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Film and the Arts
October '15 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 14 October 2015 22:56
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
The Gallows
(Warner Bros)
There's little originality left in the old found-footage filmmaking bandwagon, although some keep trying: case in point, Chris Lofing and Travis Cluff's movie follows teens through their darkened school one night as they encounter ghosts with a penchant for hanging.
There is a certain cleverness in the telling, even if the shocks are both predictable and cheap, but the found-footage gimmick makes scant sense even by the low standards of the genre. If that doesn't bother you, this may well be up your alley. The film looks OK in hi-def; extras include alternate version of the film, featurettes, deleted scenes and a gag reel.
(Cohen Media)
Catherine Deneuve and Gustave Kervern give nicely restrained performances as unlikely allies in director Pierre Salvadori's contrived but touching melodrama about a new apartment complex caretaker and how he slowly becomes the close friend of an eccentric retiree.
There are sitcom situations galore in Salvadori's storytelling, but his heart's in the right place; even the manipulative denouement is made far more watchable by Deneuve and Kervern than it should be. The hi-def transfer looks fine; lone extra is director interview.
Matchstick Men
(Warner Bros)
Ridley Scott's offbeat 2003 comedy, which stars Sam Rockwell and Nicolas Cage as hucksters whose lives are changed irreversibly when Alison Lohman shows up as Cage's estranged daughter, has problems in Ted and Nicholas Griffin's clever but bumpy script, but it also gives three actors a golden chance to show what they can do.
Cage's weird persona works for him for once, Rockwell is always first-rate and Lohman (a brilliant actress who disappeared far too soon) gives another in her extraordinary series of flawless performances as confused young women. Helpful, too, is Scott's surprisingly restrained directing. The film looks good on Blu; extras are a commentary and hour-long making-of documentary.
(Fox)
There's a lot wrong with Alfonso Gomez-Rejun's movie, whose simultaneous mawkishness and smart-ass hipness in depicting the friendship between a high school movie buff and a terminally ill teenager, so much so that I was unmoved by the dying girl's plight and left cold by the self-indulgent movie parodies, which are far less clever than they think they are.
There are a few amusing observations about high school life, and Olivia Cooke shines as the girl, but too much is derivative and self-congratulatory. The movie's hi-def transfer is sharp; extras are an audio commentary, featurettes, interviews and deleted scenes.
San Andreas
(Warner Bros)
These days, even though special effects dominate movies like never before, watching Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge get destroyed in an earthquake—as they both do in Brad Peyton's wooden disaster movie—isn't very impressive, since it all still looks fake.
Still, despite phoned-in acting, cheap flag-waving and ridiculous coincidences that ruins what little plot there is, San Andreas remains entertaining in a rubbernecking sort of way. The hi-def transfer is first-rate; extras include featurettes, director commentary, deleted scenes and gag reel.
(Disney)
Stuffed to the gills with elaborate sets and special effects and endless avenues that its plot travels (sometimes several at once), Brad Bird's sci-fi fantasy-mystery takes 130 minutes to tell its convoluted tale about invention, imagination and, ultimately, prevention of our own Armageddon.
A noble virtue, that, but Bird's own script (with two others) is insufficient to explore it all coherently and cleanly; instead, Bird's limitless visual imagination conjures amazing images, which only underscore what a dazzling but frustrating mess this is. On Blu-ray, the movie looks stupendous; extras include featurettes and deleted scenes.
Vikings—Complete 3rd Season
(Fox)
In the latest season of this grandly entertaining guilty pleasure of a series, the army of Norse warriors follows its king's war-like mentality into a bloody and violent invasion of France, showing off the first-rate recreations of an entirely forgotten era in history.
While fictional and often overdramatized, this can still be watched as history shown as it happens, down and dirty and muddy. There's a great Blu-ray transfer; extras are extended episodes, interactive guide, deleted scenes, commentaries and featurettes.
CPO Sharkey—Complete 2nd Season
The Don Rickles TV Specials, Volume 1
(Time Life)
Everybody's favorite insult comic, who helped define a politically incorrect era, parlayed that notoriety into a TV career on the sitcom CPO Sharkey, whose humor is often dated, sexist and racist but just as often funny, as several episodes from the second (and final) season show.
Along with Sharkey and his regular Tonight Show appearances, Rickles also hosted several specials during this time, and Volume 1 presents two of those, as Rickles spars with guests Johnny Carson, Harvey Korman, Carroll O'Connor and Anne Meara, and even acts, sings and dances (!). Lone Sharkey extra is a 2015 cast reunion; TV Specials extras are new Rickles intros.
Deutschland '83
(Kino Lorber)
In this absorbing eight-part German TV drama, a young East German soldier is recruited to become a spy in the West in return for his sick mother getting a needed operation: the historical details are unerringly right, as the lifestyles of both East and West during a crucial cold war era are displayed to great effect.
The superlative cast is led by Jonas Nay as the spy and Sonja Gerhardt, giving a nuanced portrayal of his confused girlfriend. My lone quibble is an over-reliance on then-current songs: in addition to Phil Collins, David Bowie and the Police, there's Duran Duran, whose lyrics become an amusing quandary for flummoxed East German officials. The series' theme song is Peter Schilling's "Major Tom (Coming Home)."
(PBS)
In this 2014 performance of Alfred Urhy's award-winning play about the long relationship of an elderly Southern matron and her loyal chauffeur, Angela Lansbury and James Earl Jones give commanding portrayals full of grit, humor and sadness, with Boyd Gaines equaling them in the thankless role of her son.
I saw director David Esbjornson's 2011 revival on Broadway with Vanessa Redgrave and Jones; Lansbury's performance is warmer, less fussy than Redgrave's. This PBS broadcast superlatively records an involving staging of a wonderfully humane play.
NYC Theater Reviews—‘Fool for Love’ on Broadway; ‘The Christians’ off-Broadway
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 12 October 2015 22:48
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Fool for Love
Written by Sam Shepard; directed by Daniel Aukin
Performances through December 6, 2015
The Christians
Written by Lucas Hnath; directed by Les Waters
Performances through October 25, 2015
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| Sam Rockwell and Nina Arianda in Fool for Love (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Among Sam Shepard's most concentrated plays, Fool for Love keeps erupting into violence: mainly the verbal kind between its antagonists/lovers/possible half-siblings Eddie and May, but also the physical confrontations as they argue and make up (rinse-repeat) in an endless—and endlessly vicious—cycle.
It all plays out in the confines of a slum of a motel room in the Mojave Desert, which is where May is staying after finally leaving Eddie for the (supposed) last time; he's tracked her down, driving some 2480 miles, he says, to drag her back with him.
As they go at it again and again, an old man sits off to the side, occasionally interrupting with his own commentary: he may (or may not) be their father, depending on his (or their) version of the couple's long and tortured tale. Also on hand is an innocent party, Martin, at the motel to take May on a date: he gets caught in their fracas against his will.
For 75 tightly-wound minutes in Daniel Aukin's taut staging, Shepard's characters do a dance—not of death, exactly, but of the complicated emotions his title suggests. And although May and Eddie aren't really fools, their ongoing battles have formed permanent scars on their hearts which they carry around proudly, exhausted but unbowed.
Nina Arianda's trenchant May is primarily an expressively physical performance, her subtle body language speaking volumes about the unbearable tension built up over this long-gestating relationship.
Even better is Sam Rockwell's would-be cowboy Eddie: he looks and plays the part—ten-gallon hat, spurs, gun-cleaning, fancy lassoing—and displays the crushing loneliness populating his soul with or without May.
Rockwell's physical comedy, whether a split after he downs a drink or his playful lying on the floor near May's bed when Martin arrives, is impressive and funny, but sharpest are his recitations of Shepard's exquisitely jagged, poetic language, particularly Eddie's monologue of remembering when he met his father's other family, including a lovely teenage girl whom he would fall in love with.
Shepard, whose more recent plays have become more irritatingly irrational in their broken-down narratives and characters, was at his artistic peak when he wrote Fool for Love, which was surrounded by the equally hard-hitting True West, Buried Child and A Lie of the Mind: his fractured style perfectly embodies these fractured people, if only for a few bruising, but beautifully rendered, moments.
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| The cast of The Christians (photo: Joan Marcus) |
In The Christians, Lucas Hnath tackles the issue of faith: specifically how a shift in one congregation's tenet leads to an unbridgeable rift and near-collapse of the church itself, which grew steadily from a small storefront to the large, imposing building the people now worship in.
The play dramatizes the fallout after pastor Paul preaches that God told him there is no hell, which causes hell to pay among his parishioners, including his associate pastor, dynamic young Joshua, who leaves to start his own successful church.
Paul must deal with his choice's ethics: is it just a coincidence he brought up this "new" tenet after his church's debt was paid off, since he knew it would be a deal-breaker for some, as bemused parishioner Jenny says? He also must deal with wife Elizabeth's decision not to follow him, and with church elder Jay bemoaning the practical (i.e., business) fallout of such a momentous moral decision.
Hnath has written a serious play about a serious subject—and Les Waters directs snappily on Dane Waffrey's sparkling church interior set—but unfortunately Hnath's ideas and plotting are too pat, his arguments neither forceful nor penetrating enough.
Still, there is his intelligent dialogue, which partially makes up for such gimmickry as the pastor haphazardly introducing other characters' dialogue and the truly annoying use of microphone cords, which makes the actors—mostly the excellent Andrew Garman as Paul—keep trying to avoid tripping. Wouldn't such a wealthy church use wireless mikes instead?
And the 90-minute play is also padded by hymns sung by a first-rate choir, which is another gimmick recently deployed by A.R. Gurney when Cole Porter tunes dominated his slight, and short, comedy Love and Money. Even though less illuminating than it purports to be, The Christians remains an interesting sermon.
Fool for Love
Friedman Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, 261 West 47th Street, New York, NY
foolforlovebroadway.com
The Christians
Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
playwrightshorizons.org
October '15 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 06 October 2015 23:23
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Beat the Devil
Salt of the Earth
(The Film Detective)
Two B&W classics have gotten the hi-def treatment, starting with John Huston's Beat the Devil, the great 1953 caper starring Humphrey Bogart, Gina Lollobrigida, Jennifer Jones and Robert Morley: Huston's sly directing and the top-notch cast give this black-comic adventure the extra push it needs to stay in the memory.
1954's Salt of the Earth, made by blacklisted members of the original "Hollywood Ten," is a crudely effective propagandistic drama about a miners’ strike against a heartless New Mexico company. Subtle it ain't, but its glimpse at workers' travails fifty years ago still resonates today. Both movies look decent if unspectacular on Blu-ray.
(Warner Brothers)
Though markedly inferior to the surprise 2012 original hit, that won't matter to anyone who just wants to watch this sequel to see Channing Tatum, Joe Manganiello, et al (excepting Matthew McConaughey), doing their patented stripper-dance moves. Steven Soderbergh's fingerprints are all over this, even if he's only listed as cinematographer and editor and his associate Gregory Jacobs is director.
For those who want cheesecake to go with their beefcake, there are too-short appearances by Amber Heard, Elizabeth Banks and Jada Pinkett Smith. The film looks sharp on Blu; extras comprise two featurettes and an extended dance scene.
Manglehorn
(IFC)
Al Pacino gives what for him is an understated performance as a locksmith whose business and personal lives are fading in his twilight years as he juggles a distant Wall Street son, an aging and sickly cat, the memory of his dead wife and a budding relationship with a charming bank teller, played by the also usually flamboyant (but here low-key) Holly Hunter.
Director David Gordon Green directs with empathy, and his reining in both of his stars keeps this offbeat character study from becoming too off-key. The movie looks excellent on Blu.
(Magnolia)
This okay documentary about Dallas Mavericks' MVP Dirk Nowitzki—the first German-born player to make it truly big in the NBA—shows his life in Germany and eventual move to the United States and big league superstardom.
Director Sebastian Bernhardt not only talks to Dirk, his parents and mentor (who all speak German for those for whom reading subtitles may be an issue) but also his teammates, coach, GM, owner and even rivals like Kobe Bryant. The movie has a superior hi-def transfer; extras are deleted scenes and a Nowitzki interview.
Poltergeist
(Fox)
When the young daughter of bemused dad and mom, after staring at the big-screen TV in their new house, says "They're here," why don’t her parents realize they’re in a remake of Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg’s 1982 ghostly smash?
Although it follows the original fairly closely—except for making the poltergeist-busting psychic male and including a lame fake ending—there’s nothing particularly interesting going on; the usually reliable Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt are wasted as the parents. Watch (or re-watch) the original instead. There’s a first-rate hi-def transfer; extras are an extended cut and alternate ending.
(Fox)
It's been 40 years since the ultimate camp/cult movie was released, and if you're watching it for the first time, you might ask what all the fuss is about: the humor is sophomoric, the songs forgettable and the acting over the top.
But that's not the point: the movie has taken on a life of its own for millions of fans, and this new edition will make it even easier for them to party like it's 1975 whenever they want. The hi-def transfer is first-rate; extras include U.S. and U.K. versions of the film, audio commentary, deleted scenes, alternate opening and ending.
When Marnie Was There
(Universal)
The latest animated masterpiece from the legendary Studio Ghibli is this moving adaptation of Joan G. Robinson's young adult novel about the memories of a young orphaned girl, who discovers her own family history while staying at a remote seaside village to recover from an illness. Unlike many Ghibli films, director Hiromasa Yonebayashi keeps the fantastical stuff to a minimum, but there remains the usual astonishing animation that explores the inner lives of its beautifully rendered characters.
The film (whose vibrant colors are vividly retained on Blu-ray) can be watched in the original Japanese or in English with familiar voices like Hailee Steinfeld, Vanessa Williams and Catherine O'Hara. Extras include featurettes.
(Alchemy)
A hot-shot lawyer’s fast-track to the district attorney's office is complicated by his obsession with paid escorts: once the escort service is busted by the feds, he finds his whole world—personal and professional—starts to crash around him.
For its first half, Mora Stephens' drama follows its protagonist’s double life with knowing plausibility: when it all becomes unhinged and turns risible, an accomplished cast—led by Patrick Wilson's lawyer, Lena Headey as his loyal wife and Dianna Agron as the escort he falls for—can’t overcome a script as obsessively one-track minded as its hero. The film looks decent on Blu; extras include deleted scenes with director's commentary.
DVDs of the Week
Darling Lili
Oh! What a Lovely War
(Warner Archive)
Two massive 1969 box-office flops are back on DVD, starting with Darling Lili, Blake Edwards' overblown paean to wife Julie Andrews, who stars as the singer/spy: despite her charm, the entire enterprise is swamped by its large scale at the expense of the smaller, more interesting story that's been buried.
Likewise, Richard Attenborough's musical-comic look at World War I, Oh! What a Lovely War, favors big-name cameos from many British movie stars—John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson and Susannah York, for starters—and ends up with an incoherent, scattershot approach to its subject. Both films are, sadly, not restored; Lili extras comprise 19 deleted scenes, while War includes Attenborough's audio commentary and a three-part retrospective documentary.
(Film Movement)
The long, eventful life of Nathan Handwerker—who founded the Nathan's Famous hot-dog chain—is recounted by his grandson Lloyd Handwerker in this charming documentary portrait that presents the career and business sense (and, at times, lack of it) of the founder and his family.
Interviews with family members—including some who've since passed away—are interwoven with an audio interview with Nathan before he died for a warts and all glimpse at a successful family business buffeted by the winds of change. Extras comprise a director's commentary, deleted scenes and extra footage.
Fresh Off the Boat—Complete 1st Season
(Fox)
Reign—Complete 2nd Season
(Warner Brothers)
Fresh Off the Boat, from chef Eddie Huang's memoir, shows great promise in its 13-episode first season with its diverting premise of cultural clashes seen through the eyes of a precociously funny 12-year-old whose family has moved from Washington D.C.'s Chinatown to bustling Orlando in the 1990s.
In the second season of the entertaining historical drama Reign, young Mary Queen of Scots discovers, along with her new husband King Francis, that there are tough times ahead for France—where she lived before returning to the Scottish throne—starting with the Black Death and famine. Lone Fresh extra is a gag reel; Reign extras comprise deleted scenes and a featurette.
(Kino)
The proliferation of chemicals in our lives—from the products we use to the foods we eat and even the furniture we sit on—causes innumerable dangers to women's and children’s health and well-being, as Dana Nachman and Don Hardy's documentary shows.
This well thought out road map for how, against insurmountable odds like lobbyists and “bought” politicians, we can fix things contains damning circumstantial evidence and touching personal stories from several individuals. Extras are deleted scenes.
NYC Theater Reviews—‘Antigone' at BAM; ‘Spring Awakening’ on Broadway
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 05 October 2015 21:38
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Antigone
Written by Sophocles; translated by Anne Carson
Directed by Ivo van Hove
Performances through October 4, 2015
Spring Awakening
Music by Duncan Sheik; book and lyrics by Steven Sater
Choreographed by Spencer Liff; directed by Michael Arden
Performances through January 24, 2016
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| Juliette Binoche as Antigone at BAM (photo: Stephanie Berger) |
Sophocles' classic tragedy Antigone, about the conflict between the individual and the state— is it ethical or right for a grieving sister to bury her brother even though it's expressly forbidden by the king's law?—has been given a workable new translation by Anne Carson, despite the ill-advised decision to allow the characters themselves to speak the words of the omitted chorus: what might be thought anachronistic is vital to a drama still relevant 2500 years after it was written.
Still, Carson's adaptation is certainly playable, so it's disappointing that director Ivo van Hove has created such a ponderous staging. One yearns for the director's infamous idiosyncrasies, which he has used in the past to do (or undo) works by Ingmar Bergman, Lillian Hellman and others. However, his Antigone, on a monochrome set of modern furniture in front, a large wall showing mainly irrelevant video imagery at the back and a circular opening in said wall that becomes alternately a blazing or eclipsed sun, passes by with nary a flicker of originality or illumination.
Even the ominous soundscape—which Daniel Freitag sculpted from musical fragments by Arvo Part, Henryk Gorecki, Morton Feldman and even Lou Reed, whose "Heroin" ends the proceedings in van Hove's usual way, as a pseudo-hip pop-song cue—comes off half-baked, not even witty. And most disheartening is the lackluster acting: even a luminous movie star like Juliette Binoche inhabits the title role in a curiously inert fashion.
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| Sandra Mae Frank and Austin P. McKenzie in Spring Awakening (photo: Joan Marcus) |
I doubt that Broadway was breathlessly awaiting a revival of Spring Awakening—Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater's mediocre musical based on Frank Wedekind's classic 1891 play about sexual confusion among teenagers—but that hasn't stopped director Michael Arden. His gimmick? Populating his cast and musicians with both hearing and deaf performers who use American sign language (ASL) throughout the show.
For example, the tragic heroine Wendla is enacted by charming deaf actress Sandra Mae Frank while her dialogue and songs are voiced by the equally talented (and hearing) actress Katie Boeck. Other teenagers, parents and teachers are played by a combination of signing deaf and hearing performers; if the fatal disconnect in the world of the original play is underlined too insistently in Arden's production, he and choreographer Spencer Liff have provided an inventive and continuous flow of onstage activity—the show begins with an almost too clever evocation of what's to come, with actresses Frank and Boeck on either side of a mirror—to help make credible Arden's original notion.
But a little of this goes a long way, since there are times when it's unclear who exactly is speaking or singing: such (deliberate?) confusion doesn't exactly parallel Wedekind's artfully rendered perturbation. Neither do Sheik's colorless tunes and Sater's flavorless lyrics get at the nuances of Wedekind's insightful exploration of adolescent psychology: in fact, whenever the dialogue ends and the songs begin, Spring Awakening screeches to a complete halt.
The large cast is energetic and mostly accomplished, with Patrick Page and Camryn Manheim performing various adults with gusto. If Frank's Wendla is less memorably innocent and sexually curious than Lea Michele in the original production, that's only because she's not Lea Michele (who also had—has—a killer voice). Likewise, Austin P. McKenzie and Daniel N. Durant as male protagonists Melichor and Moritz aren't a patch on Jonathan Groff and John Gallagher Jr. from the original, both of whom—like Michele—went on to bigger and better things.
Here's hoping that, with all the attention the return of Spring Awakening is getting, someone will bring back Wedekind's original play, which desperately needs a revival, since it's still contemporary and relevant without the musical trappings.
Antigone
BAM Harvey Theatre, 651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, NY
bam.org
Spring Awakening
Brooks Atkinson Theatre, 256 West 47th Street, New York, NY
springawakeningthemusical.com
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