April '13 Digital Week IV

Blu-rays of Week

The Central Park Five

(PBS)

Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah Burns and her husband David McMahon made this straightforwardly shocking documentary set in 1989 when New York City was aghast by the horrific Central Park jogger rape case and the rounding up of five “wilding” teens. They were found guilty and sentenced to prison, but there have always been question marks, and after a man serving time for another murder confessed, they were set free. This riveting account of failed and belated justice is a must-watch. The Blu-ray image is excellent; extras are additional interviews and updates.

Cheech & Chong’s Animated Movie

(Fox)

Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong’s greatest comedic hits are strung together in an animated misfire that hopes its audience wants to go back in time to the pair’s early ‘70s stoner-style comedy. Of course, those who are in the mood will enjoy it; C&C amusingly voice every role, but the blissfully stoned jokes and gags are as stale as a 40-year-old bag of weed. The mostly crude animation looks decent on Blu-ray; extras comprise four separate commentaries.

Django Unchained

(Lionsgate)

While no Quentin Tarantino fan, I never found his films—even the ludicrous Hitler revenge fantasy Inglorious Basterds—outright despicable: until now. Not only does he indulge in another lunatic fantasy (this time, it’s slavery), but he gleefully revels in gore that any filmmaker with artistry would avoid. Disastrously overwrought performances—that Christoph Waltz won a second Oscar for his intolerable hamminess, along with Tarantino’s second statuette for (abominable) screenplay, shows that the Academy remains clueless—underscore a movie only the uncritical can enjoy. The Blu-ray image is great; extras are featurettes.

Gangster Squad

(Warners)

With its pieces in place—gangsters, heroic/crooked cops, femme fatales, dowdy wives—director Ruben Fleischer does little more than fashion a competent crime drama comprising what appear to be a selection of scenes reminiscent of other, better movies. Even the actors—good ones like Sean Penn and Ryan Gosling and hit-or-miss ones like Nick Nolte, Josh Brolin and a woeful Emma Stone—can’t bail out this rote, unexciting movie. The Blu-ray image looks terrific; extras include a commentary, deleted scenes.

Mr. Selfridge

(PBS)

In the latest British import for PBS’s Masterpiece, Jeremy Piven is Harry Gordon Selfridge, an American entrepreneur who opened London’s first department store in the early 1900s. The show is fun when sticking to the nuts and bolts of the store opening, so it’s too bad that there’s not more of this in creator Andrew Davies’s scripts and less soapy goings-on about Selfridge, the beautiful actress with whom he flirts and his wife. Piven comes off as too contemporary as Selfridge, but the rest of the cast—led by beautiful Australian Frances O’Connor as his American wife—is fine. The Blu-ray image looks lovely; extras are making-of featurettes.

Pawn

(Anchor Bay)

What starts as a routine thriller in a diner—where miscalculating robbers find themselves in trouble after thinking they’d be gone quickly—becomes a routine puzzle: if someone seems a good guy he’s almost assuredly bad (and vice versa), so it ends up as meaningless as its drab title. Still, its interesting small-town atmosphere and solid actors (Michael Chilkis, Ray Liotta, Forrest Whitaker and Nikki Reed, now an assured adult actress after Thirteen and various Twilights) doing what they can help director David A. Armstrong and writer Jerome Anthony White’s so-so film, which looks good on Blu-ray. The lone extra is an on-set featurette.

Pierre Etaix

(Criterion)

The Criterion Collection’s two-disc set of French comic Pierre Etaix’s obscure films comprise five features and three shorts, various legal entanglements keeping them out of circulation for nearly decades (they date from 1961 to 1971).  Despite such notoriety, the inventive Etaix comes off as a funny but essentially second-rate talent too reminiscent of previous comic masters like Buster Keaton (whom his hangdog face resembles), Jacques Tati (whose style he copied) and Jerry Lewis (than whom he’s at least more subtle). Still, this set contains valuable finds that look immaculate in hi-def after their 2011 restoration. Extras include Etaix’s new intros and an hour-long profile, Pierre Etaix, un destin animé.

DVDs of the Week

Drive-In Collection—The Suckers and The Love Garden

(Vinegar)

Anyone with low expectations while watching the flicks in this “Drive-In Collection” won’t be disappointed, since the two features are disjointed, laughable and ridiculous in the best sense of those words…in other words, perfectly trashy drive-in fodder. The Suckers, a silly Most Dangerous Game rip-off, mixes semi-explicit sex scenes with killings as the cast gets off then is offed one by one; The Love Garden is an alternately erotic and boring exploration of a ménage a trois.

Future Weather

(Virgil)

In Jenny Deller’s provocative character study, Perla Haney-Jardine gives a daring portrayal of a teen loner who decides that ecological disaster awaits and takes matters into her own hands, with shocking results. She is matched by an equally fearless Amy Madigan as her hard-bitten grandmother, while the usually annoying Marin Ireland registers strongly as the girl’s selfish mother. Deller doesn’t cop out, which is more than can be said for most directors nowadays. Extras are deleted scenes.

The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg

(Ciesla)

Aviva Kempner’s celebrated 2000 documentary—which introduced to many, even rabid baseball fans, the glorious story of the first star Jewish player in the major leagues, who came within a few dingers of Babe Ruth’s home run record—returns in a two-disc special edition. In addition to the now-classic film and Kempner’s informative audio commentary on disc one, a second disc contains two hours of deleted scenes, from Greenberg’s exploits on the field to his importance as a Jewish symbol, especially during the Nazi era, when racism was displayed right in front of him on the field.

Owen Wingrave

(Arthaus Musik)

Benjamin Britten’s penultimate opera was composed in 1970 during the Vietnam War: the lifelong pacifist set Myfanwy Piper’s terse libretto about a young man in a British military family becoming an outcast due to his pacifism. The brittle score is occasionally brilliant; Britten set Piper’s words with a clarity that makes his anti-war screed digestible to those listening closely. This 2001 British TV film, imaginatively directed by Margaret Williams, has stellar singer-performers: Gerald Finley is a sympathetic Owen, Martyn Hill is his stubborn grandfather and Josephine Barstow is a domineering aunt. Not Britten’s best, it may be his most important work.

Wuthering Heights

(Oscilloscope)

Andrea Arnold’s grimy, unheroic version of Emily Bronte’s novel goes in the other direction from the adaptations before it, as if the only choices are overwrought melodrama and ugly lack of dramatics. Visually, the film has it all over perfumed Heights, with dingy interiors and dreary-looking outdoors perfectly encapsulating this messy, unromantic world. Unfortunately, although Arnold’s cast—mainly unknown amateurs—has the requisite look, it can’t bring Bronte’s complicated emotions to life. A video essay is the lone extra.

CD of the Week

Braunfels—Te Deum

(Acanta)

Walter Braunfels is another master composer whose career was killed by the Nazis, who considered his music degenerate. Best known for his extraordinary comic opera The Birds, Braunfels wrote many inventive orchestral scores, like this stirring choral work, heard in its 1952 premiere for the composer’s 70^th birthday (he died two years later). Written to celebrate the Catholic faith he left Judaism for, his score is filled with glorious vocal sections, sung by the Gurzenich Choir and soloists Leonie Rysinek and Helmut Melchert, and played by the Kolner Rundfunk Symphony Orchestra, confidently led by conductor by Gunter Ward.

On Broadway: “Orphans,” “The Nance, “The Big Knife,” “The Assembled Parties”

Orphans

Written by Lyle Kessler; directed by Daniel Sullivan

Performances through June 30, 2013

Schoenfeld Theatre, 236 West 45^th Street, New York, NY

orphansonbroadway.com

The Nance

Written by Douglas Carter Beane; directed by Jack O’Brien

Performances through June 16, 2013

Lyceum Theatre, 149 West 45^th Street, New York, NY

lct.org

The Big Knife

Written by Clifford Odets; directed by Doug Hughes

Performances through June 2, 2013

American Airlines Theatre, 227 West 42^nd Street, New York, NY

roundabouttheatre.org

The Assembled Parties

Written by Richard Greenberg; directed by Lynne Meadow

Performances through June 16, 2013

Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47^th Street, New York, NY

manhattantheatreclub.com

Sturridge, Baldwin and Foster in Orphans (photo: Joan Marcus)

The trio we meet in a shabby Philly apartment in Lyle Kessler’s obvious Orphans—tough guy Treat, his autistic brother Philip and their shady victim Harold, who shares the place with them after foiling Treat’s kidnaping attempt—charts a predictable path from the get-go.

It opens with Treat returning from a day of petty thievery and showing his meager wares to Philip, too scared to leave the house by Treat’s warning that he’ll die in the outside world: he’s content to eat tuna sandwiches with mayo and watch reruns of old movies on TV. When Treat brings home and ties up Harold—drunken, dapper, with a briefcase—the dynamics unsurprisingly shift. After untying the ropes, Harold ingratiates himself with Philip then Treat; soon Harold (also an orphan, he says) becomes a father surrogate to the parentless pair.

The solid 1987 movie version, directed by Alan Pakula, comprised a strong ensemble in Albert Finney (Harold), Matthew Modine (Treat) and Kevin Anderson (Philip). On Broadway, Daniel Sullivan directs with a veteran hand on John Lee Beatty’s authentically dilapidated set, while the three actors—Alec Baldwin (a poised Harold), Ben Foster (a wishy-washy Treat) and Jim Sturridge (an astonishingly gymnastic Philip)—never find the right rhythms to keep this crudely metaphorical drama together for two hours.

Nathan Lane in The Nance (photo: Joan Marcus)

The Nance, Douglas Carter Beane’s best idea yet for a play, is an alternately hard-edged and corny study of a “nance,” a vaudeville/burlesque-era performer whose blatant swishiness onstage belied his offstage heterosexuality—usually.

This is the 1930s, when “deviant” love dared not speak its name. Beane introduces Chauncey, a famous nance and self-hating right-winger, in an automat, where—as is his custom—he picks up willing young men for a rendezvous. Whom he meets, however—just off the bus from Buffalo—is studly Ned, and their anonymous tryst becomes a live-in relationship, something Chauncey has studiously avoided, to avoid unneeded questions about his personal life, until now.

Labor strife and New York police crackdowns make life miserable for Chauncey and his co-performers: his onstage partner/boss Efram and dancers Carmen, Joan and Sylvie, the last with whom he jousts repeatedly over her Communist talk and his staunchly anti-FDR/New Deal position. The drama comes to a head when Chauncey refuses to be cowed by police threats and is hauled off to jail after he camps it up onstage with an in-their-face defiance.

Despite dramatic clunkiness, Beane adroitly mixes backstage, offstage and onstage happenings, with Chauncey and pals’ routines played out in their entirety—sometimes too much of a (not always) good thing. Despite its ungainliness, director Jack O’Brien cannily makes The Nance Broadway’s most entertaining new show by mixing Nathan Lane’s naturally hammy Chauncey with grounded supporting performances (except Jonny Orsini’s lunkheaded boytoy Ned). Add in the clean efficiency in sets, costumes, lighting and music and The Nance is a more accomplished as a spectacle than as a semi-serious drama.

Ireland and Cannavale in The Big Knife (photo: Joan Marcus)

 The recent Golden Boy revival showed there’s still life in Clifford Odets’ plays—earnestly hard-nosed morality tales—provided there’s a pitch-perfect production. The return of The Big Knife—written in 1948, long after seminal works like Golden Boy, Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing!—proves that Odets doesn’t work when the staging isn’t on his wavelength.

The play concerns Charlie Castle, a studio system star—living the high life in a gorgeous Hollywood home (John Lee Beatty’s magnificent set is the best I’ve seen in awhile)—who decides he no longer wants to be chained to Marcus Hoff and Hoff Studios. He’s also dealing with his estranged wife Marion, gofer Buddy Bliss (whose flirty wife Connie Charlie has a fling with), agent Nat Danzinger, ingénue Dixie Evans and Hoff’s right-hand man Smiley Coy (what a name!), always around to fix the messes Charlie gets into.

Odets’ dialogue oscillates between poetic epiphanies and pretentious platitudes, often in the same speech. His heart is in the right place, but by making the far-from-innocent Charlie a bastion of integrity, Odets stumbles trying to find a dramatically satisfying conclusion to his hero’s murderously messy situation. Emotions and tempers flare but remain on the surface.

Doug Hughes’ soporific staging leaves his actors flailing. Richard Kind’s blustering Marcus and Reg Rogers’s rat-like Smiley are too loud, the women—Marin Ireland’s schoolmarmish Marion, Ana Reeder’s lummox-like Connie, Rachel Brosnahan’s perky Dixie—can’t escape caricature, and Bobby Cannavale—the endlessly resourceful actor from The Motherfucker with the Hat—is unable to inject needed humanity into Charlie, a protagonist who remains flat and uninteresting.

The cast of The Assembled Parties (photo: Joan Marcus)

Richard Greenberg’s The Assembled Parties follows a Jewish family, the Bascovs, at Christmas parties 20 years apart—in 1980 (dawn of Reagan) and 2000 (beginning of George W. Bush). If that doesn’t underline its overly schematic approach, let me add that this family—the members of which are nearly all witty wisecrackers—is as much a maze as its gigantic 14-room Central Park West apartment (in which family members who have visited for years get lost).

The play revolves around matriarch Julie, sister-in-law Faye and Jeff, friend of Julie’s college-age son Scotty, leaving in the dust Julie’s husband Ben, Faye’s husband Mort and daughter Shelley, and Julie and Ben’s young son Tim—who at least grows up and appears in 2000. (Greenberg relegates Shelley to an Act II phone call and kills off Ben, Mort and Scotty, resorting to mumbles about shady doings and AIDS, none of which is explained or explored compellingly enough: perhaps an earlier draft fleshed out what now remains as unconvincing melodrama.)

Although the second act nods toward major revelations and insights, none is forthcoming: instead, improbable one-liners keep going, stale Reagan jokes morph into stale Dubya jokes (all natural crowd-pleasers) and Greenberg, unable to become our new Bernard Shaw, must settle for being our new Neil Simon.

Jessica Hecht’s now-standard mannered line readings—also annoying in last season’s Harvey—prevent Julie from becoming the towering heroine Greenberg has written her as, while the always amusing Judith Light trots out similarly drunken witticisms for Faye that served the actress far better in Jon Robin Baitz’s superior Other Desert Cities.

Jeremy Shamos makes Jeff a sympathetic figure, but Mark Blum, Jonathan Walker and Jake Silberman do little as the other underwritten men. Santo Loquasto’s stylishly plush set unerringly recreates the place such families live in, but Lynne Meadow’s straightforward direction does this overstuffed but undernourished play no favors.

Orphans

Schoenfeld Theatre, 236 West 45^th Street, New York, NY

orphansonbroadway.com

The Nance

Lyceum Theatre, 149 West 45^th Street, New York, NY

lct.org

The Big Knife

American Airlines Theatre, 227 West 42^nd Street, New York, NY

roundabouttheatre.org

The Assembled Parties

Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47^th Street, New York, NY

manhattantheatreclub.com

April '13 Digital Week III

Blu-rays of the Week

Escapee

(Anchor Bay)

Campion Murphy’s dull serial killer thriller begins auspiciously: a group of students visits a prison and an inmate makes advances to the most attractive female among them. After that, what should be the meat and potatoes is instead mostly gristle as a murderer outsmarts a bunch of not very smart people. A half-hearted attempt at psychology is risible, and even the bloodlettings are a letdown for those who want that sort of thing. The Blu-ray image is stellar; lone extra is a making-of featurette.

Massage Parlor Murders

(Vinegar Syndrome)

This mid-‘70s cinematic artifact ineptly attempts being sexy and scary as a diabolical killer offs a Manhattan massage parlor’s nubile masseurs. What’s watchable is a time-capsule glimpse at New York City: the streets, grime, crime, people, vintage vehicles are fascinating by themselves. The disc contains an original cut and re-release cut, which junks a deadpan opening massage; there are also seven minutes of outtakes. The movie’s graininess remains on Blu-ray, which helps with its frozen-in-amber “look.”

A Monster in Paris

(Shout Factory)

The best thing about this mundane animated adventure is its setting: taking place in 1910 Paris, Bibo Bergeron’s movie has a chase scene on the Eiffel Tower and a shootout on the uncompleted Sacre Coeur church. Too bad the dazzling animation is at the service of a nondescript tale complete with bad guys and a misunderstood creature who ends up a hero. The voice talent (Danny Huston, Vanessa Paradis, Bob Balaban, even Sean Lennon) is capable; the Blu-ray transfer looks terrific in both 3-D and 2-D.

Richard III

(Criterion)

Laurence Olivier’s magnificent adaptation of Shakespeare’s early tragedy is not only a cinematic marvel but also contains one of Olivier’s most flamboyant but unhammy performances—Richard is a showboat, which Olivier plays to the hilt. But Olivier the director smartly allows his supporting cast breathing room, and Claire Bloom, Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud and Cedric Hardwicke respond superbly. The boisterous colors of this 1955 Vistavision production are captured immaculately in the Criterion Collection’s transfer; extras comprise a commentary, restoration demo, 12-minute trailer with on-set footage and an Olivier interview from a 1966 BBC series Great Acting.

Wings of Life

(Disneynature)

If you ignore corny narration spoken by Meryl Streep—who must have been gagging during recording—the latest exquisite-looking Disney nature doc shows how the world of plants interconnects with all of earth’s life. The amazing HD photography—which catches the minutest movements and variations among the flowers and insects in a nature dance that’s been going on for billions of years—is the reason to watch, even if the soundtrack (along with Meryl’s silly speech, there are lame songs of uplift) is less than sound. The Blu-ray image is unsurprisingly perfect-looking.

DVDs of the Week

Childrens Hospital—The Complete Season 4

(Warner Archive)

Rob Corddry’s whacked-out satire is undoubtedly the best 10-minute show on TV each week, and this disc brings together 14 hilarious episodes from the series’ fourth season. Along with wickedly imaginative writing, the cast is a comic dream, a group of actors—Malin Akerman, Erinn Hayes, Megan Mullally and even the Fonz himself, Henry Winkler—that’s exactly what Corddry (who’s insanely funny as a clown doctor who believes in the healing power of laughter) and his show needs.

  

Eclipse 38—Masaki Kobayashi Against the System

(Criterion)

Masaki Kobayashi is a Japanese master known for a trio of masterworks: the three-part The Human Condition (1959-61); 1962 samurai epic Hara-kiri; and 1964 eerie ghost tetralogy Kwaidan. This set comprises four films by a director unafraid to tackle pressing, even controversial social issues. The Thick-Walled Room (WWII war criminals), I Will Buy You (baseball corruption), Black River (American postwar occupation)—all released in 1956—and 1962’s The Inheritance (amoral affluence) are further proof of Kobayashi’s exceptional prescience and formidable cinematic style. Now if Criterion releases his later films—Hymn to a Tired Man, Fossil, Tokyo Trials—I’d be forever grateful.

Erroll Garner—No One Can Hear You Read and

The Last Flight of Petr Ginz

(First Run)

These documentaries introduce two individuals—a stellar musician and teenage artist—whom history has forgotten about. Erroll Garner is a tangy portrait of an unsung jazz great whom director Atticus Brady chronicles as an important, overlooked purveyor of uniquely American music. And directors Sandy Dickson and Churchill Roberts’ Petr Ginz stunningly demonstrates that a talented 16-year-old was on his way to a greatness that was tragically cut short by the Nazis.

In Another Country

(Kino Lorber)

For his playful but innocuous comic drama, Korean director Hong Sang-soo casts French actress Isabelle Huppert in a lazy trio of segments in which she plays three different women named Anne whose interaction with lovers, strangers and jealous wives have slight variations depending on the context. What could have been a charming bon-bon about relationship confusion ends up so light and airy that it literally disappears while one is still watching it, despite Huppert’s best efforts..

Shakespeare—The King’s Man

(Athena)

Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro—author of two level-headed books about the Bard, 1599 and Contesting Will—is our tour guide through the last decade of Shakespeare’s creative life, when his plays mirrored the political situation in Britain after Elizabeth’s death and James’s ascension to the throne. At first it’s jarring when Shapiro walks around contemporary London while discussing the Jacobean era (when other playwrights were also flourishing), but Shakespeare’s for-all-time brilliance comes through. The lone extra is a 1983 BBC performance of Macbeth with Nicol Williamson.

Vietnam—Ten Thousand Day War

(Time Life)

In this thorough 26-part series about the Vietnam War, journalist Peter Arnett created an incisive examination of America’s most pointless war, with archival footage and interviews with many participants, both famous (American and Vietnamese officials) and not (ordinary soldiers). It first aired in 1981, so its mention of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, to give one example, lacks the truth which was discovered afterward, but overall, the show’s 11-plus hours that run from France’s initial involvement through the final fall of Saigon can still be considered a definitive history.

CD of the Week

Dutilleux—Correspondances

(Deutsche Grammophon)
Now age 97, Frenchman Henri Dutilleux has a claim on the "world's greatest living composer" mantle, and the three works on this recording—including one world premiere—back up that assertion. The enigmatic 1970 cello concerto, "Tout un monde lointain..." (played with authority by Anssi Karttunen) and the 1997 The Shadows of Time (a magical work with three angelic boys' voices) are two of the anything but prolific composer's masterpieces. But the centerpiece is Correspondances, a remarkably muscular vocal piece from 2003, sung by the exquisite soprano Barbara Hannigan. Leading the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra is conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, one of Dutilleux's great champions.