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Film and the Arts
May '16 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 10 May 2016 20:50
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
The Choice
(Lionsgate)
Author Nicholas Sparks strikes again, and unlike lightning, he continues to hit the same places again and again—yet another young and attractive couple’s relationship is put in perilous danger by something that’s been contrived more tortuously than this sentence.
This, his umpteenth version which takes meeting cute to its extreme, is made serviceable by leads Benjamin Walker and Teresa Palmer, along with the charming Maggie Grace as our hero’s sister; still, the formula is so well-worn that it ultimately becomes easy to resist. The film looks fine on Blu; extras include a commentary, featurettes and deleted scenes.
Dillinger
(Arrow)
John Milius’s crude 1973 shoot ‘em up has more gunfire than seems possible: this is one gangster flick where so many bullets are sprayed that it’s amazing everybody isn’t dead in the first half-hour.
Still, it’s fun in its typically trashy Milius way—and there are solid performances by Ben Johnson as FBI man Melvin Purvis and Warren Oates as John Dillinger himself; there’s also colorful support by Richard Dreyfuss as a particularly lunatic Pretty Boy Floyd and Michelle Phillips as Dillinger’s gorgeous moll. The restored hi-def transfer is authentically grainy; extras comprise several interviews and a commentary.
Melody Gardot—Live at the Olympia Paris
(Eagle Rock)
American singer-songwriter Melody Gardot’s Gallic surname and fluent French in her songs and lively onstage patter endear her to the cheering crowd at Paris’s famed Olympia concert hall for this 2015 show that showcases Gardot’s distinctively sultry vocals, intimate lyrics and bluesy, jazzy tunes.
Her beast of a band—seven players strong—brilliantly backs Gardot on everything from the opener “Don’t Misunderstand” to the transcendent improvisations that give the extended closer “It Gonna Come” its flavor. The image and sound are top-notch.
Mustang
(Cohen Media)
Turkish-French director Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s beautifully observed, deeply personal drama about five young sisters whose lives are upended by the adults in their family as they get older, more mature and more interested in boys and sexuality: a no-no in their conservative Muslim family living in rural Turkey.
Not only does director-writer Erguven insightfully place her heroines in the intersection of religion and family—parents still make their children’s choices for marriage—but she also gets incredibly real, joyously alive portrayals by the splendid young actresses playing the sisters. The film (one of the best debut features in recent years) looks luminous in hi-def; extras comprise interviews with the five actresses and Erguven’s short, A Drop of Water.
Pride and Joy—Alligator Records
(MVD)
The history of Alligator Records, the blues-based record label begun by Bruce Iglauer in Chicago in 1971, is recounted in director Robert Mugge’s lively and informative 1992 documentary in which Iglauer and associates discuss Alligator’s fascinating history, along with showing several of the label’s singers doing what they best.
Much of the running time is smartly given over to live performances by such Alligator staples as Koko Taylor, Lonnie Brooks and Elvin Bishop during a marathon concert that was part of its 20th anniversary tour. The film looks decent on Blu; extras comprise 10 additional audio performances from the tour.
Susan Slept Here
(Warner Archive)
This mild 1954 comedy is definitely a relic of its era: Dick Powell plays a bachelor screenwriter in Hollywood who, after he has a 17-year-old girl foisted on him, marries the girl for convenience—eventually, however, there’s something more to their relationship.
Director Frank Tashlin adds needed color (figuratively and literally) to this ungainly contrivance, which even includes silly musical sequences; Powell and Debbie Reynolds have an offbeat chemistry as the couple, while Anne Francis is typecast as Powell’s glamorous girlfriend. The movie looks terrific in this new color hi-def transfer.
War & Peace
(Anchor Bay/Weinstein Co)
Although Leo Tolstoy’s massive historical novel is near-impossible to adapt—aside from two flawed big-screen versions, there’s also a superb but patchy Prokofiev opera based on it—this British TV mini-series is an intelligent attempt to give a sense of the breadth, if not the depth, of the book. The locales, sets and costumes provide the sumptuous trappings for the characters whose travails are dramatized throughout this mini-series’ eight hours.
The cast is generally competent—Lily James, James Norton and Stephen Rea are quite good, while Paul Dano and Gillian Anderson are less so—and the entire enterprise is, ultimately, an absorbing soap opera. The hi-def transfer is excellent; extras are several short featurettes.
DVD of the Week
Forbidden Hollywood—Volume 10
(Warner Archive)
For its tenth—and, it has been announced, final—volume of studio films made before the Hays Code decided, once and for all, what could and could not be shown on American movie screens, Warner Archive has collected this strong quintet of crime dramas and dark character studies.
Among the five rough-hewn gems, most notable are Lionel Barrymore as a district attorney hoping to get away with murder in 1931’s Guilty Hands and Barbara Stanwyck torn between two lovers in 1933’s Ever in My Heart.
Utah Symphony Celebrates 75th Anniversary at Carnegie Hall
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 04 May 2016 02:51
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Thierry Fischer
On the evening of Friday, April 29th, an excellent concert was given at Carnegie Hall by the fine musicians of the Utah Symphony — which is celebrating it’s 75th anniversary this year — under the assured direction of Thierry Fischer (plus some buzz in the air as the glamorous Mitt Romney could be seen in the audience).
The program opened with a graceful account of Franz Joseph Haydn’s appealing Symphony No. 96, “The Miracle”. This was followed by the New York premiere of the not uninteresting Switch, a percussion concerto by Andrew Norman. Within the first couple of minutes, percussionist extraordinaire, Colin Currie bounded out of the second row in the audience and ran onto the stage, athletically meeting the considerable logistical challenges posed by the work, which was effectively played by the ensemble. The young-looking and handsome composer took the stage for a bow (his new piano concerto was played by the New York Philharmonic in December while another work, Play: Level 1, received its New York premiere with Los Angeles Philharmonic at Geffen Hall in March).
The concert reached its apotheosis at the outset of its second half with a thrilling performance of a selection of excerpts from Sergei Prokofiev’s dazzling ballet score, Romeo and Juliet, displaying to the fullest the superior musicianship of this orchestra. The program closed strongly with a confident reading of Béla Bartók’s haunting Suite from his ballet score for The Miraculous Mandarin.
May '16 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 03 May 2016 13:04
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Dolemite
(Vinegar Syndrome)
In this lesser-known ‘70s Blaxploitation film, Rudy Ray Moore plays Dolemite, a pimp just out of the slammer who decides to get his revenge on the gangster who set him up for his jail time.
Although the movie is shaky dramatically and histrionically, it has some fun moments that are par for the course for this genre; as always, if this is directly in your wheelhouse, your mileage may vary. There’s a decent hi-def transfer; extras include making-of featurette, commentary and interviews.
Emelie
(Dark Sky)
Yet another nasty “nanny” thriller, this one follows a psychotic young woman who—after kidnaping the real babysitter and takes her place (because that’s what such women do)—does even crazier things like playing with a gun in front of her charges and showing the kids their parents’ sex tape.
Again, there are fleeting moments of tension—thanks to Sarah Bolger’s carefully delineated portrayal of Emelie—but they are few and far between, even for an 80-minute B-movie. The film does have a good Blu-ray transfer; the lone extra is a making-of featurette.
Jane Got a Gun
(Anchor Bay/Weinstein Co)
Natalie Portman plays a farmer’s wife and mother in the Wild West who must protect her grievously injured husband from a murderous gang with the help of her former fiancée in this surprisingly tepid western directed with only nominal energy by Gavin O’Connor.
Portman, though game, is one-note, while the various men in her life are played with little variety by Noah Emmerich, Joel Edgerton and Ewan MacGregor. The film looks impressive on Blu-ray.
Kennedy Films of Robert Drew & Associates
(Criterion)
One of the godfathers of the cinema verite movement, Robert Drew and his associates made four seminal film records of President Kennedy’s short term as president: Primary (made in Wisconsin during the spring of 1960), Adventures on the New Frontier (JFK’s early days in office), Crisis (an account of the Cuban Missile Crisis) and finally the classic silent short Faces of November (showing the reaction to his assassination).
This unexpected but superb release collects these classic historical documents, and brings them to Blu-ray in the best possible hi-def conditions, along with several excellent extras, like an alternate cut of Primary, a commentary on Primary, the new documentary Robert Drew in His Own Words, outtakes and new and vintage interviews and conversations.
Remember
Backtrack
(Lionsgate)
In the outlandish thriller Remember, Christopher Plummer plays an elderly Auschwitz survivor tracking down the last of the Nazis who killed his family before he completely loses his memory; Atom Egoyan’s chilly direction mutes what could have been a guilty pleasure, but there are Plummer’s yummy performance and a clever twist ending.
Backtrack is little more than a lukewarm update of The Sixth Sense with a confused-looking Adrien Brody as a psychiatrist whose patients are connected to victims of a train crash decades earlier—which he may have been involved with as a teen. Both films have solid transfers; both discs include featurettes, and Remember includes a director and writer commentary.
What?
(Severin)
Not one of his most memorable films, 1972’s What? is Roman Polanski at his most inconsequential: despite the presence of Marcello Mastroianni as a clichéd European playboy and photogenic locations on the Italian Riviera, it’s only the appealing appearance of Sydne Rome—a young American actress not averse to wandering around through the movie either semi-nude or completely nude—that makes this flimsy movie watchable.
Polanski has fun in a small role but, as director, only his healthy musical palette of Schubert, Beethoven and Mozart belies the fact that What? is pretentious and empty. There’s a striking hi-def transfer; extras are new interviews with Rome, composer Claudio Gizzi and cinematographer Marcello Gatti.
DVD of the Week
Pretty Little Liars—Complete 6th Season
(Warner Bros)
The fates of the “liars” quintet of Aria, Emily, Hanna, Spencer and Mona hang in the balance in an unusually diverting series of mysteries, as the drama’s daring sixth season leaps ahead a half-decade to provide some answers to many difficult questions.
The five-disc set, which comprises all 21 episodes from the most current season, also includes bonus features: four featurettes and deleted scenes.
Theater Reviews—Broadway Musical “Waitress”; Shakespeare in Brooklyn
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Sunday, 01 May 2016 15:05
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Waitress
Music & lyrics by Sara Bareilles; book by Jessie Nelson; directed by Diane Paulus
Performances began March 25, 2016
Richard II & Henry IV, Part I
Written by William Shakespeare; directed by Gregory Doran
Performances through May 1, 2016
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| Jessie Mueller in Waitress (photo: Joan Marcus) |
A sweet-natured romantic comedy, the 2007 movie Waitress was stamped by the offbeat personality of writer-director-costar Adrienne Shelly—who was brutally murdered right before its release when she was just 40 years old—balancing rom-com ickiness with a sympathetic look at Jenna, a woman trying to emancipate herself from trying circumstances. Brightly played by the endlessly resourceful Keri Russell, the heroine in Waitress was easy to root for.
In its translation to the stage, much of what made Waitress charming has been lost, replaced by a by-the-numbers musical with forgettable music, strained jokes and a desperate attempt to make Jenna’s fellow waitresses—played amusingly in the movie by Cheryl Hines and Shelly herself—as important to the show as she is. Director Diane Paulus is merely a ringmaster guiding the proceedings from scene to scene with little originality or creativity
The plot was the weakest thing about the movie—rooting for Jenna to cheat on her dastardly husband with the town’s new gynecologist with whom she begins having an affair during her pregnancy isn’t easy—but Shelly’s temperament was geared more toward Jenna’s creations, the homemade pies that amusingly commented on her frustrating life.
The musical unfortunately doubles down on the story (Jessie Nelson wrote the awkward book) and gives her cohorts Dawn and Becky far more to do in the show than onscreen, to the detriment of Jenna and the show. It doesn’t help that Kamiko Glenn and Keala Settle play the friends with maximum campiness, and with Christopher Fitzgerald piling it on as the goofball who falls for Dawn, there are at least 30 minutes of Waitress that could have been excised.
But Jenna does remain front and center thanks to Jessie Mueller. Though she lacks Keri Russell’s natural charm, she’s a capable actress who can also sing the hell out of anything, even the flaccid tunes Sara Bareilles has composed. The show’s emotional center, “She Used to Be Mine,” is an earnest attempt at an 11 o’clock number that Mueller handles with effortless ease, nearly making it the shattering crescendo it desperately wants to be.
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| David Tennant in Richard II (photo: Richard Termine) |
The Royal Shakespeare Company’s auspicious return to Brooklyn brings four plays under the title King and Country: Shakespeare’s Great Kings—Richard II, Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V—for a six-week long residency showing the breadth and depth of its talent, spread across 12 hours of prime Shakespeare to commemorate the 400th anniversary of his death.
I saw Richard II and Henry IV, Part I and was impressed by director Gregory Doran’s ability to keep things moving cleanly and swiftly but without ignoring the needed breathing spaces that make Shakespeare singular: intimate scenes of verbal jousting that are usually superior to the physical kind, which Doran doesn’t do very well anyway, i.e., the climactic Henry IV battle.
Richard II is rarely done—the only other time I saw it was at BAM in 2000 with Ralph Fiennes essaying the title role—probably because Richard is a tricky role that’s hard to pull off. David Tennant, playing a Richard whose long, wavy hair flows behind him as eccentrically as his personality, isn’t hammy, but makes this showy role his own, eventually gaining the sympathy that Shakespeare withholds from his protagonist until the moving speech when Richard bares himself to his usurper, Bolingbroke (soon to be Henry IV). It’s a high-wire performance that calls attention to itself in the best way.
I could do without Doran’s making physical Richard’s attraction for his cousin Amerle with a pointless lingering kiss (and having Amerle wield the knife that kills Richard is also a questionable decision). But this Richard II powerfully dramatizes the tragedy of a king who gets his comeuppance.
One of Shakespeare’s towering masterpieces, Henry IV, Part I joins typically probing history with the comic world of Sir John Falstaff, one of the most original and audience-pleasing characters he ever wrote. When director Jack O’Brien trimmed both parts of Henry IV at Lincoln Center a decade ago into one play, Kevin Kline’s masterly comic portrayal of Falstaff was its anchor; here, Antony Sher is equally amusing and touching as the blowhard Falstaff, who gives free rein to the king’s precocious son Prince Hal’s inability to grow up.
Sher brilliantly doesn’t overdo Falstaff; instead, he plays this garrulous, gregarious character straight, which makes him all the more endearing. And Sher’s generous performance is balanced beautifully by Alex Hassell’s Hal who, aware of his own immaturity, slowly becomes the mature prince who will be crowned Henry V by the end of the next play.
With intelligent and inspired acting throughout both plays, director Doran smartly keeps visual flourishes to a minimum: scrims and projections are sparingly but particularly well-used, Stephen Brimson Lewis designed the ingeniously spare sets and even the floor is cleverly lit (by the talented Jim Mitchell) to illuminate the strenuous physical and psychological terrain these plays traverse. There’s no better celebration of Shakespeare’s genius in this 400th anniversary year of his death than such exciting and edifying productions of his remarkable works.
Waitress
Brooks Atkinson Theatre, 256 West 47th Street, New York, NY
waitressthemusical.com
Richard II & Henry IV, Part I
Brooklyn Academy of Music, Harvey Theatre, Brooklyn, NY
bam.org
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