July '23 Digital Week III

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

The Last of Us—Complete 1st Season 

(Warner Bros)

The first HBO series based on a video game (for what it’s worth), this dystopian thriller isn’t very original—the visuals of this post-pandemic world are awfully familiar, as are the zombie-like victims of a fungal infection that’s destroyed civilization as we know it—but it gets by on  clever writing and sympathetic acting, which makes the characters more human than usual in this genre. Led by Pedro Pascal, there are also formidable performances by Bella Ramsey, Nico Parker and Anna Torv: but there’s a sense that, after nine one-hour episodes—and a second season to come— the redundancy will take over soon. The hi-def transfer looks good; extras comprise several making-of featurettes, interviews and on-set footage.

Deadstream 

(Shudder)

I don’t think we need another found-footage horror flick at this late date, but at least writers/directors Vanessa and Joseph Winter’s foray into the genre, about a disgraced YouTuber (is there any other kind?) who goes to a supposedly haunted house, has a sense of humor about itself that sustains it for at least the first half before it ends up repeating itself to death, so to speak. The film looks quite good in hi-def; extras include several featurettes, bloopers, deleted and alternate scenes, interviews, on-set footage and a commentary.

Fool’s Paradise 

(Lionsgate)

Writer-director-star Charlie Day (best known for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) has delivered a fool’s errand with this completely hamfisted Hollywood satire about a mute just released from a mental hospital, a dead ringer for a famous actor, who gets into the movie business almost accidentally. It’s an ungodly mix of Being There and Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, and Day is not a good enough actor—or writer or director—to pull it off successfully, let alone competently. Even good actors like Edie Falco and Kate Beckinsale are unable to overcome the soggy script and middling direction, and one-dimensional performers like Jason Sudekis fall back onto their usual tricks. The film looks decent on Blu.

Kandahar 

(Universal/Open Road)

Gerard Butler gives another solid if unexceptional performance in his second 2023 action thriller, but unlike the faceless Plane, Ric Roman Waugh’s film has a bit more bite for a timely excursion into the murderous world of Middle Eastern double-dealing and revenge. Although there’s nothing new here and it goes on too long, Kandahar does have its share of tense sequences, and Butler’s stoic heroism is well-suited to the role of a CIA operative desperate to save his Afghan translator and get home to his own teenage daughter. There’s a terrific hi-def transfer. 

Persian Lessons 

(Cohen Media)

In the most contrived way possible, director Vadim Perelman has made a Holocaust film in which his protagonist Gilles, a Belgian Jew, poses as a Farsi speaker with an Iranian background in order to survive: luckily for him, the camp commandant wants to learn Farsi so he can go to Teheran and live with his brother. The ludicrousness of the premise aside—Lina Wertmuller made a masterpiece out of a similar storyline with Seven Beauties, in which the survival-at-all-cost antihero had sex with the obese female commandant of a concentration camp to stay alive—Perelman and writer Ilya Tsofin’s creaky plotting militates against our complete sympathy, despite the very fine performances by Nahuel Pérez Biscayart as Gilles and Lars Eidinger as the commandant. There’s a first-rate Blu-ray transfer.

Robot Monster 

(Bayview)

One of those all-time inept “bad movies” along the lines of Plan Nine from Outer Space and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, this 1953 grade-Z sci-fi flick by Phil Tucker has virtually little to recommend it—unless, of course, you’re one of those gluttons who seeks out and devours junk like this. That’s, of course, what this 70th anniversary special edition is all about: not only do we get the amateurish B&W film in all its anti-glory in 2D and 3D versions, but there are also many contextual extras, including featurettes in both 2D and 3D and an entertaining commentary featuring the last surviving cast member, Greg Moffett.

Sisu 

(Lionsgate)

Another Nazi-fueled fantasy in which the underdogs have it all over the German monsters, Jalmari Helander’s relentlessly grim film never reaches the giddily masturbatory heights of Quentin Tarantino’s egregious Inglorious Basterds, where French and American civilians and soldiers murder Hitler. Sisu and its “immortal” fighter, who has killed hundreds of Russians, takes on an entire Nazi squadron in the wilds of the Lapland region in occupied Finland with the help of truckful of women prisoners and finishes off the whole lot in spectacular fashion, is the epitome of a guilty pleasure, especially as played with single-minded viciousness by Jorma Tommila as the mainly silent title character. The hi-def transfer is excellent.

Off-Broadway Play Review—Tennessee Williams’ “Orpheus Descending”

Orpheus Descending

Written by Tennessee Williams; directed by Erica Schmidt

Performances through August 6, 2023

Theatre for a New Audience, 262 Ashland Avenue, Brooklyn, NY

tfana.org

Pico Alexander and Maggie Siff in Orpheus Descending (photo: Hollis King)

On Broadway in 1989, director Peter Hall bemusedly helmed Tennessee Williams’ messy 1957 play Orpheus Descending, a crude melodrama crammed with specious symbolism and idle imagery. Despite Williams’ endless tinkering with it, Orpheus never reaches the poetic heights of The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; instead, its overwrought dialogue and contrived relationships make it seem like a bizarre parody of a Williams play.

Now, Orpheus Descending returns, directed by Erica Schmidt, who wholeheartedly embraces its excessiveness, for better or (often) worse. Young drifter Valentine Xavier (i.e., “Savior”) arrives in a small Southern town that could be the setting for a bad Jason Aldean song. Guitar in hand, Valentine descends into this hell to, it turns out, rescue Lady Torrance, the unhappily married proprietor of the local dry-goods store, whose mortally ill elderly husband—an unrepentant redneck—spends most of his time upstairs, attended to by a nurse. 

Handsome and charming, Valentine finds himself the target of other local women, including rich good-time girl Carol Cutrere, who loves to go “juking” at night, as well as other chattering gossipers who frequent the store. As they spend time together working in the store, Valentine and Lady start a steamy but dangerous affair that will end with two dead bodies and the community’s stalwart backwardness reinforced.

Schmidt dives headfirst into these characters’ desperation and inability to pull themselves free of their unfortunate fates, which is the only way to stage Orpheus and make it watchable—if not particularly illuminating. It’s unfortunate that Amy Rubin’s constricted set of the Torrances’ store leaves so much stage acreage available, and Schmidt utilizes it awkwardly, with some scenes played in front or at the sides of the store, including florid monologues and periodic appearances of the heavily—and fuzzily—symbolic “conjure-man.” The sound and lighting effects are adroitly handled by, respectively, Justin Ellington and David Weiner, and Ellington’s own acoustic guitar music is used sparingly but effectively.

Many speeches, where Williams lets his metaphors fly—like the footless bird that must always remain airborne a particular favorite to which he keeps returning—come off as sketches for the more luminous language the playwright would perfect in his masterpieces. Schmidt’s cast is sometimes able to untangle itself from such extravagances to find a bit of sorely needed humanity, although there are too many characters milling around that have little to do with the story, merely providing more samples of the overheated atmosphere.

Pico Alexander, as Valentine, is attractively animalistic and makes a more magnetic (and musical) martyr than Kevin Anderson did opposite Redgrave. A born scene-stealer, Julia McDermott makes Carol sadly but compellingly pathetic, spitting out her awful torrents of Williams’ pregnant metaphorical dialogue to flail around amid the misogynistic environment she’s been brought up in with commanding flair.

In the 1989 Broadway staging, Vanessa Redgrave played Lady Torrance: she was a spectacular car crash, giving a thrilling exercise in technique that never felt true or authentic. Conversely, Maggie Siff—who’s magnificent as Wendy Rhoades in the Showtime series Billions—mostly underplays Lady, cutting straight to the heart of this grievously wounded but proud woman. Siff even gives a piercingly emotional reading of Lady’s final overripe speech about remembering a barren fig tree while a child. 

But Siff plays Lady with an accent that’s less Southern Italian than Eastern European, which is headscratching. (Weirdly, Redgrave had also played Lady with an offbeat accent—sing-song Italian, which at least was theoretically closer to the target.) But why not just play Lady with a regional southern accent? After all, she’s lived her entire life in the South, not Sicily.

July '23 Digital Week II

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

Oppenheimer 

(Universal)

Christopher Nolan has weighed in with his take on Robert J. Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project—which led to the creation of the atomic bomb and the literal and figurative fallout that has plagued the world in the decades since—and it’s typically Nolanesque: very long, very loud, very overblown and very shallow. At three hours, the film is loaded with visual and aural pyrotechnics right from the start: I wouldn’t be surprised if the noise Nolan generates is louder than what the actual atomic explosions sounded like. He also, for no discernible reason, shoots partly in black and white. Then there’s Ludwig Göransson’s ludicrously bombastic score, which is smeared over virtually every scene—I hope the composer got paid by the minute—including several moments where some ostensibly important dialogue can’t even be heard. Cillian Murphy gives a properly intense performance but he’s overshadowed by his director’s self-importance. Aside from Robert Downey and Matt Damon, who manage to make their mark despite butting heads with Nolan’s singlemindedness, the rest of the starry cast is pretty forgettable: Gary Oldman is a cartoonish Harry Truman, likewise Tom Conti as Albert Einstein; while poor Florence Pugh, usually a formidable actress, is reduced to a nothing role comprising several gratuitous nude scenes.

Black Ice 

(Roadside Attractions/Grindstone)

The ongoing adversity of Black hockey players in Canada—the seemingly placid, liberal, welcoming country north of the racist U.S.—is emotionally but fairly recounted in this eye-opening documentary. Not only does Hubert Davis’ film include informative and engrossing interviews with players, both male and female (including NHL stars like P.K. Subban), about the racism they encountered playing in junior leagues or against professionals, but it’s also an enlightening chronicle about the history of Black hockey in the Great White North, demonstrating that Canada’s national sport has never been the exclusive province of white players.

Final Cut 

(Kino Lorber)

It’s amazing that French director Michel Hazanavicius won the best director Oscar for his cute but slight 2011 silent comedy The Artist: he’s a competent filmmaker whose latest, a shot-for-shot remake of a Korean zombie movie parody doubling as a cheeky tribute to guerrilla filmmaking, is another hamfisted, nearly insufferable movie without an original idea in its head. Along with everything being telegraphed and obvious, Hazanavicius seemingly can’t help himself from going off the rails. Even Hazanavicius’ real-life wife, the thoroughly charming Bérénice Bejo, is unable to transcend her husband’s laziness.

The Miracle Club 

(Sony Classics)

A sensitive cast led by Laura Linney, Maggie Smith, Agnes O’Casey and Kathy Bates gives stature to a too familiar story of a group of women in Ireland in 1967 who go on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. Pretty much nothing that happens is unsurprising or revelatory in Thaddeus O'Sullivan’s drama, but the aforementioned quartet—along with excellent support from the likes of Stephen Rea, Niall Buggy and Mark O’Halloran—give it more gravitas, both serious and comic, than it really deserves. 

Two Tickets to Greece 

(Greenwich Entertainment)

It’s hard to dislike a movie that allows middle-aged actresses to sink their teeth into substantive roles, but writer-director Marc Fitoussi’s visually sumptuous travelogue pitting former teenage besties who get together again after decades to find they are as incompatible as ever is rarely insightful. Both Laure Calamy and Olivia Côte do what they can, but Calamy’s character is so annoying from the get-go that she’s impossible to root for. Côte remains classy throughout, and none other than Kristen Scott Thomas arrives in the third act to give a master class inhow to overact without being obnoxious, but the laughs and tears are rarely earned. 

4K/UHD Release of the Week

After Hours 

(Criterion Collection)

Martin Scorsese’s surreal 1985 black comedy takes place during an endless night in Soho, as hapless Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) meets an array of “characters” as he tries to return to  normality. It’s a riotous but often unsettling ride, showing off Scorsese’s visual luster with the help of cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, costume designer Rita Ryack, production designer Jeffrey Townsend and editor Thelma Schoonmaker. Though not as substantial as his previous film, the criminally underrated The King of Comedy, but it’s a blast to watch, especially the pre-gentrified neighborhoods of lower Manhattan. The UHD transfer is impeccable; extras include a new conversation between Scorsese and friend Fran Leibowitz, new featurette about the film’s look and style, vintage making-of, deleted scenes, and commentary by Scorsese, Schoonmaker, Ballhaus, Dunne and producer Amy Robinson.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

Anne-Sophie Mutter—Vivace 

(SWR Classic)

Sigrid Faltin’s portrait of superstar German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter waxes poetic and lyrical about her eventful life and career, from her early days as a prodigy through the tragedies of losing both her husbands to her relationships with other celebrities like tennis icon Roger Federer. Mutter is funny, heartfelt and personable, unlike her ice-queen exterior and onstage persona. Hi-def video and audio are first-rate; lone extra is an extended conversation among Mutter, her son Richard Wunderlich and Federer. 

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret 

(Lionsgate)

Judy Blume’s classic 1970 novel has been turned into a humorous, touching film by writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig, who retains the empathetic POV of Blume’s eponymous teenage heroine, played beautifully by newcomer Abby Ryder Fortson. Wonderful support is provided by the always magnetic Rachel McAdams as Margaret’s mother and a nicely understated performance by the usually overbearing Kathy Bates as her beloved grandmother. Kudos also to the design team, whose early ’70s NYC and NJ suburb settings ring unerringly true. The film looks fine in hi-def; extras comprise making-of interviews and two deleted scenes.

Shakespeare in the Park Review—“Hamlet” in Central Park

Hamlet

Written by William Shakespeare; directed by Kenny Leon

Performances through August 6, 2023

Delacorte Theater, Central Park, New York, NY

publictheater.org

Ato Blankson-Wood and Solea Pfeiffer in Hamlet (photo: Joan Marcus)

Shakespeare in Central Park has always been a crap shoot. Since the overriding ethos is to please 2000 people who have gotten free tickets on a steamy summer night in Manhattan, even good stagings are not quite as good as they should be. Rarely is there a truly great production at the Delacorte Theater, and Hamlet, despite good performances and interesting directorial touches, strains to be decent.

Kenny Leon has trimmed the play—as most directors do—to a fleet 2 hours and 45 minutes, mostly eliminating the political and martial subplots. This streamlines the play to concentrate on Prince Hamlet’s strained relationships with his mother, who has married his uncle (her brother-in-law) right after the funeral of his father, the king, and with his sometime girlfriend Ophelia, whose own father, Polonius, and brother, Laertes, are also thorns in his side. Basically, it drops material that the Delacorte audience might find puzzling on Beowulf Boritt’s cleverly off-kilter and apparently post-apocalyptic (or post-pandemic) set that’s populated by a trashed Stacey Abrams election sign, abandoned Range Rover and a portrait of Hamlet’s dad in an American army uniform.

Usually, the most annoying Central Park bits are those shoehorned in with no regard for whether they make any sense: and, of course, these are often the biggest crowd-pleasers. It’s no different in Hamlet, as songs by Jason Michael Webb—nicely sung by members of the cast, especially the creamy-voiced Solea Pfeiffer, who also makes a quite sympathetic Ophelia—are heard throughout, most damagingly at the end, destroying the emotional catharsis of Horatio’s immortal words after Hamlet’s death.

Otherwise, Leon paces the play well, delicately balancing the undercurrents of melancholy and black humor, like the rollicking gravedigger scene, played with knowing hilarity by both Ato Blankson-Wood as Hamlet and Greg Hildreth as the gravedigger. Blankson-Wood, who at times seems too young for such an overwhelming role, is nevertheless poised onstage, reciting Shakespeare’s poetry as if he actually knows its meaning, unlike certain other actors on the Delacorte stage. 

It’s only in the ill-conceived ghost scene, in which Samuel L. Jackson, of all people, intones the thunderous voice of the murdered king and in which Leon, for some reason, has the dead father’s spirit enter Hamlet, who then lip-synchs the ghost’s lines as if it’s an outtake from The Exorcist, does Blankson-Wood overdo it, with risible eye-rolling and hamming it up that’s at odds with the rest of his confident performance.

There’s also good acting from John Douglas Thompson, who, as Hamlet’s murderous uncle turned stepfather Claudius, always enunciates beautifully; the formidable Lorraine Toussaint as Hamlet’s confused mother Gertrude; and a vibrant Warner Miller as a hip-hop Horatio. Less good is Daniel Pearce, who, as Polonius, pushes too hard for laughs in every line, even though Shakespeare has already written him as a buffoonish windbag. Unsurprisingly, Pearce is the audience favorite.

Still, this is a competent, coherent Hamlet, which, for a summer night at Central Park, just might be enough.

July '23 Digital Week I

In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week 

Amanda

(Oscilloscope) 

Benedetta Porcaroli’s tremendously affecting performance as an aimless 25-year-old unable to come to grips with adulthood after moving back to her family in Naples—her friends are nonexistent, her romantic relationships are a mess and she has no direction in life—brightens writer-director Carolina Cavalli’s otherwise superficial narrative that that rarely gets deeper into the psychological weeds. But Porcaroli is unafraid to be grating, irritating, obnoxious, hurtful and immature yet remains sympathetic as she burrows into the eponymous heroine’s psyche.

The Lesson 

(Bleecker Street)

Nobody can play as deliciously smarmy as Richard E. Grant, who dominates this slick black comedy as J.M. Sinclair, a superstar author who condescends to his teenage son Bertie’s new tutor Liam, an aspiring writer himself. As we see Sinclair’s literary thievery through Liam’s own jaundiced eyes, director Alice Troughton takes Alex MacKeith’s clever but overloaded script at face value, which takes some of the acid out of the nastiness. In addition, Isobel Waller-Bridge’s jaunty classical score is too on the nose to be truly ironic. Still, Grant is always formidable and Julie Delpy gives depth to Hélène, Sinclair’s wife, while Stephen McMillan as Bertie and Daryl McCormack as Liam nicely sell the film’s final, obvious dramatic irony. 

The Man from Rome 

(Screen Media) 

Based on The Seville Communion by Spanish novelist Arturo Perez-Reverte, this effective but unoriginal thriller sends an Irish priest from the Vatican to Spain to investigate mysterious deaths at a local parish—it turns out there’s blackmail and corruption as well as murder. Although director Sergio Dow paces the mystery well, and Richard Armitage gives a persuasively stoic performance as the collared Columbo—who has an improbable fling with Macarena, the gorgeous estranged wife (Amaia Salamanca) of a billionaire developer with designs on her beloved church—but at two hours it drags on too long, even though it intriguingly depicts an all-priest Vatican IT team.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

Book Club—The Next Chapter 

(Universal/Focus Features)

Wherein our group of vivacious seniors decide, during the pandemic, to travel to Italy for a frolicsome vacation that culminates in a wedding that seemingly no one really wants, as this silly sequel gets by exclusively on the charm of leading ladies Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen. Director Bill Holderman, who cowrote the script with Erin Simms, showcases the obvious tourist traps of Rome, Venice and Tuscany but the foolish attempts at cheap laughs too often make these smart, independent women the butt of jokes for no apparent reason. The film looks good on Blu; extras include several making-of featurettes.

Scream VI 

(Paramount/Spyglass Entertainment)

I’ve never been a fan of the Scream franchise, even the first one that was simply a hokey, jokey slasher movie, but the latest iteration—set in an obviously fake Manhattan that has none of the city’s teeming, screaming atmosphere, even in the big subway set piece—might be the least interesting yet. Most damagingly, it does very little with Melissa Barberra and Jenna Ortega, a pair of winning actresses in the leads, instead lazily doing the tired slasher movie bit and again bringing back dullards from previous iterations. The film looks sharp and detailed on Blu-ray; extras include a filmmaker’s commentary and several featurettes about the film’s making and franchise’s legacy.

CD Release of the Week

Kurt Weill—Propheten 

(Capriccio)

German composer Kurt Weill (1900-50) wrote a six-hour opera, The Eternal Road, which premiered in 1937; it’s been only sporadically done since—the daunting subject matter (a Jewish community is trapped in a synagogue during a Nazi pogrom) and excessive length usually mean only a section or two is heard. That’s the case with Propheten (Prophets), heard here in its 1998 world-premiere concert recording by conductor Dennis Russell Davis, the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Weiner Jeunesse Chor and soloists. Although there’s lovely music and strong vocal writing, the weight of such a serious enterprise seems to inhibit Weill, who only sporadically uses the melodic wit of his strongest music. Also included are Weill’s Four Whitman Songs for soloist and orchestra, sung by stentorian baritone Thomas Hampson.  

Musical Theater Review—“Cabaret” at Barrington Stage

Cabaret

Book by Joe Masteroff, from the play by John Van Druten and stories by Christopher Isherwood

Music by John Kander; lyrics by Fred Ebb

Directed by Alan Paul; choreographed by Katie Spelman

Performances through July 8, 2023

Boyd-Quinson Stage, 30 Union Street, Pittsfield, Massachusetts

barringtonstageco.org

Krysta Rodriguez, center, in Cabaret (photo: Daniel Rader)

The Barrington Stage production of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret is, despite some provocative window dressing, a staging of this still disturbing, groundbreaking musical that’s close in spirit to the 1998 Sam Mendes restaging that took Broadway by storm. After I read the typically imperceptive and shrilly clever New York Times review, I was expecting an out-there interpretation (“OMG, a genderqueer Cabaret—run for your lives!”), but director Alan Paul has stayed pretty faithful to the book and songs, with the notable exception of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” which is sung by a trio of non-binary and trans performers as part of the renamed Kit Kat Ensemble.

Paul’s decision to do away with the Kit Kat Girls further underlines the notion that the immorality and decadence of Weimer-era Berlin will soon be comprehensively stifled quite brutally by the thuggish Nazis. But aside from that—and the amusing squirming of some audience members pre-show and post-intermission as the ensemble wanders among the seats to flirt or dance with the paying customers—there’s nothing here that screams, “Look! We’re making Cabaret relevant to our time!” Paul doesn’t have to make obvious the parallels to today’s wannabe fascists as they viciously fight a more progressive society—it’s already there in the show.

Paul and his able choreographer, Katie Spelman, use the small stage—which features a terrific small orchestra, led by music director Angela Steiner—to their advantage, as the song and dance interludes and dramatic scenes rub against each other effectively and, often, almost inevitably.

As the proudly amoral heroine, club chanteuse Sally Bowles, the always wonderful Krysta Rodriguez turns on her natural charm—along with a beguiling, if erratic, British accent—to complement her lithe movements and powerhouse voice. Her stirringly emotional rendition of the title tune is the very definition of a showstopper; maybe Rodriguez will finally get the Broadway starring role she deserves if this production makes it to New York.

Other cast members are accomplished, at times even inspired, although Dan Amboyer’s portrayal of Cliff Bradshaw—the naïve American writer who falls in love with Sally after coming to Berlin to start a novel—is more lackadaisical than it should be, even for such a passive character. As Cliff’s spinster landlady Fräulein Schneider, Candy Buckley has a lovely but sad presence; as her paramour, the elderly Herr Schulz, Richard Kline gives a noble performance as a German Jew who can’t comprehend what the Nazis have in store for him.

The Emcee has become a touchstone role, not only because of Joel Grey’s sinister Tony- and Oscar-winning portrayal but also because of Alan Cumming’s flamboyant, Tony-winning reinterpretation in Mendes’ revival. Nik Alexander mischievously combines both of them in a slyly uninhibited, subtly menacing performance. That Alexander occasionally swallows his lines doesn’t mitigate his idiosyncratic stage presence, which is the ominous center of this Cabaret.