Monthly Archives: April 1998

Staging Life In China: Contemporary Reality In New Chinese Cinema

An illustrated lecture by Chris Berry, lecturer in cinema studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne, and one of the best scholars we have of contemporary Chinese cinema. Berry will emphasize independent film and video that shows contemporary Chinese reality and explain how it differs from the period allegories directed by such filmmakers as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. (JR) Read more

Mon Homme

Writer-director Bertrand Blier, a specialist in politically incorrect sex comedies, offers us a prostitute with a heart of gold (Anouk Grinberg) who takes in a homeless tramp (Gerard Lanvin), offers him food and sex, and invites him to become her pimp. He accepts and winds up wooing a manicurist (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) to turn her into a prostitute as well, until he gets arrested for pimping. There are further developments in this 1996 feature, and even such familiar faces as Sabine Azema, Mathieu Kassovitz, and Jean-Pierre Leaud turn up briefly, but I found it increasingly difficult to stay interested. Barry White’s offscreen songs make the tedium a little more pleasant. (JR) Read more

Don’t Look Back

D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 record of Bob Dylan’s 1965 English tour is a genuine blast from the past, evoking the 60s like few other documents; Dylan’s relentless heaping of scorn on the mainstream press, before the coercive tentacles of creative management made such things virtually impossible, is especially telling. But I’m entirely with Andrew Sarris when he writes, Don’t Look Back makes me want to fill in on Dylan’s recordings, but not Pennebaker’s movies; the raw cinema verite look bears fruit only when its subject does, and as with Truth or Dare (1991), the pretense of confidentiality is merely that. But the music is great, and the film would be memorable for its goofy, syncopated opening sequence alone (a quirky illustration of Subterranean Homesick Blues). With appearances by Joan Baez (Dylan’s steady at the time), Donovan, Allen Ginsberg, Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman, and Alan Price. 96 min. (JR) Read more