom (photo: Joan Marcus)

Among contemporary playwrights, you’d think Suzan-Lori Parks would be the one to have an original and startling take on the complicated relationship of founding father Thomas Jefferson and enslaved Sally Hemings. But, with Sally & Tom, Parks has created an intermittently lacerating but mainly mild play about one of the most fraught subjects in our fraught national history.

To grapple with and have a contemporary dialogue with the historical subject at hand, Parks introduces a scruffy off-off-Broadway troupe putting on a play titled The Pursuit of Happiness—it was originally called E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One), something that Parks gets some decent mileage out of—in which the relationship between T.J. (as Jefferson is so-called) and Sally is dramatized from a distinctly 21st-century point of view.

The play-within-a-play is written by Luce, who plays Sally, and directed by Mike, who plays T.J. Luce and Mike are a couple bound by their art and their advocacy but who are starting to get tired of begging for money and shouting their words into mostly empty theaters—perhaps belatedly realizing that leftist politics onstage is an echo chamber.

Parks would seem to the perfect playwright to dig into these parallel provocations: studying a beloved American’s indefensible personal life and if it’s possible to make genuine art in these divided times. But she instead creates distance from the task at hand. Sally & Tom has three distinct levels: T.J. and Sally in The Pursuit of Happiness; Luce and Mike as lovers and artists; and the other players in the troupe, whose backstage interactions might be amusing to those who work in the theater but which are a combination of easy laughs and cheap melodramatics that simply pad the running time.

Such a dramatic and comic imbalance dilutes what Parks is saying about the pedestal our Founding Fathers have been put on; the unfairness of history being written by white men; and the agency of a woman like Sally, who bore seven of Jefferson’s children but was never freed by him, even on his deathbed, unlike both Washington and Franklin, as is mentioned in the play. (Jefferson’s daughter Patsy freed Sally and others after her father died July 4, 1826—significantly the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence—along with John Adams in one of history’s best coincidences.)

To be sure, there are fleeting moments of precise observation and ringing insight, but Sally & Tom really only flashes to vivid life in the speeches that climax each act. Act one ends with a long and winding soliloquy by T.J. (of which Gabriel Ebert, who’s most engaging as both Mike and Tom, gives a persuasive reading), which treads the fine lines of self-pity, self-absorption, and self-analysis, thanks to Parks’ acuteness at studying this extraordinary man with extraordinary flaws.

Even better is the monologue Parks has written for Sally (the gifted Sheria Irving, who’s superb as both Luce and Sally, rises to Shakespearean heights here), in which she—and by extension Parks—grapples with her own place in a history she has officially never been part of, even if recent Jeffersonian history has started to grant her space there. Sally eloquently describes her conflicting emotions:

I want to push his hands off. Tear away whatever of myself makes him want me. And yet, the horror of him wanting me keeps me from other horrors. Some might say we were docile. I say we were resilient. And we pass that down to you. And there were so many things we wanted to say. But didn’t. So many things we wanted to do. But didn’t. We should have burned the whole place down. Instead we built it up.

Sally’s thoughtful, poignant plea overcomes some of the preceding two-plus hours’ repetitiveness.

Steve H. Broadnax III’s direction nicely corrals the three disparate story threads into a nearly cohesive whole, and the ensemble amusingly handles the doubled roles of the other performers and their characters. Riccardo Hernández’ scenic design, Rodrigo Muñoz’ costumes, Alan C. Edwards’ lighting, Dan Moses Schreier’s sound design and Schreier and Parks’ music adroitly dip us in and out of each segment.

But the final coup de theatre, a list of Monticello’s enslaved names appearing on the back wall, is a visual sledgehammer that unnecessarily underscores the play's bluntness, despite its lofty intentions.

Revel in Ravel with the Juilliard Orchestra

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Friday, 19 April 2024 17:54; Written by Jack Angstreich

Juilliard Orchestra Conducted by David Robertson. Photo by Rachel Papo.

At Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium on the evening of Tuesday, April 2nd, I had the pleasure of attending an excellent concert of modernist French music presented by the remarkable Juilliard Orchestra under the superb direction of David Robertson.

The program began brilliantly with one of the highlights of the evening, a marvelous account of Lili Boulanger’s extraordinary, seldom performed Of a Spring Morning, a beautifully scored, Impressionistic work from 1918, impeccably conducted here by Tengku Irfan. Robertson then entered the stage to introduce the next piece, a set of five challenging but rewarding selections from Pierre Boulez’s infrequently heard Notations for Piano and Orchestra, featuring the precocious Joanne Chew-Anne Chang as soloist. Originally written for solo piano when the composer was twenty, he orchestrated it admirably decades later, at the invitation of conductor Daniel Barenboim. Robertson led the artists in the first, seventh, fourth, third and second of the Notations, in that order.

The second half of the event was at least equally as accomplished, starting with a sterling performance of Maurice Ravel’s engaging Piano Concerto in G Major from 1931, dazzlingly played by another outstanding soloist, the incredibly promising Jingting Zhu. The initial, energetic and virtuosic Allegramente movement, which has a sprightly opening, strongly recalls the music of George Gershwin—Ravel evidently was greatly impressed by the latter’s Concerto in F, although his own personality is nonetheless unmistakable; the slower passages have the quality of a moody reverie and it ends forcefully and precipitously. The Adagio assai that follows begins with an extended, introspective introduction for solo piano; the movement, which contains some of the score’s most exquisite music, sustains an inward character, with some lyrical moments, throughout its length. The propulsive and percussive Presto finale, also concludes abruptly.

The event closed awesomely, first with a rare and very brief Ravel opus, Frontispice from 1918, one of the most avant-garde scores he ever composed. In it, according to the program note by Thomas May:

The numbers three and five have a notable presence—the original score comprises 15 (3x5) measures and is designed for three pianists and five hands. In 2007, Pierre Boulez arranged this music for a large orchestra.

Without a pause, Robertson transitioned to a masterly rendition of Claude Debussy’s incomparable La mer from 1905. One can discern many pronouncedly Oriental echoes across the first movement, From Dawn to Noon on the Sea, which has some of the eccentricity to be found in the early works of Igor Stravinsky and which builds to a powerful climax. The succeeding Play of the Waves is more animated, even turbulent, but concludes softly, and the finale, Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea, is agitated and tumultuous and ends unforgettably.

The players were enthusiastically applauded.

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