This very agreeable and funny low-budget documentary by Tony Buba, set in a steel-mill town just outside Pittsburgh, documents the decline of the area as the mills shut down and his own 15-year activity as a local independent filmmaker. Concerned with union organizing, his temperamental and eccentric star Sweet Sal Carullo, his dwindling finances, and his own soul, Buba has a lot of interesting things to say and show, and this witty and intelligent portrait of him and his community has charm to spare (1989). (JR) Read more
Robert De Niro, Ed Harris, and Kathy Baker star in a feature about two Vietnam veterans struggling to overcome their traumatic war experiences in the presentone (Harris) an all but broken man living with his schoolteacher sister (Baker), the other (De Niro) on the mend and gradually becoming involved with the schoolteacher. The film treats this theme sincerely, but unfortunately the script (by Stephen Metcalfe, based on his play Strange Snow) and direction (by David Jones) seem at times even more stunted than the heroes. If De Niro and Harris’s characters suffer from being partially stuck in the 60s, the movie often reaches all the way back to the cliches of the 40s and 50s to try to understand them, telegraphing most of its subtle touches with a heavy hand, including soupy, nudging music by Bruce Broughton. Still, the three leads are so good that it’s possible to overlook the material that they have to work with; Baker is especially touching and effective. (JR) Read more
I haven’t seen this 185-minute British experimental epic (1980) by Peter Greenaway (The Draughtsman’s Contract, Drowning by Numbers), but Greenaway specialists call it one of his finest works. Set in the future, after a violent unknown event claims millions of victims, it uses 92 case histories to investigate the disaster. In the alternate universe explored, the sexes have multiplied to four, there are 92 new languages, and people are haphazardly turning into birds. Michael Nyman and Brian Eno furnished the music. (JR) Read more
Kazuo Hara’s bizarre 16-millimeter documentary — a project originally conceived by Shohei Imamura — follows Kenzo Okuzaki, a survivor of the World War II battlefields in New Guinea with a bee in his bonnet about the deaths of over a thousand Japanese soldiers there, as well as the execution of several soldiers in his unit. Ultimately blaming Emperor Hirohito for these disasters, Okuzaki was arrested in 1969 for using a slingshot to fire several balls at the emperor. During the early 80s, when this film was shot, he visited various soldiers who had survived the New Guinea disaster, trying to get to the bottom of things, and on two occasions resorted to on-camera violence. Okuzaki initiated the making of this 1987 film, and while it bears a certain resemblance to some of Werner Herzog’s documentaries (as well as Marcel Ophuls’s), the results are more provocative than illuminating. In Japanese with subtitles. 122 min. (JR) Read more
Juan Valdivia’s half-hour, Chicago-made experimental narrative short Drowning (1989) is certainly ambitious. It has two quotes from J.G. Ballard, interspersed lines of poetry by Stevie Smith, a striking and effective score by George Daugherty, and a difficult allegorical plot about a real estate man who commissions an artist to record his own suicide by drowning. The metaphysical trappings and structure, which involve intercutting between two different deaths by asphyxiation, tend to overwhelm the plot, but lead to some impressive underwater photography by Janusz Kaminski. With John R. Tobinski, Tom Blanton, Tanya White, and (in a cameo) Julia Cameron. (JR) Read more
Miami Vice’s Don Johnson, starring as the real-life LA homicide detective Jerry Beck, whose cross-country investigation of a series of murders leads him to uncover a frightening right-wing conspiracy, may be the most marketable element in this thriller directed by John Frankenheimer and written by Robert Foster, but he’s also the biggest problem. Whatever Johnson’s effectiveness as a TV performer, he’s alternately an empty hole and a dead weight on the movie screen, and apart from some nice camera work from Gerry Fisher and a couple of striking scenes, this watchable but routine thriller leaves little aftereffect; not even the conspiracy gets beyond the formulaic. Watch out for one nifty vomiting scene, however. Penelope Ann Miller, William Forsythe, Bob Balaban, and Tim Reid costar. (JR) Read more
Rod Steiger gives one of his best performances in this carefully crafted gangster biopicnicely shot in black and white by Lucien Ballard with a fine sense of period, and directed by longtime Orson Welles associate Richard Wilson. With Fay Spain, Murvyn Vye, James Gregory, Nehemiah Persoff, and Martin Balsam; Marvin Wald and Henry Greenberg collaborated on the script. (JR) Read more
Leo McCarey’s 1957 remake of his 1939 masterpiece Love Affair, coscripted with Delmer Daves and shot in color and ‘Scope, is his last great filma tearjerker with comic interludes and cosmic undertones that fully earns both its tears and its laughs, despite some kitschy notions about art and a couple of truly dreadful sequences. A playboy (Cary Grant) and a nightclub singer (Deborah Kerr) meet and fall in love on a luxury liner headed for New York; each is romantically committed to someone else, but they agree to meet at a future date if they can disentangle themselves from their commitments. Neither star ever showed quite this much delicacy before or after, and McCarey’s elliptical way of framing key emotional moments meshes perfectly with their sublime performances. 115 min. (JR) Read more
This film by one of the best Belgian directors, Andre Delvaux, adapted from a Marguerite Yourcenar novel set in the 16th century, follows a dissident doctor from Flanders who is hounded throughout Europe for his views and falls into the hands of the Inquisition. Read more
Formulaic action dross, below the norm. The fact that CIA drug dealers are the villains this time theoretically adds a certain tang to the proceedings, but in practice this slugfest of Dirty Harry tactics is very much the mixture as before. Real-life martial arts master and international security specialist Steven Seagal plays the lead, coproduced, and collaborated on the story with director Andrew Davis; Pam Grier is on hand as his loyal sidekick, Sharon Stone is his wife, and Daniel Faraldo and Henry Silva are among the villains. Filmed on location in Chicago, with the usual amount of property damage. (JR) Read more
Gregory Hines stars as Maxwell Washington, the son of a famous hoofer, who’s torn between following in his father’s footsteps and continuing a life of crime. This 1989 dance musical, written and directed by Nick Castle, isn’t everything it might have been—the numbers tend to be disappointingly short, often promising more than they deliver—but on the whole it’s a respectable revival of a sadly neglected genre (very nicely shot by David Gribble) with a lot of lively tapping (choreographed by Henry Le Tang and Hines). Among the strong secondary cast are Suzzanne Douglas, Savion Glover, Dick Anthony Williams, “Sandman” Sims, and Bunny Briggs, and there’s an especially enjoyable turn by Sammy Davis Jr. as Max Washington’s mentor Little Mo. 110 min. Read more
An honorable failure, this Vietnam war drama and action film attempts to do something that, to the best of my knowledge, no other commercial movie about the war has attempted: represent the point of view of the Viet Cong as well as that of American soldiers. Given this ambition, it’s regrettable that director and cowriter Eric Weston leans as heavily as he does on previous Vietnam films: acerbic offscreen commentary (as in Apocalypse Now), choral music over action (as in Platoon), and a division between pure good and pure evil to describe soldiers in the same platoon (American sergeants in Platoon, Viet Cong fighters here). The film also gets into some trouble by conveying all of the dialogue in English, despite the fact that the American officer who narrates the story (Beau Bridges), and who eventually comes upon the diary of his Viet Cong counterpart (Liem Whatley)–based on the actual diary of an unknown Viet Cong fighter–speaks and reads Vietnamese. But the film has unmistakable virtues as well, including a good handling of the action sequences and a beautiful use of landscape. With Haing S. Ngor (The Killing Fields), Johnny Hallyday, James Ishida, Ping Wu, and Iilana B’tiste; coscripted by John Bushelman and Larry Hilbrand. Read more
Although the title is descriptive and even self-critical, a more accurate label for this might be Blake Edwards’s Greatest Hits From Malibu. Characters, gags, and situations from 10, S.O.B., The Man Who Loved Women, and That’s Life! including a womanizing, alcoholic hero in therapy for a creative block (John Ritter), a series of comic car accidents, and a lot of old standards sung at the pianoare trotted out, and the overall sense of deja vu is intensified by the fact that, apart from a lazy ending that refuses to confront or resolve the hero’s problems, Edwards gives this comedy-drama pretty much the same degree of expertise and polish that he has its previous incarnations and variations. The movie certainly has its share of laughs, but don’t expect any sort of revelation, especially if you’ve seen one or more of its predecessors. With Vincent Gardenia, Alyson Reed (in the Julie Andrews part), Joel Brooks, Julianne Phillips, and Chelsea Field. (JR) Read more
During World War II, Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune confront each other on an otherwise uninhabited island in the Pacific. Director John Boorman (Point Blank, Deliverance, The Emerald Forest, Hope and Glory) makes very photogenic hay out of all the allegorical possibilities, with the help of cinematographer Conrad Hall and scriptwriters Alexander Jacobs and Eric Bercovici. This 1969 film is not one of Boorman’s best efforts, but fans of his other films will probably want to check it out. (JR) Read more
Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman star as bumbling go-getters in a large Manhattan insurance firm who are invited by their corrupt boss Bernie (Terry Kiser) to his place in the Hamptons; Bernie gets murdered before they arrive, and for the rest of the picture they’re carting his corpse around, trying to pretend that Bernie is still alive. Most of this silly farce depends on the use of the corpse as a comic prop (which yields a few laughs, despite Kiser’s variable success in impersonating a stiff) and the appeal of McCarthy and Silverman’s strident jabbering (which I found nil); Catherine Mary Stewart plays the putative love interest, Robert Klane wrote the script, and Ted Kotcheff directed. (JR) Read more
