A program of eight films by either or both of the DinellosDan and his nephew Paul. Their latest, Shock Asylum (1996), directed by both Dinellos and starring Paul, is a hyperbolic, paranoid look at psychological evaluations in black and white that periodically calls to mind the frenetic early efforts of the Kuchar brothers. Also on the program are the somewhat less coherent Beyond the Door (1995); Dan Dinello and Sharon Sandusky’s neat Really Dead (1993); and many others that I haven’t seen: Dan and Paul’s How to Be Popular (1994); Paul’s Jesus (1994), Giant Ladybug (1994), and Skarves (1995); and Dan’s Saturnalia (1979). (JR) Read more
A rarely screened Warners musical (1931) set in old Berlin, perhaps most notable for the participation of Leon Errol and W.C. Fields, who shows off his juggling skills. William Dieterle directed; starring Marilyn Miller and Ben Lyon. 75 min. (JR) Read more
The strength of this 1995 documentary by Beth and George Gage, a couple based in Telluride, about members of the remarkable World War II Tenth Mountain Division is the presence of the men themselvesnot only as expert skiers and mountain climbers over the past half century, but as courageous soldiers and gifted, humane storytellers. The film mixes archival footage with present-day interviews and imparts a great deal of information about the historical importance of these individuals, who virtually invented snowmobiles, motorized toboggans, and Vibram-soled hiking boots while training on Mount Rainier. (JR) Read more
More impressive for its script and cast than for its handling of place and period, this fresh coming-of-age story about two working-class brothers (Joaquin Phoenix and Billy Crudup) and three wealthy sisters (Liv Tyler, Jennifer Connelly, and Joanna Going) in small-town Illinois during the late 50s is a beautifully constructed narrative. And despite some awkwardness in Pat O’Connor’s direction when it comes to establishing a world wider than that of the characters, the sincerity and craft of the actorsespecially Phoenix, Tyler, and Kathy Baker as the boys’ widowed motherput it across. With Will Patton; adapted by Ken Hixon from a Sue Miller story. (JR) Read more
Carl Dreyer’s last silent, the greatest of all Joan of Arc films. Lost for half a century, the 1928 original was rediscovered in a Norwegian mental asylum in the 80s (other prints had perished in a warehouse fire, and the two versions subsequently circulated consisted of outtakes). Joan is played by stage actress Renee Falconetti, and though hers is one of the key performances in the history of movies, she never made another film. (Antonin Artaud also appears in a memorable cameo.) Dreyer’s radical approach to constructing space and the slow intensity of his mobile style make this difficult in the sense that, like all the greatest films, it reinvents the world from the ground up. It’s also painful in a way that all Dreyer’s tragedies are, but it will continue to live long after most commercial movies have vanished from memory. With subtitled French intertitles. 114 min. (JR) Read more
All of writer-director-actor Albert Brooks’s comedy features are good, but this one, about a twice-divorced science fiction writer moving back in with his mother (Debbie Reynolds) so he can figure out why he has problems with women, is probably the most accessible and best realized (1996). 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 characterthere’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. (JR) Read more
A 1996 documentary by a movie star (Al Pacino) about his own entitlement as a movie starspecifically, his sense of his own nobility for wanting to bring a production of Richard III to the people while wearing a baseball cap backward. Just to show you what a regular guy he is, he plays Richard with and without a Bronx accent and speaks to people on the street, not to mention Vanessa Redgrave, John Gielgud, Kenneth Branagh, and lots of unidentified Shakespeare scholars; we also get shards of the play in various locations featuring Winona Ryder, Aidan Quinn, Kevin Spacey, and Estelle Parsons. This runs 118 minutes, but it felt like six or seven hours. (JR) Read more
Liar Liar
After breaking its back trying to persuade us it isn’t another Cable Guy, this Jim Carrey comedy settles on its central premise–a crass lawyer and neglectful father can’t tell a lie for 24 hours–and becomes pretty funny, except when it turns to goo. Carrey’s attempted self-immolation in a men’s room, which weirdly recalls certain Fred Astaire routines, may be a small classic. The irony is that audiences who despise Jerry Lewis and roar at Carrey probably don’t realize how close the two comics are; Tom Shadyac’s direction is closer to Lewis’s early films than his later and more personal work, but everything from the crazy grimaces to the sentimentality to the outtakes behind the final credits can be traced back to him. Written by Paul Guay and Stephen Mazur; with Maura Tierney, Jennifer Tilly, Swoosie Kurtz, Amanda Donohoe, and Cary Elwes. Bricktown Square, Burnham Plaza, Ford City, Golf Mill, Hyde Park, Lincoln Village, Old Orchard, 600 N. Michigan, Webster Place. –Jonathan Rosenbaum
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David Cronenberg wrote and directed this 1996 film, a masterful minimalist adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s 1973 neo-futurist novel about sex and car crashes, and like the book it’s audacious and intensethough ultimately somewhat monotonous in spite of its singularity. James Spader meets Holly Hunter via a car collision, and they and Spader’s wife (Deborah Kara Unger) become acquainted with a kind of car-crash guru (Elias Koteas) and his own set of friends (including Rosanna Arquette). Sex and driving are all that this movie and its characters are interested in, but the lyrical, poetic, and melancholic undertones are potent, the performances adept and sexy, the sounds and images indelible. If you want something that’s both different and accomplished, even if you can’t be sure what it is, don’t miss this. 100 min. (JR) Read more
An Irish terrorist from Belfast (Brad Pitt) becomes a boarder in the house of an Irish-American policeman (Harrison Ford) in New York City, in a thriller directed by Alan J. Pakula from a script by David Aaron Cohen, Vincent Patrick, and Kevin Jarre. As a well-directed star vehicle with a couple of good action sequences, this is good, effective filmmaking, but I was periodically bored; when Ford and Pitt aren’t lighting up the screen nothing much happens. Gordon Willis is the cinematographer; with Margaret Colin, Ruben Blades, Treat Williams, and Natascha McElhone. (JR) Read more
Of all the egregious fashion spreads and sops to cultural intimidation and middlebrow guilt that have been derived from highly respected 19th- and 20th-century novels over the past few yearsas dubious a cycle of art movies as I can think ofthis has got to be the dumbest and most offensive. Writer-director Bernard Rose’s compost heap of arch poses from the Tolstoy novel has absolutely none of the elements that make the book memorable or even worth reading; for starters, forget about the opening lines about happy and unhappy families, Vronsky’s toothache after Anna’s suicide, and Levin’s exhilaration in the fields. In fact, Levin is now the tale’s narrator, even though a good half of the plot has little to do with himthe parallel stories in Tolstoy’s novel are now parallel only in the sense that unrelated books shelved together areand even the inspired notion of casting Alfred Molina in the part can’t make up for what he’s called upon to say and do. The disastrous casting decision for Anna is Sophie Marceau, complete with incomprehensible French accent, and Sean Bean plays Vronsky as if he wishes nobody would notice, a sentiment I can sympathize with. Occasional and seemingly arbitrary snippets of writing and dialogue are given in Russian, apparently to remind us that this isn’t a story about people speaking English, and the flourish of handwriting at the end is supposed to make us think that Levin is simply Tolstoy’s stand-in. Read more
Hu Du Men
The title of this entertaining 1996 Hong Kong movie, also known as Stage Door, is a Cantonese opera term for the imaginary line separating the stage from backstage, which becomes emblematic of the divisions in the story. That story, adapted by Raymond To Kwok-wai from his own play, concerns the producer and star of a Cantonese opera company (Josephine Siao) who’s about to abandon her career to emigrate to Australia with her husband and adopted daughter. (The anticipation of Hong Kong’s return to China is a major theme here, as it is in many recent Hong Kong films.) The adopted daughter is showing lesbian tendencies, and the heroine, a specialist in male roles, is experiencing some gender confusion of her own. Director Shu Kei–the most outspoken film critic of the Hong Kong film scene, as well as a programmer, novelist, and prolific screenwriter who’s worked for the likes of Anne Hui, Yim Ho, and John Woo–navigates issues of genre and gender with wit and aplomb. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Saturday and Sunday, March 15 and 16, 4:00, 312-443-3737. –Jonathan Rosenbaum
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Episode VI (1983) in George Lucas’s still-unfolding Star Wars toy catalog and clip collection, complete with its own set of Monarch Notes and marginally upgraded by a few images filched from Blade Runner, a few improvements on the special effects, and an occasional inflation of the music. In keeping with the prissiness of the trilogy as a whole, oedipal rage and incest are briefly flirted with and then strategically avoided, but there are enough cute, fluffy animals to stock a planet. The late Richard Marquand was in charge of direction (that is, realizing the storyboards), but if a few robots had carried out the same task we wouldn’t know the difference; similarly, we don’t see a human being in the flesh for the first 20-odd minutes of this movie, but the affective landscape hardly changes when we do. If the trilogy has grown at all over its course, Dave Kehr wrote of the original, unspecial edition, it’s in terms of commercial calculationeven the confusions of the narrative seem deliberately planted to encourage repeat viewings. Merchandising protocol deems that I consider Jedi superior to Fritz Lang’s sublime pulp extravaganza and 1959 diptych The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb, which isn’t even available in this country and has the disadvantage of coming across as poetry, but the sad fact is that this movie isn’t even developed enough to qualify as prose. Read more
Richard Linklater, adhering to the same 24-hour frame of his first three features (Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise), directs a fine adaptation of Eric Bogosian’s tragicomic play about the frustrated lives of several 20-year-old suburbanites, spent mainly in parking lots and pushed to a crisis point when an old friend who’s made it big as a rock star (Jayce Bartok) stops by for a visit. Though the material is conventional to the point of generic–even in its surprises–and remains obstinately stage bound in overall ambience, the cast of mainly unknowns is so good, and Linklater is so adept at playing them off each other, that the two-hour playing time never seems overextended or inflated. With Giovanni Ribisi (especially impressive), Steve Zahn (That Thing You Do!), Amie Carey, Nicky Katt, Ajay Naidu, Samia Shoaib, and the ubiquitous Parker Posey. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, March 7 through 13. –Jonathan Rosenbaum
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Howard Stern plays himself in an adaptation of his autobiographical best-seller, with the members of his radio teamRobin Quivers, Fred Norris, Jackie Martling, and Gary Dell’Abatepitching in as well. The results are somewhere between the idealized biopic tradition of The Benny Goodman Story and the anarchic comedy represented by Mr. Roberts, in which defiance of authority is virtually the only kind of gag. Directed by Betty Thomas (whose former media spin-off was The Brady Bunch Movie) from a script by Len Blum, this is basically a selective account of Stern’s radio career, with Stern narrating and playing himself from his college days on and boy actors briefly showing him at ages 7, 12, and 16. The defiant libertine who’s actually a dyed-in-the-wool family man is an American myth with a lot of staying power, and this film makes the most of it; it isn’t very good but I had a pretty good time watching it. With Mary McCormack as Stern’s wife Alison. (JR) Read more
