YAs and Mozart? Hey, the music's good

   

    The Magic Flute, Mozart's acclaimed opera, has gone YA.

    Director Florian Sigl creates a hybrid production that combines a fanciful effects-laden production of Mozart's opera with a tale about kids at an elite boarding school for budding musicians.

    Jack Wolfe, seen in Netflix's Shadow and Bone series, plays 17-year-old Tim, an aspiring singer who's sent to a prestigious Mozart academy. The stern Dr. Longbow (F. Murray Abraham) presides over the school, sort of a Hogwarts for musical prodigies.

    Sigl splits the film into intertwining parts. One involves the life of the school and plays like a typical teen movie. In the movie's more fantastical segments, Tim travels through a magic portal and winds up in Mozart's opera.

    As Prince Tamino, he wanders the opera's enchanted landscapes with the mischievous Papageno (Iwan Rheon). The two must survive various tests to subdue the Queen of the Night (Sabine Devielhe) and find true love, Tamino with Princess Pamina (Asha Banks) and Papageno with Papagena (Stefi Celma). 

   Sarastro (Morris Robinson) opposes The Queen of Night; he poses the tests and gives the proceedings a heavy bass voice. 

    For me, the FX-dominated world in which the opera unfolds beat the boarding school environment,  a place to touch on many usual teen concerns.

    Then there's this: The movie may work as an introduction to Mozart for tweens and teens. Otherwise, it seems unclear for whom the movie was made.

     The singing, by the way, is in English, as is the rest of the movie.  It's hardly surprising that the music is good.

A house with a creepy secret

 Fresh from her Oscar-nominated turn as Marion Davies in Mank, Amanda Seyfried turns up as a troubled spouse in Things Heard & Seen, a movie that takes a stab at serious horror but can't puncture the  fog of cliches that settles over it.

    Adapted from a novel by Elizabeth Brundage, the story follows Seyfried's Catherine Clarie when she accompanies her husband (James Norton) to a small college in upstate New York in the 1980s. 

     Having just earned his doctorate, Norton's George makes a big impression on the head of his department (F. Murray Abraham), an academic with a keen interest in the spiritually oriented philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg. Abraham's character also conducts seances. 

     Hey, somebody has to believe in ghosts,  otherwise a major part of the movie would qualify as an exploration of clinical insanity, which — come to think of it — might have been more intriguing.

     Perhaps to abet the movie's spiritual/paranormal flirtations, George professes an interest in George Inness, a 19th Century  American painter and devotee of Swedenborg with a talent for creating eerie landscapes.

    It doesn't take long before the fishy stuff begins. 

    Catherine abandoned her career restoring art to support George's professional life. Instead of expressing his gratitude, George gaslights her.

    Annoyingly affable, George barely conceals his dark side. He blames his wife's mounting unease on her eating disorder, a serious subject the movie irresponsibly neglects. 

   The isolated house into which George moves his wife and four-year-old daughter (Ana Sophia Heger) has a secret history, and the supporting cast suggests other avenues of exploration that mostly fizzle.

   Another couple (James Urbaniak and Rhea Seehorn) become part of the new arrivals' social network. George does waste much time before diving into hanky-panky, starting an affair with a young woman (Natalia Dyer) who works at a local stable.

    Alex Neustaedter portrays a handy man who works on the Claire home; he knows the secrets of the house and is sympathetic to Catherine. 

    Directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini rely on at least one unforgivably convenient plot development and, most unfortunately, aren't always able to draw a clear enough line between what might deemed ghostly and what's just plain goofy.

 

Wes Anderson checks into a grand hotel

Evoking a bygone era -- or a director's carefully realized vision of it.

Watching Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, I wondered whether the Marx Brothers wouldn't have fit right into the visual intricacies and loopy grandeur of Anderson's impressive production.

It's not that Anderson's nostalgic comedy has an antic spirit or that it's full of rapid-fire word play, it's more that Anderson has concocted a fantasy that embodies the feeling of European culture at a certain moment, perhaps the interval between two world wars.

Anderson creates a time full of aristocratic pretension, ornate elegance and formal manners. The Marx brothers probably would have trashed this world, created by Anderson in the fictional Eastern European country of Zubrowka.

Anderson may not embrace everything about this bygone environment, but he establishes it with astonishing precision. At times, it almost seems as if the entire production belongs inside a snow globe.

Anderson's great strengths center on production design, color and visual wit. Even a young woman's face can't be presented without adornment. Saoirse Ronan's Agatha, for example, has a swooping red birthmark on the right side of her face. A young lobby boy at the once stately Budapest Hotel draws a pencil thin mustache under his nose.

Considerable pleasures can be found in Anderson's mixture of artifice and art: Anderson creates a charmed atmosphere in which the principal characters are introduced along with the main story line, a tale told by Zero Mustafa (F. Murray Abraham ) to a writer (Jude Law) who's visiting the Grand Budapest.

Mustafa explains how he came to own the Grand Budapest, which -- at this point in the tale -- is in a near-fatal state of decline.

Thus begins a flashback. As a young lobby boy, Mustafa found a mentor in Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes). Gustave becomes the movie's most memorable character, a concierge so well-schooled in the arts of service that he has sexual liaisons with many of the hotel's elderly women guests. They adore him, even though Gustave may have been a homosexual.

What ever his sexual preference, Gustave embodies all the surface qualities necessary to create the illusion of taste and distinction so vital to a certain segment of European civilization.

By the time, the movie is over, Anderson deepens his definition of what it means to be civilized, particularly when one realizes that life is short, brutish and subject to violent intrusions by war and other catastrophes.

Anderson's complicated, story-within-stories plot eventually comes to revolve around a supposedly priceless painting called "A Boy with Apple." The painting is left to Gustave by Madame D. (an unrecognizable Tilda Swinton), one of his aging fans.

Madame D's son Dimitri (Adrien Brody) wants the painting back. A tangle of betrayals and murders ensue. At times, the plot -- which includes a prison break -- has the over-stuffed feel of excess baggage.

That bothered me a bit, but with this kind of movie, the icing tends to be far more important than the cake, a fitting comparison because elaborately decorated pastries play a key role in advancing the plot.

Although Grand Budapest Hotel is small and highly polished, it boasts a large cast that includes Jeff Goldblum, Harvey Keitel, Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, Mathieu Amalric, Tom Wilkinson, Edward Norton and, in passing, Owen Wilson.

The heart of the story belongs to Fiennes and newcomer Rivolori. The two create a relationship in which Gustave -- a man known for his "liberal" use of perfume -- develops a genuine fondness for his young charge. If there's a love story here, it's between Gustave and Mustafa.

The movie ends with a title card that pays homage to Stefan Zweig, an Austrian writer credited with inspiring the script and who seems connected to some of the sensibilities that seem to interest Anderson. Overwhelmed by a rising barbarity in the world, Zweig committed suicide in 1942.

In a way, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a movie about sensibility. Gustave's refinements of speech (broken by the occasional epithet) contrast with Demitri's bluntness: Brody sounds as if he arrived in Zubrowka after a stop in one of New York's outer boroughs.

I can't say that Grand Budapest proceeds without sometimes losing steam. But there are enough rare sights to make the journey worthwhile: An elevator with a shocking red interior, the pink grandeur of the hotel's facade, and the changing aspect ratios that Anderson uses to evoke times past.

Moreover, the overplayed gentility of the characters remains quietly amusing throughout.

But there's a problem in all this: Anderson's sensibilities are so refined that he sometimes seems to lose sight of the audience. I enjoyed The Grand Budapest Hotel enough, but also sometimes saw it as a kind of art object, something too far removed from recognizable experience to encourage connection.

By now, though, most audiences have come to regard Anderson (Moonrise Kingdom, The Darjeeling Limited, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and Rushmore) as an acquired taste.

The taste here? Call it bittersweet.

Murky plot sinks 'Dead Man Down'

A disappointing thriller from a strong collection of talent.
If you're interested in movies, Dead Man Down seems difficult to ignore. The movie marks the U.S. debut of Danish director Niels Arden Oplev, who directed the Swedish edition of the enormously popular The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. On top of that, the movie stars Noomi Rapace, the gifted actress who worked with Oplev to create the pivotal (and unforgettable) character of Lizbeth Salander in the original Dragon Tattoo series.

The rest of the movie's cast -- Colin Farrell, Terrence Howard, Isabelle Huppert, F. Murray Abraham and, very briefly, Armand Assante -- suggests we're in for a movie with strong performances and a multi-national flavor.

But Dead Man Down -- which was written by J.H. Wyman and which is set in New York City -- proves to be a murky affair, an overly complex story that revolves around Manhattan real estate, mobsters (domestic and Albanian), explosive violence and an odd, evolving relationship between Farrell's Victor and Rapace's Beatrice, a beautician whose face has been badly scarred in an automobile accident.

Dead Man Down puts a variety of revenge-driven forces into play, turning itself into a puzzle of a movie that bets that we'll stick with it until its loose-ends are tied at the end. But in this case, we're asked to make our way through a thick pile of narrative sludge as Dead Man Down heads toward its ultra-violent resolution.

Part of the problem involves the characters. Farrell, who's in almost every frame, portrays an emotionally withdrawn, recessive man who works for a mobster named Alphonse (Howard). It takes time for the screenplay to get around to explaining what Victor really wants, and Farrell can seem as inert as he is mysterious.

Victor and Beatrice live in separate but neighboring apartment buildings. She watches him from her balcony and decides -- with encouragement from her mother (Huppert) -- that she ought to meet this mysterious fellow. As it turns out, Beatrice has a vengeful agenda of her own, which can't be described here without adding significant spoilers.

Suffice it to say that the movie's dreary mood extends to the performances. Rapace fares better than the others, remaining interesting despite the fact that she's playing a character that doesn't compute, but Howard, whose work I almost always enjoy, never seems to find a handle on his character.

Huppert portrays a happy woman who speaks more French than English, Assante is limited to one scene, and an equally underutilized Abraham pops in an out of the story as Victor's uncle.

The movie tries to make use of the fact that Victor -- a native of Hungry who was trained as an engineer -- has technical skills, but little about the character sticks, and in the end, Oplev resolves the plot's many conflicts with an overblown and preposterous display of violence.

Although Dead Man Down generates a bit of visual interest, it's noir musings mostly come off as leaden, unbelievable and more than a little confusing.

Disappointing as it is, Dead Man Down does boast at least one distinction: It may be the first neo-noir movie to figure out a way to work Tupperware into its plot.