Like Gone With the Wind, Chen Kaige’s 1993 blockbusterhalf a century of contemporary Chinese history (1925-’77) seen through the lives of two Peking Opera actors and a former prostituteis worth seeing largely for its pizzazz: riveting performances, epic sweep and storytelling, bold and melodramatic use of color, and a capacity to generalize suggestively about large historical events. But this approach has limitations. The rather gingerly treatment of a lead character’s homosexuality, while somewhat taboo breaking for a big-budget Chinese production, tends toward inscrutability, and the emphasis on violence in the early opera-training sequences sometimes has the effect of inflated rhetoric. Nevertheless, this is entertaining filmmaking on a grand scale. With Leslie Cheung, Zhang Fengyi, and Gong Li; adapted by Lilian Lee and Lu Wei from Lee’s best-selling novel. Despite having protested the Chinese censor’s cuts, the distributor Miramax induced the director to cut 14 minutes from the U.S. prints, making this 155-minute version even shorter than the censored one. (JR) Read more
In Los Angeles in the year 1996, a police sergeant (Sylvester Stallone) convicted of involuntary manslaughter and a psychopathic criminal (Wesley Snipes) are both frozen into cryogenic stasis for rehabilitation. They’re unfrozen in the year 2032, when society, lorded over by someone called Raymond Cocteau (Nigel Hawthorne), has become virtually nonviolent, and a police officer (Sandra Bullock) decides that a 90s cop is needed to defeat a 90s criminal. Would-be satirist Daniel Waters (Heathers, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, Hudson Hawk) scripted this 1993 picture, and nearly all the SF premises are accorded the status of Andrew Dice Clay one-linerswhich means that they, along with the characters, keep changing from one scene to the next. Lots of plate glass gets broken, and there’s a fine warehouse explosion in the openingif that’s what you’re looking for. TV commercial director Marco Brambilla is credited with putting the actors through their paces, and Peter M. Lenkov and Robert Reneau share the writing credit. (JR) Read more
The Chinese title of Dai Sijie’s semiautobiographical 1989 feature means bull sheds, or rehabilitation centers. At the onset of the Cultural Revolution, a 13-year-old boy momentarily disrupts the local propaganda of his small town by playing a pop record (actually a love song from the classic 1937 Shanghai film Street Angels) as a way of flirting with a girl in the courtyard below; as a consequence he’s sent to a remote labor camp in the Mountains of Eternal Life. Dai Sijie, trained in France, filmed in the French Pyrenees with a nonprofessional cast of Chinese and Vietnamese emigres; he makes the most of his spectacular settings and extracts from this story not so much a grim survival tale as a nostalgic and poetic idyll about childhood freedoma sort of Chinese Huckleberry Finn with a monk on the mountainside taking the nurturing and sacrificial role of Jim. Hampered at times by awkward performances, this is still a worthy companion to The Blue Kite and Farewell My Concubine as a contemporary reassessment of the Cultural Revolution, with an evocative and haunting lyricism all its own. (JR) Read more
Shot mainly in Minnesota over two and a half years, this independent first feature by Daniel Appleby, for all its failings (unfunny jokes about failed suicides, some strained flashbacks and daydreams, overplayed sex and violence for giggly John Waters effects), gets somewhat better as it proceeds. The main characters are a battered wife (Ginger Lynn Allen), her abusive husband (Chris Mulkey), the wife’s female lover (Elizabeth Saltarrelli), and a traumatized cuckold (Christopher Denton) obsessed with suicide whom the wife’s lover treats as a friend and sidekick. In a desperate effort to cure the battered wife of her dependency on her husband, the lover kidnaps her with the aid of her friend, and they drive her cross-country to a deprogrammer (Karen Black). If you buy all the strained efforts to be outrageous, this is a reasonably watchable, quirky road movie. (JR) Read more
I never saw the original TV sitcom, which ran from 1962 to ’71, but this godawful retooling with a new castJim Varney as Jed, Diedrich Bader as Jethro, Erika Eleniak as Elly May, and Cloris Leachman as Granny, not to mention Lily Tomlin, Rob Schneider, Lea Thompson, Dabney Coleman, and, in walk-ons, Dolly Parton and Zsa Zsa Gabordoesn’t make me feel the least bit culturally deprived. Director Penelope Spheeris brings the same dogged cheerfulness to the material that she brought to Wayne’s World, but since the comedy here is predicated on an audience’s feeling of superiority to everyone on-screen, it made me long for the wit and satire of Al Capp. Four writers worked on the script, and they all should hang their heads in shame. (JR) Read more
Directed by and starring Stavros Tornes, this unconventional, mystical 1982 Greek feature transports its protagonist, who hopes to buy a special horse from Gypsies in northern Greece, on an odyssey through time and space; with Eleni Maniati. Read more
The last film of both director Mark Robson and actor Robert Shaw (1979), and not the best of either, though the distinctive, talented Abraham Polonsky is credited with the script, an adaptation of a Colin Forbes novel. A rather lackluster spy thriller set largely on a train running from Milan to Rotterdam, it also features Lee Marvin, Linda Evans, Maximilian Schell, Joe Namath, Mike Connors, and Horst Buchholz. Because Shaw died during shooting, most of his lines have apparently been dubbed. (JR) Read more
The first feature of Martin Bell, director of the documentary Streetwise, about street kids in Seattle, which was nominated for an Oscar. Jeff Bridges is as impressive as usual, playing a convict fresh out of prison and determined to go straight who reluctantly agrees to take in his son (Edward Furlong) when the boy turns up on his doorstep in Seattle. The script, by Peter Silverman, generally does a good job depicting what living on the edge is like, moving along at a fairly lifelike and uneventful pace, so it’s a pity that the plot culminates in a slew of melodramatic contrivances that leave a lot of strands hanging. The interesting secondary cast includes Lucinda Jenney, Don Harvey, and Tracey Kapisky. (JR) Read more
This 1993 sequel starts off with the same sort of hard-sell blackout gags as its predecessor, most of them built around the premise of Gomez (Raul Julia) and Morticia (Anjelica Huston) having another baby. But once Joan Cusack enters the picture as a nanny-cum-serial-killer/gold digger with her eye trained on Fester (Christopher Lloyd) things get livelier, and by the time the movie reaches its centerpieceWednesday (Christina Ricci) and Pugsley (Jimmy Workman) are being shipped off to summer campthe comedy has moved into high gear and become one of the funniest, most mean-spirited satirical assaults on sunny American values since the salad days of W.C. Fields. Paul Rudnick wrote the script, Barry Sonnenfeld directed, and Carol Kane costars as Granny. (JR) Read more
An entertaining if somewhat uneven departure by Mohsen Makhmalbaf–perhaps the most versatile contemporary Iranian director, and certainly one of the most talented, prolific, and controversial–this 1992 film can be regarded in part as a kind of peace offering to the Iranian government after the banning of his two previous features (loosely comparable as a gesture to The Story of Qiu Ju as a follow-up to the banned films of Zhang Yimou). A fantasy and comedy about the birth of Iranian cinema, full of whimsical special effects and wacky magical-realism conceits, this is centered on an early cinematographer (Mehdi Hashemi)–modeled loosely and rather awkwardly on Chaplin’s tramp figure–who introduces movies to the Persian court, gradually winning over the shah (Ezatollah Entezami) to the new medium once the ruler falls for an actress (Fatemeh Motamed-Aria) who literally drops from the screen into the palace. Quirkily inventive and unpredictable, the film concludes with a sentimental anthology of clips celebrating the history of Iranian cinema that calls Oscar night to mind; before this, much more interesting uses are made of a silent film identified by Makhmalbaf as the first Iranian movie, Ebrahim Khan’s Hajagha, the Film Actor. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, October 1, 6:00, and Sunday, October 3, 7:00, 443-3737. Read more
Robert De Niro’s honorable directorial debut takes on Scorsese material–Chazz Palminteri adapting his own play about growing up Italian in the Bronx during the 60s–without copying Scorsese’s style; the results may be soft in spots, but it’s encouraging to see De Niro going his own way. The narrator-hero, seen at the ages of 9 and 17 (when he’s played by Lillo Brancato), oscillates between two father figures, a local gang boss (Palminteri) and his law-abiding, bus-driving father (De Niro). Once local racism comes into the picture, the moral distinctions between these parental guides become a lot more ambiguous and complex than one might initially suppose. Despite some sentimentality and occasional directorial missteps, this is a respectable piece of work–evocative, very funny in spots, and obviously keenly felt. With Francis Capra, Taral Hicks, and Katherine Narducci. Hyde Park, Norridge, Old Orchard, Webster Place, Ford City, Lincoln Village, North Riverside, Water Tower. Read more
