Not even the talents of Dolly Parton and James Woods can save the shaky premise of this Disney comedy with a Chicago setting, directed by Barnet Kellman from a script by Craig Bolotin and Patricia Resnick. Fired from a dance instructor job, Parton leaves her fiance and her small town for Chicago, where she accidentally winds up on the radio as a talk-show psychologist dispensing advice to callers; her show is such a runaway hit that Chicago Sun- Times reporter James Wood decides to investigate her credentials. This starts off brightly enough, but the fatal mistake of the filmmakers is to assume that the profound common sense and populist appeal of the heroine can be inferred from Parton’s natural charms rather than actually demonstrated. The movie never manages to paper over this gaping hole, but some agreeable secondary performancesby Griffin Dunne, Michael Madsen, Deirdre O’Connell, John Sayles, Spalding Gray, Jerry Orbach, and Philip Bosco, among othersprovide partial compensation. (JR) Read more
Duane Clark’s independent feature (1990), shot in Chicagoa conventional buddy movie about a quartet of longtime (if dissimilar) chums, set at Christmas 1989 and sparked intermittently by decent acting. If you’ve nothing else to do, it goes down easily, but don’t expect much more. With Arye Gross, Gale Hansen, Doug Savant, Steven Wilde (who scripted the movie with Clark), and Courteney Cox. (JR) Read more
Michael Hui directs and stars with his brothers Ricky and Sam in a typically broad and frenetic but hilarious Hong Kong farce about the misadventures of three security guards. The plot is rather episodic, but some of the piecessuch as a bank robbery and an attempt to burglarize an exhibition of Chinese antiquitiesare classics of their kind. Hui’s exquisite sense of rhythm, often accompanied by short bursts of music, and his antiheroic sense of character keep this hopping (1981). (JR) Read more
It’s a toss-up between this 1989 essay film and Until the End of the World (in the abbreviated U.S. version) for Wim Wenders’s worst movie. Until the End of the World is silly and boring, but it has a few redeeming moments; this has a few moments too, but it’s ideologically much more offensive. Wenders interviews and philosophizes about chic fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto, whose clothes he wears (in exchange for making this movie?), films female models, blithely decapitating them, and ruminates about the meaning of video, himself, life in generalthat sort of thing. A rich boy’s movie made by a talented artist whose view of the social world has shrunk to the dimensions of his hotel room. (JR) Read more
After the disappointing Blaze, writer-director Ron Shelton got back on track with the same mixture of sports action, sexual sparring, and comic, slangy dialogue that sparked Bull Durham. Like that earlier comedy, this is enough of a structural mess to lose itself somewhere before the end, but the jazzy surface action is even more lively and seductive. Basically the movie is a string of episodes involving two basketball hustlers (Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes) in Los Angeles, with racial differences serving both to help their hustles along and to define the limits of their friendship; Do the Right Thing’s feisty Rosie Perez plays Harrelson’s girlfriend, who longs to be a contestant on Jeopardy, while Tyra Ferrell is accorded the less interesting and less prominent part of Snipes’s wife. Shelton’s flair for fancy dialogue and his preoccupation with scoring often make him seem like the Preston Sturges of southern jive; unfortunately he doesn’t have a matching sense of plot and continuity. This picture is packed with fun, but it doesn’t really go anywhere, and elements that summon up memories of The Hustler don’t work in its favor (1992). (JR) Read more
Winner of the Camera d’Or at the 1991 Cannes film festival, this first feature by Belgian writer-director Jaco van Dormael leapfrogs between childhood, adulthood, and old age as it explores the memories and fantasies of a malcontent (Michel Bouquet) who has believed since childhood that he was switched at birth with the boy next door. Well crafted and easy to watch, this is at times like a mainstream version of an Alain Resnais feature (Je t’aime, je t’aime or Providence), but without a soupcon of Resnais’ style or poetryclever and effective on its own level, but ultimately fairly shallow. Mireille Perrier, Joe de Backer, and Thomas Godet costar. (JR) Read more
As Todd Gitlin has pointed out, even if all the mysteries about the John F. Kennedy assassination were cleared up tomorrow, nothing in our current political situation would change. This camp spin-off of the already campy JFK simultaneously deconstructs assassination countermyths and contrived movie packages through its very ineptness. Danny Aiello as Jack Ruby may sound like dream casting, but without a script or a character of any substance Aiello encounters trouble the moment familiar historical details loom into view, and so does the rest of the movie, whose cast includes Sherilyn Fenn as one of Ruby’s strippers and Arliss Howard as a CIA operative. Adapting his own play Love Field, Stephen Davis seems strapped for ideas about what made Ruby tick, and John Mackenzie’s sluggish direction only compounds the awkwardness. As a general principle, I don’t like to recommend bad movies, but this is such a hoot you might well find it as enjoyable as I did. (JR) Read more
The acting is raw and unglued, the guest-star appearances of aging 60s icons (Arlo Guthrie, Timothy Leary, David Carradine) are self-conscious and arch, and the sprawling episodic construction is underlined by conceptions that are sentimental to a fault. But this odd little road moviea first feature written and directed by Abbe Wool, who cowrote Sid & Nancystill got to me, mainly because of its sincerity and its relative novelty in trying to locate the dregs of American counterculture in various portentous and philosophical roadside encounters. The semifantastical plot concerns the absurdist journey of two bikers (John Doe and Adam Horovitz, members respectively of the bands X and the Beastie Boys) from southern California through parts of Nevada. Doe, the older biker, is a grizzled factory worker literally searching for a place called El Dorado, where he wants to scatter the ashes of an acquaintance (David Anthony Marshall) who died in a freak accident; Horovitz is a younger biker with a Motel 9 fixation who insists on tagging along. At its worst, this registers like an unconscious parody of Easy Rider; at its best, it suggests a flea-bitten yahoo version of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Hawks and Sparrows. It clearly isn’t for everybody, but if you like it at all you’ll probably wind up moved as well as charmed by its ambitions and conceits. Read more
Completing a loose trilogy that began with Red Sorghum and Ju Dou, Zhang Yimou’s grim 1991 adaptation of a novel by Su Tong once again stars Gong Li as a young woman who marries a much older man, and once again tells a story that explicitly critiques Chinese feudalism and indirectly contemporary China. This time, however, the style is quite different (despite another key use of the color red) and the vision is much bleaker. The heroine, a less sympathetic figure than her predecessors, is a university student in the 1920s who becomes the fourth and youngest wife of a powerful man in northern China after her stepmother can no longer afford to pay for her education. She quickly becomes involved in the various intrigues and rivalries between wives that rule her husband’s world and family tradition: each wife has her own house and courtyard within the palace, and whoever the husband chooses to sleep with on a given night receives a foot massage, several lighted red lanterns, and the right to select the menu for the following day. The film confines us throughout to this claustrophobic universe of boxes within boxes, where wives and female servants devote their lives to scheming against one another; the action is filmed mainly in frontal long shots. Read more
The biggest hit of Hong Kong comedy star and director Michael Hui is also considered his best movie, or his next best (after Security Unlimited), by many fans and critics. Having seen only an unsubtitled print of this episodic comedy, I still can say that I laughed a lot at the frenetic slapstick and rapid-fire bursts of rhythmic invention. Hui plays the mean-spirited head of a private detective agency, and among his employees are Hui’s likable brothers Sam and Ricky (1977). (JR) Read more
The unwary might regard this French Canadian feature as a blatant rip-off of Green Card, but in fact it’s the earlier filmand a much better one. Though lacking the yuppie preoccupations (such as real estate) and cute star mugging (Gerard Depardieu and Andie MacDowell) that were Green Card’s selling points, the basic plot is the same: a well-to-do single woman (Genevieve Bujold) is persuaded to marry a penniless Chilean (Manuel Arangiz) to save him from deportation, then is drawn to him while trying to convince the immigration authorities that their marriage is genuine. The director here is Michel Brault, best known for his brilliance as a cinematographer, and the sensitive low-key script is mainly the work of Jefferson Lewis. This isn’t a major work, but unlike Green Card it’s never a phony one; the characters and situations ring true throughout (1989). (JR) Read more
French colonial life in Algeria for three grown sisters (Nicole Garcia, Marianne Basler, and writer-director Brigitte Rouan) and their families in the 40s and 50s is the focus of this skillful semiautobiographical first feature. Rouan is both a graceful storyteller and a capable handler of actors (including herself), though, as with Diane Kurys, there are times when her style may seem too facile for what she wants to get across. This impressed me as I watched it, but it didn’t stick to my ribs (1990). (JR) Read more
Pyrotechnical action specialist Tsui Hark (Peking Opera Blues) delivers spirited choreography and humor in spades in this adventure epic set in 1875, when Western trade and the lure of California gold were both threatening Chinese culture. (The title points to a Sergio Leone influence.) The story involves a legendary kung fu fighter (Jet Li), his deadly opponent, his cousin (Rosamund Kwan) who was sold into prostitution, and a student (Yuen Biao) of his opponent who loves the cousin and hopes to save her; Jackie Cheung also figures in the cast (1991). In Cantonese with subtitles. R, 134 min. (JR) Read more
A soft-core comedy by Monika Treut (The Virgin Machine) about the problems encountered by a German bisexual (Shelley Kastner) working as a waitress in New York’s East Village when her conservative Bavarian father (Alfred Edel) comes to visit. He believes she’s a successful actress, so she tries to hide her job and pretend that her gay roommate (David Bronstein) is her husband; thanks to a New Age porn entrepreneur (Annie Sprinkle), her father winds up having a sexual adventure of his own. If Treut had more of a sense of where to place her camera and when to cut, this brief cruise past the New York sexual underground might have passed as a minor variant of early Almodovar. But apart from the likable presence of Kastner, this is basically simpleminded sexual tourism addressed to rubes. With Michael Massee, Mary Lou Graulau, and enough leather to support a small cattle ranch (1991). (JR) Read more
Two college students from New York (Ralph Macchio and Mitchell Whitfield) are wrongly accused of killing a clerk in a convenience store in Wahzoo City, Alabama, and one’s Brooklyn cousina rookie lawyer (Joe Pesci)arrives with his fiancee (Marisa Tomei) to defend them in what proves to be his first court case. While it’s easy to imagine an infinite number of bad courtroom comedies based on this scenario, this movie turns out to be wonderfulbroad and low character comedy that’s solidly imagined and beautifully played. Far from having a bone to pick with either side of the cultural collision, writer-producer Dale Launer (Ruthless People) and director Jonathan Lynn (Nuns on the Run), both surpassing their earlier work, are clearly equal-opportunity caricaturists, with affection for both the southern and northern factions in the movie. The cast (which also includes a very wry Fred Gwynne and Austin Pendleton in a cameo role) is uniformly good, but Tomei is especially worth noting as the lawyer’s smart and feisty girlfriend; her performance triumphs over an improbable number of costume changes (1992). (JR) Read more
