Xie Fei, the fourth generation mainland Chinese director who taught filmmaking to both Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine) and Tian Zhuangzhuang (The Blue Kite), wrote and directed this 1993 melodrama, based on a novel by Zhou Daxin, about a middle-aged woman who runs a highly successful sesame-oil business in a northern village but can’t escape the cycle of abuse that started when she was sold into marriage at a young age. When she buys a wife for her dysfunctional only sonwho appears to be epileptic and winds up beating his brideshe’s beaten by her own husband. The drama here is often pointed, and Xie’s direction is sensitive. But the sometimes opaque and unidiomatic subtitling (e.g., Human life is a long way to go) doesn’t help; alternately titled Woman Sesame Oil Maker and The Women of the Lake of Scented Souls. In Mandarin with subtitles. 105 min. (JR) Read more
From the Chicago Reader (September 1, 1994). — J.R.
A sardonic Mexican melodrama from 1964, directed by Alberto Isaac and based on a Gabriel Garcia Marquez story, about a provincial town where nothing much happens until a layabout steals the game balls from the local billiard parlor and the local population goes ballistic. With Julian Pastor, Rocio Sagaon, and cameos by several well-known artists and intellectuals, including Juan Rulfo, Garcia Marquez, Arturo Ripstein, and Luis Buñuel. Read more
This 1933 film focuses on life in a huge department store from the vantage point of the employees, whose lives are made miserable by a heartless, amoral manager (Warren William). As an attack on ruthless capitalism, it goes a lot further than more recent efforts such as Wall Street, and it’s amazing how much plot and character are gracefully shoehorned into 75 minutes. Adapted by Robert Presnell from a play by David Boehm, and directed by the reliable Roy Del Ruth; with Loretta Young, Wallace Ford, Alice White, and Allen Jenkins. 75 min. (JR) Read more
There’s nothing wrong in theory with Bernardo Bertolucci choosing to make a movie about Buddhism for kids, any more than with Akira Kurosawa taking a kids’ view of certain ecological issues in Dreams. Working with a script by Rudy Wurlitzer and Mark Peploe, the film oscillates between a contemporary tale about an elderly Tibetan lama believing that a little boy living in Seattle might be the reincarnation of his teacher and the story of Siddhartha and the origins of Buddhism 2,500 years ago; the latter sections tend to be more compelling than the former. The cast, which includes Keanu Reeves, Chris Isaak, and Bridget Fonda, isn’t all it might have been, but Bertolucci’s celebrated burnt-orange-and-burnished-lemon look remains handsome, and the story itself still commands some interest as a pivot into daunting material. Too bad that Miramax decreed about 15 minutes be cut from the original version, which has shown overseas; apparently a snappier kind of Buddhism is required here. 123 min. (JR) Read more
Also known as Armor of God II, this 1990 Jackie Chan sequel has its hero searching for Nazi gold in Morocco at the behest of the United Nations, with no fewer than three spunky heroines in tow (Carol Cheng, Eva Cobo de Garcia, Shoko Ikeda). Dubbed in English for rerelease, with Chan (who directed and cowrote the script) supplying his own lines, this is a much purer example of Hong Kong’s silly, exuberant popular cinema than a diluted and pretentious concoction like Face/Off. The intrigue and behavioral comedy (complete with voyeurism) may seem to come straight out of a Bob Hope farce, but the choreographed action and stunts are breathtaking. (JR) Read more
Apparently bent on following the Robin Williams route to success, Steve Martin stars in a contemporary soap opera from Disneywhich Martin himself loosely adapted from George Eliot’s Silas Marnerabout a hermetic furniture maker who adopts a baby girl deposited on his doorstep. As he is raising her the biological father (Gabriel Byrne), a local politician, demands custody of the child. There are only a few laughs here, and though the efforts to elicit tears show a certain amount of sincerity, Eliot’s 19th-century armature keeps poking through the proceedings, making them all seem faintly archaic. With Catherine O’Hara and Stephen Baldwin; directed by Gillies MacKinnon. (JR) Read more
Now I know what hip is: looking indifferent about whether the cat lying on the floor of your apartment is dead or not. Apart from this invaluable lesson, not a whole lot is going on here, and most of the moves are awfully familiar. Just as there’s a branch of filmmaking that could be called the school of Jim Jarmusch, this 1994 bank-heist thriller with a Paris setting, written and directed by Roger Avary, clearly belongs to the Quentin Tarantino school. (Avary once worked with Tarantino in a video store, and Tarantino serves here as executive producer.) Unfortunately it’s primary school; Killing Zoe has little of the style, pacing, characterization, or wit of Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction (though Avary worked on the scripts of both). With Eric Stoltz, Julie Delpy, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Tai Thai, and Bruce Ramsey. (JR) Read more
Slight but charming, this low-budget feature by cabdriver Eric Schaeffer and bartender Donal Lardner Ward about a cabdriver and bartender in Manhattan trying to make a low-budget feature presents a somewhat dumbed-down version of the producer-writer-director costars, whose semifictional counterparts would never have gotten this picture financed and made. But it’s an amusing enough facsimile of some of the vagaries of the film business and its aspirants. Among the highlights are cameos by Phoebe Cates, Martha Plimpton, and Casey Siemaszko playing themselves and John Sayles as a marginal producer. Only some of the proceedings are laugh-out-loud funny, but the adolescent energies of the filmmakers and characters keep this chugging along agreeably. With Lisa Gerstein, Dana Wheeler Nicholson, Debra Clein, and Sheila Jaffe. (JR) Read more
Sad to say, John Candy’s last movie is also his worsta stridently unfunny western comedy that is equally lame in its writing (Matthew Carlson and Jerry Abrahamson) and direction (Peter Markle). Candy plays an inefficient wagon master leading a group of disgruntled western settlers back to Saint Louis; they encounter a string of adventures and bad gagsmany of them anachronistic, some of them homophobic, virtually all of them stupidalong the way. With Richard Lewis, John C. McGinley, Ellen Greene, Robert Picardo, and Ed Lauter. (JR) Read more
Howard Davies, a distinguished director on the London and Broadway stage, makes his feature debut with this David Hare play, adapted by the author. Two grown sisters (Juliet Stevenson and Penelope Wilton) and the young wife (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer) of their father try to reach a business agreement together after the father dies. What emerges is a rather morose and (for me) unsatisfying psychological thriller, but the three actresses are so good at making characters liveand Neil Pearson as one sister’s lover is not far behindthat you’ll probably be held by the story all the same. (JR) Read more
Bruce Willis plays a New York psychologist who abandons his practice and moves to LA after the suicide of a patient, only to find himself enmeshed in an obsessive sexual relationship with a mysterious woman (Jane March) and a murder investigation involving a colleague and friend. All the major suspects are in group therapy together, and look like they need italong with just about every other character in this somewhat preposterous but fairly watchable mystery thriller. The plot gets so convoluted and farfetched that you still may be scratching your head after the denouement, but you probably won’t be bored. Directed by Richard Rush (Getting Straight, The Stunt Man) from a script by Matthew Chapman and Billy Ray; with Ruben Blades, Lesley Ann Warren, Brad Dourif, Lance Henriksen, and Kevin J. O’Connor. (JR) Read more
A funky independent feature by Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging), set in the Los Angeles barrios and concentrating on the friendships between working-class women there. The stylistic boldness may get a little top-heavy in spots, but in general this is funny, insightful, and imaginatively told. The cinematographer, interestingly, is Rodrigo Garcia, son of writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez. With Angel Aviles, Seidy Lopez, Jacob Vargas, Marlo Marron, and Jessie Borrago (1993). Pipers Alley, Wilmette, Norridge. Read more
Three boys from the suburbs travel to the city in order to see a naked woman and wind up meeting a friendly hooker (Melanie Griffith) who drives them all home and then gets a crush on the father (Ed Harris) of one of the boys while she hides out from a gang boss (Malcolm McDowell). John Mattson’s script is every bit as silly as it sounds; it dawdles, stumbles, stalls, embarrasses both itself and the audience, and is routinely formulaic to boot. But Harris and Griffith (the latter doing her customary maternal Marilyn/Madonna shtick) make an appealing couple, and Richard Benjamin’s direction of them and the boys is halfway nice. With Michael Patrick Carter, Casey Siemaszko, and Brian Christopher. (JR) Read more
According to Robert Frost, poetry is what gets lost in translationwhich describes the difficulty as well as the interest of the first feature directed by Ismail Merchant (1993), best known as James Ivory’s producer for 30-odd years (he has forayed into directing only twice before, making two films for British television). His principal motive here was to pay homage to Urdu, a poetic language on the verge of extinction in northern India. Based on a novel by Anita Desai and adapted by her and Shahrukh Husain, the film tells of a Hindu teacher coming into contact with one of his idols, a revered Urdu poet who’s fallen on hard times; a central part of the story involves the teacher’s protracted tragicomic efforts to record the poet reciting his own poetry. Merchant’s storytelling and direction are fluid and graceful, but there’s nothing he can do to convey in subtitles the essence of the language he’s celebrating. With Shashi Kapoor, Shabana Azmi, Om Puri, and Sushma Seth. (JR) Read more
An OK documentary by actor Andy Garciawho also appears as host and interviewerabout Israel Cachao Lopez, the Cuban bassist and bandleader who invented the mambo and exerted a major influence over salsa and Afro-Cuban jazz. Lopez is interviewed, and Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante is on hand for his recollections and scholarly asides on the music; most of the remaining footage is devoted to a 1992 concert in Miami. Read more
