Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) thinks he lives in a model island community, but then he discovers that his entire life has been televised without interruption as The Truman Show; his family and friends, along with everyone else in town, are actors and extras, and the island itself is a TV studio. Half-clever and half-dumb, though always interesting and provocative, this 1998 fantasy was written with some wit by Andrew Niccol and directed with some style by Peter Weir. It makes better sense as allegory than as SF premise, expecting you to accept that the viewing public consists of jerks (except for you and me and other media-savvy types) and that the Truman Show creator (Ed Harris, radiating holiness) who services the jerks is a godlike genius. In short, this pretends to be daring while parroting what much of the TV industry already thinks about itself and its audience. But it’s still pretty much fun to watch. With Laura Linney, Noah Emmerich, Natascha McElhone, and Holland Taylor. 103 min. (JR) Read more

At first I was put off by the hagiographic and metaphoric aspects of this 2002 Canadian documentary about communications essayist Marshall McLuhan (1911-’80); director Kevin McMahon and screenwriter David Sobelman seem to regard their subject as Moses, Hegel, and Northrop Frye rolled into one. But I was won over by the film’s mimetic process, as McLuhan’s endlessly suggestive (if sometimes fruitless) probes are matched by fragmented voices intoning all the praise and criticism that have circled his work (among the commentators are Gerald O’Grady, Lewis Lapham, Neil Postman, Laurie Anderson, and McLuhan’s son Eric). Ultimately this adds up to a comprehensive and highly ambitious study of McLuhan’s life, thought, and influence. 94 min. (JR) Read more

Hunter S. Thompson’s 1971 account of taking drugs and behaving like an asshole in Las Vegas yields a singularly unpleasant 1998 feature from writer-director Terry Gilliam, though one with a lot of creativity and a scuzzy integrity of its own. There’s a good grasp of period, an impressive impersonation of the author-hero by an almost unrecognizable Johnny Depp, and a determination to honor the original in all its gross-out particulars. I assume that part of the idea here was to play in the ambiguous zones where Las Vegas tackiness, LSD hallucinations, Gilliam beasties, and lots of vomit become difficult to separate. It’s certainly distinctive, looking at times like Richard Lester put through a postmodernist blender, and Gilliam, an American expatriate since the 60s, skewers his native country with guts and zeal. 119 min. (JR) Read more

Art 1998 Chicago presents continuous showings of films that debuted at the Documenta X festival in Kassel, Germany, last summer. The Final Insult is Charles Burnett’s first foray into digital video, released in 1997 and running 55 minutes. It’s a fictional story about a homeless middle-aged man (Ayuko Babu of When It Rains) interspersed with a lot of documentary footage about the homeless, including several interviews. Both blocks of material have their own strength and validity, but they seldom mesh comfortably, and their juxtaposition tends to distract one from the subject at hand. Mother and Son (1997) is by the Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov. Apart from the eye-filling black-and-white video Oriental Elegy Sokurov’s painterly, visionary side has seldom been more evident than in this gorgeous contemplation of a son caring for his dying mother. The story is minimal, but the color images are so breathtaking that there’s never a lax moment; even when the already slow action is reduced to a virtual standstill, Sokurov’s intensity insures that something is always happening, both on the screen and inside us. (This is only 73 minutes long, but if you’re hungry for plot, it will seem like an eternity.) In his taste and his patience, Sokurov may be our only truly 19th-century avant-gardist—which means in effect that his works are timeless. Read more

A better-than-average Quentin Tarantino imitation, this 1999 feature crosscuts the overlapping adventures of a teenage supermarket cashier (Sarah Polley) who’s filling in for a British coworker and trying to take over a little of his drug business to score some rent money, the coworker (Desmond Askew) partying in Las Vegas, and a couple of TV actors (Scott Wolf and Jay Mohr) caught up in a drug sting. The LA-underground characters, situations, and ambience keep this lively, even if most of the Tarantino-esque narrative rewinds seem forced and dutiful. Doug Liman (Swingers) shot and directed the script by first-timer (and coproducer) John August; others in the cast include Katie Holmes, Taye Diggs, William Fichtner, Nathan Bexton, and Timothy Olyphant. 100 min. (JR) Read more

Funny as well as poignant, this 1999 comedy stars Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence as New York bootleggers sentenced to life in a Mississippi prison after being framed for murder in 1932. This might be better than anything either comedian has done before; at least it made me laugh more. A movie about black men in prison comes dangerously close to being a movie about contemporary reality, and part of what I like about Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone’s episodic screenplay and Ted Demme’s mainly self-effacing direction is how many real-life issues it manages to broach without ever threatening to become pompous. Character humor growing out of adversity has a long and venerable tradition, and if this in part suggests a street-smart Forrest Gump, it also recalls the euphoric gusto of W.C. Handy’s song Long Gone as performed by Louis Armstrong. As is expected by now in a Murphy movie, the makeup effects (handled by the ace Rick Baker) are elaborate, but little of this is asked to replace performance; Murphy and Lawrence and the secondary cast, which includes Obba Babatunde, Bokeem Woodbine, Ned Beatty, and R. Lee Ermey, all do a fine job. (JR) Read more

An intelligent and informative feature-length documentary (1999) by Canadian filmmaker Nettie Wild about the Zapatista movement and uprising in southern Mexico, concentrating on events that occurred between 1994 and 1997. The film focuses mainly (and cogently) on the struggles of the Zapatista National Liberation Army in Mexico and in cyberspace, but it also allows the government-allied paramilitary group north of Chiapas, which calls itself Peace and Justice, to speak on its own behalf (when it isn’t assaulting the film crew). This is sturdy as well as stirring political filmmaking that asks all the right questions, including ones about the role of the U.S. in the outcome. 89 min. (JR) Read more

From the Chicago Reader (May 1, 1999). — J.R.

Not just a remake of the Boris Karloff-Karl Freund classic but an Indiana Jones spin-off with dollops of Jason and the Argonauts, George Romero’s zombie series, Land of the Pharaohs, Samson and Delilah, and even Apocalypse Now (Arnold Vosloo’s mummy bears a certain resemblance to Brando’s Kurtz). Writer-director Stephen Sommers does a pretty good job of zipping things along and occasionally scaring us, and the digital effects are fun; Brendan Fraser, John Hannah, and Jonathan Hyde do what they can with one-dimensional parts but tend to be outshone by the almost two-dimensional Rachel Weisz. Kevin J. O’Connor is mainly embarrassing as a conniving Arab, but then all the Arabs in this 1999 film, set during the 1920s, are accorded roughly the same respect, affection, and humanity as black people in The Birth of a Nation. Thanks to the example of Lucas-Spielberg, guiltless colonialism backed by endless gun power is still the name of the game. PG-13, 124 min. (JR)

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A TV writer (executive producer Lona Williams) and a first-time director (Michael Patrick Jann) join forces with Kirstie Alley, Ellen Barkin, Kirsten Dunst, and Denise Richards in a uniquely mean-spirited skewering of teen beauty pageants. An intermittently enjoyable bad movie that never knows when to stop, this heaps scorn not only on every aspect of (and participant in) the pageant but also on mental defectives, signing for the deaf, and Japanese-Americans eager to assimilate. All the leads play their roles like strident amateurs (only Allison Janney, as Barkin’s best friend, emerges relatively unscathed), and the film’s so aggressive about its bad-taste agenda that the early John Waters seems a pussycat by comparison. There’s something bracing about the unleashing of so much unbridled negativity, especially for anyone who’s ever suffered through small-town pettiness and mediocrity, but this 1999 release eventually outstays its welcome. Still, if you come to it in a sufficiently foul mood, it might cheer you up. 98 min. (JR) Read more

The only other adaptations I’ve seen of the Alexandre Dumas novel (which I haven’t read) are the Classics Illustrated comic book and the 1939 James Whale potboiler, both of which I prefer to this vulgar and overwrought 1998 free-for-all, which makes you wait interminably for the story’s central narrative premise. (The Whale version spills the beans right away.) Written and directed by Randall Wallace (best known as the screenwriter of Braveheart), this starts off as a Three Musketeers sequel, trusting that its hefty cast and fart jokes will keep you interested. But to be fair, the story is close to foolproof once it finally gets going. With Leonardo DiCaprio, Jeremy Irons, John Malkovich, Gerard Depardieu, Gabriel Byrne, Anne Parillaud, and Judith Godreche. 132 min. (JR) Read more

The best Wim Wenders documentary to date and an uncommonly self-effacing one, this 1999 concert movie about performance and lifestyle is comparable in some ways to Latcho Drom, the great Gypsy documentary/musical. In 1996 musician Ry Cooder traveled to Havana to reunite some of the greatest stars of Cuban pop music from the Batista era (who were virtually forgotten after Castro came to power) with the aim of making a record, a highly successful venture that led to concerts in Amsterdam and New York. The players and their stories are as wonderful as the music, and the filmmaking is uncommonly sensitive and alert. 105 min. (JR) Read more

Stanley Kubrick’s last feature (1999) skillfully portrays the dark side of desire in a successful marriage. Since the 60s he’d thought about filming Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Traumnovelle, about a young doctor contemplating various forms of adultery and debauchery after discovering that his wife has entertained comparable fantasies. It has a Kafkaesque ambiguity, wavering between dream and waking fantasy, and all the actors do a fine job of traversing this delicate territory. Yet the story has been altered to make the doctor (Tom Cruise) more of a hypocrite and his wife (Nicole Kidman) feistier; Kubrick’s also added a Zeus-like tycoon (played perfectly by Sydney Pollack) who pretends to explain the plot shortly before the end but in fact only summarizes the various mysteries; his cynicism and chilly access to power reveals that Kubrick was more of a moralist than Schnitzler. This is a gripping, suggestive, and inventive piece of storytelling that, like Kubrick’s other work, grows in mystery over time. R, 154 min. (JR) Read more

An edgy youth thriller, packed with speed and technique, that basically offers three versions of how Lola (Franka Potente), the girlfriend of a small-time drug courier (Moritz Bleibtreu), spends 20 minutes running across town trying to hustle up 100,000 deutsche marks so that her boyfriend won’t get iced by his boss. The industrial music, the show-offy visual effects, the conceptual interest of following a story in three separate directions, and the sheer energy of the cast and writer-director Tom Tykwer make this 1999 film about as entertaining as a no-brainer can bea lot more fun, for my money, than a cornball theme-park ride like Speed, and every bit as fast moving. But don’t expect much of an aftertaste. In German with subtitles. R, 88 min. (JR) Read more