Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask

Isaac Julien directed this excellent British documentary (1996) about the psychiatrist and theorist who wrote about colonial oppression and revolution. In English and subtitled French. 52 min. (JR) Read more

Cold Fever

This arresting, oddball 1995 road movie by Fredrik Thor Fridriksson concerns a Japanese businessman (Mystery Train’s Masatoshi Nagase) who’s planning a golfing vacation in Hawaii until his grandfather (the late Seijun Suzuki, ace B-film auteur) persuades him to fly to Iceland during the dead of winter, travel cross-country to the spot where his parents died in an accident, and perform a memorial service for them. His absurdist, mock-epic adventures constitute both a spiritual quest and a comic travelogue; among the strangers he encounters are a murderous American couple named Jack and Jill (Fisher Stevens and Lili Taylor) and a philosophical, self-styled Icelandic cowboy (Gisli Halldorsson). Strange, often funny, and occasionally beautiful, the film begins in Tokyo at standard screen ratio before expanding to ‘Scope in scenic Iceland. Fridriksson scripted with producer Jim Stark (a longtime Jim Jarmusch associate); this was the first Icelandic feature to be released commercially in the U.S., though nearly all of the dialogue is in English. (JR) Read more

The Monster

Roberto Benigni (Life Is Beautiful) directed, cowrote (with Vincenzo Cerami), and stars in this funny if slightly overextended 1995 comedy about a doofus who’s mistaken for a crazed sex killer. Benigni’s brand of vulgar, high-spirited physical comedy, influenced by the erotic inflections of some of Tex Avery’s wartime cartoons, tends to be casually leering in its sexual politics. The sex comedy is funniest in the very skillfully performed extended scenes featuring Nicoletta Braschi (Benigni’s wife) as a policewoman; it’s most tiresome when it focuses on the machinations of a crazed psychiatrist played by Michel Blanc (who, like Jean-Claude Brialy, is dubbed into Italian). (JR) Read more

The Search For One-eye Jimmy

Sometimes laborious, sometimes mildly funny Brooklyn jive from the head writer at Seinfeld, Sam Henry Kass. I didn’t mind watching this shaggy-dog story most of the time, but I came away feeling that the actors had much more fun than I did. With Nick and John Turturro, Michael Badalucco, Ray Boom Boom Mancini, Holt McCallany, Anne Meara, Steve Buscemi, Samuel L. Jackson, and Jennifer Beals. (JR) Read more

The Watermelon Woman

Cheryl Dunye’s 1996 first feature is a lighthearted and for the most part lightweight pseudodocumentary about an aspiring lesbian filmmaker (Dunye) attempting to research the life of an early Hollywood black actress known as the Watermelon Woman. The film’s laid-back charm and the delicacy of the sex scenes make the controversy the film raised in the U.S. Senate all the more grotesque. With Guinevere Turner (Go Fish), Valarie Walker, and a funny bit by Camille Paglia about the positive aspects of watermelon imagery in relation to both blacks and Italians. (JR) Read more

Guimba The Tyrant

The original title of Cheick Oumar Sissoko’s striking and vibrant 1995 folkloric feature from Mali, a film dedicated to Africa, is Guimba: A Tyrant, an Epoch. A fantasy complete with magic spells and special effects, it recounts the intrigues that ensue when the title king allows his dwarf son to ride roughshod over their village kingdom to satisfy his lust, demanding that a married woman divorce her husband and marry him. With Falaba Issa Traore and Lamine Diallo. Check this one out. 93 min. (JR) Read more

The Long Gray Line

John Ford’s first and only completed film in ‘Scope also happens to be one of his major neglected works of the 50s. A biopic of epic proportions (138 minutes) about West Point athletic instructor Marty Maher (Tyrone Power), who failed as a student at the academy but stayed on to become a much-beloved figure, this 1955 film is an almost paradigmatic example of the “victory in defeat” theme that comprises much of Ford’s oeuvre. Adapted by Edward Hope from Maher’s autobiography, Bring Up the Brass, the film is rich with nostalgia, family feeling, and sentimentality. It’s given density by a superb supporting cast (including Maureen O’Hara at her most luminous, Donald Crisp, Ward Bond, and Harry Carey Jr.) and a kind of mysticism that, as in How Green Was My Valley, makes the past seem even more alive than the present. Not for everyone, but a work that vibrates with tenderness and emotion. A Technicolor, adapted 16-millimeter ‘Scope print will be screened. LaSalle Theatre, 4901 W. Irving Park, Saturday, June 29, 8:00, 904-5549.

–Jonathan Rosenbaum Read more

Independence Day

For better and for worse, this 1996 megahit is an archetypal 50s alien-invasion/disaster movie, though it contains dollops of Dr. Strangelove (without the 60s irony) and Star Wars (with equal nostalgia for old movie tropes). After invading bug-eyed monsters reduce New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and assorted unseen world capitals to rubble, a black and a Jew (Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum) set out to give humanity another chance. The earnestness, the effects, and the notion of a whole world forgetting its differences to defeat a common foe carry a certain charm, but like the U.S., this movie is so hamstrung trying to represent the whole worldor anything outside its own bordersthat it pretty nearly gives up at the start. Otherwise this is overlong but watchable. Roland Emmerich directed from a script he wrote with Dern Devlin; with Mary McDonnell, Judd Hirsch, Margaret Colin, Randy Quaid, Robert Loggia, and Bill Pullman as the U.S. president. PG-13, 145 min. (JR) Read more

The Nutty Professor

Eddie Murphy’s 1996 remake of Jerry Lewis’s most accomplished comedy narrative (1963) is most memorable for Murphy’s impersonation of the title hero, defined in this version as an obese science professor who undergoes a Jekyll-to-Hyde transformation, with his own formula turning him into the usual slim and narcissistic Murphy persona. (By contrast Lewis’s nutty professor, a mere klutz, turned himself into the real-life Lewis and made this complex and highly critical self-portrait the center of the movie.) Exploiting audience anxieties about food and overeating and never shying from vulgarity and excess, this remake has a touch of pathos derived from the original that is uncharacteristic of Murphy, though with none of the tragic undertones that Lewis found in the subject. I’m not much of a Murphy fan, but this movie made me laugh a lot. Tom Shadyac directed and collaborated on the script with many others; the costars are Jada Pinkett (in the sexist/alluring Stella Stevens part), James Coburn, Larry Miller, Dave Chappelle, and John Ales. 95 min. (JR) Read more

Phenomenon

Moribund, dopey stuff, about an all-American garage mechanic (John Travolta) who witnesses a strange light in the sky and turns into some sort of genius (the kind who excels in answering TV-quiz-show-style questions), with telekinetic and prophetic powers to boot. Isolated from the frightened folks in his small town, he moves toward death. I don’t doubt the noble motives behind this Disney parable, but the attempts at amiable, laid-back dialogue (script by Gerald DiPego) are painful, the pacing is sluggish, and the confused story’s poorly focused. Travolta is as charming as usual, but seems distinctly out of his element here as a nice-guy everyman who oozes significance. With Kyra Sedgwick, Forest Whitaker, and Robert Duvall; directed by Jon Turteltaub. (JR) Read more

Striptease

A mainly disappointing 1996 entry from comedy writer-director Andrew Bergman, who seems to be overwhelmed by both the contractual power of Demi Moore and unsuitable material (a crime novel by Carl Hiaasen). Moore plays a former FBI clerk who takes up topless dancing to make enough money to regain custody of her little girl (Rumer Willis, Moore’s real-life daughter), but about the only intriguing character is a bouncer of ambiguous sexuality played by Ving Rhames. Everyone else seems both underimagined and overblown, including Robert Patrick as the stripper Read more

Nelly And Monsieur Arnaud

The relationship between a 25-year-old Parisian woman (Emmanuelle Beart), recently separated from her husband, and the septuagenarian former judge and businessman (Michel Serrault) she works for as a typist and editor is at the center of this masterful 1995 feature by French writer-director Claude Sautet, but what’s important here is less a matter of literal events than sexual and emotional undercurrents. Sautet (Cesar and Rosalie, Un coeur en hiver) is a septuagenarian himself, but there’s an admirable detachment and sense of balance in the way that he attends and responds to his title characters, not merely defining one through the eyes of the other. The results are seamless and profoundnovelistic in the best sense. With Jean-Hugues Anglade, Claire Nadeau, and Michael Lonsdale. (JR) Read more

Eraser

Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a federal marshal dedicated to the witness protection programin this case he’s protecting Vanessa Williamsin an enjoyably paranoid kick-ass adventure romp (1996) with some giddily hyperbolic action moments. Charles Russell (The Mask, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors) directs a limited but serviceable script by Tony Puryear and Walon Green and puts costars James Caan, James Coburn, and Robert Pastorelli through predictable paces. Schwarzenegger and Williams are regarded as blocks of decor that occasionally emit dialogue when they’re not diving out of airplanes, fighting off alligators in Central Park, evading fancy weapons and explosions in Washington, D.C., and on the Baltimore docks, and carrying out elaborate impersonations to defeat the treasonous feds on their tail. A few of the set pieces are fussy or overly extended, but the rest is tolerable bone-crunching diversion. (JR) Read more

The Hunchback Of Notre Dame

Roll over, Victor Hugo. This 1996 cartoon feature, based on Hugo’s 1831 Notre Dame de Paris, is surely one of Disney’s ugliest and least imaginative efforts. It’s especially unattractive in its fast editing and zooms. There’s a glib happy ending to replace the novel’s, a cute pipe-smoking goat, and politically correct positions on Gypsies and hunchbacksthough virtually no feeling for Paris or France, which might have interfered with all those commercial tie-ins. If your main aim is to find somewhere to park your kids, the familiar Disney formula is at your service. Among the voices used are those of Demi Moore, Tom Hulce, Kevin Kline, Jason Alexander, and Mary Wickes; Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise are the credited directors. (JR) Read more

Knocks at My Door

Adapted from a successful play, this tense and effective 1992 Venezuelan political thriller follows the story of a nun who decides to shelter a fugitive from armed rebels during a civil war, the ambivalent cooperation she elicits from another nun, and the price they both have to pay for their courage. Directed with craft and discretion by Alejandro Saderman, the film sticks to the claustrophobic feeling I assume the original play had while conveying a detailed sense of the surrounding community, from mayor to bishop to shopkeeper. Wisely, Saderman veers away from close-ups when he wants certain dramatic points to register; indeed, many of the finest moments–most of them related to the performance of Veronica Oddo, who plays the more committed nun–transpire in long shots. Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday, June 14, 7:00 and 9:00; Saturday and Sunday, June 15 and 16, 3:00, 5:00, 7:00, and 9:00; and Monday through Thursday, June 17 through 20, 7:00 and 9:00; 281-4114. –Jonathan Rosenbaum Read more