The fascinating thing about this 50-minute documentary (1993) by Peggy Ahwesh and Margie Strosser — about the everyday lives of four Miami crackheads, three women and a man — is the offbeat intimacy they create with their imaginative and resourceful use of a Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera. The crackheads are mainly glimpsed goofing off, talking about themselves, and trying to coax money out of family and friends during a severe hurricane. {2011 postscript: I’ve belatedly discovered, from Ahwesh herself, that this is in fact a pseudodocumentary in which the four characters weren’t crackheads at all.] On the same program, Ahwesh’s short film From Romance to Ritual (1985), a personal documentary involving travels and friends in England as well as some ancient history. Chicago Filmmakers, 1543 W. Division, Friday, February 18, 8:00, 384-5533. Read more
Brilliant, problematic, and hyperbolic, Mike Leigh’s postapocalyptic look at post-Thatcher England may look like allegory, but only because the picaresque story line, this time involving lone individuals rather than families, seems to sprawl more randomly than usual (which, incidentally, makes the customary clash of acting styles all the more glaring). What passes for a plot involves the restless, random movements of a working-class pontificator on the dole who’s visiting his former girlfriend in London, to no clear purpose, and a number of the people he encounters, including his former girlfriend’s roommate, a homeless couple, a philosophical night watchman, and a couple of women who take him in. We also periodically follow a similarly misogynistic, sadistic yuppie whose path eventually crosses the hero’s; it’s here that Leigh’s occasional weakness for caricature seems most obvious. Though far from perfect, this film is galvanizing and disturbing, powerfully acted and teasingly unresolved. With David Thewlis, Lesley Sharp, Katrin Cartlidge, Peter Wight, and Greg Cruttwell. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, February 18 through 24. Read more
