The main message of this interesting program of 16 short films and videos selected by Chicagoan Elisabeth Subrin–nearly all of them by artists under 30 from around the country–seems to be that minimalism is finally over. An exception may be Sadie Benning’s black-and-white German Song, a rarity in that it’s a music video that breathes, but my two favorites among the seven I’ve seen–Cauleen Smith’s Chronicles of a Lying Spirit and Tran T. Kim-Trang’s Aletheia–are busy works that bombard the viewer with material and information. Smith’s film recycles cacophonous combinations of sound, images, and words as it sketches the history of blacks in America as if it all happened to a single individual; Kim-Trang’s work, even more experimental, begins by exploring the cosmetic surgery undergone by some Asian women to alter their eyelids and proceeds to broader reflections about westernization, blindness, race, and sexuality through the use of clips, quotations, maps, and different kinds of raw footage. The other artists in the show, eight of whom are Chicagoans, are Nancy Andrews, Tammy Rae Carland, Amanda Cole, Shari Frilot, Leah Gilliam, Sean Kryston, Laura Nix, Helen Mirra, Jeanine Oleson, Jennifer Reeves, Jon Schluenz, Kirsten Stoltman, and Kristen Thiele. Randolph St. Gallery, 756 N. Read more
My favorite Douglas Sirk film–made in Germany in 1936, when he was still known as Detlef Sierck–is a dazzlingly cinematic, fast-moving melodrama built around classical music; it’s alternately perverse, exalted, and delirious. Shuttling back and forth between New York and Berlin with an ease that suggests those cities were in closer proximity to each other in the 30s than they are today, the opening sequences present a destitute widow (Maria von Tasnady) recovering her will to live by listening to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” on the radio, broadcast live from Germany, where the conductor (Willy Birgel) is coincidentally in the process of adopting her little boy. When she returns to Berlin she goes to work as the boy’s nanny, concealing the fact that she’s his mother, while the conductor’s less musically inclined wife (Lil Dagover) tries to break free from an astrologer-blackmailer who’s threatening to expose her adultery with him. There’s also a creepy and seemingly malevolent maid, a climactic trial, and several sequences involving music and duplicity that produce some astonishing visual cadenzas and editing rhyme effects. (This is the film that inspired Sirk to note that camera angles “are a director’s thoughts” and “lighting is his philosophy.”) The movie was an enormous success in Germany when it came out, and it isn’t hard to understand why; it’s the finest Nazi-era fiction feature I’ve seen. Read more
Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline costar in a genuine odditya Francophobic romantic comedy set in France (1995). Ryan stays behind in Toronto when her fiance (Timothy Hutton) goes off to a medical conference in Paris, but when he phones to tell her he’s fallen in love with a Frenchwoman, she becomes so unhinged that she flies directly to Paris to win him back. Kline plays a French petty criminal sitting next to her on the plane who dupes her into getting involved with his smuggling scheme, and by the time they’ve visited his family’s vineyard and followed the fiance and his new girlfriend to Cannes, their own romance has started to blossom. The film’s almost systematic misrepresentations of France and the French, ranging from Kline’s accent to the geography of Paris and Cannes to the ways French people talk to one another, seem based less on stupidity than on cynical calculationthe realization that Americans are more comfortable with stereotypes than with real-life places and people. Ryan’s most winning quality, her sensuality, seems defeated by the project; but she’s one of the producers, so who’s to blame? Hollywood hack Lawrence Kasdan directed a script by Adam Brooks; with Jean Reno, Francois Cluzet, and Susan Anbeh. Read more
Laura San Giacomo cut off two feet of her hair to star in this first feature by writer-director Alan Jacobs, a serious movie about adultery set in San Francisco. It’s a lovely, nuanced performance, even if it’s ultimately handicapped, like the rest of the film, by a belatedly revealed narrative gimmick that you may find as hard to accept as I did. As a romantic story, this benefits from the fact that Jacobs and his three coproducers are all first-timers, which means that whatever mistakes they make are their own, not somebody else’s; there’s a lot of honest feeling in this movie, as well as some searching thoughts about what keeps or doesn’t keep certain long-term relationships going. With Paul Rhys (Vincent & Theo), Michael O’Keefe, Cristi Conaway, and Fisher Stevens. (JR) Read more
A genuine oddity from 1935 Germanya musical-comedy version of a play by Plautus. Reinhold Sch Read more
A successful 35-year-old lesbian stand-up comic who’s been happily living for five years with an artist and gallery owner is thrown for a loop when a former close friend from high school and college turns up, husband in tow, and offers her a contract for a TV sitcom. The characters in Mindy Kaplan’s independent feature are quirky enough to seem real at first, and the generous samplings of the heroine’s stand-up routines make an interesting blend of fiction and performance. But the storytelling turns lugubrious, an arty flashback to what broke up the friendship seems mannered and contrived, and the limitations of this 123-minute feature become more apparent than the intelligence of certain details. With Jan Derbyshire, Kate Twa, Cindy Girling, Eileen Barrett, and Steve Adams. (JR) Read more
A visually striking if dramatically somewhat oblique look at a visionary girl’s struggle (ostensibly spiritual, but also clearly sexual and sensual) against the ruling powers in a 14th-century English villagea first feature directed by Chris Newby from a script by Judith Stanley-Smith and Christine Watkins (1993). The high-contrast black-and-white cinematography (by Michel Baudour) is stunning throughout, the acting is all competent or better, and the period ambience seems flawless, though a certain academic distance tends to limit our emotional involvement; what emerges is thoughtful, arresting, and interesting rather than gripping. (This was produced by the British Film Institute, and at times a theoretical rigor, suggestive of that organization’s education department, seems to hover over the proceedings.) Yet it’s an intelligent take on the Middle Ages, a far cry from the usual treatment, and well worth checking out. With Natalie Morse, Eugene Bervoets, Toyah Willcox, Peter Postlethwaite, and Christopher Eccleston. (JR) Read more
A kitschy if sincere Chicano family saga by Gregory Nava (El Norte), nicely shot by Ed Lachman, covering three generations in Los Angeles. Francis Ford Coppola is one of the executive producers, and the colorful sweep and the likable schmaltz both bear his stampthough an uncredited appropriation of Satyajit Ray’s The World of Apu in one of the major plot strands is also apparent. With Jimmy Smits, Esai Morales, Eduardo Lopez Rojas, Jenny Gago, Elpidia Carrillo, Constance Marie, and Edward James Olmos, who serves as narrator; producer Anna Thomas collaborated with Nava on the script. (JR) Read more
It’s not clear why Steven Spielberg’s Amblin decided to make a live-action entertainment starring the least interesting and most saccharine of all 50s cartoon characters, the friendly ghost who can’t help scaring people, but here’s your chance to shell out in search of an answer. Brad Silberling directed this 1993 feature from a script by Sherri Stoner and Deanna Oliver; the cast includes Christina Ricci, Bill Pullman, Cathy Moriarty, and Eric Idle. 100 min. (JR) Read more
Elvis Presley in 1961, just after the onset of his artistic slaveryonly three years before he’d wanted to star in The Defiant Ones with Sammy Davis Jr., but Colonel Parker signed him up to appear in stuff like this instead. This is supposed to be somewhat better than most Elvis films of the period because he sings Can’t Help Falling in Love. Angela Lansbury plays his mother; Norman Taurog directed. 101 min. (JR) Read more
Director John Carpenter takes a nosedive in this remake of the 1960 English chiller, itself adapted from John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoo. Much of the problem devolves from David Himmelstein’s script, not because it transplants Wyndham’s story of a group of children born with supernatural and telepathic powers to a small coastal village in California but because it represents both a considerable dumbing down and a hokey inflation of material that originally depended on mood and subtle suggestion for its effectiveness. Apart from a few shocks near the beginning, this version comes across as more harebrained than suggestive. With Christopher Reeve, Kirstie Alley, Linda Kozlowski, Michael Pare, Mark Hamill, and Meredith Salenger. (JR) Read more
Mario Van Peebles directs a script adapted by his father Melvin from the latter’s novel about the Black Panther movement, from its formation in Oakland in 1966 to its eventual destruction by the FBI in collaboration with organized crime; father and son coproduced (1995). The information here, much of it corresponding closely to the account of South Central Los Angeles in the 1994 video documentary The Fire This Time, is persuasive and compelling, though the drama and storytelling only intermittently do justice to it; MTV aesthetics tend to predominate, so that even grandiloquent crane shots for funerals are made to whiz by like fleeting attractions. But the sincerity of the project can’t be questioned, and much of the message gets across. With Kadeem Hardison, Marcus Chong (as Huey Newton), Courtney B. Vance (as Bobby Seale), Bokeem Woodbine, Joe Don Baker, Nefertiti, and Tyrin Turner. 124 min. (JR) Read more
An hour-long 1995 video documentary by Chicagoans Kate Kirtz and Nell Lundy about the women’s health collective Jane, whose members performed 12,000 safe but illegal abortions within the University of Chicago community between 1969 and 1973. The oral history that emergeswhich links this work to other political activities of the period even as it distinguishes it from themis a fascinating and important chronicle. The video is limited at times by the difficult task of representing events recounted in the interviews when appropriate footage isn’t available, but the overall story is indelible. (JR) Read more
Not John Ford at his best, but still full of interest, this somewhat dry-cleaned version of Jack Kirkland’s play adaptation of the famous Erskine Caldwell novel, scripted by Nunnally Johnson, offers a bittersweet view of Georgia hillbillies that doesn’t register fully as either comedy or drama (1941). Reportedly the same thing was true of the original play, which became a comedy only after audiences started laughing at it, but Ford benefits from this ambiguity by putting a wry spin on the populist humanism of The Grapes of Wrath, which he’d recently made for the same studio, Fox. With Charley Grapewin (repeating his stage role as Jeeter Lester), Marjorie Rambeau, Gene Tierney, William Tracy, Elizabeth Patterson, Dana Andrews, and Ward Bond. (JR) Read more
Peter Brook’s 1966 filming of one of his greatest stage productionsa Peter Weiss play based on the premise of the Marquis de Sade staging a play about the French Revolution in the Charenton asylumdoesn’t translate too well to the screen, especially when close-ups are expected to take the place of Brook’s multifaceted original mise en scene. The castincluding Ian Richardson, Patrick Magee, and Glenda Jackson (in her screen debut)is certainly skillful, but the compexity and originality of the work as originally conceived is basically missing. (JR) Read more
