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Off-Broadway Reviews—"Da," "The Road to Damascus"

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 29 January 2015 22:34; Written by Kevin Filipski

Da
Written by Hugh Leonard; directed by Charlotte Moore
Performances through March 8, 2015

The Road to Damascus
Written by Tom Dulack; directed by Michael Parva
Performances through March 1, 2015

O'Reilly and O'Brien in Da (photo: Carol Rosegg)

Hugh Leonard's intimate memory piece, Da, is an affecting comic drama unashamed to wear its heart on its sleeve. In this lovely elegy to his own father, Leonard paints an achingly personal portrait of a son remembering his 'da' with complicated and conflicted emotions: Charlie Tynan, while sifting through his dad's belongings following the old man's funeral, is visited by both his father's ghost and his own memories of life with his parents while growing up in that same house.

Throughout, Da is funny and joyous, sad and painful, at times ponderous and slow-going, but always real and humane: in short, it honestly conveys one man's relationships with his parents—and especially with his hard-headed but not hard-hearted father—in a way that allows every audience member to see the universal truths that Leonard shows so unpretentiously.

The Irish Rep's lively production, under Charlotte Moore's precise direction, is led by two forceful performances: Ciaran O'Reilly as the exasperated Charlie and Paul O'Brien as a jovial Da, capture the humanity that makes Leonard's 1978 Tony Award-winning play memorable.

Polonsky and Collins in The Road to Damascus (photo: Carol Rosegg)

In the not too distant future, Islamic terrorist groups are still overrunning the Middle East, especially Syria. And, after midtown Manhattan is shaken by a deadly bombing that's been traced back to Syria, the new American president—the first third-party winner in decades—weighs his few options, which include a devastatingly lethal strike on the capital city of Damascus. However, the brand new (and first) African pope has made it clear that he will go to Damascus as a human shield if American bombs go off in retaliation for the New York terrorist attack.

So goes The Road to Damascus, a new play by Tom Dulack, which shows a future U.S. and world not far removed from our own, in which our current global crises are given greater urgency, and where terrorists and statesmen are strange, if sometimes unwilling, bedfellows.

Our nominal hero is State Department agent Dexter Hobhouse, who's on friendly terms with the Pope's closest advisor, Roberto Guzman, who alerts him to His Holiness's decision about Syria, while Pope Augustine is friendly with a popular international journalist of Chechen Muslim extraction, Nadia Kirilenko, who's also (no surprise here) Dexter's lover. When Hobhouse disappears after meeting the Pope in Rome, both State and the NSA try and figure out whether he has jumped to the other side.

Dulack writes scenes of palpable tension and excitement, tautly building the drama to its breaking point. Don't expect any insights about how politics, religion and terrorism intersect, but rather enjoy a perfectly paced thriller that's compelling and all too pertinent, thanks in large part to Michael Parva's confident direction, Brittany Vasta's clever sets and Graham Kindred's magnificent lighting.

The sterling company of actors—led by Rufus Collins' properly frumpy Dexter, Larisa Polonsky's sexy and ruthless Nadia and Liza Vann's foul-mouthed NSA agent Bree Benson—is the icing on a very entertaining, if unsettling, cake.

Da
Irish Rep, 103 East 15th Street, New York, NY
irishrep.org

The Road to Damascus
New York Theatre Workshop, 59 East 59th Street, New York, NY
59e59.org

January '15 Digital Week IV

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Tuesday, 27 January 2015 21:20; Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week

Adua and Her Friends

(Raro/Kino)

Antonio Pietrangeli's 1960 neo-realist drama—which sympathetically follows a quartet of prostitutes who decide to open a restaurant when a new Rome law closes all of the city's bordellos—sounds treacly and melodramatic in the extreme.

But Pietrangeli's sensitive direction, assisted by the wonderfully realistic portrayals of Simone Signoret, Emmanuelle Riva, Sandra Milo and Gino Revere as the women, provides a powerful dramatic trajectory for this compassionate and insightful character study. The B&W film's transfer looks good enough if a bit waxy; extras include an introduction and Pietrangeli short.

By the Gun

(Millennium)

"By the numbers" more accurately describes this wheels-spinning crime drama about a flashy young gangster (Ben Barnes) doing things on his own—including picking up the adorable daughter (Leighton Meester) of a rival—against his boss's wishes.

Director James Mottern and writer Emilio Mauro follow the blueprints of other, better films, but do little more than make a hollow recreation of them, drowning veteran actors like Harvey Keitel and Toby Jones in a tsunami of banalities. The hi-def transfer looks good; extras are a commentary and deleted scenes.

La Cienaga

(Criterion)

Argentine director Lucrecia Martel's auspicious debut feature is a blackly comic 2001 exploration of a bourgeois extended family dealing with hidden tensions that threaten to bubble up to the surface.

Although there is more provocation than substance in her visual and dramatic symbolism, at least Martel was onto something interesting, which unfortunately was not followed through with her increasingly hermetic films The Holy Girl and The Headless Woman. The Criterion hi-def transfer is excellent; extras include interviews with Martel and filmmaker Andrés Di Tella.

Downton Abbey—Complete 5th Season

(PBS)

The final season of the PBS/Masterpiece smash hit comprises nine episodes that wrap up the various story strands, from an ongoing murder investigation to a wedding and a farewell.

Although there is some obviousness in the writing—a discussion of someone named Hitler and his new group the Nazis is an example of 20/20 hindsight—that's a mere quibble when the production values remain impeccable, the acting generally outstanding and the storytelling sheerly entertaining. The hi-def transfer looks smashingly good indeed; extras are three featurettes.

The Drop

(Fox)

The late James Gandolfini—who seems to be in more films since he died than before—is at his disheveled best in this violent, uneven but generally compelling crime drama by writer Dennis Lehane, playing a bartender in a drop bar who doesn't trust his partner after a suspicious robbery.

Although he could have played the role in his sleep, Gandolfini has a formidable presence that outshines costar Tom Hardy's sleepy sidekick; happily, chameleon actress Noomi Rapace is also on hand, and her performance makes us forget how ludicrously implausible her character is. Director Michael R. Roskam has a good eye for Brooklyn locations; the Blu-ray looks solid and extras are Roskam/Lehane's commentary, deleted scenes and featurettes.

DVDs of the Week

All Neat in Black Stockings

(Warner Archive)

This late-'60s artifact came out in the wake of such successful farces as The Knack and Alfie,which show a young man seducing attractive "birds" without a thought, until he meets a young woman who turns his head and stops him in his tracks.

Victor Henry plays a window washer ladies' man who is upended by the bird played by Susan George, one of the most delectable bits of typecasting in movie history. The comedy is creaky, the sentiments sexist, but it works, mostly due to Henry and George's chemistry.

Art & Craft

Coherence

(Oscilloscope)

Mark Landis, who donated his own forgeries of master paintings to museums as gifts, is chronicled in Art & Craft, Sam Cullman, Jennifer Grausman and Mark Becker's eye-opening documentary exploring the complications of art forgery, mainly through the eyes of Matt Leininger, who exposes Landis's chicanery.

In Coherence, four couples at a dinner party discover, as a comet flies overhead, that theirs is one of many realities; as Twilight Zone ripoffs go, it's an OK diversion, but writer-director James Ward Birkit trips himself up trying to outsmart viewers. Art extras are commentary, featurette, deleted scenes, Q&A; Coherence extras are commentary, behind the scenes featurettes.

Bird People

(IFC)

For the first two-thirds of its two-hour running time, Pascale Ferran's ambitious character study of two lonely people—an American businessman and a French cleaning woman—who don't meet until the very end is beguiling in how it displays the minutiae of their lives through an exhilarating combination of formal precision and alternating narratives.

But when the film's heroine (played by the always excellent Anais Demoustier) transforms into one of the title creatures, all bets are off, and Ferran's movie limps along to an enervating, diffuse, predictable finale.

The Green Prince

(Music Box)

In the impossible-to-believe-it's-true category is this forcefully engrossing documentary portrait of Mosab Hassan Yousef, a Palestinian whose father was a Hamas leader and who became, against all odds (and even credulity), an informant for Israel's version of the FBI, Shin Bet, under the auspices of agent Gonen Ben Yitzhak.

Director Nadav Scirman adroitly explores the dynamic—and dynamite—relationship between the two men, an unlikely pairing that throws a wrench into the accepted narrative of the Middle East's political situation. Extras include interviews and featurettes.

January '15 Digital Week III

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Wednesday, 21 January 2015 02:10; Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week

Genesis—Sum of the Parts

(Eagle Rock)

For a band formed in the late '60s that went through numerous personnel changes—notably the loss of its dynamic lead singer and, as his replacement, the drummer who led the group to its greatest commerical heights—these classic British art-rockers don't get their deserved deluxe treatment: instead, this is a straightforward 90-minute documentary about a long, winding and storied career.

At least everyone is present and accounted for, starting with Peter Gabriel, who for so long wanted little to do with his fomer mates; Phil Collins, Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford, Steve Hackett round out a lively discussion that, while only skimming the surface, hits the right notes. The hi-def transfer looks good; extras are additional interviews.

Jessabelle

(Lionsgate)

This routine paranormal thriller follows a young woman—scarred from a car crash that killed her boyfriend—who returns to her family home and becomes haunted by her long-dead mother's spirit, through which she discovers unsavory secrets her father prefers to remain buried.

Director Kevin Greutert leaves no cliched unturned, while Sarah Snook plays the victimized woman as gracefully as possible under the underwhelming circumstances. The Blu-ray transfer is excellent; extras are a commentary, featurette, deleted scenes, outtakes, alternate ending.

The Palm Beach Story

(Criterion)

In Preston Stuges' delectable 1942 comedy, Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert play a married couple whose finances are even less secure than their relationship, so the wife runs off to Florida to try and fix things in her unique manner.

Only Sturges could have made such a fiercely funny, provocative comedy within the Hollywood system, while McCrea and Colbert give typically memorable comic portrayals. The Criterion hi-def transfer looks great; extras are interviews, a Sturges WWII short and a radio play of the story starring Colbert.

The Skin

(Cohen Media)

Based on controversial short stories by Curzio Malaparte—who dared to show how badly Italians acted in the aftermath of the Allied invasion during World War II—Liliana Cavani's 1981 drama chronicles, in often sickening detail, how far some Italians went to remain above the fray as Americans took over following Mussolini's demise.

Set in Naples, this hard-hitting if diffuse film stars Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale and a dubbed Burt Lancaster; the physical production is almost too authentic, but cardboard dialogue and anemic acting lessen the potential impact. The Blu-ray looks OK; extras include Caviani interviews and a commentary.

A Walk Among the Tombstones

(Universal)

In this supremely violent thriller based on books by Lawrence Block, Liam Neeson again assumes his tough-middle-aged-guy mantle as Matt Scudder, retired New York City cop turned private eye hired by a man whose wife was murdered by her kidnapers.

The NYC locations and Neeson are appropriately gritty, but director Robert Frank overdoes the gory quotient; sure, the kidnapers are really bad guys, but why revel in their sadism? The Blu-ray image looks splendid; extras comprise interviews and a making-of featurette.

DVDs of the Week

The Bridge—Complete 2nd Season

(Fox)

The original series The Bridge, set on the Sweden-Denmark border, was a subtle, incisive and involving whodunit-cum-character study that became heavily watered down in the American version, set—where else?—on the U.S.-Mexican border.

The 13 episodes of the American second season, while not as cliche-ridden as the initial season, continue the hackneyed dramatics that leave Diane Kruger and Demian Birchir's flavorful performances in a vacuum. It's too bad that a more imaginative series didn't come out of this, preferably one set on the U.S.-Canadian border. Extras comprise behind the scenes featurettes and deleted scenes.

4 Adventures of Reinette and Maribelle

(Icarus)

I'm no Eric Rohmer fan, so the supposed charms of his films usually escape me, with a few exceptions: unfortunately, this 1987 trifle about two uninteresting young women who meet and bond is not one of those.

The women's banal chattiness is married to the contrived situations that Rohmer insists on throwing his heroines into in what unfolds as a barely entertaining throwaway. Lone extra is an interview with Jessica Forde, who plays Mirabelle; too bad this wasn't released on Blu-ray, like it was in France.

Middle of Nowhere

(Lionsgate)

Ava DuVernay—now best known for last week's Oscar snub for her direction ofSelma—helmed this thoughtful 2011 character study about Ruby, a young Compton mother with a husband in jail, who looks to straighten out her life by going to school and tentatively exploring a new relationship.

DuVernay's credible dialogue and insightful script, coupled with a shatteringly real Emayatzy Corinealdi as Ruby, make this a compelling exploration of a society that's still far under most people's radar. Lone extra is an informative commentary by DuVernay and Corinealdi.

Film Review: "Blackhat"

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Wednesday, 14 January 2015 18:01; Written by Matt Oakes

trailer-for-michael-manns-blackhat-thriller-with-chris-hemsworth.jpg
The only way to make sense of Blackhat is to imagine Hansel (of the Zoolander variety, not he of the breadcrumbs) taking an online computer science class, changing his name to Michael Mann and setting out to wow the world by going "inside the computer." The result is 135 minutes of excruciating, unequivocal gobbledegook led by the most frigid onscreen couple since Joel Schumacher's Mr. Freeze squabbled with Poison Ivy. To call it bad is a lie by degree; it's impossibly poor. For over two simply unbearable hours, join Mann as he sullies his good name with a film so awesomely abhorrent you'll be doubting that he (he of international critical acclaim and assorted Oscar nominations) ever stepped foot on set.

Unfortunately, Mann's fingerprints are undeniably all over Blackhat. His signature wide-lens nocturnal cityscapes are too crisp to be the work of even a dedicated understudy. If we're digging deep to give Mann points (something we really shouldn't be doing for a movie this embarrassingly bad), at least those fleeting heli-shots of x or y city at night provides temporary respite from the narrative implosion happening all around it. With force, Mann throws down the gauntlet for a movie where the establishing shots are incontestably better than the actual goings on of the film.

The plot (if you're generous enough to refer to this "RAT after cheese" hunt as a plot) consists of a rogue hacker con (Chris Hemsworth) furloughed by the FBI in an attempt to hunt down those responsible for bringing a Chinese nuclear reactor to the brink of a meltdown, old MIT buddies reunited under the most improbable of circumstances, a kid sister sidekick with eyes for the hunky Hemsworth and one ESL-lesson shy of a TOEFL-degree and evil hackers who lounge around with their pale bellies protruding. Blackhat pivots on the oh-so-exciting prospects of coding, stock manipulation and the DOW value of soy. And eventually tin. If only 1995 Michael Mann could hear how tinny it sounds.

Hemsworth isn't to blame for the bed-shitting puddle of yuck that is Blackhat (though he could have tried a touch less humorlessness), nor is seasoned compatriot Viola Davis (though I'd like to have a word with her heavy-handed makeup artist). The other leads though - those of the Asian persuasion - seem culled from the international recycling bin. As the female lead, Wei Tang has less restraint than a local weatherman and her consistent jumbling of volume and cadence leads to some wonky audio issues that a finished, wide-release film should never encounter. The conversations are loud, then inexplicably quiet and then overbearingly tremble-y. Like someone sat on the audio control board and no one cared enough to fix it.
But Blackhat is filled with those brush-it-off-the-shoulder moments, as it succumbs steadily to a tide of directionless, thoughtless bunk. The perceived mounting suspense-by-laptop is as exciting as waiting two hours to discover a broken roller coaster at the end of the queue. Or watching a friend play a video game. As in watching only them, without being privy to what's happening on the screen. For two hours.

The second time that Mann dips into the computer circuits to spider around for an improbable amount of time, you know you're in trouble. When the leads lunge at each other like caged rabbits, holding back hearty howls is as impossible as enjoying the film. It's all the worst habits of bad filmmaking puked onto the screen and shown over and over again. If The Fifth Estate is a golden boy for laughable hacker drama gone wrong, Blackhat dares to one-up it.

When affairs get gun-fighty, you breathe a sigh of relief. "Well at least Mann knows how to shoot the hell out of a gun fight. We're all set here guys. Right?" Wrong. One couldn't predict how horribly clunky and straight-to-video the transpiring blaze of gunfire is if they had a crystal ball. It's almost unreasonable to be expected to come to terms with the fact that the same Michael Mann who directed the infamously taut bank shootout of Heat filmed what is quite reasonably the worst wide-release gunfight of the 21st century. Hang your head heavy Mr. Mann, feel the shame waft over you. Either that or your captors should feel rather guilty ("Where is the real Michael Mann and what have you done with him?!")

The hacker thriller is a tough cookie to crack and has led to more certifiably misfires than any other action subgenre I can summon (yes, even more so than the geri-action sort). The closest anyone's ever gotten to a great hacker thriller is The Matrix, and I use the comparison softly because calling it a hacker thriller is me admittedly bending the lines. Michael Mann's film doesn't come close to great. It's not even within the realm of good. It couldn't see the periphery of good with 400x binoculars. To have his name attached to it is to bear a Scarlet Letter from this point hence. Insufferable and tacitly overlong, his shameful film is an early contender for being crowned worst film of the year. Play at being Neo for a day: dodge a bullet and skip Blackhat.

F

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