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
Like many children’s movies these days, this 1999 animated feature by writer-director Brad Bird (The Incredibles) is an E.T. spin-off, but it’s a very likable and imaginative one. Set in a small town in Maine in 1957, it features a nine-year-old hero and his friend, a 50-foot extraterrestrial robot with a big appetite for metal and a peaceful, playful nature that turns threatening only when the paranoia of grown-ups activates its destructive possibilities. Adapted by Tim McCanlies from the book The Iron Man by British poet Ted Hughes, this is enjoyable in part because of its flavorsome period ambience and its lively and satiric charactersespecially a beatnik sculptor and a government agent voiced respectively by Harry Connick Jr. and Christopher McDonaldthough its graphic and dramatic virtues are nothing to sneeze at either. Some of the other voices are furnished by Jennifer Aniston, Eli Marienthal, Vin Diesel, Cloris Leachman, John Mahoney, and M. Emmet Walsh. PG, 86 min. (JR) 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 officialsnot 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 Yuean impressive director in his own rightwith a sharp feeling for landscape, this is a powerful piece of filmmaking. (JR) Read more
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 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 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 and 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. (JR) Read more
A remake of the 1968 heist movie that starred Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, with Dunaway returning as the hero’s psychiatrist. This time Pierce Brosnan plays the gentleman thief, and he’s pursued by Rene Russowho depicts an insurance detective and all-around superwoman with so much sexy panache that she’s the main reason for seeing this movie. Too bad the script (by Alan R. Trustman, Leslie Dixon, and Kurt Wimmer) eventually demotes her in favor of Crown’s superior genius. John McTiernan (Die Hard, Die Hard With a Vengeance) directed and Denis Leary costars. Like the original, it’s highly enjoyable trash that probably needs the big screen in order to register as pop mythit may evaporate entirely on video. But the myth by now is slightly shopworn, and the older folks in the audience might get the most pleasure out of it. (JR) Read more
This charming adaptation of Son of Adam, the autobiography of British TV executive Sir Denis Forman, was left on the shelf for a while, and given that it’s a Miramax production it’s probably been tampered with. But though it fades fairly quickly from memory, it’s a pretty flavorsome portrait of an eccentric family in the Scottish Highlands, complete with a crotchety inventor-father (Colin Firth), a more practical mother (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), and lots of children and animals. Scripted by Simon Donald and reuniting the director (Hugh Hudson) and producer (David Puttnam) of Chariots of Fire, this registers as a class act to be enjoyed more for the performances and period decor than for the mise en scene. With Rosemary Harris, Irene Jacob, Tcheky Karyo, and Malcolm McDowell. (JR) Read more
New York City during the summer of 1977, with the Son of Sam serial killings providing a frame for (and backdrop to) the main action. This sprawling, highly ambitious film, adapted from a script by Michael Imperioli and Victor Colicchio, is the first in which director Spike Lee has concentrated almost exclusively on white characters (most of them Italian-American), and if his own cameo as a TV reporter is the least convincing performance, it nonetheless offers a succinct and fascinating summary of his complex relation to the story. Among the classic films echoed here are M (the tracking of a serial killer by everyone, including organized crime), the first half of Fury (the making of a lynch mob), and Lee’s own Do the Right Thing (a sizzling New York summer and what it does to people). Perhaps the most remarkable achievement is the lead performance of John Leguizamo as a hairdresser who epitomizes the sexual double standards the movie is designed to critique–it’s one of the most fascinating portraits of a proletarian lunkhead since Brando in On the Waterfront. Like most of Lee’s work, this movie bites off a lot more than it can possibly chew, and it bristles with the worst kind of New York provincialism. Read more
Terse, informative, and convincing, Ronit Bezalel’s half-hour video documents the eviction of longtime residents from Chicago’s mid-city ghetto due to what’s euphemistically called “city planning” (the city claims that these people will be able to move back into the area, but so far most of them haven’t been able to find affordable housing). The story is basically told by the people being uprooted, and the feel for the neighborhood and its history is what leaves the strongest impression; Bezalel and her cinematographer, Antonio Ferrera, are especially good in handling the closing down of a barbershop. A discussion will follow the screening. Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, Thursday, July 8, 6:30, 312-346-3278 or 773-728-1879. –Jonathan Rosenbaum
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still. Read more
Art teacher and former architect Patrick Keiller followed up his debut feature, London, with this 1997 film, and it’s equally worth seeing. Like the earlier film it’s a fictionalized documentary about contemporary England that at times suggests an anglicized Chris Marker. Paul Scofield narrates, playing the fictional hero’s sidekick and researcher. (JR) Read more
Andrew Kotting’s touching, personal 1997 documentary about his 6,000-mile journey along the coasts of England, Wales, and Scotland with his 90-year-old grandmother and his 7-year-old daughter, who suffers from the serious neurological disease Joubert’s syndrome. Far from depressing and often funny, this has as many quirky aspects as the films of Ross McElwee and manages to cover an interesting range of topics as well. (JR) Read more
