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
I haven’t been able to find a scrap of information about this feature, so its title will have to stand as its calling card. 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
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
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
Woody Allen returns to his Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters mode, albeit with many fewer laughs and a completely different filmmaking stylewhich just goes to show how superficial his style usually is. The story concerns the vicissitudes of two married couples who are friends (Allen and Mia Farrow play one couple, Sydney Pollack and Judy Davis the other), and the pseudodocumentary style, which occasionally suggests certain aspects of 60s Godard, includes handheld camera movements, many jump cuts, monaural direct sound, and interviews with most of the major characters by an offscreen narrator (Jeffrey Kurland). Allen’s conception of character is as banal and shallow as ever, but the lively performances of some of his actorsmainly Davis, Pollack, and Juliette Lewis (as a creative writing student of Allen’s who has a brief flirtation with him)and the novelty of the film’s style make this more watchable than many of his features. With Liam Neeson, Blythe Danner, Lysette Anthony, Cristi Conaway, and in a cameo, fiction writer Bruce Jay Friedman (1991). (JR) Read more
If you liked the demystification of the hero in Unforgiven, you might enjoy this comedy with the same general theme written by the same screenwriter, David Webb Peoples, from a story he authored with Laura Ziskin and Alvin Sargent, directed with appropriate speed and cynicism by Stephen Frears. A small-time crook (Dustin Hoffman) on his way to the clink saves the lives of 54 passengers trapped inside a crashed plane, and a homeless derelict (Andy Garcia) decides to impersonate him in order to collect a million-dollar reward. Basically this is enjoyable Capracorn with a few dashes of Preston Sturgesthree parts Meet John Doe (with Geena Davis taking over the Barbara Stanwyck part of caustic star reporter) to two parts Hail the Conquering Heroand Hoffman extracts all the juicy ham he can out of it. The scattershot satire about the media suffers from overkill (though Chevy Chase is effective in an unbilled part as a hard-nosed editor), the movie as a whole has a slightly archaic feel (not surprising inasmuch as it’s largely built on situations and characters half a century old), and in spots there’s an irritating sentimentality and complacency about its own attack on sentimentality and complacency. But the basic messagethat heroism is a kind of role-playing created by the media for the gulliblecertainly comes across, and there’s lots of fun as well as bitter wisdom extracted from the premise. Read more
