March '12 Digital Week IV

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 26 March 2012 15:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week
B-52s with the Wild Crowd
(Eagle Rock)
The biggest band from Athens, Georgia, pre-REM, reunited last year for this raucous 90-minute 34th anniversary hometown concert. With performances of its biggest hits and most durable songs--like “Roam,” “Love Shack” and of course “Private Idaho” and “Rock Lobster”--the quartet, which comprises Kate Pierson, Cindy Wilson, Fred Schneider and Keith Strickland, shows it’s still in peak form.

The HD cameras and audio are excellent; a lengthy interview with the band is the lone extra.

A Lonely Place to Die
(IFC)
This ludicrous horror film has a premise in questionable taste--hikers find a scared little girl and are picked off one by one by snipers paid to kidnap her--and simply sets up the innocent victims as ducks in a shooting gallery without attempting to garner any legitimate suspense from their plight.

It’s well-made, and has razor-sharp editing, but your mileage may vary on how much gratuitous violence can make you enjoy it. The movie looks fine on Blu-ray.

Lost Keaton
(Kino)
While nowhere near the sustained level of hilarity of his early silent shorts and classic features, the 16 Buster Keaton shorts collected on these two discs from the sound era (mid-1930s) have their moments, notably when Buster’s physical comedy genius is allowed to run riot, i.e., during disc one’s opener, The Gold Ghost.

Keaton is on less firm ground with dialogue and interacting with the other stiff performers. But when he’s on--infrequently as he is here--he’s still unbeatable. The hi-def transfer enhances these beat-up prints, but at least they’re watchable.

The Muppets
(Disney)
Jason Segal is not my idea of a leading man or talented scriptwriter--so his fingerprints all over the new Muppets movie is cause for concern. The plot and jokes are so simplistic that one yearns for the lamest episodes of The Muppet Show.

And if the humans other than Segal and a too-perky Amy Adams--there are appearances by Chris Cooper, Rashida Jones and Jack Black, and, if you don’t blink, James Carville and Dave Grohl, among others--make the most of the silliness, the Muppets themselves are rarely amusing, for once. It all looks good on Blu-ray; extras are featurettes, deleted scenes and commentary.

Roadie
(Magnolia)
Director Michael Cuesta explores the lives of people on society’s fringes again in this familiar drama in which Jimmy--long-time Blue Oyster Cult employee--returns to Queens and pretends to be a successful songwriter and producer.

A delicious Jill Hennessey is an old flame building her own music career and Bobby Cannavale paints a warm, funny portrait of a loser with dreams of grandeur, but Ron Eldard is a wanly unconvincing Jimmy, preventing the movie from reaching its modest aims. The image is very good; the lone extra is a making-of featurette.

The Sitter
(Fox)
If you thought American comedies couldn’t become cruder or more infantile than The Hangover or Bridesmaids, this will prove you wrong. Watching Jonah Hill in anything (even Moneyball) is not my idea of a good time, and watching his one-note persona alongside a trio of irritating kids he’s babysitting--which of course goes horribly, unfunnily awry--is the least fun imaginable.

That charming actresses like Ari Graynor and Kylie Bunbury got mixed up in this mess is depressing. The Blu-ray looks decent enough; the usual extras comprise deleted scenes, alternate ending, featurettes and a gag reel.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
(Universal)
John Le Carre’s methodical Cold War spy thriller was brilliantly adapted for British TV in 1979 with Alec Guinness as a peerless George Smiley, which had the luxury of leisurely lingering over the convoluted plot and relationships.

Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation has much to recommend it--great locales, superlative acting by Gary Oldman (Smiley), Ciaran Hinds, John Hurt, Colin Firth, et al, in subordinate roles--but tailoring Tailor to two hours is both too much and far too little. The Blu-ray image is superior; extras include cast/director interviews and an Oldman/Alfredson commentary.

The War Room
(Criterion)
D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’ impressive fly-on-the-wall documentary about the 1992 Clinton campaign both opened eyes to down-and-dirty American politics and made stars of Clinton’s campaign managers, James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, polar opposites visually and temperamentally.

The original 16mm footage looks sharper in its upgrade to hi-def; the Criterion Collection’s typically packed Blu-ray edition includes new interviews with several principals and 2008’s retrospective, Return of the War Room.

DVDs of the Week
In the Garden of Sounds, Little Girl, Monsenor
(First Run)
This trio of typically intriguing First Run titles is led by In the Garden of Sounds, Nicola Bellucci’s fascinating documentary about a man who lost his sight to an hereditary disease and who gives “sound therapy” to disabled children.

Little Girl, from directors Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel, unsentimentally shows a group of hard-scrabble circus people who must care for an abandoned baby; and the clear-eyed Monsenor is a hard-hitting documentary about the life and violent death of Oscar Romero, the heroic archbishop who was murdered trying to help the less fortunate in El Salvador in 1980.

Mister Rogers and Me
(PBS)
Cristofer Wagner’s personal documentary presents his own story about Fred Rogers, one of the most popular--and easily satirized--television personalities in the medium’s history.

This engaging portrait earnestly shows how Rogers’ self-effacing and honest approach not only benefited millions of children (and their parents) for decades, but was exactly how the man lived his life off-camera as well. Extras include a commentary, Q&A, interviews.

Moses and Aaron
(New Yorker)
Arnold Schoenberg’s lone opera--intense (but problematic) musically--is dramatically stiff, so the decision of Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet to keep their 1975 film visually static is a smart one. The actors’ lip-synching doesn’t mesh with their arch performances, but strangely, that disconnect contextualizes a problematic 20th century opera telling an ancient story.

It’s not an enervating experience, but it is an audacious one. The lone extra is the directors’ minimalist adaptation of Schoenberg’s Accompaniment to a Film Scene.

Out
(Acorn)
The grit and grime of London’s inner city are the stars of this 1978 British TV mini-series, which stars an impressive Tom Bell as a jailbird who returns to his old stomping grounds after eight years up the river and finds it both the same and irrevocably changed.

Skillfully written by Trevor Preston and directed by Jim Goddard, this five-hour drama memorably evokes the seediness of criminals without romanticizing them, and features a stunning turn by Brian Cox as a deadly mob boss. Extras include audio commentaries.

Sidewalls
(IFC)
Director Gustavo Taretto’s romantic comedy is too clever by half: by bypassing his charismatic stars--Javier Drolas and the Pilar Lopez de Ayala--for amusingly droll but cloying segments, Taretto overwhelms the humanity at the heart of his machinery.

But thanks to his two stars--especially Ayala, a spectacular and little-seen actress who, in a just world, would be more popular than Penelope Cruz--the movie is watchable, even if it skimps on depth or insight.

Snow White: A Deadly Summer
(Lionsgate)
This tame, PG-13 thriller dangles its tantalizing premise--troubled teen may or may not be targeted by her evil stepmother--in front of viewers but offers little payoff aside from a twist ending. The actors can’t do much with a well-worn storyline, and Shanley Caswell, in the lead role, isn’t allowed to do much more than look cute.

Teenagers--the obvious audience for this--will also be unimpressed with a routine, mostly unscary horror film. The lone extra is an audio commentary.

Films in Brief: "Free Men"; "4:44 Last Days on Earth"; "The Deep Blue Sea"

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 22 March 2012 10:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Free Men
Directed by Ismael Ferroukhi

4:44 Last Days on Earth
Directed by Abel Ferrara

The Deep Blue Sea
Directed by Terence Davies

The history of the French resistance, which comprises thousands of worthy stories, was most recently treated most compellingly by director Robert Guédiguian in 2009’s Army of Crime. The latest attempt, Free Men, presents the resistance through a different lens: the setting is the Paris Mosque, where it was historically documented that the Muslim community protected and assisted Jews to escape the Nazis.

Director Ismael Ferroukhi’s fictionalized version revolves around his Algerian-born hero Younes who, after being coerced by the Vichy-controlled police force to inform on Muslims suspected of being freedom fighters, almost accidentally becomes transformed from an uninvolved immigrant to a committed resistance member. This remarkable change occurs after Younes discovers that the young and talented Algerian singer Salim--whom he has befriended--is Jewish; soon after, he helps hide two Jewish youngsters whose parents were taken away, and his new career has begun.

Despite melodramatic touches, Ferroukhi builds tension without sacrificing credible psychology as Younes becomes politically--and morally--engaged. Tahar Rahim, who was so memorable as the protagonist in Jacques Audiard’s prison drama A Prophet, plays Younes as an innocent naïf, remaining a blank slate for the director to fill in the character’s interior complexity. At times, Rahim is too much his director’s pawn, so detached he seems. But no matter: Free Men believably chronicles the multi-faceted Vichy atmosphere through the eyes of people we’ve rarely encountered onscreen: Muslims putting their lives on the line to defeat Hitler.

Abel Ferrara’s movies come off as unhinged rantings, which result in stillborn messes like the recent Go-Go Tales or his latest, 4:44 Last Days on Earth, which explores the final hours for a group of Manhattan city dwellers as the countdown to (an unexplained) Armageddon begins.

There are interesting moments here--particularly when protagonist Willem Dafoe screams from his building’s rooftop at neighbors and others still wandering the neighborhood--but Ferrara never develops anything coherently. The relationship between Dafoe and a wooden Shanyn Leigh as his wife never gives us any reason to care about the impending demise of non-entities. Aside from the woeful Leigh, the cast works hard, but Ferrara lets them (and the end of the world) down.

For his first fiction film since The House of Mirth in 2000, British director Terence Davies tackles Terence Rattigan’s dated play, The Deep Blue Sea, in which Hester, an unsatisfied young wife, finds solace in the arms of another man; since these are the conservative 1950s, her older husband--an upstanding judge--refuses to divorce her, committing her to a life of unhappiness.

Rattigan--a closeted homosexual at a time when it was a crime--originally wrote Sea with gay characters, but he knew it could never be produced during his lifetime, so he made the protagonist female, which further simplifies an already simplistic story without gaining emotional or psychological weight. Davies--also a homosexual--doesn’t change too much, diving head-first into Rattigan’s drenching sentimentality. The result is at the same time remote and syrupy.

Rachel Weisz suffers dutifully as Hester, first seen recovering from a suicide attempt; she looks and sounds perfect, yet her character’s inner life remains unexplored. Tom Hiddleston (lover) and Simon Russell Beale (husband) are fine. Davies’ eye for period detail is unerring, but his ear needs work: by smearing Samuel Barber’s aching, yearning, gorgeous Violin Concerto over everything, he fails too urgently dramatize Hester’s (mostly) unspoken longings and feelings.

Beautiful as Barber’s music is, it’s forced to carry the bulk of the drama’s burden, which Davies usually--and impeccably--avoids. But with Barber an easy shortcut, The Deep Blue Sea ends up treading water.

Free Men
Directed by Ismael Ferroukhi
Opens March 16, 2012
http://filmmovement.com

4:44 Last Days on Earth
Directed by Abel Ferrara
Opens March 23, 2012
http://ifcfilms.com

The Deep Blue Sea
Directed by Terence Davies
Opens March 23, 2012
http://musicboxfilms.com

March '12 Digital Week III

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Friday, 16 March 2012 20:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week
The Descendants
(Fox)
Alexander Payne (Election, Citizen Ruth, Sideways) makes movies that aren’t as substantial as he thinks. The Descendants is no different: a superbly befuddled George Clooney plays a Honolulu lawyer who discovers--once she’s in a coma--that his wife cheated on him, so he gathers his two daughters to track down her lover. What begins as a nicely observed adult comedy about dealing with everyday disasters switches gears, and spins its wheels, once the race is on to find the adulterer.

Payne builds to a satisfyingly melancholic ending, but too often finds easy, sitcom laughs a la James Brooks. The Blu-ray has a first-rate image; extras are featurettes on casting, Hawaiian locations, the real family behind the story, music videos and conversation between director and star.

Killer’s Moon and Virgin Witch
(Redemption/Kino Lorber)
This pair is the latest in Redemption Films’ attempt to redeem schlocky guilty pleasures. Alan Birkinshaw’s Killer’s Moon (1978) follows mental patients gleefully killing off teenage girls and their strait-laced chaperones; Ray Austin’s 1972 Virgin Witch follows innocent wannabe models discovering the agency is a front for a murderous witches’ coven.

They’re both as silly as they sound, but with plentiful gore and nudity, there’s definitely a built-in--and unfinicky--audience. The movies retain blemishes on hi-def but look good enough; Moon extras include director and star interviews.

The Last Temptation of Christ
(Criterion)
Martin Scorsese’s deeply personal adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ controversial novel was labeled anti-Christian to those who obviously never saw it; watching it in the Criterion Collection’s glorious hi-def version is a treat.

Shot on authentic Holy Land locations and propelled by Peter Gabriel’s otherworldly score, the film even overcomes some questionable casting with tremendously committed performances by Willem Dafoe (Jesus), Harvey Keitel (Judas) and Barbara Hershey (Mary Magdalene). Michael Ballahus’ cinematography shines on Blu-ray; extras include a Paul Schrader/ Dafoe/Jay Cocks commentary, Gabriel interview and Scorsese-shot location footage.

Melancholia
(Magnolia)
Ham-fisted and relentlessly clumsy--narratively, psychologically and metaphorically--Lars von Trier’s latest provocation begins with a ponderous wedding sequence that plays like a slack-eyed parody of The Deer Hunter, and his leaden dramatics are on display for a mind-boggling 135 minutes.

Kirsten Dunst is fatally hamstrung by her character’s essential shallowness: this depressive’s troubles are small potatoes compared to the title planet (who named it?) moving toward earth. Trier even repeats trite effects: Antichrist’s slo-mo Handel opening returns, as Armageddon is here scored to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. On Blu-ray, Trier’s clever imagery gets its digital due; extras are four featurettes.

My Week with Marilyn (Anchor Bay)
Michelle Williams’ gently affecting portrayal of Marilyn Monroe dominates Simon Curtis’ incredibly thin biopic that does little with a great subject: the battle royale between Marilyn and Lord Olivier on the set of The Prince and the Showgirl.

Despite Kenneth Branagh’s excellent Olivier impersonation, the movie never livens up, with bland scenes between Williams and Eddie Redmayne as the lowly assistant whom MM gloms onto (at least according to his memoir) mere filler. The movie looks strong on Blu-ray; extras include a Curtis commentary and making-of featurette.

Neverland
(Vivendi)
This lengthy (three hours!) Peter Pan prequel does Spielberg’s Hook one better by actually fleshing out characters and leaving the big-names to Keira Knightley’s voice (as Tinkerbell). Despite occasional dawdling and repetition, Neverland scores in the person of Anna Friel, a delightfully frisky, criminally underused actress who steals scenes as a pirate any man would love to be the enemy of.

The rest of the cast and effects are fine, but some story streamlining would have helped. No qualms about the Blu-ray image, which is fantastic; the extras comprise commentary, cast interviews and special effects featurette.

The Search for One-Eyed Jimmy
(Kino Lorber)
This 1993 Brooklyn-shot indie by Sam Henry Kass (remember him? I didn’t think so) has the dubious distinction of casting future stars of film, stage and screen--Samuel L. Jackson, Sam Rockwell, John Turturro, Steve Buscemi (and Jennifer Beals and Ann Meara for good measure)--and letting them flounder with an unfunny script and non-story that would bore any shaggy dog.

The movie looks decent in its leap to hi-def; no extras.

The Three Musketeers
(Summit)
In this lukewarm swashbuckler, director Paul W.S. Anderson puts a middling cast (Orlando Bloom, Milla Jovavich, Logan Lerman, Luke Evans) through its paces, but never approaches the grand fun and swordplay heroics of earlier adaptors Richard Lester and Bertrand Tavernier.

The movie looks gorgeous--Anderson’s refusal to use more green screen than in-camera effects is refreshing for an action director today--especially on Blu-ray. Extras include filmmakers’ commentary, deleted scenes with commentary and scene-specific featurettes and interviews.

DVDs of the Week
Bellissima and La terra trema
(e one)
Before such luscious, opulent spectaculars as The Leopard and The Innocent, Italian director Luciano Visconti made small, neo-realist pictures, and two of his classics return, superbly restored.

1948’s magnificent Trema was shot on Sicilian locations with non-professional actors, while 1951’s Bellissima stars Anna Magnani as the most overbearing stage mother ever; here Visconti uses neo-realist techniques to great effect, not least in the unaffected acting of young Tina Apicella. Would that those annoying yellow subtitles didn’t detract from the near-pristine black and white pictures.

House of Pleasures
(IFC)
Bertrand Bonello’s unerotic turn-of-the-century character study about prostitutes in a high-class Parisian brothel is more successful at relationships than sex, even if dividing screen time among several women robs them of their individuality, despite their compelling stories, like one whose mouth has ghastly scars from a crazed john and a teen whose “career” is off to a rocky start.

Costumes, sets and lighting are exquisite, but Bonello--as in his other films--takes a good idea then does little with it. Extras include casting and making-of featurettes.

In Their Own Words
(Athena)
These fascinating, informative BBC documentaries do more than save the words and voices of the 20th century’s prominent writers and intellectuals: they intelligently and learnedly place them in context so one can appreciate their achievements in art, science, politics and economics.

The first program features seven decades of British writers from Virginia Woolf to Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie; the second chronicles thinkers from Sigmund Freud and Margaret Mead to cultural attaches from the BBC and others.

My Joy
(Kino Lorber)
Sergei Loznitsa’s astonishing debut feature makes little narrative sense: if you don’t pair the first half’s clean-shaven truck driver with the bearded man of the second, you’ll be lost during a corrosive series of unsettling vignettes showing the anarchic society that Putin’s Russia has become.

But Loznitsa is in total command of the frame: rarely has widescreen seemed so terrifying, especially the breathtaking final shot on a snow-bound road in near-total darkness. Too bad there are burnt-in subtitles, no extras and no Blu-ray.

Savage Sisters, Sinful Davey, Timbuktu
(MGM)
Three decades are represented in this latest trio from MGM’s Limited Edition Collection, on DVD-Rs instead of official DVDs. There’s Jacques Tourneur’s vaguely ludicrous sand epic, 1958’s Timbuktu, starring Victor Mature and Yvonne DeCarlo in a romantic adventure set in the French colony in 1940.

John Huston’s 1969 Sinful Davey, a Tom Jones retread, is as forced and hollow as the earlier film was witty and relaxed; John Hurt’s performance as the title rogue is wasted. And 1974’s Savage Sisters is a weak attempt at a T&A epic set in an unnamed jungle nation, as three buxom heroines get caught up in a disastrous coup attempt. The films look decent on DVD, at least; no extras.

CDs of the Week
Marlis Petersen: Goethe Lieder
(Harmonia Mundi)
German soprano Marlis Petersen--whose torrid Lulu at the Met a few years back introduced her New York audiences in a big way--sings a well-programmed recital of songs by 16 composers on texts by Goethe about the “eternal feminine.”

With excellent pianist Jendrik Springer along for her adventurous ride, Petersen begins with Ernst Krenek’s epic “Stella’s Monologue” and performs 18 more songs, from Schumann, Wagner and Liszt to rarities by Walter Braunfels and a new work by Manfred Trojahn, all in a crystalline voice conveying the varied moods of Goethe’s unreachable, ideal females.

Massenet: Don Quichotte
(Mariinsky)
Jules Massenet’s grand opera, loosely based on Cervantes’ classic novel, has the requisite rousing choral numbers and vivid orchestral passages that give a sense of the mock-grandeur of literature’s most absurdly heroic buffoon. But intimate scenes between Don and sidekick Sancho Panza or Dulcinea, the woman of his dreams, lack comic and romantic fire.

At least that’s what we get in this workmanlike 2011 Mariinsky Theater performance--the indefatigable Valery Gergiev leads orchestra, chorus and his academy’s young singers in a dutiful, occasionally inspired interpretation of a twilight work from the French composer.