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
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
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
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
Canadian filmmaker Ann Marie Fleming, a child of Chinese and Australian parents, directed this intriguing and original 1996 film about her Chinese great-great-grandfather. An orphan in 19th-century Hong Kong, he was kidnapped, put to work in a brothel, and taken to San Francisco; there he converted to Christianity, worked as a servant to a Jewish family, and returned to Hong Kong, where he worked for a doctor and eventually became a surgeon. Fleming’s approach to this colorful material is extremely playful and ironic, mixing fiction and documentary as she uses both actors (including Kwok Wing Leung, George Chiang) and herself to recount the story in a highly stylized manner. (JR) Read more
Victor Hugo is a madman who believes he is Victor Hugo, Jean Cocteau reportedly once said, and judging from the adaptations I’ve seen of this Hugo warhorseI still haven’t caught up with the source novelhe must have been a sublime madman at that. In any case, the 129 minutes this film has carved out of the 1,200-page book are certainly vivid. Bille August’s sincere, hokey, and irresistible mounting of Rafael Yglesias’s script shares with Titanic a refusal to look at virtue and vice cynically, though the characters, for all their simplicity, are considerably richer: Jean Valjean (Liam Neeson), emerging from 19 years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread to become an enlightened factory owner and mayor a decade later, and the fanatical Inspector Javert (Geoffrey Rush), a sort of 19th-century J. Edgar Hoover who devotes a lifetime to tracking Valjean down. Uma Thurman makes a swell Fantine and Claire Danes and Hans Matheson are fine as Cosette and her revolutionary lover Marius; the production designer, Anna Asp, also worked on Fanny and Alexander. The pacing never flags and the storylet’s face itis well-nigh unbeatable. (JR) Read more
The Delta
Ira Sachs wrote and directed this stylistically captivating, subtly nuanced, and structurally unpredictable 1996 independent feature. Like Spike Lee’s forthcoming He Got Game, the film focuses on an oedipal scenario that partially hinges on skin color. The central figure is Minh (Thang Chan), the immigrant son of a poor Vietnamese woman and a black American soldier, although his centrality isn’t apparent at first. Most of the first part of the film concerns a well-to-do, sexually confused teenager (Shayne Gray) who picks up Minh for sex, then goes off on a date with his steady girlfriend (whom he mainly ignores) before gravitating back to Minh much later. Because the wholly believable dialogue is more overheard than heard, and because Sachs is interested in showing us a whole Memphis milieu, Minh’s hatred for his father–a mirror image of the racism he encounters in the world around him–doesn’t seem as important at first as we eventually discover it is. If you think contemporary social reality rarely winds up in movies, this feature offers a bracing if mainly low-key exception to the rule. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, April 24 through 30.
–Jonathan Rosenbaum
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still. Read more
Martin (Hache)
An Argentinian film director exiled in Spain tries to become reacquainted with his son Martin (also known as “Hache”), who’s come to Madrid from Buenos Aires to recover from a drug overdose. Two other key characters in the story, and in many respects the most fascinating, are the director’s girlfriend and his gay best friend, who partially play the roles of surrogate parents for the boy. This excellent 1997 Argentinian-Spanish coproduction, directed by Adolfo Aristarain and shown at the last New York Film Festival, carries the kind of personal conviction, novelistic depth, and sense of lived experience that we seldom get in movies nowadays, including complex, three-dimensional characters and a plot that proves as unpredictable as they are. This is the only film I’ve seen at this year’s Chicago Latino Film Festival that I’d consider seeing a second time. (JR) Read more