A rather unfunny pseudodocumentary in the manner of This is Spinal Tap, Bob Roberts, and Fear of a Black Hat about two American independents setting out to make a big-budget biblical spectacular. If you haven’t seen as many movies of this ilk as I have, it’s possible you might be amused. Directed by Arthur Borman from a script he wrote with Chicagoan Mark Borman, Gregory S. Malins, and Michael Curtis; with Michael Riley and Stephen Rappaport, as well as cameos by Lou Ferrigno, Eve Plumb, and, in the part of Moses, Soupy Sales. (JR) Read more
American TV watchers, eat your hearts out! It isn’t always easy to trace the connections in these selections from “Ten to Eleven”–a series of short, experimental “essay” films made for German television by the remarkable German filmmaker Alexander Kluge–but they’re the liveliest and most imaginative European TV shows I’ve seen since those of Ruiz and Godard. Densely constructed out of a very diverse selection of archival materials, which are manipulated (electronically and otherwise) in a number of unexpected ways, these historical meditations often suggest Max Ernst collages using the cultural flotsam of the last 100 years. I’ve seen four of the programs: Why Are You Crying, Antonio? relates fascism, opera, and domesticity; Antiques & Advertising historicizes ads in a number of novel ways; Madame Butterfly Waits offers a compressed history of opera and its kitschy pop-culture successors; and the self-explanatory The Eiffel Tower, King Kong, and the White Women makes use of comics, 1890s movies, a quote from Heidegger, and multiple images of the famous ape and tower. The first part of this program features Madame Butterfly Waits, The Eiffel Tower, King Kong, and the White Women, Antiques & Advertising, and The African Lady, or Love With a Fatal Outcome; the second includes Blue Hour Tango Time, Why Are You Crying, Antonio?, Read more
A witty British courtroom comedy-drama, set circa 1450, in which a Parisian lawyer (played by Colin Firth), accompanied by his clerk, tries his hand in the French provinces, meanwhile becoming involved with a beautiful Gypsy outcast. In a misguided effort to cash in on the fanfare accompanying The Crying Game, also distributed by Miramax, viewers are urged not to reveal a “surprise” that this picture virtually gives away in its opening sequence, one predicated on the medieval practice of treating animals as “equals” under the law. What’s actually surprising is that most of this sexy, nicely acted, and humorously detailed picture works on its own modest terms, without hype or gimmicks, even after some stupid censorious cuts. Written and directed by the able TV documentarist Leslie Megahey, whose best earlier work includes a wonderful three-hour interview with Orson Welles; with Amina Annabi, Jim Carter, Donald Pleasence, Ian Holm, and Nicol Williamson. Pipers Alley. Read more
You’d never guess it, but the title heroine is actually a refurbished bus, and this nicely made 1994 comedy-drama could be described as an Australian Easy Rider, with Sydney drag queens instead of bikers and no apocalyptic ending. Terence Stamp brings a certain suave integrity to his role as a transsexual who takes two queens cross-country in a drag show. Hugo Weaving (Agent Smith in The Matrix and the blind photographer in Proof) and Guy Pearce are almost as good, with Bob Hunter doing a fine job in a smaller role. Not everything works equally well in this road movieI could have done without Hunter’s disgruntled Japanese wife, a poorly conceived and crudely executed characterbut writer-director Stephan Elliott keeps things watchable. 104 min. (JR) Read more
The exciting thing about Haile Gerima’s lush, wide-screen folkloric feature about black slavery–independently made and distributed–is its poetic conviction, backed up by a great deal of filmmaking savvy. Born in Ethiopia but based in the U.S., Gerima attended UCLA’s film school around the same time as Charles Burnett, Larry Clark, Julie Dash, and Billy Woodbury. I haven’t seen his previous films–which include Harvest 3000 Years, Bush Mama, and Ashes and Embers–but Sankofa (1993) shows that he has a camera style and political vision all his own. A glamorous black model (Oyafunmike Ogunlano) posing for pictures outside an ancient castle in Ghana where slaves were once bought and sold provokes the ire of a self-appointed tribal guardian of this tourist spot, who hurls a curse at her that magically transports her into the role of a slave on a Jamaican plantation, where most of the remainder of the film is set. Beautifully shot and powerfully acted, the depiction of slavery from the vantage point of the slaves as they move toward revolt is rendered mainly in English dialogue, with an interesting score by David J. White that manages to encompass American jazz and blues as well as African elements. It stands to reason that if anything could bridge the radically disparate experiences of being an American black and being an African slave it’s poetry, and Gerima puts it to stirring use. Read more
SF specialist Peter Hyams, doubling as usual as director and cinematographer, leaves his record for mediocrity (Outland, 2010) unblemished in this silly time-travel tale, set in 2004, that has Jean-Claude Van Damme going after a corrupt senator (Ron Silver) who seeks to buy his way to the presidency by making select raids on the past (e.g., gold bullion from 1863, crafty investments on Wall Street in 1929), thereby manipulating the present. But fans of the humorless Van Damme’s brutal footwork probably won’t be disappointed. The script is by Mark Verheiden and executive producer Mike Richardson; with Mia Sara, Gloria Reuben, and Bruce McGill. (JR) Read more
A dotty and disheveled but fairly watchable comedy of errors set in Africa, adapted by William Boyd from his own novel, directed by Bruce Beresford, and probably suffering from nervous studio recutting. Colin Friels plays the not-so-likable hero, an English diplomat posted to the newly independent state of Kinjanja, where he has to contend with a pompous boss (John Lithgow doing a mildly funny if predictable turn), a possible venereal disease, and his own as well as his boss’s indifference to the local customs. Sean Connery plays a serene local doctor who is understandably dubious about this fellow, and Louis Gossett Jr. plays a rising local politician; romantic interest is provided by Diana Rigg and Joanne Whalley-Kilmer. (JR) Read more
An intermittently engaging first feature by writer-director Boaz Yakin, who previously scripted The Rookie, about a 12-year-old boy living in a Brooklyn slum who manages to extricate himself from drug running by applying lessons learned in speed chess from his estranged father (Samuel L. Jackson). Poised somewhere between a movie-familiar (i.e., semiscurrilous) look at inner-city life as trench warfare and a farfetched Hollywood revenge fantasy, this is kept alive largely through its first-rate performances, beginning with Sean Nelson’s as the boy; Giancarlo Esposito is also a standout. With Cheryl Freeman, and N’Bushe Wright. (JR) Read more
The rise and fall of a talented cabaretera from a good family, played by Cuban rumba dancer Ninon Sevilla, is the focus of this 1949 Mexican cult item, highly critical of and disparaged by the Mexican middle class. Alberto Gout directed. In Spanish with subtitles. 111 min. (JR) Read more
A singularly weird if watchable Italian courtroom drama about rape from the once very promising Marco Bellocchio (Fist in the Pocket, China Is Near), who more recently has been known for his ponderous sexual psychodramas and for having his psychotherapist present on his shooting locations to advise him on each shot. Perhaps he could use a better therapist. In this 1990 feature a young woman who finds herself locked inside an art museum is approached and, after some initial reluctance, seduced by an architect. Afterward the architect reveals that he was responsible for locking her inside the museum, and the woman brings rape charges against him. In the courtroom the architect expounds at length on the philosophy of rape and the philosophy of orgasm; for him, her orgasm proves there was no violence. Bellocchio seems to think he has a point; as he puts it, I am convinced that violence against women must be severely punished by law, but at the same time the perpetrator or the rapist is not really a rapist, but the ‘ideal’ man which every woman is looking for deep down, the man who does not destroy the woman’s identity, but by stimulating her desire does not disappoint her and therefore enables her to ‘be born’ and to strengthen her own identity. Read more
Luchino Visconti’s controversial 1975 feature was originally hooted off the screen at that year’s New York film festival, perhaps because the audience felt ill-prepared to cope with its frank homoeroticism, though many friends I respect insist it’s one of the best of his late features. Burt Lancaster plays an aging professor who becomes involved with the entourage of a wealthy woman (Silvano Mangano), including her young lover (Helmut Berger in the angel of death part. It almost certainly warrants a look. Read more
Three generations of Indian women living in England take a day trip from Birmingham to Blackpool, a working-class seaside resort, in Gurinder Chadha’s watchable but generally ho-hum 1994 first feature about assimilation and generational clashes. The overall style is realist, though there are a few fleeting fantasy interludes that don’t work very well; most of the various feminist miniplots intersect at a male strip joint, where some strident melodrama triumphs briefly over the comedy. (JR) Read more
Banned in China, the powerful eighth feature (1993) of Tian Zhuangzhuang (The Horse Thief) follows its fictional hero, Tietou, and his family from 1953 to 1968. It’s a sublime and often subtle look at how history and politics disrupt ordinary lives, with memorable use of its central courtyard location and a profound sense of how individuals strive to maintain a sense of ethics within a changing society that periodically confounds those ethics or makes them irrelevant. In Mandarin with subtitles. 138 min. (JR) Read more
The main reason to see this movie is two fabulous performances: Tommy Lee Jones as a military scientist involved with nuclear testing, and Jessica Lange as his flirtatious and rebelliously flamboyant wife. Set mainly in a straitlaced Alabama military compound in 1962, this odd little dramaeffectively directed by Tony Richardson from a semiautobiographical script written by Rama Laurie Stagner in collaboration with Arlene Sarner and Jerry Leichtlingcan be read as a suggestive reflection on the relationship between nuclear power and sexual repression during the cold war. In that sense it’s like the otherwise radically different Kiss Me Deadly, whose Va-va-voom! slogan and deadly plutonium made a similarly volatile mixture. Completed in 1991, this film remained on the shelf for three years, reportedly because of the bankruptcy of Orion. With Powers Boothe, Carrie Snodgress, Amy Locane, and Chris O’Donnell. (JR) Read more
The plot, set in 1927, recalls Elia Kazan’s 1960 Wild Rivera recalcitrant Vermont log driver (Rip Torn) refuses to sell his property lease so that the region’s first big hydroelectric dam can be builtbut this sincere, carefully made independent feature by Jay Craven, adapted by him and Don Bredes from a novel by Howard Frank Mosher, has plenty of distinctive elements. The most impressive is a wonderful, richly detailed performance by Tantoo Cardinal (Dances With Wolves) as the eccentric Native American woman who lives with the log driver. Shot entirely on location, this film also boasts a cast that includes Michael J. Fox and Bill Raymond in smaller roles and cameos by Treat Williams and Amy Wright. (JR) Read more
