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
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
It isn’t easy to accept Diane Keaton as a brittle, high-powered executive, and it’s even harder to believe she’d throw away her boyfriend and career for the sake of a 13-month-old baby girl she inherits from a long-lost cousin. This, however, is the kind of Hollywood comedy that wants to have everything both ways, to give us a character who decides not to play the game and who wins all the chips just the same. Producer Nancy Meyers and director Charles Shyer collaborated on the fanciful and unconvincing script; Keaton does her best, which is unfortunately not enough, with the fatal miscasting. With Harold Ramis, Sam Wanamaker, and Sam Shepard, the latter as an amiable New England veterinarian who more or less plays Annie Hall to Keaton’s Alvy Singer. (JR) Read more
A reflective autobiographical film about filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien’s youth in the late 40s and early 50s; largely filmed in the same places in Taiwan where the events originally happened, this unhurried family chronicle carries an emotional force and a historical significance that may not be immediately apparent. Working in long takes and wide-screen, deep focus compositions that frame the characters from a discreet distance, Hou allows the locations to seep into our own memories and experience, so that, as in Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs, we come to know them almost as intimately as touchstones in our own lives. Yet paradoxically, the unseen Chinese mainland carries as much weight in the film as the landscape of Taiwan: Hou’s Christian family left in 1948, and the revolution that followed made it impossible for them to return. Subtly interweaving everyday details with processes and understandings that evolve over years, the film conveys a density of familial detail that we usually encounter only in certain novels, and a sense of the tragic within hailing distance of Ozu. (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, September 11, 8:00, and Sunday, September 13, 5:00, 443-3737) Read more
Significantly, when Vietnamese filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha gives herself a director’s credit in her remarkable meditation on West African life and architecture, she places an X over the word “directed.” Why? Because a central aspect of her project is the dislocation of the authority by which we generally presume to understand the alien, and redirection and indirection are equally descriptive of what she is up to. A composer and a poet, she pans and cuts in irregular rhythms, continually stopping and starting, and rather than “direct” our focus and interpretation like an anthropologist, she interweaves three distinctly accented female voices speaking English, each of which conveys a different kind of discourse, traversing the images at different angles. Like the separate typefaces in Mallarme’s poem “A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance,” these voices and mesmerizing recordings of African music encircle and commingle with their subjects rather than attempt to capture them in linear/colonial/narrative fashion. (Sample: “The house is composed like the human body. The earth or clay is the flesh, the water the blood, the stones the bones, and the placid surface of the walls the skin.”) The results are both beautiful and instructive, a duet between filmmaker and subject, disclosures and enclosures, which remains perpetually fresh and unpredictable over the film’s 134 minutes. Read more
It’s strange to recall that as a modern dancer and choreographer, Yvonne Rainer was known throughout the 60s and early 70s as a minimalist. For the past 15 years, she has been making experimental quasi-narrative films of an increasing multitextual density, culminating in this angry, vibrant film of 1985, which, in her own words, takes on “the housing shortage, changing family patterns, the poor pitted against the middle class, Hispanics against Jews, artists and politics, female menopause, abortion rights. There’s even a dream sequence.” Working with the speech and writing of over a dozen figures, ranging from Raymond Chandler to Julia Kristeva, Rainer also confronts and parodies male theoretical discourse (Michel Foucault in particular, sampled and discussed in extended chunks) as a mode of sexual seduction. Politics have been present in all her features, but usually folded into so many distancing devices that they mainly come out dressed in quotes. Here she allows the politics to speak more directly and eloquently, and it charges the rest of the film like a live wire–rightly assuming that we could all use a few jolts. (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Thursday, September 10, 6:00, 443-3737) Read more
