Fernando de Fuentes directed this 1936 Mexican musical about a romantic triangle. The picture won the great Gabriel Figueroa his first award for cinematography, at the 1938 Venice film festival. With Tito Guizar, Rene Cardona, and Esther Fernandez. (JR) Read more
John Maybury’s first feature, subtitled Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon, is a passionate and highly personal work whose impact will partially depend on how you feel about Bacon’s paintings. Maybury didn’t receive permission to use any of those paintings in the film, but one could argue that this homage goes well beyond the range we associate with biopics of artists. Basically set during the 60s and early 70s, the film concentrates on the sadomasochistic relationship between Bacon (played by Derek Jacobi) and his hard trade model and lover over seven years, a burglar and petty thief named George Dyer (Daniel Craig). There’s also a detailed portrait of Bacon’s foppish salon that gathered at London’s Colony Room, presided over by Tilda Swinton. I admire this movie more than I like it, maybe because I’m not very partial to Bacon’s work, but there’s no question that it carries a visceral charge and lots of inventive energy. (JR) Read more
In a Beijing park one night, a gay writer is arrested by the policeman he has a crush on, prompting a long, ambiguous battle of wills and a series of psychological games. Director Zhang Yuan (Mama, Beijing Bastards, Sons), a mainland Chinese independent, is heterosexual but seems to have read Genet: this 1996 feature reaches for a mise en scene more theatrical than one finds in his earlier documentaries and semidocumentaries. The results are more querulous than clearly focused, though the edginess may keep one interested. The title, incidentally, is a gay joke referring to the public toilets located east and west of the Forbidden Palace. (JR) Read more
The putative setting is New Mexico, but this is basically Kentucky-style ethnic cleansing that harks back to mountain feuds like the McCoys versus the Hatfields. Strictly 90s are the nonstop gore and the unpleasantness of all the characters. Adapted by Don Jakoby from John Steakley’s novel Vampire$, this dull splatterfest (1998) follows an exceptionally mean and single-minded vampire slayer (James Woods) who heads a team of Vatican mercenaries bent on finding and destroying a 600-year-old vampire priest (Thomas Ian Griffith) and not caring much who gets mauled in the process. Apart from the bitter glee of the anti-Catholic asides and the obligatory nods to Howard Hawks, the nastiness of the good guys is so unrelentingit extends even to Daniel Baldwin, who plays Smiley Burnette to Woods’s Gene Autrythat I was rooting for the vampires, albeit without much enthusiasm. It’s hard to be on anyone’s side when the genocidal fervor is so dogged and dehumanizing that characterization scarcely exists and the closest thing to wit is an epithet directed at a woman stabbed in the heart: How d’ya like your stake, bitch? (JR) Read more
Though not really as accomplished as it’s cracked up to be, this Cannes and Sundance prizewinner about a young rap poet (Saul Williams) finding himself in prison with the help of a sensitive writing teacher (Sonya Sohn) has all the inspirational uplift it strives for, and some pretty good rap performances as well. The fact that it wears its good intentions so clearly on its sleeve limits it. Directed by Marc Levin from a script he authored with Richard Stratton, Sohn, Williams, and costar Bonz Malone. (JR) Read more
The first feature of Samira Makhmalbaf (the eldest daughter of Iranian writer-director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who furnished the script and edited) is a wonder–a comic, lyrical, and “politically incorrect” poetic docudrama so acutely focused in its characters and ethics that it can afford to be relaxed about them, all the more remarkable coming from a director still in her teens. The film reenacts the true story of illiterate, 11-year-old twin sisters who were kept in their house from birth, until a social worker discovered them and enabled them to step outside. Their encounters with the world outside their home and the neighborhood’s reaction to them are the twin subjects that keep this feature going, exposing how involved people are in their neighbors’ lives, for better and for worse, in everyday communal Iran. (The twins and most of the other participants play themselves.) These two screenings are previews; the film will open commercially in Chicago at a later date. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Saturday, October 24, 6:00, and Sunday, October 25, 4:00, 312-443-3737. –Jonathan Rosenbaum
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still. Read more
Teenage siblings from a broken family (Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon) find themselves transported via a mysterious TV repairman (Don Knotts) to the “perfect” town of a 50s black-and-white sitcom called Pleasantville; eventually they bring about changes in the town and TV show, introducing rain, fire, reading, rock, jazz, and above all color. The directorial debut of Gary Ross (screenwriter of Big and Dave), this ideologically confused but fascinating postmodernist fantasy is about five years off — the date is 1958, but the clothes and decor are much closer to 1953. Furthermore, one might argue that Ross, who also scripted and coproduced, is even more hypocritical than he claims the 50s were: his film is about the 90s bringing life and spirit to the 50s, yet its emotional thrust — which is what makes it so interesting — is to reject the 90s in toto, in favor of the 50s and the onset of the 60s. It’s axiomatic that we’re supposed to be more sophisticated than our predecessors, but then people in the 50s could choose between color and black-and-white movies, while black-and-white movies can be made or seen today only with arcane excuses (like the plot of this one). Read more
As the 34th Chicago International Film Festival moves into its second week, my favorite new movie among the selections this year, Manoel de Oliveira’s Anxiety, has come and gone, but a lot of other worthy fare is playing. An especially welcome last-minute addition, though I haven’t seen it, is Theo Angelopoulos’s Eternity and a Day, winner of the top prize at Cannes this year.
My major recommendations day by day this week begin with Monte Hellman and Rudolph Wurlitzer’s 1971 Two-Lane Blacktop, probably the most underrated road movie of the 70s, playing Friday at 7:00 at the Music Box along with a short film about Hellman by George Hickenlooper, and Ko I-cheng’s Taiwanese feature Blue Moon–a film designed to be shown each time with the reels in a different order–showing at the same location at 9:30. If interactive cinema isn’t your thing, you might want to check out Stefan Rozowitzky’s Austrian rural parable, The Inheritors, playing at the other Music Box screen at 9:30, about the efforts of Alpine farmhands to collectively run the farm they inherit shortly after World War I.
For Saturday I strongly recommend the talented Tsai Ming-liang’s apocalyptic musical of Taiwanese alienation, The Hole, at 600 N. Read more
As was apparent in the uneven Funny Bones, there’s something pretty shameless about director Peter Chelsom when he goes into tear-jerking mode, and this six-handkerchief weepieadapted by Charles Leavitt from Rodman Philbrick’s novel Freak the Mightypulls out all the stops. A large, friendless, apparently retarded 13-year-old (Elden Henson) who lives with his grandparents (Gena Rowlands and Harry Dean Stanton) teams up with the fast-talking, brilliant cripple (Kieran Culkin) who’s moved in next door with his mother (Sharon Stone); together they come on like gangbusters. There’s a lot of magical-realist stuffor should I say guff?about King Arthur’s knights of the Round Table, most of which I could have done without, an offscreen narration by Henson that I rarely believed in, and a snarling villain out of D.W. Griffith. But portions of this inspirational claptrap touched me in spite of everything. (JR) Read more
“See for yourself” is the slogan of the 34th Chicago International Film Festival–which, as one of my colleagues has noted, could probably be translated as “Don’t listen to the critics.” Such an admonition would be understandable given what many in my profession do in relation to world cinema. As Stuart Klawans remarks in the October 12 issue of the Nation, reporting on the Toronto film festival last month, only a few dozen members of the international press and industry went to see the sole Congolese feature made in the last 12 years–an opportunity they weren’t likely to have again–but several hundred made tracks to the Robert Towne movie that Warner Brothers was releasing the following day. Since I made it to neither movie, I’d rather recall the time a few years back when a colleague I otherwise admire admitted to me that he’d rather see four bad movies than Bela Tarr’s seven-hour Satantango, which attracted fewer press people in Toronto than the Congolese film–though it nearly packed the house at the Chicago Film Festival a month later, and most of the audience stayed to the end.
My colleague didn’t give me his reasons for avoiding this Hungarian film, but they’re easy enough to guess: a long foreign-language masterpiece from an unfashionable country is precisely what his fashion-magazine editors didn’t want to hear about. Read more
The 1998 first feature of Samira Makhmalbaf (the eldest daughter of Iranian writer-director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who furnished the script and edited) is a wondera comic, lyrical, and politically incorrect poetic docudrama so acutely focused in its characters and ethics that it can afford to be relaxed about them, all the more remarkable coming from a director still in her teens. The film reenacts the true story of illiterate 11-year-old twin sisters, kept in their house from birth until a social worker discovered them and enabled them to step outside. Their encounters with the world outside their home and the neighborhood Read more
Daniele Wilmouth’s striking 13-minute Curtain of Eyes (1997), an experimental film working with elements of Japanese butoh. On the same program, Wilmouth’s work in progress Pinman and a short video by Ximena Musch entitled Compose. (JR) Read more
This 1992 feature about impoverished bricklayers was originally banned in Iran, then mutilated through the addition of an offscreen narration by its boy hero, which director Abolfazl Jalili had nothing to do with; this year it surfaced at the Locarno film festival in its original form and won several prizes. It Read more
Though one might critique its sexual politics, this is a lovely, memorable feature from Burkina Faso (1994), directed by Dani Kouyate, about a young boy who’s torn between the influence of a modern schoolteacher and the influence of a griot. Well worth checking out. 94 min. (JR) Read more
A rough-and-ready and, if memory serves, heroic piece of radical agitprop produced by Newsreel in 1969 about a student strike at Columbia over the University’s policy toward the surrounding community of Harlem. On the same program, two 25-minute Newsreel documentaries of the same year, San Francisco State: On Strike and People’s Park. For a genuine whiff of this era, you probably couldn’t do much better. (JR) Read more