A silent picture by Yasujiro Ozu (1930) about a petty thief who dreams of becoming a boxer and decides to go straight; he’s helped by the love of a woman and ultimately a job as a window washer. Like all Ozu silents, this is much brisker than his subsequent sound work, and the compositions are an eyeful. 96 min. (JR) Read more
This uncharacteristic Sternbergian crime thriller by Yasujiro Ozu, one of his more interesting silent pictures (1930), is set almost entirely inside a single cluttered flat, where a policeman, hoping to arrest a commercial artist who’s robbed an office, is held at bay by his gun-wielding wife. The results are tense, claustrophobic, and visually striking throughout. In Japanese with subtitles. 65 min. (JR) Read more
The earliest of Yasujiro Ozu’s silent films to have survived, this is a chipper skiing comedy (1929) involving two college friends on holiday who are in love with the same woman. The ambience is akin to Harold Lloyd, and the slapstick is funny as well as touching. Ozu’s playful formalism is already fully evident, especially in what he does with ski poles. In Japanese with subtitles. 103 min. (JR) Read more
One of the most interesting and effective aspects of this prizewinning new documentary by Arthur Dong about gay men and lesbians in the military during World War II is the fact that it’s in black and white. Among other things, this puts contemporary interviews and archival footage on an equal footing, so they seem continuous with one another. (Mark Adler’s serviceable score strengthens this continuity by playing over both kinds of footage.) Adapted by Dong and Allan Berube from Berube’s 1990 book of the same title and narrated by Salome Jens, this informative and intelligent work provides a comprehensive historical context for the recent debates stirred up by Clinton’s efforts to allow gay men and women to serve in the armed forces. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, August 5, 6:00 and 7:45; Saturday, August 6, 4:15 and 6:00; and Sunday, August 7, 4:00; 443-3737. Read more
The exciting thing about Haile Gerima’s lush, wide-screen folkloric feature about black slavery 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 and Larry Clark, 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; he hurls a curse 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 is rendered mainly in English dialogue, with an intriguing score by David J. White that manages to encompass American jazz and blues as well as African elements. 124 min. (JR) Read more
French director-costar Bartabas shows off his celebrated Zingaro horse theater in Aubervilliers as well as a lot of flamboyant, mannered film technique, in this speculative period account of the early-19th-century encounter between the French romantic horse painter Theodore Gericault and Franconi, horse trainer and master of the Olympic Circus. Winner of the technical prize for best visual achievement at the 1993 Cannes festival, this movie is often striking as spectacle, yet it’s too calculated and self-enamored about its effects to allow one to get very involved with the material. But if you like horses and horse acts, this is a must. With Miguel Bose and Brigitte Marty; written by Bartabas, Claude-Henri Bufford and Homeric. (JR) Read more
Ironically, Atom Egoyan’s 1993 masterpiece is the most spontaneously generated of his features, one in which he plays the male leada petulant photographer whose marriage falls apart during an assignment to shoot a dozen historic Armenian churches for a calendar. The movie basically oscillates between two time frames: scenes with the photographer, his translator wife (Arsinee Khanjian), and their local guide (Ashot Adamian) in Armenia, and scenes in Canada afterward, in which the photographer repeatedly goes through the same romantic ritual with a number of other women. One of the best movies made anywhere about tribalism and its perils, this is at once hilarious and painful, fresh and beautifulan apotheosis of Egoyan’s preoccupations with identity, sex, and representation. 75 min. (JR) Read more
An exciting double feature of Yasujiro Ozu silents. The sacrificial theme in Woman of Tokyo recalls Mizoguchia young woman supports her brother through school by becoming a prostitutebut the elliptical and mysterious style is thoroughly Ozu’s. This 1933 film may be the most formally radical of his late silent pictures. 47 min. The earlier That Night’s Wife (1930), an uncharacteristic Sternbergian crime thriller, is mainly set inside a single cluttered flat, where a policeman, hoping to arrest a commercial artist who’s robbed an office, is held at bay by his gun-wielding wife. The results are tense, claustrophobic, and visually striking throughout. 65 min. Both films are in Japanese with subtitles. (JR) Read more
Yasujiro Ozu released this 1932 silent feature only four months after his masterpiece I Was Born, But . . . , and like the earlier film it begins as a comedy before its treatment of conformity and class difference grows tragic. A rich goof-off joins his less privileged schoolmates in cheating on exams; called home after his father dies, he takes over the family business, hires his friends, and eventually feels both devastated and angry when one of them breaks off his engagement in order to keep his job. Stylistically as well as thematically boldone whole sequence focuses on the characters’ handsthis isn’t an unqualified success, but it packs a wallop. 86 min. (JR) Read more
A young functionary in a Tokyo insurance office stands up for a colleague, loses his job as a result, and ends up distributing flyers on the street, struggling to support his wife and three children. Film historian Tadao Sato has described this 1931 Japanese silent, a major work by Yasujiro Ozu, as a cheerful tragedy, and it shows Ozu’s sense of physicality at its most poetic. Striking in its similarity to Hollywood movies of the Depression era, it synthesizes much of Ozu’s previous work; in some respects I prefer his silent films over everything that followed, and this is an excellent introduction to them. In Japanese with subtitles. 90 min. (JR) Read more
This silent gangster picture by Yasujiro Ozu (1933), about a typist determined to make her criminal boyfriend go straight, is one of the most striking of Ozu’s American-style silents. It stars the great Kinuyo Tanaka, who later played the title role in Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu and subsequently became a director herself (the first Japanese woman to do so). In Japanese with subtitles. 100 min. (JR) Read more
Brainscam might be a more appropriate title. This high-tech horror story promises a lively rip-off of elements from both Videodrome and Monkey Shines: An Experiment in Fear, but soon clicks into automatic pilot. The post-Freudian notions of the return of the repressed might have been fresh around the time of Forbidden Planet, but by now they’re more evocative of repetition compulsion. Terminator 2’s Edward Furlong stars as a dysfunctional teenager with a morbid taste in slasher films who . . . too bad that Andrew Kevin Walker rather than John Waters wrote the rest. John Flynn directed; with Amy Hargreaves, Frank Langella, and T. Ryder Smith as Mr. Return of the Repressed himself, known in this case as Trickster. (JR) Read more
I was afraid I’d find this Swedish period piece by Ake Sandgren cutesy, but I wound up liking it quite a bit. Based on an autobiographical novel by Roland Schutt, it’s set in Stockholm in the 20s. The ten-year-old hero’s mother is a Russian Jew, his father’s a revolutionary socialist, and his older brother, an aspiring boxer, keeps punching him in the nose. The anti-Semitism of Roland’s teacher and schoolmates and the illegal activities of his parents–which include distributing condoms to workers and attending incendiary political meetings–make him something of a defiant outcast. All the characters are treated with a fair amount of humor and affection (the father, played by Stellan Skarsgard, is indelible), the period details are well handled, and the episodic story line is fairly engaging. The film doesn’t dig too deep, but it might make you feel pretty good. With Jesper Salen and Basia Frydman. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, July 29 through August 4. Read more
In my review of Blown Away last week, an editing error made it sound as if an Irish wedding takes place as Tommy Lee Jones is blasting his way out of a prison cell at the beginning of the movie, and as if Jeff Bridges appears in the opening sequence. In fact the wedding and Bridges’s first appearance take place later in the movie.
Jonathan Rosenbaum Read more
As far as I know this is something of a first, at least since the 20s or 30s: a movie predicated on film theory playing in a commercial theater. Written, directed, and produced by American independents Scott McGehee and David Siegel, this odd black-and-white ‘Scope thriller (1993) about identity and social construction concerns a young man named Clay who becomes briefly acquainted with his half-brother Vincent. Vincent, who wants to flee the country for various reasons, secretly arranges to have Clay blown up in Vincent’s car wearing Vincent’s clothes; with everyone believing he’s dead, Vincent can easily disappear. But Clay survives the explosion, though he has amnesia, and with the help of a plastic surgeon and a psychoanalyst is “restored” to an identity that was never his–Vincent’s. A subversive spin is given to this material: Clay and Vincent are said by all the characters to be dead ringers, yet Clay is played by a black actor and Vincent by a white one–and no one ever comments on it. The film may be at times a little too smart (as well as a little too drab and mechanical) for its own good, but the witty, provocative implications of the central concept linger, and the story carries an interesting sting: this is a head scratcher that actually functions. Read more