Though not entirely satisfying, Manthia Diawara’s 1995 video documentary about the great innovative French anthropological filmmaker Jean Rouch–which intermittently attempts to practice a “reverse anthropology” on Rouch himself–is an invaluable introduction to one of the greatest living filmmakers. Diawara, a critic and film professor at New York University who hails from Mali, has known Rouch for years and struggles admirably to balance the filmmaker’s unquestionable achievements (including his role as a precursor of and guru to the French New Wave) with his paternalism toward Africans–an attitude that was still progressive 20, 30, and 40 years ago, when most of Rouch’s masterpieces were made, but is harder to rationalize today. Diawara fails to resolve the conflict, but at least he articulates it as honestly as possible. On the same program–which will be introduced by Chicago documentary filmmaker Judy Hoffman, who has worked with Rouch–is a rare early short film by Rouch, In the Land of the Black Magi (1947), codirected by Pierre Ponty and Jean Sauvy. And if you want to see what Rouch in his prime can do as a filmmaker, check out his Jaguar (1967) at Chicago Filmmakers next Friday, same time, same place. Kino-Eye Cinema at Chicago Filmmakers, Friday, January 31, 8:00, 773-384-5533. Read more
George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977) with a few minor restorations of bits deleted from the original and an upgrading of certain effects (more beasties in the background, better sound). Almost a decade after its original release, Dave Kehr wrote, George Lucas’s science fiction adventure is an exhilarating update of Flash Gordon, very much in the same half-jokey, half-earnest mood, but backed by special effects that, for once, really work and are intelligently integrated with the story. It’s easy to see what he means, but I still prefer the homey and homemade Flash Gordon serials, which for all their 30s racism lack the antiseptic genocidal fervor and new age pretensions of Lucas’s giddy celebration of warfare. (It’s also, as Kehr suggested, very knowing about its supposed dumbness, and a triumph of market research.) But if you want to see the movie that made mild diversion for ten-year-old boys the model of commercial filmmaking, ruling out nuanced characterization and emotions that last longer than 20 seconds, this is where to look. With Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Alec Guinness, Peter Cushing, and the voice of James Earl Jones. PG, 121 min. (JR) Read more
A delightful, sexy farce featuring the same lead actors as A Fish Called Wanda–John Cleese (who wrote the script with Iain Johnstone), Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, and Michael Palin–in a very different story, this one entertaining various revenge fantasies against Rupert Murdoch. The Murdoch-like tycoon (played by Kline), who runs a company called Octopus, sends one of his bureaucrats (Cleese) to an English zoo to make its operations more profitable or else close it down. The horrified staff of animal lovers plots various forms of revolt, while the tycoon’s crass and unappreciated son (Kline again) and an ambitious new Octopus employee (Curtis) come up with schemes of their own. Combining the gentle with the vulgar as only the English can, this lively comedy is bursting with character and energy, and directors Robert Young and Fred Schepisi–the latter completed the movie–do a fine job of keeping it all rollicking. Burham Plaza, Ford City, Lincoln Village, 900 N. Michigan, Webster Place, Golf Glen, North Riverside, Old Orchard. –Jonathan Rosenbaum
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Just as she’s about to start a job with room service at a luxury hotel in Paris, a young woman (Virginie Ledoyen) tells her boyfriend that she’s pregnant and wants to keep their child. They quarrel but arrange to meet an hour later, and the film then follows her first hour at work in real time. This segment of Benoit Jacquot’s compelling 1995 feature, written with Jerome Beaujour, is a stunning demonstration of moral and existential suspense in relation to duration, much like Agnes Varda’s 1962 Cleo From 5 to 7. Later the excitement dissipates somewhat, and when the film abandons real time to make room for an epilogue it becomes ordinary. But until then it’s an essential piece of filmmaking–not simply as a stylistic exercise but as a fascinating look at a hotel in operation. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, January 24 through 30.
–Jonathan Rosenbaum
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The title characters are a dog and a dolphin that become friends; their respective keepers, Steve Guttenberg and Kathleen Quinlan, both single parents, become friends too. Written by Tom Benedek, this family entertainment was directed by George Millersometimes known as George Miller the Bad (Robinson Crusoe, The Man From Snowy River) to distinguish him from George Miller the Good (the director of Lorenzo’s Oil and producer of Babe). (JR) Read more
A broad, hit-and-miss Australian youth comedy, set in the title hotel in Niagara Smalls. Some of it looks like a TV commercial, and the characters’ motivations could have been generated by a computer, but the castRay Barrett, Julia Blake, Simon Bossell, Saffron Burrows, Pippa Grandison, and Aden Youngis attractive and energetic. Written and directed by Craig Rosenberg. (JR) Read more
I suspect that Jon Robin Baitz’s play, about a Holocaust survivor who’s become a stubbornly idealistic publisher of books about the Holocaust and an inflexible father, worked very effectively onstage. But despite a compelling opening, as a movie it loses focus and purpose as it proceeds. Whether this is due to miscalculations on the part of either Baitz (adapting his own work) or Daniel Sullivan (a stage director turning to film for the first time), or to meddling on the part of the distributor I can’t say, but in its present form it sheds more heat than light. The cast is good, but like me they seem to have trouble figuring out why they’ve been summoned. With Ron Rifkin, Timothy Hutton, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Tony Goldwyn. (JR) Read more
Tim Roth, Thandie Newton, and the late Tupac Shakur play strung-out members of an offbeat Detroit band in a well-made and pointedly satirical feature written and directed by Vondie Curtis Hall. After Newton overdoses and winds up in a coma, Shakur decides that the other two need to kick their habitsbut the government bureaucracy, the police, and some hoods manage to dissuade them at every turn. Hall’s anger about the way society works never blunts his tenderness toward the central characters, and all three of the leads are fineespecially Roth, who’s thankfully free of the dem-der-dose dialect Woody Allen assigned him in Everyone Says I Love You. With John Sayles and Tom Towles. (JR) Read more
A delightful, sexy farce featuring the same lead actors as A Fish Called WandaJohn Cleese (who scripted with Iain Johnstone), Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, and Michael Palinbut in a very different story. A Rupert Murdoch-like tycoon (Kline), who runs a company called Octopus, sends one of his bureaucrats (Cleese) to an English zoo with instructions to make it more profitable or close it down; the horrified staff of animal lovers plot various forms of revenge, while the tycoon’s crass and unappreciated son (Kline again) and an ambitious new Octopus employee (Curtis) come up with schemes of their own. Combining the gentle with the vulgar as only the English can, this lively comedy is bursting with character and energy, and directors Robert Young and Fred Schepisi (who completed the movie) do a fine job of keeping it all rollicking. (JR) Read more
Kevin Spacey’s directorial debut (1996) is obviously the price we’ve had to pay for his Oscar for The Usual Suspectsitself part of the price we’ve been paying for the success of Quentin Tarantino. Honoring his constituency, Spacey directs a script by Christian Forte designed to put us into a Tarantino frame of mind. Three desperate robbers (Matt Dillon, Gary Sinise, William Fichtner) fleeing from a failed heist hole up in a New Orleans bar significantly known as Dino’s Last Chance, a holdover from prohibition, where Faye Dunaway, Viggo Mortensen, Skeet Ulrich, and M. Emmet Walsh as hostages get to act their hearts out while Joe Mantegna as a cop on the outside tries to get in. The set decor is more intricate than any of the characters, the mise en scene fancy but gratuitous, the story strictly standard issue. (JR) Read more
All of writer-director-actor Albert Brooks’s comedy features are good, but this one, his fifth, about a twice-divorced science-fiction writer moving back in with his mother (Debbie Reynolds) in order to figure out why he has problems with women, is probably the most accessible as well as the best realized. For all the seriousness of the subject matter, Brooks and his customary cowriter Monica Johnson make it pretty hilarious. Brooks’s comedies, like Woody Allen’s, are basically multifaceted reflections on neurosis, but the probing goes a lot deeper and the human landscape is usually more generously furnished. Understanding isn’t limited to the lead character–there’s every bit as much insight into the characters of Reynolds and Rob Morrow (the hero’s kid brother, a sports agent). A must-see. Pipers Alley, Esquire, Gardens.
–Jonathan Rosenbaum
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Zeinabu Irene Davis’s provocative 1995 black-and-white short about slavery. On the same program, A Powerful Thang, Davis’s 1991 feature about a young black familya freelance writer, a saxophone player who teaches high school, and a two-year-old childliving in a college town in Ohio. (JR) Read more
Someday I’d like to see a dissection of the rock-music scene that doesn’t look like a stretch of MTV. In the meantime, Doug Pray’s 1996 documentary about the manufacturing of the Seattle soundless as a kind of music than as a kind of advertisingis an informative and well-made collection of sound bites, music bites, and thought bites put together over several years, with well-aimed jabs at such deserving targets as the New York Times, for its arrogant gullibility in chronicling pop culture, and Rolling Stone, for its designer sleaze. But don’t expect to see, hear, or think about anything for more than a few seconds at a time. 87 min. (JR) Read more
Due to a falling out with his producer, Upton Sinclair, Sergei Eisenstein never edited any of the footage for Que viva Mexico, one of his most ambitious projects. Montage was central to his art in the 20s and 30s, so this 1933 one-hour assembly by Sol Lesser of the first section of Eisenstein’s epic is only a taste of something that might have beenextraordinary for its graphic compositions if nothing else. (JR) Read more
Subtitled The Fine Art of Separating People From Their Money, this is a quirky German essay film (1996) by Hermann Vaske about the making of TV commercials, featuring Vaske and Dennis Hopper. Also making appearances are Tony Scott, Wim Wenders, Spike Lee, Alan Parker, Mike Figgis, Joe Pytka, Chicago commercial director Joe Sedelmaier, Harvey Keitel, Dave Stewart, David Bowie, and Julien Schnabel. Vaske will attend the screening. (JR) Read more
