Gutsy experimental filmmaker Yvonne Rainer tackles two personal issues at oncehaving a lesbian relationship for the first time in middle age and developing breast cancerin one of her most direct and accessible semiautobiographical narratives. This 1996 film has a rich sense of social history, and the wisecracking irreverence of Rainer’s earlier work (e.g., Film About a Woman Who . . . , Privilege) is back in force, though for once the humor seems homey, even homespun, and not merely angry. With Joanna Merlin and Kathleen Chalfont; Rainer also turns up periodically in a tuxedo. (JR) Read more
Richard Linklater, adhering to the 24-hour frame of his first three features (Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise), directs a fine 1996 adaptation of Eric Bogosian’s tragicomic play about the frustrated lives of several 20-year-old suburbanites. They spend their time mainly in parking lots and are pushed to a crisis point when an old friend who’s made it big as a rock star (Jayce Bartok) stops by for a visitmaterial that’s conventional to the point of being generic, even in its surprises, and that remains obstinately stage bound. Nevertheless, the cast of mainly unknowns is so good, and Linklater is so adept at playing them off one another, that the two-hour running time never seems overextended. With Giovanni Ribisi (especially impressive), Steve Zahn (That Thing You Do!), Amie Carey, Nicky Katt, Ajay Naidu, Samia Shoaib, and the ubiquitous Parker Posey. (JR) Read more
Films by one of the directors of Hoop Dreams, an Illinois-based film and video maker whose experimental and political interests sometimes inform each other. House of Un-American Activities (1983) is a documentary that mixes personal and public history as it describes the 1956 persecution of Marx’s fathera Jewish refugee from Germany who joined the Communist Party in 1945. Dreams From China was shot while Marx was working as an English teacher in China between 1983 and 1985; the portrait of China it presents is highly personal, full of fascinating details, and, given Marx’s leftist background, unfashionably negative. Also showing are Higher Goals, an offshoot of Hoop Dreams, about a children’s program; Jail Vision, an excerpt from a play written and acted by Cook County Jail inmates; and excerpts from works in progress. (JR) Marx will attend the screening. Read more
A 1995 Slovak feature, directed and cowritten by Martin Sulik, about a 30-year-old schoolteacher beset by problems who gradually becomes enlightened by the experience of spending time in his late grandfather’s overgrown garden. If memory servesI saw this a couple of years ago and retain only a few imagesthis is an intriguing and poetic piece of magical realism. It was nomiated for an Oscar. (JR) Read more
Believe it or not, Ben Hecht wrote the original script for this deliberate hoot of 1958, and Charles Beaumont gave it a polish. Producer Walter Wanger turned the project over to director Edward Bernds, a Bowery Boys and Blondie specialist; Laurie Mitchell was cast in the lead, and Zsa Zsa Gabor and several others filled out the cast, which largely consists of Venusian amazons in miniskirts, along with Eric Fleming and Paul Birch. (JR) Read more
