Director Ron Howard (Parenthood, Backdraft, Far and Away) scores with an old-fashioned entertainment about a day in the life of a New York tabloid like the Post or the News. The contrived climaxes are strictly over the top, and the Coca-Cola plugs are so frequent that the movie starts to seem like a feature-length commercial, but a bustling script by David and Stephen Koepp and fancy turns by Michael Keaton, Robert Duvall, Glenn Close (as a snarling villain), Marisa Tomei, and Randy Quaid keep your adrenaline up even when your mind is on automatic pilot. There’s a very strong moment showing how a trumped-up police bust registers on the innocent party’s sister, a black girl doing her homework, and it’s easy to forgive the movie’s ham-handed depiction of the New York Times when its west-coast ribbing of Manhattan provinciality is so on target in other places. (Indeed, one suspects that the coolness of many reviewers to both this picture and Greedy, the latter made by Howard’s production company, is similarly motivated: for all their good humor, both movies are just a little too skeptical about slimy aspects of the contemporary world too often uncritically accepted.) This may not be The Front Page, but it understands what made those early newspaper pictures so breezy. Read more
Highly controversial and troubling but undeniably powerful and impossible to dismiss, this French feature cowritten (with critic Jacques Fieschi) by, directed by, and starring the late Cyril Collard follows the last reckless days and nights of a 30-year-old cinematographer and musician who discovers he is HIV positive but continues to have sex with strangers as well as with his two more regular lovers. Based on Collard’s autobiographical novel Les nuits fauves, Savage Nights won Cesars (the French equivalent of Oscars) for best picture, best first picture, most promising actress (Romane Bohringer), and best editing a few days after the 35-year-old filmmaker died of AIDS in March 1993. These honors can’t simply be written off as sentimental: stylistically and dramatically, this is an accomplished piece of work. If Collard’s driven hero often seems far from admirable–unconsciously misogynistic beneath his apparent bisexual “tolerance,” and, as his masochistic behavior often implies, full of self-loathing–the film seems admirably unpropagandistic in permitting spectators to make up their own minds about him. It also gives full voice to the agony of unrequited adolescent love (Bohringer’s volcanic performance), and, for better and for worse, offers a treatment of AIDS that’s the other side of the moon from Philadelphia–politically incorrect with a vengeance. Read more
The charm, humor, and healthy eroticism of Australian writer-director John Duigan (The Year My Voice Broke, Flirting) are back in force in this pleasantly recounted tale, set in the 30s, about a newlywed Anglican clergyman and his wife, freshly played by Hugh Grant and Tara Fitzgerald, who stop off at the remote home of a controversial (i.e., erotic) painter (Sam Neill). The clergyman has been asked by his bishop to try to persuade the painter to remove one of his sexy paintings from an upcoming exhibit, and when the couple unexpectedly have to extend their stay, the sensual lures of both the scenic setting and the bohemian household–which largely consists of the painter’s female models–have a subtle but indelible effect on them, the wife in particular. With Elie Macpherson, Portia De Rossi, Kate Fischer, and Pamela Rabe; Duigan himself has a cameo as a local minister. Pipers Alley. Read more
For my money, Abel Ferrara’s remake of a remake — namely Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, based on Don Siegel’s classically paranoid 1956 SF adaptation of Jack Finney’s effective novel The Body Snatchers — doesn’t match the Siegel original, though it’s a lot scarier and more memorable than Kaufman’s low-key, new-agey version. Kaufman shifted the action from a small California town to San Francisco, while Ferrara–shooting a script by Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli, and Nicholas St. John from a screen story by Raymond Cistheri and Larry Cohen — locates the action in an Army compound in Alabama. Until the end, when the story lamentably collapses into incoherence, the theme — uncertainty about whether family members or friends have been replaced by extraterrestrial replicas spawned by pods, a notion of conformity rich in sociopolitical overtones — affords a lot of queasy moments. Ferrara, whom I prefer dressing up genre exercises (as in King of New York and this movie) to dressing down art movies (as in Bad Lieutenant), swims well in these troubled waters. (Why this picture is being marketed as an art movie is anybody’s guess, but the initial reluctance of Warners to release it at all — another mystery — is probably related.) Read more
Even if you have a taste for movies about dysfunctional families, as I do, you may be a little put off by the Grapes in this adaptation by Peter Hedges of his own novel: missing father, 500-pound mother, mentally disabled son (especially good work by Leonardo DiCaprio), and two daughters, as well as Johnny Depp to more or less hold things together. This is directed by Lasse Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog, Once Around), and his feeling for the look and mood of a godforsaken midwestern town is often as acute as Sven Nykvist’s cinematography; Juliette Lewis plays the out-of-town girl Depp takes a shine to once he starts getting tired of the married woman (Mary Steenburgen) he’s involved with, and while the picture is too absentminded to explain what it is that makes Lewis move in and out of town, she and Depp make a swell couple. There are other rough edges as far as plot is concerned, but I liked it. With Darlene Cates, Laura Harrington, Mary Kate Schellhardt, Kevin Tighe, and Crispin Glover. Old Orchard, Webster Place, Ford City, Bricktown Square, Lincoln Village, Water Tower. Read more
A program of recent works by two local video artists. The longest is Pure (1993), an extremely ambitious and highly provocative globehopping video essay by the University of Chicago’s Scott Rankin–a densely packed discussion of exoticism, authenticity, and a great deal more. Mocking the role of the in-person TV commentator while offering nonstop philosophical notations about our dubious and ideologically informed grasp of the world we live in, Rankin may give us more material than we can comfortably digest in an hour–but then so do the world and the media he describes. On the same program are four videos by Northwestern University’s Annette Barbier; the only one I’ve seen, The Kitchen Goddess (1992), has some interesting computer graphics and ideas about domestic work. The others: Domestic Portraits 1 and 2 and Moving to the Suburbs, both made in 1993. Chicago Filmmakers, 1543 W. Division, Friday, March 4, 8:00, 384-5533. Read more
The charm, humor, and healthy eroticism of Australian writer-director John Duigan (The Year My Voice Broke, Flirting) are back in force in this pleasantly recounted tale, set in the 30s, about a newlywed Anglican clergyman and his wife, freshly played by Hugh Grant and Tara Fitzgerald, who stop off at the remote home of a controversial (i.e., erotic) painter (Sam Neill). The clergyman has been asked by his bishop to try to convince the painter to remove one of his sexy paintings from an upcoming exhibit, and when he and his wife unexpectedly have to extend their stay, the sensual lures of both the scenic setting and the bohemian householdwhich largely consists of females who pose nude for the painterhave a subtle but indelible effect on the couple, the wife in particular. With Elle Macpherson, Portia De Rossi, Kate Fischer, and Pamela Rabe; Duigan himself has a cameo as a local minister. (JR) Read more
A beautiful first feature (1993) by Vietnamese filmmaker Tran Anh Hung, shot on a French soundstage and set in two bourgeois Saigon households in 1951 and ’61. The central character, inspired by Tran’s mother, is a servant girl, played as a ten-year-old by Lu Man San and as a young woman by Tran’s wife, Tran Nu Yen-khe, and the main focus is on everyday household chores and sensual discoveries, all made mesmerizing by elaborately choreographed camera movements that link interiors and exteriors in the same fluid itineraries. The first household contains an unhappy family, the second a wealthy Europeanized composer, and, perhaps significantly, only the first seems to have much connection with the surrounding neighborhood. The Vietnam war is dealt with so elliptically that it figures only as offscreen sirens and overhead planes. This stylish period piece won the Camera d’Or at the 1993 Cannes film festival and was nominated for an Oscar. In Vietnamese with subtitles. 103 min. (JR) Read more
A step down from the first Naked Gun cop-thriller spoof, which was a step down from Airplane! and Top Secret!; but if you care about such fine distinctions, this may be marginally better than Naked Gun 2<4: The Smell of Fear. Or at least it is when the movie finally arrives at the climactic Academy Awards ceremony; prior to that, it's mainly just one little-boy gag after anothertopical enough to include a reference to Tonya Harding, silly enough to make you laugh sometimes in spite of yourselfat least if you're feeling like a little boy. With Leslie Nielsen, Priscilla Presley, George Kennedy, O.J. Simpson, Fred Ward, Anna Nicole Smith, Kathleen Freeman, and Ellen Greene; directed by Peter Segal from a script by Pat Proft, David Zucker, and Robert LoCash. (JR)
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The songs are sappy (apart from Barry Manilow’s one good song here, Marry the Mole); the hero and heroine are bland master-race specimens; and some of the pastel effects are ugly and tacky. But most of the animation in this Don Bluth feature is fairly nice, if not exactly memorable to adults who’ve seen it all before. Kids should like it fine, I suspect. Gary Goldman codirected, and among the actors supplying the voices are Jodi Benson, Carol Channing, John Hurt, Gilbert Gottfried, Kenneth Mars, and Loren Michaels. (JR) Read more
Like every other screen version of the great Emily Bronte novel, including the ones by Luis Bu Read more
This witty, poker-faced 1965 Italian adaptation of Robert Sheckley’s memorable story The Sixth Victimabout licensed killing celebrated in the 21st-century media as a spectator sporthas probably dated badly, but that’s a good reason to see it. It’s derived from the mod S and M ethos of the James Bond films, which it simultaneously parodies and emulates with the help of Marcello Mastroianni (here a platinum blond) and Ursula Andress, both of whom play popular killers. Not nearly as good as Point Blank, but infinitely better than Barbarella. Directed by Elio Petri; the production design by Piero Poletto is pretty funny too. In italian with subtitles. 92 min. (JR) Read more
Director Ron Howard (Parenthood) scores with an old-fashioned entertainment about a day in the life of a New York tabloid like the Post or the News. The contrived climaxes are strictly over the top, and the Coca-Cola plugs are so frequent that the movie starts to seem like a feature-length commercial, but a bustling script by David and Stephen Koepp and fancy turns by Michael Keaton, Robert Duvall, Glenn Close (as a snarling villain), Marisa Tomei, and Randy Quaid keep your adrenaline up even when your mind is on automatic pilot. There’s a very strong moment showing how a trumped-up police bust registers on the innocent party’s sister, a black girl doing her homework, and it’s easy to forgive the movie’s ham-handed depiction of the New York Times when its west-coast ribbing of Manhattan provinciality is so on target in other places. (Indeed, one suspects that the coolness many reviewers exhibited toward this picture and Greedy, the latter made by Howard’s production company, was similarly motivated: for all their good humor, both movies are just a little too skeptical about slimy aspects of the contemporary world too often unacknowledged.) This may not be The Front Page, but it understands what made early newspaper pictures so breezy. Read more
A rather captivating if unlikely tale about a little girl, nicely played by Thora Birch, who winds up with a pet monkey that’s been trained to be a pickpocket and jewel thief. Real-life Gypsies undoubtedly have cause to be offended by Harvey Keitel’s greasy impersonation of one as the monkey-trainer villain, and Sam Fuller could lodge some legitimate beefs against this movie’s wholesale appropriation of the deprogramming theme from his White Dog, but the story’s kernel still carries some undeniable charm. With Mimi Rogers and Christopher McDonald; written and directed by Italian filmmaker Franco Amurri, a former assistant to Fellini, Zeffirelli, and Mazursky who’s best known for Da grande (the movie that inspired Big) and Flashback; Stu Krieger collaborated on the script. (JR) Read more
Vincent Price is the only survivor of a plague that turns its victims into vampires. Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkowin directed this 1964 Italian-American horror/SF item, shot in ‘Scope and adapted from Richard Matheson’s paranoid postapocalyptic novel I Am Legend. Some would consider this version better than the 1971 remake with Charlton Heston, The Omega Man, but that isn’t much of an achievement. With Franca Bettoia and Emma Danieli. 86 min. (JR) Read more
