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June '15 Digital Week II

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Tuesday, 09 June 2015 22:42; Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week

Camp X-Ray

(IFC)

Guantanamo Bay is the setting for writer-director Peter Sattler's straightforward account of the unlikely friendship between a female American soldier and a Muslim man she guards inside the notorious prison.

Kristen Stewart and Payman Maadi give strong portrayals of the confused young woman and equally bemused detainee who discover their common humanity; too bad Sattler's weakness for repetition makes for a saggy midsection: 15 to 20 minutes could have been cut. The hi-def transfer looks superb; lone extra is a making-of featurette.

The Duff

(Lionsgate)

An amusing riff on high school a laJohn Hughes, The Duff stands for "Designated Ugly or Fat Friend," which is what Bianca discovers she is as while navigating the land mines of high school's hallways, classrooms and online bullying.

It's funny despite an obvious moral hammered home at the end, with a percolating cast led by Mae Whitman as Bianca, Skyler Samuels and Bianca Santos as her prettier friends and Bella Thorne, who effortlessly embodies the hottest girl in school. The Blu-ray looks excellent; extras include gag reel and featurettes.

Island of Death

Society

(Arrow)

In director Nico Mastorakis's demented 1976 horror flick Island of Death, a weirdly religious couple visits the Greek isle of Mykynos and proceeds to kill everybody immoral, irreligious or plain not worth living; its insane plot and laughably bad acting aside, there's a certain chuztapah to the inventive murderous ways, including a beheading, a hanging from a flying airplane and impaling a nude woman on a blade through a door.

Society, Brian Yuzna's 1989 gore-splattered mess, has an absolutely lunatic finale in which the hero improbably escapes—maybe to set up a sequel that mercifully never came. One point of interst is Devin Devasquez, a Playboy playmate who showed off her best attributes. Both movies look properly grainy on Blu-ray; extras comprise interviews and featurettes.

Killing Jesus

(Fox)

Bill O'Reilly's "killing" cash cow, which has already done in Lincoln, Kennedy and Patton, goes after even bigger game in this stillborn adaptation of his best-selling book about the crucifixion of Christ that adds nothing dramatically, philosophically or cinematically to what we've seen onscreen for deacdes, from King of Kings and The Greatest Story Ever Told to The Passion of the Christ.

Lacking the grandiosity of the reverent Biblical epics and the out-and-out sadism of Mel Gibson's movie (although it tries), the movie also features a blank slate in Haaz Sleiman's Jesus, although Pontius Pilate—a foolproof role—is well-played by Stephen Moyer. The hi-def transfer is first-rate.

The Pillow Book

(Film Movement Classics)

Peter Greenaway's 1996 Tokyo-set drama of vengeful calligraphy written on men's bodies was the beginning of his fall from arthouse grace following the extreme violence of The Cook the Thief His Wife and Her Lover and The Baby of Macon: its unwieldy mix of visual experimentation, eclectic music from U2 to Japanese songs and Greenaway's own formal elegance never coheres into anything beyond empty if stimulating images.

The Blu-ray—with a new Greenaway commentary covering the first 38 of the film's 127 minutes—has a transfer which shows the varied aspect ratios within the square 1.33:1 frame, cutting down considerably the visual information one can see. Too bad the hi-def transfer isn't like that for The Grand Budapest Hotel, which utilized the entire 16:9 widescreen for its varied ratios.

Thank Your Lucky Stars

(Warner Archive)

This 1943 musical revue fills its two-hour running time with appearances by the biggest names in Hollywood at the time, some of whom (Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield, Errol Flynn) might be surprising in this context, while others—Bette Davis, Dinah Shore, Ann Sheridan, Alexis Smith—make it a glittering paean to the Great American Songbook.

The enjoyable musical numbers are the main interest of this embodiment of the era's "that's entertainment!" type of moviemaking. The restored film looks perfect on hi-def; extras comprise vintage cartoons, shorts and a radio broadcast.

DVDs of the Week

Gett

(Music Box)

Writer-director-star Ronit Elkabetz and her brother, co-writer-director Shlomi, have made a remarkably gripping study of the difficulties middle-aged Viviane has getting a divorce (or gett) from her husband in Israel.

Humanizing a managerie of characters—Viviane, her husband, her lawyer, his brother/court representative and the three-man panel of judges—the talented siblings' stunning look at how modern society butts heads with ancient law gives as much weight to their characters' pauses, silences and gestures as they do the words that alternately wound and heal. Extras comprise a making-of featurette and interviews.

Once a Thief

(Warner Archive)

The grit and grime of working-class criminals underscores this 1965 cop drama about a former thief tempted with one last big score by his brother while a relentless detective bears down on him, his innocent wife and young daughter.

The screws are tightened by Ralph Nelson's taut direction and Zekial Marko's precsise script (based on his own novel), and even if the finale is too convoluted, the acting by Alain Delon, Van Heflin, Jack Palance and Ann-Margret help finesse the plot holes to keep things moving.

Pretty Little Liars—Complete 5th Season

(Warner Bros)

Aria, Emily, Hanna and Spencer are joined by Alison—presumed dead last season—to find answers to seemingly unanswerable questions, as the mysteries continue unabated for what is now a quintet of "liars" in the popular ABC Family series' fifth season.

The five-disc set, which includes 25 episodes, also contains a plethora of bonus features: several featurettes, cast interviews, a look inside the series' 100th episode, a fan appreciation episode and deleted scenes.

Tough Being Loved By Jerks

(Kino Lorber)

Daniel Leconte’s account of the 2007 trial of the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo after being sued over its publication of cartoons deemed offensive to Muslims has an added poignance after the horrific January events when its editorial staff was cut down by extremists. (Many of those interviewed by Leconte are now dead.)

Leconte's cameras record editorial meetings where cartoons, columns and cover art are discussed, and he sits down with everyone involved—from editors and cartoonists to aggrieved Muslims—to arrive at a thorough overview of a still-volatile subject, allowing all sides to speak openly.

Off-Broadway Reviews—"The Way We Get By," "Permission"

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Monday, 08 June 2015 23:41; Written by Kevin Filipski

The Way We Get By
Written by Neil LaBute; directed by Leigh Silverman
Closes June 21, 2015

Permission
Written by Robert Askins; directed by Alex Timbers
Closes June 14, 2015

Seyfried and Sadoski in The Way We Get By (photo: Joan Marcus)

Playwright Neil LaBute has made a career out of random shocks, but his latest The Way We Get By makes it look as if the well is running dry. Positioned somewhere between earlier taboo-busters as Wrecks and Fat Pig and recent LaBute-lite works like Reasons to Be Pretty, the new play is pleasantly bland but ultimately forgettable.

After covering incest with Wrecks, LaBute kinda sorta returns to the subject with his two-hander about the aftermath of a one-night stand between Doug and Beth, twenty-somethings who tiptoe around each other the next morning until they finally confront an inescapable fact that will impact their decision to become a couple. For 80 minutes, they sift through their feelings, fears and personal histories, all to little avail because, in LaBute's hands, their story has all the urgency and excitement of watching the mirowave heat up one's leftovers.

Lame jokes about Doug's Star Wars t-shirt (which Beth wears after their night of sex) and Beth's annoying unseen roommate garner easy chuckles, but the psychology of two people unsure of where they stand in their relationship is bypassed for facile moments like Doug guiltily stopping Beth from going down on him, even though they just had a wild night of satisfying sex.

LaBute's facility with dialogue sounds, in its hemming and hawing, like twenty-somethings earnestly trying to break through their inarticulateness, while Amanda Seyfried and Thomas Sadoski give engaged and engaging performances. Leigh Silverman adroitly directs on Neil Patel's perfect apartment set, but Doug and Beth's morning-after predicament remains less than earth-shattering.

The cast of Permission (photo: Jenny Anderson)

Permission emanates from the pen of Texan playwright Robert Askins, who wrote the Tony-nominated Hand to God. Askins undoubtedly knows the people about whom he writes, and he has a genuinely skewered perspective: but Hand to God trafficked in juvenile humor and Permission unfortunately follows suit.

Friends Eric and Zach and their wives Cynthia and Michelle are eating dinner at Zach's home: when Eric and Cynthia see Zach spanking Michelle for percevied indiscretions, they discover that CDD, Christian Domestic Discipline, is being practiced and start using it themselves. Eric is also interested in Jeanie, his cute student assistant at the local college where he is acting head of the Computer Science department, and soon finds himself juggling a willingly disciplined Cynthia, a reluctantly discplining Zach and a confused Jeanie, who believes she's joining a swinging marriage cult after her tryst with Eric.

As in Hand to God, Askins treats a valid comic subject in a trashy way; the earlier play copped cheap laughs from its foul-mouthed hand puppet, and Permission is no less risible. Rather than explore the mingling of religion, patriarchy, sexual pleasure and hypocrisy in a serious but amusing way, Askins again reverts to the lowest common denominator with glib jokes about things like gluten, kale, Facebook and Matlock reruns.

Director Thomas Kail plays into the frivolity by staging the play like a sitcom, letting the audience chuckle at rather than with these stick figures. Only Nicole Lowrance's performance shows she's aware that the play should have multiple layers: her Michelle is strong, smart, sexy and sympathetic. But for the most part, Elizabeth Reaser's Cynthia, Justin Bartha's Eric, Lucas Near-Verbrugghe's Zach and Talene Monahon's Jeanie approach caricature. Permission ends up lacking the courage of its convictions, preferring cheap laughs to stinging adult satire.

The Way We Get By
Second Stage Theatre, 305 West 43rd Street, New York, NY
2st.com

Permission
Lucille Lortel Theatre, 121 Christopher Street, New York, NY
mcctheatre.org

"24 Days" Brings the World’s Attention to Anti-Semitic Crime in France

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Friday, 05 June 2015 15:36; Written by Nora Lee Mandel

24 Days helps an American audience put into alarming context what only grabbed our attention intermittently, early this year with the hostage-taking and killings of four Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris, last year when a Frenchman shot visitors to the Jewish Museum in Brussels, and another killed three children and a rabbi at a Toulouse school in 2012. Some 241 violent anti-Semitic acts were reported last year in France, twice as many as the previous year, according to the SPCJ, the country’s equivalent to the Anti-Defamation League.

But in 2006 most Americans were not aware of the first notorious incident that marked the start of this most disturbing phenomenon in Europe since the Holocaust, making this methodically step by step closely realistic docudrama, filmed in the original locales, as tensely suspenseful as it is shocking.

The Halimi family gradually comes together for a typical Shabbat dinner. The mother Ruth (Zabou Breitman) leaves her secretarial job and shops for items her children would enjoy, then her teenage daughter Yaël (Alka Balbir) helps her cook in the kitchen, and an older brother stops by with his wife and toddler. Her shaggily handsome 23-year-old son Ilan (Syrus Shahidi) comes home from his job at a mobile phone shop and works his own phone to set up his social activities for the evening. With his girlfriend and best friend busy, he’s open to an invitation to meet up at a café from the pretty woman he recalls flirting with at the store.

24 daysposter But their relaxed weekend explodes when a frantic friend of Ilan’s calls about an email notice that Ilan has been kidnapped. With a photo of the bound and gagged young man with a gun to his head and a demand for 450,000 Euros, they all panic. Her ex-husband Didier (Pascal Elbé), who owns a small clothing store, is perplexed that they could be targeted. Confused when they get another call – in what will soon be hundreds and hundreds -- now demanding a hundred thousand Euros, they go to the police in desperation. Just as calm Police Chief Delcour (Jacques Gamblin) brings in a coolly experienced negotiator Brigitte Farell (Sylvie Testud, who recently starred in La Rafle/The Round Up, about French complicity in the Gestapo round-ups), the film flashes back to let us know this is not the typical kidnapping the police presume as they methodically check Ilan’s contacts. That cute girl in the phone shop got into a car with a question for the driver: “How can you tell he’s Jewish?” The ringleader was casing the block: “The store closes on Saturday, so they’re all Jews.” An additional flashback shows her luring Ilan to the place where three men attack him.

The almost 700 phone calls are nerve-wracking and inconsistent, with different demands and ever more violent and profane threats, ratcheting up the family’s tension and helplessness. Some calls are traced to Ivory Coast in Africa – where we start to see that the ringleader Fofana (Tony Harrisson) has family and smuggling connections. The anxious mother thinks their wording indicates Islamists, but the negotiator is skeptical: “Why would Al Queda be after a phone store operator?” The police commander is firm about not giving into ransom demands, but any attempts to deliver money fail anyway. When the mother learns the kidnappers have also sent a letter to a rabbi to publicize “A Jew had been kidnapped”, she is emotionally haunted by Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl’s kidnapping in Pakistan four years earlier, even as the father scoffs at the comparison. As seen in André Téchiné’s 2009 Girl on the Train (La Fille du RER) fictionalized version, the police had just gotten nationally embarrassed by a girl’s false accusation of an anti-Semitic incident and cautiously ignored the references, even as the mother gets more and more insistent about this clue.

The police effort focuses on internet cafés and spot checking for ID’s – but their miscommunications help Fofana slip by them several times, and the film shifts (a bit awkwardly and inconsistently) to his young motley crew, who call themselves “The Barbarians”, and are mostly differentiated by age and how little or much they gleefully torture. Ilan is hidden in the depths of a dense apartment block, of the kind that the French call “cités”, full of immigrants, minorities, the unemployed, and drug dealers. They eat take out, while the bound and gagged Ilan whimpers from fear and hunger. “Can’t that Jew shut up?” complains one, and kicks him into silence. Over the days, others take turns beating him, and then even worse. There are plenty of intimidated witnesses when the gang drags him from an apartment to the basement half-way through his ordeal (though, unfortunately, there’s no day countdown on screen) – but no one tells the authorities in a neighborhood that the police have been avoiding since riots just a few months earlier. French director Alexandre Arcady, whose 15 earlier films were not distributed in the U.S., makes these scenes almost as effective as Venezuelan director Jonathan Jakubowicz’s Secuestro Express from 2005, one of the most realistic of the South American kidnapping movies, which emphasizes that the French were inexperienced in handling such crimes.

Before seeing this wrenching film, most Americans won’t be familiar with the outcomes for the victim, the police, the perpetrators, and the French Jewish community that are difficult to watch, the case of Ilan Halimi was cited in Tablet Magazine’s recent insightful five-part series on “France’s Toxic Hate” as a key marker that woke up a nation to the targeted terror in its midst. While Ruth Halimi’s memoir that is the basis for the film is not yet available in English, her courageous public, and prescient, insistence that her son’s kidnapping and torture were virulently anti-Semitic will now be loudly heard beyond France.

While continuing theatrical and festival runs, the film is now available on such platforms as: iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, Google Play, Playstation Network, Xbox Live and VUDU.

Nora Lee Mandel is a member of New York Film Critics Online and the Alliance of Women Film Journalists.

Off-Broadway Reviews—"What I Did Last Summer," "Tuesdays at Tesco's"

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 04 June 2015 23:21; Written by Kevin Filipski

What I Did Last Summer
Written by A.R. Gurney; directed by Jim Simpson
Closes June 7, 2015

Tuesdays at Tesco's
Written by Emmanuel Darley; translated/adapted by Mathew Hurt & Sarah Vermande
Directed by Simon Stokes
Closes June 7, 2015

Kristine Nielsen and Carolyn McCormick in What I Did Last Summer (photo: Joan Marcus)

Playwright A.R. Gurney has been so prolific that at times his plays bleed into one another. A couple of seasons back, I saw Gurney'sFamily Furniture, about an affluent Buffalo family vacationing on the Canadian shore of Lake Erie in the summer of 1953. Now, there's a revival of a Gurney's 1981 play What I Did Last Summer, about an affluent Buffalo family vacationing on the Canadian shore of Lake Erie in the summer of 1945.

Summer's autobiographical look back at a teenage boy’s artistic—and, to a lesser extent, sexual—awakening doesn’t linger in the memory as did Family Furniture’s quiet exploration of a family's fraught relationships. Gurney’s odd decision to break the fourth wall and have his characters talk directly to the audience—our hero Charlie, his mother Grace, his Canadian friend Ted and his older sister Elsie all announce that they are the play's lead character—also undercuts his own elegant but incisive dissection of the upper crust.

Director Jim Simpson furthers the alienation effect by projecting stage directions and dialogue onto the back wall, which the characters often refer to (garnering cheap laughs), and having talented drummer Dan Weiner pound away throughout the play, needlessly punctuating jokes or one-liners with rim-shots: that drumming was a big part of two Oscar-winning movies, Birdman and Whiplash, no doubt contributed to this idea. These ill-fated directorial tricks drag Gurney down from his usual civility into the jokily experimental and inconsequential.

For those like me who grew up in Buffalo, there's nostalgia in hearing about summer vacations on Lake Erie and the roller coaster on the water’s edge called The Cyclone (it was actually The Comet at Crystal Beach). But despite an endearing cast—even Kristine Nielsen, who plays Anna, the "crazy lady" of the neighborhood who befriends and teaches Charlie about art, tones down her signature overacting—What I Did Last Summer is little more than a pleasant idyll.

Simon Callow in Tuesdays at Tesco's (photo: Carol Rosegg)

The acting tour de force of Simon Callow in Tuesdays at Tesco’s—part of this season’s Brits Off Broadway Festival—is theater at its most sublime. As Pauline—the middle-aged transgender daughter of an elderly man whose wife recently died, visiting his home once a week to tidy up, do laundry and take him to the local supermarket to stock up on groceries, hence the title—Callow gives an exceptionally lively portrayal that has no hint of the stage ham that might afflict many a lesser actor.

For this 70-minute monologue, Callow’s Pauline enters dressed in a wrinkled blouse and skirt, wearing a wig, makeup and high heels, speaking in that unmistakably mellifluous voice that allows the dialogue, however clunky, to take flight, whether speaking in Pauline's carefully cultivated accent or the father's more gutteral, working-class one.

But this is not simply a drag show. Callow gets straight to the heart of Pauline—nee Paul, which his father still calls her in anger and sadness—with a rich, wondrously humane portrayal (any allusions to Caitlyn Jenner are coincidental) that makes the play itself seem substantial. Written by Frenchman Emmanuel Darley, and translated and adapted by Mathew Hurt and Sarah Vermande, Tuesdays skims the surface of Pauline’s psyche—and ends with a desperate attempt to shock—while director Simon Stokes' abstract staging (complete with a piano player who tickles the ivories to punctuate scenes, as Callow does a few amusingly incongruous jigs) for the most part keeps out of Callow's way. That's the smart thing to do.

What I Did Last Summer

Signature Theatre, 480 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
signaturetheatre.org

Tuesdays at Tesco's
59 E 59 Theatres, 59 East 59th Street, New York, NY
britsoffbroadway.com

Reviews

June '15 Digital Week II

Off-Broadway Reviews—"The Way We Get By," "Permission"

"24 Days" Brings the World’s Attention to Anti-Semitic Crime in France

Off-Broadway Reviews—"What I Did Last Summer," "Tuesdays at Tesco's"

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