Daily Archives: March 1, 1990

Speaking Parts

Interesting yet maddening, Atom Egoyan’s third feature (1989) is a sustained meditation on the uses and meanings of video and TV in personal relationsinformed by theoretical work on the subject that links it with such matters as narcissism, voyeurism, sexual obsession, power relations, alienation, and death. The nonrealistic plot concerns a disturbed hotel chambermaid (Arsinee Khanjian) obsessed with a coworker who’s an aspiring actor (Michael McManus), a scriptwriter obsessed with her brother’s death, a worker at a video rental store who videotapes weddings, and a TV producer. The intricate relations among these figuresone hesitates to call them charactersare mediated mainly by video; even the mechanical crosscutting between them suggests switching channels. There’s a lot of food for thought here but very little drama. 93 min. (JR) Read more

Nuns On The Run

Switch the action of Some Like It Hot to contemporary London and substitute a convent for an all-women band and you have the rough scenario for this good-natured if rather silly English farceexcept for the fact that writer-director Jonathan Lynn is a far cry from Billy Wilder, and a nearsighted Camille Coduri suggests Marilyn Monroe only in patches. Eric Idle and Robbie Coltrane as two small-time hoods on the run aren’t bad, however, and the hard-sell music by Yello and Hidden Faces is fairly bouncy. With Janet Suzman, Tom Hickey, Doris Hare, and Lila Kaye. (JR) Read more

House Party

A day in the life of a black teenager (Christopher Reid) who sneaks away from home to attend a house party given by his best friend (Christopher Martin). Reid and Martin compose the rap duo Kid ‘n Play, and the movie also features Full Force (the George Brothers), A.J. Johnson, Tisha Campbell, Martin Lawrence, and Robin Harris in a wonderful performance as the hero’s hardworking father; Reginald Hudlin scripted and directed. There’s a lot more energy and social reality in this picture than one is accustomed to finding in teen exploitation movies; the cutting is often dynamic, and Hudlin generally does a good job of keeping things moving. (The rap numbers are serviceable, but it’s one sign of the film’s liveliness that these songs tend to slow things down.) One wishes, however, that this movie was as hip about homophobia as it is about safe sex, casual racism, sexual rivalry, and the other matters it incidentally takes up (1990). (JR) Read more

Hands Of Orlac

Robert Wiene’s legendary 1924 silentabout a pianist (Conrad Veidt) who gets a hand transplant and then discovers he has an impulse to killplays a significant role in Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano. The film’s been remade several times, but reportedly this first version is the best of the lot. (JR) Read more

The Handmaid’s Tale

A 1990 adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel about the near future in which, after a right-wing fundamentalist takeover of the U.S. government and a series of ecological disasters that have rendered most women infertile, the female population of the U.S. is herded like cattle and assigned the obligatory roles of wives, domestics, or child bearers called handmaids. Scripted by Harold Pinter and directed by Volker Schl Read more

Yaaba

Idrissa Ouedraogo’s second feature (1989), from Burkina Faso, focuses on a young boy (Noufou Ouedraogo) and his female cousin (Roukietou Barry) as they befriend an old woman in their village (Fatimata Sanga) who’s treated as an outcast and accused of being a witch. The locations are attractive, the performances are natural, and the details about local folkways are interesting, but the plot is a bit dull in spots, if only because the moral divisions are fairly simplistic. This is certainly not a bad film, but don’t expect anything comparable to the African cinema of Cisse or Sembene. (JR) Read more

Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid

Sam Peckinpah’s cut of his last major western (1973) runs 15 minutes longer than the originally released version, and it is structured differently. Filmed in ‘Scope and originally scripted by Rudy Wurlitzer (though his script was much revised under the supervision of Peckinpah and others), this story about the last days of Billy the Kid, framed by the death of Pat Garrett in 1908, is perhaps Peckinpah’s most elegiac picture and certainly one of his most romantic. Peckinpah’s cut is a lot more coherent, though it’s still a film of uneven pieces. The movie tends to be stronger in its handling of secondary charactersSlim Pickens’s death scene is a classic, and Katy Jurado, Jason Robards, Chill Wills, Jack Elam, Gene Evans, and Harry Dean Stanton all acquit themselves memorablythan in its treatment of the three leads; James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson have their moments, but the mythic heft of the story seems at times to weigh them down, and Bob Dylan is too clearly Bob Dylan to portray anyone else convincingly. 123 min. (JR) Read more

Opportunity Knocks

Saturday Night Live’s Dana Carvey stars as a small-time con man who impersonates an executive, in a comedy written by Mitchel Katlin and Nat Bernstein and directed by Donald Petrie (Mystic Pizza). The story, while familiar, has some comic possibilities, but Carvey manages to squelch them with leaden clowning and warmed-over impersonations (George Bush, a Japanese businessman) that never seem to be keyed to the surrounding movie. With Todd Graff, Julia Campbell, Milo O’Shea, James Tolkan, and Robert Loggia. (JR) Read more

The Miracle Woman

Frank Capra’s 1932 film about a thinly disguised Aimee Semple McPherson (Barbara Stanwyck), adapted by Jo Swerling from Bless You Sister, Robert Riskin and John Meehan’s popular satirical play about the famous evangelist. The movie never goes quite as far in its exposure of religious confidence games as you want it to, but Stanwyck is wonderful, and the gritty punch of Capra’s early 30s work certainly keeps this lively. With Sam Hardy and David Manners. 90 min. (JR) Read more

Lord Of The Flies

For roughly its first half, this second film adaptation of William Golding’s parable novel about English schoolboys stranded on an island after a plane crash and eventually reverting to savagery works pretty well as a straight adventure story, thanks to director Harry Hook’s eye and the lush Jamaican locations. But around the time that Philippe Sarde’s score is overtaken by pretentious, uncredited, and distorted derivations from Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, the movie becomes similarly overburdened by its hectoring themea sort of pseudoanthropological schema whereby the rational intellectuals in possession of the means to make fire are opposed by the crude blood lust of the huntersand the decision to turn Golding’s public-school boys into American military-school cadets, while theoretically defensible, throws the characters and situations slightly out of kilter. Peter Brook’s 1963 black-and-white version worked better as drama; this one gets all dressed up, but finds it has no place to go. Scripted by Sara Schiff; with Balthazar Getty, Chris Furrh, Danuel Pipoly, and Badgett Dale. (JR) Read more

The Gold Diggers

Sally Potter’s surrealistic and metaphorical epic about women, gold, and cinemashot in ravishing black and white by Babette Mangolte on location in Icelandis a good deal wittier and more fun than its checkered career would lead you to expect. Starring Julie Christie and Colette Laffont, this feminist fantasy-musical, set in the past and the future, was financed by the British Film Institute in 1983 and has a relatively lavish budget for an experimental feature. What keeps it aliveapart from the arresting music and uncanny, haunting imagesis Potter’s imaginative grasp of film history: odd references to Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and Kuleshov’s By the Law are recalled in the mise en scene, but the ambience may also remind you a little bit of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. Not a film for everyone, but if you like it, chances are you’ll like it a lot. (JR) Read more

The Fourth War

John Frankenheimer still hasn’t regained his stride since his black-and-white films of the 60s, but he’s settled down into being a pretty good director of thrillers, and this is one of his more recent bestcomparable to the lean, purposeful work he used to do for such 50s TV shows as Studio One and Playhouse 90. On the border between West Germany and Czechoslovakia in November 1988, American and Soviet border control commanders Roy Scheider and Jurgen Prochnow, embittered veterans of Vietnam and Afghanistan, get embroiled in a petty personal war of their own. That’s about all that the plotadapted by Stephen Peters and Kenneth Ross from Peters’s novelconsists of, but Frankenheimer handles it tersely and professionally, and coaxes an exceptionally good performance out of Harry Dean Stanton as an American general. Gerry Fisher handled the cinematography, and Tim Reid and Lara Harris also costar. (JR) Read more

Found Footage Films

A free program devoted to a fascinating subgenre of the avant-gardefilms that take footage from other sources and use it for their own ends. Along with Joseph Cornell’s seminal Rose Hobart (1939), the films include works by Stan Brakhage (Murder Psalm), Bruce Conner (Report, Marilyn Times Five), Bruce Posner, and Gabor Csazari. Read more

Forty Guns

Samuel Fuller’s wild, wonderful, semicoherent black-and-white ‘Scope western (1957) was shot in ten days, and in some ways looks it. But it’s also the feature that fully announces his talent as an avant-garde filmmaker, even in this unlikeliest of genres. Barbara Stanwyck stars as the woman with a whip, the land baroness of Tombstone Territory. She’s assisted by the 40 dudes of the title, and Barry Sullivan is the marshal who turns up to challenge her. There’s a hilarious romantic subplot involving a female gunsmith (whose sexual initiation is handled through an iris and dissolve that Godard incorporated into Breathless), an endless crane-and-track shot through a western town that defies belief, a lot of delirious violence, perverse sexuality, imaginative visual energy, and several startling plot twists. If you’ve ever wondered why Godard and other French New Wave directors deify Fuller, this movie explains it all. With Dean Jagger, John Ericson, and Gene Barry. 80 min. (JR) Read more

Earth

Alexander Dovzhenko’s ravishing and lyrical 1930 film about life on a collective farm in the Ukraine, the last and best of his silent features, shows his pantheism and poetry at their most exalting. The compositions are breathtaking, the evocations of death and social transformation powerful, the eroticism remarkably potent. Incontestably one of the greatest of all Soviet films. In Russian with subtitles. 62 min. (JR) Read more