The landscapes are lovely and the castRobert Redford, Kristin Scott Thomas, Sam Neill, Dianne Wiest, Scarlett Johannson, and Chris Cooperdoes an honorable job, yet there are times when this leisurely movie seems so much in love with its own virtue and nobility that there’s not much room left for the spectator. Redford directs this apparently upgraded adaptation by Eric Roth and Richard LaGravenese of Nicholas Evans’s best-selling novel, and seems bent on matching or outdoing Clint Eastwood’s The Bridges of Madison County as a class act. After a 14-year-old (Johannson) loses part of her leg and her favorite horse loses its mind in a freak riding accident in New York State, her mother (Scott Thomas), a big-time magazine editor, seeks to revive the girl’s spirits by having the horse cured by a legendary horse whisperer (Redford) in Montana. Too long for what it has to say and too evasive when it comes to spelling out certain key detailslike the financial arrangements (or lack of same) between the mother and the horse whisperer, and the full logic of the latter’s therapythis has loads of craft and honor but never quite takes off. (JR) Read more
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 tempsplayed by Toni Collette (Muriel Read more
He Got Game
Colleagues of mine have called this Spike Lee’s best feature since Malcolm X, though I don’t see how one can embrace that film without undervaluing the book it’s based on. But He Got Game is certainly Lee’s best narrative film in years, and the fact that it’s based on an original script–as were Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever–is surely telling. The story focuses on the tortured relationship between a father in Attica (Denzel Washington at the top of his form) and the son he ruthlessly trained in basketball (the NBA’s Ray Allen), who’s already famous and about to graduate from high school on Coney Island. Having gone to prison for accidentally killing the boy’s mother, the father is granted a week outside to try to convince his son to attend the governor’s alma mater, with the promise of a reduced sentence if he succeeds. The son, however, despises his father, and though the light complexion of the mother (Lonette McKee) is never mentioned, it seems to play a significant role in the film’s complex emotional dynamics, as does the father’s brief affair with a white prostitute (Milla Jovovich). As usual, Lee tries many kinds of stylistic effects and uses wall-to-wall music (by Aaron Copland and Public Enemy); what’s different this time is how personally driven the story feels. Read more
This Manhattan-based romantic comedy might be fun if it didn’t hit you over the head with a sledgehammer every few minutes. The title heroine (Jada Pinkett Smith) goes on a blind date with a law clerk (Tommy Davidson) and everything goes wrong (cf After Hours). Since every pratfall and wisecrack is delivered with three times the emphasis needed, there’s not much opportunity to enjoy the charismatic leads. Daisy V.S. Mayer (Party Girl) directedor, rather, overdirectedDavid C. Johnson’s script; with Paula Jai Parker and LL Cool J. (JR) Read more
Throwing caution to the wind, producer-director-cowriter-star Warren Beatty sounds off about politics, delivering his funniest and liveliest film to date (1998). Beatty plays a senator up for reelection who suffers a nervous breakdown, takes out a contract on himself, and with nothing to lose finds himself blurting out what he actually believesmostly in the style of street rap. He addresses the lies of the government in general and the Democratic Party in particular, especially regarding black people, and once he starts hanging out with the daughter of Black Panthers (Halle Berry), whether the two of them will have sex becomes more of an issue than whether he’ll get reelected. This lacks the craft of Preston Sturges or Frank Capra, but it offers a personal statement that may be just as important, and some of it equals Richard Pryor’s concert films in farcical candor and reckless energy. Coscripted by Jeremy Pikser; with Oliver Platt, Jack Warden, Paul Sorvino, Don Cheadle, Amiri Baraka, and lots of enjoyable cameos. R, 108 min. (JR) Read more
In Adam’s Rib (1991), adapting a contemporary novel, director Vyacheslav Krishtofovich revealed a fine sense of absurdist anomaly in probing personal relations in the former Soviet Union. Working six years later with Andrei Kourkov’s adaptation of another novel, he gives us a piquant story about an unemployed intellectual in today’s Ukraine (Alexandre Lazarev) that’s entirely worthy of its predecessor. The hero’s married to an advertising executive who’s about to leave him for another man, and when an old friend proposes hiring a hit man to rub out his rival, he agrees but flippantly designates himself as the victim instead. A few days later, after meeting a cheerful prostitute, he decides he wants to live after all, and hires a second hit man to rub out the first. It’s a well-told story of a society where, as one character points out, business relationships have replaced friendships, and Krishtofovich recounts it with dry wit and telling detail. (JR) Read more
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). (JR) Read more
Hunter S. Thompson’s 1971 account of taking drugs and behaving like an asshole in Las Vegas yields a singularly unpleasant 1998 feature from writer-director Terry Gilliam, though one with a lot of creativity and a scuzzy integrity of its own. There’s a good grasp of period, an impressive impersonation of the author-hero by an almost unrecognizable Johnny Depp, and a determination to honor the original in all its gross-out particulars. I assume that part of the idea here was to play in the ambiguous zones where Las Vegas tackiness, LSD hallucinations, Gilliam beasties, and lots of vomit become difficult to separate. It’s certainly distinctive, looking at times like Richard Lester put through a postmodernist blender, and Gilliam, an American expatriate since the 60s, skewers his native country with guts and zeal. 119 min. (JR) Read more
While not as terrible as his subsequent adaptation of Lord Jim, this 1958 Hollywoodization of the Dostoyevsky novel by writer-director Richard Brooks is pretty grotesque all the same. John Alton’s color cinematography and some candy-box decor and lighting fare a lot better than the cast (Yul Brynner, Claire Bloom, Richard Basehart, William Shatner, Lee J. Cobb, and Maria Schell). (JR) Read more
A pretty good survey of the diversity and range of inhabitants on the famous street. This video by David Simpson (who coproduced When Billy Broke His Head . . . and Other Tales of Wonder with journalist Billy Golfus) gets additional vigor and flavor from a wonderful prologue and epilogue narrated by Studs Terkel. 57 min. (JR) Read more
Art 1998 Chicago presents continuous showings of films that debuted at the Documenta X festival in Kassel, Germany, last summer. The Final Insult is Charles Burnett’s first foray into digital video, released in 1997 and running 55 minutes. It’s 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. Mother and Son (1997) is by the Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov. Apart from the eye-filling black-and-white video Oriental Elegy Sokurov’s painterly, visionary side has seldom been more evident than in this gorgeous contemplation of a son caring for his dying mother. The story is minimal, but the color images are so breathtaking that there’s never a lax moment; even when the already slow action is reduced to a virtual standstill, Sokurov’s intensity insures that something is always happening, both on the screen and inside us. (This is only 73 minutes long, but if you’re hungry for plot, it will seem like an eternity.) In his taste and his patience, Sokurov may be our only truly 19th-century avant-gardist—which means in effect that his works are timeless. Read more
Bob Hope disguises himself as Casanova (Vincent Price) and bores the hell out of everyoneincluding 1954 audiences, who stayed away in droves. With Joan Fontaine, Audrey Dalton, Basil Rathbone, and Raymond Burr; Norman Z. McLeod directed. (JR) Read more
Brigitte Rouan’s 1997 comedy-drama opens with an image of a cat in heat. A 40ish book editor, wife, and mother (Rouan) falls in love with a hydraulics engineer about half her age (Boris Terral) and goes slightly gaga during and after their short-lived affair. In a contrapuntal subplot her lawyer husband (Patrick Chesnais) is defending an older woman who’s murdered her adulterous husband, and then goes gaga himself once he finds out about his wife. The film is pretty good at suggesting various mental states in physical and cinematic termsthe heroine floating on a motorized cloud, the husband experiencing a growing chasm between himself and his clientyet its greatest virtue could be its low-key reasonableness in showing how everyone copes with crisis, a modest and affectionate detachment that approaches wisdom. Rouan has acted in films by Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette, and Bertrand Tavernier, among many others; as director, screenwriter, and star, she Read more
An intriguing but not entirely successful 1969 ‘Scope feature by the idiosyncratic Yasuzo Masumura, adapted from a famous novel by Yasunari Kawabata about a tea ceremony master (Mikijiro Hira) who becomes sexually involved with two of his late father’s girlfriends (one played by the great Machiko Kyo). Masumura (1924-’86) clearly had a feeling for kinky subjects of this kind, but here his mise en scene tends to be relatively flat and predictable. (JR) Read more
It’s entirely possible that Abbas Kiarostami, who’s been making films in Iran for about three decades, is our greatest living filmmaker. The problem isn’t that his films are esoteric, simply that they’re different from Western and other Iranian films alike, in the way they’re put together (without scripts and in most cases without professional actors), in the way they address us, and in what Kiarostami includes and leaves out. Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987, 85 min.), one of his most popular films in Iran, is a miniature epic about a schoolboy trying to return a classmate’s notebook. Like the somewhat related Life and Nothing More (1992; also known as And Life Goes On . . .) and Through the Olive Trees (1994), both shot in the same section of northern Iran, this is a sustained meditation on singular landscapes and the way ordinary people live in them; an obsessional quest that takes on the contours of a parable; a concentrated inquiry that raises more questions than it answers; and a comic as well as cosmic poem. It’s about making discoveries and cherishing what’s in the worldincluding things that we can’t understand. In Farsi with subtitles. (JR) Read more
