After a long and successful career in day care, Ruby L. Oliver made this, her first feature, originally known as Leola, in her late 40s (1989). It’s a remarkable debut: assured, tightly focused, surprisingly upbeat considering the number of problems it addresses without flinchingand the best low-budget Chicago independent feature I’ve seen. Set in contemporary Chicago, it concerns a 17-year-old girl from the ghetto whose plans for the future are jeopardized when she becomes pregnant. Her brothers are gradually drifting into a life of crime, her mother is having difficulty maintaining a day-care center without a license, and her stepfather is an alcoholic and philanderer. The plot line is concentrated and purposeful, and the castincluding Carol E. Hall, Audrey Morgan (particularly impressive as the mother), Earnest Rayford, Andre Robinson, and Kearo Johnsonis uniformly fine. In addition to writing, directing, producing, and financing the film, Oliver is credited with the casting, served as set decorator and location manager, and sang as well as wrote the lyrics to the film’s theme song. (JR) Read more
Andy Warhol’s last feature as a director (1967) is one of his campiest, but not one of his best; it features Taylor Mead, Viva, and Joe Dallesandro in a western setting (the film was actually shot in Arizona), and the superstars lend it whatever life it has. (JR) Read more
James Bond (Timothy Dalton) goes after a mean drug dealer (Robert Davi) south of the borderthis time on a personal vendetta, which means that he isn’t working for the English government, although the usual attributes of the Bond cycle are otherwise preserved. Carey Lowell (more plucky and interesting than the usual Bond bimbos) and Talisa Soto form part of the Bondish decor, Michael G. Wilson and Richard Maibaum wrote the script, and John Glen directed. Despite some shaky narrative continuity and muddled motivations, this manages to move pretty briskly, and the action sequences are generally well handled, especially at the climax. (JR) Read more
During roughly the last year of jazz trumpeter and singer Chet Baker’s life, fashion and art photographer Bruce Weber (Broken Noses), a passionate fan, followed Baker and his entourage with a film crew, interviewed some of his former wives and lovers, and came up with a two-hour black-and-white documentary (1989) that’s much more attentive to Baker as an emblem and iconfrom a pretty boy of the early 50s to a wasted junkie in the 80sthan to his music, which is almost never heard except as dreamy background. A gripping and affecting film with a striking noirish look (well photographed by Jeff Preiss), but also a rather dumb one that’s both enhanced and limited by Weber’s pie-eyed adoration of his subject. 119 min. (JR) Read more
Possibly the movie most responsible for Ronald Reagan’s success in politics. (He loses a leg and winds up in a wheelchair in this one, declaring Where’s the rest of me?; according to polls at the time of his first gubernatorial election, some Californians voted for him out of pity for this handicap.) Set in a midwestern town prior to World War I, this adaptation by Casey Robinson of Henry Bellamann’s best-selling novel describes the crisscrossing destinies of several localsincluding Ann Sheridan, Robert Cummings, Betty Field, Charles Coburn, Judith Anderson, and Claude Rains; Sam Wood directed (1942). (JR) Read more
A very dark and perverse Spanish feature by first-time director Agustin Villaronga, set during the Franco era. Disturbing and suspenseful, it centers around the sadomasochistic relationship that develops between a former Nazi doctor (Gunter Meisner) who’s in an iron lung and a curious young man named Angelo (David Sust) who becomes his nurse and gradually takes over his household, including his wife and daughter. (JR) Read more
The third film version of the Raymond Chandler novel (after Murder My Sweet and The Falcon Takes Over), directed by Dick Richards, and starring Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe. This 1975 feature is no sort of miracle, although the overall ambience and the supporting cast (Charlotte Rampling, Harry Dean Stanton, John Ireland, Sylvia Miles) have their moments. 98 min. (JR) Read more
Newcomer Temistocles Lopez’s low-budget independent feature has been described as a comical musical thriller, but unfortunately the comedy isn’t very funny, the thriller isn’t very thrilling, and the musical numbers, along with the dialogue, are sabotaged by poor sound recording. A trombone player from Oklahoma (Gary Knox, who also furnished the score) goes to New York, is discovered by a gay casting agent (Frank Roccio), and winds up singing in a cabaret and getting involved in an international spy ring. The first third of the movie is a cut-rate Midnight Cowboy, the second third is a cut-rate Cabaret, and the remainder is so muddled that only the Day-Glo lighting and colors in Stephen McNutt’s cinematography offer a modicum of relief. (JR) Read more
Teeming with visual invention and energy and very much a film of 1968, this Ukrainian film by Yuri Illyenko, the cinematographer on Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, was banned by the Soviet government for almost two decades, apparently because of the satirical treatment of Soviet condescension toward the Ukraine in a sequence near the end. Freely adapted from Gogol’s first short story, the film benefits from a punchy, staccato score by L. Grabovsky. The relation of its style to Chagall that many critics have suggested is apt, for better and for worsethe giddy lightweightness is more than just a matter of characters floating through the air. Although the narrative doesn’t quite get lost in the virtuosity, this is more a work of ornamentation than of storytelling, rendered in lively ‘Scope images. (JR) Read more
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1987 Taiwanese feature is less powerful than the preceding A Time to Live and a Time to Die but much better than his subsequent Daughter of the Nile. It follows two young lovers who move to the city (Taipei) to find work because they can’t afford to finish high school, and slowly but irrevocably their relationship is torn asunder. Hou’s feeling for the textures of everyday life, caught mainly in long takes and intricately framed deep-focus compositions, gives this unhurried but deeply affecting drama a deceptively subterranean impact that gradually rises to the surface. The very natural and, for the most part, underplayed performances by nonprofessionals are especially impressive. In Mandarin with subtitles. 109 min. (JR) Read more
A charming and amiable Disney live-action feature, directed by newcomer Joe Johnston, about an inventor (Rick Moranis) who devises a gizmo that accidentally shrinks his two kids and their two friends (Amy O’Neill, Robert Oliveri, Jared Rushton, and Thomas Brown) to about a quarter of an inch high. While the plot abounds in improbabilities and even a few absurdities, and the special effects are uneven, the poetics of the basic idea really pay off: a suburban backyard is transformed into an endless jungle packed with adventures (including rides on a bumblebee and a friendly baby ant, and menacing attacks from a hose and a lawn mower). Written by Ed Naha and Tom Schulman, and based on a story by Stuart Gordon, Brian Yuzna, and Naha; the setting and at least one character–the neighbor kids’ father (Matt Frewer, best known as TV’s Max Headroom)–recall Joe Dante’s The ‘Burbs. On the same program is Tummy Trouble, a Roger Rabbit and Baby Herman cartoon directed by Rob Minkoff, with a live-action coda directed by Frank Marshall; the short isn’t quite as brilliant as Somethin’s Cookin’ (which opened Who Framed Roger Rabbit), but it’s full of extravagant Tex Avery-like action and reaction; Richard Williams unfortunately didn’t supervise the animation of this short, although some of his animators worked on it. Read more
One of the boldest selections at the 1988 New York Film Festival, this experimental South Korean narrative feature, directed by Chang-ho Lee in 1987, seems closer in some ways to an Alain Resnais film than to most examples of Eastern cinema that come to mind. Interweaving several narrative strands and oscillating between the past and present, this allegorical parable is not always easy to follow in story terms, but its highly original editing, framing, and uses of color never fail to impress. (Facets Multimedia Center; 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday and Saturday, June 16 and 17, 7:00 and 9:00; Sunday, June 18, 5:30 and 7:30; and Monday through Thursday, June 19 through 22, 7:00 and 9:00; 281-4114) Read more
Written and directed by Steve DeJarnatt, this taut, apocalyptic thriller shows some improvement over DeJarnatt’s previous direction of Cherry 2000 (which was released in this country only on videotape), apart from some faulty continuity in the final reel. Most of the film concerns what happens when the young hero (Anthony Edwards) accidentally intercepts a phone call that announces an impending nuclear holocaust only 70 minutes away, and is desperate to find the woman (Mare Winningham) he has just fallen in love with. The action all unfolds in and around the stretch of Wilshire Boulevard that constitutes LA’s “miracle mile,” nearly all of it in the middle of the night, and the strongest B-film virtues here (apart from a running time of only 87 minutes) mainly have to do with a very nice feel for the particulars of this time, milieu, and place; the biggest drawback is that the film doesn’t wind up going anywhere in particular. Among the many interesting costars (including Lou Hancock, Danny de la Paz, Robert Doqui, Kelly Minter, and Denise Crosby), there’s a particularly nice cameo by John Agar as the heroine’s grandfather. (McClurg Court, Ridge, Oakbrook Center, Bricktown Square, Webster Place, Evanston) Read more
A Manhattan literary agent (Nicolas Cage) who has problems with women imagines that he’s turning into a vampire. This is the first script by Joseph Minion to be produced since After Hours, and it reflects some of the same obsession with predatory and/or defenseless females and New York perceived as an expressionist landscape; the variable but generally competent direction is by British newcomer Robert Bierman. Practically nothing happens other than the gradual deterioration of any distinction between reality and fantasy, and the theme is closer in some ways to Jekyll and Hyde (with the emphasis almost entirely on Hyde) than to Dracula or Nosferatu. What really makes this worth seeing is Cage’s outrageously unbridled performance, which recalls such extravagant actorly exercises as Jean-Louis Barrault in Jean Renoir’s The Testament of Dr. Cordelier and Jerry Lewis as Buddy Love in The Nutty Professor. Even for viewers like myself who have never been especially impressed with Cage, his over-the-top effusions of rampant, demented asociality are really something to see, and they give this quirky, somewhat out-of-control black comedy whatever form and energy it has. With Maria Conchita Alonso, Jennifer Beals, Elizabeth Ashley, and Kasi Lemmons. (McClurg Court) Read more
Clint Eastwood plays a “skip-tracer” cop with a taste for impersonations who is assigned to track down a woman (Bernadette Peters) on the lam with her eight-month-old baby. The wife of an ex-con (Timothy Carhart) who is linked to a group of white supremacists (a band of misfits and speed freaks that the movie has great fun ridiculing), she jumps bail after being arrested for passing counterfeit money; Eastwood follows her to Reno and then finds himself gradually shifting his loyalties. Buddy Van Horn (The Dead Pool) directed from a John Eskow script, but in fact this is very much an Eastwood movie, full of his cranky personality and quirky intelligence, and brimming with ideas. Not all of these ideas are successfully dramatized, and you may have trouble believing in most of the characters, but as a deeply personal work about free-floating existential identities, this has the kind of grit and feeling that few recent action comedies can muster, with Eastwood and Peters interesting and unpredictable throughout. With John Dennis Johnston and Michael Des Barres. (Ford City, Harlem-Cermak, Deerbrook, Biograph, Bolingbrook, Burnham Plaza, Chicago Ridge, Chestnut Station, Woodfield, Orland Square, Plaza. Evanston, Hyde Park, Bricktown Square, Oakbrook Center, Golf Mill) Read more
