Grim reaping

Les Saisons (Seasons)

Crit

First, this is an absolutely spectacular nature documentary, cameras placed inside lairs and on bird- and beetle-stalking drones, or fixed with zoom lenses to provide stunning intimacy to the cycles of the European forest.

After a while, though, one species--mostly seen dimly, and at a distance not afforded any of the others--intrudes and establishes a narrative, inevitably of domestication and destruction, of single-minded progress, if you will.

Two products of that species came to mind as I watched: this song, and this Gary Larson cartoon.

Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened . . .

Crit

A documentary about faith and failure on Broadway. If you're the sort of musical theater junkie my daughter is, you probably know Merrily We Roll Along as the audacious show--starring young people, mostly amateurs, as characters whose story is followed backward from jaded adulthood to idealistic youth--that lasted 16 performances in 1981 and killed the long-running collaboration between Stephen Sondheim and Hal Price, but that later became an improbable standard of the genre.

I knew nothing about that, but found the film--by Lonny Price, one of those fresh-faced kids (Jason Alexander was the only one I'd heard of) who put on the show--heartwarming and -breaking in pretty much equal parts. Everyone who went through the experience came out of it scarred, and while most were unbowed, few stayed in musical theater. Several, though, tellingly, kept some tangential connection to the biz.