Yet another step down the ladder from Diner by writer-director-producer Barry Levinson. This is an unconvincing tale of a would-be Hollywood actor (Joe Pesci) who, with his slow-witted sidekick (Christian Slater), becomes a vigilante bringing petty thieves and dope dealers to justice and turning into something of a TV news hero as a consequence. The conceit is ripe for glib homilies and generalizations, and Levinson lets us know how profound it’s all supposed to be. What one mainly comes away with is tons of condescension designed to flatter a middle-class audience; with Victoria Abril. (JR) Read more
A striking 1983 independent short film by Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust) about a light-skinned black woman in Hollywood during the studio era. 34 min. (JR) Read more
Alternately wise and very funny in its treatment of tribalism and in its grasp of neocolonial corruption, Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene’s seventh feature (1992, 115 min.) has so much to say about contemporary Africa that you emerge from it with a sense of understanding an entire society from top to bottom. A political activist and Catholic figurehead known as Guelwaar (which means the noble one) dies from a beating after delivering an impassioned speech against foreign aid and its attendant corruptions, and when friends and family gather for his funeral they’re shocked to discover that his body is missing. It emerges that he was accidentally buried in a Muslim cemetery, and the tribal, political, and cultural disputes that arise from this constitute the remainder of this beautifully told story. (A lot of significance is attached to when the characters speak French and when they speak Wolof, the principal language of Senegal.) In French and Wolof with subtitles. 115 min. (JR) Read more
This lyrical, bitter 1987 Vietnamese feature, directed with style and distinction by Dang Nhat Minh, focuses on two womena prostitute working on a boat on the Perfumed River in central Vietnam during the war who winds up sheltering and having an affair with a wounded Vietcong leader, and a reporter hearing her tell her story in the present. A blistering attack on both censorship and the changes in Vietnamese society since the war, it offers a provocative juxtaposition of past and present, even if it reaches for a rather outlandish plot coincidence in doing so. (JR) Read more
A fascinating 1993 documentary by Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine that follows eight freshmen living in a Stanford University coed hall over an academic year. Unless Muzak is perpetually heard on the Stanford campus, inserting it on the sound track throughout insults everyone in the audience; but in other respects, including the use of topic headings for various sections, the film does an admirable job of organizing 250 hours of material into a brisk 97 minutes. The eight teenagers are ethnically diverse, as are their sexual attitudes and class and religious backgrounds, all of which are discussed at length. What emerges isn’t exactly profound, but it’s still highly interesting. (JR) Read more
Three films by the great experimental dancer-performer-filmmaker-theorist, perhaps the first major figure in the American avant-garde cinema: Meshes of the Afternoon (1943, 18 min.), codirected by Alexander Hammid; At Land (1944, 15 min.), possibly her greatest film; and Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1985, 52 min.), her posthumously edited documentary about voodoo rituals. (JR) Read more
Argentinean filmmaker Eliseo Subiela’s disappointing 1992 follow-up to his Man Facing Southeast (1986) and Last Images of a Shipwreck (1989) chronicles the misadventures of a boorish, self-absorbed, and, to all appearances, untalented poet searching for the woman of his dreams in contemporary Buenos Aires. He’s approached mainly by prostitutes, and gets along by reciting lines of his verse to passing motorists in exchange for handouts. It’s hard to sustain much interest in such an insufferable character for 126 minutes. Moreover, Subiela’s magical-realism devices look distinctly shopworn. The light satire of the Argentinean avant-garde, mainly expounded through the film’s treatment of the hero’s artist friends, shares with Woody Allen’s movies and Borges and Bioy Casare’s Chronicles of Bustos Domecq too much contempt for bohemian art, which makes it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff; ultimately this leads to a smirking middle-class complacency about artists that seems flagrantly unearned. (JR) Read more
This highly personal take on the themes of immortality and vampirism, a first feature (1992) by Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, may not be your cup of tea, but you have to admire the style, sincerity, and overall sense of craft even if you don’t fancy the comic-book gore. A strange instrument delivering both pain and immortality, developed during the Spanish Inquisition by an alchemist, winds up in the possession of an elderly antique dealer in contemporary Mexico City, but a wealthy invalid has dispatched his goonish nephew to search for it. If this sounds a mite formulaic, del Toro incorporates enough dark camera poetry and authentic feeling (including intense familial affection) to make you periodically forget it; one of his conclusions, incidentally, is that immortality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The cast is especially fine, including onetime Bunuel regular Claudio Brook, Argentinean star Federico Luppi, U.S. actor Ron Perlman, and a highly expressive little girl (Tamara Shanath). (JR) Read more
After doing something highly personal and more serious in his previous feature (Memoirs of an Invisible Man) and getting slammed as a result, Chevy Chase returns to the anonymous, unmemorable suburban mode that made his earlier movies profitable. And guess what? The results are anonymous and unmemorable. The basic situation is that Chase’s character, an accountant with a wife (Dianne Wiest) and two kids, has to allow the police (including Jack Palance) to take over his home in order to stake out a dangerous criminal (Robert Davi) living next door; you can pretty much guess the rest. The once-interesting Michael Ritchie, well equipped for routine assignments like this, directed from a script by Bernie Somers. With David Barry Gray, Jason James Richter, Fay Masterson, and Miko Hughes. (JR) Read more
It’s interesting to speculate why this ho-hum period sex comedy by Fernando Trueba won the 1993 Oscar for best foreign film (over The Scent of Green Papaya, Farewell My Concubine, and The Wedding Banquet): could it simply be that it’s the most Hollywoodish? The plot, set during the last days of the Spanish monarchy in 1931, bears a distant resemblance to Raoul Walsh’s The King and Four Queens and you may be reminded momentarily of Meet Me in St. Louis, but this picture isn’t within hailing distance of eitheror of one of its conscious models, Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country. Still, it’s fairly inoffensive and intermittently charming. An army deserter winds up in the home of an old painter (Fernando Fernan Gomez, who gives the most likable performance) with four single daughters, all of whom have romances with the young man. Eventually the missing mother, an opera singer, turns up with her lover, and other complications ensue. With Jorge Sanz, Maribel Verdu, Ariadna Gil, Miriam Diaz-Aroca, Penelope Cruz, and Mary Carmen Ramirez. In Spanish with subtitles. 108 min. (JR) Read more
One of MGM’s lesser musicals (1944), about a songwriter whose scheming publisher (Basil Rathbone) is trying to break up his marriage. Director George Sidney has all the oomph and vulgarity required, but he can’t do anything about Red Skelton, who takes up way too much time and space. With Keenan Wynn, Xavier Cugat, and Esther Williams in her first starring role. 101 min. (JR) Read more
It’s the usual combo of high concept and low execution, and not even Jonathan Kaplan’s background as an exploitation director can bail him out. The various problems here include boredom and silliness. Madeleine Stowe, Mary Stuart Masterson, Drew Barrymore, and Andie MacDowell star as prostitutes who become gunfighters to defend their lives and honor, and while it’s good to see four strong women in a western for a change, it’s not much fun to encounter the hectoring sound track (bad wall-to-wall music and very loud sound effects) and find the screenwriters (Ken Friedman and Yolande Finch) feebly modeling their showdown on The Wild Bunch. But if you’re a sunset buff, this movie has at least three peachy onestwo of them orange red and the last one lemon yellow. With James Russo, James LeGros, Robert Loggia, and Dermot Mulroney. (JR) Read more
This unpretentious account of the Beatles during their first gig, in Hamburg in 1960before painter Stuart Sutcliffe (likably played by Stephen Dorff) left the group, and before Ringo Starr joined ithas been heralded as the best rockudrama since The Buddy Holly Story. It’s a distinction that it probably deserves, though the movie lacks the sensitivity and precision of Christopher Munch’s hour-long The Hours and Times (1991), which effectively cast Ian Hart in the role of John Lennon (a role he plays here as well). English director and cowriter Iain Softley seems to have little on his mind apart from filling in a bit of the Beatles’ prehistory, which includes the romance between Sutcliffe and art photographer Astrid Kirchherr (Sheryl Lee), who more or less invented the Beatle haircut and indirectly inspired the avant-garde aspirations of the group in several other respects. There’s nothing very profound here, but we do at least get a nice handling of period and milieu, and pretty good performances of the songs. With Gary Bakewell, Chris O’Neill, and Scot Williams; cowritten by Michael Thomas and Stephen Ward. (JR) Read more
I wouldn’t call this 1960 picture one of Billy Wilder’s best comediesit’s drab, sappy, and overlong at 125 minutes. But its numerous Oscarsfor best picture, direction, script, editing, and art directionindicate that many disagree with me (including the Coen brothers, who seem to have studied it for The Hudsucker Proxy, just as Wilder studied Vidor’s silent The Crowd for this). Jack Lemmon at his most hyperventilated plays an ambitious clerk who tries to get ahead by lending his apartment to executives for one-night stands, then falls in love with an elevator operator (Shirley MacLaine) who’s being mistreated by his boss (Fred MacMurray). Wilder cohort I.A.L. Diamond collaborated on the script of this black-and-white ‘Scope movie; with Ray Walston and Edie Adams. (JR) Read more
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
