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Film and the Arts
November '16 Digital Week IV
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 22 November 2016 18:03
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams
(Criterion)
One of Japanese master Akira Kurosawa’s most vividly visual filmscapes, this episodic 1990 fantasy doesn’t connect in any way but its stories are heartfelt—if at times diffuse—reminders of how life on this planet is both precious and filled with man-made horrors.
The best segments, at the beginning and end, present Kurosawa’s singular cinematic vision at its most colorful: the middle segment, on Vincent van Gogh (with Martin Scorsese miscast as the painter), gloriously bursts into dazzling primary colors. Criterion’s excellent release comprises an eye-poppingly beautiful hi-def transfer; Stephen prince commentary; Making of “Dreams,” a 150-minute on-set documentary; Kurosawa's Way (2011), a 50-minute feature with many filmmaking admirers discussing Kurosawa; and new interviews with assistant director Takashi Koizumi and production manager Teruyo Nogami round out this excellent set.
J’accuse
(Olive Films)
In Christopher Hampton’s choppy 1995 biopic Carrington, Emma Thompson embracingly embodies the title character, whose love for avowed homosexual writer Lytton Stratchey (a powerful Jonathan Pryce) was forever unrequited; Hampton gets much right, but he meanders too often to no discernable point.
Abel Gance’s J’accuse, a strong but strident 1938 anti-war tract, showcases several formidable actors (Victor Francen, Jean-Max, Line Noro, Paul Amiot) who point Gance’s polemic in the right direction. Both films have nicely restored transfers.
Hannie Caulder
(Olive Signature)
This 1971 revenge western stars a comely but wooden Raquel Welch as a frontier woman who survives a rape by three outlaws, then tracks them down after they kill her husband in cold blood. Director Burt Kennedy is unsure whether he’s making an exploitation flick or a serious drama about a woman’s degradation and redemption, ending up in a no man’s (or woman’s) land uneasily poised between two extremes.
Robert Culp is gamely appealing as the hired gun who helps Hannie, while Ernest Borgnine, Strother Martin and Jack Elam are an appropriately despicable bunch of hombres. The film looks quite good on Blu-ray; extras are adirector Alex Cox (Walker, Repo Man) commentary and two featurettes.
(HBO)
This HBO series about a trio of gay men who are close friends explores their relationships, both platonic and intimate, over the course of two seasons and 16 episodes—along with a full-length film which reunited the friends a year later at a wedding.
The five-disc Blu-ray set brings together all of the episodes and the film, all showcasing the rich, sensitive performances in the leads by Jonathan Groff, Frankie J. Alvarez andMurray Bartlett. The hi-def transfers are first-rate; the 16 episodes contain audio commentaries.
One-Eyed Jacks
(Criterion)
Marlon Brando’s lone directing effort was this overambitious 1961 western in which he plays a gunslinger who, after going to prison because of his partner’s betrayal, spends the rest of the long movie getting his ultimate revenge. The always-charismatic Brando is never less than watchable, Karl Malden fine as his nemesis and Slim Pickens steals scenes as Malden’s lackey, but there’s a huge hole left by Pina Pellicer’s amateurishly stiff performance as the woman Brando loves.
It’s undeniably gorgeous to look at, as Charles Lang’s splendid cinematography gains in color and detail in Criterion’s restored hi-def transfer. Extras include a Martin Scorsese intro, Brando voice-recording excerpts made during production and video essays on Jacks’production history and Brando’s making a western.
Capital
Syndicate—All or Nothing
Wentworth
(Acorn)
The acting is the main thing is two new British television series, as well as one from Down Under. Capital is a clever drama tinged with mystery and paranoia, helped along by an ace cast led by Toby Jones, Rachael Stirling, Lesley Sharp and Gemma Jones; Syndicate—which follows the servants at a ritzy mansion who win the lottery—features a stellar ensemble headed by Alice Krige, Polly Walker and Anthony Andrews.
The intense Australian prison drama Wentworth—emphatically not a rip-off of Orange Is the New Black—also features a plethora of superb performers: Danielle Cormack, Nicole da Silva, Kris McQuade, Leeanna Walsman and Kate Atkinson. Wentworth extras include an hour of on-set featurettes and several interviews.
The Childhood of a Leader
(IFC)
Actor Brady Corbet’s haunting directorial debut, a Fascist allegory for our time, is an absorbing tale of a rambunctiously wild child—son of an American ambassador in Europe—who quickly discovers that he can have his way at any cost, including the lives of his parents.
Although the finale unsubtly depicts the adult leader beginning his reign in front of cheering crowds—the showy camerawork and blatant score are showy undercut the power of the images—overall, this is an unsettling and pertinent expose, which features a brilliant performance by Berenice Bejo as the boy’s mother.
Lo and Behold—Reveries of the Connected World
(Magnolia)
Another of German director Werner Herzog’s endlessly fascinating documentaries—as opposed to his trite and unconvincing fictions—is this playfully serious study of how the virtual world has encroached on the real one, most likely to our ultimate peril.
As usual, Herzog seeks out the most interesting if unlikely people to talk with, all in his own, charmingly accented English; that inimitable voice also provides the alternately amused and bemused narration. Lone extra is a Herzog interview.
CD of the Week
Arthur Honegger and Jacques Ibert—L’Aiglon
(Decca)
Two master French composers did that rare thing, joining forces to collaborate on an opera. The unsurprisingly tuneful but surprisingly coherent result (musically and dramatically) contains both charming and intense music, with a flavorful libretto based on Edmund Rostand’s play about Napoleon’s son.
This recording—conducted by Kent Nagano, leading a lovely performance by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra—gets all the little details right and builds the opera to a taut finale; there’s exquisitely idiomatic singing by sopranos Anne-Catherine Gillet and Helene Guilmette and baritones Marc Barrard and Etiene Dupuis. Too bad this rarity—first performed in 1937 then infrequently done since—wasn’t given a staging that we could watch on DVD or Blu-ray.
Off-Broadway Review—“Terms of Endearment” with Molly Ringwald
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 22 November 2016 03:25
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Terms of Endearment
Adapted by Dan Gordon; directed by Michael Parva
Performances through December 11, 2016
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| Molly Ringwald and Hannah Dunne in Terms of Endearment (photo: Carol Rosegg) |
I’ve never read Larry McMurtry’s novel Terms of Endearment, so I don’t which parts playwright Dan Gordon used for his stage adaptation. But since I know James L. Brooks’ film of the book—which swept the 1983 Oscars—pretty well, it’s striking how many of the best lines in this alternately sardonic and sentimental comedy-cum-tragedy about the volatile relationship between a headstrong widow and her only daughter are taken directly from the screen version.
Of course, in the movie, writer-director Brooks had such acting luminaries as Shirley MacLaine, Jack Nicholson, Debra Winger and Jeff Daniels—all at their considerable best—at his disposal. Their long shadows unfortunately hang over the stage version of Terms, efficiently directed by Michael Parva and tidily if a bit too obviously adapted by Gordon.
This is not to blame the very capable actors: Molly Ringwald is, like MacLaine, a simultaneously appealing and exasperating matriarch Aurora Greenaway; Hannah Dunne gives feisty daughter Emma a tangy Texas twang a la Winger, but smartly never apes her outright; Jeb Brown treads lightly around the scene-stealing Nicholson performance as the aging but still womanizing astronaut Garrett Breedlove; and Denver Milord makes a likable Flap, Emma’s put-upon husband, who was so memorably played by Jeff Daniels.
But even with such solid acting, whenever the all-time classic dialogue tumbles out of the characters’ mouths—Aurora (“Why should I be happy about being a grandmother??!!”), Garrett (“If you wanted to get me on my back, all you had to do was ask”); and Emma (“I don't give a shit, mother, I'm sick”)—anyone with passing familiarity with the movie will miss the legendary spins put on it by MacLaine, Nicholson, Winger, et al. It earns the tears it gets at the end, but this Terms of Endearment sits uneasily between the screen and the stage.
Terms of Endearment
59e59 Theatres, 59 East 59th Street, New York, NY
59e59.org
Off-Broadway Review—Anna Deavere Smith’s “Notes from the Field”
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 21 November 2016 04:30
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Notes from the Field
Written and performed by Anna Deavere Smith; directed by Leonard Foglia
Performances through December 11, 2016
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| Anna Deavere Smith in Notes from the Field (photo: Joan Marcus) |
We need Anna Deavere Smith more than ever. Her form of documentary theater—where she “plays” real-life individuals discussing whatever subject she has to hand, starting with Fires in the Mirror, about the Crown heights riots, and continuing with Twilight Los Angeles 1992, House Arrest and Let Me Down Easy—returns with Notes from the Field, another provocative and wide-ranging exploration of a peculiarly American problem: the uneasy relationship between education and the penal system.
The starting point for Smith is the police killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore. But Smith is after something more substantial than simple racial politics: she charts a more systematic failure in how people who need help are treated, often being thrown them in prison instead. The words of the NAACP’s Sherrilyn Ifill—who bookends the show with remarkably clear-headed pronouncements on race, education and prison—puts it into perspective by saying “one of the huge investments that we made was in the criminal justice system. And that investment was made at the expense of other investments.” Namely, she elaborates, education and mental illness. And so it begins…
Smith introduces school officials like Philadelphia principal Linda Cliatt-Wayman and teacher Stephanie Williams, who continue fighting the good fight even while having little in the way of ammo to fight with, as Williams willingly admits: “It's like me running a jail without a gun…I can’t throw you in a closet, I can't do any of that. It's just like, I gotta keep you in order just by being me!”
There’s Pastor Jamal-Harrison Bryant, speaking to an emotionally charged audience at Gray’s memorial service, where he gives his own take on why Gray ended up dead in the back of a police van: “in a subtlety of revolutionary stance, (Gray) did something that black man were trained to—taught—know not to do. He looked police in the eye. I want to tell this grieving mother, you are not burying a boy, you are burying a grown man. Who knew that one of the principles of being a man is looking somebody in the eye.”
And, most poignant of all, there’s John Lewis, Congressman and former 1960s civil rights protestor, who was seriously injured marching with Martin Luther King. Lewis’s story about meeting ex-Klan members who apologize to his face for their viciously racist actions against him and them crying genuine tears over it is heartrending and hopeful.
As always, Smith’s chameleon-like ability—indeed, genius—to bring out the nuances in 19 very different people underlines the fact that this is a moral dilemma, not a partisan one, which is something we desperately need during this uncertain time in our country. Leonard Foglia’s astute direction shifts the visuals often enough to keep the performance from stagnating—particularly the use of a video camera to bring subjects into closer focus—and the appearance of Marcus Shelby occasionally playing an upright bass, which at times enters into a duet of sorts with Smith that makes the subject matter even more urgent.
Notes from the Field
Second Stage Theater, 305 West 43rd Street, New York, NY
2st.com
Off-Broadway Review—Classic Musical “Finian’s Rainbow” Returns
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Sunday, 20 November 2016 03:51
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Finian’s Rainbow
Music by Burton Lane; book by E.Y. Harburg & Fred Saidy; lyrics by E.Y. Harburg
Adapted & directed by Charlotte Moore
Performances through December 31, 2016
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| Ryan Silverman and Melisa Errico in Finian's Rainbow (photo: Carol Rosegg) |
The Irish Rep’s revival of the 1947 musical, Finian’s Rainbow, is stripped-down musically (a four-piece ensemble led by piano and harp), but such a small-forces staging allows this charming show—with a smart, sassy book by E.Y. Harburg and Fred Saidy, clever lyrics by Harburg and sweetly beguiling music by Burton Lane—to inhabit such a tiny space so engagingly.
The story, a messy mix of the magical and mundane, has progressive racial attitudes for its day—and for our day too, it now appears. Irish immigrant Finian (the delightful Ken Jennings) and his marriageable daughter Sharon (the delightfully plucky Melissa Errico) arrive in America with a crock o’gold Finian stole from a leprechaun, which he hopes helps them become rich in their new country.
The pair settle in Rainbow Valley, Missitucky, where Sharon falls in love with handsome local yokel Woody (a nice turn by Ryan Silverman), leprechaun Og (a too campy Mark Evans) slowly turns human while searching for the lost gold, and racist Senator Rawkins (an amusingly blustery Dewey Caddell) gets his comeuppance when he’s transformed into a black man.
Combining standard ethnic jokes with standard romantic comedy, the show bubbles along nicely, spurred on by wonderful Lane-Harburg songs like “Old Devil Moon” and “Look to the Rainbow,” and spirited dance numbers choreographed by Barry McNabb, particularly “Dance of the Golden Crock,” performed with gusto by young dancer Lyrica Woodruff.
The whole shebang is wrapped up with a reprise of one of the score’s most soaring melodies, “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” Director Charlotte Moore obviously loves Finian, and it shows: even in her scaled-down version, it’s an unalloyed pleasure.
Finian’s Rainbow
Irish Rep, 132 West 22nd Street, New York, NY
irishrep.org
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