BY GIACOMO SELLONI

If you are like me, you probably have a nostalgic heart. The fact that you read Cinema Retro is a major clue. Have you ever yearned to spend an evening in the past, a la Gil (Owen Wilson) in Woody Allen's “Midnight in Paris?” What if I told you how to experience an evening with Josephine Baker, Fanny Brice, Marion Davies, Will Rogers and Florenz Ziegfeld for a show at his famous theater that is hosted by Eddie Cantor? Would you go?

While real life can not actually bring you back in time to do so, Cynthia Von Buhler can, and has, with her new iTheater production “Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic” current running on Friday and Saturday evenings at the Liberty Theater on 42^nd Street in NYC. Cynthia's previous interactive and immersive shows “The Bloody Beginning” and “The Brothers Booth” were wonderful productions that brought audience members into the cast playing famous (and not so famous) characters that interacted with the show and cast members. The Frolic takes you one step closer and one step beyond.

The show centers around the tragic death of Olive Thomas, a small town girl who moved to NY in 1914 to seek her fame and fortune at 17 years old. She started out as a model and won the title of “Most Beautiful Girl in NY.” The following year she starred as a Ziegfeld girl in one of his most risque shows held late nights in a smaller stage at the top of The New Amsterdam Theater. She had a four-year film career and married Jack Pickford, the younger brother of film star Mary Pickford. She died, under mysterious circumstances, in Paris, in 1920 when she drank mercury bichloride. It was one of the first heavily publicized celebrity scandals.

Audience members 'travel' between Paris - the Cabaret du Néant (Cabaret of Nothingness). VIP ticket purchasers party for half an hour at a “champagne orgy” with Alberto Vargas and scantily clad Ziegfeld girls including the aforementioned ladies. You can also visit the room of honeymooners Pickford and Thomas at the Ritz Hotel but are eventually whisked magically back to NYC to watch the “Midnight Frolic” and back to Paris for the death scene and investigations.

Syrie Moskowitz and Joey Calveri shine as the doomed couple and perform some wonderful stage numbers. Delysia La Chatte is Josehine Baker incarnate. Chris Fink as Eddie Cantor controls the show as emcee. Other standout performers are dancer Brianna Hurley, Heather Bunch as “the down and out lady” and Erica Vlahinos as Fanny Brice who will knock you out with her songs. The music is all 1920s but there are a couple of rearranged recent hit songs given a jazz era arrangement that will pleasantly surprise you. Did I mention the aerialists? Amazing. How they do it with so little clothing on is a wonder.

“Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic” is running under a well-deserved extension for the next two weeks. I hope it will continue its run. I know I'm going back to see it again. I didn't get to see everything - there is so much to see and do, so many nooks and crannies to visit, too many flirtatious flappers, well, you get the idea. To learn more visit speakeasydollhouse.com where you can also purchase tickets. There is also a prix fixe dinner option available. I did not eat the night I attended but people I spoke with enjoyed the meal. It must, however, be reserved in advance. Details are available on the website.

Cynthia's web-site disclaimer: “PLEASE BE ADVISED: THIS SHOW CONTAINS JAZZ, LIQUOR & FAST WOMEN” is well-deserved. So are all the rave reviews this show has received. 

“I LOVE NEW YORK IN JUNE”

By Raymond Benson

I had seen Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King only once, back in 1991 on its initial release, and I liked it very much. As years went on, though, my memories of it were such that I considered it to be atypical of Gilliam’s work. For me, he’s always been a hit-and-miss director; some of his pictures are absolute classics and others not so much. There is a certain beautiful sloppiness to his direction; to use a painting analogy, it’s as if he throws a lot of paint on the canvas and maybe it’ll turn out to be something coherent, funny, and meaningful. Gilliam, I think, is much more of a visual designer than a people-director—his films always look great, usually very original and envelope-pushing in their conception and the execution of the visuals. They are often big pictures on large canvases. They contain lots of effects work, wild costuming, over-the-top performances, and a frenetic energy that is exhaustive. And a lot of fantasy.

On viewing The Criterion Collection’s brand new Blu-ray release of the picture for the first time since 1991, I now realize that The Fisher King is absolutely not atypical of Gilliam’s work. I remembered it as being an intimate study of two characters who go from despondency to finding meaning in their lives, with not much “Gilliam-esque” aspects to the picture. Whoa, my memory was flawed. Gilliam’s wildness, his visual extravagance, the over-the-top performances, the crazy camera angles, fantasy, and the acerbic humor is all there. And it’s terrific, easily one of Gilliam’s best movies (it’s certainly the one that received the most Oscar nominations—five, including Best Actor (Robin Williams), Supporting Actress (Mercedes Ruehl, who won), Original Screenplay (by Richard LaGravenese), Art Direction/Set Design (of course!), and Original Score.

Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges) is a “shock jock” DJ who burns out when one of his listeners becomes a mass murderer based on something Lucas said on the air. Three years later he has quit his job, become an alcohol and drug abuser, and hooked up with video store owner Anne (Mercedes Ruehl in an outstanding performance). Then he accidentally meets a homeless man named Parry (Robin Williams), whose wife was killed by that mass murderer in the incident that also wrecked Lucas’ life. Lucas and Parry form an odd couple friendship and Lucas gets the bright idea of playing matchmaker with Parry and the woman the homeless man dreamily watches from afar, Lydia (Amanda Plummer).

Parry suffers from hallucinations (he believes a horrific “Red Knight”—a fantastic accomplishment in visual effects and costuming—is after him, and that he must find the Holy Grail—shades of Monty Python!—in order to bring his sanity back to earth). Williams delivers one of his wild, crazy-man, wacky performances, and it’s a gem. Bridges, too, is no slouch and he matches his co-star’s antics with a grounded portrayal that is the anchor of the piece. One must also mention Michael Jeter, who almost steals the movie as another homeless man who does a song and dance in drag that brings down the house.

In short, The Fisher King may be Gilliam’s most “humane” picture, for it takes a serious look at homelessness, mental illness, and the trappings of life that contribute to these ills. Perhaps that’s why I remembered the movie as being “atypical” of Gilliam... it had a message of social responsibility and wasn’t some dystopian fantasy set in another world, although the director’s presentation of New York City certainly places Manhattan in another world!

Criterion’s new restored 2K digital transfer, approved by Gilliam, looks fabulous, of course, and the 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack is terrific. There’s an enlightening audio commentary by Gilliam. Other extras include new interviews with actors Bridges, Ruehl, and Plummer; as well as Gilliam, producer Lynda Obst, and writer Richard LaGravenese. A new interview with artists Keith Greco and Vincent Jefferds explores the creation of the Red Knight. There’s a wonderful video essay of Bridge’s on-set photographs, narrated by Bridges. Footage from 1991 of Bridges training as a radio personality with acting coach Stephen Bridgewater is a lot of fun. There are several deleted scenes with commentary by Gilliam, costume tests, and trailers. But the most poignant—and absolutely the funniest—extra is a 2006 interview with Williams discussing the film. An essay by critic Bilge Ebiri completes the enclosed booklet.

If you’ve never seen The Fisher King, it should be high on your list of “to-be-watched” titles. And if you’re a Gilliam fan, well, it’s a must-have for the collection.

By Fred Blosser

Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Inherent Vice” drew almost uniformly positive A-list reviews on its limited theatrical release in December 2014 (to qualify for 2014 Academy Award nominations), and on its official nationwide release the following month. Not a surprise: Anderson has been a darling of critics since “Boogie Nights” (1997), and his script was based on a 2009 novel by Thomas Pynchon, an academically revered novelist. Box-office wasn’t so hot, though. The gross from the nationwide opening weekend was $381,000, and the total gross by the end of April only $11.1 million, just a little more than half the film’s reported budget. Observers theorized that the film was sunk by Pynchon’s perplexing, labyrinthine storyline about a pothead private eye in a Cinema Retro setting of 1970 Los Angeles. Well, maybe, but “Chinatown” (1974) was a commercial success with an equally twisty script, and Ross Macdonald, the dean of complex PI mysteries, sold well enough that he regularly made the New York Times bestseller list at the end of his career.

In fact, Ross Macdonald and “Chinatown” are two strands of the movie’s DNA, along with Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” (1939) and “The Long Goodbye” (1954), the classic movies by Howard Hawks (1946) and Robert Altman (1973) that were based on the two novels, Roger Simon’s counterculture PI Moses Wine in “The Big Fix” (1973), turned into a 1978 film with Richard Dreyfuss, and arguably, the Coen Brothers’ “The Big Lebowski” (1998). Mystery fans may enjoy teasing out the influences. Mainstream viewers may feel like they’ve already been there, done that.

The private eye at the center of Pynchon’s story, Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), is visited at his beach shack by a former girlfriend, Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston). Shasta Fay’s sugar daddy, Mickey Wolfmann, a real estate mogul, has disappeared. Shasta Fay believes that he may have been put away against his will by his wife Sloane and Sloane’s boyfriend. She asks Doc to investigate. Doing so, the amiable, ambling PI encounters a series of high-rolling and low-life characters who seem to have little or nothing in common with each other. With a little digging, Doc begins to uncover one tenuous thread that seems to connect most of them, an association with something called “The Golden Fang.” The name may refer to a schooner used to ship dope from Southeast Asia, a criminal ring that uses the vessel, a fraternity of dentists, or a secluded sanitarium where Doc has a fleeting encounter with a spaced-out Mickey, or all of the above. With each character, the name carries a different connotation. When a cute Asian girl in a massage parlor reveals an important clue to Doc in a foggy alley, veteran mystery fans may wonder if Pynchon and Anderson are also channeling the venerable pulp trappings of Sax Rohmer and Fu Manchu.

Perhaps today’s moviegoers don’t read Chandler or Macdonald, or maybe attention spans have gotten shorter over the years. Like their predecessors, Pynchon and Anderson use a variety of tricks to keep viewers off-balance, principally the relentless introduction of new characters as suspects and red herrings, to the point that in one brief scene, Doc perplexedly writes all the names on a wall board and draws lines from one to the other to keep them straight. However, the ultimate unraveling of the mystery, when it arrives, seems pretty clear. For a real headscratcher, try Ross Macdonald’s “The Blue Hammer” (1976) some time.

The film’s actual shortcomings lie more with Anderson than Pynchon, including inconsistent tone, uneven casting, and a decision to use a tired dramatic device as the way to relate the story -- voiceover narration by one of Doc’s other pals, trippy astrologer Sortilege (Joanna Newsom). Some critics defended Anderson’s choice as the only way that the filmmaker could feasibly spoon out chunks of information that Pynchon conveyed in his novel through the running narrative. But it seems like an easy and lazy out of a challenge that might have been surmounted in a more dramatically satisfying way with a little more thought. At that, it still leaves unexplained some prominent details that were clear in the novel but hazy in the film. For example, who is “Aunt Reet,” the eccentric elderly woman from whom Doc mines some basic intel about Mickey Wolfmann? Played by an unrecognizable Jeannie Berlin, the character actually is Doc’s aunt, as the novel explains, but she’s a puzzling cypher in the movie as she comes and goes in one brief scene. Neither are Doc’s working quarters in a medical building explained. Is he actually a physician? You have to read the novel to find out why he operates out of a medical office. I suspect that these puzzling, unexplained details were actually the main source of frustration for paying audiences, and not the mystery plot itself.

Joaquin Phoenix is excellent as Doc, and Josh Brolin is amusing as his requisite cop nemesis, his performance hovering somewhere between the menacing persona of his character in “Gangster Squad” (2013) and his straight-faced send-up in “Men in Black III” (2013). In a bit perhaps inspired by “L.A. Confidential” (1997), Brolin’s character exploits the LAPD’s ties with Hollywood to land small roles in Jack Webb’s “Adam-12.” On TV, Doc watches a scene from the old show in which Brolin is digitally inserted in the background behind Martin Milner. The film’s best stunt-casting places Reese Witherspoon as Doc’s occasional playmate, Deputy D.A. Penny Kimball, and the two have the single best exchange of lines in the film:

Doc: “I need something from you. I need to look at somebody’s jacket.”

Penny: “That’s it? That’s no big deal. We do it all the time.”

Doc: “What? You break into officially sealed records all the time?”

Penny (casting a jaundiced glance): “Grow up.”

The Warner Home Video Blu-ray presents the movie in high-def, richly saturated color. The special features include three trailer-style clip compilations, each focused on a specific element of the movie (paranoia, Shasta Fay, and the Golden Fang). An alternate, unused ending is included in the fourth feature, “Everything in This Dream.” It hews a little closer to the final chapter of Pynchon’s novel than the rather pedestrian finale that Anderson decided to use instead, in which Doc and Shasta Fay sorta get back together. Nevertheless, although closer, it’s still not up to Pynchon’s lyric, evocative conclusion. The package also contains a DVD version and a digital copy.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON