As a bracing alternative to the steady diet of straight story films and talking-heads documentaries of the Chicago Film Festival–as well as the hit-or-miss selection that makes random viewing a very high risk venture–the experimental shorts at the fourth annual Onion City Film Festival offer a breath of fresh air. Apart from the intriguing-sounding Chicago-Frankfurt Film Exchange, which is being offered as a separate special event (see listings), two three-hour programs have been put together representing work all across North America, and the overall quality and diversity of talents on display are impressive indeed. Judging from the ten films I’ve seen, comprising about a third of the selections, there are no major breakthroughs, but a lot of interesting and energetic forays. Today Is Sunday, a lovely black-and-white, elliptical seminarrative by Chicago performance artist Jean Sousa, gravitates around a beachside location and is punctuated by suggestive, free-floating intertitles and isolated bursts of music. Chick Strand’s Artificial Paradise, shot over three years in Mexico, interweaves a kaleidoscope of colorful visual and aural textures in dancelike rhythms; Alex Prisadsky’s short and silent Dmitri and Ramona performs a sprightly jig of its own using only printed words. Domenic Angerome’s Continuum does wonderful things with tar, paint, and other aspects of urban street work in striking high-contrast black-and-white photography that evokes the 30s, while Scott Guitteau’s Advanced Civilized Nation makes politically provocative use of found footage. Read more
The 23rd Chicago International Film Festival, running from Monday, October 19, through Sunday, November 8, promises 131 separate programs, not counting repeats. As a newcomer to this event who has attended about a dozen other international film festivals, most of them several years in a row, I can offer at this point only a single, broad generalization about what seems to make Chicago’s relatively pluralistic and amorphous, for better and for worse.
Although film festivals come in all shapes and sizes, one can generally make a loose distinction between the free-for-alls, where anything and everything is likely to turn up (Cannes, London, Los Angeles’s Filmex), and the ones with a more discernible selection process that tend to project a more critical and polemical profile (Toronto, New York, Rotterdam). By reputation and to all appearances, Chicago belongs more in the first category than in the second. What this means in practice is that the shopping spectator has to become his or her own critic while browsing through the festival schedule, rather than trust in either fate or some imagined philosophical unity in director Michael Kutza’s selections.
Practically speaking, with a festival this size, taking some initiative is what everyone has to do anyway. Read more
Cantonese director Yim Ho’s delicate and touching film charts the return of Coral (Josephine Koo), an attractive Hong Kong businesswoman in her thirties, to her native village in southern mainland China. Staying with her childhood friend Pearl (Si Quin Gao Wa)–now a school principal married to a farmer, with a daughter-she discovers that her urban life and problems have irrevocably estranged her from the ways and attitudes of the village, although she and Pearl make many heartfelt efforts to bridge their differences. Kong Liang’s screenplay eschews melodrama and big events for quiet insights, and a remarkably dense portrait of the village emerges, framed by Ho with a distinctive grasp of composition, landscape, and personal detail that occasionally evokes the complexity of a Brueghel. The performances are nuanced and moving, and one comes to know these people–not only the heroines, but Pearl’s defensive and tongue-tied husband, an unruly and mercenary little boy, a man who can’t read the letters in English his son sends him from UCLA, a wise uncle, and many others–on a first-name basis. (Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Saturday, Tuesday, and Thursday, October 3, 6, and 8, 9:00, 281-4114) Read more
There are many pleasant surprises in this collection of 18 animated shorts from ten countries, but perhaps the biggest one is that the range of influences informing animation seems to be getting wider. While the terminal cuteness of Disney and the gallows humor of Eastern Europe have tended to dominate in the past, and are far from absent here, the more vernacular genius of Tex Avery also seems to be making some headway–in such diverse works as Bon Kurtz’s parodic Drawing on My Mind from the U.S., Guido Manuli’s Plus One, Minus One (a screwball remake of It’s a Wonderful Life) and Bruno Bozzetto’s Baeus (a doodle-bug variation on Avery’s King Size Canary) from Italy, and Joanna Quinn’s Girl’s Night Out from Great Britain, which plays with some Averyesque gags on striptease and libido from a female Cockney point of view. There’s also striking hyperrealist computer animation from the U.S., clay animation from the Soviet Union and Hungary, and the usual batch of glum parables from all over. But my favorites in this batch strike out freshly on their own: Susan Young’s semiabstract Carnival, which beautifully evokes a London ethnic street fair; Academy Leader Variations, the most avant-garde selection which combines the giddy talents of 20 animators from the U.S., Read more
A fair to middling liberal courtroom thriller set in Washington, D.C., this Peter Yates picture takes a while to get started, and never tells us as much about its major characterspublic defender Kathleen Riley (Cher), juror and lobbyist Eddie Sanger (Dennis Quaid), and derelict and murder suspect Carl Wayne Anderson (Liam Neeson)as we’d like to know. But there’s some interesting material about the plight of the homeless (a subject not broached by many 80s movies), and effective performances by Joe Mantegna (as the prosecuting attorney) and John Mahoney (as a stern judge). (JR) Read more
Talk about meeting cute: a much-divorced best-selling novelist (Michael Caine) and a production-line painter of tacky hotel room landscapes (Sally Field) both turn up at an art museum benefit, where a gang of terrorists orders them to strip and ties them together for several hours. She lives with a vegged-out yuppie boyfriend (Steve Guttenberg) and paints her own stuff in her spare time; the novelist has been through so many costly divorces that he’s reluctant to reveal his professional identity. Written and directed by TV veteran Jerry Belson, this light and sexy romantic comedy starts off as a fairly witty satire of southern California folkways (including styles of conspicuous consumption and dating), but eventually succumbs to complacency and a string of improbable plot twists. In between, Caine, Field, and Guttenberg put on a pretty good show, assisted by the owlish Peter Boyle as the writer’s lawyer and best friend, and Jackie Cooper as the painter’s country-club father. (JR) Read more
Ridley Scott’s 1987 feature takes a conventional romantic police thriller script, written by Howard Franklin, and dresses it up like a Christmas tree. A happily married rookie police detective from Queens (Tom Berenger) is assigned to protect a wealthy and attractive Manhattan woman (Mimi Rogers) who is the material witness to a homicide by (you guessed it) a psycho who’ll stop at nothing (Andreas Katsulas). Despite class barriers and the detective’s devotion to his plucky wife (Lorraine Bracco), he and the witness fall in love and have an affair. While the actors show some sensitivity and Scott works up a modicum of suspense and involvement, the real interest of this picture is the radiance of the imagesa mastery of lighting and decor second only to Scott’s Blade Runner, with atmospheric textures so dense you can almost taste them. Unfortunately, this mastery bears only the most glancing relationship to the story at hand, and Scott becomes guilty of the sort of formalism that used to be charged (less justly) against Josef von Sternberg. But even though the movie doesn’t leave much of a residue, it looks terrific while you’re watching it: Manhattan has seldom appeared as glitzy or as glamorous. With Jerry Orbach, John Rubenstein, and a nice rendition of the Gershwin title tune by Sting. Read more
Despite the apparent havoc wreaked on this film by David Begelmanwho eliminated 29 minutes from Michael Cimino’s cut and reedited the remainder more for action than for the meditative rhythms the director (who reportedly used Visconti’s The Leopard as a model) had in mindthis is one of Cimino’s best films, with a fine sense of spectacle and landscape, following the bloody career of Salvatore Giuliano (effectively played by Christopher Lambert), the violent and idealistic Robin Hood of the Sicilian peasantry in the 40s. The rhetorical self-importance of Cimino’s films makes them resemble Stalinist epics, and the nonstop wallpaper music of David Mansfield certainly doesn’t help this one. But the uncredited dialogue of Gore Vidal has a cynical, bantering polish that helps to keep things in perspective, and the film’s visual sweep commands respect even when it becomes hyperbolic, which is fairly often. (Steve Shagan receives sole credit for the script, adapted from Mario Puzo’s novel.) What emerges might be described as great moments from Michael Cimino’s The Sicilian. With Terence Stamp, Joss Ackland, John Turturro, Richard Bauer, and Barbara Sukowa in her first English-speaking role. (JR) Read more
Coming from the same director (Stephen Frears), writer (Hanif Kureishi), and producers (Tim Bevan and Sarah Radclyffe) who gave us My Beautiful Laundrette, this lively film about social and political turmoil in Thatcher England bears the same relationship to that earlier film as Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip has to Richard Pryor Live in Concerti.e., a spontaneous gathering of forces whose energies and inspirations hit a raw nerve is succeeded by a more deliberate and self-conscious effort to bring the same powers into play. In this case, the return of corrupt, old-fashioned Rafi (Shashi Kapoor) to London to visit his son Sammy (Ayub Khan Din) and daughter-in-law Rosie (Frances Barber) reveals to him the cataclysmic changes the country has been undergoingrace riots, sexual warfare, and political upheavalsand he never quite recovers from the shock, even after he goes to see his old girlfriend Alice (Claire Bloom). When Sammy throws a dinner party for Rafi, he remarks to Rosie, We’ll round up the usual social deviants, communists, lesbians, and blacks, with a sprinkling of the mentally subnormal, and the rather stylized landscape of interracial couples, bombed-out streets, and multisexual adventurers goes beyond the relative naturalism of My Beautiful Laundrette to create a world more akin to the scene of 50s turmoil in the underrated Absolute Beginners. Read more
It’s almost impossible to imagine an uninteresting film about Chuck Berry, but Taylor Hackford’s overextended and poorly edited documentary (1987) makes a stab at being one. There are, to be sure, some very enjoyable sequencesin particular some excerpts from a three-way conversation between Berry, Bo Diddley, and the volatile Little Richardbut a good deal of this film is devoted to a 60th birthday celebration concert for Berry that pairs him with Linda Ronstadt, Julian Lennon, Etta James, and others and tends to reduce him to a show-biz icon, the George Jessel of rock. What one misses most of all are some glimpses of the earlier Chuck Berry, as seen in the black-and-white rock movies of the 50s, when the intensity of his music and his jackrabbit moves had more satanic majesty. Berry is still a dynamite performer when he wants to be, but he’s done the same tunes so many times that he knows he can get away with relatively little, and too much of this film shows him at half-throttle. The film also skimps on certain portions of his careermost noticeably his brushes with the lawthat are treated in fuller detail in his autobiography. You won’t want to miss this if you’re a Berry fan, but don’t count on getting the full measure of the man and his music. Read more
Madonna’s third feature is no masterpiece, but it deserves a lot more than the heaps of critical contempt and the quick playoff it received on its first run. A loose remake of Howard Hawks’s screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby, it charts the complications that ensue when Madonna’s street-smart character emerges from prison after taking the rap for a corporate crime, and straitlaced yuppie lawyer Griffin Dunne, due to be married soon, is ordered to drive her to the bus station. (A Rolls-Royce and a Patagonian cougar also figure significantly in the plot.) Directed by James Foley (At Close Range, Reckless), who shows a certain fitful flair for contemporary satire and elaborate sight gags. With John Mills, Haviland Morris, John McMartin, and an adroit animated prologue behind the credits. (JR) Read more
It must have sounded good on paper. Director John Hancock, once involved with former convict Rick Cluchey’s San Quentin Drama Group, had for some time wanted to make a film loosely inspired by this experience. After developing a screenplay with his wife, Dorothy Tristan, about the subjecta group of ex-cons who put on a show about their life behind bars and take it on the roadhe struggled to get it financed, enlisting Nick Nolte to play the uneducated writer-director-actor who heads the group. But sadly, neither the script nor the direction is up to the job of telling the story coherently or effectively; the pacing and structure never click into place, and the film comes across like a sprawling rough cut, full of dangling threads and unrealized possibilities. Nolte, who starts out plausibly, is ultimately defeated by the film’s ellipses and discontinuities; John Toles-Bey, a promising newcomer who plays his jivey sidekick, gets killed off by the plot before his part can take full shape; and Angelo Badalamenti’s terrible score only adds to the general confusion. It all seems a genuine pity, because the ostensible themethe freedom and clarity that art can bring to confinementhasn’t been matched by the filmmaking. (JR) Read more
One hint that this is slightly more subversive than the average bland teenpic: Steven Spielberg, the executive producer, asked to have his name removed from the credits. First-time director Phil Joanou is such a show-off with his fancy camera angles and other gratuitous forms of visual workout that at first you suspect he’s trying to distract us from the formula scenario (by TV writing team Richard Christian Matheson and Thomas Szollosi)a countdown routine about the 90-pound weakling (Casey Siemaszko) who has to fight the Charles Atlas bully (Richard Tyson) as soon as school lets out. But after it gradually becomes clear that the true villains of the piece are more the school authorities than the bully, the movie becomes a bit more interesting: the hero’s eventual rise to macho potency begins to resemble an anarchist’s progress rather than a Clark Kent turnaround. The film’s incessant cutting away to clocks gets needlessly corny, and while Joanou gets pretty broad in jazzing up the mythological aspects of the material (from David and Goliath to the Vigo-esque caricatures of the grown-ups), he does manage to pull off a few nifty sight gags. (JR) Read more
A debut feature by director Gerd Roman Frosch and screenwriter Edeltraud Rabitzer, set in Berlin, depicts the coming of age of a teenage bank employee (newcomer Zacharias Preen) who obsessively identifies himself with a murderer on trial. Shot by Jurgen Jurges (A Woman in Flames, Effi Briest). Read more
Genre specialist John Carpenter returns to the principle of confined space that he used as a disciplinary structure in Assault on Precinct 13 and The Thing in this horror thriller set in an abandoned church. The main difference here is the heavy metaphysical baggage: a team of graduate science students and teachers (including Lisa Blount, Victor Wong, and Jameson Parker) is summoned by a Catholic priest (Donald Pleasence) to study an ancient religious manuscript that proves to contain differential equations (written long before such equations were developed), and a canister containing a green liquid that proves to be seven million years old. Mathematics combines with demonology to produce a variant on Night of the Living Dead, and while the church is playfully called Saint Godard’s, the pivotal use and significance of mirrors spawned by the canister liquid might make Saint Cocteau’s more appropriate. While the dense significations of the script (credited to one Martin Quatermass) may get a bit thick in spots, Carpenter’s handsome ‘Scope images generally make the most of them. Some haunting poetic notions such as video images from the future that appear as recurring dreams to the church’s inhabitantsalso figure effectively in the plot (1987). (JR) Read more
