I’ve only sampled this nearly three-hour 1989 extravaganza by German filmmaker and performance artist Ulrike Ottinger (Ticket of No Return, Freak Orlando), but most of what I saw whetted my appetite for more. The film centers on four female travelers on the Trans-Siberian RailwayLady Windermere (one of the last performances by the great Delphine Seyrig), a German botanist (Fassbinder regular Irm Hermann), the Broadway star Fanny Ziegfeld, and a beautiful young student. (Peter Kern is also on board as a Catskills comic.) They get kidnapped by a band of wild Mongolian women riding camels, and what follows has been described as documentary combined with ironic narrative. In German with subtitles. 165 min. (JR) Read more
This 1989 documentary by Karen Thorsen touches on various aspects of James Baldwin’s life and writing. From a literary standpoint, one occasionally regrets the film’s efforts to illustrate some of its commentaries (including footage from various dramatizations of his work), which tends to shortchange the viewer’s imagination. (An ideal Baldwin documentary might have juxtaposed passages from his neglected and fascinating book about film, The Devil Finds Work, with clips from the films he writes about, which would have been more to the point.) Despite the value of many of these commentaries (from former lovers, friends, relatives, and colleagues, such as Ishmael Reed), which testify to the love and lucidity that Baldwin inspired, the material drawn from numerous interviews with the writer himself is the most beautiful: Baldwin was usually his own best explicator, and his passion and power as a speaker are given full rein. 87 min. (JR) Read more
Kevin Costner stars, coproduces, and makes his directorial debut in a three-hour epic (1990), adapted by Michael Blake from his novel of the same title, about a Union lieutenant in the 1860s who gradually becomes a member of a Sioux tribe in the Dakotas. In reward for an act of heroism in Tennessee, the lieutenant is allowed to select his own reassignment, and he chooses the western frontier. Finding himself in an abandoned fort, he slowly makes the acquaintance of the nearby Sioux (as well as of a prairie wolf, which eventually leads to his Sioux name, Dances With Wolves) and helps them find buffalo; eventually he falls in love with and marries Stands With a Fist (Mary McDonnell), a white woman adopted by the tribe as a child, who serves as interpreter. By the time he’s arrested as a traitor by the army, he has fully assumed a Sioux identity. Sincere, capable, at times moving, but overextended, this picture is seriously hampered by its tendency to linger over everythingespecially landscapes with silhouetted figures, and not excluding its own good intentions. For all the film’s respect for the Sioux, it has surprisingly little to tell us about their culture, and the implicit link between the hero’s wolf friend and his Sioux friends is rather emblematic of the sentimentality behind the overall conception. Read more
C’est la vie bourgeoise would be a better title, not only for this filmDiane Kurys’ autobiographical version of her parents’ breakup (also treated in Peppermint Soda and Entre nous)but for Kurys’ work as a whole. Like many other depictions of French middle-class life from within, it’s a view that equates this life with life in general, as the title implies. Set in the summer of 1958 in the French resort town of La Baule les Pins on the coast of Brittany, where the families of two half-sisters (Nathalie Baye and Zabou) are vacationing, the plot is mainly shaped around the viewpoint of Frederique (Julie Bataille), whose father (Richard Berry) is mainly away due to a marital crisis, and whose mother (Baye) turns up only belatedly, with a boyfriend (Vincent Lindon) in tow. While Kurys is adept as usual in handling the surface details of this world, the overall vision is neither fresh nor especially insightful, only familiar. Written with Alain Le Henry; with Jean-Pierre Bacri, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, and Didier Benureau (1990). (JR) Read more
A transitional work between Jonas Mekas’s beat and arty Guns of the Trees (1961) and his diary films (which began around 1966), this 1964 filming of the Living Theatre’s production of Kenneth H. Brown’s gritty and disquieting stage play about military discipline in a Marine Corps prison, utilizing cinema verite techniques, was a last-ditch effort to preserve the production after the theater was forcibly shut down. Widely mistaken abroad for a documentary about an actual prison. (JR) Read more
Ten years after a group of Stanford students take some bad LSD, they lose their hair and become psycho killers. Jeff Leiberman wrote and directed this nonsense, which stars Zalman King, Robert Walden, Mark Goddard, and Alice Ghostley (1978). (JR) Read more
Kathryn Bigelow’s stupid serial-killer movie (1990) dispelled the hopes of Near Dark and proved that a Dirty Harry rip-off, even one made by a woman and featuring a female cop (Jamie Lee Curtis) who happens to be dating the raving lunatic killer (Ron Silver with bulging eyes), is still just a Dirty Harry rip-off. The plot, coscripted by Bigelow with Eric Red, is based on a string of ridiculous premises leading up to a ludicrously protracted finale; suspense is generated in spots, but only by the characters uniformly behaving like imbeciles. Some effort is made to give the visuals (including the usual phallic gun worship) a bit of razzle-dazzle, but Bigelow never knows when to stop: the numerous close-ups have a deadening effect, and even the more perverse elements in the story are made to seem recycled and obligatory. With Clancy Brown, Elizabeth Pe Read more
This fabulous compilation of 20s and 30s cartoons by Max and Dave Fleischer, highlighting (but not devoted exclusively to) their Betty Boop cartoons, looks as wild and wacky now as when it was put together (1974). Over the years, it seems that Tex Avery has become the recognized surrealist master of the Hollywood cartoon, and with reason. But one shouldn’t forget that the Fleischers anticipated many of his free-form imaginative flights with charming and creepy fantasies and radical transitions that are in some ways even more dreamlike. The plots are minimal, but the intricate and integral uses of live action, Cab Calloway and his orchestra, bouncing-ball sing-alongs (complete with scat lyrics, in some cases), rampant and delirious anthropomorphism, and daffy wit make these cartoons enduring classics. The black-and-white (and triumphantly uncolorized) selections include Koko’s Earth Control (1928), the only silent film in the bunch; Koko’s Harem Scarem (1929); Bimbo’s Initiation (1931); Minnie the Moocher (1932); Stoopnocracy (1933); Boilesk (1933); and Betty Boop’s Rise to Fame (1934). Stoopnocracy, a demented concerto about insanity, is alone worth the price of admission. (JR) Read more
Not to be confused with either Alan and Susan Raymond’s documentary or the Hollywood Sean Penn vehicle, this is a 1961 fiction film utilizing documentary techniques by the resourceful and neglected Japanese filmmaker Susumu Hani. Recruiting real-life juvenile delinquents in Tokyo, Hani filmed a story based in part on their experiences, using actual detention areas and reform schools as locations. (JR) Read more
