Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1971 film of ten tales from the Boccaccio classic represents the first part of his celebrated trilogy of life, which also includes the less enjoyable The Canterbury Tales and the more enjoyable (though equally questionable) Arabian Nights. Working with an Italian classic, he seems less inclined to transform his material, though what emerges is entertaining, if only in a mild wayrather like Playboy’s Ribald Tales. With Franco Citti and Pasolini regular Ninetto Davoli. In Italian with subtitles. 112 min. (JR) Read more
Working almost entirely without dialogue, Michael Bartlett’s first feature, made in West Berlin, sounds like a very strange black comedy indeed. A park cleaner adopts a department store mannequin as his sole companion, but loses the mannequin’s right arm. A boutique owner who used to play concert piano finds it and uses it to replace his own missing right arm (lost in an accident), and it magically springs to life. Featuring music by director Bartlett’s employer, Berlin’s Radio Symphony Orchestra, the film is said to be modeled after Berlin chamber drama of the 20s. Read more
A dense and subtle masterpiece from Iran (1990, 97 min.) by Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry), this documentaryor is it pseudodocumentary?follows the trial of an unemployed film buff in Tehran who impersonated acclaimed filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf and became intimate with a well-to-do family while pretending to prepare a film that was to feature them. Kiarostami persuades all the major people involved to reenact what happened, finally bringing the real Makhmalbaf together with his impersonator for a highly emotional exchange. Much of the implicit comedy here comes from the way cinema changes and inflects the value and nature of everythingthe original scam, the trial, the documentary Kiarostami is making. Werner Herzog has called this the greatest of all documentaries about filmmaking, and he may not be far offif only because no other film does more to interrogate certain aspects of the documentary form itself. In Farsi with subtitles. (JR) Read more
Jean Renoir’s first sound feature (1931) and one of his best, about a bored banker (Michel Simon) who becomes hopelessly smitten with a prostitute (Janie Mareze). This was later remade by Fritz Lang as Scarlet Street, a powerful film that nevertheless can’t hold a candle to the original. Strongly recommended. In French with subtitles. 100 min. (JR) Read more
Like so many post-Val Lewton horror films, this 1992 feature starts out promisingly while the plot is mainly a matter of suggestion, but gradually turns gross and obvious as the meanings become literal and unambiguous. A University of Illinois grad student (Virginia Madsen) doing a dissertation on urban folklorespecifically on a legend about a killer with a hook (Tony Todd) associated with the Cabrini-Green public housing projectventures into the project for interviews and photographs and gets more than she bargained for, etc, etc. Adapted by writer-director Bernard Rose from a short story by executive producer Clive Barker that originally had an English setting, this depends for much of its shock and suspense on demonizing ghetto life beyond its real-life horrors, which is another way of saying that it exploits white racism to produce some of its kicks. Philip Glass contributed one of his monotonous hack scores; with Xander Berkeley and Kasi Lemmons. 93 min. (JR) Read more
A former archaeologist and forger of relics (Barton Fink’s David Warrilow), awaiting the arrival of a former colleague (film critic Berenice Reynaud), revises the story he plans to tell her about the disappearance of a Mayan hieroglyphic tablet from an excavation in the Yucatan many years before. Writer-director Leandro Katz, an Argentinean now based in New York, has been making experimental shorts since the 70s, but this ambitious and daunting first feature represents a fresh and exciting departure. A metaphysical puzzler that suggests at times a novella by Adolfo Bioy-Casares adapted by Alain Resnais, it straddles the space between memory and fantasy, often suggesting a Victorian fever dream. You might find the proceedings a bit heavy and dry in spots, but the verbal and filmic quotes from Dreyer’s Vampyr are far from superfluous–this film too is conceived as a series of teasing question marks. With Stefan Brecht and Andrew Sharp; the haunting score is by David Darling. (Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W. Belmont, Saturday, September 19, 8:00, 281-8788) Read more
In the Gospel According to Barry Levinson, it would appear that the universe — i.e., the world, i.e., America, i.e., Hollywood, i.e., Levinson’s own brain –is nothing but one gigantic toy factory. When factory owner (Donald O’Connor) dies, he leaves the business not to his elfin and playful son (Robin Williams) but to his military brother (Michael Gambon), who proceeds to install security systems and manufacture war toys. This is a movie Levinson wanted to make for a dozen years, and it’s possible that in the long career slide from the promise and coherence of Diner he’s forgotten why. Maybe with a smaller budget and less solipsism at its center this project might have retained certain possibilities. But in its present monstrous, cacophonous, and semicoherent form it constitutes a prime example of everything it is attempting to satirize. Coscripted by Valerie Curtin; with Joan Cusack, Robin Wright, LL Cool J, Arthur Malet, and Jack Warden (1992). (JR)
A rather brilliant if overloaded pseudodocumentary satire in the mode of Real Life and This Is Spinal Tap, Tim Robbins’s first feature as writer-director is an angry catalog of recent media abuses in the realm of politics. (Properly speaking, there are no real characters here, only types and images, which is part of the point.) Robbins plays a folksinging Pennsylvania conservative running for the U.S. Senate against fuddy-duddy liberal incumbent Brickley Paiste (Gore Vidal) shortly before the Persian Gulf war. While it’s certainly true, as most reviewers have been claiming, that this movie does a devastating job on Reagan and Bush’s values and corruption, it offers an equally sharp critique of various liberal politicians. (Robbins may believe everything Paiste says, but even the lampoonish name shows that we’re not supposed to take him entirely straight, and Vidal’s bow ties and improvised oratory add immeasurably to the parody.) The functioning of media itself is Robbins’s true subject, and it’s exciting to see him appropriating some of the ideas of his mentor Robert Altman and giving them more bite than Altman ever did (not only in Tanner ’88 and The Player, but also in Nashville). Robbins is attempting too much here, but the 70 percent or so that he brings off borders at times on the breathtaking. Read more
A highly distinguished and immensely enjoyable selection of 13 Warner Brothers cartoons made between 1948 and 1956, 9 of them by Chuck Jones. Leading off the program is Lumberjack Rabbit (1953), the only Warners cartoon in 3-D, and more a curiosity than a classic. The eyepoppers include two masterpieces of the same year, the modernist Duck Amuck and the wildly futurist Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2 Century, as well as one of the most beautiful Road Runner cartoons (the 1956 Gee Whiz-z-z-z), a Tweety Pie cartoon in which Sylvester loses all nine of his lives (Friz Freleng’s Satan’s Waitin’, 1954), and two hilarious character items from 1951, one starring the underrated Foghorn Leghorn (Robert McKimson’s Leghorn Swoggled), the other featuring the Three Bears on Father’s Day (A Bear for Punishment). There’s also Freleng’s pretty good Curtain Razor (1949), a Porky Pig version of Broadway Danny Rose before the fact. The others are simply OK: Freleng’s Hare Do (1948), Bully for Bugs (1953), Feed the Kitty (1952), Rabbit Seasoning (1952), and One Froggy Evening (1955). (Music Box, Friday through Thursday, September 4 through 10) Read more
Far and away the best SF movie of the 80s, Ridley Scott’s visionary look at Los Angeles in the year 2019a singular blend of grime and glitter that captures both the horror and the allure of Reagan-era capitalism with the claustrophobic textures of a Sternberg filmwas a critical and commercial flop when it first appeared (1982). Loosely adapted from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the film follows the hero (Harrison Ford) as he tracks down and kills replicants, or androids. Much of the film’s erotic charge and moral and ideological ambiguity stems from the fact that these characters are very nearly the only ones we care about. (We never know for sure whether the hero is a replicant himself; in the director’s cut version that uncertainty is even greater.) The grafting of 40s hard-boiled detective story with SF thriller creates some dysfunctional overlaps, and the movie loses some force whenever violence takes over, yet this remains a truly extraordinary, densely imagined version of both the future and the present, with a look and taste all its own. With Rutger Hauer, Edward James Olmos, Joe Turkel, and William J. Sanderson. R, 112 min. (JR) Read more
Robert Redford plays a 60s radical hired to penetrate and test security systems with an eccentric team of expertsincluding a CIA veteran (Sidney Poitier), a computer whiz (River Phoenix), a gadget man (Dan Aykroyd), and a blind audio expert (David Strathairn). Forced to participate in a covert operation, they wind up enlisting the hero’s former girlfriend (Mary McDonnell) and matching wits with a friend of his from college (Ben Kingsley). It’s questionable whether this 1992 caper movie and thriller by Field of Dreams director Phil Alden Robinson (with help from producers Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes, who collaborated with Robinson on the script) is art, but it’s certainly well-crafted entertainment on a very high level, full of humor and character and with nice election-year running gags. Recommended. 125 min. (JR) Read more
A working-class Jew from Scranton (Brendan Fraser) gets a football scholarship to an exclusive boys school in rural Massachusetts in 1955, and finds himself confronted by anti-Semitism. Produced by the calculating and often ideologically crass Sherry Lansing and Stanley R. Jaffe (Fatal Attraction, Black Rain, The Accused), and directed by Robert Mandel from a script by Dick Wolf and Darryl Ponicsan, this is a bewildering mixture of fairly accomplished storytelling (I enjoyed it more than Dead Poets Society, which isn’t saying a lot), awkward contrivances in the script, and lies in the overall conception so egregious they undercut any pretensions the film might have to social seriousness. By far the worst of these lies is the notion that being Jewish at an expensive prep school is difficult in a way being working-class is not. (The film tells us again and again, with a kind of compulsion that seems demented, that class bias is not only inconsequential and unrelated to prejudice but nonexistent.) With Chris O’Donnell, Andrew Lowery, Matt Damon, Randall Batinkoff, Amy Locane, Peter Donat, Ed Lauter, and Kevin Tighe. (JR) Read more
A 1992 movie version of Mbongeni Ngema’s inspirational stage musical about the struggle of Soweto high school students against apartheid, starring Whoopi Goldberg as a progressive teacher and Leleti Khumalo as the title heroine, one of her pupils. Apart from functioning as a rudimentary history lesson, this basically aims at uplift more than edification, and does a pretty good job of it. With Miriam Makeba, John Kani, and Dumisani Dlamini; directed by Darrell James Roodt, and filmed on location in South Africa. PG-13, 115 min. (JR) Read more
James Benning’s 1991 experimental feature, an account of a cross-country motorbike trip with continuously moving narrative subtitles that are most often either ahead of or behind the images. Difficult to digest as a whole but fascinating to grapple with, this film is rich with memories, political reflections, portraits of friends and family members, and comments on what’s been happening to this country. I wanted it to be a film of one-night stands, Benning has said, a statement that’s borne out by the dislocations and discontinuitiesas well as the locations and continuities, which include both flashbacks and flash-forwards. 87 min. (JR) Read more
