Errol Morris’s widely admired first documentary feature (1978) is a detailed look at pet cemeteries. Morris’s use of talking-head interviews initially appears cool and conventional, but there’s a lot more to it in terms of form and attitude than initially meets the eye, and the apparent cruelty of the deadpan satire gradually gives way to something more compassionate, as well as deeper and stranger. 85 min. (JR) Read more
Hugh Leonard’s adaptation of his autobiographical play of the same title, partially based in turn on his book Home Before Night, offers a charming mix of childhood memoir and speculative wish fulfillment. An Irish playwright living in New York (Martin Sheen) returns to Ireland to attend the funeral of his father (Barnard Hughes), and then proceeds to have lengthy conversations with the old codger, with his younger self (Karl Hayden), his mother (Doreen Hepburn), and a former employer (William Hickey) all becoming a part of the discussion. As touching as most of this is, one’s tolerance for good-natured, sentimental blarney is occasionally stretchedas in some of John Ford’s depictions of Irish life, such as The Quiet Manbut the actors and director Matt Clark manage to keep most of it fluid and likable. (JR) Read more
Eddie Murphy is an African prince looking for an American bride in Queens in a comedy directed by John Landis and written by David Sheffield and Barry W. Blaustein, based on a story by Murphy. Murphy takes on a softer edge than usual this time: the plot recalls a Jeanette MacDonald operetta of the Depression, the mythical African country looks like a Beverly Hills fever dream, and, true to Murphy’s idealized black middle-class view of things, everybody gets what he wants without much fuss or sacrifice, and virtually the only poor people in evidence are white. Murphy and his pal Arsenio Hall, who plays his royal assistant, also impersonate a few other characters. With James Earl Jones, Madge Sinclair, John Amos, and Shari Headley (1988). (JR) Read more
Jay McInerney’s slender 1984 novel about yuppie despair gets treated with a lot of respect, pizzazz, and talent; it remains superficial, but in many respects the movie improves on the original. Director James Bridges and cinematographer Gordon Willis punch up McInerney’s script with a lot of dressy visuals, Michael J. Fox does a respectable job as the lead (a young writer who loses his wife and his job, and snorts a lot of coke), and Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen supplies the disco score. A hollow view of hollowness with a very polished surface; with Kiefer Sutherland, Swoosie Kurtz, Phoebe Cates, Frances Sternhagen, Tracy Pollan, Jason Robards, Dianne Wiest, and, in cameos, John Houseman and William Hickey. The hero works for a magazine called Gotham, which is a transparent cover for the New Yorker. (JR) Read more
Big-scale 1930 Fox western, originally shot in a 70-millimeter, wide-screen format known as the Grandeur process. Directed by Raoul Walsh, this story of a wagon train traveling from Saint Louis to Oregon has not only impressive landscape work but a very young John Wayne in his first starring role. Marguerite Churchill is the romantic interest. (JR) Read more
Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin star as two sets of identical twins who are accidentally switched at birth by a myopic nurse. One pair is raised in a well-to-do New York family, the other is brought up in the sticks, and 30 years later they all come together during a calamitous weekend at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. It would be nice to report that two times Midler plus Tomlin equals twice as much fun, but the combination of Dori Pearson and Marc Rubel’s mechanical script with Jim Abrahams’s routine direction yields something akin to a standard Bob Hope farce of the 50s. The country caricatures are so crudely sketched in that they make Li’l Abner look like neorealism, and the repeated opening and closing of elevator doors to keep the twins apart eventually gets tiresome. A few laughs here, but most of them are forced. (JR) Read more
Yet another comedy about a boy occupying a man’s body, this one produced by James L. Brooks and Robert Greenhut, written by Anne Spielberg (sister of Steven) and Gary Ross, and directed by Penny Marshall (1988). A teenager attends a carnival, makes a wish about growing up to a fortune-telling machine, and promptly turns into Tom Hanks. While this is marginally better and more serious than most of the other movies in the cycle, the psychological ramifications of the change still aren’t very convincing. The hero in this case becomes an ace executive at a toy company and wins the heart of Elizabeth Perkins (acquitting herself rather well here), but ultimately decides to become a Norman Rockwell teenager again. Once again, the overall premise is milked for some mild titillation involving the hero’s sexual innocence, making one wonder if the genre’s popularity might involve some deeply sublimated form of kiddie pornarguably the distilled ideological essence of squeaky-clean Reaganism. In keeping with the overall Spielbergian metaphysics, even skid row has a scrubbed look here; but as far as the movie’s message is consideredif only grown-ups could be more like kidsJerry Lewis did an infinitely better job of plugging it in the 50s. Read more
In the belated sequel to Steve Gordon’s yuppie fairy tale of 1981, the love of alcoholic multimillionaire Arthur (Dudley Moore) for his working-class wife (Liza Minnelli) is put to the test when the father of his former fiancee assumes corporate control of his family’s holdings, forcing the obnoxious playboy into a state of poverty until he agrees to divorce his wife and marry the jilted Susan (Cynthia Sikes). Whatever limited possibilities there might have been in the second-degree Capra-corn of Andy Breckman’s script (which traffics in such matters as Arthur and his wife’s hopes to adopt a baby and a cameo visit from the ghost of John Gielgud’s Hobson) are immediately killed by the sluggish and convictionless direction of old-time hack Bud Yorkin; there’s nary a laugh in sight. With Geraldine Fitzgerald. (JR) Read more
The idea must have seemed like a natural to producer Don Boyd: invite ten filmmakers to select an operatic aria and make a short film interpreting the music independent of the opera’s original story line. The results are decidedly mixed, but the best segments are worth waiting for. To take them in ascending order of preference: Bill Bryden provides an uninteresting wraparound using Leoncavallo that links the various segments; Nicolas Roeg’s use of Verdi in depicting a plot to assassinate King Zog of Albania in Vienna in 1931 (with Theresa Russell as Zog) is disappointingly pointless, and Bruce Beresford’s matching of a love duet and Korngold seems equally thin. Robert Altman’s view of the audience at the opening night of Paris’s Ranelagh Theater in 1734 (where a Rameau opera was premiering) is ambitious but sluggish, and Franc Roddam’s version of a young couple’s suicide pact in Las Vegas to the strains of Wagner is thoughtful but corny. More experimental sections by Charles Sturridge (lyrical black-and-white shots of children playing hooky, used with Verdi) and Derek Jarman (an elderly opera singer on stage in 35-millimeter recalls her romantic childhood in Super-8, all to a Charpentier aria) are arresting but rather unsatisfying. Ken Russell’s surreal depiction of a car-crash victim’s fantasies of her wounds becoming jewels in a lush ritual done to Puccini seems to benefit from Russell’s previous experience in matching music to action. Read more
Kon Ichikawa’s odd and magisterial docudrama of 1963 (also known as My Enemy, the Sea), beautifully filmed in ‘Scope and color, follows the true adventures of a young Japanese who sailed a 19-foot yacht from Osaka to San Francisco over 94 days in 1962. Alternating between scenes of this journey and flashbacks showing the hero’s various preparations and his overall estrangement from his family, Ichikawa makes this story a fascinating study of obsession, often comic, and a striking portrait of a solitary consciousness, full of Ichikawa’s graphic and compositional brilliance. 97 min. (JR) Read more