After the neocolonialist nostalgia of Driving Miss Daisy, some outright colonialist nostalgia from the same director, Bruce Beresford, albeit tempered by ambiguity and irony in the depiction of the title hero (Maynard Eziashi)the West African clerk of a British district officer (Pierce Brosnan). An Anglophile and con artist, Johnson is called upon to help organize the building of a road linking north and south Nigeria. Adapted from the Joyce Cary novel by William Boyd, this is a project that John Huston tinkered with before his death, and there are times when you suspect it could have wound up in the James Ivory canon as well. Polished, rather dull, and somewhat sentimental in its efforts to catch the noble pathos of a duplicitous yes-man who goes to his grave praising his white masters, it’s a bit too tasteful for its own good, although Eziashi and the other actorsincluding Edward Woodward, Femi Fatoba, Bella Enahoro, and Beatie Edneydo their best with the material. (JR) Read more
Subtitled A Politics of Revolting Bodies, Laura Kipnis’s video essay features Chuck Kleinhans as Karl Marx and focuses on the relationship between the writing of Das Kapital and Marx’s carbuncles and other bodily discomforts; this relationship is then commented on through discourses by drag queens, discussions by women about their discomfort with their own bodies, and related theoretical annotations. Interesting and watchable, though awfully familiar to anyone who’s been watching academic-theory films and videos over the past few years. (JR) Read more
In 1948, a few days before he’s scheduled to marry the daughter (Elisabeth Shue) of the head of a movie studio (Robert Loggia), a wealthy playboy (Alec Baldwin) gets the hots for the singer girlfriend (Kim Basinger) of Bugsy Siegel (Armand Assante); the gangster catches them and forces them to get married for what proves to be the first of many times. Told mainly in flashback from the vantage point of 1956, this somewhat overproduced and overextended Neil Simon romantic comedy, like its lead couple, has more persistence than lasting charm, but at least certain aspects of the trimmingstenor sax solos by Stan Getz, sleek production design by William F. Matthewsmake it pleasant and watchable. Directed by former animator Jerry Rees (The Brave Little Toaster), the movie exhibits a fanciful period landscape that often suggests an animator’s background, and Basinger is a bit livelier than usual. Costars Paul Reiser, Fisher Stevens, Peter Dobson, and Steve Hytner compose a sort of kibitzing Greek chorus of friends to the hero and are meant to suggest, respectively, Phil Silvers, Sammy Cahn, Tony Martin, and Leo Durocher. (JR) Read more
One of the many 40s prototypes for family TV sitcom, this film adaptation by Donald Ogden Stewart of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse’s playbased in turn on Clarence Day’s autobiographical account of growing up in New York at the turn of the centuryfeatures William Powell as the lovable tyrant-father and Irene Dunne as his wife. Costars include Edmund Gwenn, Zasu Pitts, and Elizabeth Taylor; Michael Curtiz directed (1947). (JR) Read more
Aki Kaurismaki’s flaky one-note comedy from Finland (1989) about an eight-piece Finnish band with weird hairdos and shoes that tours the American and Mexican boondocks. A reasonably enjoyable (if occasionally monotonous) piece of conscious camp, with Matti Pellonpaa and Kari Vaananen; director and hipster-in-arms Jim Jarmusch puts in a brief cameo. In Finnish with subtitles. 80 min. (JR) Read more
D.W. Griffith’s last film for Biograph and first extended narrative (1914), based on a popular play of the period. To be shown with Griffith’s rarely screened The Avenging Conscience (also 1914), in conjunction with a lecture by Linda Williams. Read more
The second feature by Zhang Yimou, this 1990 film is even more beautiful and complex than Red Sorghum, both in its ravishing uses of color and its grim critique of feudalism. Freely adapted by author Liu Heng from his contemporary novel Fu Xi, Fu Xi, the film centers on a dye factory in northwest China in the 1920s; the factory’s bitter, sadistic, and impotent owner purchases a third wife named Ju Dou (Gong Li) in hopes of gaining an heir, and he mercilessly beats and tortures her when she fails to produce one. She initiates a passionate affair with his adopted nephew, who works at the factory, and when she becomes pregnant with the nephew’s child, feudal custom dictates that they pretend her husband is the father. After the husband suffers a crippling accident they flaunt their relationship in front of him, but the son grows up hating the lovers: unlike the other major characters, the son is treated as an allegorical figure for the persistence of Chinese feudalism. In Mandarin with subtitles. 95 min. (JR) Read more
Milan Kundera and director Jaromil Jires adapted Kundera’s novel about an ironic Czech professor and ladies’ man (Josef Somr) who’s sentenced to six years of hard labor for a jokey, irreverent postcard he sends a woman he’s trying to seduce. Later he tries to take revenge on the man who turned him in by seducing the man’s wife. Shot during the 1968 Prague Spring, this sour black-and-white comedy with New Wave cutting comes much closer to the spirit of Kundera than Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being; it registers as both a well-crafted story and an acerbic reflection of life in Czechoslovakia during the Stalinist 50s. (JR) Read more
The talentless but irrepressibly trendy Luc Besson (Subway, The Big Blue) dreamed up this idiotic story (1990, in French with subtitles) that seems vaguely inspired by Kubrick’s (not Anthony Burgess’s) A Clockwork Orange. A hardened junkie punk (Anne Parillaud) is sentenced to life in prison, then allowed to choose between death and becoming an assassin for the French secret police. Jeanne Moreau is around long enough to give her lessons in femininity, and Tcheky Karyo plays the paternalistic government official who shepherds the young woman through her recycling, thenafter she’s been released and has settled down with a pussycat boyfriend (Jean-Hugues Anglade)calls her at odd hours to send her on murderous missions, preferably in decorous surroundings. Go figure. 117 min. (JR) Read more
Jackie Chan, director Samo Hung, and Yuen Biao costar in this sprightly ecological action thriller from Hong Kong centered on a chemical plant that turns out to be a front for a drug-processing operation. The plant’s pollution of local fish farms and Chan and Hung’s infatuation with the local farmers’ star witness form part of the interest, but most important, of course, are the choreographed fights and stunts (1988). (JR) Read more
Albert Brooks’s 1991 feature is something of a departure from its predecessors (Real Life, Modern Romance, and Lost in America) because of its fantasy premisea recently deceased adman (Brooks) has to defend his life (screened in the form of movie rushes) before a small tribunal in a sort of theme-park resort called Judgment Citybut it’s every bit as funny and serious. Meryl Streep plays the saintlike woman Brooks meets and falls in love with in this plastic purgatory while they pursue their separate trials, and the depth of feeling uncovered by their relationship works hand in glove with the daily examination sessions: the twin evils in this metaphysical netherworld, which has more than a passing resemblance to contemporary American society, are fear and stupidity, and over the course of the movie we and Brooks learn a great deal about both. Rip Torn (at his juiciest) plays Brooks’s defender, Lee Grant plays his prosecutor, and Buck Henry has a nice comic turn as another defender. A wonderful movie not only for its satirical richnessJudgment City is imagined in copious detailbut for the seriousness of its comedy. 111 min. (JR) Read more
John Lundin’s short, which adapts the same story (Le Fanu’s Camilla) that served as the basis for Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr, registers in part as an eerie homage in color to that classic; the visuals are often effective, and only the uncertainty of some of the performances occasionally breaks the spell. (JR) Read more
Not only is Jane Birkin at her best in this low-key, realistic 1990 drama, she’s also the element that ties the whole thing together. Directed by Bertrand Tavernier from a script by his ex-wife, Colo Tavernier O’Hagan, it’s 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 speaks mainly English with her father and mainly French with her mother, from whom she feels even more remote). 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. In English and subtitled French. 112 min. (JR) Read more
Jacques Rivette’s first foray into professional filmmaking was this very uncharacteristic and relatively conventional half-hour 35-millimeter short. The plot, which involves the complex trajectory of a fur coat, dimly suggests Max Ophuls’s Madame de . . . ; Rivette himself narrates the anecdote in terms of chess moves, one of which serves as the film’s title. Claude Chabrol, who coproduced, also collaborated on the script with Rivette, and in some respects it now looks more like part of his work than Rivette’s; Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut put in cameo appearances (1956). (JR) Read more
Possibly the best of Paul Schrader’s filmsa dubious distinctionbut there’s still more windup than delivery (1990). The screenplay is Harold Pinter’s adaptation of an Ian McEwan novel, about what happens when an English couple (Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett) vacationing in Venice, trying to rekindle their relationship, fall under the baneful and kinky influence of an older resident couple, an Italian (Christopher Walken) and a Canadian (Helen Mirren). All four leads are effective, with Walken a particular standout (though Mirren seems more subdued than usual); cinematographer Dante Spinotti works very attractively with the local light and color; and Schrader integrates these blessings with resourceful mise en scene. But as with some of the earlier Pinter and Joseph Losey projects (which this often resembles), arty ambience with S and M trimmings is the basic bill of fare: it’s a vehicle designed to tease more than edifymore fun to watch than to think about afterward. (JR) Read more
