This 1993 film by the eclectic and talented Iranian Mohsen Makhmalbaf (The Peddler, Marriage of the Blessed) is a contemporary, semitragic farce about a burly film actor who wants to play only in art films but is forced by his family’s economic demands to act in a string of trashy commercial movies. His tormented wife, infertile and obsessed with having a baby, insists that her husband marry and impregnate a second wife, a deaf-mute Gypsy, to provide them with a child. What keeps this picture frenetic, apart from the hysterical action and the satirical treatment of Iranian media, is the couple’s surreal, high-tech home and Makhmalbaf’s hyperbolic, eccentric mise en scene, which fit together hand in glove (as they were undoubtedly designed to do). The three lead actors–Akbar Abdi (playing some version of himself), Fatemeh Motamed Aria, and Mahaya Petrossian–were all in Once Upon a Time, Cinema, Makhmalbaf’s previous feature, and there appear to be some cross-references (such as the hero’s Chaplin worship), but here the tone is more caustic, the inventiveness more pointed. The meanings of both films are less than entirely clear, but my hunch is that each is a comic allegory about the rift between traditional and contemporary Iran, in which class differences and cultural differences are equally pertinent. Read more
A conventionally made documentary about the Mississippi Voter Registration Project, which existed from 1961 to 1964, this is special because of the precise sense of time and place it manages to impart through archival footage and recent interviews, as well as for the exemplary history lesson it offers about a key branch of the civil rights struggle. Produced and directed by Connie Field (The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter) and Marilyn Mulford and written and edited by Michael Chandler, it not only offers a welcome corrective to the multiple obfuscations of Mississippi Burning; it also furnishes the viewer with enough solid information to reevaluate the subject intelligently. (Whether you regard the civil rights movement as a whole as a success or as a failure, chances are you’ll have a more complicated view after seeing this.) Among the interview subjects are many Mississippi activists (including Victoria Gray, Endesha Ida Mae Holland, L.C. Dorsey, and Curtis Hayes) as well as those who came to the scene from other states (including Bob Moses, Marshall Ganz, and Pam Chude Allen), and the story they have to tell remains an essential part of our history. This won the grand jury prize for best documentary at the 1994 Sundance film festival. Read more
This 1994 SF film starts out suggesting 2001 and winds up recalling Flash Gordon. In between, it proceeds fairly enjoyably on the level of a minor Forbidden Planetpleasurable for some of its vistas, its overall scenic design, and its unself-conscious naivete about displaying otherworldliness, but not very nourishing or satisfying to the mind. James Spader plays an archaeologist specializing in Egyptian ruins who’s invited to join a secret military team, headed by Kurt Russell, that’s investigating a curious artifact uncovered in Giza. It proves to be a gizmo planted on earth centuries ago that serves as a doorway to a planet in a remote corner of the galaxy. Most of the remainder of the movie is set on this desert outpost, which has three moons and is lorded over by an androgynous despot (The Crying Game’s Jaye Davidson). The adventure and spectacle tend to be more sustaining than the speculative anthropology. Directed by Roland Emmerich from a script he wrote with Dean Devlin; with Viveca Lindfors, Alexis Cruz, Mili Avital, and John Diehl. (JR) Read more
This bewildering 1994 first feature by David Johnson, written by Johnson and Butch Robinson and inspired in part by Ellis Cose’s book Rage of a Privileged Class, is about a secret black organization known as the DROP Squad (DROP being an acronym for Deprogramming and Restoration of Pride), which kidnaps black people who’ve allegedly sold out their culture and community and deprograms them through brainwashing and other forms of torture. Part of what’s bewildering is that the movie seems mainly to endorse this form of de facto terrorism but never builds a coherent case for either its justice or its effectiveness. Produced and subsequently recut by Spike Lee, the movie may suffer from a collision of viewpoints and approaches; as it stands, the material is provocative but confusing. With Eriq LaSalle, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Ving Rhames, Vanessa Williams, and Kasi Lemmons. 86 min. (JR) Read more
To the editors:
When I wrote last week that Pulp Fiction was only “the flip side” of Forrest Gump, an editor took this to mean “the opposite” rather than another version of the same thing, and changed the text accordingly. Sorry for any resulting confusion.
Jonathan Rosenbaum Read more
This epic, compulsively watchable 169-minute documentary about two Chicago inner-city basketball whizzes, William Gates and Arthur Agee, striving to land the grades and the scholarships to make it to the big time (and stay there) is a heady dose of the American Dream and the American nightmare combined–a numbing investigation of how one point on an exam or one basket or fumble in a game can make all the difference in a family’s fortune. It’s a depressing (albeit energizing) saga that often feels like a noncomic application of the worldview of Preston Sturges. Chicago filmmakers Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert, with coproducers Kartemquin Films and Minnesota’s KCTA TV, spent seven years tracking the lives and careers of their two principals, and there’s little doubt that the presence of the camera and filmmakers becomes part of the unfolding story (a fact that the movie might have acknowledged a little more). Even if you’re as bored by team sports as I am, you won’t be able to tear your eyes away from this memorable cast of characters and the action-packed story, which speaks volumes about the way we live and think and what we do to others and ourselves in the process. Read more
Jean-Luc Godard’s most spiritual film to date (1991) is also his most opaque; if you’re looking for a paraphrasable plot, don’t come near this. But the beauty of his work — framed image and Dolby sound, all shot and recorded in rural Switzerland — is often breathtaking, and I’d much rather hear Godard talking to himself than Spielberg addressing half the planet. The poems and reflections of Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) and the Greek myth about Zeus impersonating and cuckolding Amphytrion, especially as treated by Jean Giraudoux — both having to do with cosmic injustice and the relationship between love and war — are two of the principal points of reference. Gerard Depardieu, who turns up in a village wearing a raincoat and carrying the London Observer, is the Amphytrion figure, and Zeus is a croaking voice on the sound track, dimly reminiscent of the voice of the computer in Alphaville. I also spotted references to Kierkegaard, Hitchcock’s I Confess (known as La loi de silence in French), and Straub-Huillet’s From the Cloud to the Resistance and Antigone. But for all its hermetic poetry and esoteric mysticism, the film also has concrete things to say about the bombing of Baghdad and the slaughter in Bosnia. Read more
This stunning debut is a first feature by writer-director Darnell Martin, and the first movie by a woman who grew up in a ghetto to be produced by a major studio. A raucous comedy-drama about a volatile Latino couple trying to raise their three kids and stay out of trouble–with the world and each other–in a Bronx ghetto, it manages a truce between Hollywood pizzazz and authenticity while positively jumping with energy (though it runs out of a little steam before the end). The charismatic heroine, played by Lauren Velez–a mulatto, like Martin–goes after a job with a recording executive (Griffin Dunne) after her husband (Jon Seda) tries to steal a stereo during a blackout and winds up in jail; among the other characters are her brother (Jesse Borrego), who’s a transvestite botanica owner, and her downstairs neighbor and worst enemy (Lisa Vidal), who’s an unwed mother trying to wangle away her husband. (Rita Moreno also does a delightful turn as her disapproving mother-in-law.) While keeping up a frenetic pace, the movie manages to speak thoughtfully about parenting, marital sex problems, jealousy, gossip, lotteries, record promotion, inner-city crime, and homophobia. It’s not common to find so much bombast and wisdom coexisting, but from the evidence offered here, Darnell Martin is an uncommon talent–offering an eyeful as well as an earful. Read more
The lineup for the second week of the Chicago International Film Festival looks at least as good as the first, in some respects even better. I’m sorry to report that two of the best movies scheduled for last week, Olivier Assayas’s Cold Water and Luchino Visconti’s Bellissima, were canceled after the Reader went to press. Both were replaced by an Australian movie, The Sum of Us, that we weren’t able to review.
As we go to press this week, the word from the festival is that no further changes are anticipated, but if you want to be on the safe side, call the festival to be sure. (Last-minute changes and related screwups, I should add, are a bugaboo at virtually all film festivals, and though Chicago has had more than its fair share of them in the past, they’ve diminished in recent years.)
My own recommendations for the week, in rough order of preference, are Satantango (reviewed at length elsewhere in this section), The Leopard, Red, The Red Lotus Society, The Tarnished Angels, The Seventh Continent, Dear Diary, Through the Olive Trees, The Innocent, Dallas Doll, The Silences of the Palace, When Pigs Fly, The Troubles We’ve Seen, Ryaba, My Chicken, Family, The Serpent and the Rainbow, Too Much Happiness, and Paradjanov. Read more
A rather glum, halfway interesting film, about a single man (William Hurt) living and working as a postmaster in a tiny Welsh village who decides to adopt a ten-year-old boya recalcitrant youngster who still reserves all his emotional loyalty for his real father in prison. Directed by former cinematographer Chris Menges from a script by David Cook adapting his own novel, this is impressive mainly for Hurt’s finely shaded and wholly committed performance. With Keith Allen (also fine as the boy), Prunella Scales, Jane Horrocks (Life Is Sweet), and Alan Cumming. (JR) Read more
This stunning 1994 debut by writer-director Darnell Martin was the first movie by a woman from a ghetto background to be produced by a major studio. A raucous comedy-drama about a volatile Latino couple trying to raise their three kids and stay out of troublewith the world and with each otherin a Bronx ghetto, it manages a truce between Hollywood pizzazz and authenticity while positively jumping with energy (though it runs out of steam a little before the end). The charismatic heroine, played by Lauren Veleza mulatto, like Martingoes after a job with a recording executive (Griffin Dunne) after her husband (Jon Seda) tries to steal a stereo and winds up in jail; among the other characters are her brother (Jesse Borrego), who’s a transvestite botanica owner, and her downstairs neighbor and worst enemy (Lisa Vidal), who’s an unwed mother trying to wangle away her husband. (Rita Moreno also does a delightful turn as her disapproving mother-in-law.) While keeping up a frenetic pace, the movie manages to speak thoughtfully about parenting, marital sex problems, jealousy, gossip, lotteries, record promotion, inner-city crime, and homophobia. It’s not common to find so much bombast and wisdom coexisting, but from the evidence offered here Darnell Martin is an uncommon talentoffering an eyeful as well as an earful. Read more
A charming black-and-white fantasy by Tim Burton about the late Edward D. Wood Jr., a writer-director-actor at the lowest reaches of 50s Z-budget filmmaking, recently accorded cult pantheon status by virtue of his eccentric personality (he was a straight transvestite) and his very personal form of ineptness. Suggested by Rudolph Grey’s oral history Nightmare of Ecstasy, the movie concentrates on the time period during which Wood’s three best-known works (Glen or Glenda?, Bride of the Monster, and Plan 9 From Outer Space) were made; these efforts are all treated as holy writ, but the man himself, despite Johnny Depp’s best efforts to convey Wood’s greenhorn enthusiasm, remains elusive. Such a project requires remembering a time when camp (as an attitude of affection as well as derision) wasn’t yet part of the mainstream sensibility, and this is clearly beyond the range of Burton and writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. They opt instead for a sort of pie-eyed postmodernist fancy that in effect transports today’s audience back to the 50s–it’s derisive at a premiere of Bride of the Monster, respectful at a premiere of Plan 9 (absurdly set in Hollywood’s plush Pantages Theater)–in a way that magically transforms a singularly miserable and abject career ending in alcoholism and indigence into the feel-good movie of the year, budgeted for a cool $18 million and radiating tenderness (at least for the guys in the story; nearly all the women are regarded as betrayers and spoilsports). Read more
I can’t vouch for the first 22 editions of the Chicago International Film Festival, but the 30th threatens to be the best since I moved to this town in 1987. Much of the usual fat and filler has been trimmed away, and the selections this year are unusually thoughtful and judicious (thanks in large measure to the efforts of coprogrammer Marc Evans, who knew where to look). Happily, there’s more attention given to older films, and the overall spread of films promises a veritable bounty to anyone ready to take the plunge.
This presupposes in many cases a pretty hefty commitment–taking a whole day (or much of one) during one of the busiest seasons of the year–but the payoff is experiencing something not generally available in an ordinary night at the movies. Regrettably, even many of my more serious colleagues have been forsaking such adventures at the film festivals in Cannes, Toronto, and New York, focusing instead on the same big commercial releases you’ve been hearing about for months. But here’s your chance to delve into riches never dreamed of in Entertainment Weekly. Having seen exactly half of the 118 separate programs being offered, I can testify that at least 40 of the features are well worth seeing and perhaps a dozen fall under the category of essential viewing. Read more
Marisa Tomei and Robert Downey Jr. meet cute in Italy (1994), allowing the filmmakers (screenwriter Diane Drake, director Norman Jewison) to allude at length to Roman Holiday and letting Downey do an excellent Gregory Peck impersonation. Tomei, engaged to a podiatrist, runs off to Italy after a stranger; her sister-in-law (a likable performance by Bonnie Hunt) comes along for the ride, and Downey tries to cultivate Tomei’s impractical romanticism. Silly stuff, but it passes the time and the locations are nice; just don’t expect anything like Billy Wilder’s Avanti! With Joaquim De Almeida, Fisher Stevens, and Billy Zane. (JR) Read more
Another silly explosion movie (1994), this one hatching revenge plots under every bush in Miami. Sharon Stone (here in her va-va-voom mode) hires loner explosives expert Sylvester Stallone to blow up the killers of her parents. Stallone’s former CIA buddy James Woods (a villain out of The Perils of Pauline, now working for the mob and abusing Stone in his spare time) seeks revenge against Stallone for punching him out. Stallone has it in for Woods for allowing a little girl to get blown up in one of their former team efforts. And Rod Steiger, enjoyably overplaying a Cuban American crime boss, wants to catch the killer of his terminally obnoxious son (Eric Roberts). Oh yes, and Stallone wants to beat up an unrelated character because he steals a seat on a bus from a middle-aged woman, and Woods takes pleasure in insulting and humiliating everyone in sight. If campy sex and violence is your cup of tea, here’s a full thermos jug to take on a picnic. Written by Alexandra Seros (Point of No Return) and directed by Luis Llosa (Sniper). (JR) Read more
