Performance artist Spalding Gray’s follow-up to his 1987 Swimming to Cambodia is easy and entertaining to watch, but has less thematic focus and directorial polish than its predecessor; Nick Broomfield directs this time, and though he’s resourceful, his resources clearly don’t match those of Jonathan Demme. Perhaps the overall sprawl of the material is partly to blame; the title refers to an 1,800-page novel Gray has been writing, which we see on the table in front of him, and most of the monologue is about professional activities that took Gray away from his work on it. Much of this qualifies as engaging but fairly lightweight sit-down comedy, capped by a stand-up routine in which Gray describes his experience playing the Stage Manager in a production of Our Town, complete with the negative reviews he got in the New York papers. Liberal guilt is once again a principal theme, and Gray’s approach to the subject is more playful than polemicalwhich means that we wind up feeling tweaked and tickled more often than challenged or enlightened. But his powers as a writer and performer certainly hold one’s attention. Incidentally, more than five dozen names appear in the credits of this one-man show, including Laurie Anderson (for the music) and Skip Lievsay (for the sound effects). Read more
From the Chicago Reader (June 1, 1992). — J.R.
High Spanish melodrama (1991), without the camp of a Pedro Almodovar, much less the humor of a Luis Buñuel. It’s pretty well executed for what it is, but without the sort of characters that can outlive their generic functions. During the mid-50s a young man from the provinces who’s finishing up his military service (Jorge Sanz) becomes engaged to his commandant’s virginal maid (Maribel Verdu) but then gets enmeshed in a steamy affair with his landlady (Victoria Abril), a glamorous widow with criminal connections and treacherous designs. Roughly speaking, this starts out like a Last Tango in Madrid before gravitating slowly toward James Cain country; Vicente Aranda directed and collaborated on the script. 103 min. Read more
An awkward and unsuccessful writer (Crispin Glover) who dates a playwright (Tatum O’Neal) and shares a room with an unsuccessful actor (Steven Schub) steals the poems of a deaf-mute (Matthew Hutton); claiming them as his own, he shows them to a literary agent (Rik Mayall) who is so impressed that he immediately advances the writer hundreds of dollars. It’s hard to imagine how a movie this terrible and unrealistic ever got made, much less distributed; perhaps some filmic equivalent of vanity publishing is responsible. Directed and cowritten (with Jon Zeiderman) by Jane Spencer; with Tate Donovan, John C. McGinley, Nina Siemaszko, and Carole Shelley. (JR) Read more
It’s sentimental and overlong, the period dialogue doesn’t always sound authentic, and one has to put up with some strident overplaying by Tom Hanks. But most of what makes this movie about the wartime All American Girls Professional Baseball League score in spite of such drawbacks is the way it’s been deftly structured by director Penny Marshall (Big) and writers Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel to resemble a 40s musical (albeit, somewhat anachronistically, one in ‘Scope); the rest is mainly streamlined and spirited teamwork. The more prominent ballplayers include Geena Davis, Madonna, Lori Petty, Rosie O’Donnell, Megan Cavanagh, Tracy Reiner, Bitty Schram, and Ann Cusack, and other significant cast members include Garry Marshall, Jon Lovitz, and Bill Pullman. (JR) Read more
Alan Berliner’s highly original and mysterious hour-long documentary about his maternal grandfather Joseph Cassuto, a Palestinian Jew who worked for the Japanese Cotton Trading Company in Alexandria, Egypt, moved his family to Brooklyn in 1941, and then spent most of the next 15 years in Japan. Drawing together an enormous amount of personal archival material (letters, photographs, home movies, documents) and the contrasting off-screen voices of family members (mainly disgruntled) and Japanese friends (uniformly grateful) to compose this multifaceted portrait, Berliner derives much of his cutting rhythm from the sound of a typewriter. The result is a fascinating, moving, and highly evocative work. (JR) Read more
A PBS-style documentary by Michael Apted (35 Up, Thunderheart) about the notorious Pine Ridge incident of June 1975, when two FBI agents illegally drove onto an Indian reservation and were killed in a shoot-out, along with a Native American. The deaths of the agents led to the biggest manhunt in the history of the FBI and the protracted persecution of one individual, Leonard Peltier, who’s still serving a life sentence. Narrated by executive producer Robert Redford, this is certainly compelling for the information it has to impart, and one would like to think that it might help change an intolerable situation. But the conventionality of the overall formattalking heads (some of which are fascinating), sound bites, and re-creations a la The Thin Blue Lineand the film’s tendency to turn everything into a mystery-story narrative and lose itself in trivial details render the material familiar and banal. What emerges is well-intentioned liberal head shaking, very little analysis, and no real discomfort for the spectatorin other words, business as usual (1992). (JR) 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). (JR) Read more
A fascinating and highly moving documentary by Jonathan Demme about his cousin Robert Castle, whom he hadn’t seen for 30 years before 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 saintunpretentious and unself-conscious, though by no means simpleand this unpreachy film, which also shows us a lot of Demme’s 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 for having spent some time with these people (1991). (JR) Read more
A pretty good American independent feature by Dieter Weihl about a family reunion in a desert setting. This low-key example of undershirt realism gives us an overweight Polish American TV addict (L.A. Davis) and his directionless teenage son (Joe Toppe), who are visited in their mobile home by the father’s sister (Sandi Stutz) and her punk teenage daughter (Amilia Richer-Hart) from Milwaukee. Not very much happens, apart from a discernible emotional thaw on the part of the two males. The two actresses are especially lifelike (except for a contrived monologue by the daughter during a car ride that perhaps no actress could handle), and the jazzy score by Patricia Weiss and Norbert Stachel is often striking (1989). (JR) Read more
This 1992 Eddie Murphy comedy starts out like a warmed-over Frank Sinatra vehicle of the 50s or 60s, but before long it becomes clear that Murphywho’s credited with the story that Barry W. Blaustein and David Sheffield’s script is based onis interested in critiquing, perhaps even dismantling, the narcissistic womanizer he’s been playing for years. In a rare act of deference, he even lets himself get blown off the screen by the galvanic Robin Givens (A Rage in Harlem), who plays his boss at an ad agency, and before it’s all over Halle Berry gives him a run for his movie too. The general idea is to exploit a certain amount of role reversal, and Reginald Hudlin, who directed House Party, does a fairly good job of making this fun. There are also a couple of spirited and raunchy turns by Grace Jones and Eartha Kitt, and David Alan Grier and Martin Lawrence are around as the hero’s best friends. (JR) Read more
This campy, melodramatic 1968 Japanese thriller in ‘Scope and color with its leading character in drag isn’t even a patch on Kon Ichikawa’s extraordinary 1963 An Actor’s Revenge, which has the same characteristics and strikes me as infinitely more worthy of revival. But if you’re looking for something weird and nutty, this might suit. The famous female impersonator Akihiro Maruyama stars as a jewel thief named Black Lizard, who’s pursued by a detective (Isao Kimura) and interested in doing perverse things with the body of a jeweler’s daughter (Kikko Matsuoka). The story was adapted by Masahige Narusawa from a novel by Rampo Edogawa, which was earlier adapted for the stage by Yukio Mishima, who appears here very briefly as a human statue owned by the thief. (JR) Read more
More of the same, but nowhere near as good (funny, disturbing, obsessive) as the uneven original, revealing arrested development on every level. As villain, Danny DeVito’s Penguin is a pale substitute for Jack Nicholson’s Joker, coming across more as a sketch for a character than a fully realized portrait; ditto for Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman, who promises a lot more than she delivers. Both characters are Jekyll-and-Hyde schizos like Batman/Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton again), but it appears the filmmakers were so busy plotting the obligatory special effects that they never got around to developing these three leads past the drawing-board stage. The pictorial effects all seem to come straight out of badly reproduced stills from other movies (Batman, Metropolis, Citizen Kane, Blade Runner), and there’s practically no suspense. Tim Burton directs with a strong sense of once more around the block from a script by Daniel Waters and Sam Hamm that plays suspiciously like a first draft, and Danny Elfman did the music again. Consider, though: this could have been much worse than it is and still have made piles of money, so why make it even halfway decent? With Christopher Walken, Michael Gough, Pat Hingle, and Michael Murphy (1992). (JR) Read more
Engaging and lively Disney 1949 cartoon diptych adapting Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. (JR) Read more
Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman star in old-fashioned hokum on a very high level–the sort of thing Hollywood used to do well and more often–in a Ron Howard blockbuster about Irish immigration to the U.S. in the 1890s. Written by Bob Dolman and Howard and shot with Panavision super-70 camera equipment using 65-millimeter stock, this epic utopian fantasy about love overcoming class barriers (complete with a passing nod to It Happened One Night) is designed like a triptych, beginning in rural Ireland (where tenant farmer Cruise falls in with Kidman, the rebellious daughter of his wealthy landlord, when she decides to flee to the U.S.), continuing in Boston (where they share the same room, posing as brother and sister, and he triumphs for a while as a boxer), and concluding in the Oklahoma Territory (where they proceed separately to stake their claims). Never afraid of excess, Howard excels at giving imaginative density to the Boston locations and exploiting the chemistry between the two leads; he also shows a nice aptitude for story telling. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s mere overreaching and what’s nostalgia for Hollywood’s former grandiloquence–Howard certainly seems to love his fancy corkscrew crane shots–but for me this is the most enjoyable of his features to date. Read more
I’ve never been much of a Paul Cox fan, but this feature about a fiercely independent and passionate 79-year-old woman in Melbourne, Australia, is something rather special, largely because Cox regular Sheila Florance–who, like the character she plays, was dying of cancer over the course of the film–is magnificent. Affirmative without being sentimental, this is a deeply absorbing movie with no false notes or wasted motion; with Gosia Dobrowolska, Norman Kaye, and Chris Haywood (1991). (Fine Arts) Read more
