This relentlessly vulgar Mafia-movie parody from Jim Abrahams (Airplane!, Hot Shots!) begins promisingly with a lampoon of Casino before descending to more predictable hit-or-miss riffs on the Godfather movies. Another descent is made from high spirits to bad vibes, as crassness and cruelty eventually overwhelm any sustained sense of fun. With Jay Mohr, Billy Burke, Christina Applegate, Pamela Gidley, Olympia Dukakis, and Lloyd Bridges in one of his last screen performances; written by Abrahams, Greg Norberg, and Michael McManus. (JR) Read more
Small Soldiers
Director Joe Dante (Gremlins, Innerspace, Explorers, Matinee) is a national treasure, and his lack of recognition by the general public may actually make it easier for him to function subversively. His unpretentious fantasy romps have more to say about the American psyche, pop culture, and the ideology of violence than anything dreamed up by Steven Spielberg or George Lucas. This delightful adventure about war toys running amok in suburban middle America is a synthesis and extension of most of his previous movies, with echoes of Gulliver’s Travels (including some of the satire). The toys in question are the villainous Commando Elite, fashioned using a microchip from the U.S. Defense Department to mercilessly slaughter the noble if freakish Gorgonites, a set of toys programmed (like other minorities one can mention) to hide and to lose; the Ohio citizens who wind up in the cross fire are strictly generic sitcom types, but we wind up caring about them almost as much as we care about the toys. It’s typical of Dante as a pop connoisseur that he adroitly links a creepy sequence about mutated Barbie dolls to Bride of Frankenstein. His films are about not just culture and violence but also everyday cultural violence, something we all have to cope with. Read more
Steven Spielberg’s 1998 exercise in Oscar-mongering is a compilation of effects and impressions from all the war movies he’s ever seen, decked out with precise instructions about what to think in Robert Rodat’s script and how to feel in John Williams’s hokey music. There’s something here for everybody — war is hell (Sam Fuller), war is father figures (Oliver Stone), war is absurd (David Lean, Stanley Kubrick), war is necessary (John Ford), war is surreal (Francis Coppola), war is exciting (Robert Aldrich), war is upsetting (all of the preceding and Lewis Milestone), war is uplifting (ditto) — and nothing that suggests an independent vision, unless you count seeing more limbs blown off than usual (the visceral opening sequence, showing Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944) or someone getting graphically shot underwater. The story is about a squad trying to find and send home a private whose three older brothers have already been killed in World War II; it’s a mission ordered by General George C. Marshall (backed by the authority of Abraham Lincoln, who’s backed in turn by Spielberg) and executed by Tom Hanks, a captain named John instead of Joe. It has a few pretty good action moments (including a climax straight out of the Indiana Jones trilogy), a lot of spilled guts, a few moments of drama that don’t seem phony or hollow, some fairly strained period ambiance, and a bit of sentimental morphing that reminds me of Forrest Gump; it also lasts the better part of three hours. Read more
High Art
As storytelling it isn’t always as clean as it might be, but this first feature by writer-director Lisa Cholodenko is an interesting debut for its nuanced sense of character and its terrific sex scenes–scenes that actually serve character development for a change. A 24-year-old assistant editor (Radha Mitchell, shedding her Australian accent) at a chic photography magazine shares an apartment with her boyfriend but becomes infatuated with an older woman from a well-to-do family (Ally Sheedy), who occupies the apartment over hers; once a well-known art photographer, the woman now inhabits a drug scene and lives with an addicted German actress. When she and the young editor start having an affair, neither is quite sure what’s happening at first–and to Cholodenko’s credit neither are we. With Patricia Clarkson, Bill Sage, and Tammy Grimes. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, July 3 through 9. –Jonathan Rosenbaum
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still. Read more
Though advertised as an Andy Warhol film when it came out, Joe Dallesandro’s 1969 debut feature was actually directed by Paul Morrissey, and it was his first feature too. A rambling and sometimes funny tale of a low-energy hustler who goes to work to pay for his wife’s girlfriend’s abortion, the film consists largely of the one-on-one encounters that characterized most of the dramatic Warhol Factory releases. (JR) Read more
Writer-director Brian Sloan has a nice, loose way of handling his actors, and his decision to locate this gay screwball comedy in a world of mainly straight peoplespecifically a circle of George Washington University students and (a few years later) alumni, some straight and some gaygives this breezy feature a certain freshness. In most other respects, however, this is a movie we’ve all seen several times before and can expect to see many times again. With Alexis Arquette, Maddie Corman, Guillermo Diaz, Marianne Hagan, Jamie Harrold, Christian Maelen, Lauren Velez, and Tuc Watkins. (JR) Read more
Hal Hartley’s ambitious 1997 feature has a precise sense of everyday life in a working-class neighborhood of Queens: the sense of community, the casual desperation of people without defenses, the way people hang out on their front stoops or in the local convenience store. He uses his quirky, almost diagrammatic style to give us two literary archetypes: a repressed garbageman named Simon (James Urbaniak), who supports his invalid mother (Maria Porter) and oversexed sister (Parker Posey) and serves as the local scapegoat, and the title hero (Thomas Jay Ryan), a rebellious autodidact with a prison record who rents Simon’s family’s basement flat and encourages Simon to write. When Simon goes on to become a celebrity while his teacher remains mired in trouble and obscurity, a more abstract design begins to take shape. What eventually emerges isn’t nearly as achieved or convincing as the neighborhood portrait, but even when it ultimately overwhelms the characters, it’s full of juice, humor, and nuance. R, 137 min. (JR) Read more
I haven’t seen this legendary and rarely screened French film in ‘Scope, but it should be well worth checking out. Director John Berry was a longtime member of Orson Welles’s Mercury repertory company, working as an actor on stage and radio and sometimes as a director; because he was also a communist, his promising Hollywood career as a film director (From This Day Forward, He Ran All the Way) was cut short by the blacklist. He emigrated to France, where he spent most of the remainder of his career, though he returned to the U.S. in the 70s to make, among other films, the wonderful ghetto comedy Claudine. Tamango (1957), loosely based on a story by Prosper Merim Read more
Good-natured but haunting, elliptical and repetitive as narrative but extremely likable, this is a poignant and sometimes funny story about two young Native American men (Adam Beach and Evan Adams) who travel from their Idaho reservation to Phoenix to retrieve the ashes of an estranged father of one of them. Directed by Chris Eyre and adapted by Sherman Alexie from stories in his book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, this 1998 film has been billed as the first feature written, directed, and coproduced by American Indians, and while its general notations about being Native American are nothing to sneeze at, its particularities are the best thing about it. Gary Farmer, who was so memorable in Dead Man, gives an equally impressive but more abbreviated performance as the father, and the others in the cast portray the kind of characters you wind up remembering. PG-13, 88 min. (JR) Read more
I watched all but one of the shorts on the second of the two programs that constitute this festival, and, much as I hate to say this, I didn’t laugh once. I suspect seeing some of the clips with an audience might make a difference, but how much of a difference would depend on how eager that particular assembly was to laugh. Some of the works here are worth looking at simply because they’re weird (Noel Olken’s Mr. Peach’s Dinner Party), extreme (Joe Ryan’s The Western), unsettling (a clay-animation effort called The Boy With the Flip-Top Head), or nicely designed (Bubble Quandary), but none of them was actually funny. (JR) Read more
Finnish mannerist Aki Kaurismaki (Ariel, The Match Factory Girl, Leningrad Cowboys Go America) takes on the theme of contemporary unemployment in a tender love story that, by his own account, places Frank Capra’s emotional rescue story It’s a Wonderful Life in one extreme corner and Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief in the other, and the Finnish reality in between. The film was conceived in part for actor Matti Pellonpaa, who died before it went into production; it’s now dedicated to his memory, and a photograph of him as a boy plays a key role in the emotional orchestration. Despite some careful color coordination in the sets and some quiet humor in the mise en scene and plot, not to mention a mournful seriousness in the overall treatment of the theme, this is arguably one of those instances in the filmmaker’s touching but reductive minimalist oeuvre where less becomes less (1996). In Finnish with subtitles. 96 min. (JR) Read more
An antiseptic, unemotional police procedural (1997, 96 min.) set in northern Norway, where an ace Swedish police sleuth (Stellan Skarsgard) turns up to investigate the murder of a 17-year-old girl and (surprise, surprise) winds up demonstrating he’s fairly screwed up himself. The style of director and cowriter Erik Skjoldbjaerg in this first feature is clipped and crisp, and much is made of the action’s transpiring inside the arctic circle during the season when there’s no night, but I had a much easier time nodding off than the hero. It’s nice to see a genre film from abroad for a change, but I would have preferred one with an interesting character or two, not to mention a livelier plot. In Norwegian with subtitles. (JR) Read more
Despite my earlier reservations about Bobby and Peter Farrelly, they’re progressively winning me over, partly because they keep getting better; this 1998 comedy often had me in stitches. Their gross-out humor is basically sweet tempered, for all its tweaking of PC attitudes, and though this film looks slapdash, its script (by the Farrellys, Ed Decter, and John J. Strauss) is surprisingly well put together. The victimized hero (Ben Stiller) nurtures a 13-year infatuation with the title heroine (Cameron Diaz), who moved away to Miami soon after high school in Rhode Island. He hires a shady detective (Matt Dillon) to track her down, and the detective falls in love with her himself. This movie’s unforced feeling for lower-middle-class disaffection is worthy at times of W.C. Fields, and there are some worst-case-scenario sequences involving a prom date, a dog, and jerking off that are convulsively hilarious. With Lee Evans and Chris Elliott. 119 min. (JR) Read more
From the Chicago Reader (June 29, 1998). — J.R.
It’s strictly a side issue whether mankind will survive colliding with an asteroid the size of Texas; the real question is whether Liv Tyler, who plays Bruce Willis’s daughter, gets to keep her boyfriend (Ben Affleck). Not wishing to spoil the fun — pretty hard to come by anyway in this 1998 blockbuster’s 150 minutes — I won’t tell you the outcome, but I’ll wager you can guess. Basically this is The Dirty Dozen meets When Worlds Collide: a grubby team of oil drillers headed by Willis is dispatched to save the planet by nuking the asteroid from within. Michael Bay, who was more comfortable with the subtleties of The Rock, is director and coproducer, and among the credited and uncredited writers — all of them clearly encouraged to work in their sleep — are Jonathan Hensleigh, J.J. Abrams, Tony Gilroy, Shane Salerno, Robert Roy Pool, Robert Towne, Paul Attanasio, Ann Biderman, and Scott Rosenberg. Others in the cast who embarrass themselves and us for their salaries include Billy Bob Thornton, Keith David, Steve Buscemi, Chris Ellis, Will Patton, and Jason Isaacs. (JR)
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Lightly comic agitprop about homophobic bigotry in a small southern townsincere, hokey, and artlessby first-time writer-director Kelli Herd. Various complications ensue when the rumor spreads that something in the drinking water turns people gay. In spite of a couple of able actors (Keri Jo Chapman and Teresa Garrett) as the two leadsestranged wives and best friends who become loversmost of the performances and direction call to mind little theater productions, and the storytelling and sense of character remind me of porn films. I can sympathize with this movie’s reactive essentialism, which seems to imply that straights are as one-dimensional as they seem to think gays are, but I find it hard to stay interested in the reductive sense of human personality that levels everyone in the movie regardless of his or her sexual preference. With Derrick Sanders, Timothy Vahle, and Barbara Lasater. (JR) Read more
