Three coke dealersone black (Michael Beach), one white (cowriter Billy Bob Thornton), and one with a racially mixed background (Cynda Williams)flee a deal that entails the slaughter of many innocents in South Central Los Angeles. They head for Star City, Arkansas, the woman’s hometown, where the local sheriff (Bill Paxton), working with two LA cops (Jim Metzler and Earl Billings), hopes to catch them. There’s plenty to be impressed by while watching this 1992 noirish thriller, cowritten by Tom Epperson and directed by Carl Franklin, but not a great deal of aftertaste. 105 min. (JR) Read more
A hallucinating recluse (Ted Raimi) in LA who doesn’t leave his apartment falls in love with an abandoned woman (Valley Girl’s Deborah Foreman) who thinks she brings bad luck in this independent feature made by a number of people who have worked on the films of Sam Raimi (Ted’s brother). Most of the effort here seems trained on tatty horror-movie foddermostly special effects for the hero’s obscurely connected hallucinations involving spiders and street rappersbut it’s the charm of the youthful leads that makes this intermittently watchable (1991). (JR) Read more
One of the earliest of the Disney true-life adventures (1953), this won an Academy Award for best documentary, in spite (or because) of its celebrated use of square-dance music with footage of scorpions. James Algar directed. (JR) Read more
More of the same, though a lot coarser than its immediate predecessor, and the characters and situations have now calcified to the point where they’re simply sitcom staples. LA cops Mel Gibson and Danny Glover are back and so is Joe Pesci as former federal witness Leo Getz, now a Beverly Hills entrepreneur. They and an internal affairs detective (Rene Russo) are after a crooked former cop (Stuart Wilson) who’s selling confiscated guns to street gangs. A hyped-up movie in love with its own cuteness, this shows gratuitous police violence with a relish that would’ve warmed the cockles of Daryl Gates’s heart; How to Have Fun in a Police State would not be an inappropriate subtitle. Once again, Richard Donner directed from a script by Jeffrey Boam, cowritten this time by Robert Mark Kamen. (JR) Read more
Twenty-seven shorts from Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK, the U.S., and the former Soviet Union. Apart from being an enjoyable selection, this affords an interesting glimpse of what people from other countries think about. Highlights include three very personal tributes to Tex Avery (by John Schnall, Paul de Nooijer, and Gavrilo Gnatovich), a hilarious political allegory from Bulgaria featuring tin cans, and winners of an MTV competition about world problems. (JR) Read more
Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman star in old-fashioned hokum on a very high level. This Ron Howard blockbuster about Irish immigration to the U.S. in the 1890s is the sort of thing Hollywood used to do well and more often. 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 storytelling. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s mere overreaching and what’s nostalgia for Hollywood’s former grandiloquenceHoward certainly seems to love his fancy corkscrew crane shotsbut this remains perhaps the most enjoyable of his features. Read more
Rock performer and composer John Mellencamp directs and stars in a feature about his hometown, Seymour, Indiana, that was written by his longtime friend Larry McMurtry. Mellencamp plays a California-based country music singer who comes home with his wife (Mariel Hemingway) for his grandfather’s 80th birthday and becomes involved in the various problems of his family and his old friends; with Claude Akins, Kay Lenz, Dub Taylor, and Larry Crane. Curiously, although this film was well received by some critics in New York and elsewhere when it opened, it was unloaded locally without press screenings at second-run theaters; once again the message appears to be that Chicago doesn’t count in the wider scheme of things. Read more
A 61-minute Universal programmer from 1943, directed by Edward Dmytryk, in which John Carradine turns an orangutan into a beautiful woman (Acquanetta) who goes nuts because of unrequited love and kills a lot of men. This was popular enough to spawn two sequels, Jungle Woman and Jungle Captive; with Evelyn Ankers and Milburn Stone. (JR) Read more
Although there’s a lot of unpleasantness here to maintain the tradition of this SF thriller’s predecessors, one finds neither the high-tech effects of the first nor the quality direction of the second, and few of the thrills in either; just about all that music-video veteran David Fincher has to show for himself in his feature debut is clumsy elliptical cutting and alien-point-of-view shots. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is the only human survivor when her rocket ship crash-lands on a remote lice-ridden planet containing a religious order of maximum security male prisoners; a deadly extraterrestrial winds up on the planet, too, and menaces everybody in sight. It isn’t hard to figure out the rest, but I found it pretty boring. Written by David Giler, Walter Hill, Larry Ferguson, and Vincent Ward; with Charles S. Dutton, Charles Dance, Paul McGann, Brian Glover, and Lance Henriksen (1992). (JR) Read more
A fascinating German documentary by Sybille Schonemann about her return to the East German penitentiary where she spent a year as a political prisoner before Germany’s reunification. In addition to restaging portions of her own arrest and incarceration, she films her confrontations with the officials who brought unspecified charges against her, the secret police who arrested her, and the prison matrons and warden. It’s as if Kafka’s Joseph K. went back and tried to conduct rational and even-tempered interviews with the bureaucrats who condemned him–most of the people she speaks to are friendly, vague, evasive, and forgetful, and something about the state apparatus they were a part of courses through the film like a chilly draft (1991). A Chicago premiere, cosponsored by the Goethe-Institut; Schonemann will be present at both Saturday screenings. (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Saturday, May 2, 6:00 and 8:15; Sunday, May 3, 1:00 and 3:00; and Tuesday, May 5, 6:00; 443-3737) Read more
Jon Jost’s ravishing independent feature about art, money, and loneliness in Manhattan–beautifully shot in ‘Scope by Jost himself and with a wonderful, Gil Evans-ish big-band jazz score by Jon A. English–can be viewed as a kind of companion piece to Jost’s earlier Rembrandt Laughing (1988), which dealt with several friends and acquaintances over several months in San Francisco. The main characters here are three young women who share a spacious apartment–Emmanuelle Chaulet (from Rohmer’s Boyfriends and Girlfriends), Katherine Bean, and Grace Phillips–and a Wall Street broker (Stephen Lack) who loves the Vermeers in the Metropolitan Museum. As in Jost’s other features, the narrative is elliptically constructed–the film seems more concerned with evoking a place, time, and milieu than with a dramatically shaped story–but there’s still a lot of lyrical passion and drama in the sounds, images, and characters themselves (1990). This Chicago premiere complements the comprehensive Jost retrospective that begins next week at Chicago Filmmakers. (Music Box, Friday through Thursday, May 1 through 7) Read more
This may be the most enjoyable animated feature I’ve seen since Walt Disney died–a passionate ecological fable that combines more wit and wonder than the entire output of some animation studios. Basically a collaborative effort between Australians and Americans, directed by Bill Kroyer (a Disney-trained animator) from a script by Jim Cox based on the FernGully stories by Australian writer Diana Young, it benefits greatly from the voices of such actors as Robin Williams, Tim Curry, Samantha Mathis, Christian Slater, Grace Zabriskie, Cheech Marin, and Tommy Chong, as well as from a canny sense of how to use them. The simple story involves the multiple creatures of an enormous rain forest and the grim encroachments of humans, one of whom gets shrunk to insect size and learns what “toxic love” (as one of the songs calls it) is all about. The rain forest itself is invested with an imaginative depth and variety and a sense of immensity that hark back to the best early Disney features, and the expressionist depiction of deforestation and pollution is equally rich and potent. The score (by several hands) isn’t as memorable as Beauty and the Beast’s, but the dialogue is arguably even funnier. In other words, you should see this. Read more
Larry Fishburne plays a cop who poses as a Hollywood drug dealer in order to infiltrate and destroy a cocaine cartel, but gradually discovers that the U.S. State Department has other political priorities and agendas in mind. Amply fulfilling the promise recently shown in A Rage in Harlem, director Bill Duke does a terrific job in spelling out the grim implications of this exceptionally violent picture, scripted by Henry Bean and Michael Tolkin (The Rapture). What emerges is a powerhouse thriller full of surprises, original touches, and rare political lucidity, including an impressive performance by Jeff Goldblum as a yuppie Jewish gangster. With Victoria Dillard, Charles Martin Smith, Sydney Lassick, Clarence Williams III, Gregory Sierra, and Roger Guenveur Smith. (Starts Wednesday, April 15, Hyde Park, Broadway, Burnham Plaza, Chestnut Station, Golf Glen, Plaza) Read more
After the disappointing Blaze, writer-director Ron Shelton is 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 occasioned by the teaming up of 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. But if Shelton’s flair for fancy dialogue and his preoccupation with scoring often make him seem like the Preston Sturges of southern jive, it’s a pity that he doesn’t seem to 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. (Biograph, Bricktown Square, Burnham Plaza, Chestnut Station, Golf Glen, Plaza, Evanston, Hyde Park, Ford City) Read more
It’s tempting to call this low-budget, independently made feature by Chicago stand-up comic Greg Glienna (who directed and cowrote the script) the ultimate worst-case-scenario comedy. Glienna plays an unassuming young man in advertising who drives from Chicago to Indiana with his fiancee (Jacqueline Cahill) to meet her folks (Dick Galloway and Carol Whelan) and sister (Mary Ruth Clarke, Glienna’s cowriter). What follows is a cascade of nightmares that may not always make you laugh but will impress you with the singularity of Glienna’s dark approach. Some of these nightmares work better than others–I could have done without the encounter with the fiancee’s former boyfriend, and there are times when the bits about the maniacal star struck sister seem overworked–but you’re still likely to be taken by the purity and relentlessness of this picture’s vision (1991). (Music Box, Friday through Thursday, April 3 through 9) Read more
