For Creeps might make a better title. One would like to think that at least part of the original intention of the script by Saturday Night Live’s Tim Kazurinsky and former Reader staffer Denise DeClue was to deal with some of the hard facts about teenage pregnancies that other youth movies gloss over. If so, fitful snatches of that intention remain, but buried under so many layers of conventionality and cloddishness that one has to dig for them with a bulldozer. Molly Ringwald and Randall Batinkoff play the hapless romantic leads, and while the former gamely does what she can with John G. Avildsen’s direction, it’s a losing battle; others include Miriam Flynn, Conchata Ferrell, and a particularly cliched sitcom turn from Kenneth Mars. There are bad country music songs written about this, Ringwald remarks at one point. Bad movies, too. (JR) Read more
It’s a pity that producer and onetime actor (Come Blow Your Horn) Tony Bill doesn’t have a better sense of history in his direction of this nostalgic piece of exploitation (1988) about a lower-middle-class Bronx neighborhood in 1964, although screenwriter John Patrick Shanleywhose script for Moonstruck exhibits a related sense of New York cozinessis also partially responsible. An Irish working-class kid, the son of a recently deceased cop, believes in the nonviolent principles of Martin Luther King until some disillusioning brushes with the black world and some violent skirmishes with an old pal just out of prison show him the error of his ways. For all I know, some of the local and period details about the Bronx may be deadly accurate, but the exploitative cynicism of the plot and the complacencies about race relations smack more of contemporary mythology, particularly as it’s strained through TV sitcom misreadings of the 60s and more bad thrillers than you can shake a stick at. Cinematographer Fred Murphy does his usual fine work, and some of the cute domestic details make this intermittently watchable, but the ideological platitudes are repulsive and false, and the plot manipulations for the sake of effectsculminating in an all-stops-out violent finaleare no less tacky. Read more
Stylistically distinctive (with a rhythmically inventive use of jump cuts), impressively acted (by Jean-Francois Stevenin, Yves Afonso, and Carole Bouquet), and simultaneously unpredictable and rather bewildering as narrative, Jean-Francois Stevenin’s second feature, made in 1986, looks like nothing else in contemporary French cinema. Stevenin, who is mainly known as a rather ubiquitous actor, plays a character who accidentally runs into a boyhood chum (Afonso); together they decide to pay a surprise visit to another mutual childhood friend who now lives outside Grenoblea mysterious figure who never makes an appearanceand the film basically charts their long wait together, largely in the company of the missing friend’s wife (Bouquet). Arresting visually as well as aurally (it’s filmed in direct sound), Double Messieurs manages to make all of its characters and their behavior sad as well as mysterious; a sense of broken dreams and an irretrievable past lurks behind the fitful, random actions and picturesque settings. Crew members are utilized in the cast, and Stevenin’s bizarre notations on the buddy movie stay firmly lodged in one’s memory. (JR) Read more
Yojiro Takita’s 1986 satire about the snooping excesses of a scandal-hungry reporter has loads of energy, though some spectators may find this sensationalist look at sensationalism guilty of some of the attitudes it ridicules. With Yumi Asou, Yuya Uchida, and Seiko Matsuda. (JR) Read more
The fact that lower Manhattan’s Chinatown and Little Italy are adjacent to one another provides the basis for this 1987 exploitation bloodbath directed by Abel Ferrara (Bad Lieutenant), which has racial gang fights and old-boy networks to spare. Bojan Bazelli’s location photography is luminous and exciting, and the battle lines charted in Nicholas St. John’s script are fairly complex, but the characterizations in this Romeo and Juliet tale of an Italian-American (Richard Panebianco) and a Chinese-American (Sari Chang) caught in the cross fire are so minimal that it’s hard to get very involved in the proceedings. (The fact that St. John occasionally filches dialogue from West Side Story doesn’t help much either.) James Russo, David Caruso, Russell Wong, Joey Chin, and the Living Theatre’s Judith Malina also figure in the cast. (JR) Read more
This first feature by Polish stage director Yurek Bogayevicz stars Sally Kirkland and Paulina Porizkova, who play an emigre movie star down on her luck in New York and the idolizing refugee she takes in. The screenplay is by Andrzej Wajda associate Agnieszka Holland, from a story by her and Bogayevicz. A curious blend of the plot of All About Evewith an emphasis on the humiliations of acting and middle age that is appreciably more blunt than the originaland an account of the political and cultural alienation of Czech emigres, the film lives mainly through its performances: Kirkland is especially powerful as the eponymous lead, offering conceivably the most remarkable impersonation of an eastern European by an American on record. Although the film climaxes in some rather forced melodrama, the eastern European perspective on the New York theater world has much of the satirical sharpness that only an outsider’s viewpoint can bring to it. With Robert Fields, Ruth Maleczech, and Stefan Schnabel. (JR) Read more
