Some Hitchcock esoterica from 1930, shot at the studios of British International Pictures at Elstreean all-star vaudeville and revue entertainment apparently intended as an English equivalent of early sound show-biz anthologies such as The King of Jazz and The Hollywood Revue of 1929. Hitchcock is credited with directing the sketches and other interpolated items. Tommy Handley serves as host to about a dozen performers borrowed from current West End musicals, including xylophonist Teddy Brown and his orchestra, the Three Eddies tap-dancing in blackface, Helen Burnell and the Adelphi Girls, and comic and singer Will Fyffe. Donald Calthorp and Anna May Wong contribute a comedy skit about The Taming of the Shrew. (JR) Read more
The first documentary of Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan), made with British money in 1992, is a predictable 50-minute account of her return at age 40 to Huntingdon Valley, a Philadelphia suburb, to look up her old girlfriends and reminisce about what it was like to be a well-to-do Jewish female teenager. It’s backed up by the usual postmodernist trimmingsmainly corny found footage from the 60s and home movies, though also some clips from Seidelman’s underrated She-Devil. None of the analysis, if you want to call it that, digs very deep; in place of it we get an assumption of entitlement that seems to go with the environment. (JR) Read more
It’s hard to think of a movie my feelings have been more divided on. An action adventure directed by ace craftsman Renny Harlin, in spectacular mountain settings (supposedly the Rockies, though most of the picture was filmed in Italy), this is often breathtaking and beautifully put together; the action never flags, and despite the presence of Sylvester Stallone (who wrote the silly boy’s fantasy of a script with Michael France), sheepdog expressions and all, the movie comes across as if somebody half-believed in it. On the other hand, the brutality and sadism it delivers at every opportunity, which we’re supposed to take for granted as part of the fun, left me feeling that any civilization that can create such an entertainment may not deserve to survive; except for our recent turkey shoots in Panama and the Persian Gulf, savagery has seldom been celebrated as shamelessly or as disgustingly. Maybe the way those scenic mountain vistas recall the pre-Nazi star vehicles of Leni Riefenstahl isn’t just coincidence: the movie seeks to make proto-Nazi thugs out of all of us. With John Lithgow, Michael Rooker, Janine Turner, Rex Linn, Caroline Goodall, Paul Winfield, and Ralph Waite. (JR) Read more
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 masterpiece, his last silent, follows the plight of a murderer caught between her blackmailer and her detective boyfriend. For all the experimental interest of the sound version that followed (the first full-length talkie released in England), this is more fluid and accomplished. Apart from two suspenseful set piecesan attempted date rape in an artist’s studio that ends with the murder of the artist-rapist, and a chase through the British Museum, Hitchcock’s first giddy desecration of a national monumentwhat most impresses is the masterful movement back and forth between subjective and objective modes of storytelling, as well as the pungent uses of diverse London settings. As someone who’s always preferred Lang’s treatment of serial killers to Hitchcock’s, I would opt for this thriller over the much better known The Lodger as Hitchcock’s best silent picture, rivaled only by his less characteristic but formally inventive The Ring. 96 min. (JR) Read more
A reflection on last year’s riot in Los Angeles put together for the grass-roots TV series Not Channel Zero–The Revolution, Televised and produced by Black Planet Productions, an inventive New York media collective with an afrocentric perspective and a refreshing way of combining aesthetic imagination with political savvy. However incendiary it may sound, its “Top 11 Reasons to Loot or Riot” is actually a model of reasoned analysis, which can also be said of many of the other discourses featured. A member of the Black Planet collective will be present for a discussion. Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W. Belmont, Friday, April 30, 8:00, 281-8788. Read more
A four-hour film about modern China made in 1972 by Michelangelo Antonioni. Though I’ve only been able to sample it, I believe it’s one of the very few comprehensive and serious Western documentaries on the subject. (The only other one that I’m aware of is Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan’s equally scarce six-part, 12-hour How Yukong Moved the Mountains, made four years later.) While the Chinese government invited Antonioni to make this film, and Western viewers at the time regarded it as a sympathetic portrayal, the results was widely denounced by the Chinese when it first appeared–a fascinating instance of radically divergent interpretations of the same images and camera angles. It now appears that the denunciation was partially dictated by government policies that had relatively little to do with Antonioni, and it’s worth pointing out that the Chinese offered a public apology to the filmmaker in 1980. For the past two decades or so this work has been completely unavailable in the U.S., and it still has no distributor, so this may well be your only chance to see it. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Sunday, May 2, 1:30, and Thursday, May 6, 6:00, 443-3737. Read more
The Italian title of this lovely, rambling feature by Gianni Amelio (Open Doors) translates unidiomatically as “The Children Thief,” and is undoubtedly meant to remind us of the 1948 film The Bicycle Thief. The “thief” in question is actually a young carabiniere officer (Enrico Lo Verso) based in Milan who’s given the job of escorting an 11-year-old girl (Valentina Scalici) and her 10-year-old brother (Giuseppe Ieracitano) to a religious home after their mother is arrested for forcing the daughter into prostitution. After the home turns them away the officer has to bring them to a reform school in Sicily, but he winds up taking his time about it–stopping off at his family home en route and finding other distractions. The biggest box-office hit in Italy last year, this also won the grand jury prize at the Cannes film festival, but the nice thing about it is that it doesn’t shove its virtues in your face; it’s made up of small discoveries and natural performances that raise as many questions about the characters as they answer. Accompanying some of the showings of this feature is an Oscar-nominated short film, Swan Song, starring John Gielgud and Richard Briers, directed by Kenneth Branagh, and adapted by Hugh Cruttwell from a short play by Anton Chekhov. Read more
Astrong documentary by Dean Bushala and Deirdre Heaslip about gay bashing in Chicago, alternately terrifying and empowering in its matter-of-fact instructiveness about the extent of the problem and the response of local activists–including the Pink Angels street patrol, the Coalition Against Bashing, and Horizon’s antiviolence counseling and court advocacy program. Following many individual cases of violence against gay men and lesbians, the film makes effective use of several local talents: two videos by Charles Christensen, a song by the duo Ellen Rosner & Camille, and black-and-white photographs by Allen Nepomuceno, Paul Vosdic, and Paul Roesch. The title, if you’re wondering, originally referred to the 19th-century practice of gay men wearing green ties to work on Thursdays to identify themselves to each other; today it raises the issue of how much being “out” means being a target for a sociopath. The film deals only glancingly with the reasons for homophobic violence, but has a lot to say about the possible responses to it. A panel discussion with the filmmakers, film participants, and representatives from the Chicago Police Department and the mayor’s office will follow the Sunday screening. Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday and Saturday, April 23 and 24, 7:00 and 9:00; Sunday, April 25, 5:30; and Monday through Thursday, April 26 through 29, 7:00 and 9:00; 281-4114. Read more
Even if you decide at times that the story telling and the visual style aren’t as compelling as the characters, this woman-oriented feature by Australian filmmaker Gillian Armstrong (My Brilliant Career, High Tide), working here with novelist and screenwriter Helen Garner, is so alive with felt and observed experience and subtle familial interaction that you may not care. The story concerns a group of people living in a ramshackle house in Sydney, among them a middle-aged novelist (Lisa Harrow), her teenage daughter (Miranda Otto), her French husband (Bruno Ganz), her younger sister (An Angel at My Table’s Kerry Fox), and a young male boarder (Kiri Paramore); the plot consists largely of what ensues when the sister has an abortion and then becomes involved with her brother-in-law. The performances are so powerful and persuasive–especially in the cases of Harrow, Ganz, and Bill Hunter, who plays the novelist’s father–that you may periodically forget they’re performances; these are complex characters you remember, not actors’ turns you’re asked to admire (1992). Music Box, Friday through Thursday, April 16 through 22. Read more
Based on the best-selling novel by Laura Esquivel, who adapted her own work for the screen, this delightful piece of magical realism from Mexican director Alfonso Arau (1991) contemplates the unrequited love of a single woman for her brother-in-law, a passion that can only be expressed and sublimated through the sensual meals she prepares for him. (The original novel even contained recipes.) With Lumi Cavazos, Marco Leonardi, and Regina Torne. The title, incidentally, derives from a Mexican slang expression that means, approximately, “ready to boil.” Fine Arts. Read more
Michelangelo Antonioni’s haunting first feature (1950)a remarkable formal effort involving a detective, an adulterous trio, a murder plot, a choreographic mise en scene, and an extended flashbackqualifies in many ways as an Italian noir, set in the milieu of the Milanese upper classes; with Lucia Bose (The Lady Without Camellias) and Massimo Girotti. In Italian with subtitles. 98 min. (JR) Read more
William Wyler wasn’t generally known for his light touch, but he made this comic 1966 piece of fluff about a million-dollar heist from a Paris art museum pretty easy to takehelped no doubt by his charming leads, Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole, not to mention Charles Boyer, Eli Wallach, and Hugh Griffith. Harry Kurnitz wrote the script. This is forgettable, but to hazard a paradoxpricelessly forgettable. 127 min. (JR) Read more
Doctor Dre and Ed Lover, hosts of the Yo! MTV Raps TV show, star as sidekicks who become Harlem policemen and help to expose a gentrification scam and extortion ring, in a funny, lighthearted, and enjoyably overplayed hip-hop comedy shot on location in Harlem. Directed by Ted Demme from a script by Seth Greenland, this costars Badja Djola (A Rage in Harlem), Denis Leary, Colin Quinn, Jim Moody, and Richard Bright, and over 40 rap artists ranging from Ice-T to Public Enemy make cameo appearances. (JR) Read more
Though debatable as an adaptation of the Franz Kafka novel, Orson Welles’s nightmarish, labyrinthine comedy of 1962shot mainly in Paris’s abandoned Gare d’Orsay and various locations in Zagreb and Rome after he had to abandon his plan to use setsremains his creepiest and most disturbing work; it’s also a lot more influential than people usually admit (e.g., After Hours, the costume store sequences in Eyes Wide Shut). Anthony Perkins gives an adolescent temper to Joseph K, a bureaucrat mysteriously brought to court for an unspecified crime. Among the predatory females who pursue him are Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, and Elsa Martinelli; Welles himself plays the hero’s tyrannical lawyer, and Akim Tamiroff is one of his oldest clients. Welles adroitly captures the experience of an unsettling and slightly hysterical dream throughout. Given the impact of screen size on what he’s doing, you can’t claim to have seen this if you’ve watched it only on video. 118 min. (JR) Read more
Yurek Bogayevicz, the Polish stage and film director who previously showed some real promise with Anna (1987), dissipates much of it here. This less interesting script (by Adam Greenman and Phillip Epstein) is about a male escort (William Baldwin) in flight from a jealous husband, who becomes involved with a bisexual woman (Sherilyn Fenn). Bogayevicz still shows some feeling for marginal Manhattan lifestyles, but without an actor of the caliber of Sally Kirkland in Anna, he seems as adrift as most viewers are likely to feel; Kelly Lynch costars. (JR) Read more
