The usually adept Daniel Day-Lewis, employed here more as an icon than as an actor, stars as Hawkeye, frontiersman and adopted son of a Mohican (Indian activist Russell Means), who becomes romantically involved with the daughter (Madeleine Stowe) of a British officer in 1757, during the French and Indian War, in a visually handsome but dramatically attenuated 1992 adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper’s classic American novel. The North Carolina locations, framed in ‘Scope, are certainly pretty, but the period ambience is undermined by a tacky wallpaper score by Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman; all things considered, I still prefer Maurice Tourneur’s 1920 adaptation of the tale (I haven’t seen George B. Seitz’s 1936 version, but Philip Dunne’s script from that film is credited here as a source). Michael Mann, the director, collaborated on the screenplay with Christopher Crowe; with Wes Studi and Jodhi May. R, 114 min. (JR) Read more
Richard Attenborough plays the deranged father of a little girl killed by a hit-and-run driver. An explosives expert, he boards the same flight from London to New York as the guilty driver and plots to blow the plane up. Cy Endfield directed and cowrote (with Sigmund Miller) this hard-edged, almost entirely airborne English thriller with his characteristic sense of how people show their true colors, for better and for worse, during a collective crisis. Stanley Baker is the pilot and Mai Zetterling plays Attenborough’s second wife; the capable cast also includes George Rose, Hermione Baddeley, Diane Cilento, and Sybil Thorndike. Also known as Killing Urge and Jetstream (1959). (JR) Read more
A singularly unpleasant and unedifying 1991 documentary by David Van Taylor about the young survivor of a suicide pact in Reno who blew half his face off with a shotgun, and the subsequent suit brought against the heavy-metal band Judas Priest for inspiring his friend (consciously and subliminally) to pull the trigger on himself. To make art or even sense out of this horrific storywhich also involves a lot of family abuse, drugs, violence, and fundamentalismwould require an H.L. Mencken or a Nathanael West. All it gets here is a barely competent documentarist more interested in exploiting his subjects’ misery than in attempting anything that resembles serious analysis. The sheer cheapness, crassness, and inhumanity of what emerges certainly makes an impression, but don’t expect any intelligence or insight. (JR) Read more
Working with the two writers responsible for Apartment Zero (Martin Donovan and David Koepp), two of the best screen comediennes around (Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn), Bruce Willis under pounds of makeup, and Isabella Rossellini in the raw, Robert Zemeckis sustains both the nastiness of Used Cars and the animated cartoon aesthetics of Who Framed Roger Rabbit in a violent and macabre farce about female vanity and aging, featuring the mutilation of women’s bodies as its chief source of amusement. If there were something resembling genuine satire of human behavior beyond the simple pretexts for fancy special effects and relentless sadism, I might have found some of this funny. (JR) Read more
Buffy (Kristy Swanson) is a high school cheerleader who discovers from an ancient guru (Donald Sutherland) that she’s the latest in a series of girls fated to slay vampires, with the aid of acrobatic kicks, pirouettes, and wooden stakes (1992). In the middle 60s this would have been a beach-blanket comedy. The direction of Fran Rubel Kuzui (Tokyo Pop) suggests that she’s more comfortable with character than action, and Joss Whedon’s script has some fun with Valley talk (both genuine and ersatz) but strains to sell the story. Paul Reubens (the former Pee-wee Herman) and Rutger Hauer camp it up as vampires, Luke Perry provides romantic interest, and Michele Abrams, Hilary Swank, and Paris Vaughan provide the teenage backup. 86 min. (JR) Read more
A fascinating documentary by Madeleine Ali, an American black woman who has converted to Judaism, about a group of black teenagers from a high school for problem kids in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant who spent ten weeks living and working on an Israeli kibbutz. Ali carefully and, to all appearances, quite objectively chronicles the entire experience, from anticipation in Brooklyn to initial alienation and frustration at the kibbutz to passionate commitment to disappointment about leaving. Branford Marsalis provides an effective jazz score. (JR) Read more
Russ Meyer’s most deliriously mannerist and frenetically edited feature (1978); it’s helped along by an extremely arch script written by Meyer and, pseudonymously, Roger Ebert. Set in Small Town, USAa curious place peopled exclusively by hapless males (including Ken Kerr) and voracious amazonian women with abnormally swollen breasts (including Francesca Kitten Natividad, Anne-Marie, and June Mack)this is basically a parody of Meyer’s already parodic style of porn comedy; Meyer himself makes an appearance. (JR) Read more
All of Stanley Kubrick’s features look better now than when they were first released, but Barry Lyndon, which fared poorly at the box office in 1975, remains his most underrated. It may also be his greatest. This personal, idiosyncratic, melancholy, and long (three hours) adaptation of the Thackeray novel is exquisitely shot in natural light (or, in night scenes, candlelight) by John Alcott, with frequent use of slow backward zooms that distance us, both historically and emotionally, from its rambling picaresque narrative about an 18th-century Irish upstart (Ryan O’Neal). Despite its ponderous, funereal moods and pacing, the film is a highly accomplished piece of storytelling, building to one of the most suspenseful duels ever staged. It also repays close attention as a complex and fascinating historical meditation, as enigmatic in its way as 2001: A Space Odyssey. With Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Kruger, and Leonard Rossiter; narrated by Michael Hordern. PG, 183 min. (JR) Read more
Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan’s fourth feature (1991), attractively shot in ‘Scope by Paul Sarossy, is a lot closer in style and form to his third, Speaking Parts, than to his first or second, Next of Kin and Family Viewingwhich is to say that the story line seems to be only secondary. Principally the film consists of steady crosscutting between underlighted depictions of sexual perversity and spiritual deprivation that might be called Capitalism and Its Discontents. The narrative consists of several interlocking, highly didactic metaphors involving displacement: an insurance adjuster (Elias Koteas) has sex with several clients who have lost all their belongings in fires, his estranged wife (Egoyan regular Arsinee Khanjian) works as a government censor and sneaks videos of the porn films she sees to her sister (Rose Sarkisyan), and a former football player (Maury Chaykin) and his wife (Gabrielle Rose) devote their lives to playing out elaborate and expensive sex fantasies. Despite some dark and suggestive poetry in all the arty murk, the movie seems too caught up in the puritanical illnesses of its characters to provide any commentary but the most obvious. (JR) Read more
This essay film by the U.S.-based, French-educated Vietnamese writer and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha (Naked Spaces: Living Is Round, Surname Viet Given Name Nam) approaches Chinese culture from an outsider’s position–or, more precisely, through a series of contrasted outsider positions and layered perspectives. Shoot for the Contents, whose title alludes to a Chinese guessing game, was motivated by Trinh’s desire to explore her Vietnamese roots (she plans to make a companion film about India, the other major influence on Vietnamese culture), but she’s more concerned with poetic evocation than journalistic information. This film may confound spectators looking for a thesis or the kind of false knowledge proffered by conventional documentaries; as usual, Trinh is interested in radically opposing the means by which documentaries generally claim to be authoritative. But the dispersed presentation–which makes use of video as well as 16-millimeter footage and consists largely of speculative conversations with filmmakers and diverse kinds of visual displacement–is provocative and compelling. Like Trinh’s other work, this could be described as the film of an accomplished and talented writer rather than the “writing” of a pure filmmaker, but it is no less commanding for that (1991). (Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W. Belmont, Saturday, June 27, 7:30, 281-8788) Read more
Four independent shorts by women about mothers and daughters. All of them are original and well worth seeing, but I was especially struck by Anna Campion’s English documentary The Audition (1989), in which her famous filmmaking sister Jane auditions their mother, a former stage actress, for a small part in An Angel at My Table. Charting the subtle shifts in power and control between mother and daughter, this intimate family piece seems partly scripted and partly improvised, and the complicity of the participants makes it wholly convincing and riveting. Tracey Moffatt’s Australian Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1989) is a visually striking experimental piece about an aboriginal woman nursing her dying mother. Pam Tom’s Two Lies (1990), a U.S. film in black and white, focuses on the tensions between a Chinese American divorcee, who’s just undergone plastic surgery to make her eyes rounder, and her disaffected teenage daughter. Ngozi Onwurah’s English The Body Beautiful (1991) is a frank and suggestive reverie about the filmmaker herself (played by an actress), who’s the daughter of a mixed marriage, and her white mother (who plays herself). (Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W. Belmont, Friday, June 26, 7:30, 281-8788) Read more
A fascinating and highly moving documentary by Jonathan Demme about his cousin Robert Castle, whom he hadn’t seen for 30 years when he started making this film. A 60-year-old white Episcopal minister working in Harlem with a multiracial and multidenominational congregation, Castle is a passionately committed community organizer who started out in Jersey City and forged strong links with the Black Panthers and other radical organizations of the 60s and 70s. He comes across as something of a saint–unpretentious and unself-conscious, though by no means simple–and this unpreachy film, which also shows us a lot of Demme and his developing friendship with his cousin, is similarly direct and unaffected. Some of our questions about Castle’s peripatetic family life are left unanswered, and it’s not clear precisely where home movie is meant to shade off into political document, but such ambiguity carries a certain charm and conviction; at the end one simply feels grateful to have spent some time with these people (1991). (Music Box, Friday through Thursday, June 26 through July 2) Read more
Three fascinating examples of recent filmmaking in Eastern Europe (all completed in 1990) that tell us something about what it’s like to live there now. (If we had world news on TV that was worthy of the name, this is the sort of work we’d see every week.) Drahomira Vihanova’s Czech The Metamorphosis of My Friend Eva presents a striking emotional portrait of an aging, alcoholic jazz singer who was unable to perform under the communist regime. Jan Spata’s Czech Between Darkness and Light chronicles the return of Spata, a photographer, to his hometown after many years; it cuts freely between color footage and black-and-white stills, and its depictions of rural life are equally free ranging. Alexy Chanyutin’s feature-length DMB from the former Soviet Union, which I only sampled, is a beautifully shot portrait of life in the Soviet army among soldiers just back from Afghanistan–more generally it’s a highly suggestive look at life and problems in the former Soviet Union. To be presented on video in cooperation with the School of the Art Institute’s filmmaking department. (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Sunday, June 21, 4:00, 443-3737) Read more
Virtually a crash course on the most important and talented living Japanese filmmaker after Kurosawa and related aspects of contemporary Japanese politics and culture. This superb feature-length documentary made in 1984 by Paul Joyce for England’s Channel Four offers an indispensable look at a fearlessly innovative and political filmmaker who is all but unknown in this country today, thanks to the reluctance of his U.S. distributor to make such vital works as Boy, Death by Hanging, and The Ceremony available on video. Making intelligent use of Anglo-American commentators (writers Donald Richie, Roger Pulvers, and Paul Mayersberg) as well as Oshima himself, this film somehow manages to cover everything in Oshima’s career from his early youth shockers to In The Realm of the Senses and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence–including his fame as a Japanese TV personality (at the outset we see him acting in a commercial for bug spray). Essential viewing. To be shown on three-quarter-inch video. (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Saturday, June 13, 6:00, 443-3737) Read more
A must-see for Dirk Bogarde fans, and highly recommended to anyone who wants to hear an intelligent actor speak at length. This two-part British TV documentary by Paul Joyce features a fascinating discussion by Bogarde about his craft, with particularly interesting bits about Visconti’s blocking of his mise en scene to music by Mahler in Death in Venice; how Fassbinder allegedly destroyed Despair in the cutting room; the controversial early handling of a gay theme in Victim; experiences with Judy Garland and Joseph Losey; the Hollywood blacklist; and work with Bertrand Tavernier on Daddy Nostalgia, Bogarde’s farewell film. This riveting interview inspires thoughts on why this country can’t produce documentaries about film that are even a fraction as good (1991). To be shown on three-quarter-inch video. (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Saturday, June 13, 4:00, 443-3737) Read more
