Two teenage girls (Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams) touring the White House in the mid-70s stumble upon some secrets of Richard Nixon (Dan Hedaya) without realizing what they are, and when things snowball they wind up as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “Deep Throat” informant. This is silly and shameless stuff that made me laugh quite a lot, in part because it provides the perfect antidote to the neo-Stalinist pomposity of Oliver Stone’s Nixon and the glib self-importance of Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men. Andrew Fleming (Threesome, The Craft), who directed from a script he wrote with Sheryl Longin, lacks the polish and pizzazz of Stone or Pakula, but arguably his notions about American politics are healthier and more earthbound than theirs; in his book, Nixon and Kissinger and Woodward and Bernstein are all deserving of ridicule. In some ways this is like Forrest Gump without the neocon trimmings, which for me makes it bracing and energizing, though younger viewers may not catch all the historical references. With Harry Shearer as G. Gordon Liddy, Saul Rubinek as Kissinger, and Teri Garr. Biograph, Evanston, Lake. –Jonathan Rosenbaum Read more
The impressive directorial debut of actress Joan Chen, who’s appeared in everything from Twin Peaks to The Last Emperor to Heaven and Earth. Adapted from the novella “Tian Yu” by Yan Geling, who collaborated with Chen on the screenplay, and filmed in Tibet, this feature has enraged mainland Chinese government officials–not only because it was shot without an official permit but apparently also because its tragic plot gives such a dark portrait of the effects of the Cultural Revolution. The young title heroine, who like many others in her generation travels from a city to a remote part of China, winds up working with a horse trainer in Tibet, a solitary and stoic figure whose quiet love for her is the main focus of the story. Desperate after a spell to return to her native Chengdu, Xiu Xiu winds up sleeping with a series of men who she believes have influence on such state decisions. Exquisitely acted, and shot by Zhang Yimou cinematographer Lu Yue–an impressive director in his own right–with a sharp feeling for landscape, this is a powerful piece of filmmaking. Village. –Jonathan Rosenbaum
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An aspiring composer of musicals (Christian Campbell) encounters protracted difficulties trying to have sex with a go-go boy he’s picked up (J.P. Pitoc) in this comedy directed by Jim Fall. I don’t want to oversell its merits, but what’s relatively refreshing about this is that it isn’t another movie about gay men–it’s a movie about these gay men. The other Greenwich Village characters who weave in and out of the action–the hero’s ditsy actress friend (Tori Spelling), his straight and horny roommate, the latter’s eccentric girlfriend, an estranged gay couple, and an outrageous drag queen named Miss Coco Peru (Clinton Leupp)–are comparably singular, and Fall gives certain bits of the story the feel of an old-fashioned musical. Jason Schafer wrote the clever script. Pipers Alley.
–Jonathan Rosenbaum
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Though not much more than lightly charming, this romantic comedy about Star Trek fanatics trying to cope in the contemporary world is everything the recent documentary Trekkies failed to be. Written by coproducer Mark A. Altman and director Robert Meyer Burnett, it’s mainly a boys’ movie, and it’s helped as well as hampered by the participation of Star Trek icon William Shatner playing himself. For self-mockeryShatner is seen hawking a musical version of Julius Caesar in which he plays all the partshe’s at least as weird as Dean Martin in Kiss Me, Stupid but not nearly as funny. With Rafer Weigel, Erik McCormack, Audie England, Patrick Van Horn, Deborah Van Valkenberg, and Phil LaMarr. (JR) Read more
Another neo-noir about the intersection of various scams in a small American town. This one stars Alessandro Nivola, Reese Witherspoon, and Josh Brolin, and it’s directed by England’s Mike Barker from a script by Ted Griffin. The movie makes a great show of parsing moral issues, but it’s clear from the outset that the stylish interiors and the fancy colors in Ben Seresin’s cinematography are what really count, along with a couple of predictably unpredictable twists. It’s vacuous but diverting in a seedy sort of way. (JR) Read more
The impressive directorial debut of Jeremy Thomasproducer of major films by Bernardo Bertolucci, David Cronenberg, Nagisa Oshima, and Nicolas Roeg, among othersis a compelling throwback to the emotional purity and directness of 19th-century melodrama and its various offshoots; though it isn’t as good as D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms or Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, these are the sort of pictures it calls to mind. The somewhat Dickensian plot, adapted by Eski Thomas (the producer-director’s wife) from a novel by the late Walker Hamilton, involves an intellectually challenged animal lover (Christian Bale) who flees from his evil stepfather (Daniel Benzali) in London after his mother’s death and an eccentric former bank clerk (John Hurt) he links up with on the road who devotes his life to burying animals killed by motorists. The unabashed depiction of characters so purely good or evil that their behavior virtually defies motivation demands a certain innocence from the viewer that is rarely solicited nowadays, but the film fully rewards it: Thomas has a wonderful feeling for landscape and a keen sense of storytelling that falters (and not by much) only when he overextends the plot’s suspenseful finale. This isn’t for everyone, but can be emphatically recommended to anyone suffering from a surfeit of cynicism at the movies. Read more
A military secret weapon that can obliterate everything in its path is intercepted by a couple of working-class stiffs (Skeet Ulrich and Cuba Gooding Jr.) in Montana and pursued by a disgruntled and scapegoated major (Peter Firth) who wants to make a zillion dollars by holding the world at ransom. This action-adventure movie shows the usual contempt for life, humanity, art, the audience, intelligence, characterization, and plot, and the usual affection for stunts, minor star turns, and cliches. The stunt work is pretty good, the brain work close to nonexistent. Directed by Hugh Johnson from a script by Drew Gitlin and Mike Cheda; with David Paymer and Kevin J. O’Connor. (JR) Read more
Like all of Albert Brooks’s features, this satire of Hollywood’s insularity is funny, with adroit comic performances from Sharon Stone and Jeff Bridges. But it’s difficult not to see it as a coarsening of Brooks’s rare conceptual talent as a chronicler of American mores. As always, his directing is impeccable, and his whiny performance is pretty much what you’d expect, but his script is fairly lazy by his usual standards. The plot concerns a Hollywood screenwriter (Brooks) who hires a muse with expensive tastes (Stone) to get him out of a career crisis, but the main source of humor is basically Hollywood myopia and all it entails. Andie MacDowell plays the hero’s wife, Bridges plays a fellow screenwriter, and there are a good many cameos by Hollywood notables to fill in the cracks. Monica Johnson, Brooks’s usual cowriter, helped with the script. (JR) Read more
I haven’t seen Andre Labarthe’s 1991 documentary about the French director and former film critic. But it’s part of the superb French TV series Filmmakers of Our Times, which has been around since the 60s, consisting of the best documentaries about filmmakers that I know, all in the form of interviews. Labarthe, who’s in charge of the series, used to be a critic for Cahiers du Cinema along with Chabrol, so this is bound to be interesting. (JR) Read more
Written by Steve Martin, who stars with Eddie Murphy, this low comedy about low-rent Hollywood filmmaking is funnier than it is logical or satirically consistent. Martin plays a contemporary version of Ed Wood who’s so desperate to shoot his underfunded SF epic that he winds up following an already paranoid action star (Eddie Murphy) around town with hidden cameras, filming him without his knowledge or permission. Most of the satire concerns the star’s religious cult, with Terence Stamp as the guru. This is enjoyable but thin, which is no doubt what was intended; with Heather Graham and Christine Baranski. (JR) Read more
Ideologically this lurid tale of two American teenage girls (Claire Danes and Kate Beckinsale) who wind up in a Thai prison on a manufactured drug charge is every bit as xenophobic as Midnight Express, though it’s not nearly as compelling (the storytelling is sluggish) nor as pornographic. Just about every Thai is depicted as evilthe exception is the wife of an expatriate American lawyer played by Bill Pullmanwhich is pretty disgusting but typical of how American movies deal with this corner of the globe. The revisionist approach to this sort of material proposed by the excellent 1998 Return to Paradise, about the imprisonment of Americans on drug charges in Malaysia, is nowhere in sight. Director Jonathan Kaplan clearly has a feel for the material, but he’s at the mercy of a pedestrian script by David Arata and producer Adam Fields. (JR) Read more
Pretty Woman proved that the Disney peopleor Julia Roberts’s smilecould sell just about anything, including a misogynistic celebration of big business and prostitution. This romantic comedy from Paramount (1999, 116 min.), which reunites Roberts and Richard Gere with director Garry Marshall, presumes we’re so ready to love them all over again that we’ll accept the characters’ sudden shift from loathing to doting when Marshall says abracadabra. But I wonder. Gere plays a male-chauvinist New York newspaper columnist who ridicules Roberts’s character for her habit of backing out of weddings at the last minute; when he’s fired for flubbing some facts he hunts her down in rural Maryland to write one more story. And guess what? Maybe writers Josann McGibbon and Sara Parriott were thinking of Tracy and Hepburnassuming they were thinking of anythingbut not even Roberts’s smile can put this one over. With Hector Elizondo, Joan Cusack, Rita Wilson, and Paul Dooley. (JR) Read more
Treating Frisch’s 1974 novel Montauk as if it were autobiographical, Swiss filmmaker Richard Dindo rewrites it through images of the New York locations where the action took place and quotes from several of Frisch’s published works, exploring the creative process. Read more
