Also known as The Bastard, this is a campy 1963 black-and-white Japanese period drama and tragic love story about a teenage delinquent who wants to be a pulp writer (and is inspired by a Strindberg novel). It’s the first film made by B-movie mannerist Seijun Suzuki in collaboration with art director Takeo Kimura, and some of the lighting schemes are exquisite, even if the low-budget production values often call to mind Samuel Fuller’s period pictures (e.g.,Park Row). It’s hard to know how seriously to take the eccentric script construction, in which, for example, the only offscreen narration, very soap-operaish in style, occurs at the very end. With Ken Yamanouchi and Masako Izumi. (JR) Read more
Lori Petty does a nice job in the title role of this enjoyable 1995 feature based on the postapocalyptic SF comic book and set in the year 2033; it’s basically aimed at teenagers, though it’s a lot more feminist than what usually passes for adult fare. When a tribe of doped-out beasties known as the Rippers turns up, spouting beat poetry and giving the heroine and her best friend some military backup, this movie shifts into high gear, and the animated sequences and comic-strip montages throughout the film are a delight. Unless you’re a preteen boy who hates girls, it’s funnier and a lot more fun than Batman Forever. Directed by Rachel Talalay from a script by Tedi Sarafian; with Malcolm McDowell, Ice-T, Naomi Watts, Don Harvey, Reg E. Cathey, Scott Coffey, and Jeff Kober. (JR) Read more
Not to be confused with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead cycle, this 1985 horror parody represents the directorial debut of scenarist Dan O’Bannon (Alien, Lifeforce). It’s pretty funny, if memory serves, but nothing special. 90 min. (JR) Read more
In 1955, the year Satyajit Ray’s beautiful first feature won the Grand Prix at Cannes, no less a humanist than Francois Truffaut walked out of a screening, declaring, I don’t want to see a film about Indian peasants. Time and critical opinion have been much kinder to this family melodramaderived, like its successors in the Apu trilogy, Aparajito and The World of Apu, from a 30s novel by Bibhutibhusan Banerjeethan to Truffaut’s remark. Yet there’s no question that Ray’s contemplative treatment of a poor Brahman family in a Bengali village, made on a small budget and accompanied by the mesmerizing music of Ravi Shankar, is a triumph of mood and character rather than an exercise in brisk Western storytelling. In Bengali with subtitles. 115 min. (JR) Read more
The docudramas of Judit Elek are barely known in the U.S., but this Hungarian filmmaker has been acquiring a reputation abroad, including a recent retrospective at the Cinematheque Francaise. Her most recent film is set in the mid-19th century, 17 years after the failed revolution of 1848-49, and centers on the events of one day during an aristocratic family gathering. Read more
A very low-budget ($7,000) first feature by Robert Rodriguez (1993) that’s juicy, adroit, and likablean action picture set in a town on the Mexican border, where a mariachi musician (Carlos Gallardo) and a hit man (Reinol Martinez) arrive at the same time, both carrying guitar cases. Not only are they mistaken for each other by the various henchmen working for an Anglo drug baron (Peter Marquardt) who wants the hit man rubbed out, but the musicianwho’s already being shoved out of his traditional art by Muzakwinds up becoming a killer simply to stay alive. The whole thing can be read as a potent satirical allegory about an independent third world filmmaker like Rodriguez forced to imitate and sell out to his Yankee exploiters to survive: the drug baron, like a Hollywood producer, spends most of his time lounging around a pool served by a bimbo in a bikini, and the film itself was distributed by Columbia, which promptly signed Rodriguez to shoot a $6 million English-language remakea form of humiliation that obviously constitutes ultimate success in many people’s minds. Consuelo Gomez plays the feisty heroine. (JR) Read more
Apart from Crumb, this film by Steven M. Martin may be the best American documentary feature of 1994. It’s certainly one of the most fascinating, taking as its subjects the electronic musical instrument known as the theremin; Leon Theremin, the Russian visionary who created it; and all the remarkable things that have happened to inventor and invention over the past seven decades. In a way, the film also describes the complex history of a concept in this country: how a particular sound gave birth to electronic music (Robert Moog is one of the many people interviewed here, along with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and various classical musicians) and wound up being used in Hollywood, mainly in SF films. Then there’s the hair-raising story of Theremin being kidnapped by Soviet agents in 1938, his romance with a Russian violin prodigy, and much, much more. I shouldn’t leave out the fascination of watching a theremin being played; just as it’s difficult to play a vibraphone without dancing, it’s hard to play a theremin without conducting. 104 min. (JR) Read more
Though I liked his criticism for Cahiers du Cinema in the 60s, on the basis of five of his early films I haven’t been a big fan of Andre Techine. But this wonderful and masterful feature (1994), his 12th, suggests that maybe he’d just been tooling up. It’s one of the best movies from an excellent French television series of fiction features on teenagers of the 60s, 70s, and early 80s, and it’s the first to be released in the U.S. If Techine’s French Provincial (1974) evoked in some ways the Bertolucci of The Conformist, this account of kids living in southwest France in 1962, toward the end of the Algerian war, has some of the feeling, lyricism, and sweetness of Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution–though it’s clearly the work of someone much older and wiser. The main characters, all completing their baccalaureate exam at a boarding school, include a boy struggling with his homosexual desire for a close friend, an older student who’s a right-wing opponent of Algerian nationalism, and a communist girl, the daughter of one of the teachers, who befriends the homosexual and falls for the older student in spite of their violent political differences. One remembers these characters and others as vividly as old friends, and Techine’s handling of pastoral settings is as exquisite as his feeling for period. Read more
Director Irwin Winkler, who’d previously given us a political movie without politics (Guilty by Suspicion) and a remake of a classic noir without atmosphere or flavor (Night and the City), here gives us a thriller without thrills, though Sandra Bullock in the lead and the putative themethe paranoid possibility of deleting people’s public profiles from computer networksmay keep you intermittently interested. Bullock plays a lonely freelance hacker who accidentally stumbles upon a conspiracy that wipes out her identity during a vacation in Mexico. What’s really terrible here is the script credited to John Brancato and Michael Ferris and apparently written by a computer with identity problems of its own. Winkler doesn’t know how to transcend or circumvent it, and the mechanical music by the omnipresent Mark Isham doesn’t help much. With Jeremy Northam, Dennis Miller, and Diane Baker. (JR) Read more
A much better-than-average comedy-adventure and animal picture from Disney, set in South Vietnam in 1968 and inspired by a true story, about the mission of five Green Berets to transport an 8,000-pound elephant through 200 miles of jungle. This logistical nightmareinvolving travel by plane, parachute, truck, and boat as well as by footwas carried out for Montagnard villagers after the elephant they’d planned to use in a ceremony was accidentally killed. Leading the mission are two captains (Danny Glover and Ray Liotta) at temperamental loggerheads, and leading the elephant is a war orphan (Dinh Thien Le) suspicious of both of them; part of what makes this picture distinctive is a humanist treatment of the Vietnamese characters, North as well as South. Simon Wincer (Free Willy) does a fine job of keeping things both mobile and scenic, and the script by Gene Quintano and Jim Kouf has an old-fashioned sense of character and story development that kept me entertained; even when this picture is corny, it’s corny in a likable way. With Denis Leary, Doug E. Doug, and Corin Nemec. (JR) Read more
You’ve probably never heard of this crime picture and love story (1994), but it’s almost certainly the best American genre movie released so far this year–the sort of beautifully crafted personal effort that would qualify as a sleeper if our film industry still allowed sleepers to function as they did in the 50s. Given the kinky (and highly erotic) sex scenes and the quirky comedy, the expert handling of actors and the playful experimenting with both narrative form and genre expectations, one is tempted to compare writer-director Mark Malone to Quentin Tarantino. But in fact he stands Tarantino squarely on his head; this movie, originally titled Killer (and scripted for contractual reasons under a pseudonym), about the unexpected overnight awakening and humanizing of a cold-blooded hit man (Anthony LaPaglia) by his willing victim (Mimi Rogers) puts back the tenderness and conscience that Tarantino removed from his pulp sources, and does it with soul as well as style. Apart from the wonderful leads, Matt Craven and Peter Boyle are both inspired–and often very funny–in secondary parts. The story may wind up haunting you for days. Like the ad writers, I’m tempted to call this movie a noir, but since it isn’t misogynist that would be misleading. Read more
A very funny if mean-spirited French farce (1994) about the French film industry, with writer-director-star Michel Blanc (Menage, Monsieur Hire) playing himself. Boasting a certain metaphysical dimension as well as a satirical edge about the cult of show-biz celebrity and the decline of French cinema, this movie raises the possibility that vulgar look-alikes may be taking jobs away from the stars they’re imitating. Several international film personalities (ranging from Carole Bouquet and Philippe Noiret to Josiane Balasko, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Roman Polanski) have been induced to play themselves (or is it their doubles?), and if you can overlook the offensiveness of a few jokes about rape, you’re likely to enjoy the boisterous energy and cascading anger. Incidentally, this won a prize at Cannes for best screenplay. (JR) Read more
The surprising thing about the first English-language feature (1993) of Iranian filmmaker Amir Naderi (The Runner, Water, Wind, Sand) is that it has nothing at all to do with Iran or Iranians. Rather, it tells the story of a laid-off American newspaperman (John Wojda), separated from his wife and child and at the end of his economic resources, traveling across New York City in an effort to find enough money by the end of the day to keep himself from becoming homeless. It’s a realistic, keenly felt, and richly detailed movie about American urban life in the mid-90s, but what’s most striking about it is its power as poetry, as it delineates a landscape and the precise contours of a state of mind. This is a potent example of what Hollywood, which can’t seem to make movies about the world we’re living in, is studiously avoiding. The beautiful, original jazz score is by Gato Barbieri, the Brazilian musician best known for his score for Last Tango in Paris. Music Box, Saturday and Sunday, July 15 and 16. Read more
Proof positiveif any is neededthat the films of writer-director-coproducer Chris Columbus (who once upon a time wrote the script for Gremlins) are not only insults to the intelligence but crimes against humanity. Much as the fleet, free-form style of Robin Williams was methodically destroyed in Mrs. Doubtfire, the subtle underplaying of Hugh Grant is replaced here by grotesque mugging and telegraphing designed to ensure that even brain-dead members of the audience aren’t remotely challenged. Grant unconvincingly plays an unmarried expectant father and child psychologist, and Julianne Moore is the expectant mother in a glib, reactionary yuppie comedy set in San Francisco, remade from a French comedy by Patrick Braoude that may or may not be just as nauseating. The costars are Tom Arnold (still playing the poor man’s Alan Alda), Joan Cusack, Jeff Goldblum, and Robin Williams (who clearly thinks he’s the cat’s pajamas as an inept Russian doctor). If you’re determined to make Columbus richer than he already is, why not save yourself further dehumanization and simply send him a check. (JR) Read more
A highly Americanized and extremely bland adaptation of Lynne Reid Banks’s English novel for children, about a nine-year-old boy (Hal Scardino) who discovers he can bring plastic toy figures to life inside a small cupboard. I haven’t read the novel, but I gather that one of the key differences in this version from writer Melissa Mathison and director Frank Oz is a sort of fractured multiculturalism whereby the hero gets to keep a real-life miniature Indian as a pet and a nonwhite kid (an Indian from India, played by Rishi Bhat) gets to keep a real-life white cowboy (David Keith) to even things up. The premise has its enjoyable aspects, but the casting and direction of actors here (not to mention the extremely narrow sense of character) seem so misconceived that the title Indian, though played by a member of the Cherokee nation named Litefoot, seems unconvincing throughout; the other little people aren’t much better, and Lindsay Crouse as the hero’s mother seems totally wasted. Hunt down Tod Browning’s The Devil-Doll, James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein, or even Ernest Schoedsack’s Dr. Cyclops or Jack Arnold’s The Incredible Shrinking Man for a much more enjoyable exploration of the same theme with more imaginative special effects. Read more
