A group of seven scuzzy Vietnam vets, including Dennis Hopper and Michael J. Pollard, have taken over an old B-29 bomber, dubbed it Uncle Slam, and jammed the nation’s airwaves with their own anarchic brand of dissidence, S and M TV. The principal target of their irreverence is Willa Westinghouse (Nigel Pegram), a right-wing female impersonator running for president as a womanfooling the entire American public with his impersonation, but not the viewer of this inept and offensively misogynistic movie, who should be able to spot the disguise in about four seconds. With a pigheaded script (by Scott Roberts) and direction (Maurice Phillipswho gets everyone in sight to overact), this 1986 throwaway production, originally known as The American Waya would-be SF satire that is so inattentive to the American yahoo subjects it tries to tackle, such as TV evangelists and Pentagon pontificators, that it inadvertently builds up sympathy for themmight be taken as camp if you’re stoned enough not to see or hear more than a fraction of what’s in front of you. I found it torture from beginning to end. (JR) Read more
Like Esther Williams in the 50s, Arnold Schwarzenegger seems fairly auteur-proof as a star, automatically trampling underfoot any director with a personal style and/or visionin this case, Walter Hill. But thanks to a fairly good script (by Harry Kleiner, Hill, and Troy Kennedy Martin), this thriller about a Soviet cop (Schwarzenegger) sent to Chicago to apprehend a Soviet drug dealer (Ed O’Ross) is a respectable enough star vehicle. (James Belushi plays Schwarzenegger’s American partner, and Peter Boyle plays a police commissioner, but the show really belongs to the Soviet hero and villain; Belushi is more or less assigned the Gabby Hayes part.) Lurking in the background is a cross-cultural comparison of Soviet and American attitudes that, for once, seems to give the Soviet characters the edge. (JR) Read more
The 1,400-acre military compound located at the base of Golden Gate Bridge is the partial setting for this mystery thriller, in which the army and the San Francisco police join forces to investigate a murder. Sean Connery is the military detective, and Mark Harmon plays his police partner; the strained relationship between the two is exacerbated when Harmon starts an affair with Connery’s daughter (Meg Ryan). At first, this promises to be a somewhat-better-than-average formula thriller; but the director, alas, is Peter Hyams (Outland, 2010)better equipped as a cinematographer here than as a tight storytelling craftsmanand Larry Ferguson’s script rarely moves beyond the shopworn. It’s a pity that an actor as talented and as likable as Connery seems routinely called upon to perform those mechanical mugging gymnastics that are widely applauded as Oscar performances; Jack Warden is enlisted here to pluck a few extra heartstrings. The San Francisco locations are serviceable. (JR) Read more
A singular virtue of the French cinema compared to our own is the use of well-known actors in low-budget, offbeat projects. Michel Deville’s very theatrical adaptation and direction of a whodunit novel by Franz-Rudolf Falk isn’t especially compelling as storytelling, but it allows one to see eight of the best movie actors in FranceFanny Ardant, Daniel Auteuil, Richard Bohringer, Philippe Leotard, Jeanne Moreau, Michel Piccoli, Claude Pieplu, and Jean Yanneacquitting themselves honorably; Ardant and Piccoli are particularly delightful. Better yet, it permits the neglected and prolific Deville to forge an interesting stylistic exercise in mise en scene, restricting most of the action to a cavernous bar resembling a warehouse. The dialogue bristles with breezy wordplay that is not easily translated (the title means the nonentity, and refers to Piccoli’s ambiguous role as bartender), but Deville’s ingenious use of ‘Scope framing in charting out the space keeps things lively, fluid, and unpredictable (1986). (JR) Read more
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
This is almost as much fun as it sounds: a Cuban feature-length animated film (by Juan Padron) that makes fun of horror and gangster movies in a bawdy and caricatural style. Among the heavies who are out to steal Professor von Dracula’s formula, which allows vampires to survive in sunlight, are the European Group of vampires from Dusseldorf and the Vampire Mafia from Chicago. Although the animation style is less than brilliant, there are enough action and high spirits here to make this lively and amusing. With a good Afro-Cuban jazz score by Rembert Egues, featuring Arturo Sandoval’s trumpet (1985). (Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday and Saturday, May 20 and 21, 7:00 and 9:00; Sunday, May 22, 5:30 and 7:30; and Monday through Thursday, May 23 through 26, 7:00 and 9:00; 281-4114) Read more
