A feeble sequel to The Naked Gun that’s about one and a half rungs down from its predecessor and a good four or five down from Airplane! Still, if you have nothing better to do, you might laugh a few times. Directed and cowritten by David Zucker and starring Leslie Nielsen as Lieutenant Frank Drebin; with Priscilla Presley, O.J. Simpson, George Kennedy, and Robert Goulet. Pat Proft collaborated on the script. (JR) Read more
Not the sublime Ernst Lubitsch masterpiece, but a 1978 comedy that had the brass to steal its title. Warren Beatty’s first flight out as a director was codirected by Buck Henry, but Beatty’s also around as producer, cowriter (with Elaine May), and star, so you can’t exactly accuse him of lacking confidence. A charming but not very profound comedy about a football player (Beatty) accidentally killed before his appointed time who gets fixed up with a new body formerly owned by an eccentric millionaire, this is actually a remake of Alexander Hall’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), with football substituting for prizefighting. It’s certainly likable enough and was a big hit when it came out, but one could hardly call it an auspicious artistic debuta crafty commercial entertainment with a certain amount of intelligence is more like it. With Julie Christie, Jack Warden, James Mason (as the archangel Mr. Jordan), Dyan Cannon, Charles Grodin, Buck Henry, and Vincent Gardenia. 100 min. (JR) Read more
A French comedy about a nasty old lady (Tsilla Chelton) who is taken in by her well-intentioned great-nephew (Eric Prat) and his family in Paris, then challenged by a teenager (Isabelle Nanty) hired to watch over her while the family leaves on vacation. This movie is intermittently funny, but virtually strangled at birth by the sort of bourgeois complacency that it makes a few token gestures toward satirizing. Directed by Etienne Chatiliez (Life Is a Long Quiet River) from a script by Florence Quentin; with Catherine Jacob and Laurence Fevrier (1990). (JR) Read more
Bill Campbell stars as a test pilot working in southern California in 1938 who discovers an experimental rocket pack that enables him to fly; Joe Johnston (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids) directed. After a promising, nicely paced, and well-edited beginning, this fantasy-adventurewhich initially suggests an action version of Tucker, complete with Howard Hughes (Terry O’Quinn)settles into the more familiar packaged goods of an Indiana Jones or Back to the Future rip-off, complete with eccentric mechanic (Alan Arkin), loyal girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly), Nazi spy (Timothy Dalton playing a fanciful version of Errol Flynn), central casting hoods (Paul Sorvino, Jon Polito, and others), and an outsized blimp for a climax. The whole thing is good-natured enough, but increasingly mechanical. Screenplay by Paul De Meo and Danny Billson, based on a graphic novel by Dave Stevens. (JR) Read more
A breezy little James Cagney vehicle (1933), made at Warners during his best and busiest period, about an ex-racketeer who becomes a scandal photographer and manages to get a picture of a woman in the electric chair. Allen Rivkin and P.J. Wolfson’s script reportedly has some basis in fact; Ralph Bellamy, Patricia Ellis, and Alice White costar. (JR) Read more
Except for Juha nine years later, this 1990 feature is the best thing I’ve seen by Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki. The conclusion of his proletarian trilogy, which began with Shadows in Paradise and Ariel, it centers on a meek, morose assembly-line worker (Kati Outinen) who’s brutalized by her mother and stepfather and usually ignored by everyone else. After she’s picked up and impregnated by a well-to-do architect who coolly exploits her, she plots and executes a rather extravagant revenge. Basically a postmodernist reshuffling of Robert Bresson and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, this doesn’t hold a candle to the best work of either, but on its own terms it has an unmistakable minimalist elegance. In Finnish with subtitles. 70 min. (JR) Read more
Spike Lee’s high-powered, all-over-the-place 1991 movie about interracial romance (Wesley Snipes and Annabella Sciorra), crack addiction (a remarkable turn by Samuel L. Jackson), breaking away from one’s family (a theme that crops up in at least five households, with Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Anthony Quinn, and Frank Vincent among the parents), and corporate advancement for blacks (Snipes again), chiefly set in two New York neighborhoods (Harlem and Bensonhurst). The disparate themes never quite come together, but with many fine performancesJohn Turturro and Lonette McKee are especially goodyou won’t be bored for a minute. Overall the film suggests a kind of living newspaper, with stories and subplots crowding one another for front-page space. There are so many voices you may think you’re swimming through a maelstrom, but thanks to Lee it’s all superbly orchestrated. 131 min. (JR) Read more
The first feature (1983) of Finnish hipster filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki is a very loose adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel, set in contemporary Helsinki, in which a solitary slaughterhouse worker murders the man who killed his fiancee in a hit-and-run accident. In Finnish with subtitles. 93 min. (JR) Read more
Three urban buddies (Billy Crystal, Daniel Stern, Bruno Kirby) suffering through various midlife crises take off for a southwest dude ranch and a real-life cattle drive. What starts out as pure farce turns momentarily into a straight western adventureafter a number of calamities increase the heroes’ responsibilitiesbefore once again becoming a comedy-drama about midlife crisis. Director Ron Underwood (Tremors) does a fair job navigating all the key changes proposed by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel’s script, and with the actors’ help he makes this a diverting if bumpy ride (1991). With Patricia Wettig, Helen Slater, Noble Willingham, Josh Mostel, Tracey Walter, and Jack Palance as an old-time trail boss. (JR) Read more
The Marx Brothers, in their last film for MGM, are let loose in a department store; regrettably, so are Tony Martin and Virginia Grey (1941). Charles Riesner directed, and Margaret Dumont is around to take up part of the slack. Not the brothers at their best, but there are some delightful moments. (JR) Read more
A two-hour Swedish documentary by Peter Cohen, narrated in German by Bruno Ganz, that addresses the fascinating subject of Hitler’s aesthetics, with particular emphasis on the art that he made, admired, bought, and commissioned; his taste for Greek and Roman antiquities and grandiose architecture; and the ideological relationship between this taste and his extermination programs. Regrettably missing from this historical survey is Hitler’s cinephilia (before the war, according to Albert Speer, he used to screen two movies a night) and the grander perspectives offered by Hans-Jurgen Syberberg’s Hitler, a Film From Germany (1977). Solid (if a little stolid) as an essay film, it offers an excellent introduction to Nazi ideology. (JR) Read more
In style and overall approach, Amy Greenfield’s adaptation of Sophocles’ tragedy (including some elements from Oedipus at Colonus) harks back to experimental filmmaking of the 60s and early 70s, particularly in the uses of modern dance and nature. Greenfield basically keeps the text offscreen, works with aggressive modernist music by several hands, and depends quite a bit on gestures, highly composed frames, and percussive, eclectic editing; at times the film seems divided between the idea that the tragedy is taking place in the deadpan faces and the idea that it’s happening in the bodies, settings, text, and music. (By and large, the music and dance are more compelling than the faces or the readings of the text, both of which aim at stoicism.) Not an easy film, nor one that entirely escapes the charge of rigor artis, but one that grapples constantly and seriously with the problem of translating dance into film, the camera playing as important a role in the choreography as Greenfield or any of the other dancers. (It lacks the humor and fleetness of The Red Shoes and Mammame, but given the source this is hardly surprising.) The ghost of Maya Deren seems to hover over the proceedings, for better and for worse. Read more
A fascinating and masterful melodrama from Japan, written by Goro Nakajima and directed by former independent Shunichi Nagasaki, that may remind you in spots of both Vertigo and Lilith, although the treatment is strictly Japanese. A Tokyo psychiatrist (Masao Kusakari) who is engaged to his receptionist (Kiwako Harada) becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with a beautiful tourist guide (Kumiko Akiyoshi) who claims to have been beaten by her lesbian lover; further events reveal that this lover is dead and that her identity is being schizophrenically re-created by the tourist guide. A film that juxtaposes two kinds of obsession and implicitly asks the spectator to determine which is sicker (or healthier); it’s all done with effective plot twists and a sure story-telling hand (1989). (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Saturday, June 1, 8:00, 443-3737) Read more
An English feature written and directed by playwright Anthony Minghella, about a young woman (Juliet Stevenson) stricken by the death of her cellist lover (Alan Rickman) who appears to be revisited by his ghost. This comes across as an English realist variation on the sort of quasi-supernatural stories that producer Val Lewton specialized in during the 40s: that is, the supernatural elements are used to enhance the realistic psychology rather than the other way around. If the relatively prosaic Minghella, making his movie debut, lacks the suggestive poetic sensibility of Lewton, he does a fine job in capturing the contemporary everyday textures of London life, and coaxes a strong performance out of Stevenson, a longtime collaborator. Full of richly realized secondary characters and witty oddball details (e.g., the home video tastes of the dead lover’s ghostly male companions), this is a beguiling film in more ways than one. (Piper’s Alley) Read more
Not only is Jane Birkin at her best in this low-key, realistic drama; she’s also the element that ties everything else together. Directed by Bertrand Tavernier from a script by his ex-wife, Colo Tavernier O’Hagan (he wrote some of the dialogue), this is basically a chamber piece for three voices about a Parisian screenwriter (Birkin) separated from her husband who visits her ailing English father (Dirk Bogarde) and her French mother (Odette Laure) in a small villa on the Cote d’Azur, trying to create a closeness with her father that she has never felt. She mainly speaks English with her father and French with her mother (from whom she feels even more remote), and the characteristic strength of Tavernier’s direction is its capacity to take these unexceptional people as he finds them. A few fleeting flashbacks and snippets of offscreen narration barely intrude on the relatively eventless but finely nuanced action. Contributing to Antoine Duhamel’s score is jazz pianist Jimmy Rowles, and Birkin herself and Rowles sing “These Foolish Things.” (Fine Arts) Read more