A touching and pungent contemporary noir by the same basic team that yielded Nobody’s Foolwriter-director Robert Benton, cowriter Richard Russo (this time with an original script rather than an adaptation of his own novel), and septuagenarian actor Paul Newman, glowering with underplayed intensity. Though this movie is as much about aging as the late westerns of Howard Hawks (and evokes in particular the wizened melancholy humor of El Dorado), it also forms a kind of dialectic with Nobody’s Fool by focusing on upper-class ties in LA (as opposed to working-class ties in a small town in New York), as well as offering an extended gloss on the novels of Raymond Chandler. Playing a former cop and retired private detective who now occupies the garage apartment of his best friends (Gene Hackman and Susan Sarandon), both former movie stars, Newman gets sucked into a mystery that ultimately tests his various loyalties as well as his own identity. The remainder of the stellar castespecially James Garner, Stockard Channing, Giancarlo Esposito, and Reese Witherspoonplays a significant role in the process. Sturdily constructed and gracefully written, this is a movie that shines. (JR) Read more
Charles Burnett’s first foray into digital video, released in 1997 and running 55 minutes, is a fictional story about a homeless middle-aged man (Ayuko Babu of When It Rains) interspersed with a lot of documentary footage about the homeless, including several interviews. Both blocks of material have their own strength and validity, but they seldom mesh comfortably, and their juxtaposition tends to distract one from the subject at hand. (JR) Read more
Palestinian independent Elia Suleiman returned to Nazareth after many years in New York to make this 1996 first feature, an intriguing, highly sophisticated, and often very funny combination of fiction, documentary, diary, essay, and home movie. Armed with irony, absurdist humor, and a handsome visual style, Suleiman offers a surprisingly comprehensive portrait of middle-class Palestinian life in Israel and a complex understanding of Arab identity within that world that encompasses both family and friends. In Hebrew and Arabic with subtitles. 88 min. (JR) Read more
Two half-hour films by the Argentine-American artist. El dia que me quieras (The Day You’ll Love Me, 1997) mixes color with black and white in a poetic meditation on the famous 1967 photograph of Ernesto Che Guevera’s corpse surrounded by his Bolivian captors; the film Read more
One of the most beautiful and difficult of Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet’s features, this 1972 filming of portions of Bertolt Brecht’s novel The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar is a major early summary of this masterful filmmaking couple’s grasp of history and the material world. A young man in contemporary dress drives through contemporary Rome and interviews characters from ancient Romea poet, a jurist, a peasant, and a banker. Straub-Huillet’s unorthodox handling of space through editing is like no one else’s, and the duo’s passionate adherence to direct-sound recording is comparably powerful. (JR) Read more
Standard Bud Abbott and Lou Costello farce, made in 1944 while Universal was loaning the team out to MGM; as a result, it’s a bit more opulent than most of their efforts. With Marilyn Maxwell (as a harem wife), Douglas Dumbrille (as a sultan), and the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra; Charles Reisner directed. (JR) Read more
A lumbering SF thriller built around the perennial theme of the Return of the Repressed (cf Forbidden Planet and Solaris, among others); appropriately enough, the film itself regresses, starting in the present and winding up with a cautionary ending that evokes the hokiest SF movies of the 50s. In between, the star power of Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, and Samuel L. Jackson carries one past some of the confused and confusing storytellingthe plot has something to do with finding an alien vessel a thousand feet down in the middle of the Pacificbut the lazy script and sprawling direction ultimately defeat everyone and everything. There are shocks and thrills along the way, but not many. Adapted from a Michael Crichton novel by Kurt Wimmer, Stephen Hauser, and Paul Attanasio, and directed by Barry Levinson (with a mid-film break to shoot Wag the Dog); with Peter Coyote and Liev Schreiber. (JR) Read more
Jivey all-black musical, some of it enjoyable and some of it fascinatingly dated, directed by William Forest Crouch in 1947 and featuring Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five, June Richmond, and Valerie Smythe. (JR) Read more
Partly because I love the style and grace of Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness novel, set over one day in 1923, and partly because I’ve had it up to here with classic English novels reduced to consumerist set-decoration jamborees, I walked out of this adaptation after 15 minutes at Cannes, and I’d be wasting your time as well as mine if I ever went back. True, Vanessa Redgrave plays Clarissa Dalloway, and maybe that’s justification enough to submit to the rest. Marleen Gorris (Antonia’s Line) directed the screenplay by Eileen Atkins (creator of the TV series Upstairs Downstairs); with Natascha McElhone, Rupert Graves, Michael Kitchen, and John Standing. (JR) Read more
Guy Maddin, responsible for Tales From the Gimli Hospital, comes up with an even stranger black-and-white feature (1990), made on a heftier budget, that involves amnesiac victims of mustard gas during World War I and the Russian Revolution. The hero, a Canadian soldier (Kyle McCulloch), mistakes a nurse (Kathy Marykuca) for his dead love; she’s married to a Belgian aviator (Ari Cohen) who can’t remember he’s married, and she gets so confused that she winds up mistaking the Canadian for the Belgian. There are other complications, but this film often appears to be about nothing at allexcept perhaps Maddin’s obvious love for late silent and early talkie studio productions with kitschy pictorial effects, as well as offbeat surrealist conceits, such as a hailstorm of bunny rabbits falling into trenches. What comes across is a fascinating fetishist delirium, where memories of remote war movies get recycled into something that’s alternately creepy and beautiful. 90 min. (JR) Read more
Mother Courage and Her Children and History Lessons
One of the most abused critical terms we have is “Brechtian,” and the weeklong series “Brecht and Film” offers the rare opportunity to discover what that adjective really means. As it turns out, Brechtian practice and Brechtian theory are different matters entirely, occupying opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum, and this series offers superb examples of both. To understand and experience Brechtian practice at its finest, hightail it to Peter Palitzsch and Manfred Wekwerth’s intelligent and resourceful 1961 filming in black-and-white ‘Scope of the most celebrated Berliner Ensemble production, Mother Courage and Her Children, starring Helene Weigel and directed by Brecht and his longtime associate Erich Engel. It’s a play with musical interludes about the psychology of war profiteering, viewed from the inside; shot in a studio, the film employs all the stage scenery and skillfully masks different portions of the frame to honor and enhance the original mise en scene. For the more challenging rigors of Brechtian theory–which argues against the emotional engagement of the audience, something Brechtian practice never fully abandons–try History Lessons. One of the most beautiful and difficult features of Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, this 1972 filming of portions of Brecht’s novel The Business Affairs of Mr. Read more
An incoherent title for a less than coherent satire originally known as just An Alan Smithee FilmAlan Smithee being the pseudonymous directing credit conferred when a real director has his name taken off a film, usually due to interference from the producer. Ironically, this labored send-up of Hollywood greed and foolishnessscripted by Joe Eszterhas in what appears to have been uncontrolled rage rather than recollected tranquillitywas apparently directed by Arthur Hiller, who had his own name removed from the credits, yielding a clear case of the pot calling the kettle black. The premise of this muddled, hit-or-miss comedy, done in pseudodocumentary form, is that an Englishman (Eric Idle) whose name actually is Alan Smithee becomes the director of an action-adventure blockbuster starring Sylvester Stallone, Whoopi Goldberg, and Jackie Chan, then flips out and steals the negative. I laughed a couple of times but can no longer remember at what; mostly I was simply amazed that the aforementioned actors, Ryan O’Neal, Coolio, Chuck D, Sandra Bernhard, and a good two dozen industry insiders ranging from Harvey Weinstein to Larry King to Eszterhas himself, could disgrace themselves with such submoronic material as if it were the height of hipness. If you harbor an interest in watching so-called industry smarts autodestruct, this carries a certain morbid appeal, but that’s about the extent of it. Read more
I haven’t read Margaret Rosenthal’s biography, The Honest Courtesan, which formed the basis of Jeannine Dominy’s script, but I found this a much more enjoyable, enlightening, and intelligent treatment of Venice and sex than the specious movie version of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove. Set in the 16th century, it’s about a beautiful and brilliant woman (Catherine McCormack) who’s unable to marry the aristocrat she loves (Rufus Sewell) because of her family background. Trained as a courtesan by her mother (Jacqueline Bisset), she becomes a formidable political figure through her liaisons with the most powerful men in Venice as well as visiting royalty, until the Inquisition threatens to brand her as a witch. (The title’s something of a misnomer, by the way, since she’s much more a feminist heroine than a bitch goddess.) Though the dialogue is predictably anachronistic in flavor, producer-director Marshall Herskovitz, best known for his work on Thirtysomething, gives this a narrative sweep and polish that makes it consistently entertaining. The city is used beautifully, and so, for the most part, is the cast (though Fred Ward seems a bit uncomfortable with his part). With Oliver Platt and Moira Kelly. 112 min. (JR) Read more
An astonishingly beautiful and hypnotic 1996 video by Alexander Sokurov, most of it in black and white, but with brief patches in color and sepia. Basically it’s a 45-minute mood piece with a disembodied narrator who moves through a village on a remote Japanese island that’s wreathed in mist; the sound track consists of Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Wagner, and traditional Russian and Japanese music. At times the vague narrative suggests a gothic novel, though the ending recalls one of the final images in Tarkovsky’s Solaris. One shot of the mist rising over the village is worthy of Murnau’s Faust, and most of the rest resembles a series of fine engravings in constant, dreamlike flux. In Russian with subtitles. (JR) Read more
Oriental Elegy
An astonishingly beautiful and hypnotic 1996 video by Alexander Sokurov, most of it in black and white, but with brief patches in color and sepia. Basically it’s a 45-minute mood piece with a disembodied narrator who moves through a village on a remote Japanese island that’s wreathed in mist; the music consists of Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Wagner, and traditional Russian and Japanese music. At times the vague narrative suggests a gothic novel, though the ending recalls one of the final images in Tarkovsky’s Solaris. One shot, of the mist rising over the village, is worthy of Murnau’s Faust, and most of the rest resembles a series of fine engravings in constant, dreamlike flux. Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday and Saturday, February 13 and 14, 7:00 and 9:00, and Sunday, February 15, 5:30 and 7:30, 773-281-4114. –Jonathan Rosenbaum Read more
