A far-ranging and innovative essay film about technology and seeingintricate, beautiful, dense, and provocativeby the highly original Marxist German independent Harun Farocki. Despite the wealth of material covered, the film is closely structured, rather like a narrative or a musical composition, with themes, images, and sounds recurring in fresh contexts to develop the meanings. A particular point of interest is the examination of some of the directions not taken by mainstream technologies, though vestiges of alternative routes taken by others are also investigated in fascinating detail (1986). (JR) Read more
A comedy-drama that actually tries to be political before incoherently copping out, this is about a veterans’ hospital so plagued with economic cutbacks and bureaucratic red taperepresented by villain John Mahoney, with no mention of Reagan or Bushthat the doctors have to break rules and risk suspension to save people’s lives. Directed by Howard Deutch from a screenplay by Ron Cutler, it has a certain energy and sense of outrage, although the sentimentality and casual sexism occasionally thrown into the mixture don’t exactly help. The fairly lively cast includes Ray Liotta, Kiefer Sutherland (unfortunately saddled with a yuppie-makes-good part that no one could play), Forest Whitaker, Lea Thompson, John C. McGinley, Eli Wallach, and Kathy Baker. (JR) Read more
The U.S. premiere of a Chicago-made feature by Daniel Currana rather studied film about obsession, attractively shot in black and white by Janusz Kaminski, that goes absolutely nowhere. The tiresome narrator-hero (Tom Blanton) roams about searching for love in the abstract after witnessing the murder of two lovers; eventually he finds love, concretely and instantaneously, when he meets a novelist (Lauren Campedelli), but only after killing at least a couple of people at random, presumably in order to demonstrate how much of a depressive existentialist he is. One can certainly respect Curran’s interest in doing something nonrealistic and provocative, but his patchwork of referencesBreton’s Nadja and Murnau’s Sunrise, intertwining bodies from Hiroshima, mon amour and floating heads from Eraserhead, motiveless killings a la Dostoyevski and Camusnever fuse into anything solid. Though there’s clearly some film savvy and style in the overall drift, the rawness and flatness of the dialogue tend to undermine the images (1991). Read more
A rerelease of the 1986 Disney cartoon feature The Great Mouse Detective with a slight title change. It’s a mystery adventure set in Victorian England, directed by John Musker, Ron Clements, Dave Michener, and Burny Mattinson, with the voices of Vincent Price, Barrie Ingham, Val Bettin, and Susanne Pollatschek. When the film first opened, Patrick Gourley described it in a review in the Reader as easily the best of the animated features since the early 1960s, offering several clear reminders of 30s-style joy of animation and the triumph of skill and imagination over physical reality, while Pat Graham, reviewing it in a capsule, called it new generation Disney, bland generation Disney and a stylistic retreat from the previous year’s more ambitious if less evenly toned The Black Cauldron, although he praised the imaginative sparkle in the crackling Big Ben finale. Decide for yourself. (JR) Read more
