Pretty Vacant
“The movie’s all told in voice-over–it’s cheaper that way.” The last words in this energetic, low-budget, 33-minute film by Jim Mendiola, spoken by its narrator, Molly (Mariana Vasquez)–a 21-year-old Chicana who drums for an all-girl punk band and is working on the fifth issue of her zine, this one in Super-8–are a pretty fair description of what Mendiola is up to, technically speaking. Culturally this black-and-white effort is even more interesting, especially as it describes what alienates Molly from her more traditional, Mexican-oriented dad (David Mercado Gonzales). To be shown with other short films; Mendiola will lead a discussion. Tres en Uno, 1769 W. Greenleaf, Friday, September 12, 7:00, 773-764-8634; also Calles y Suenos, 1900 S. Carpenter, Sunday, September 14, 7:00, 312-243-4243.
–Jonathan Rosenbaum
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This 1997 thriller is fairly entertaining nonsense if all you’re looking for is 128 minutes of diversion. But if you’d like something more from David Fincher, the director of Seven, don’t get your hopes up; in retrospect, one wonders how much of the previous film came from Fincher’s collaborators. A wealthy, jaded, self-centered businessman (Michael Douglas) gets enlisted in a mysterious game as a birthday present from his wastrel younger brother (Sean Penn). A conspiratorial manipulation of everything around him, including even the newscast he watches on TV, it winds up consuming and perhaps even destroying his life. Though a paranoid plot of this kind has clear metaphysical implications, most of them prove to be fairly banal, and on a plot level screenwriters John Brancato and Michael Ferris don’t even try to make the details add up. What emerges is a very poor man’s North by Northwest without much moral nuance and a decreasing number of thrills. Most of the kicks have to do with seeing Douglas’s unpleasant character get his comeuppance, along with some OK turns from the other actors: Deborah Kara Unger (Crash), Armin Mueller-Stahl, James Rebhorn, Carroll Baker, and Peter Donat. (JR) Read more
Gabbeh
Is it possible for a movie to be intoxicatingly pretty without quite attaining beauty? Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s fantasy about the nomadic Ghashghai of southern Iran, who weave colorful carpets that tell stories, is a delightful treasure chest of colors, costumes, landscapes, magical-realist details, and very simple characters–all of whom tend to have the allure of trinkets and living legends. This romantic parable seems less personal than Makhmalbaf’s more troubled urban dramas (The Peddler, Marriage of the Blessed, A Moment of Innocence), but it’s also more accessible, and the magical moods keep one fairly spellbound. Hints of a lament about the sacrifices made by a young woman for her family and against her romantic nature (she longs to marry a mysterious stranger who rides after her tribe) are never supported with a clear take on the patriarchy that oppresses her, but the fairy-tale seductiveness piques one’s imagination throughout. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, September 5 through 11. –Jonathan Rosenbaum
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A romance between a transsexual born as a man (Steven Mackintosh) and a straight 34-year-old punk (Rupert Graves) who were friends at school 15 years earlier is the unlikely but exclusive focus of this British comedy-drama, directed by Richard Spence from an original screenplay by Tony Marchant. The script shows some sensitivity and the performances are good (Miriam Margolyes and Saskia Reeves figure in the secondary cast), but as moviemaking this is fairly dull and conventional stuff. (JR) Read more
Pay no attention to the claims that this 1988 Danish video feature by Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves) is a faithful or even remotely respectful realization of the late Carl Dreyer’s unrealized script, cowritten by poet Preben Thomsen. For starters, the Dreyer script, based only loosely on the Euripides tragedy, features a chorus that is omitted here, its lines grotesquely converted into printed titles when they aren’t simply dropped; many of Dreyer’s scenes are eliminated, scrambled, or placed elsewhere in the overall continuity, and some of von Trier’s scenes and sequences are strictly his own invention. That said, this is well worth seeing as a visually inventive and highly dramatic version of the Medea story, with strong performances by Kirsten Olesen and Udo Kier. In some respects it’s as striking as anything von Trier has done, but Dreyer could never have accepted this florid piece of showmanship as even a remote approximation of his intentions. (JR) Read more
When I saw this 141-minute ‘Scope biopic about Franz Liszt (played by Dirk Bogarde) in my teens, the title seemed appropriate, even though I enjoyed the music (the score received an Oscar) and lush settings (photographed by James Wong Howe). Started by director Charles Vidor and then completed by George Cukor after Vidor’s death, the film costars Capucine and Genevieve Page (1960). (JR) Read more
Given that most homicidal movie fantasies are rated G or PG, it’s baffling that this harmless 1997 movie about surviving in the Alaskan wilderness was assigned an R. I can say without irony that it’s an excellent, rousing adventure film for ten-year-old boyswith sincere moral lessons about self-reliance, self-respect, marital fidelity, and money (the latter mainly as a signifier of wisdom) that seem perfectly suited for that age group. David Mamet’s original script reeks with macho awe of wealth and nature, and the landscapes are often stunning. Anthony Hopkins plays a bookish billionaire superman who decides to accompany his fashion-model wife (Elle Macpherson) on an exotic shoot in Alaska. On a side trip with her photographer (Alec Baldwin) and his assistant (Harold Perrineau) their plane crashes, and the three men struggle to survive in the wilderness, matching wits, courage, and poundage with a humongous killer bear. Some of the individual details are far from plausible, but as this is a boys’ fantasy and parable it hardly matters. Too bad only grown-ups with the innocence of ten-year-olds can enjoy it. Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors, Mulholland Falls) directed. (JR) Read more
A troubling and fascinating if not entirely satisfactory film documenting the 1993 clash between federal agents and the Branch Davidians, which it argues was almost completely misrepresented in the press at that time. Despite strong investigative journalism, the film suffers from David Hamilton’s unnecessarily pushy musical score and what appears to be a sloppy reedit trimming about half an hour from the original 165-minute cut. Directed by William Gazecki; written by Gazecki and coproducer Dan Gifford. (JR) Read more
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Kull the Conqueror
You can keep your dinosaur romps and your cartoon fairy tales; this is the kind of kids’ movie I treasured in my own youth, sexy, pictorial, and unfathomable. Raffaella De Laurentiis produces her third sword and sorcery fantasy based on the works of Robert E. Howard (the two Conan movies of the 80s were the others). Scripted by Charles Edward Pogue and directed by John Nicolella, this one’s a campy hoot by most standards, and for me a highly pleasurable one–in part because everything from the anachronistic rock score to the simplicity of the story line to the lurid, boyish fantasies about evil and women manages to suggest the clunky innocence of Howard’s original tales. The title hero, played by Kevin Sorbo, a sort of Rock Hudson with longer and greasier hair, inadvertently becomes hunky king of Valusia by being in the right place at the right time, but then meets and is lured into marriage by the evil sorceress Akivasha (Tia Carrere) inside of about 30 seconds. Others in the cast include Thomas Ian Griffith, Karina Lombard, Litefoot, and (believe it or not) Harvey Fierstein, and SF writer L. Sprague de Camp is credited as technical adviser. Read more
Hoodlum
Five years after their powerful collaboration on Deep Cover, director Bill Duke (A Rage in Harlem) and Laurence Fishburne pool their talents again, this time on a crime story loosely based on the true-life exploits of Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson (Fishburne), king of the numbers racket in 1934 Harlem–at least until Dutch Schultz (Tim Roth) muscles in on the business while Johnson is away in Sing Sing. Also involved in the intricate power plays are Lucky Luciano (Andy Garcia), Johnson’s partner Stephanie St. Clair (Cicely Tyson), and Thomas Dewey (William Atherton), while the major fictional characters include Johnson’s cousin and best friend (Chi McBride) and his idealistic girlfriend (Vanessa Williams). Clocking in at 142 minutes, this is an ambitious effort to re-create Harlem in the 30s; Chris Brancato’s script supplies a provocative character study of a killer with a Robin Hood streak and only occasionally takes on more than it can handle. The grisly violence (most of it suggested rather than depicted) overwhelms the story in spots, but the interracial politics in divvying up the spoils of a city remain fairly lucid. Duke is a superb director of actors, and, as in Deep Cover, Fishburne manages to suggest a lot with a deft economy of means. Read more
I have a weakness for movies described as pretentious, at least when they appeal to my imagination, but this terminally pretentious first feature by writer-director Alan Wade seems too far removed from reality to carry any sort of allure. I haven’t read the short story it’s adapted from, Branimir Scepanovic’s La mort de Monsieur Golouga, but the French title and eastern European author’s name suggest an attempt on Wade’s part to adapt European material to an American context, which is where I suspect some of the problems begin. The title hero (Christian Slater), a bookkeeper on holiday, wanders into a remote small town that isn’t accustomed to visitors and arouses everyone’s suspicions; when questioned he blurts out that he’s been contemplating suicide, and he’s regarded thereafter as a mythic, messiahlike figure. If this screenwriter’s notion of a townits inhabitants, its buildings, its faded signs (Supersweet Feeds says one of them)bore any resemblance to any real town on earth, the symbolic hardware might be a little more palatable. With Robin Tunney, Michael Parks, Harve Presnell, and LaTanya Richardson. (JR) Read more
In the Company of Men
Don’t tell anyone, but this blistering piece of provocation by independent writer-director Neil LaBute, his first feature, has a lot to do with capitalism and how it alters our notions of masculinity and romance; in short, it’s about how business affects the way we live and think and feel. Two 30ish male execs (Aaron Eckhart, Matt Malloy) sent to their company’s branch office for six weeks decide to date, flatter, and then humiliate a woman they pick at random. (They settle on a deaf typist, deftly played by Stacy Edwards.) It doesn’t sound like a believable story without the context provided by LaBute’s concentrated minimalist style and the strong performances, but every nuance here counts, and most of them add up to something pretty potent as well as scary. Check this one out. Evanston, Pipers Alley. –Jonathan Rosenbaum
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You can keep your dinosaur romps and your cartoon fairy tales; this is the kind of kids Read more
The Organizer
Marcello Mastroianni in one of his best roles, as a late-19th-century labor leader orchestrating a strike at a Turin textile plant. Directed by Mario Monicelli (Big Deal on Madonna Street) with an exquisite handling of period, this powerful film had a sizable impact when it came out in 1963, though it’s been curiously neglected ever since. Arguably one of the great Italian films of the 60s, it cries out for rediscovery. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Thursday, August 21, 6:00, 312-443-3737.
–Jonathan Rosenbaum
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