Writer-director Noah Baumbach’s second feature (after Kicking and Screaming) has about as much romantic charm and wit as the first, which is pretty much. Cast in the form of a nostalgic art movie like Jules and Jim, it recounts the obsession of its hero (Eric Stoltz) with the former lovers of his girlfriend (Annabella Sciorra), which leads him to spy on one of them, a successful novelist (Chris Eigeman), by adopting the name and identity of a friend (Carlos Jacott) and joining the novelist’s therapy group. Stoltz looks so wholesome that it’s a little hard to believe in his dementia, but the visible pleasure of this cast (also including Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Bridget Fonda, and Peter Bogdanovich) in working together and with Baumbach is part of what makes it so enjoyable. There’s a ton of New York atmosphere, if you like that sort of thing, evoking Woody Allen without the sarcasm. (JR) Read more
Not everything works in this no-budget autobiographical romantic comedy by writer-director-actor Christopher Scott Cherot, but just about everything is fresh and unpredictable. A homeless novelist named Lee Plenty (Cherot) is invited by a wealthy college friend named Hav Savage (Chenoa Maxwell) to join her at her mother’s home in Washington for New Year’s Eve; during the weekend, he finds himself sexually approached by her best friend, her recently married half sister, and Hav herself. Quirky throughout, this is seldom laugh-out-loud funny, but it kept me interested and amused. (JR) Read more
Jessica Lange plays the title heroine in another highly forgettable piece of set decoration inspired by a 19th-century novelin this case Balzac’s tale of a calculating spinster. At least writers Lynn Siefert and Susan Tarr and director Des McAnuff play it mainly for laughs, rather than with the usual strangled piety. Others in the cast include Bob Hoskins, Hugh Laurie, Kelly MacDonald, Elisabeth Shue, and Aden Young. (JR) Read more
Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) thinks he lives in a model island community, but then he discovers that his entire life has been televised without interruption as The Truman Show; his family and friends, along with everyone else in town, are actors and extras, and the island itself is a TV studio. Half-clever and half-dumb, though always interesting and provocative, this 1998 fantasy was written with some wit by Andrew Niccol and directed with some style by Peter Weir. It makes better sense as allegory than as SF premise, expecting you to accept that the viewing public consists of jerks (except for you and me and other media-savvy types) and that the Truman Show creator (Ed Harris, radiating holiness) who services the jerks is a godlike genius. In short, this pretends to be daring while parroting what much of the TV industry already thinks about itself and its audience. But it’s still pretty much fun to watch. With Laura Linney, Noah Emmerich, Natascha McElhone, and Holland Taylor. 103 min. (JR) Read more
Less a remake of Frederick Knott’s play and Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Dial M for Murder than a variation on some of the same materials. This nasty, watchable, but instantly forgettable thriller combines Michael Douglas at his most reptilian with Gwyneth Paltrow in the classy Grace Kelly part, planting the married couple in ultraswank New York settings, throwing in Viggo Mortensen as Paltrow’s downtown lover (a character with no counterpart in the original), and adding twists to keep us from falling asleep. There’s nothing to wake us up either: this is simply efficient, routine storytelling with a high gloss but an undernourished sense of character. Directed by Andrew Davis from a script by Patrick Smith Kelly. (JR) Read more
Eight short films in Super-8, two of them premieres and one excerpting a work in progress, by former Chicagoan Mike Williams, who will attend the screening. I’ve previewed four of these films on videoParadise Lost (1990), Losers (1991), The 12 Seconds of Love (1996), and The Crowdand had a pretty good time with them. The first two are contemporary beatnik romps around San Francisco and Chicago; the 40-second 12 Seconds is a lovely depiction of sexual congress between a corkscrew and a lemon; and The Crowd is a brooding meditation on street accidents in Chicago and elsewhere, with explicit nods to the Ray Bradbury story and the King Vidor film carrying the same title. The other films to be shown: The Undeadheads (1990), Another Dead Soldier (1997), Bum (the work in progress), and Rapid Transit. Rounding out the program are two rare short Super-8 films by German experimental filmmaker Maria Von Voss, Fuhrer und Jazztanzer (1974) and Der Leson (1976), and a lot of live music by Katie Belle and several members of her band, the Belle Rangers. ( I say a lot because the program is scheduled to run five hours and the film segments add up to 70-odd minutes.) Read more
An outdoor screening of three independent films by Chicago-area women filmmakers, all made last year: Deborah Stratman’s From Hetty to Nancy, Daniele Wilmouth’s striking and experimental Curtain of Eyes, and Angela Kates’s Mr. McFarlind. (JR) Read more
The Paris-based Georgian filmmaker Otar Iosseliani has made about a dozen quirky features to date, and this ambitious 1996 frescoa French-Russian-Italian-Swiss productionis the best of those I’ve seen. Moving back and forth between 16th-century Georgia, Stalinist Georgia, contemporary Georgia, and contemporary Paris, each of which solicits a somewhat different directorial style, the movie might be regarded as a mordant, witty variation on D.W. Griffith’s Intolerancea view of warfare and political corruption over the past four centuries, with the same actors playing different parts in all four periods. (The lead, Amiran Amiranachvil, plays a king in the 16th century, an early-20th-century pickpocket enlisted by communists, and a Paris clochard, for instance.) Keeping his camera at a certain measured distance from his action, Iosseliani’s bleak view of human behavior is complex and amused enough to make this something more than a bitter tract; this picture is much closer to Tati or Bu Read more
Longtime Orson Welles assistant Richard Wilson was a good director in his own right, and this 1960 crime story about the Mafia in New York in 1906, made after his better known Al Capone, shows him at his near best. With Ernest Borgnine, Zohra Lampert, Al Austin, and John Marley. (JR) Read more
Another Jim Carrey comedy (1994), every bit as nihilistic as Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. This one teams him with Jeff Daniels in a cross-country quest to return a briefcase full of money to its rightful owner. A few of the bad-taste gags are funny, and Carrey’s grimaces have a certain inspired delirium, but this is a long way from the social comedy of Jerry Lewis. The characters here are ultimately turned into punching bags or punch-line dispensers. Peter Farrelly directed from a script he wrote with his brother Bobby and Bennett Yellin; with Lauren Holly, Victoria Rowell, Mike Starr, Charles Rocket, and Teri Garr. 101 min. (JR) Read more
Films by Lewis Klahr
I haven’t seen Whirligigs in the Late Afternoon (1996), the longest show on this program, but Lewis Klahr’s dreamlike work is so special that I’m sure it’s worth checking out. I’m especially partial to Altair (1994), a gossamer “color noir” culled from late-40s pages of Cosmopolitan and set to the strains of a section of the Firebird Suite, and Pony Glass (1997), a collection of kinky and gender-bending nightmares involving repressed homoerotic fantasies, Superman sidekick Jimmy Olsen, and such stray elements as a maple leaf and a turtle. But Klahr is always doing something slightly uncanny, whether he’s confusing a toy carousel with actual traffic in the silent Green ’62 (1996) or animating cutouts to the music of Berg in Lulu (1996). Klahr will be present to discuss his work, and admission to this Chicago Filmmakers program is free. Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, Friday, May 22, 7:00, 773-384-5533 or 312-346-3278. –Jonathan Rosenbaum
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): uncredited film still. Read more
Clockwatchers
This impressive first feature by Jill Sprecher, coscripting with her sister Karen, shows that she has an eye and ear all her own. The focus of this subtle and intelligent comedy is the experience of four office temps–played by Toni Collette (Muriel’s Wedding), Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow, and Alanna Ubach–who temporarily bond to stave off their alienation and frustration, and each is presented as an individual, not a type. Collette’s character, perhaps the most distinctive in the bunch, also narrates, and the movie is especially good at sizing up the social atmosphere and dynamics of an impersonal firm as perceived by relative outsiders, not to mention the overall look and feel of such an environment. With Paul Dooley, Bob Balaban, and Helen Fitzgerald. Fine Arts.
–Jonathan Rosenbaum
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still. Read more
Julian Mitchell’s screenplay, supposedly based on Richard Ellmann’s biography of Oscar Wilde, focuses exclusively on the last stages of Wilde’s life and career: his marriage, his tortured relationship with Lord Alfred Bosie Douglas (played here by Jude Law in an upper-class reprise of his role in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil), and his subsequent martyrdom in court and in prison prior to his death. Though Brian Gilbert’s direction is certainly adequate, the only good reason for seeing this 1997 feature is Stephen Fry’s wonderfully nuanced, sweet-tempered, and charismatic performance as Wilde; almost everything else is PC hindsight and Merchant-Ivory spreads, though Vanessa Redgrave turns up briefly as Oscar’s mother. 115 min. (JR) Read more
Life and Nothing More
Known less accurately as And Life Goes On… (to distinguish it from Bertrand Tavernier’s Life and Nothing But), this 1992 masterpiece by Abbas Kiarostami uses nonprofessional actors to restage real events. Accompanied by his little boy, a film director from Tehran drives into the mountainous region of northern Iran, recently devastated by an earthquake that killed more than 50,000 people. He searches through various villages for two child actors who appeared in Where Is My Friend’s House? (a 1987 Kiarostami feature), but what we find is more open-ended and mysterious: the resilience and in some cases the surprising optimism of people putting their lives back together, the beautiful landscapes, the alternating and overlapping viewpoints of the director and his son. A picaresque narrative with a profound sense of presence and a philosophical sense of the long shot that occasionally calls to mind Tati, this haunting look at what does and doesn’t happen to people confronted by natural disaster won the Rossellini prize at the 1992 Cannes film festival, and it’s one of the very best Iranian features I’ve seen. Music Box, Saturday and Sunday, May 16 and 17. –Jonathan Rosenbaum
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Forest Whitaker is a wonderful actor and a sensitive, if less distinctive, director of other actors. It’s his latter capacity that’s on view hereenhanced by such actors as Sandra Bullock and Gena Rowlands but limited by the absence of fresh material. (Steven Rogers’s script seems sincere enough but it’s awfully familiar.) A former prom queen (Bullock) married to her high school sweetheart and devoted to her daughter (Mae Whitman) discovers on a TV talk show that her best friend is having an affair with her husband, who no longer loves her. Still in a state of shock, she returns to her hometown in Texas with her little girl and tries to get her life back in order. Bullock, Rowlands, Whitman, and others in the castmost notably Harry Connick Jr.acquit themselves as admirably as the pedestrian script allows. (JR) Read more
