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Film and the Arts
February '17 Digital Week IV
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 01 March 2017 04:55
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Brahms—German Requiem
(Clasart Classic)
Perhaps the most emotionally charged of the famous Requiems (Mozart, Verdi, Faure, Britten), Johannes Brahms’ German Requiem is often trotted out for an anniversary or other large-scale memorial.
But this 2016 performance by the Cleveland Orchestra under conductor Franz Welser-Most, the Vienna Singverein chorus and soloists Hanna-Elisabeth Muller and Simon Keenlyside in Austria’s gilded baroque Saint Florian Basilica doesn’t need any extra-musical reason to hold its audience in thrall. The hi-def video and audio are excellent.
The Level
(Acorn Media)
Led by a bold, confident Yael Stone (best known from Orange Is the New Black), Deep Water is an absorbing police procedural about a series of murders that may be related to several unsolved gay-related killings that occurred in the same area decades earlier.
And, propelled by a gritty performance by Karla Crome, The Level is an arresting crime drama about a young detective whose ties to a sordid underworld figure may hinder her investigation—especially if her colleagues discover the connection. Both sets’ extras include on-set featurettes.
Doctor Strange
(Marvel/Disney)
One of the most watchable of recent superhero movies is this fairly streamlined—under two hours—if crazily plotted odyssey of an arrogant neurosurgeon who gains an awesome array of mystical powers after he’s almost killed in a car crash that destroys the use of his hands.
Benedict Cumberbatch nicely balances the haughtiness and self-parody of our title hero while Rachel McAdams invests the underwritten female sidekick role with far more sympathy and humor than is warranted. The hi-def transfer is first-rate; extras are director commentary, deleted scenes, gag reel and several featurettes.
(Arrow)
Emiliano Rocha Minter’s demented post-apocalyptic drama is twisted right from the start: a trollish loner is joined by a desperate brother and sister, and to allow them to stay with him, he makes them have sex as he watches.
Aside from the camp factor—there’s actual sex filmed among actors Noe Hernandez, Maria Evoli and Diego Gamaliel—it’s also been done with a certain amount of artful flair, but with this ultimate “dividing audiences” type of film, viewers’ mileage will vary. It looks fine on Blu; extras include director and cast interviews, Minter short films and video essay.
DVDs of the Week
Casablancas—The Man Who Loved Women
(First Run)
This engaging portrait of John Casablancas—who rose from obscurity to found the Elite model agency in 1972—is centered around a revealing interview he did two years before his untimely death in 2013.
Director Hubert Woroniecki’s documentary returns to the days of celebrities hobnobbing at Studio 54 and supermodels from Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell to Stephanie Seymour and Christie Brinkley becoming global superstars. And there was Casablancas, helped make it happen.
(KimStim)
As usual with Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s movies, more is most definitely less: the first hour or so of this ominous mystery follows a crime investigator who, while looking into an unsolved series of serial killings, discovers that the actual culprit might be his and his unsuspecting wife’s neighbor.
It’s too bad that the final hour becomes increasingly more hysterical and shrill as the murderer is triggered to continue with his lethal behavior, logic be damned. The first half is suggestive, and all the more effective for it, while the second half is unnecessarily oppressive, and all the poorer for it, unfortunately.
Off-Broadway Review—Tracy Letts’ “Man from Nebraska”
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 24 February 2017 20:03
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Man from Nebraska
Written by Tracy Letts; directed by David Cromer
Performances through March 26, 2017
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| Reed Birney and Heidi Armbruster in Man from Nebraska (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for his towering psychological drama August: Osage County, playwright Tracy Letts writes about extremes in behavior, as an early play of his,Man from Nebraska—belatedly making its New York premiere, long after Killer Joe, Bug, August and Superior Donuts did—fitfully demonstrates.
Letts’s protagonist, Ken Carpenter, is a 57-year-old Baptist living in Omaha with his beloved wife Nancy. The play begins with the couple going through a typical day together: driving to church, sitting at services singing a hymn and listening to a sermon, going to a local place to eat, and visiting Ken’s mother in an assisted living facility. Then, after they turn out the lights for the night, Ken gets out of bed and goes to the bathroom, where he begins weeping uncontrollably. When Nancy awakens and asks what’s the matter, he drops a bombshell: “I don’t think there’s a God. I don’t believe in Him any more.”
After that statement, nothing is the same again. Nancy can’t understand, their cynical daughter Ashley thinks he’s taken leave of his senses, and Reverend Todd, who provides him with some clichéd bromides, tells him to get away for awhile: which Ken actually does, flying to London for the first time in decades since he was there briefly while in the Air Force. Leaving Nebraska loosens him up, of course: he meets Pat, a flirty vivacious businesswoman, on the flight over and talks so insistently with Tamyra, a young bartender at his hotel, that she makes him an alcoholic drink—he’s pretty much a teetotaler—which he loves so much that he gets smashingly drunk.
This leads to (for Ken) aberrant behavior: being seduced by Pat (who turns out to be a sex freak, natch), becoming friends with Tamyra and her artist roommate Harry, who give Ken a pep pill which makes him an uninhibited dancer and—apparently—a game sculptor, which Harry trains him as with Tamyra as their model in their small flat. Eventually—after hearing bad news about his aged mother—Ken returns home to make amends with God and Nancy.
Letts can be incisive when he shows how a devout man can suddenly, seemingly inexplicably decide that he no longer believes, skillfully charting his confusions, self-doubts and self-recriminations. But Ken’s linear progression from believer to unbeliever and back is charted all too predictably; it may be that Letts wants it to remain mysterious—after all, faith is beyond any intellectual reasoning—but by letting Ken have the time of his life partying it up, fooling around and even becoming an artist of sorts while in London is a little too much on the side of having his cake and eating it too, especially when he hotfoots it back home at the first sign of life’s adversity.
Actually, Nancy becomes the more interesting character after Ken leaves for London: first she’s in denial, waiting for him to return, then she begins falling into a depression until she slowly starts coming out of her shell, even if it’s initially to fend off the bumbling but earnest advances of Reverend Todd’s 75-year-old father Bud, who enjoys Outback Steakhouse, mindless shows on TV and making crude remarks. Nancy seems to grow more than our man from Nebraska, but it’s not a given that the playwright knows this.
As sensitively staged by David Cromer and acted with by a nuanced and penetrating cast led by Reed Birney, who makes Ken a persuasive bundle of contradictions—both secular and spiritual—and by Annette O’Toole as Nancy, whose transition from dutiful to less dutiful wife is sympathetically drawn. Special mention must go to Heidi Armbruster, who embodies Pat, conceived as an unconvincing character, with a bruised honesty that gets to the heart of Lett’s often strained and manipulative exploration of the spirit.
Man from Nebraska
Second Stage Theatre, 305 West 43rd Street, New York, NY
2st.com
Theater Review—“Big River” Returns via Encores
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 23 February 2017 04:25
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Big River—The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Book by William Hauptman; music & lyrics by Roger Miller; directed by Lear deBessonet
Performances February 8-12, 2017
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| Kyle Scatliffe and Nicholas Barasch in Big River (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Premiering in 1985 on Broadway—where it won several Tonys, including Best Musical—and returning in 2003—revived by Deaf West Theatre—Big River doesn’t seem the usual kind of reclamation project at which Encores excels. But in Lear deBessonet’s lively staging, this tuneful musical based on Mark Twain’s classic 1885 novel Huckleberry Finn remains engaging and thought-provoking.
There will be carping about using the “n” word to describe Jim, Huck’s fellow traveler down the river—but Jim is an escaped slave and those using the epithet are whites with ties to the South’s “peculiar institution.” Although deBessonet doesn’t skimp on what audiences find uncomfortable a century and a half later, she never gets bogged down in a heavy-handed “message.”
Instead, the focus is on the relationship between Huck and Jim, by turns dramatic and funny, and tough-minded and sentimental, complemented nicely by Roger Miller’s score, a collection of sturdy, alternately rousing (“River in the Rain”), emotional (“Worlds Apart”) or spiritual (“How Blest We Are”) songs that hit on gospel, country, bluegrass and even rockabilly. In the leads, Nicholas Barasch’s delightful Huck and Kyle Scatliffe’s powerful Jim are worthy companions and even adversaries; both men sing beautifully, but it’s Scatliffe who mesmerizes during the show-stopping “Free at Last.”
In the supporting roles of The King and The Duke—who board Huck and Jim’s raft, take over their lives, and sell Jim back into slavery—David Pittu and Christopher Sieber again show why they are among today’s best comic actors. There’s lovely singing by Adrianna Hicks, Katherine A. Guy and Patrice Covington in their soulful solo turns, while the Encores Orchestra and music director Rob Berman provide the often fiery playing.
Big River—The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
New York City Center, 131 West 55th Street, New York, NY
nycitycenter.org
February '17 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 21 February 2017 13:07
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Betty/L’Enfer/The Swindle
(Cohen Film Collection)
These features by French director Claude Chabrol—who, at his best, could compete with Alfred Hitchcock for witty, well-turned suspense films—are variable in quality, as so much of his career was. 1992’s Betty is an intimately offbeat drama about two scarred women; 1994’s L’Enfer stars a breathtaking Emmanuelle Beart in a twisted psychological portrait of a husband (Francois Cluzet) who believes his wife is cheating; and 1997’s The Swindle wastes Isabelle Huppert, Michel Serrault and Cluzet in a by-the-numbers comic thriller.
As usual, Cohen’s hi-def transfers are exemplary; too bad the scarce extras are two commentaries and a Cluzet interview: no extras from the French discs are included, a shame since we’re missing out on interviews and commentaries from Chabrol himself.
(FilmRise)
This intelligent documentary portrait is essentially one long discussion that director Nancy Buirski conducted before Sidney Lumet’s 2011 death, taking the director from his early TV days to his string of ‘70s and ‘80s film classics that took the pulse of his city (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Prince of the City) and even the nation (Network, Running on Empty).
Lumet is smart, funny, personable and compulsively listenable, and Buirski shows copious clips from his most—and even least—celebrated films (The Wiz, anyone?). The hi-def transfer looks good; extras comprise bonus interview footage and an interview with Treat Williams, who starred in Prince of the City.
Hacksaw Ridge
(Lionsgate)
Director Mel Gibson fetishizes violence: Christ being tortured in The Passion of the Christ, Mayans being slaughtered in Apocalypto, Scots and English armies fighting in Braveheart. His latest ultra-violent war drama ups the ante: in showing how an American pacifist joins the service during World War II, I wouldn’t be surprised if Gibson actually made combat carnage worse than it really is.
At heart a standard war film, it’s sentimental and brutal by turns—with boot-camp sequences stolen from The Boys in Company C and Full Metal Jacket, but far less effective—and it’s up to Andrew Garfield’s emotionally naked performance to deliver the goods. The film looks superb on Blu; extras include a 70-minute making-of documentary, deleted scenes and Gibson’s Veterans Day greeting.
(Warner Archive)
In Billy Wilder’s gossamer 1957 May-December romance, Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper are an unlikely couple who fall for each other in a Paris made even more glamorous by Wilder’s lustrous black and white visuals, which illustrate every cultural cliché of the City of Lights.
Hepburn is luminous, of course, and Maurice Chevalier strangely right as her father; even if Cooper is far too stiff, Wilder has made a high-gloss entertainment of the highest order. Warner Archive’s Blu-ray includes a first-rate hi-def transfer.
Nocturnal Animals
(Universal)
Tom Ford’s excruciating would-be thriller is a textbook study in how not to make a movie: with his flat, repetitive visual palette, clumsily handled plot devices and comatose acting from a stellar cast—how often can Amy Adams look up in feigned shock from a manuscript she’s reading?—Ford’s drama is ham-fisted and pretentious.
Only Michael Shannon escapes the dourness as a dying detective, but even he can’t resuscitate something that’s already DOA. There’s a stellar Blu-ray image; extras include short featurettes and brief interviews.
(Criterion)
Pedro Almodovar became an international art-house figure with this colorful 1988 comedy that had the anarchic spirit of his earlier, scruffier films but also had winning performances from formidable female stars, led by the great Carmen Maura.
Almodovar’s unique comic sensibility has long since worn out, but he was near the top of his game here; Criterion’s hi-def transfer is appropriately outstanding, and extras are new interviews with Almodovar, Maura, brother/producer Augusto Almodovar and former New York Film Fest head Richard Pena, who introduced Almodovar to festival audiences.
The Yakuza
(Warner Archive)
In this 1974 Sydney Pollack drama, Eastern and Western customs literally do battle when Robert Mitchum visits Japan to help save longtime buddy Brian Keith’s daughter from the murderous clutches of the Yakuza, a Mafia-type organization with long-reaching tentacles.
The melding of gangster film, travelogue and romance sits uneasily in Pollack’s messily problematic if intriguing film, with Robert Towne and Paul & Leonard Schrader’s gritty script at odds with Pollack’s more cerebral direction. The fine performances are led by Mitchum’s non-nonsense anti-hero. The grainy hi-def transfer is exceptional; extras are Pollack’s commentary and vintage featurette.
London Town
(IFC)
This minor but diverting study of teenage angst follows its nerdy music-loving hero—teen Shay, living in a lower-class London suburb in the late ‘70s—who is befriended by Joe Strummer of the still-unknown The Clash.
The movie ambles along with bursts of punk rock blasting out of the speakers as Shay falls for his very first girlfriend Vivian and deals with his parents’ separation, all while discovering that Strummer, of all people, is a friendly dude. It’s all kind of precious but redeemed by emphatic acting by Daniel Huttlestone (Shay), Nell Williams (Vivian) and Jonathan Rhys-Myers (Strummer).
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