A social worker (Jennifer Anniston) finds herself falling in love with her gay roommate and best friend (Paul Rudd), an elementary-school teacher, as she becomes pregnant by her lawyer boyfriend (John Pankow), decides to have the baby, and concludes that she can’t live with the father. Adapted by Wendy Wasserstein from Stephen McCauley’s novel and directed by Nicholas Hytner (The Crucible), this entertaining comedy-drama often plays like ideologically upgraded Neil Simon, and though I was grateful for many things in itI especially love the fine shading of an English drama professor played by Nigel HawthorneI never could shake off the impression that the whole thing was propaganda, even if I agreed with everything the propaganda was saying. The mixture of sincerity and sitcom phoniness is bewildering at times, but on some level, I guess, the film works. With Alan Alda, Allison Janney, and Tim Daly. (JR) Read more
The release of Fireworks, Takeshi Kitano’s seventh feature, belatedly goaded Quentin Tarantino and Miramax into releasing the writer-director-actor’s fourth (1994, 94 min.) after they’d sat on it for years, thereby making it possible to view this bizarre mannerist artist’s work in an even purer state, without the distractions of sentimentality or lousy paintings. Another gangster tale, this one features Beat Takeshi (as he’s affectionately known in Japan) as an underboss ordered to settle a dispute between two warring gangs in Okinawa. After losing several of his regulars and then finding out that his services weren’t even necessary, he and his surviving stooges hide out and goof off on a remote beach. Like Fireworks, this basically becomes a movie about waiting. Even if you’re like me and find Kitano’s films relatively empty apart from his self-parodic macho stoicism and quizzical style, these qualities alone provide quite an eyeful and earful; preternatural quiet and stillness alternate with flurries of loud violence in a manner that is singularly his, and the colors and compositions are riveting. The deadpan humor is somewhere east of Harry Langdon and north of Jacques Tati, though far from humanist. Attitude is everything, and if you get into his moodsI do about half the timethat’s plenty. Read more
A Price Above Rubies
Though scoffed at by some professional Jews, writer-director Boaz Yakin’s 1997 second feature (after Fresh), about the painful break of a young wife and mother (Renee Zellweger) from her husband and Hasidic community in Brooklyn’s Borough Park, is for me a potent and very moving polemic about the oppressive misogyny often found in Orthodox Jewish life, predicated on a kind of patriarchal mind-set that seems surprisingly close to attitudes found throughout the Middle East. After becoming involved in the jewelry business through her husband’s double-dealing brother (Christopher Eccleston), the heroine finds herself drifting further and further from her family; once she begins to champion the work of a Puerto Rican artist who makes jewelry (Allen Payne), her ejection from the Orthodox Jewish community becomes total. Yakin isn’t always successful in shoehorning various forms of magical realism–appearances of the heroine’s late brother and a spectral bag lady–into the story, and the denouement, like some of the events preceding it, may seem a bit overdetermined. But this is still a powerful and persuasively acted piece of dramatic agitprop about a neglected subject, provocative and spellbinding. 900 N. Michigan. –Jonathan Rosenbaum
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): fiml still. Read more
Roger & Me’s Michael Moore videotapes his own tour to promote his best-selling book, Downsize This!, and the results are both energizing and exasperating. Energizing because virtually no one else in the U.S. mainstream is dealing as directly, honestly, comprehensively, and confrontationally with the outsize corporate greed that has been eroding the quality of American life; exasperating because Moore deals with it all in terms of humor, which often short-circuits his discourse by turning it into light entertainmentcause for bitter amusement and more cynicism rather than for actual change. Only during a few moments of this 1997 moviemost noticeably a radio interview with Studs Terkeldoes he put the brakes on his banter and give us his message straight. With or without the banter, what he has to say is indispensable, yet it seems that the more we laugh the more we revel in our own impotence and helplessness. 90 min. (JR) Read more
While raising his son in Boston, Ross McElwee (Sherman’s March) contemplates the state of the world as implied by human disasters on the six o’clock news, chases down some of the victims, and occasionally gets them to ruminate on-camera. This 1996 film has some absorbing bits—including two segments with McElwee’s former teacher and friend Charleen (who’s graced all his major films to date) and another with a Korean millionaire in the deep south who’s feeling his way into a new marriage while trying to get over the murder of his previous wife—but it often comes across as willful autobiography predicated on the autobiographer finding new material. As always, McElwee gets a certain mileage out of his bemused, laconic persona, but the other people’s stories carry most of the interest. (JR) Read more
This romantic comedy by writer-director Peter Howitt is built around the intriguing narrative premise of exploring all the things that might have ensued if a young woman in London (Gwyneth Paltrow) who’s just lost her job at a PR firm hadn’t missed her train. Through parallel editing that Howitt makes surprisingly easy to follow, two disparate story lines unfold in parallel universes. Unfortunately, once the freshness of the concept wears off, the same premise starts to feel mechanical and willful. With John Hannah, John Lynch, Jeanne Tripplehorn, and Zara Turner. (JR) Read more
A university professor in Turin (Nanni Moretti) has a chance meeting with the woman who tried to kill him 12 years earlier in a terrorist attack. Mimmo Calopresti directed this 1996 Italian feature, which will be shown on video without subtitles. Read more
The memorable swan song of former Harvard psychology professor, LSD guru, and political mischief maker Timothy Leary, launched when he discovered he had incurable cancer in mid-1995. This documentary by Paul Davids, cowritten with Todd Easton Mills, comprises his cheerful last rites, including his plan to have his brain frozen after death in the hope that it might get transplanted some day. Deliberately shocking in spots, gleefully irreverent, often downright sensible, this is a fitting and fairly entertaining final gesture from a revolutionary charlatan/visionary who occasionally gave evidence of having thoughts. Worth checking out, and the musicby the Moody Blues, Jimmie Rodgers, and othersisn’t bad either. (JR) Read more
In order to pay some of his bills for his own film production of Othello, Orson Welles costarred as Cesare Borgia in this black-and-white 1949 costume epic, filmed on location in Italy and starring Tyrone Power. Pretty nice to look at anyway, thanks to Leon Shamroy’s cinematography. Directed by Henry King and adapted by Milton Krims from Samuel Shellabarger’s novel; with Wanda Hendrix, Everett Sloane, and Katina Paxinou. (JR) Read more
A sequel to the 1995 SF chiller about a deadly artificial woman (Natasha Henstridge) created with the help of extraterrestrials. This follow-up costars Justin Lazard as an astronaut who accidentally becomes infected by a male alien on Mars and brings his deadly gook back to earth. The possessed astronaut immediately begins impregnating women, all of whom immediately give birth to mutants. Meanwhile, a genetics expert (Marg Helgenberger) from the first movie has created a supposedly peaceful artificial woman (Henstridge again) who’s enlisted to help track down the astronaut. Most of this is silly, dim-witted stuff, but a few of the shocks carry some of the crude power of Jack Arnold’s low-budget horror films of the 50s. Directed by Peter Medak from a script by Chris Brancato; with Michael Madsen, Mykelti Williamson, James Cromwell, and George Dzundza. (JR) Read more
Two amiable but far from definitive programs of Warner Brothers cartoons, tagged respectively Fest of the Best and Taz Gone Looney and containing 15 cartoons each. It seems criminal to include only one item by Tex Avery (A Wild Hare, 1940), the virtual inventor of Bugs Bunny, and nothing at all by Frank Tashlin, and it’s certainly regrettable to have none of Greg Ford’s recent witty and critical addenda to the canon. One can similarly question the decision to highlight the least interesting creature in the Warners menagerie, the Tasmanian Devil (the animated equivalent of Sylvester Stallone) over Foghorn Leghorn (a character worthy of Preston Sturges) and the Road Runner (Chuck Jones’s greatest conceptual principle), who are accorded only one cartoon apiece. But there are still plenty of classics here, especially Jones’s Duck Amuck, What’s Opera, Doc?, and One Froggy Evening, not to mention the latter’s belated sequel (receiving its Chicago premiere), two Oscar winners, and the first appearances of Bugs Bunny, Tweety Pie, the Road Runner, and even Pete Puma (who never appeared again). If you’re over ten, I’d recommend not seeing the two programs consecutively, and if you have to opt for just one, I’d suggest Fest of the Best, which includes the Avery, ten Chuck Jones items, three by Friz Freleng, and one by Bob Clampett. Read more
An expert ladies man in Harlem who’s riddled with financial woes (Andre Blake) sets about teaching his technique to his brother (Mekhi Phifer), an upstanding journalist who has less luck with women. The premise periodically threatens to become slick and misogynistic, but this fairly serious 1997 independent comedy, written, produced, and directed by Mandel Holland, manages to wind up both modest and likable. With Michele Morgan and Tangi Miller. (JR) Read more
An illustrated lecture by Chris Berry, lecturer in cinema studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne, and one of the best scholars we have of contemporary Chinese cinema. Berry will emphasize independent film and video that shows contemporary Chinese reality and explain how it differs from the period allegories directed by such filmmakers as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. (JR) Read more
Writer-director Bertrand Blier, a specialist in politically incorrect sex comedies, offers us a prostitute with a heart of gold (Anouk Grinberg) who takes in a homeless tramp (Gerard Lanvin), offers him food and sex, and invites him to become her pimp. He accepts and winds up wooing a manicurist (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) to turn her into a prostitute as well, until he gets arrested for pimping. There are further developments in this 1996 feature, and even such familiar faces as Sabine Azema, Mathieu Kassovitz, and Jean-Pierre Leaud turn up briefly, but I found it increasingly difficult to stay interested. Barry White’s offscreen songs make the tedium a little more pleasant. (JR) Read more
D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 record of Bob Dylan’s 1965 English tour is a genuine blast from the past, evoking the 60s like few other documents; Dylan’s relentless heaping of scorn on the mainstream press, before the coercive tentacles of creative management made such things virtually impossible, is especially telling. But I’m entirely with Andrew Sarris when he writes, Don’t Look Back makes me want to fill in on Dylan’s recordings, but not Pennebaker’s movies; the raw cinema verite look bears fruit only when its subject does, and as with Truth or Dare (1991), the pretense of confidentiality is merely that. But the music is great, and the film would be memorable for its goofy, syncopated opening sequence alone (a quirky illustration of Subterranean Homesick Blues). With appearances by Joan Baez (Dylan’s steady at the time), Donovan, Allen Ginsberg, Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman, and Alan Price. 96 min. (JR) Read more
