Jose Alvaro Morais’s first feature, O bobo, winner of first prize at the Locarno film festival, is set during the onset of the right-wing backlash against the Portuguese revolution in 1978. A group of friends are staging a play adapted from Alexandre Herculano’s novel The Jester–a mythic romance built around scenes from Portuguese history–in the abandoned film studio Lisboa Filmes. The film alternates between scenes from the play and the intrigues among the friends who are putting it on–including the murder of the instigator of the project, whose body is discovered in the studio during the rehearsal of the final scene. Six years in the making, the film presupposes a certain knowledge of Portuguese culture and recent history that I don’t have; but though I occasionally found myself at sea in following all the significations, the beauty of the mise en scene and Mario de Carvalho’s photography, and the grace with which Morais negotiates between different time frames and modes of narration kept me entranced. Combining the meditative offscreen dialogue of a film like India Song with the use of a historical play to investigate national identity (as in Raul Ruiz’s Life Is a Dream), The Jester offers a complex, multilayered view of revolutionary retrenchment that is worthy of standing alongside some of the best films of Manoel de Oliveira. Read more
Derek Jarman’s kaleidoscopic experimental film–a dark, poetic meditation on Thatcher England–is visionary cinema at its best. A work that manages to combine more than a half century of home movies of Jarman’s family, a documentary record of industrial and ecological ruin, and sustained looks at Jarman regulars Tilda Swinton and Spencer Leigh, the film was shot in Super-8, transferred to video for additional touches and processing, and then transferred to 35-millimeter. The results are often astonishing and spellbinding. Over an evocative narration by Jarman (which includes apocalyptic quotes from such poets as T.S. Eliot and Allen Ginsberg) and stirring uses of music and sound effects, images in black and white, sepia, and color explode and merge with mesmerizing intensity and build toward a powerful personal statement (1987). (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Saturday and Sunday, July 15 and 16, 6:00, 443-3737) Read more
Directed by Jack Arnold and scripted by Ray Bradbury (though his hand isn’t readily apparent), this scary black-and-white SF effort from 1953 was shot in 3-D, and on occasion it’s shown that way. Richard Carlson and Barbara Rush star, and there’s a chilling cameo by an oversize extraterrestrial eye. 81 min. (JR) Read more
George Roy Hill’s very professional, very entertaining 1972 adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s time-traveling novel, with the pseudoprofundities nicely tucked into place as peppy one-liners and narrative tricks. With Michael Sacks and Valerie Perrine. R, 104 min. (JR) Read more
Two male servants (Robert Beltran and Ray Sharkey) at adjoining Beverly Hills households make a bet to see who can seduce the other’s female employer first; the ladies involved are Jacqueline Bisset and Mary Woronov, and friends and relatives in the two households include Wallace Shawn, Ed Begley Jr., Arnetia Walker, and directors Paul Bartel and Paul Mazursky (the latter as a ghost). Despite a partially amusing script by Bruce Wagner (from a story by Bartel and Wagner) and some nice moments from the cast (particularly Bisset and Walker), this campy, irreverent 1989 farce is essentially defeated by Bartel’s awkward and unnuanced direction, which manages to crush most of the gags underfoot before they can blossom. On the other hand, viewers who weren’t troubled by this problem in Eating Raoul may be amused. R, 102 min. (JR) Read more
Viva, Taylor Mead, Alan Midgette, Ingrid Superstar, and other Warhol regulars talk a lot as they circulate in G-strings, as either waiters or customers, in a New York restaurant. This 1967 feature is one of the more enjoyable of Warhol’s voyeuristic gabfests, punctuated, or fractured, by strobe cuts in which the camera is shut off for reasons that are sometimes arbitrary. 100 min. (JR) Read more
A trio of short films, all set in New York, by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Woody Allen, who launched this 1989 feature. Whether it happened by chance or design, the sketches have more than just New York in common: all three have something to do with middle age, as well as with romantic relationships. Scorsese’s sectionrelatively weak in plot, but very strong in style and characterstars Nick Nolte and Rosanna Arquette, both at their best, as a painter and his disaffected mistress and apprentice; Richard Price wrote the script. Coppola’s epsiode, scripted by Coppola and daughter Sofia (then 17), stars Heather McComb as the precocious daughter of a well-to-do flute player (Giancarlo Giannini) who tries to reunite him with her mother (Talia Shire). The most experimental of the three segments but also the most arch, the film contrives, though set in the present, to give us a fairy-tale Manhattan out of the 40s and the world of Noel Coward populated mainly by children. Allen’s episode, which he wrote and stars in, is a welcome throwback to the purely comic, pre-art-house Woody, following the psychoanalytical history of a lawyer (Allen) menaced by his aggressive mother (Mae Questel); Mia Farrow and Julie Kavner also star. Read more
Art Carney stars as Harry, a septuagenarian sitcom version of Lear who sets out on a cross-country journey with his aging cat Tonto, in this sentimental and reflective comedy of Paul Mazursky. Carney won an Oscar for his work here, and the secondary castincluding Ellen Burstyn, Larry Hagman, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Josh Mostel, and Arthur Hunnicuttis unusually fine, but you may find much of this, despite the apparent sincerity, too cutesy and self-satisfied for its own good (1974). (JR) Read more
Writer-director Istvan Szabo and actor Klaus-Maria Brandauer, who previously joined forces on Mephisto and Colonel Redl, reunite in a muddled allegory about an Austrian sergeant in World War I who becomes a magically endowed clairvoyant and hypnotist in Austria and Germany during the rise of Nazism. As in Mephisto, Szabo’s handling of period detail is often sloppy (some scat singing heard at a decadent party is a good two decades ahead of its time) or silly (there’s a rather unconvincing character based on Leni Riefenstahl named Henni Stahl), and the dubbing of some of the secondary roles is clumsy. But Brandauer’s command as a performer and the movie’s incidental glimpses of European high life in the late teens and 20swhich apparently had something to do with this film getting an Oscar nominationmake it intermittently watchable. Erland Josephson, Walter Schmidinger, and Grazyna Szapolowska also star; it was cowritten by Peter Dobai. (JR) Read more
Music video parodist Weird Al Yankovic stars in this satirical 1989 farce about a bumpkin who takes over a run-down TV station; after he enlists a retarded janitor (Michael Richards) to take over the kiddie show, the station’s ratings soar, but the owner of a competing station (Kevin McCarthy) tries to put him out of business. Gamely running through parodies of TV commercials and shows, not to mention Spielberg, Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Selznick, and Gandhi, this is awful by any standardfeeble, corny, and labored in script as well as directionalthough the Capracorn of the basic premise occasionally manages to convey a certain sweetness. Jay Levey directed; with Victoria Jackson, David Bowe, and Stanley Brock. PG-13, 97 min. (JR) Read more
Marlon Brando stars in one of his more likable (if minor) mid-career performances as an American ambassador to a mythical Asian country called Sarkhan, which resembles Thailand, in a very loose adaptation by Stewart Stern of William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s novel. An earnest if muted and halfhearted attempt to say something about U.S. foreign policy in Asia, directed only adequately by George Englund. Kukrit Pramoj, who plays the premier of Sarkhan and served as the film’s technical consultant, later went on to become Thailand’s real-life premier. With Eiji Okada, Pat Hingle, Sandra Church, and Jocelyn Brando (1963). (JR) Read more
Tom Hanks is a compulsively fastidious detective who winds up with a large, ugly, drooling, and destructive dog that happens to be the only eyewitness to a murder. Needless to say, it proves to be a match made in heaven, and dog slobber enthusiasts (as well as fans of dog farts) will have a field day. Everyone else will have to settle for a formulaic cop comedy that has Hanks but little else. Roger Spottiswoode directed from a screenplay by many hands (Dennis Shryack, Michael Blodgett, Daniel Petrie Jr., Jim Cash, and Jack Epps Jr.), and Mare Winningham and Craig T. Nelson costar. (JR) Read more
Marleen Gorris’s controversial Dutch radical-feminist film from 1981 describes what happens when three otherwise unconnected women spontaneously conspire to murder the male owner of a boutique. The overall polemical thrust of this story may be as didactic as an Ayn Rand narrative, but it contains a number of provocative ideas and challenging insights, and Gorris’s handling of the material is compelling and assured. In Dutch with subtitles. 92 min. (JR) Read more
This first feature (1988, 96 min.) by Anne-Marie MievilleGodard’s major collaborator since the mid-70s, whose short The Book of Mary played in tandem theatrically with his Hail Maryconcerns three generations of women and their relations with men as well as each other. Loosely plotted but highly structured it’s in some respects a reply to Godard’s First Name: Carmen (there’s one direct allusion in the dialogue), and the carefully constructed sound trackparticularly in a striking sequence devoted to a voice lessonevokes some of the formal concerns of Godard’s work as well. But on the whole, it’s a disappointment; there’s hardly more substance here than in the much shorter The Book of Mary. One is also reminded once again that certain sectors of French feminism are still at a fairly rudimentary stage of development: the usual sexism of Godard’s work (to take one example) deserves more of a response and an alternative than is proposed here. In French with subtitles. (JR) Read more
Akira Kurosawa’s slimmest feature, running only an hour, is also one of the best of his early period. Made in 1945 but not released until 1953, it’s about a celebrated Japanese general fleeing another general who happens to be his brother. Based on Kanjincho, a Kabuki drama that’s said to be as well-known in the East as Robin Hood is in the West, this film is pitched as a parody of Kabuki, meant to undermine the feudal values of the original. (JR) Read more
