Im Kwon-taek ‘s 1990 gangster film, set in Seoul during the Japanese occupation of Korea, is loosely based on the life of Korean statesman Du-han; apparently it’s more an action picture than a standard biopic. In Korean with subtitles. 130 min. (JR) Read more
Adapting the Patricia Highsmith thriller of the same title while transferring the action from an American small town to Vichy, Claude Chabrol returns to the mannerif not quite the distinctionof his late 60s work (e.g., La femme infidele, Le boucher). The plot concerns a solitary figure (Christophe Malavoy) fleeing a vengeful wife (Virginie Thevenet). He spies on a young woman (Mathilda May) from afar until she discovers and is drawn to him, which destroys her own relationship with her fiance (Jacques Penot). Things get much more complicated after that; Jean-Pierre Kalfon (L’amour fou) plays the police detective who eventually steps in. For viewers who enjoy the grim moral ironies of Highsmith, this can be highly recommended; those like myself who find her work gratuitously unpleasant won’t see any reason here to revise their opinion (1987). (JR) Read more
A remarkably accomplished and beautiful second feature by English playwright Stephen Poliakoff (Hidden City), this lyrical drama might be described as a period film about the present. The plot concerns an incestuous affair that suddenly develops between a grown brother (Clive Owen) and sister (Saskia Reeves) who grew up with separate parents; the sister, now married to a wealthy entrepreneur (Alan Rickman), insists on ending the affair after the brother becomes hopelessly smitten with her. There’s nothing prurient about Poliakoff’s handling of this subject, though the movie certainly has its erotic moments. The focus is rather on how we live our livesincluding the complications of sex and the chaos of real estate development, in which the brother is professionally involved: Poliakoff uses the incest theme as a pivot for an elegiac, quasi-apocalyptic, and ineffably sad reflection on life in the early 90s. (Though settings and tone are different, this film may remind one in spots of Richard Lester’s underrated Petulia.) Most of the story takes place during an unusually hot English summer, and the settings are almost surreally radiant; the acting of the three leads is edgy, powerful, and wholly convincing, with Rickman a particular standout. The haunting music is by Michael Gibbs (1991). Read more
Standard-issue trashthe sort of smirky horror exercise where the acting is supposed to be bad, which doesn’t necessarily mean it would have been good if the filmmakers had something other than facetiousness on their minds. In a small town in California, Auntie Lee (Karen Black) and her five sexy nieces have a thriving meat-pie business that depends on the nieces luring men (most of them young and handsome) to their gruesome deaths; most sequences take the form of lengthy seductions followed by decapitation, impalement, and devouring accompanied by ecstatic giggles. Director Joseph F. Robertson, who coscripted this with producer Gerald M. Steiner, is so bent on reminding us that this is meant to be camp that he doesn’t bother to make his film acceptable on any other level. Pat Morita plays the local police chief, and the Bowery Boys’ Huntz Hall turns up as a local farmer. (JR) Read more
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
What produces a skinhead is the subtle subject of Mike Leigh’s powerful and mysterious feature for British TV, though it may take you most of the film to realize it. We’re treated to the bitter inertia of a family on the dole in a cramped high rise in London’s East End, with particular emphasis on a raspy layabout (Phil Daniels) who berates and undermines his nearly catatonic kid brother (Tim Roth, who played van Gogh in Vincent and Me); a street punk; a young woman in the neighborhood; and the boys’ aunt, who has married into the middle class. Watch for an interesting early performance by Gary Oldman, as well as contributions from Marion Bailey and Alfred Molina (1983). (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, January 24, 6:00, 443-3737) Read more
Jacques Rivette’s greatest film since the 70s is one of the most penetrating examinations of the process of art making on film. It concerns the highly charged work of a figurative painter (Michel Piccoli, giving the performance of his career) with his beautiful and mainly nude model (Manon of the Spring’s Emmanuelle Beart), but also the complex input and pressures of the painter’s wife and former model (Jane Birkin), the model’s boyfriend (David Bursztein), and an art dealer who used to be involved with the painter’s wife (Gilles Arbona). The complex forces that produce art are the film’s obsessive focus, and rarely has Rivette’s use of duration to look at process been as spellbinding as it is here. The film runs for four hours, but the overall effect is mesmerizing and perpetually mysterious (as Rivette always is at his best), and not a moment is wasted. Rivette’s superb sense of rhythm and mise en scene never falters, and the plot has plenty of twists. Freely adapted from Balzac’s novella The Unknown Masterpiece by Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, and Rivette, with exquisite cinematography by William Lubtchansky, beautiful location work in the south of France (mainly a 19th-century chateau), and drawings and paintings executed by Bernard Dufour. Read more
A fascinating if numbing feature-length narrative video by David Blair with remarkable computer graphics and other special effects. The intricate science-fantasy plot, which is narrated in an offscreen monotone by Blair, involves, among many other things, a beekeeper and cinematographer (represented by a photo of William S. Burroughs) who films “the moving spirits of the dead” circa 1914; his grandson (played by Blair), half sister, and brother-in-law; the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, including the Trinity nuclear test site; the moon; the “planet of television”; the Tower of Babel; the “Garden of Eden Cave” (“a town the size of Manhattan beneath the New Mexican desert”); and the gulf war. The images obliquely illustrate the narrative, and the constant visual flux often suggests a graphic novel translated into MTV, which helps to account for the numbing effect. The results are highly watchable, though more intellectually than emotionally involving (1990). Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday and Saturday, January 17 and 18, 7:00 and 9:00, and Sunday, January 19, 5:30 and 7:30, 281-4114. Read more
A fascinating postmortem on the making of Francis Coppola’s 1979 Apocalypse Now, mainly consisting of footage shot by Eleanor Coppola in the 7Os that has been intelligently selected, augmented, and arranged by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper. Like the Coppola film itself, this documentary at times seems to value self-styled profundity and rhetoric over observation and common sense–one especially regrets the absence of any thoroughgoing political or historical critique of Apocalypse Now in relation to the Vietnam war–but the various personalities involved–including Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, Dennis Hopper, and Coppola himself–keep this compulsively watchable. Too bad that Michael Herr, who wrote Apocalypse’s effective narration after the film was shot, is overlooked in the kaleidoscopic clashes of male egos, but it’s nice to see that Orson Welles’s radio and screenplay adaptations of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness are acknowledged as precedents and probable influences. (Fine Arts) Read more
A knockout thriller that succeeds brilliantly at just about everything Scorsese’s Cape Fear only tries to do. It’s another revenge plot in which the villain (Rebecca De Mornay) attempts to destroy a family (Annabella Sciorra, Matt McCoy, Madeline Zima) from within, but there’s no pretentious art agenda on the filmmakers’ minds; they merely work the genre for all it’s worth, which proves in this case to be plenty: the suspense is masterfully controlled, and the story, which makes effective use of Seattle locations, builds to a terrifying climax. Curtis Hanson’s direction and Amanda Silver’s screenplay are both models of no-flab craft and intelligence, and all the actors (who also include Ernie Hudson and Julianne Moore) are believable from the first frame to the last. (Burnham Plaza, McClurg Court, Lincoln Village, Golf Mill, Evanston, Norridge, Hyde Park, Webster Place, Ford City) Read more
King Vidor’s 1940 adaptation of Kenneth Roberts’s book about Rogers’ Rangers opening up a trade route and triumphing over fatigue, hunger, rage, insubordination, weakness, and even cannibalism as they slaughter Indians. (The grim violence and outright racism may remind you in spots of the Vietnam sections in The Deer Hunter.) Spencer Tracy is effective as the leader and all-purpose daddy figure; Robert Young and Walter Brennan are among the greenhorn recruits. Much of this is effective in terms of action and adventure, and the color cinematography is memorable, but don’t expect an enlightened historical view. With Ruth Hussey. (JR) Read more
A genuine oddity: a 1950 adaptation of Richard Wright’s great novel of black Chicago, with the author himself as the hero, Bigger Thomas, shot in Buneos Aires by French director Pierre Chenal. Wright is clearly too old for the part, and there are many other ways in which the film can’t begin to do justice to the extraordinary power and density of the original, but it’s still a noble and interesting if highly uneven effort. With Jean Wallace, Gloria Madison, and Nicholas Joy. (JR) Read more