December '11 Digital Week II

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Sunday, 11 December 2011 20:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week
Becoming Jane (Echo Bridge)
Anne Hathaway’s breakthrough performance in Julian Jarrold’s biopic about how a young Jane Austen became a beloved author highlights a refreshingly lighthearted costume drama filled with strong characterizations by James Cromwell, Maggie Smith and Julia Walters--only James McAvoy as Austen’s beau is too lightweight.

With richly detailed sets and costumes, the movie’s visuals are ripe for a hi-def upgrade, and the excellent Blu-ray has the right amount of grain; extras include a commentary, deleted scenes and an on-set featurette.

Design for Living (Criterion)
One of Noel Coward’s wittiest plays was transformed by director Ernest Lubitsch into a charming 1933 romantic comedy minus the acerbic Coward wit. With the trio played by Miriam Hopkins, Gary Cooper and Frederic March, this Design is amusing if surprisingly superficial.

Dazzling-looking black-and-white visuals are courtesy of the Criterion Collection’s superb Blu-ray transfer; extras comprise scholar William Paul’s commentary, Joseph McBride interview about Ben Hecht’s adaptation, and a superior British TV condensation of the play introduced by Coward himself.

Friends with Benefits (Sony)
Traversing territory recently trod by Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman in No Strings Attached, this routine comedy pits another charming and sexy actress--Mila Kunis--against a charmless Justin Timberlake, who again shows his glaring inability to enact a real character.

Like the other movie, there’s nasty dialogue galore, and it’s fun to hear a beautiful actress spit out tart dialogue, but the game Kunis is wasted next her costar. The Blu-ray release sports a solid transfer and extras that include a commentary, outtakes and deleted scenes.

The Help (Touchstone/Dreamworks)
Kathryn Stockett’s mega-bestseller about racism in 1960s South is transferred to the screen with minimal fuss and its basic tear-jerking mechanisms intact, courtesy of writer-director Tate Taylor.

This story of black servants stoically retaining their dignity during Jim Crow is one that most audiences can watch and feel good about from a safe distance, while those who don’t connect can still admire the unfussy acting by Jessica Chastain, Allison Janney, Sissy Spacek and Viola Davis. (The others are too broad in their characterizations.) The picture is excellent on the Blu-ray transfer; extras include deleted scenes and an on-set featurette.

Life, Above All (Sony)
Oliver Schmitz’s heartfelt drama about superstition and disease in a small African village is an emotionally wrought tragedy that’s lined with a sliver of hope.

In this story of a teenage girl who tries to reverse a stigma that’s attached itself to her family when her infant sister dies, there are moments of melodramatic excess, but for the most part, the film is gripping, stark and brilliantly acted. The Blu-ray image is first-rate; the lone extra is a making-of featurette.

Medea (e one)
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s typically idiosyncratic adaptation of Euripides’ tragedy, which stars ill-at-ease opera diva Maria Callas in the title role, is highlighted by intriguing visuals despite a modest budget.

These include the centaur and splendid use of Turkish and Italian locations, including Pisa’s Field of Miracles that refrains from showing the famous Leaning Tower. On Blu-ray, the film looks especially good despite the limitations of the film stock. The lone extra is Tony Palmer’s fine 90-minute documentary about Callas.

Now and Later (Cinema Libre)
Bring together a Wall Street whiz kid running from the law and a spiritual (and sexual) Latina who takes him under her wing and you have this partly interesting, mostly ludicrous Last Tango in East L.A.

If you tune out the tin-eared dialogue--much of which sounds like New Agey outtakes--there’s lots of sex--some of which doesn’t look simulated--to keep one’s interest. Even if their line readings are mainly wooden, James Wortham and Shari Solanis handle the physical intimacy deftly. Hi-def doesn’t really help the movie’s low-budget look; extras include deleted scenes and cast interviews.

Tora! Tora! Tora! (Fox)
In honor of the 70th anniversary of American sailors’ heroism at Pearl Harbor, this 1970 fictional reenactment of the prelude to and consequences of the Japanese attack resurfaces in hi-definition.

Meticulously showing belligerent Japanese planning and the defensive U.S. posture, the movie has almost unavoidable and plodding sanctimony, but it’s still a worthwhile recreation of historic events. The Blu-ray release has an overload of film-like detail; included are both the U.S. and the Japanese versions (which includes an additional 10 minutes), with loads of  extras including new and vintage featurettes and interviews.

2011 World Series Champions (A&E)
When the St. Louis Cardinals won its 11th  championship in October, it was a fitting end to the season for baseball fans sick of hearing about the dominance of the league’s richest teams, the Yankees, Red Sox and Phillies, none of whom got very far.

This highlight-rich retrospective--narrated by Mad Men star (and St. Louis native) Jon Hamm--shows off the team’s season-long run, which culminated in those amazing final weeks when the Atlanta Braves’ epic collapse allowed the Cards to clinch a playoff berth on the final day. Shot in hi-def, the World Series games look stunning; included among a bunch of extras is the clinching NLDS Game 5 against the Phillies in its entirety.

Vietnam in HD (History)
On the heels of its excellent release WWII in HD comes this two-disc set containing four hours of hi-def footage from the most divisive U.S. war of the 20th century. With so much film footage--well-known or barely seen, much of it quite shocking--at their disposal, the filmmakers have made a thorough overview of the war from 1964 to 1975’s fall of Saigon, with several soldiers and family members’ own stories woven into the rich fabric.

Even in its often ragged state, this color footage is extremely powerful in HD, and it gives the resulting document a “you are there” immediacy for viewers.

DVDs of the Week
Come Have Coffee with Us (Raro Video)
Nearly forgotten Italian director Alberto Lattuada--who co-directed Fellini’s debut, Variety Lights, and also made the unforgettable 1964 comedy Mafioso--helmed this frisky 1970 comedy that stars the irrepressible Ugo Tognazzi as a man who gets involved with three spinster sisters after their rich father dies: predictably, amorous adventures ensue.

Although the movie is not much different than other erotic Italian comedies of its era, Lattuada’s light touch and Tognazzi’s presence distinguish it. The lone extra is an interview with film critic Adriano Apra.

Inside Hana’s Suitcase (Menemsha Films)
This unbearably moving documentary is yet another Holocaust story--but since so many will never be told, this one must be. When a young Jewish victim’s suitcase surfaces at Tokyo’s Holocaust Museum, its director and her students attempt to piece together its history. They discover that she died at Auschwitz as a teenager, but her older brother survived and now lives in Toronto.

Director Larry Weinstein’s re-enactments--which normally don’t work for me in documentaries--are so restrained they snugly fit in the film. When Hana’s brother goes to Japan to meet the kids who have “resurrected’ his sister, it’s so rawly emotional that I dare any eyes to stay dry in the movie’s final reels.

Milestones/Ice (Icarus)

Robert Kramer’s epic study of Americans trying to come to terms with their disillusionment over their lost 60s idealism, Milestones is an epic snapshot of our nation at a specific point in time in a brilliant and original mash-up of documentary and fiction.

This 200-minute masterwork of reportage--made over a period of years and finished in 1975--gets its first DVD release some dozen years after the filmmaker‘s death; also included is Kramer’s espionage-paranoia meditation, Ice (1969), which is more relevant historically than artistically.

CDs of the Week
Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Glyndebourne)
Benjamin Britten’s 1959 opera based on Shakespeare’s fantastical play of sprites, fairies, mechanicals and lovers is given a superlative hearing in this 2006 recording from England’s summer Glyndebourne Festival.

The orchestra positively shimmers during the nocturnal interludes, while countertenor Bejun Mehta (as fairy king Oberon) and soprano Kate Royal (as one of the lovers, Helena) head a terrific cast, with an inspired group of youngsters making up the impish fairies’ chorus.

Honegger, Orchestral Works (LPO Live)
Masterly Swiss composer Arthur Honegger was a member of Les Six, a group of French-based composers from the first half of the 20th century.

This recording of live performances by the illustrious London Philharmonic Orchestra under the steady baton of conductor Vladimir Jurowski--highlights Honegger’s brilliant orchestral work, from the shimmery Summer Pastoral and propulsive Symphony No. 4 to the glorious chorale of his final composition, the seasonally apt Christmas Cantata.

NYC Theater Roundup: Off-Broadway Doings

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Friday, 09 December 2011 10:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Neighbourhood Watch
Written and directed by Alan Ayckbourn

Burning
Written by Thomas Bradshaw; directed by Scott Elliott

For his 75th play, the astonishingly prolific and proficient Alan Ayckbourn has created the scarily prescient Neighbourhood Watch, which premiered in North Yorkshire after riots engulfed London and other British cities last summer. With Ayckbourn’s typical precision and wit, the play explores relevant themes of law and order (or lack thereof), as a gated community finds itself at the mercy of outside lawbreakers and resorts to extreme measures for self-protection.

It’s a pair of new arrivals, the middle-aged and God-fearing brother and sister Martin and Hilda who, after fending off a would-be juvenile intruder in their own backyard, decides to start a neighborhood watch group with other like-minded folk in the Bluebell Hill development. The siblings are joined by local gossip and widower Dorothy; former security man Rod; cuckolded husband Gareth; and music teacher Magda, whose tyrant of a husband Luther wants nothing to do with them.

Martin, despite his essential passivity (and pacifism), becomes leader of the group, turning Bluebill Hill into a mini-police state with armed patrols, mandatory ID cards, barbed-wire fences and even stocks for egregious lawbreakers (which don’t work so well for anorexic teenage girls, who are able to slip out of them). Martin soon begins to enjoy the perks of being in charge, and there are not only whisperings of future political office--the group’s success at curbing crime is receiving attention from the media--but also the attention of Gareth’s supremely unfaithful wife Amy.

Ayckbourn, of course, plants weeds in this supposed garden of paradise, as the responsible law-and-order crowd can’t see past its paranoia until it is too late, and a home is burned down and one of the group is shot dead by the police who think a weapon is being brandished (it’s only a statue of Jesus, while Martin’s equally benign garden gnome was thrown through the window during an earlier melee).

As always, Ayckbourn sets up outlandishly farcical situations--especially Martin’s dalliance with the ravenously sexy Amy--and transforms them into comic nirvana by grounding his characters, however eccentric they are, in a basic realism. Like last year’s My Wonderful Day--another highlight of the annual Brits Off Broadway festival--Neighourhood Watch finds dark humor and humane insight in the everyday, even if the ending lacks a certain comic finesse.

Under Ayckbourn’s own spirited direction, which takes the full measure of his foolishly endearing characters, the formidable cast of eight is superlative separately and together, combining subtlety and broadness in a kind of ridiculously grand tango.

Frances Grey’s nymphomaniacal Amy, Alexandra Mathie’s protective Hilda and Matthew Cottle’s naive Martin are best, but kudos also go to Eileen Battye (Dorothy), Terence Booth (Rod), Phil Cheadle (Luther), Amy Loughton (Magda) and Richard Derrington (Gareth). In fact, everything about Neighbourhood Watch is so effortless that it appears to be a frivolous farce, not a corrosive satire.

In Burning, playwright Thomas Bradshaw obsesses on sex and death: there are numerous gay, straight and interracial couplings, funeral/memorial/cremation scenes, even a movie house murder. But there’s no discernible point of view or credible psychology, for all the screwing and killing.

Bradshaw’s story, which encompasses two generations of characters living in New York and Berlin, can be described by its sexual pairings: incestuous German neo-Nazi brother and sister; two men and 14-year-old Chris; Chris and another man, who later dies of AIDS; grown-up Chris with Franklin, cousin of Chris’ half-sister Josephine’s husband Peter; Peter, who is black, and Josephine; Peter and Gretchen, an African-born prostitute while he’s in Berlin for a gallery opening of his paintings.

It’s telling that the lone sexual act not enacted onstage is Franklin’s first sexual encounter, when he was raped by a hermaphrodite when he was 17: he only describes it to Chris before they have sex. Now that would have been something to see! The problem with so much simulated sex is that it turns the actors into mere performers: these sex scenes add nothing to our understanding of their relationships, except to discover that most of these people love anal sex, an unilluminating revelation in the scheme of things.

Bradshaw’s fixation on anal sex makes little sense on the evidence he presents: for example, if Peter really wants to screw Gretchen anally because Josephine doesn’t want to, why isn’t that shown earlier when husband and wife have sex, which is obviously loving and tender and consensual, but without any begging (from Peter) or whining (from Josephine) about what kind of sex they’re going to have.

Scott Elliott’s sharp-edged direction smoothes many bumps in Bradshaw’s script, but those that remain make for a nearly three-hour slog. Although the large and talented cast falls just short of turning Bradshaw’s chess pieces into real people, Larisa Polonsky makes the most of her brief time onstage to create a sympathetic, touching Josephine, another memorable performance by an actress who, with One Arm and now Burning, is quickly becoming one of our more reliable performers.

Neighbourhood Watch
Previews began November 30, 2011; opened December 7; closes January 1, 2012
Brits Off Broadway @ 59 E 59, 59 East 59th Street, New York, NY
http://britsoffbroadway.com

Burning
Previews began October 20, 2011; opened November 14; closes December 17
The New Group, 410 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
http://thenewgroup.org

NYC Theater Roundup: Was ‘Once’ Enough?

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 06 December 2011 05:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Once
Book by Enda Walsh; music and lyrics by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová
Directed by John Tiffany
Starring Steve Kazee, Cristin Miloti

An Evening with Patti Lupone and Mandy Patinkin
Directed by Mandy Patinkin

A bona fide cult hit, the 2006 movie Once was a modest, unassuming romance that hinged on its stars’ freshness: two unknowns parlayed their shared love of music and, soon enough, each other into an Oscar-winning song and spin-off concert tour.

I wasn’t a big fan of the movie, which evaporated from my memory after it ended, mainly because the characters (Glen Hansard played Guy and Marketa Irglova played Girl) weren’t memorable and neither were their songs, Academy Award notwithstanding. Still, Once is the perfect candidate for stage musical adaptation: it’s a superficial romance with recognizable songs. The stage result, now off Broadway and already announced to transfer to Broadway in February, is as flimsy as the screen original.

The story is simplicity (or simplemindedness) itself: Irish Guy meets Czech Girl, Guy plays his songs for Girl, Guy kind of falls for Girl (and she for him). This basically plotless romance has been gussied up in Enda Walsh’s book with performers who not only enact secondary characters--Guy’s Da, Girl’s Czech roommates, mother and young daughter--but also play instruments like a cello, fiddles and guitars. That conceit, borrowed from John Doyle’s actors-playing-instruments Sweeney Todd, works more handily here since those onstage are playing musicians anyway.

Director John Tiffany and choreographer/movement director Steven Hoggett try their damndest to keep this basically immobile story moving. The cast of a dozen, when not sitting on stools at either side of the stage, is in constant motion, jumping up and walking on the large curved bar that sits at center stage (Bob Crowley’s remarkable set also contains 61 mirrors on the wall, a clever bit of conjuring an Irish pub atmosphere) or moving in synchronization during several meandering musical numbers.

Although the tired music is the least memorable thing about Once--the songs are either acoustic or piano-based drones with fortune-cookie lyrics, including the Oscar-winning “Falling Slowly”--Martin Lowe’s arrangements include lovely blocks of harmony that the dozen performers bellow with conviction and emotion. With Steve Kazee’s handsome and charming Guy and Cristin Milioti’s oddly endearing Girl at its center, this 2-½ hour slog is tolerable if not terribly memorable.

A reunion of old friends makes An Evening with Patti Lupone and Mandy Patinkin endearing. Best known for starring in Evita for its 1979 Broadway premiere, Lupone and Patinkin revisit that show’s showstoppers (his “Oh What a Clown,” her “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” of course), and if their voices are not as rich as they once were--especially his--they get by on sheer emotion.

The two-hour performance, heavy on Stephen Sondheim numbers, begins with “Another Hundred People” and includes a bizarre duet of his “Loving You” and her “Getting Married Today,” the ultimate patter song that she easily tosses off. There’s also a nice Merrily We Roll Along medley, but the show’s centerpiece is Rodgers and Hammerstein: mini-groupings from South Pacific and Carousel, in which they overact the dialogue but do well by the songs themselves, which culminate with a rousing “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”

The question needs asking: do we need Cliff’s Notes versions of our greatest musicals? Probably not, but standalone triumphs like Lupone’s Gypsy showstopper “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” work despite not having the necessary orchestral power behind the singers: pianist Paul Ford and bassist John Beal, who acquit themselves admirably, give the show an intimate nightclub quality. Or at least as intimate as a 1,000-seat theater can be. But it's Patti and Mandy's mutual admiration and affection that make this a treat.

Once
Previews began November 15, 2011; opened December 6; closes January 1, 2012
New York Theater Workshop, 79 East 4th Street, New York, NY
http://nytw.org

An Evening with Patti Lupone and Mandy Patinkin
Previews began November 16, 2011; opened November 21; closes January 13, 2012
Barrymore Theatre, 243 West 47th Street, New York, NY
http://pattyandmandyonbroadway.com