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
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
A middle-class housewife (Stephanie Roscoe) recovering from a brutal rape decides to forge a series of separate identities for herself, borrowing the names and birth dates of various strangers. Produced, written, and directed by Andy Anderson, this low-budget independent production, shot and set around Fort Worth, displays a certain awkwardness in exposition and takes its time in spelling out the specifics of its mystery plot. But there’s something refreshing about the sheer unadorned, un-Hollywood look of the film, and in a style that is somewhat eclectic and at times lightly satirical, Anderson acquits himself respectably, as does the cast of unknowns, also including John Davies and Steve Fromholz. (JR) Read more
Hot on the heels of A Room With a View, director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant adapted another E.M. Forster novel, posthumously published in 1914 (the quasi-autobiographical subject, a male homosexual in prewar upper-class England, prevented Forster from publishing it while he was alive). At Cambridge, Maurice Hall (James Wilby) develops a discreet, romantic, semiplatonic relationship with the aristocratic Clive Durham (Hugh Grant), a relationship that continues after Maurice is expelled and goes to live at the Durham estate. But after a former classmate is imprisoned for making homosexual advances (an addition to Forster), Clive takes a trip alone to Greece, renounces his relationship with Maurice, and winds up in a conventional marriage. Lonely and frustrated, Maurice seeks help in hypnosis, then begins an affair with Clive’s lusty gamekeeper, Alec Scudder (Rupert Graves). A kind of low-key, homoerotic Splendor in the Grass, this 1987 film weighs in at 140 minutes, and despite many fine actors in smaller partse.g., Billie Whitelaw, Ben Kingsley, and Denholm Elliottthe dissection of Edwardian repression never gets beyond the dutiful, tasteful obviousness of a BBC miniseries. With a script by Ivory and Kit Hesketh-Harvey, and postcard photography by Pierre Lhomme. (JR) Read more
This rather lackluster first feature by Ismet Elci, a disciple of West German independent filmmaker Lothar Lambert, has many of the same low-budget attributes as films by Lambertshort takes, semisynchronous soundbut little of the charm or energy. The plot concerns two young Turks in Berlin, a carpet seller who is trying to produce a film and a hustler who gets involved with drugs and robbery. Many Lambert regulars make appearances, including Lambert himself. (JR) Read more
Whoopi’s back, and the LAPD’s got her. One has to wait about 90 minutes before the cartoonish slam-bang action, bloodbath gore, and Whoopi Goldberg’s wisecracks about the size and threatened fate of diverse penises subside long enough for her to act: one nice little scene to show her character’s vulnerability and preach the evils of hard drugs before the movie reverts to the same nonsensical overkill of violence and tough talk. The characters are uniformly cardboardincluding bits by Jennifer Warren and Brad Dourif, and a larger part with Sam Elliott as a crook’s bodyguard who turns into a pussycat in order to win the heart of Goldberg’s Dirty Harry cop. The notion of a black female detective who’s harder than anyone else in the Western Hemisphere seems to hark back to the fantasies of certain black exploitation films of the 70s, but the movie has too little imagination to do much with this conceit other than repeat it endlessly. Tom Holland directed from a script and story credited to three individuals, anyone could have knocked this one out during coffee break. The title, incidentally, refers not to Goldberg but to a brand of lethally cut cocaine, the ostensible pretext for all this mayhem. Read more
