From the Chicago Reader (April 29, 1996). — J.R.
This 1996 American independent feature by Mary Harron, written with Dan Minahan, is so good at re-creating the appearance of Warhol and his 60s milieu that I was almost completely won over — that is, until a closing title called Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto a feminist classic. Having gone out out of its way to persuade the audience that Solanas was a raving lunatic, the movie ends by calling her a visionary. But having things both ways characterizes just about every facet and offshoot of the Warhol industry, so I guess this movie shouldn’t be castigated for the same principled (and often instructive) confusion. Lili Taylor turns in a good performance as Solanas, and almost as impressive are Jared Harris as Warhol, Stephen Dorff as Candy Darling, and Michael Imperioli as Ondine. If you want to know what the Warhol scene was all about, this is even better than the documentaries. With Martha Plimpton, Danny Morgenstern, and Lothaire Bluteau (as the nefarious Maurice Girodias). (JR)
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A meandering 60s-style movie (1994) by writer-director Anna Campion (sister of Jane), filmed in England and focusing on what happens when seven students decide to shoot a 16-millimeter horror movie in and around a crumbling country mansion; things start to unravel after they all decide to take acid (with the director serving up weird sounds and images, including animation, to suggest their experiences). On the whole Campion’s much better at directing actors than at telling a story. With Oliver Milburn, Dearbhla Molloy, Danny Cunningham, Catherine McCormack, Thandie Newton, Nick Patrick, Biddy Hodson, and Matthew Eggleton. (JR) Read more
A spunky white woman (Rhea Perlman) becomes coach of an inner-city basketball team and eventually wins the players’ hearts, in another example of the sort of feel-good liberal Band-Aid for racial inequality that Benjamin DeMott exposed recently in a valuable book. (Other examples in this burgeoningor should I say bludgeoning?cycle include Dangerous Minds and The Substitute.) I don’t deny the sincerity of such a movie, but it’s questionable whether it accomplishes much beyond flattering the audience for its goodwill. Steve Gomer directed a script by Seth Zvi Rosenfeld and Kathleen McGhee-Anderson, and the costars include Fredro Starr, Carol Kane, Terrence Dashon Howard, Camille Saviola, and De’Aundre Bonds. (JR) Read more
An odd kettle of fish, though a pretty alluring one. Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors) directs a Pete Dexter and Floyd Mutrux script, a noirish crime story set in Los Angeles during the 50s; thanks in part to gorgeous cinematography by Haskell Wexler and a yearning Dave Grusin score, the lyrical style often recalls Chinatown. An elite police unit nicknamed the Hat Squad (Nick Nolte, Chazz Palminteri, Michael Madsen, and Chris Penn) finds a routine murder investigation leads to the Atomic Energy Commission, and the troubled personal involvement of Nolte in the case makes matters even more vexing. The cast includes Melanie Griffith (as Nolte’s wife), Treat Williams, Jennifer Connelly, Daniel Baldwin, Andrew McCarthy, John Malkovich, and an uncredited Bruce Dern. If some of the plot twists are predictable, the performances and dialogue do plenty to make up for them. This has craft, feeling, and atmosphere you can taste. (JR) Read more
Universal Pictures has soft-pedaled this psychological thriller in the Fatal Attraction-Sleeping With the Enemy mold by holding the only local press screening in Skokie, but I’m not sure why we’re expected to dislike it. James Foley (After Dark, My Sweet, Glengarry Glen Ross), working as uncredited cowriter with Christopher Crowe, is one of the best studio directors around; even if you feel ambivalent about the subgenre he adopts here, as I do, you can’t deny that he knows how to deliver the goods. A 16-year-old girl in Seattle (Reese Witherspoon) falls for a young man (Mark Wahlberg) with a troubled background who eventually becomes obsessed with her. Complicating the issue at least momentarily are the feelings of her father (William Petersen) about her budding sexuality. If you’re only looking for brutal jolts you’ll probably get impatient; the buildup is at least as gradual as in Hitchcock’s The Birds, and Foley has a fine sense of shading in depicting a slightly dysfunctional family. The problem with this subgenre is the way it has to demonize and dehumanize its villains to produce the desired effect, which brutalizes the spectator along with the story and characters. If you can accept this limitation, this is a very efficient piece of machinery. Read more
A very moving love story about an Australian airman in training in Canada during World War II and a prairie woman whose husband is already overseas. Canadian writer-director and coproducer Aaron Kim Johnston handles both the period ambience and the actors with great sensitivity; without much exaggeration one could say that this is the way they used to make good moviesespecially English movies in the Brief Encounter mode. With Russell Crowe, Christianne Hirt, Wanda Cannon, and Scott Kraft. (JR) Read more
A black-and-white 1994 French film by writer-director Mathieu Kassovitz (Cafe au Lait) about racism in the Paris suburbs. It focuses on three alienated youthsone black (Hubert Kounde), one North African (Said Taghmaoui), and one a working-class Jew (Vincent Cassel)who go on an all-night spree after a race riot sparked by police brutality. Though some of this might seem a bit old to Americans, Kassovitz has some things of his own to sayand he says them with nuance, feeling, and authority. In French with subtitles. 96 min. (JR) Read more
At first glance it’s just another entry in the series of delayed Blackboard Jungle spin-offs in which a principled teacherhere, ironically, a CIA mercenary (Tom Berenger)gains respect from a bunch of rowdy inner-city kids, in this case while substituting for his girlfriend (Diane Venora). But vying with this plotline, and ultimately overtaking it, are some kick-ass action sequences deriving from the fact that the principal is running a drug business out of the Miami school in question, in collusion with its leading gang. The results are lively if periodically silly; it’s too bad more use wasn’t made of the powerhouse Venora. With Ernie Hudson, Glenn Plummer, Richard Brooks, Marc Anthony, and Raymond Cruz; directed by Robert Mandel from a script by Roy Frumkes, Rocco Simonelli, and Alan Ormsby. (JR) Read more
Whatever you think of the cable TV showa postmodernist recycling operation in which characters watching a 40s or 50s movie make teenage wisecracks about how terrible it isthis is a dreadful spin-off that starts out on the wrong foot by selecting one of the better SF movies of the 50s, This Island Earth, as its stinkburger. A kidnapped Mike Nelson (playing himself) and robot pals Tom Servo, Gypsy, and Crow are watching this color feature on the so-called Satellite of Love while mad scientist Dr. Forrester (cowriter Trace Beaulieu) monitors their responses. The running time here is actually 13 minutes shorter than This Island Earth, even with the projection breaking down twice and an exceptionally feeble prologue and epilogue tacked on; the 50s movie is also shown in the wrong aspect ratio, with the top and bottom of every frame cut off, perhaps because the filmmakers realized that showing it correctly and completely would render the effort to ridicule it even more pathetic. Six people are credited with the atrocious script, one of them director Jim Mallon. PG-13, 73 min. (JR) Read more
The first movie directed by Michael Lehmann that I didn’t dislike, this relatively tender 1996 romantic comedy, written by former jazz disc jockey Audrey Wells, concerns a talk-radio hostess (Janeane Garofalo) who dispenses advice about pets and has self-esteem problems regarding her looks, her attractive next-door neighbor (Uma Thurman doing a Marilyn Monroe-like ingenue turn), and an intellectual English art photographer (Ben Chaplin) who through various mishaps falls for the voice and mind of the former while believing she looks like the latter. Though the basic brains-versus-beauty tension suggests a female variation on The Nutty Professor, this is a softer version of the dilemma than Jerry Lewis offerseasier to take and easier to forget. With Jamie Foxx and James McCaffrey. 97 min. (JR) Read more
Scandalously neglected and all but forgotten in recent years, Leopoldo Torre-Nilsson (1924-1978), perhaps the first world-class Argentinean director, enjoyed a certain vogue in this country in the early 60s–despite the stiff competition from France, Italy, and Japan in offering personal and stylistically expressive cinema. Among his films distributed in that era, La casa del angel (1957)–also known back then as End of Innocence–is almost certainly the most impressive, a gothic tale of female adolescence with an arresting and original flashback structure and a baroque visual style worthy at times of Orson Welles (especially in his Magnificent Ambersons mode). Written, like many of Torre-Nilsson’s other major features, by his wife, novelist and playwright Beatriz Guido–adapting in this case one of her own novels–this is a haunting and captivating mood piece that almost never turns up, a rare viewing opportunity courtesy of the Chicago Latino Film Festival. (It will screen again at the same time and place next week.) Village, Monday, April 15, 6:15, 642-2403. –Jonathan Rosenbaum
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still. Read more
Ken Loach, perhaps the most accomplished and intelligent Marxist practitioner of social realism left in England, stretches his impressive talents to depict the Spanish civil war from the point of view of a young unemployed communist from Liverpool (Ian Hart) who joins the republican anti-Franco forces. Scripted by Jim Allen (who also wrote Loach’s Raining Stones) Land and Freedom is historically convincing as well as gripping–Loach near his passionate best. Far from offering a standard defense of the communist position, this 1995 film presents a detailed revisionist critique of the party’s betrayal of other leftist factions in Spain. With Rosana Pastor, Iciar Bollain, Tom Gilroy, and Frederic Pierrot. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, April 12 through 18. –Jonathan Rosenbaum Read more
Richard Benjamin directs a labored comic adaptation by Phoef Sutton and Lisa-Maria Radano of Cornell Woolrich’s I Married a Dead Man, about a poor unmarried mother (Ricki Lake) who impersonates a dead heiress and widow. Translating Woolrich’s pulpy obsessiveness and crazy contrivances into the stuff of light comedy is no easy matter, and the movie gets as far as it does mainly with the help of Lake and Shirley MacLaine, who plays Lake’s newly acquired mother-in-law. With Brendan Fraser, Miguel Sandoval, and Loren Dean. (JR) Read more
TV comics David Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, and Scott Thompson star in a 1996 TV spin-off, produced by Lorne Michaels, about the creation of a designer drug that makes everybody happy. It was written by Norm Hiscock and all the Kids except Foley, and directed by Kelly Makin. I think it’s supposed to be a comedy. Perhaps because no one in the cast adjusted his performance style to the big screen, I may have thought about laughing three times over the 90-some minutes. (JR) Read more
The ultimate exercise in dehumanizing liberals, this is a very silly 1995 black comedy about five Iowa graduate students and housemates (Cameron Diaz, Annabeth Gish, Ron Eldard, Jonathan Penner, and Courtney B. Vance) who throw a series of dinner parties in order to poison their bigoted right-wing guests and bury them in their backyard. The notion here of what constitutes a liberal (and of what constitutes a right-wing bigot) is scaled down to the level of, say, a sitcom written by Newt Gingrich during his lunch breaks. The automatic trivialization of human beings, to say nothing of political positions, is the sine qua non of this kind of goof, and you may get a fleeting kick out of it if you’re sufficiently alienated from both. Stacy Title directed the Dan Rosen script; with Nora Dunn, Charles Durning, Mark Harmon, Bill Paxton, and Ron Perlman. (JR) Read more
