Silly but nicea marijuana farce featuring Cheech Marin and Thomas Chong as spaced-out dealers working out of an ice-cream van, Stacy Keach as the cop on their trail, and Evelyn Guerrero as the romantic/sexual interest. Chong directed (1981). (JR) Read more
Perhaps the biggest revelation here is how advanced the British are in the specialized area of claymation, particularly when it comes to using this technique to delineate character. (A substantial amount of this work comes from TV commercials, though perhaps the best in the lot, saved for last, is Nick Park’s 1989 Oscar nominee Creature Comforts, a short in which zoo animals describe their living conditions.) Unfortunately, the length of the program presents some problems; 110 minutes of compressed bombardment ultimately becomes a kind of punishment, regardless of how good the work is. But taken in reasonable doses, this is mainly delightful. Among the more prominent animators are David Stone, Peter Lord, Candy Guard, Joanna Quinn, David Anderson, and Richard Ollive, who contributes a lovely re-creation of a turn-of-the-century comic strip that recalls Winsor McCay. (JR) Read more
A threadbare comedy from Universala sequel to Bedtime for Bonzo without Ronald Reagan but with the same chimp and the same director (Frederick de Cordova). With Maureen O’Sullivan, Charles Drake, and Edmund Gwenn (1952). (JR) Read more
Kurt Russell and William Baldwin star as fire-fighting brothers in Chicago carrying on the tradition of their late father, in an action picture written by former firefighter Gregory Widen and directed by Ron Howard. While Russell is at his best, creating a character of some density and mystery, Baldwin mainly registers like a cavity on the screen; his character seems both underwritten and uninhabited. Howard, as usual, seems bent on mixing genres to make several movies at oncemonster movie, crime movie, coming-of-age movie, and action-adventure movie (among others)yielding an overall narrative that’s not boring but not especially suspenseful or focused either. Visually speaking, the film does pretty well with fire-as-spectacle, less well with everything else (Howard tends to trot out fuzzy-toned Spielbergian backlighting on any pretext). With Scott Glenn, Jennifer Jason Leigh (basically wasted), Rebecca De Mornay, and Donald Sutherland and Robert De Niro, both working minor wonders with their limited parts. (JR) Read more
This time Woody Allen’s irresolute, neurotic, and masochistic stand-in protagonist is Alice Tate (Mia Farrow), a very upscale housewife and lapsed Catholic with an unappreciative husband (William Hurt). She goes to a Chinese herbalist for a bad back and gets more than she bargained forincluding hypnosis and a magic potion that makes her invisiblewhich finally pushes her into having a tentative affair with a musician (Joe Mantegna). The thematic sources this time appear to be Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits and Topper, although when the heroine briefly sprints off to India to join Mother Teresa, Allen borrows a clip from Louis Malle’s Calcutta. Weak and predictable, this comedy differs from earlier Allen forays only in that its ethnocentric limitations are more glaring than usual: the Chinese sage, played by one of Charlie Chan’s number one sons (Keye Luke), is encouraged to speak a kind of pidgin English that would have been offensive even in the 30s, and needless to say, we hear a lot of Limehouse Blues on the sound track. As usual, there are many good actors present in small rolesincluding Blythe Danner, Bob Balaban, and Gwen Verdonand they’re invariably wasted (1990). (JR) Read more
Chicago filmmaker Tom Palazzolo’s sequel to his semiautobiographical Caligari’s Cure, featuring Chicago performance artists Carmella Rago, Jim Grigsby, Lynn Book, Michael K. Meyers, Ellen Fisher, Jack Helbig, Kapra Fleming, and Liam Hayes. I haven’t seen its predecessor, but this free-form fan-tasy/absurdist vaudevillewhich leads its affectless young hero through some striking surrealist and expressionist sets as well as some Chicago locationsis much more enjoyable to look at than to think about or to follow as a consecutive (or even nonconsecutive) narrative. References to such movie landmarks as Les vampires, Un chien andalou, and The Blue Angel are scattered through this picaresque free-for-all (along with confetti, a painted lunch pail, and a bird cage, among other significant images), but the loosely satirical SF framework promises more than it delivers, and Palazzolo’s deft cutting and sense of visual extravagance rarely matches his dialogue or his direction of actors. On the same program, Hey Girls, a ten-minute short by Palazzolo and Heather McAdams described as a live-action comic strip. (JR) Read more