Why is it that paranoid cold-war spy films were more numerous in the mid-80s than at any other period since the worst days of McCarthyism? Mulling this question over makes for a better use of time than sitting through this glib, repulsive thriller, another Frederick Forsyth special. Adapted from his fifth novel by Forsyth himself (who also coproduced), the picture concerns a Soviet spy who is smuggling an atomic bomb into England piece by piece while a British agent tries to track him down. Overlong, alternately nasty and tedious, with uniformly colorless and humorless characters; neither director John Mackenzie nor actors Michael Caine, Pierce Brosnan, Ned Beatty, and Joanna Cassidy can juice up the proceedings. (JR) Read more
A profoundly uninteresting married yuppie lawyer (Michael Douglas) has a weekend affair with a profoundly uninteresting unmarried yuppie book editor (Glenn Close), who proves to be insane and makes his life a living hell. This 1987 feature gradually turns into a sort of upscale remake of The Exorcist, with female sexuality (personified by Close) taking over the part of the devil and yuppie domesticity (personified by Douglas, wife Anne Archer, and daughter Ellen Hamilton Latzen) assuming the role of innocence. While billed as a romance and a thriller, the film strictly qualifies as neither, appealing to our prurience, guilt, hatred, and dread. With director Adrian Lyne shoving objects like a knife, a boiling pot, and an overflowing bath in the spectator’s face to signal that Something Awful’s Going to Happen, there’s little room for curiosity about the motivations of the spurned antiheroine, who eventually becomes a robotic killer. James Dearden wrote the screenplay, although producers Stanley R. Jaffe and Sherry Lansing, faced with dissatisfied preview audiences, are responsible for the totally dehumanized finale. (The original ending is now available on DVD, but I haven’t seen it.) 119 min. (JR) Read more
An American TV reporter (Christopher Walken) arrives in Beirut to cover the war in Lebanon, and receives an unexpected invitation to tape an exclusive interview with a major PLO official who speaks out against violence. Before long, the reporter is accused by other PLO officials of having perpetrated a hoax, and accused by the Christian Phalangists of working for the PLO. Equivalent in some respects to Oliver Stone’s Salvador, this well-intentioned and efficient thriller by Israeli filmmaker Nathaniel Gutman, partially financed by German TV, explores some of the complexities of a major trouble spot through the moral reeducation of a cynical and flippant outsider. Nothing major, but capably scripted by Hanan Peled and crisply cut by Peter Przygodda, Wim Wenders’s usual editor. (JR) Read more
While it may not add up to anything very profound, this paranoid thriller is put together with so much craft and economy that a significant part of its pleasure is seeing how tightly and cleanly every sequence is hammered into place. Brian Dennehy is Dennis Meechum, an incorruptible police detective who doubles as a successful crime writer; James Woods is Cleve, a hit man who doubles as a corporate executive, and who wants Meechum to write a nonfiction best-seller exposing his ruthless and respectable former boss — a philanthropist tycoon who has stealthily slaughtered his way to the top. Dennehy’s square and skeptical cop is an adroit reading of a dull part, but he makes a wonderful straight man for Woods’s fascinatingly creepy yet sensitive killer — modeled in part on Robert Walker’s Bruno Anthony in Strangers on a Train, with a comparable homoerotic tension between the two men. Tautly and cleverly scripted by Larry Cohen, crisply shot by Fred Murphy, and directed by John Flynn without a loose screw in sight, this is first-class action storytelling stripped to its essentials: no shot is held any longer than is needed to make its narrative point, and the streamlining makes for a bumpless ride. Read more
Virtually a sequel to John Landis’s Kentucky Fried Movie, this collection of comic sketches (1987), most of them TV and grade-Z movie parodies, was written by Michael Barrie and Jim Mulholland and directed by several hands: Joe Dante, Carl Gottlieb, Peter Horton, Landis, and producer Robert K. Weiss. Like most such ventures, it’s pretty hit-or-miss, with Dante and Weiss providing most of the energy; Horton is competent (in a single bit with Rosanna Arquette and Steve Guttenberg), Gottlieb routine, and Landis is OK with sight gags but somewhat adrift in satire. Overall, too many of the ideas –e ven some of the better ones — are paranoid derivations from either Sherlock Jr. (by way of Woody Allen) or Paul Bartel’s The Secret Cinema, and too many of the objects satirized are easy targets. The strongest aftertaste is left by Dante’s bad-taste rendition of movie critics reviewing a failed life, a sequence that eventually turns into a celebrity roast for the dead person, attended by Slappy White, Jackie Vernon, Henny Youngman, Charlie Callas, and Steve Allentoo sinister for comfortable laughs, but queasy in the best Dante manner. (Other stars in cameos include Ralph Bellamy, B.B. King, Griffin Dunne, and Michelle Pfeiffer.) Read more
The title of Alain Tanner’s melancholy 1985 film refers to the rural zone between Swiss and French customs, where a group of small-time smugglers eke out a precarious, in-between existence. Films about border tensions (Grand Illusion, Touch of Evil, Luc Moullet’s unjustly neglected Les contrebandieres) tend to treat their locations metaphorically, and this one is no exception, although it’s equally a Losers’ Club movie in the manner of The Asphalt Jungle about a band of assorted malcontents who dream of escape to a better life. Decorously framed and shot, with lingering landscape shots, stately camera movements, and a wonderful Terry Riley score, this movie glides along with a kind of graceful inertia that eventually defeats its spectators as well as its characters by gradually leading both to the same inconclusive impasse. With Hughes Quester, Myriam Mazieres, and Jean-Philippe Ecossey. (Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday and Saturday, August 28 and 29, 7:00 and 9:00; Sunday, August 30, 5:30 and 7:30; and Monday through Thursday, August 31 through September 3, 7:00 and 9:00; 281-4114) Read more
Coinciding with the Film Center’s Jim McBride retrospective (whose most provocative program, on Thursday, August 20, combined the flaky sex comedy Hot Times and a brilliant Twilight Zone episode about Elvis, The Once and Future King) is the release of McBride’s least personal and most commercial movie to date. Rewriting a hackneyed crooked-cop story by Beverly Hill Cop’s Daniel Petrie Jr., he gets tense, sexy performances from Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin and makes the most of his New Orleans locations. But as in some Cajun cooking, it’s the spices rather than the meat that imparts the essential McBride flavor: offbeat secondary casting (the late, great Charles Ludlam’s eye-rolling defense attorney) and a use of props ranging from the surreal (Mardi Gras floats in a warehouse) to the homey (Quaid’s squeaking gator doll). (Old Orchard, River Oaks, Water Tower) Read more
The problem with most jazz documentaries is combining talk with music without allowing either to ride roughshod over the other. Peter Bull’s recent feature about Thelonious Monk disciple and soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy is a stirring object lesson in how to do this without compromising either the performances of Lacy’s inventive sextet or the interest in what Lacy has to say about his career. The mesh isn’t quite so fine in Ken Levis’s short about another postbebop saxophonist. Jackie McLean has some acute things to say about politics, racism, and the music business, but it’s a drag to hear them interrupting his solos; only in an outtake from Shirley Clarke’s The Connection is he allowed to stretch a little. (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Sunday, August 23, 6:00 and 8:00, 443-3737) Read more
Not for every taste, Donna Rosebud suggests at times a throwback to 60s Underground whimsy. But local independent J.P. Somersaulter, who shot this in high-contrast black and white over five years, has some rather novel fantasy notions up his sleeve. His eponymous heroine–mayor, musician, doctor, philosopher, and mother of seven, among other accomplishments–dreams about the real world while inhabiting a telepathic alternate universe where sync sound is unnecessary. Like other animators who’ve turned to live action Frank Tashlin, Walerian Borowczyk, David Lynch–Somersaulter has some pretty elastic notions about reality, and you might want to try bending along with him. (Music Box, Friday, August 14) Read more
A mild, romantic comedy-thriller, set in Austin, Texas, in 1954. If only the actors — Kim Basinger, Jeff Bridges, Rip Torn, and Gwen Verdon — had more to sink their teeth into, they could have had a field day; but writer-director Robert Benton gives them so little nourishment or stimulus that even a pro like Bridges seems somewhat bemused by the lack of material, while Rip Torn looks so bored with his own cardboard villain that he might as well be phoning in the part. Neither the setting nor the period is made distinctive, and apart from a few minor Hitchcockian jolts, the overall strategy seems to be banking everything on the behavioral cuteness of the two leads, who do the best they can with their condescendingly sketched-in southern working-class characters. Not even cinematography by Nestor Almendros can juice up the proceedings; the movie chugs along, but barely. Although Benton went to school in nearby Austin in the 50s, he seems to remember the movies he saw there better than the region, which is scaled down to sitcom proportions. (JR)
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Masochistic, sub-Le Carre stuff about the dirtiness of spying, adapted by Julian Bond from a novel by John Hale. The performances are solid and subtle, with Michael Caine especially effective, but more valuable are the film’s insights into 80s English conservatism. With foreign news coverage in this country dwindling, even this stodgy 1986 thriller can tell us something about how the English middle class thinks. Simon Langton directed; with James Fox, Nigel Havers, Felicity Dean, and John Gielgud. (JR) Read more
While lack of feeling is ascribed more often to Stanley Kubrick, Brian De Palma qualifies more as a detached formalist. Here the relative absence of directorial emotion works hand in glove with the slickness and cynicism (as well as craft) of this big-scale 1987 adaptation by David Mamet of the 60s TV series, shellacked with a grandiloquent Ennio Morricone score. The results are watchable enough, with a particularly adept use of Sean Connery, Chicago locations, and period details. But De Palma’s vulgar habit of copying and thereby reducing sequences from better directors is even more offensive when he turns to Eisenstein instead of the usual Hitchcock; his Odessa Steps hommage to Potemkin is the worst kind of kitschy student exercise. There’s much more of Kevin Costner (as Eliot Ness) here than there is of Robert De Niro (as Al Capone), though Costner is quite effective in setting the Reaganite law-and-order tone. Still, it’s a pity to have Charles Martin Smith eliminated so early in the proceedings. 119 min. (JR) Read more
Mamie Van Doren stars with (get this) Mel Torme, Paul Anka, Ray Anthony, Gigi Perreau, Gloria Talbott, Jim Mitchum, Sheilah Graham, the Platters, and Harold Lloyd Jr., playing a bad girl who gets sent to reform school, where Maggie Hayes sets her straight. Charles Haas directed this 1959 film (also known as The Innocent and the Damned), and it’s every bit as junky and tawdry as one might hope. 92 min. (JR) Read more
Passionately lusting after her missing brother, the eponymous heroine (Tiziana Jelmini), a lonely provincial pharmacist, turns herself into a seductress at night, and, to deal with her frustration and amuse herself, perfects a poisioning technique which allows her to polish off an inordinate number of hapless men. Made in 16-millimeter as a graduation thesis at the Berlin Film Academy by Tania Sticklin and Cyrille Rey-Coquais, this somewhat stylish and dutifully perverse black comedy, a Swiss/West German coproduction, is fairly watchable, but really nothing specialthe sort of nihilistic exercice de style that invariably turns up as festival fodder because of its relative familiarity. You might have a little fun with it, but you can just as easily live without it. (JR) Read more
An independent feature from Florida, adapted from a story by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Victor Nunez’s film moves slowly, but with such a precise sense of period (prohibition) and place (the backwoods of central Florida) that it acquires a solid, sensual mass as it develops, aided and abetted by Nunez’s pleasurable camera work. A well-to-do widow (Dana Preu) marries and gets exploited by a slick, younger moonshiner (David Peck) who eventually brings home a teenage mistress (J. Smith, the title waif) until poetic comeuppance finally gets delivered. Preu and a wonderful ginger cat, both inspired nonprofessionals, jointly walk away with the movie (1979). (JR) Read more
