This German TV documentary by Helmut Grosse (2002, in English and subtitled German) offers a concise and lucid account of the multiple ties between the second Bush administration and the oil and energy industries, many of which date back to the president’s membership in the secret Skull and Bones Society at Yale. Some of the material is familiar and obvious, but Grosse makes a strong case for the disproportionate influence of Texas on the national agenda, and he defuses likely charges of Eurocentric bias by limiting his interviews to American experts. (JR) Read more
At a time when the new Argentinean cinema seems to be going through an unusually exciting and fertile period, the festival continues to select the most banal and conventional stuff imaginable from that country. This lachrymose and poorly acted Argentinian-Cuban coproduction (2003), about a Wall Street hotshot traveling to Havana to investigate his emigre roots, is distinctive only for its utter lack of distinction. Jorge Dyszel directed. In English and subtitled Spanish. 95 min. (JR) Read more
British documentarian Mark Littlewood stages scenes from George Orwell’s life, emphasizing his heroism during the Spanish Civil War, and from his fiction, including the torture of the hero in Nineteen Eighty-Four, with Orwell’s texts as voice-over. I’m sufficiently interested in the left-wing novelist and essayist to find any account of his life absorbing, but this 2003 film is so reductive that even I have to admit the same 54 minutes might be better spent reading or rereading his work. (JR) Read more
Given the greatness of George Romero’s 1978 independently made classicin which cannibal zombies besiege a shopping mall where a clutch of still-human survivors is making its last standI feared what a studio remake of this apocalyptic thriller would be like. The new version has its share of disturbing moments, but writer James Gunn and director Zack Snyder have stripped away the social satire of the original and put little in its place. Sometimes the film seems a commentary on the ease with which humanity slips into barbarism, at other times a slip into barbarism itself. But if you leave when the end credits begin, you’ll miss further plot developments. With Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Jake Weber, and Mekhi Phifer. R, 90 min. (JR) Read more
Now I know why more Americans don’t travel to Europe; judging from this dumbed-down teen comedy, directed and written by the people responsible for The Cat in the Hat, it’s sexual panic about all the perverts over there. A high school senior (Scott Mechlowicz) belatedly discovers that his German pen pal (Jessica Boehrs) is female and sexy. Having recently alienated her, he flies to Europe with a buddy (Jacob Pitts) to make amends. Their farcical odyssey through London, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, and points east seems intentionally slapdash and stupid, but when one of them referred to Europe as a country, I wasn’t sure if it was meant as a joke or not. Even so, I laughed once or twice. R, 90 min. (JR) Read more
I’ve seen only one of these eight shorts, but Tsai Ming-liang’s 23-minute The Skywalk Is Gone (2002) is probably better than most full-length features showing at the festival. A minimalist sequel to his 2001 What Time Is It There?, it features the same two characters in approximately the same Taipei setting where they last metonly this time they don’t meet. As usual with Tsai, less is, if not necessarily more, still a great deal. I’d love to see Nanni Moretti’s The Last Customer, with the same running time, about the closing of a family-run pharmacy. Also screening: Gemma Carrington’s Coming Home (UK, 7 min.), Mervi Junkkonen’s Barbeiros (Finland, 12 min.), Julio Robeldo’s The Trumouse Show (Spain, 6 min.), Robias Bechtloff’s To Impress the Girl Next Door (Germany, 7 min.), Ezra Krybus and Matthew Miller’s The School (Canada, 13 min.), and Annemarie Jacir’s Like Twenty Impossibles (U.S./Palestine, 17 min.). (JR) Read more
Alexander Sokurov conceived this 2003 drama as a companion piece to his 1997 Mother and Son; it has more plot than that picture but little of its painterly intensity. The story highlights the intimate bonds between a father and his adult son, both military men who share an apartment in an unnamed seaside city. Sokurov disavows any homoerotic intent, but it’s hard to attach any other theme to the lyrical shots of intertwined male bodies at the beginning (accompanied by heavy breathing), or protracted close-ups throughout (conspicuously few of which involve the son’s girlfriend). For mannerist obsessiveness of this kind, I prefer Beau travail. In Russian with subtitles. 84 min. (JR) Read more
An 18-year-old from New Hampshire (Emily Grace), heading south to stay with a friend in Floria, loses her car and money but is rescued by a kindly middle-aged couple (Judith Ivey and Bill Raymond) who offer her a lift in their RV. She gradually discovers that the wife is a hooker and her husband helps to drum up trade, and after a while the teenager decides to turn some tricks herself. This low-budget digital video by writer-director A. Dean Bell looks pretty blotchy, and in terms of exposition and character development it’s hit-or-miss. But it’s worth seeing if only for Ivey, whose wonderful performance single-handedly legitimizes the film’s provocative commentary on prostitution. 96 min. (JR) Read more
Rebellious German teenagers who like big-band jazz trying to resist social pressures to join the Hitler Youth in 1939 Hamburg is the subject of this corny but sincere weeper written by Jonathan Marc Feldman, directed by Thomas Carter, and shot mainly in Prague. Needless to say, all the German kids are played (pretty well, as it happens) by Americans, and if it seems that kitsch of this kind is a less than ideal way to teach history, it’s still infinitely preferable to Reagan’s Bitburg pieties. With Robert Sean Leonard, Christian Bale, Frank Whaley, and Kenneth Branagh. (JR) Read more
In 2020, after Japan and the U.S. have joined forces politically and economically, an undercover cop (Olivier Gruner) specializing in robot-generated crimes has to undergo reconstructive surgery before investigating his ex-lover and fellow operative on a tropical island. Albert Pyun directed this 1993 feature. 95 min. Read more
Considering certain Orthodox Jewish practices (e.g., a daily prayer recited by men that thanks God for not making them female), Jewish feminism may be a contradiction in terms. Francine Zuckerman’s hour-long Canadian talking-head documentary seems quite aware of this possibility, and her film is interesting not so much because it provides conclusive answers, but because it offers several intelligent and determined Jewish womenincluding a rabbi, a journalist, a novelist, an activist, a professor, an experimental educator, and an Israeli Knesset membera forum for describing some of their own approaches to the problem (1990). (JR) Read more
The title refers to an interminable practical-joke game played by the four preppy leadsthree Northwestern graduates (Jon Tenney, John G. McGinley, Tom Sizemore) and the cousin of one of them (Peter Gallagher), all of whom share a house in the Chicago suburbsin a smart-ass, conventionally misogynist locker-room comedy that I found tiresome in spite of the better-than-average cast, which also includes Suzy Amis, Cynthia Stevenson, and Lili Taylor. Tom Flynn wrote and directed this first feature; Stanley Clarke is in charge of the music. (JR) Read more
The heart, a weak one, belongs to Christian Slater, playing a reclusive and eccentric busboy at a Minneapolis coffee shop, but the movie mainly belongs to Marisa Tomei (My Cousin Vinny), a waitress at the same establishment who falls for him after he saves her from being raped. It’s a sure sign of how good Tomei is that she can even occasionally do something with Tom Sierchio’s lachrymose script; the usually wonderful Rosie Perez, stuck with an uninteresting part, is less lucky. Tony Bill (Five Corners, Crazy People) directed, and Kyle Secor, Willie Garson, Gary Groomes, and James Cada costar. (JR) Read more
The 1954 ‘Scope version of the Canadian Mountie operetta, with Howard Keel and Ann Blyth replacing Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, who starred in the 1936 original, and Fernando Lamas completing the triangle. Busby Berkeley handled the choreography, and the underrated Mervyn LeRoy directed; what they yield may be hokum, but it’s hokum with a certain zip and polish, apart from the stagy sets. With Bert Lahr, Marjorie Main, and Ray Collins. (JR) Read more
Ken Loach, perhaps the last unreconstructed English realist (Kes, Land and Freedom), takes a funky, intermittently comic, and generally uncompromisingly grim look at a group of men on a London building crew, placing particular emphasis on a young man from Glasgow and his affair with an aspiring singer (1991). Using actors experienced in construction, Loach shot on an actual building site complete with rats. Written by the late Bill Jesse, a former laborer himself, this film has a gritty authenticity about English working-class life that makes even Mike Leigh seem like a bit of an artificer. With Robert Carlyle and Emer McCourt. Recommended. (JR) Read more
