October '15 Digital Week IV

Blu-rays of the Week

3 Films by Benoit Jacquot 

(Cohen Film Collection)

Mediocre French director Benoit Jacquot specializes in surface studies of young women that are energized by his actresses—notably Virginie Ledoyen, who became a star in 1995's A Single Girl, in which she persuasively portrays the title character juggling a boyfriend, pregnancy and dead-end job. Ledoyen highlights this three-film set, which also includes 1990's The Disenchanted, a blah look at a confused teenager starring Judith Goreche, and 1999's Keep It Quiet, a wan, sub-Chabrol satire that features Isabelle Huppert and Vahina Giaconte. The films themselves are noticeably improved in hi-def; extras are audio commentaries and new Jacquot interviews, but it’s too bad there's nothing about any of his leading ladies.

I Spit on Your Grave 3—Vengeance Is Mine 

(Anchor Bay)

Revenge is always a go-to trope for a horror movie, and when a woman bashes men who've done her and others wrong, so much the better: at least that's what this blunt, bloody sequel to the sequel to the latest reboot promises. For awhile, it's a trashy guilty pleasure as rape victim Jennifer (a lively Sarah Butler) gets vengeance after her friend is killed by going after sleazebags who meet their applause-worthy demise; but it soon bogs down in ham-fisted visualizations of Jennifer’s crazed mindset. The hi-def transfer is first-rate. 

Indian Summers 

The Widower 

(PBS)

Indian Summers, a novelistic depiction of the misunderstandings among native Indians and their British rulers, takes its time fleshing out its characters’ political, personal and social status while fashioning a deepening and involving mystery; superb acting and unerring recreations of a bygone era give this 10-part series staying power. Based on a bizarre true story, The Widower absorbingly dramatizes how Malcolm Webster, after killing his first wife, tries to off his second and fools a third woman into falling for him: the performances of Reece Shearsmith (Malcolm), Sheridan Smith, Kate Fleetwood and Archie Panjabi (the women) and John Hannah (detective) are brilliantly of a piece, lending dramatic gravitas to this three-part mini-series. Both series have excellent hi-def transfers; lone Indian extra is a one-hour series documentary.

Just Let Go—Lenny Kravitz Live

Roxy, The Movie—Frank Zappa & the Mothers 

(Eagle Rock)

Shot live in Paris during his latest tour, Just Let Go shows Lenny Kravitz pumping out hit after hit for an adoring audience; although he took too commercial a turn after his first two well-crafted albums, there's no denying the joy in songs like "Let Love Rule," "It's Not Over Til It's Over" and "New York City." Roxy—The Movie, the Holy Grail for Frank Zappa fanatics, is the long-awaited video release of the legendary 1973 Los Angeles concerts that found Zappa and his crack band The Mothers of Invention at their peak, kicking out classic jams and showcasing Zappa's inimitable humor and nimble guitar playing. Both films look and sound excellent on Blu; extras include bonus songs.

The Making of the Mob 

(Anchor Bay)

This eight-part mini-series—narrated by Ray Liotta and featuring talking-head interviews with everyone from Rudy Giuliani to Chazz Palminteri, alongside many historians and experts—is a bastardization of the current mania for reenactment documentaries and docudramas. But the subject matter—how mobsters were able to rule New York City—is so compelling that it remains watchable throughout. The visuals are vividly evoked in hi-def; extras comprise deleted scenes and featurettes.

Nurse Jackie—Complete 7th Season 

(Lionsgate)

As the drug-addicted title character, Edie Falco has proven her mettle as a gifted dramatic and comedic actress far beyond The Sopranos, in the process making this self-consciously cute but “serious” sitcom entertaining during its seven up-and-down seasons. The final season ends on an unsurprisingly ambiguous note, but even amid the many haphazard and wayward changes in tone, Falco is always on point. The hi-def transfer is solid; extras are commentaries, featurettes, deleted scenes and a gag reel.

Paper Towns 

(Fox)

Lightning doesn't strike twice when it comes to movie adaptations of John Green's popular young adult novels: whereas The Fault in Our Stars had a schmaltzy if tragic premise and the fantastically authentic actress Shailene Woodley, Jake Schreier's Towns has insufficient amounts of drama, comedy and even believable teenage behavior. I'm not asking for The Breakfast Club, mind you, but something more than the jokey silliness mitigating the nicely understated performances of Cara Delevingne and Nat Woolf as unlikely friends would be welcome. The movie has a sharp Blu-ray transfer; extras include deleted scenes, gag reel, making-of and featurettes.

The Wolfpack 

(Magnolia)

Crystal Moselle's documentary about six home-schooled brothers who never ventured outside their lower Manhattan apartment and who began making home movies based on favorites they watched repeatedly begins rather one-dimensionally, as they’re seen primarily through their bizarre movie-only existence. Soon, however, Moselle effectively builds a sympathetic portrait of siblings using the only means possible to survive incarceration by their parents. The movie looks fine on Blu; extras include some of the brothers’ home movies.

DVDs of the Week

The Great American Dream Machine 

(S'more)

Shown on PBS from 1971-3, this satirical comedy-variety series, hosted and starring humorist Marshall Efron, was a forerunner of Saturday Night Live, but its three seasons were marked by the same sort of unevenness plaguing the shows that followed, as classic bits like Albert Brooks' hilarious "School for Comedians" are interspersed with pieces that don’t work or take too long to hit their marks. The wide-ranging nature of the show—short documentary interludes included a “Great American Hero” segment—allowed it to feature such notables as Studs Terkel, Evel Knievel and Andy Rooney, and the four discs have some true gems amid the dross. Extras include additional sketches.

Satiesfictions—Promenades with Erik Satie 

(Accentus Music)

French composer Erik Satie was a master of musical miniatures, mostly piano works with the perfect balance of exquisite musicality and offbeat humor that no one else could approach without seeming hopelessly retrograde. This impressive hour-long exploration of his life and art finds the wondrous whimsy in the absurd that was Satie’s most endearing (and enduring) feature. The program includes interviews with experts and friends such as Jean Cocteau, as well as performances of some of his most representative works. Extras include more performances.

CDs of the Week

Anne Akiko Meyers—Serenade 

(e one)

Leonard Bernstein’s five-movement Serenade, based on Greek philosophers' writings about love, is a concerto in all but name: and when Anne Akiko Meyers plays the solo violin part with such passionate intensity, it certainly sounds like the most romantic (in both senses) of Bernstein’s works. The rest of the CD comprises shorter pieces arranged for violin and orchestra (Keith Lockhart leads the London Symphony); the picks of this litter—Astor Piazzolla’s Oblivion and two Gershwin compositions—sound ethereally beautiful in Meyers' radiant hands (and bow).

Chris Cornell—Higher Truth 

(UME)

On his fourth solo studio album, Chris Cornell again teams with producer Brendan O'Brien for a sometimes dazzling trip through many of the singer's influences, from intimate folk to muscular rock to the Beatles; his trademark yelp is held in check as he shows off his vocal range on an eclectic group of songs adorned with sparse but inventive instrumentation by (mainly) Cornell and O'Brien. Highlights include the soaring chorus of "Before We Disappear," the majesty of the piano-based title track, the soothing optimism of "Our Time in the Universe" and the acoustic strumming on "Only These Words," which wouldn't be out of place on the American version of Rubber Soul.

Prokofiev—Peter and the Wolf…and Jazz! 

(Le Chant du Monde)

Viktoria Mullova—Prokofiev 

(Onyx)

For those for whom classical music might seem too imposing, Sergei Prokofiev’s bright and friendly Peter and the Wolf provides an intro to orchestral sounds and instrumentation: for those for whom even that might be too much, a clever big-band arrangement is played with cheerful aplomb by the French jazz combo The Amazing Keystone Big Band, with actor David Tenant as the capable narrator. On her new Prokofiev CD, the exciting Russian violinist Viktoria Mullova tackles three of the master's violin works—the spry and lively Second Concerto, the melancholy Sonata for Two Violins (with Tedi Papavrami) and the rueful Solo Violin Sonata—in a rich, purposeful recital.

October '15 Digital Week III

Blu-rays of the Week

The Anomaly 

(Anchor Bay)

If you're confused while watching this futuristic tale of amnesia and parallel universes about a man who can only stay awake for 9 minutes and 47 seconds at a time, then join the club: the hero, who is played by the movie's director Noel Clarke, is probably even more so. Although the production design and visual effects are impeccable and accomplished actors like Brian Cox and Alexis Knapp are part of the supporting cast, nothing can overcome a script riddled with the genre's usual inconsistencies. The movie does look striking on Blu-ray.

Blood and Glory—The Civil War in Color 

(History)

History buff that I am, I thoroughly enjoyed this mini-series spanning the years of the American civil war, which admirably doesn't try to cover the same ground as Ken Burns' seminal (but problematic) classic documentary. The gimmick, the colorizing of hundreds of photographs from the era, makes for a more immediate historical and educational experience for viewers, providing added detail to photographer Matthew Brady's iconic images, along with many others. The hi-def transfer is excellent; extras include additional interviews and featurettes.

Blunt Force Trauma 

Nocturna 

(Alchemy)

In Blunt Force Trauma, two underground duelists fall in with each other as he tracks down the champion and she avenges her brother's killing, leading to a tender romance amidst the violence; if neither Ryan Kwanten nor Mickey Rourke is able to play an interesting, even semi-real character, fans of Freida Pinto won't be disappointed in her typically committed performance. Nocturna, an oddball addition to New Orleans vampire sagas, suffers from unsavory inhuman creatures and idiotic behavior of the police while investigating the disappearance of several children around Christmastime. Both films have decent hi-def transfers.

Call Me Lucky 

(MPI)

In his sympathetic documentary of comedian Barry Crimmins, Bobcat Goldthwait presents a trenchant portrait of a man known for uncontrolled anger as a standup, with other comics chiming in to say he was one of the best around: but he went AWOL for awhile. Goldthwait shows what happened, and when Crimmins himself discusses it, and we watch him trying to simultaneously erase terrible scars and ensure others don't go through the same hell, our grudging respect for his comic talent becomes outright admiration for his bravery. The film looks fine on hi-def; lone extra is a Goldthwait/Crimmins commentary.

Eaten Alive 

(Arrow)

One of director Tobe Hooper's earliest scarefests is a schlocky depiction of a dastardly motel where people check in but don't check out; it's risible, forgettable and insipid all at once. Hooper later turned rancid material into frightful flicks, but in this 1976 attempt—hampered by sound-staginess and bad acting across the board—nothing works out. Even upgraded to hi-def, the movie looks cheap, which may make purists happy. Extras include a Hooper intro and interview, commentary, other interviews and featurettes.

A Special Day 

(Criterion)

Ettore Scola's subdued 1977 character study got Oscar nominations for Best Foreign Film and for Marcello Mastroianni's typically strong performance as a homosexual living under Fascism on the very day in 1938 when Hitler visits Mussolini in Rome; equally memorable is Sophia Loren as a married woman with six children who spends the day with this man and discovers there's life beyond her front door. The film, shot in burnished tones by cinematographer Pasqualino de Santis—whose palette is so drained of color it's nearly black and white—is one of the erratic Scola's best studies of history and personal lives intersecting. Criterion's hi-def transfer is first-rate; extras are new Scola and Loren interviews, two Dick Cavett shows from 1977 with Loren and Mastroianni, and a new short, The Human Voice, with Loren.

The Vatican Tapes 

(Lionsgate)

This banal Exorcist rip-off follows a young woman whose erratic behavior finally alerts her father, boyfriend and priests to conclude that she has come under the spell of an evil spirit. Director Mark Nevelone has little sense of pacing or narrative flow, the choppiness of the movie of a piece with the hazy script and indifferent acting: even the promising found-footage angle soon becomes a narrative dead end. The film looks decent on Blu; extras are commentary, featurettes, deleted and extended scenes.

DVDs of the Week

All-Star Orchestra—Programs 11 & 12 

(Naxos)

For the latest episodes of this entertaining classical-music series, conductor Gerard Schwartz and his first-class ensemble perform two classics and one new work. Richard Strauss's orchestral masterpiece Ein Heldenleben and Wolfgang Mozart's lilting Posthorn Serenade are played with clarity and proficiency, no surprise from these musicians. What's thrilling to hear—and watch—is soloist Anne Akiko Meyers, whose impassioned style coaxes all the lyricism out of Samuel Jones' Violin Concerto. Short intros by Schwartz, Jones and Meyers set the stage for all three pieces.

Hungry Hearts 

(Sundance Selects)

Writer-director Saverio Costanzo's modern-day horror film eschews the typical found-footage, cheap scares or wooden performers: instead, he simply shows a young and tentative couple having difficulties after their son is born. For over an hour, Costanzo ratchets up the tension tautly and tightly, as the wife continually endangers her infant son and her husband slowly realizes the serious implications. Too bad the last half-hour degenerates into the usual cop-out melodramatics, nearly canceling strong performances by Adam Driver and especially Alba Rohrwacher as the couple.

People Places Things 

(Alchemy)

If it wasn't for the delightful dual presence of Daily Show standout Jessica Williams and Regina   King as a 19-year-old student and her mother, this self-important comic look at a cartoonist/professor with young twin daughters going through a personal crisis after his wife leaves him, writer-director Jim Strouse's film would be less tolerable. The main problem is the insufferable presence of Jemaine Clement as the protagonist, whose lack of charm and charisma drags the movie down, even with an appealing and talented supporting cast (the actresses playing his daughters are especially real and funny).

Wind Across the Everglades 

(Warner Archive)

In Nicholas Ray's pulpy 1958 melodrama, a young Christopher Plummer battles a burly Burl Ives in the Florida Everglades, the two going mano a mano in the depths of the gator- and snake-infested swamplands. Budd Schulberg's script may be overstuffed with atmosphere and undercooked with plausible drama, but Ray's direction compensates, while Plummer and Ives make worthy adversaries (and support from the likes of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee is essential). It's too bad that this unrestored color film isn't also available on Blu-ray.

NYC Theater Reviews—‘The Gin Game’ on Broadway; ‘Perfect Arrangement’ and ‘Clever Little Lies’ off-Broadway

The Gin Game
Written by D.L. Coburn; directed by Leonard Foglia
Performances through January 10, 2016
Golden Theatre, 252 West 45th Street, New York, NY
thegingamebroadway.com

Perfect Arrangement
Written by Topher Payne; directed by Michael Barakiva
Performances through November 6, 2015
Primary Stages, The Duke on 42nd Street, 229 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
primarystages.org

Clever Little Lies
Written by Joe DiPietro; directed by David Saint
Performances through January 3, 2016
Westside Theatre Upstairs, 407 West 43rd Street, New York, NY
cleverlittlelies.com

James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson in The Gin Game (photo: Joan Marcus)

That D.L. Coburn's The Gin Game won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for Drama says less about its quality and more about those who chose it. This slight two-hander about two lovably cranky oldsters in a senior citizens' home who bond and bicker while playing cards might be a sure-fire crowd-pleaser, but it's little more than an enjoyable way to pass two hours in the theater with two living legends.

Its premiere starred real-life couple Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, followed by E.G. Marshall and Maureen Stapleton, as Weller and Fonsia. For this first Broadway staging since 1997 (when Charles Durning and Julie Harris starred), two of our biggest—and oldest—stage stars are headlining: James Earl Jones and Cecily Tyson. And they are superb together, making the play's gimmicky surface—the constant repetition of the games, or of Weller's counting the cards while dealing, or of their cantankerous back-and-forth, which shows their growing (if grudging) affection—seem natural and organic.

There are moments—their tender dance, their final spewing of a certain F-word—when Jones and Tyson transcend the script's built-in limitations, while Leonard Foglia's direction spotlights what's amusing more than what's dramatic. The Gin Game is nowhere near top-drawer, except when pros like the 84-year-old Jones and 90-year-old Tyson play it at the top of their game.

The cast of Perfect Arrangement (photo: James Leynse)

Two off-Broadway plays, Perfect Arrangement and Clever Little Lies, both nod to TV and stage sitcoms to construct their comic tales. Topher Payne's Perfect Arrangement, which explores the closeted lives of homosexuals in Washington, D.C., circa 1950, has a surface resemblance to '50s "family" comedies like Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It To Beaver, I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners. 

But such wink-winks and nudge-nudges allow Payne to slyly tell his story of two gay couples posing as straight husbands and wives. Bob Martindale, a Department of State employee, and Jim Baxter, his schoolteacher lover, pretend to be married to, respectively, the stay-at-home Millie and her girlfriend Norma, who works with Bob to ferret out Communists during the height of the Red Scare; in fact, they are so good at their job that their unctuous boss Theodore Sunderson wants them weeding out other undesirables and perverts, straight and (it goes without saying) gay. Theodore's ditsy wife Kitty and Barbara Grant, an unapologetically loose straight woman who works with Bob and Norma, round out the septet.

Although Payne wittily lampoons the era's rigid homosexual and straight ideology, at times he's too facile: the men literally go into and out of a closet to reach their apartment adjoining the women's. The laughs are there, and if they don't go too deeply, they do provide food for thought. Michael Barakiva's adroit directing balances sitcom tropes with Payne's more serious provocations, and the cast has great fun with the just-this-side-of-cartoon characters, especially Mikaela Feely-Lehmann, whose Millie is intelligent, forthright and shrewdly funny.

Marlo Thomas in Clever Little Lies (photo: Matthew Murphy)

In Clever Little Lies, Joe DiPietro takes his cue from Neil Simon's one-liner-filled '60s and '70s comedies; that it stars Marlo Thomas also nods to her That Girl sitcom. Unlike Living on Love, a farce that was DOA on Broadway last spring, Lies shows that DiPietro can make his jokes hit their marks, even if too many are vulgar and crass, and, unlike the lazy stereotypes of Love, here there are characters worth spending time with.

When Billy tells his father, Bill, Sr., that he's cheating on his beloved wife Jane—who just had a baby—with a gorgeous 23-year-old personal trainer named Jasmine, dad inadvertently spills the beans to his wife Alice, who invites her son and daughter-in-law to the house to talk. As things are hashed out among the foursome, arguments ensue, drinks are downed, and dad eventually walks out in a huff. But this is no Virginia Woolf: DiPietro simply wants laughs, and he gets them, even throwing a late curveball that sheds new light on mom and dad's marriage, along with Billy's own infidelity.

David Saint's snappy staging smartly builds the conversations toward their humorous payoffs, while his acting quartet—Marlo Thomas (Alice), Greg Mullavey (Bill, Sr.), George Merrick (Billy), Kate Wetherhead (Jane)—perfectly hits the beats of most of the jokes.

October '15 Digital Week II

Blu-rays of the Week

The Gallows

(Warner Bros)

There's little originality left in the old found-footage filmmaking bandwagon, although some keep trying: case in point, Chris Lofing and Travis Cluff's movie follows teens through their darkened school one night as they encounter ghosts with a penchant for hanging. There is a certain cleverness in the telling, even if the shocks are both predictable and cheap, but the found-footage gimmick makes scant sense even by the low standards of the genre. If that doesn't bother you, this may well be up your alley. The film looks OK in hi-def; extras include alternate version of the film, featurettes, deleted scenes and a gag reel.

In the Courtyard

(Cohen Media)

Catherine Deneuve and Gustave Kervern give nicely restrained performances as unlikely allies in director Pierre Salvadori's contrived but touching melodrama about a new apartment complex caretaker and how he slowly becomes the close friend of an eccentric retiree. There are sitcom situations galore in Salvadori's storytelling, but his heart's in the right place; even the manipulative denouement is made far more watchable by Deneuve and Kervern than it should be. The hi-def transfer looks fine; lone extra is director interview.

Matchstick Men

(Warner Bros)

Ridley Scott's offbeat 2003 comedy, which stars Sam Rockwell and Nicolas Cage as hucksters whose lives are changed irreversibly when Alison Lohman shows up as Cage's estranged daughter, has problems in Ted and Nicholas Griffin's clever but bumpy script, but it also gives three actors a golden chance to show what they can do. Cage's weird persona works for him for once, Rockwell is always first-rate and Lohman (a brilliant actress who disappeared far too soon) gives another in her extraordinary series of flawless performances as confused young women. Helpful, too, is Scott's surprisingly restrained directing. The film looks good on Blu; extras are  a commentary and hour-long making-of documentary.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

(Fox)

There's a lot wrong with Alfonso Gomez-Rejun's movie, whose simultaneous mawkishness and smart-ass hipness in depicting the friendship between a high school movie buff and a terminally ill teenager, so much so that I was unmoved by the dying girl's plight and left cold by the self-indulgent movie parodies, which are far less clever than they think they are. There are a few amusing observations about high school life, and Olivia Cooke shines as the girl, but too much is derivative and self-congratulatory. The movie's hi-def transfer is sharp; extras are an audio commentary, featurettes, interviews and deleted scenes.

San Andreas

(Warner Bros)

These days, even though special effects dominate movies like never before, watching Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge get destroyed in an earthquake—as they both do in Brad Peyton's wooden disaster movie—isn't very impressive, since it all still looks fake. Still, despite phoned-in acting, cheap flag-waving and ridiculous coincidences that ruins what little plot there is, San Andreas remains entertaining in a rubbernecking sort of way. The hi-def transfer is first-rate; extras include featurettes, director commentary, deleted scenes and gag reel.

Tomorrowland

(Disney)

Stuffed to the gills with elaborate sets and special effects and endless avenues that its plot travels (sometimes several at once), Brad Bird's sci-fi fantasy-mystery takes 130 minutes to tell its convoluted tale about invention, imagination and, ultimately, prevention of our own Armageddon. A noble virtue, that, but Bird's own script (with two others) is insufficient to explore it all coherently and cleanly; instead, Bird's limitless visual imagination conjures amazing images, which only underscore what a dazzling but frustrating mess this is. On Blu-ray, the movie looks stupendous; extras include featurettes and deleted scenes.

Vikings—Complete 3rd Season

(Fox)

In the latest season of this grandly entertaining guilty pleasure of a series, the army of Norse warriors follows its king's war-like mentality into a bloody and violent invasion of France, showing off the first-rate recreations of an entirely forgotten era in history. While fictional and often overdramatized, this can still be watched as history shown as it happens, down and dirty and muddy. There's a great Blu-ray transfer; extras are extended episodes, interactive guide, deleted scenes, commentaries and featurettes.

DVDs of the Week

CPO Sharkey—Complete 2nd Season

The Don Rickles TV Specials, Volume 1

(Time Life)

Everybody's favorite insult comic, who helped define a politically incorrect era, parlayed that notoriety into a TV career on the sitcom CPO Sharkey, whose humor is often dated, sexist and racist but just as often funny, as several episodes from the second (and final) season show. Along with Sharkey and his regular Tonight Show appearances, Rickles also hosted several specials during this time, and Volume 1 presents two of those, as Rickles spars with guests Johnny Carson, Harvey Korman, Carroll O'Connor and Anne Meara, and even acts, sings and dances (!). Lone Sharkey extra is a 2015 cast reunion; TV Specials extras are new Rickles intros.

Deutschland '83

(Kino Lorber)

In this absorbing eight-part German TV drama, a young East German soldier is recruited to become a spy in the West in return for his sick mother getting a needed operation: the historical details are unerringly right, as the lifestyles of both East and West during a crucial cold war era are displayed to great effect. The superlative cast is led by Jonas Nay as the spy and Sonja Gerhardt, giving a nuanced portrayal of his confused girlfriend. My lone quibble is an over-reliance on then-current songs: in addition to Phil Collins, David Bowie and the Police, there's Duran Duran, whose lyrics become an amusing quandary for flummoxed East German officials. The series' theme song is Peter Schilling's "Major Tom (Coming Home)."

Driving Miss Daisy

(PBS)

In this 2014 performance of Alfred Urhy's award-winning play about the long relationship of an elderly Southern matron and her loyal chauffeur, Angela Lansbury and James Earl Jones give commanding portrayals full of grit, humor and sadness, with Boyd Gaines equaling them in the thankless role of her son. I saw director David Esbjornson's 2011 revival on Broadway with Vanessa Redgrave and Jones; Lansbury's performance is warmer, less fussy than Redgrave's. This PBS broadcast superlatively records an involving staging of a wonderfully humane play.

NYC Theater Reviews—‘Fool for Love’ on Broadway; ‘The Christians’ off-Broadway

Fool for Love
Written by Sam Shepard; directed by Daniel Aukin
Performances through December 6, 2015
Friedman Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, 261 West 47th Street, New York, NY
foolforlovebroadway.com

The Christians
Written by Lucas Hnath; directed by Les Waters
Performances through October 25, 2015
Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
playwrightshorizons.org

Sam Rockwell and Nina Arianda in Fool for Love (photo: Joan Marcus)

Among Sam Shepard's most concentrated plays, Fool for Love keeps erupting into violence: mainly the verbal kind between its antagonists/lovers/possible half-siblings Eddie and May, but also the physical confrontations as they argue and make up (rinse-repeat) in an endless—and endlessly vicious—cycle.

It all plays out in the confines of a slum of a motel room in the Mojave Desert, which is where May is staying after finally leaving Eddie for the (supposed) last time; he's tracked her down, driving some 2480 miles, he says, to drag her back with him. As they go at it again and again, an old man sits off to the side, occasionally interrupting with his own commentary: he may (or may not) be their father, depending on his (or their) version of the couple's long and tortured tale. Also on hand is an innocent party, Martin, at the motel to take May on a date: he gets caught in their fracas against his will.

For 75 tightly-wound minutes in Daniel Aukin's taut staging, Shepard's characters do a dance—not of death, exactly, but of the complicated emotions his title suggests. And although May and Eddie aren't really fools, their ongoing battles have formed permanent scars on their hearts which they carry around proudly, exhausted but unbowed.

Nina Arianda's trenchant May is primarily an expressively physical performance, her subtle body language speaking volumes about the unbearable tension built up over this long-gestating relationship. Even better is Sam Rockwell's would-be cowboy Eddie: he looks and plays the part—ten-gallon hat, spurs, gun-cleaning, fancy lassoing—and displays the crushing loneliness populating his soul with or without May. Rockwell's physical comedy, whether a split after he downs a drink or his playful lying on the floor near May's bed when Martin arrives, is impressive and funny, but sharpest are his recitations of Shepard's exquisitely jagged, poetic language, particularly Eddie's monologue of remembering when he met his father's other family, including a lovely teenage girl whom he would fall in love with. 

Shepard, whose more recent plays have become more irritatingly irrational in their broken-down narratives and characters, was at his artistic peak when he wrote Fool for Love, which was surrounded by the equally hard-hitting True West, Buried Child and A Lie of the Mind: his fractured style perfectly embodies these fractured people, if only for a few bruising, but beautifully rendered, moments.

The cast of The Christians (photo: Joan Marcus)

In The Christians, Lucas Hnath tackles the issue of faith: specifically how a shift in one congregation's tenet leads to an unbridgeable rift and near-collapse of the church itself, which grew steadily from a small storefront to the large, imposing building the people now worship in. The play dramatizes the fallout after pastor Paul preaches that God told him there is no hell, which causes hell to pay among his parishioners, including his associate pastor, dynamic young Joshua, who leaves to start his own successful church. 

Paul must deal with his choice's ethics: is it just a coincidence he brought up this "new" tenet after his church's debt was paid off, since he knew it would be a deal-breaker for some, as bemused parishioner Jenny says? He also must deal with wife Elizabeth's decision not to follow him, and with church elder Jay bemoaning the practical (i.e., business) fallout of such a momentous moral decision.

Hnath has written a serious play about a serious subject—and Les Waters directs snappily on Dane Waffrey's sparkling church interior set—but unfortunately Hnath's ideas and plotting are too pat, his arguments neither forceful nor penetrating enough. Still, there is his intelligent dialogue, which partially makes up for such gimmickry as the pastor haphazardly introducing other characters' dialogue and the truly annoying use of microphone cords, which makes the actors—mostly the excellent Andrew Garman as Paul—keep trying to avoid tripping. Wouldn't such a wealthy church use wireless mikes instead? 

And the 90-minute play is also padded by hymns sung by a first-rate choir, which is another gimmick recently deployed by A.R. Gurney when Cole Porter tunes dominated his slight, and short, comedy Love and Money. Even though less illuminating than it purports to be, The Christians remains an interesting sermon.

October '15 Digital Week I

Blu-rays of the Week

Beat the Devil

Salt of the Earth 

(The Film Detective)

Two B&W classics have gotten the hi-def treatment, starting with John Huston's Beat the Devil, the great 1953 caper starring Humphrey Bogart, Gina Lollobrigida, Jennifer Jones and Robert Morley: Huston's sly directing and the top-notch cast give this black-comic adventure the extra push it needs to stay in the memory. 1954's Salt of the Earth, made by blacklisted members of the original "Hollywood Ten," is a crudely effective propagandistic drama about a miners’ strike against a heartless New Mexico company. Subtle it ain't, but its glimpse at workers' travails fifty years ago still resonates today. Both movies look decent if unspectacular on Blu-ray.

Magic Mike XXL 

(Warner Brothers)

Though markedly inferior to the surprise 2012 original hit, that won't matter to anyone who just wants to watch this sequel to see Channing Tatum, Joe Manganiello, et al (excepting Matthew McConaughey), doing their patented stripper-dance moves. Steven Soderbergh's fingerprints are all over this, even if he's only listed as cinematographer and editor and his associate Gregory Jacobs is director. For those who want cheesecake to go with their beefcake, there are too-short appearances by Amber Heard, Elizabeth Banks and Jada Pinkett Smith. The film looks sharp on Blu; extras comprise two featurettes and an extended dance scene. 

Manglehorn 

(IFC)

Al Pacino gives what for him is an understated performance as a locksmith whose business and personal lives are fading in his twilight years as he juggles a distant Wall Street son, an aging and sickly cat, the memory of his dead wife and a budding relationship with a charming bank teller, played by the also usually flamboyant (but here low-key) Holly Hunter. Director David Gordon Green directs with empathy, and his reining in both of his stars keeps this offbeat character study from becoming too off-key. The movie looks excellent on Blu.

Nowitzki—The Perfect Shot 

(Magnolia)

This okay documentary about Dallas Mavericks' MVP Dirk Nowitzki—the first German-born player to make it truly big in the NBA—shows his life in Germany and eventual move to the United States and big league superstardom. Director Sebastian Bernhardt not only talks to Dirk, his parents and mentor (who all speak German for those for whom reading subtitles may be an issue) but also his teammates, coach, GM, owner and even rivals like Kobe Bryant. The movie has a superior hi-def transfer; extras are deleted scenes and a Nowitzki interview. 

Poltergeist 

(Fox)

When the young daughter of bemused dad and mom, after staring at the big-screen TV in their new house, says "They're here," why don’t her parents realize they’re in a remake of Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg’s 1982 ghostly smash? Although it follows the original fairly closely—except for making the poltergeist-busting psychic male and including a lame fake ending—there’s nothing particularly interesting going on; the usually reliable Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt are wasted as the parents. Watch (or re-watch) the original instead. There’s a first-rate hi-def transfer; extras are an extended cut and alternate ending.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show—40th Anniversary 

(Fox)

It's been 40 years since the ultimate camp/cult movie was released, and if you're watching it for the first time, you might ask what all the fuss is about: the humor is sophomoric, the songs forgettable and the acting over the top. But that's not the point: the movie has taken on a life of its own for millions of fans, and this new edition will make it even easier for them to party like it's 1975 whenever they want. The hi-def transfer is first-rate; extras include U.S. and U.K. versions of the film, audio commentary, deleted scenes, alternate opening and ending.

When Marnie Was There 

(Universal)

The latest animated masterpiece from the legendary Studio Ghibli is this moving adaptation of Joan G. Robinson's young adult novel about the memories of a young orphaned girl, who discovers her own family history while staying at a remote seaside village to recover from an illness. Unlike many Ghibli films, director Hiromasa Yonebayashi keeps the fantastical stuff to a minimum, but there remains the usual astonishing animation that explores the inner lives of its beautifully rendered characters. The film (whose vibrant colors are vividly retained on Blu-ray) can be watched in the original Japanese or in English with familiar voices like Hailee Steinfeld, Vanessa Williams and Catherine O'Hara. Extras include featurettes.

Zipper 

(Alchemy)

A hot-shot lawyer’s fast-track to the district attorney's office is complicated by his obsession with paid escorts: once the escort service is busted by the feds, he finds his whole world—personal and professional—starts to crash around him. For its first half, Mora Stephens' drama follows its protagonist’s double life with knowing plausibility: when it all becomes unhinged and turns risible, an accomplished cast—led by Patrick Wilson's lawyer, Lena Headey as his loyal wife and Dianna Agron as the escort he falls for—can’t overcome a script as obsessively one-track minded as its hero. The film looks decent on Blu; extras include deleted scenes with director's commentary.

DVDs of the Week

Darling Lili

Oh! What a Lovely War 

(Warner Archive)

Two massive 1969 box-office flops are back on DVD, starting with Darling Lili, Blake Edwards' overblown paean to wife Julie Andrews, who stars as the singer/spy: despite her charm, the entire enterprise is swamped by its large scale at the expense of the smaller, more interesting story that's been buried. Likewise, Richard Attenborough's musical-comic look at World War I, Oh! What a Lovely War, favors big-name cameos from many British movie stars—John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson and Susannah York, for starters—and ends up with an incoherent, scattershot approach to its subject. Both films are, sadly, not restored; Lili extras comprise 19 deleted scenes, while War includes Attenborough's audio commentary and a three-part retrospective documentary.

Famous Nathan 

(Film Movement)

The long, eventful life of Nathan Handwerker—who founded the Nathan's Famous hot-dog chain—is recounted by his grandson Lloyd Handwerker in this charming documentary portrait that presents the career and business sense (and, at times, lack of it) of the founder and his family. Interviews with family members—including some who've since passed away—are interwoven with an audio interview with Nathan before he died for a warts and all glimpse at a successful family business buffeted by the winds of change. Extras comprise a director's commentary, deleted scenes and extra footage.

Fresh Off the Boat—Complete 1st Season 

(Fox)

Reign—Complete 2nd Season 

(Warner Brothers)

Fresh Off the Boat, from chef Eddie Huang's memoir, shows great promise in its 13-episode first season with its diverting premise of cultural clashes seen through the eyes of a precociously funny 12-year-old whose family has moved from Washington D.C.'s Chinatown to bustling Orlando in the 1990s. In the second season of the entertaining historical drama Reign, young Mary Queen of Scots discovers, along with her new husband King Francis, that there are tough times ahead for France—where she lived before returning to the Scottish throne—starting with the Black Death and famine. Lone Fresh extra is a gag reel; Reign extras comprise deleted scenes and a featurette.

The Human Experiment 

(Kino)

The proliferation of chemicals in our lives—from the products we use to the foods we eat and even the furniture we sit on—causes innumerable dangers to women's and children’s health and well-being, as Dana Nachman and Don Hardy's documentary shows. This well thought out road map for how, against insurmountable odds like lobbyists and “bought” politicians, we can fix things contains damning circumstantial evidence and touching personal stories from several individuals. Extras are deleted scenes.