Rob Marshall | Into the Woods / 2014 [with a discussion also of a stage production the same year]

out of the woods

by Douglas Messerli

James Lapine (book) and Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics) Into the Woods / Beverly Hills, California, the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts presenting The Oregon Shakespeare Festival Production, December 20, 2014

James Lapine (screenplay, based on his libretto), Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics), Rob Marshall (director) Into the Woods / 2014

It seems strange, given my long admiration for and knowledge of American musical theater, that I had not seen Lapine and Sondheim’s successful musical Into the Woods previously. I missed its original Old Globe Theatre production in San Diego, shortly we after we moved to the West Coast (we were busily attending almost nightly dinners and events in Los Angeles during 1986), and for some explicable reason failed to see it in the late 1980s when it appeared on Broadway. Even more inexplicable was our failure to see it in 2002 when it was revived at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles and subsequently in New York.

     But the coincidence of seeing a production just a week before watching it on the large screen in the film rendition, more than made up for my previous lack of attention to it. Of course, I had heard Bernadette Peters’ rendition of “Children Will Listen” many times, and I knew that the work involved a twisted telling of several different Grimm Brothers’ fairytales. But I had remained in the dark, fortunately, about the convoluted plot-line.

    All was finally revealed to Howard and me in a resplendent, if slightly trimmed-down version by The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, who were asked to repeat their engagingly skeletal production for the second season of the Beverly Hills Wallis Annenberg’s events.

     This was not truly a “perfect” production—indeed given the work’s convoluted story and its self-consciously witty lyrics and patter, along with its bullet-quick pace, one wonders whether there could ever me a thoroughly resolved performance—but it was certainly an excellent example of what musical theater creativity is all about. If it was difficult, at times, to make out all the lyrics (which reminded me a bit of my endlessly-rhymed couplets in my own short musical attempts), we, along with the general audience, were certainly moved by the blithe performances and more affected by the many deeper subtleties of the Lapine-Sondheim telling.

      For these authors the woods was not just a slightly strange world in which frightening events often take place (Little Red Riding Hood’s descent in the stomach of a wolf, Jack’s amazing ascent into a world of giants, and Rapunzel’s torturous relationships with those whom she allowed to climb her hair up to her open window) but, in Lapine’s version, is a  locale through which Cinderella runs on her way home from the ball, and in which the Baker and his Wife, determined to break the spell of their barren relationship, seek out the trophies—a white cow, a red cape, a golden shoe, and corn-white locks—that will break the witch’s evil spell. It is a world where everyday life can be reconsidered, reality perceived in different dimensions, love and adventure explored, an rejuvenation attained. In songs such as “I Know Things Now” (sung by Little Red Ridng Hood), “Giants in the Sky” (by Jack), “Agony” (by the two princes), “It Takes Two” (by the Baker and His Wife), and “Moments in the Woods” (by the Baker’s Wife), the characters tell us what they have discovered and learned from their incredible “time out” in nature. 

      Yet the goal of nearly all of these figures is somehow, after their glorious new perceptions, to return to normalcy, to get “out of the woods” and return home to everyday life as quickly as possible. If the woods, as Little Red Riding Hood perceives is a world that makes her feel “excited and scared,” a world where the Baker suddenly discovers the need for communal action, and his brave Wife delights in the special sexual “moments” the woods have to offer, nonetheless, the forest is a dangerous place to which they do not wish to return, but are forced to in the second act by the giants—immense forces that control their lives and are fully capable of destroying them. Indeed, the great power of Lapine and Sondheim’s musical fable, unlike the Disneyfied world in which anyone of my age grew up, is that even in the imagination of children (and definitely in the child-like imaginations of peasants) evil happens: mothers are murdered, princes are discovered to be insincere, children are recognized as greedy and demanding appendages, witches are vain and selfish, and even the most ordinary group of citizens can suddenly turn upon each other with accusations. As LA Weekly film critic Alan Scherstuhl nicely summarizes it:

 

                    No matter how it performs in theaters, Stephen Sondheim’s and

                    James Lapine’s dark, glorious and supremely messy fairytale

                    mash-up musical/therapy session is now forever a pop-culture

                    curio unwary kids will stumble upon, to their bafflement and

                    betterment. The princess-party punch-bowl has forever been

                    spiked.

 

    The Annenberg production rambled and gamboled through and around the forest with hardly any sets, creating an enormous amount of locational atmosphere simply with lights and costumes. Fortunately nearly all the performers could act and, most importantly in this musical, could sing. Of my many favorite moments, I’d be derelict not to mention Kjerstine Rose Anderson’s touching wake-up call “I Know Things Now,” Jeremy Peter Johnson’s and Royer Backus’s poignant paean to emotional suffering “Agony,” Rachael Warren’s troubling either/or consideration “Moments in the Woods,” and, of course, the musical’s inevitable show-stopper, “Last Midnight,” sung with nightclub zest by Miriam A. Laube. But everyone in this production succeeded well in taking the audience through the dark gnarls of woodland and out again into the safety of Sondheim’s conforming vision of reality, where parents are warned about the stories and words they tell to their children—including, presumably, the tale we’ve just experienced.

     Given all the dark elements of this work and its complexity of plot I winced at the idea of Rob Marshall’s upcoming film rendition. I’d seen his nervously–hyperventilated version of Chicago and his disastrously over-the-top retelling of Nine, and I got scared, very scared of what he might do to Lapine’s and Sondheim’s gem. And then, there was the even-more frightening specter of the film’s producer, the Disney Studios! As Howard expressed it, at best we might see the tamed-down version that Lapine and Sondheim had approved for high-school productions.

    What a surprise, accordingly, to find a nearly intact and, in many ways, superior-to-the-play movie in a nearby theater. Sondheim musicals generally dispense with dance (one of Marshall’s downfalls in Chicago), and, accordingly, he could concentrate this time in bringing a story that suffers on the stage as characters go rushing in and off into the theater wings. With movie-camera mobility, Marhsall maneuvers his characters in tête-à-tête-like encounters as the neighbors go scurrying through the forest. Some critics have understandably criticized this approach as isolating the musical’s increasingly socialized figures, and certainly this does have an effect on the second act when the quartet of survivors are forced to work together in order to rid their world of a female giant; but Marshall’s clearer delineation of the character encounters with one another also help to make Lapine’s tale clearer, and brings greater focus upon each one of these fairytale figure’s psychological desires and failures.

     To devotees of the musical, which even after just having seen it, I had already become, it is always disappointing, moreover, to find that some of the songs of missing, including reprises such as the two Princes’ mocking love-stricken duo, “Agony.” And I agree with some observers that cutting important songs such as “No More,” in which the Mysterious Man (the Baker’s long-dead father), sympathizing with the Baker’s determination to escape from the wood (with lovely admissions such as “We disappoint, / We leave a mess, / We die but we don’t”) makes the Baker’s decision to return to his friends and new family somewhat inexplicable. But one has simply to expect those treasured absences given the genre of cinema musicals.

     I was less able to forgive the sanitizing of the Baker’s Wife’s tryst with the Prince in the forest. The Disney film leaves us with the impression that the “dangers” she has discovered which bring her to suddenly comprehend it’s time to leave the woods have consisted of only a few kisses, instead of, as the play demonstrates, a full-out, old-fashioned fuck. And accordingly, her wondrous song after (excellently realized by Emily Blunt) does not make a lot of sense.

     But, again, if that minor concession allowed the rest of the film to remain intact, I can live with it. The performances (made more important in the close-up attention of the camera) and singing were uniformly excellent. As the wolf, Johnny Depp was wily, suave, and lascivious in just the right amounts. Okay, his witty lines (“Think of that scrumptious carnality / Twice in one day…/ There’s no possible way / To describe what you feel / When you’re talking to your meal.”) didn’t get the giggles it surely did on Broadway. I’d still argue they were well sung. And the movie did even better with songs that got somewhat lost in the busy run-arounds of the stage. By slowing down and focusing on Anna Kendrik’s (as Cinderella) perplexing contradictory desires to run and remain in “On the Steps of the Palace,” we suddenly were able to comprehend and enjoy that lovely ballad. The young Daniel Huttlestone (as Jack) truly made us feel that there were suddenly “Giants in the Sky.”  The handsome, self-preening princes (Chris Pine and Billy Magnussen) capably sang of their agonies while sporting about in a waterfall. And Rapunzel (Mackenzie Mauzy) tossed out her golden chords along with her flaxen hair quite glowingly. 

 

    My only criticism of the star of the show, Meryl Streep as the Witch (an actress about whom, I admit, I have often sounded like an old curmudgeon), was that she played her part, even when singing, just a bit too well: in her gently sung “Stay with Me,” Streep growled out some darker tones in a manner that Bernadette Peters might never have imagined. I wanted to more clearly hear Streep’s expressive coloratura, which has been denied us far too long—except for a few quick ditties in Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion and some saccharine standards in Phyllida Lloyd’s Mamma Mia!. But Streep made up for it with a full-throttle rendition of “Last Midnight” and an offstage, show-worthy voicing of “Children Will Listen.” Like Dickens’ Oliver Twist, I simply wanted “some more.”

    Sure, the movie version of Into the Woods was not perfect…but as I said above I can’t imagine any production of the musical-comedy equivalent of King Lear to ever be everything it aspires to. There’s way too many fascinating characters, too many plot possibilities, and far too many cleverly rhymed couplings to allow any directorial vision to get it just right. That Marshall achieved so much perfection is a kind of miracle in itself. His Into the Woods might, in the end, be one of the best of musical movies—and I’ve seen most of them—on record.

 

Los Angeles, December 27, 2014

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (December 2014) and World Cinema Review (December 2014).

 

Richard Linklater | Boyhood / 2014

a life made of moments

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Linklater (screenwriter and director) Boyhood / 2014

 

Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, in many respects, is unlike any previous film. Centered upon a young boy, Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane), as he grows up from a child to a young man going off to college, the film was shot over a 12-year period, using the same actors. Coltrane, accordingly, along with his fictional mother, Olivia (Patricia Arquette), father, Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke), and sister, Samantha (Lorelei Linklater), performing together across the years as the movie progresses for the more than a decade it took the director to film them and his story.

     Linklater’s script, moreover, seems to be written in the form of a fully realized plot, with the narrative turnings of windings of imaginative prose; but was, in fact, created by the incremental changes that occurred in the lives of Coltrane, Arquette, Hawke, and the director’s daughter in the interim between each filming session. The director insisted that nothing might occur in the character’s lives—particularly in the life of the boy at the center of his work—that did not actually happen in his off-screen life.

     Of course, Linklater was taking wild chances in filming in this manner. Any one of the central figures of his film might have died or been seriously injured during the years of the film’s making. And, even more importantly, the central figure, Coltrane, who begins as a wide-eyed child of seeming wonderment, might have grown up to be a drugged-out kid with little cinematic presence, without much of a “story” to tell. Or, even more likely, the boy might easily have grown into an absolutely normal young man, so boringly straight-forward that the serially-created film would fall apart. Although mothers and fathers may be absolutely fascinated by the details of their children’s lives, most of us looking in from outside would likely be mystified and utterly disinterested in the life of an average daughter or son. If Linklater’s own daughter, for example, might have been at the center of his film—although it me pains me to say this—the film might have produced primarily yawns.

     There is absolutely nothing wrong with the character of Samantha or the actor Lorelei; particularly in the early scenes where she tortures her younger brother simply by imposing her presence upon him, the young Linklater is a fine actor; but, at least in the film’s fiction, she grows up to be such an absolutely normal girl, without any of the trauma-produced hysterics that are perhaps necessary to create a significant cinematic character.

     The Coltrane character also seems to have grown up with the usual boyhood tribulations— somewhat abusive stepfathers, an over-busy mother, an often-missing father, and a painful brush with love—to become, nonetheless, a rather well-balanced young man. But the actor behind him represents something deeper; a would-be photographer, he looks at the world around him with more questions than answers, with more reservations and fears than with optimistic pluck. And, as such a being, the camera and the audience cannot help but dote on him. By film’s end we don’t know what kind of man this teenager will turn into, but we believe in him and hope for his future. And that the director had the intuition and determination to explore this young man’s growth against the background of his fictional family attests to Linklater’s brilliance.

      Finally, what hasn’t been sufficiently written about in the almost entirely positive reviews of Boyhood that I’ve read to date, is that Linklater has had the adventurousness, the audacity to develop his film without a true “story” or “plot.” Many critics have pointed out that “nothing truly happens” in this director’s film. But few have extended that to describe that this work not only has no narrative in the ordinary sense, but is so truly “ordinary” that it almost does not read as fiction. As my companion Howard kept repeating, after seeing this film for his second time, “It was hard for me to perceive it as a film that really had a script.”

     In fact, Boyhood isn’t really a fiction by any standard definition. It begins simply with a young child looking up into the clouds and ends with a young man looking across a beautiful canyon landscape at sunrise. In between are “events” and, most importantly, “moments” of what pretend to define a life. Such “moments,” as the hard-working Arquette proclaims near the end of the film, are insufficient, so it seems, to represent lived experience—something which narrative fiction aspires to and pretends to convince us we have encountered. Linklater’s work is artless in the sense that it makes utterly no attempt to “pretend” a reality. Using the idea of “frame”—both the frame of a film and the frame of a photograph—this director shows us what the great French philosopher Bergson argued was the way we truly experience duration (durée), the actual flow of life. If in reality life is a constantly shifting, alternating flux of moments, each instant utterly transforming the previous and the very next, we experience that flux slowed-down as a series of “moments,” which, with memory, we pull together into a kind of stitched up notion of our own lives.

 

      

     When we truly reflect back, of course, we know our lives cannot have been so threadbare, so clumsily experienced that we have lost most of our time on this earth; and that feeling—as Proust insisted—leaves us with a sense of utter desolation as time passes. Where did our lives go? we ask ourselves. How can we get it back? Surely all those days of dreaming and loving and working and hoping cannot now be defined through a kind of memory scrapbook presentation of favorite, unfortunate, and even happenstance events? Yet, there we are, near the end of lives, suggests Linklater, with some of those photo-like opportunities even now fading from our minds.

     We know, however, instinctively, that this director’s vision of life is a true one, the way we experience our own lives—even at those very moments when we try hard to “seize the day.” The young women and men at the very end of Linklater’s profoundly painful film suddenly realize that it is nearly impossible to “seize the day,” to grab hold of and live in the now of life. And they sense the tragedy in that. They recognize the emptiness which, like Mason’s mother, they will one day have to face. But they also realize something quite marvelous, that fortunately life does not depend only upon their willful projection of self upon the world, but that the world itself sometimes seizes the individual, that what we see and experience around us often defines our life as surely as all of our intentional and unintentional acts. Beauty, nature, a communal sense of well-being, however we might define art, it is sometimes—maybe more often—what frames and transforms our fragmented memories of life than do our everyday activities.

     For those of the audience who are receptive to that truth—and it appeared to me that most of the theater-goers with whom I sat through Boyhood’s nearly three hours were more than receptive—a film such as Linklater’s, in its stately yet homely questioning of what defines a life, will surely join with the remembered images that help to tell us who we are.

     Boyhood is not only a great film, but is a necessary work of art.

 

Los Angeles, July 23, 2014

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (August 2014).

Luis Buñuel | Símon del Desierto (Simon of the Desert) / 1965

a monument

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gustavo Alatriste (screenplay, based on a novel by Luis Buñuel), Luis Buñuel (director) Símon del Desierto (Simon of the Desert) / 1965

 

The first action of Buñuel’s short fable Simon of the Desert is a descent, as Símon (Claudio Brook)—like the Syrian saint, Símon Stylites before him—comes down from a desert pillar where, feeling in need of spiritual purification, he has stood for six years, six months, and six days. Greeted by nearby townspeople and monks, they gather round the saintly martyr to grab fragments of his filthy garment and beg him to bless them. The local head of the monastery attempts to anoint Símon into the priesthood, but the hirsute saint refuses it, arguing that he is not yet worthy.

       A wealthy landowner has built another, taller pillar nearby, to the top of which Símon now climbs in search of further purification. When he has returned to the top, a man whose two hands have been amputated, begs him to perform a miracle. Símon prays, and the man’s hands are restored, but his first action is to push his child from him. So the director notes the irony of Símon’s gifts. While he may be a kind of saint, he is also shunned by most of the locals as, one by one the monk rails against them for their human sins. A dwarf goat-herder is attacked by Símon for loving his goat; a handsome young monk who brings Símon food, is attacked by the elderly martyr for being too vain, and orders him to not return to the monastery until he grows a beard. Símon rejects even the pleas of his own mother to be able to live near to him.

      In short, if Símon is perceived as a saintly sufferer, he also rejected as a proud bigot, a man who himself recognizes his vanity in wishing to bless the people below. The man in the ridiculous position atop the pillar has become a kind of monument, a testament, perhaps, to his own sense of superiority and holiness.

       It is no wonder, accordingly, that Satan soon arrives in the form first of a lovely girl (Silvia Pinal), flirtatiously trying to lure Símon to come down and play with her. Símon, however, recognizes her as Satan. Satan returns, this time with a ridiculous beard and curled hair, pretending to be Christ, but again the saint, after a few minutes, recognizes the tempter to be Satan.

       Possessing one the priests who come to visit him—a priest who has secretly filled Símon’s food bag with cheese and other delicacies—Satan again makes an attempt to denounce Símon. Recognizing the deceit, Símon prays, exorcising the priest of the devil on the spot.

      Finally, in a third appearance a coffin trails across the desert sand to stop by the pillar, opening to reveal Satan once more, this time in a toga. Climbing to the top, Satan promises, this time, to end Símon’s vigil, as suddenly the couple vanish.

       The next scene shows a shorn Símon (looking somewhat like a beatnik) next to a woman in a New York City nightclub of the 1960s, where a crowd of young dancers enthusiastically rock to the beat of a band playing Radioactive Flesh. Símon begs to leave, but Satan tells him he is damned to stay forever.

       The mix of the serious religiosity of Buñuel’s story and the humor it elicits makes it clear that for all the “saint’s” suffering, he gains nothing, no vision nor loss of pride—Simon’s major sin. Satan captures him simply because Símon has become someone apart and above the people, a kind of Pharisee who demonstrates his penance so extremely, that he can no longer be embraced by those who might have loved him. And accordingly, in this wonderful short, Buñuel has turned his “life of a saint” into a warning of dangers of human nature. 

 

Los Angeles, February 18, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (February 2014).

Luis Buñuel | La Joven (The Young) / 1960, USA 1961

where you gonna run to?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hugo Butler and Luis Buñuel (screenplay, based on a story by Peter Matthiessen), Luis Buñuel (director) La Joven (The Young) / 1960, USA 1961

 

Spanish-Mexican director Luis Buñuel’s second and last English-language film, La Joven, is generally perceived as a pallid and failed film, and one might well agree that, for the most part, it does seem to be an atypical Buñuel product, having none of his signature surrealist-based flourishes. Perhaps, given the film’s various subject matters—racism, pedophilia, false claims of rape, and moral lassitude, all played out on a small Carolina island in the American south—that he need present no more of an exaggerated or unsettling world view.

        

     The marvel of this small film—and the film is, to my way of thinking, far superior to how it was seen by the critics and audiences of its day—is that it presents these issues in the US context in a way that few other films of its day could manage. True, during the shooting of the film in 1960, a film with similar concerns, Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones appeared. But Kramer’s work, although notable for pairing (quite literally with handcuffs) a racist (Tony Curtis) and a Black man (Sidney Poitier), was also far more in the Hollywood mode, declaring its liberal sentiments on its sleeve. Buñuel’s work is more nuanced and troubling for that very reason. The director and film, although they clearly have a strong point of view, present their various characters with great subtlety, refusing to outright judge them.

      At the center of La Joven—or perhaps I should say, at one of its centers, since the work ultimately ripples out in a series of interrelated rings of hell—is a black musician, Traver (Bernie Hamilton), who has been accused of rape on the mainland by an elderly woman. Given that the clarinetist is a black and Northerner, he is surely in danger of being lynched, and, understandably, escapes by stealing a boat and beaching it on an isolated island. In the original Peter Matthiessen story, the character was a man with a long criminal record with periods of his life being spent in jail. Traver in Buñuel’s tale, however, is guilty of only stealing the boat and going on the run, similarly to the character in To Kill a Mockingbird. But as the song of the movie’s pared-down music track asks” “Where You Gonna Run To?” The place Traver has selected is fraught with perhaps far more dangerous people than even the mainland.

     The man who controls this small island, Miller (Zachary Scott) is a rough and tough bee keeper, whose alcoholic partner, Pee Wee, has died moments before the story begins, leaving his wild and innocent daughter, Evelyn (Key Meersman) under his tutelage. For years apparently he has already been abusing her by forcing her to keep his house and work in the aviary; but now that he suddenly is forced to become her surrogate father, he also suddenly perceives her nubile adolescence, demanding suddenly that she scrub up and tie her wild hair back. When she bows to his demands, he almost immediately goes on the attack, attempting to kiss her, seating her on his lap and toying with her near complete innocence: warning her to never allow a man to do what he doing to her at that very moment. This first time she escapes his unwanted embraces; and he determines to go into town to pick up provisions and new clothing in order to woo her.

      In his absence the musician appears, asking her for honey (the product of their aviary, not her body) and paying her as he steals Miller’s guns. Although she is at first somewhat frightened of the stranger’s appearance, he quickly wins her friendship, which sets up a relationship far different from Evvie’s and Miller’s. Traver makes no advances and pays her for what he takes. But Traver is also another kind “joven,” a greenhorn who before he can even set off in his small boat for another, safer place, accidently shoots a hole in the craft, and is forced to return to the house to find tools and tar with which to fix it. It takes time for the repairs and before he can finish the task Miller has returned with a new dress and shoes for his would-be young lover, discovering as he awards the gifts that there is a now a stranger on the island and that he has paid Evvie for “something,” presuming it must have been sex. Yet, despite Miller’s determination to find and kill the stranger, he is not the stereotype that other directors have presented him as. When he finally encounters Traver, he and the black man—in part because of the clarinetist’s odd courage and straight forwardness, and, in particular, because of their shared experiences as soldiers in World War II—reach a kind of impossible truce, with Traver returning the guns and Miller giving him his former partner’s house in which to sleep—which at the same time gives him the opportunity to bring Evvie into his house. It is apparent that after this night Evvie is no longer a virgin.

      Still, she remains incredulous that the two men can simply get along, growing increasingly fond of Traver. A rationalist, Traver explains it to her in a way that takes this black character into completely new territory, a world in which goodness simply is not a match for hate: “It’s easy for him to kill me,” he tells Evvie, “It’s hard for me to kill him.” His recognition of the black-white dynamic is devastating, and perhaps explains his salvation.

      All changes, however, with the arrival on the island of an all-out bigot, Jackson, determined to once again track down the elusive Traver and kill him. Indeed in the original version of the script, as in the original story, Jackson does kill Traver in a knife fight, in which Traver once again proclaims his recognition of the world in which he lives—so different yet so connected with, for example, the vision of writer Richard Wright—“He supposed he could kill a white man if he had to, and a white man could kill him. But a black man did not kill a white man.” In Buñuel’s editing of his film, however, Traver survives, and is allowed to escape through Miller’s and Revered Fleetwood (Claudio Brook’s) intervention.

       It is less a moral “intervention,” however than what the 1993 article in Cineaste correctly describes as a “bargain,” truly a bargain with the Devil, as the weak Fleetwood, who has come to the island to baptize Evvie, begins to hear both Traver’s and the child’s story, realizing that the white woman has accused others of having raped her and that, in fact, Miller, has actually raped the girl. Miller and Fleetwood allow Traver to escape only to further protect Miller, who now promises to Mary his “daughter.”

       No one in this complex work, finally, gets off easily. Each of the figures carry with them the guilt of their own blindness and lust, which “the young” can only suffer or attempt to escape. And even that act, escape, as the director suggests, is only a temporary event. “Where you gonna run to” in a society that is so corrupt?

      That Buñuel’s film was written and shot by so many former Hollywood artists who had been blacklisted in the hysteria of the 1950s notions of Communist conspiracies, makes this question even more poignant. The film, denounced by New York Times critic Bosley Crowther—one of my least favorite commentators on film of all time—only points up the fact that a significant film like Buñuel’s La Joven could only be made outside the US, in this case Mexico, and reiterates my feeling that the early 1960s were, in the USA, even more conservative than many of the years of the previous decade.

 

Los Angeles, February 13, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (February 2014).