Blu-rays of the Week

Populating his film with the irritating but oh so clever denziens of most of today's movies, writer-director Matthew Weiner (creator of Mad Men) has made an occasionally well-observed comic portrait of American self-absorption.

 

Though the tone is consistently inconsistent, Owen Wilson, Amy Poehler and Zack Galifianakis are each less annoying than usual, while Laura Ramsey steals the film with sexy and funny performance. The Blu-ray image looks first-rate; lone extra is director's commentary.

 

Cold in July 

What begins as a typical crime drama—after innocent homeowner Richard shoots an intruder, his family is terrorized by the dead man's raging dad Ben—morphs into an engrossing thriller as Richard and Ben team with renegade cop Jim Bob and get involved in the mother of all criminal messes.

 

Director-writer Jim Mickle and co-writer Nick Damici's complex study of twisted relationships among men with little in common has its share of clunky moments, but strong acting by Michael C. Hall, Sam Shepard, Don Johnson and Vinessa Shaw more than compensates. The movie looks fine on Blu-ray; extras comprise commentaries, previsualization tests, deleted scenes and previsualization tests with optional commentaries.

 

 

 

 

From Dusk Til Dawn—Season One 

Based on the mindless but fun 1996 vampire movie by director Robert Rodriguez and writer-star Quentin Tarantino, the TV series stretches out the movie plot through 10 one-hour episodes, which unfortunately stretches the drama and amusement much too thin.

 

Still, there's much to enjoy, especially when a true find like Eiza Gonzalez, who plays Santanico Pandemonium, the stripper/vampire whom Salma Hayek played originally, is onscreen. The hi-def image looks perfect; extras include commentaries, featurettes and premiere Q&A.

 

Nightcap 

Claude Chabrol's delicious 2000 thriller sets up its convoluted but logical storyline—involving possible swapped babies at birth and a quietly fanatical stepmother with a penchant for poison—slowly, as in his masterly 1996 La Ceremonie, building inexorably to a final spasm of violence: offscreen this time but equally potent.

 

Superbly enacted by Isabelle Huppert, Anna Mouglalis, Jacques Dutronc and Rodolphe Pauly and directed by an effortless master, Nightcap (whose original title, Merci pour le chocolate, is far better) is dryly diverting entertainment. The movie has an excellent hi-def transfer; the lone extra is a commentary.

 

 

 

 

Michael Moore's first documentary, made in 1989, introduced a unique cinematic voice who became (and still stands as) a populist call for fairness, especially in one of the first films to so memorably capture the "have vs. have-not" divide that has only worsened in the quarter-century since its release.

 

The Blu-ray image is decent, but this isn't a visual film by any means; the lone extra is Moore's occasionally insightful commentary. But where is Moore's terrific follow-up short, 1992's Pets or Meat, which succinctly revisits the original's themes? 

 

Songs from Tsongas—Yes 35th Anniversary 

This 2004 concert showcases the legendary progressive rockers' most famous lineup (Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Chris Squire, Alan White and Rick Wakeman), comprising 2-1/2 hours of splendid music-making, including multi-part classics "South Side of the Sky," "I've Seen All Good People," "Yours Is No Disgrace" and "Starship Trooper," deep tracks "Wondrous Stories" and "Going for the One" and acoustic versions of smashes "Long Distance Runaround" and "Owner of a Lonely Heart."

 

The hi-def image looks good and the music sounds superb in surround sound; extras comprise nine songs from another 2004 concert, including full-band versions of Tsongas acoustic numbers; a bonus track, the 25-minute epic "Ritual"; and an interview with album-cover artist and stage set designer Roger Dean.

 

DVDs of the Week

Based on short stories by G.K. Chesterton, this entertaining drama series follows the genial but whipsmart priest who immerses himself in local crime scenes from which he extracts guilty parties, thanks to abilities which even veteran detectives are lacking.

 

As Father Brown, Mark Williams (best known for the Harry Potter movies) is amusingly real, while the natural beauties of the locations (it was shot in the Cotswolds area of England) give an enticing physical dimension to each of the 10 episodes. Extras include behind the scenes footage and cast and crew interviews.

 

The FBI—Complete 9th Season 

The classic crime-fight drama The FBI ended its nine-year run in the 1973-4 season, and the 23 episodes in this set explore the relationships among the agents, especially between new kid on the block Chris Daniels (played by ex-NFL star Shelly Novack) and veteran Inspector Eskerine (Efrem Zimbalist Jt.); the usual array of guest stars includes Dabney Coleman, Jackie Cooper, Joan Van Ark, Ann Francis and Leslie Nielsen.

 

In the sixth season of the hit procedural The Mentalist, the team of agents finally closes the "Red John" serial killer case, before jumping ahead two years and going to investigate more killings; 22 episodes are included on five discs. Mentalist extras comprise a featurette and deleted scenes.

 

 

 

 

The Prosecution of an American President 

Prosecutorial legend Vincent Bugliosi, who convicted Charles Manson, wrote a book calling for the prosecution of George W. Bush: not for mere war crimes, but for the murder of thousands of Iraqi citizens and American soldiers; directors David A. Burke and Dave Hagen persuasively visualize his well thought-out brief.

 

This is not an anti-Bush screed but a warning to any president who willfully enters into a war of convenience with lies and distortions, like the well- known ones shown. Most devastating, though, are the testimonies of families torn apart by loved ones dying unnecessarily in our endless War on Terror. Extras are deleted scenes.

 

To Be and To Have 

As anyone familiar with French director Nicholas Philibert’s non-fiction work can attest, he is an unassuming master at recording quotidian lives with care and precision—as he does in this sublime 2002 documentary about young schoolchildren and their caring teacher in the Auvergne region of central France.

 

In his inimitable fly-on-the-wall way, Philibert shows the give and take between the selfless teacher George Lopez with the utterly natural youngsters in his classroom. Extras include a Philibert interview and a "children reciting poetry" featurette.

Written by A.R. Gurney; directed by Gregory Mosher

Performances through February 15, 2015

 

Our most astute chronicler of the upper-crust, A.R. Gurney provides another one-percent primer with Love Letters, returning to Broadway for the first time since 1989 (it premiered the year before in New Haven). Comprising letters written by Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and Melissa Gardner over the course of their lives together and—mostly—apart, the play's epistolary structure makes it easy to perform (it's easily Gurney's most popular play): the performers sit at adjoining desks and read directly from their scripts.

 

The device is so ingeniously simple it's surprising it isn't been done more often. Andrew and Melissa discuss what's happening in their increasingly distant lives, while admitting to (or, occasionally, hiding) their feelings for each other as their decades apart pass by. Andrew is a WASP through and through who is a U.S. Senator by play's end—and, maybe one day, president—who writes letters that are mostly formal and even bland, while Melissa, far more emotionally volatile, wears her heart on her sleeve in each letter (about which she complains regularly, much preferring the telephone), signaling her intensely creative personality.

 

There are flaws, starting with that missing telephone: even with all their letter-writing, are we to believe these people never once pick up a phone to talk about important, or even everyday, matters? (We are also obviously in the pre-cell phone, pre-social media era.) Another problem is pitting highstrung Melissa against even-keel Andrew. She barrels through relationships, breakups, drinking bouts, stints in rehab, etc., while Andrew is the lone person to whom she writes about such momentous events. Even when they finally have their long-overdue affair—he's a Senator with a wife and children, she a divorced mother and frustrated artist—it seems that it's only so she can fly off the handle when he ends it because he's worried about his political career.

 

Gurney's acute ear for dialogue allows his actors to perform sundry miracles, particularly Mia Farrow, who looks two decades younger than her real age (69) as she makes manifest Melissa's broad emotions without wallowing in caricature. She even begins with a young girl's voice for the early letters, gradually—and imperceptibly—turning into a woman's.

 

Brian Dennehy has a forceful stage presence, so sitting and reading isn't his strong suit. But he's a hard-working, intelligent actor who nails Andrew's hesitant attitude. Understatedly directed by Gregory Mosher,Love Letters is an acting exercise in the best sense. (Dennehy and Farrow are in the play until Oct. 10, followed by Dennehy and Carol Burnett Oct. 11-Nov. 8 and Alan Alda and Candice Bergen Nov. 9-Dec. 5.)

 

Brooks Atkinson Theatre, 256 West 47th Street, New York, NY

lovelettersbroadway.com

Written by Ingmar Bergman; English version by Emily Mann; directed by Ivo van Hove

 

Scenes from a Marriage, one of Swedish master Ingmar Bergman's greatest films, has received a tantalizing stripping-down on its way to the stage. That was in Munich back in 1981, when Bergman himself directed his own adaptation of his masterly cinematic exploration of the 20-year relationship of Johan and Marianne, in and out of their marriage. 

 

The German-language production was, by all accounts, a rousing success, and if one can track down a copy of the book Ingmar Bergman: A Project for the Theatre, one can read Bergman's own play, which distills the laser-like focus of the six-part, five-hour television mini-series (edited to 169 minutes by Bergman himself for theatrical release) into an even narrower, pointed psychological anlaysis.

 

Instead of Bergman's own stage version in New York, however, we are getting Scenes from a Marriage as concocted by Ivo van Hove, the Flemish director famous (or infamous) for his deconstructions of classic texts: here, his treatment is a superficially clever travesty of a masterpiece.

 

Emily Mann gets credit for the English version, but it's van Hove who stamps this staging with his own brand of willfully perverse tampering. For the first act, which comprises the first three scenes we see of Johan and Marianne's marriage, the audience is split into three groups to successively watch the scenes, all performed simultaneously in three different spaces by three different couples. (The audience groups move to new sets of seats to watch each scene.) 

 

As each couple enacts its scene, the small space allows the (often yelling) voices from the other two scenes to bleed through, while strategically placed windows at the back of each stage allow audience members to catch what's going on in the other two spaces. 

 

That it doesn't add up too much illumination is beside the point, which apparently is that van Hove is attempting to make this couple's story more universal by casting Johan and Marianne in triplicate, despite the fact that none of his cast looks similar or is even age-appropriate. And van Hove's cast isn't a patch on Bergman's magisterial performers, Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, who created exacting, individualized characters who were also Everyman and Everywoman through sheer force of their volcanic talent and, of course, their writer-director's genius.

 

After a 30-minute intermission in which the crew dismantles the smaller stages to leave one large, mostly empty performing space, Act II comprises the final three scenes of Bergman's magnum opus. To one-up both Bergman and his own tripling conceit, van Hove has all the Johans and Mariannes act out scenes four and five simultaneously, their words often echoing what what one or another has just said, the dialogue overlapping to the point that one cannot hear clearly what is being said. (There's also a cheap-laugh moment when all three couples, after each retreating to the corners of the space behind the audience, make love and seemingly climax together.)

 

The effect is one of sheer irrationality; and later, during the big fight between the divorcing partners, three sets of couples roll around on the floor in marital and martial war, the whole thing becomes an acting class in which an unimaginative teacher asks students to perform a laboriously physical exercise in front of the others. 

 

What Bergman accomplished with incomparable acting and Sven Nykvist's impeccable cinematography (alternating between unrelenting closeups and exquisitely framed two-shots) cannot be replicated or even approximated, however many actors and actresses are onstage. Van Hove's so-called innovations seem to flame out after the fight, because he stages the last scene with only Johan and Marianne #3 (played by Arliss Howard and Tina Benko, the production's most accomplished perfomers, although Carmen Zilles is appealingly tart as Katarina, the spiteful wife of their friend Peter). 

 

Even here van Hove can't help himself: when Marianne falls asleep, Johan puts on a record and proceeds to do an interpretive dance to Michel Legrand's syrupy "Windmills of Your Mind," another example of this "innovative" director using pop songs for unsubtle ironic commentary, including Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water."

 

Since the dialogue comes directly from Bergman's own script (with added instances of unneeded foul language), moments of humanity and psychological complexity do bleed through. But van Hove's often arbitrary experimentation smothers the rest.

 

Performances through October 26, 2014

New York Theatre Workshop, New York, NY

nytw.org