Daily Archives: April 1, 1988

The Courtesans Of Bombay

This 1983 documentary by Ismail Merchant, known mainly as the producer of James Ivory’s films, describes a large, traditional Bombay community where the business of temptation by the local courtesans is being threatened by movies and television. Read more

Colors

Dennis Hopper’s fourth feature as a directorafter Easy Rider (1969), The Last Movie (1971), and Out of the Blue (1980)is the first in which he doesn’t appear as an actor. It’s also the first that doesn’t improve on its predecessor, except perhaps from a commercial standpoint. Sean Penn and Robert Duvall as a younger and older cop taking on the LA gangs is the hot subject, and all the elementsscript (Michael Schiffer), cinematography (Haskell Wexler), and score (Herbie Hancock)combine to provide a lively, authentic surface and an aggressively hip attack on the material. But narrative continuity and momentum have never been among Hopper’s strong points, and this time the choppiness of the storytelling diffuses the dramatic impact without offering a shapely mosaic effect (as in the previous films) to compensate for it. Too many thematic strandsthe contrast between Penn’s sadism and Duvall’s leniency, Penn’s courting of a Chicano waitress (Maria Conchita Alonso), the individual gang skirmishesget curtailed before they can bear much fruit, and too much of the energy gets lost or wasted in the patchwork editing. Considering how good so many of the pieces of this film areDuvall is especially fineit’s a pity they don’t add up to more (1988). Read more

Charleen

Fans of Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March (1985) will undoubtedly recall the character Charleen Swansea, the filmmaker’s friend and former teacher, and will be pleased to discover that McElwee devoted an entire feature to this memorable woman back in 1977. An unorthodox fifth-grade teacher, small publisher, and poet who at one point was a protege of Ezra Pound, Charleen is an exuberant and outspoken southern eccentric, and McElwee’s affectionate portrait (which, unlike Sherman’s March, doesn’t do double duty as a portrait of the filmmaker) gives her plenty of opportunities to show her special qualitieswhich she takes full advantage of. Much of the film focuses on her inspired methods of teaching poetry and the difficulties of her relationship with a man who’s much younger. Larger than life and bursting with energy and intelligence, Charleen makes a fascinating film subject and indirectly gives us a glimpse of certain southern virtues that most accounts of the south gloss over. (JR) Read more

Casual Sex?

This started out as a three-song skit written and performed by Wendy Goldman and Judy Toll for the Groundlings in LA, and was later expanded into a play. Producer Ivan Reitman and his wife, director Genevieve Robert, decided to turn it into a film, getting Goldman and Toll to rewrite the play in light of the impact of AIDS, and adding a question mark to the title for good measure. The setting is a swanky health resort, though the film periodically returns to the dark space of a cabaret stage and the two female leads occasionally address the camera; Lea Thompson and Victoria Jackson star, with Stephen Shellen, Jerry Levine, Mary Gross, and Andrew Dice Clay also in the cast. Definitely a lightweight movie, without any heavy ambitions, but for the most part a likable one; with script and direction by women, it’s considerably less arch and dehumanized than the usual sex comedy. (JR) Read more

Cannibal Tours

This 1987 documentary by Australian Dennis O’Rourke shows the homogenized, packaged tours being offered to Westerners who want to see the Sepik River region of New Guinea. Its tribal dwellers try or pretend to be what the tourists expect from them, though there hasn’t been a cannibal in the region since the turn of the 20th century. The result is a series of ironic commentaries. 77 min. (JR) Read more

The Blue Iguana

A sleazy bounty hunter (Dylan McDermott) is dispatched to the scuzziest hellhole in Mexico to recover a fortune in laundered contraband cash from a bunch of crooks (including James Russo and Jessica Harper); the bank holding the loot is across the street from the seedy hotel and nightclub of the title. Writer-director John Lafia, making his debut here, manages to make the pseudotoughness pretty amusing on the level of dialogue, although his characters are shopworn and his plot fairly standard. From the fancy cartoon credits to the Peter Gunn-ish score (by Ethan James), the movie tries awfully hard to be hip, and while it can’t quite muster enough style to match the aggressive hyperbole, it still manages some intermittent fun. With Pamela Gidley, Yano Anaya, Dean Stockwell, Tovah Feldshuh, Michele Seipp, and an actor known as Flea. (JR) Read more

The Battle Of The Sexes

Adapted from a James Thurber story, this slightly macabre English comedy describes the plans of an elderly Scottish accountant (Peter Sellers) to eliminate a meddling efficiency expert (Constance Cummings). Charles Crichton directed; Robert Morley and Donald Pleasence costar (1960). (JR) Read more

Bad Dreams

A nice, old-fashioned horror thriller with psychological overtonesthe sort of thing Hollywood used to be able to turn out in its sleep. Andrew Fleming’s script (cowritten by Steven E. de Souza) and direction have their occasional awkward moments, but the overall drive of the narrative helps us to overlook them. The plot involves the sole survivor of a religious cult that committed suicide years before, and a series of deaths at the mental hospital where she’s recovering that suggest that the cult’s leader may still exert power over her. Unassuming, workmanlike stuff that keeps you guessing and interested. With Jennifer Rubin, Bruce Abbott, Richard Lynch, Dean Cameron, Harris Yulin, and Susan Barnes. (JR) Read more

Backyard

As a chronicler of the contemporary south, independent filmmaker Ross McElwee has a great deal to tell us that gets factored out of most other accounts. This gives a particular interest to this rather loosely structured 1984 film (shot in 1976) that describes one of the filmmaker’s visits home to Charlotte, North Carolina. While we learn about his uneasy relationship to his conservative father and his curiosity about the family’s black servants, McElwee doesn’t offer himself as a comic focal point as he does later in Sherman’s Marchalthough he does emphasize his troubles filming his father’s activity as a surgeon to indicate his squeamishness. (JR) Read more

Anitadances Of Vice

Rosa von Praunheim’s AnitaTanze des Lasters alternates between two versions of nude dancer Anita Berber, a star of Berlin cafe society of the 20s: an elderly woman today who claims to be Berber (Lotte Huber) and is confined to a mental ward (in black and white), and her imagined version of Berber in the 20s (in color, portrayed by Ina Blum). Von Praunheim uses some striking expressionistic intertitles and on the whole does some interesting things with period evocation, but after a while his procedures become mechanical and repetitive (1987). (JR) Read more

Altered States

No, not the Paddy Chayefsky/Ken Russell film of 1980, but a selection of ten shorts on the same theme: drugs, mainly hallucinogenic, and the mind-altering experiences they impart. Chronologically, the survey will extend all the way from Tod Browning’s 1916 Mystery of the Leaping Fish (with Douglas Fairbanks as Coke Enniday) to Mark Nugent’s recent Manual Labour. The others: Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (with a La Monte Young stereo sound track), John Hawkins’s LSD Wall, Steve Arnold’s Liberation of the Mannique Mechanique, Daina Krumins’s Babobilicons, Adam Beckett’s Heavy-Light, Heather McAdams’s Black Coffee, Bob Cowan’s Rockflow, and Chick Strand’s Waterfall. The Experimental Film Coalition promises free acid at the door, which one assumes is not lysergicbut who knows? Read more