An edgy youth thriller, packed with speed and technique, that basically offers three versions of how Lola (Franka Potente), the girlfriend of a small-time drug courier (Moritz Bleibtreu), spends 20 minutes running across town trying to hustle up 100,000 deutsche marks so that her boyfriend won’t get iced by his boss. The industrial music, the show-offy visual effects, the conceptual interest of following a story in three separate directions, and the sheer energy of the cast and writer-director Tom Tykwer make this 1999 film about as entertaining as a no-brainer can bea lot more fun, for my money, than a cornball theme-park ride like Speed, and every bit as fast moving. But don’t expect much of an aftertaste. In German with subtitles. R, 88 min. (JR) Read more
Given that Robert Zemeckis, in his post-Forrest Gump mode, has a clear case of Oscaritis, and that the heaps of piety expended on this ambitious 1998 adaptation of Carl Sagan’s SF novel lead to traces of unintentional camp, this is still an adroit and compelling piece of storytelling, well worth anybody’s time. Jodie Foster plays a dedicated radio astronomer and atheist who receives the first message from extraterrestrials; Matthew McConaughey (one of the campier elements) portrays a sort of New Age Billy Graham and romantic hunk who helps to negotiate her dealings with Washington, not to mention spirituality and sexuality. Others in the cast include not only James Woods, John Hurt, Tom Skerritt, Angela Bassett, and Rob Lowe, but also a host of TV regulars (most of them CNN favorites) playing themselves: Bernard Shaw, Larry King, Bill Clinton (who seems to be taking over the Forrest Gump role), Jay Leno, etc. If indeed the view of reality is strictly CNN, the aesthetics (if not the politics) are strictly Ayn Rand; the otherworldliness manages to be both visually exciting and very southern California. James V. Hart and Michael Goldenberg wrote the screenplay, though the late Sagan and his widow Ann Druyan both worked with Zemeckis on the adaptation. Read more
No Abel Ferrara movie is devoid of interest, and this one (1996) — a period melodrama set in the 30s about brothers (Vincent Gallo, Christopher Walken, and Chris Penn) in a gangster family — certainly has some actorly punch (the cast also includes Benicio Del Toro, Annabella Sciorra, and Isabella Rossellini) as well as the sort of neo-Rembrandt atmospherics and gory histrionics one expects from such Godfather-ish material. But it also suggests that Ferrara, hampered as well as helped by his usual screenwriter, Nicholas St. John, doesn’t have much aptitude for handling period. (JR) Read more
Alain Resnais’ masterpiece is bound to baffle spectators who insist on regarding him as an intellectual rather than an emotional director, simply because he shares the conviction of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson that form is the surest route to feelings. In his 11th feature, he adapts a 1929 boulevard melodrama by a forgotten playwright named Henry Bernstein, and holds so close to this dated and seemingly unremarkable play that theatrical space and decorincluding the absence of a fourth wallare rigorously respected, and shots of a painted curtain appear between the acts. None of this is done to strike an attitude or make a statement: Resnais believes in the material, and wants to give it its due. Yet in the process of doing this, he not only invests the original meaning of melodrama (drama with music) with exceptional beauty and powerso much so as to reinvent the genrebut also proves that he is conceivably the greatest living director of actors in the French cinema, and offers a way of regarding the past that implicitly indicts our own era for myopia. (Melo is certainly a film of the 80s and not an antique, but it may take us years to understand precisely how and why.) Read more
Anthony Pelissier’s 1953 Ealing comedy shows the diabolical effects of television on English people introduced to the medium by Satan’s assistant (Stanley Holloway, who plays the devil as well). With Peggy Cummins and Kay Kendall. To be shown with Television Preview, a documentary short produced at Paramount in 1940. Read more
Hope Perello wrote and directed this sincere but pedestrian comic account of an Irish-American family reunion; its main distinction is the participation of Piper Laurie as the matriarch, a reformed alcoholic who banishes booze from the weekend gathering. There are more miniplots here than you can shake a stick at, nearly all of them familiar, and though Laurie and Redmond Gleeson show admirable restraint, most of the actors tend toward overkill. With Joanne Baron, Jim Metzler, and Robert Evan Collins. (JR) Read more
Europudding incoherence with minor virtues. Director Maria Ripoll and writer Rafa Russo are Spanish, their characters are Spanish and English, and the setting is London; but the milieu, as far as I can tell, is effectively nowhere. An unpleasant and manipulative English actor (Douglas Henshall) sabotages his relationship with his longtime girlfriend (Lena Headey), then gets to go back in time and relive the experience, making different decisions this time around. The premise sounds promising, but the working out of the possibilities is relatively laborious, and arch references to Don Quixote don’t help. With Penelope Cruz, Charlotte Coleman, and Elizabeth McGovern. (JR) Read more
Previously known by the equally bad title Straight Through the Heart, this 1997 drama is a good example of a certain kind of American feature: although it’s better than 80 percent of the movies that get shoved in your face, it has no public profile because there’s no studio muscle behind it. Set in a Baltimore suburb in 1959, it focuses on courageas it relates to a 12-year-old boy (Small Soldiers’s Gregory Smith) who wants to climb a radio tower near his home; to a bitter neighbor (John Hurt) dying of lung cancer who wants the boy’s assistance in putting him out of his misery; and to the boy’s father (John Sayles regular David Strathairn), who’s perpetually bullied by the local drunk because he didn’t serve in the war. The script by Vince McKewin, which has some of the feeling and conviction of lived experience, tends to avoid easy effects, and the Evanston-born director, Bob Swaimbest known for his French thriller La balance and Half Moon Streetdoes a fine job of handling the actors and charting the movie’s physical terrain. There’s a hair-raising action climax and a lot of fine shading in the characterizations; I hope you’re as pleasantly surprised as I was. Read more
An entertaining, adroitly cast adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1895 play by writer-director Oliver Parker, though the expansion of settings and reduction of theme that one might expect from the Miramax label is at times distracting. Trivialized Wilde could sound like an oxymoron, insofar as he functioned rather like Neil Simon in the London theater of a century ago, but this play has its serious as well as its flip side, and the flipness gets much more of Parker’s attention. Though this isn’t a musical, it often feels rather like Gigi (Charlie Mole’s music is particularly effective). With Cate Blanchett, Minnie Driver, Rupert Everett, Julianne Moore, Jeremy Northam, John Wood, Lindsay Duncan, Peter Vaughan, and Jeroen Krabbe. (JR) Read more
Last year the Film Center screened Last Dance, the 69-minute film directed by Tsai Ming-liang for the French TV anthology “2000 Seen By”; this 95-minute version is the one Tsai prefers, though the film is well worth seeing in any form. An SF story set in the present, wryly postapocalyptic and gorgeously shot and framed, it charts the effects of an epidemic on a Taipei man and the woman who lives in the apartment directly below his. After the rest of the building has been vacated, a plumber drills a hole in the man’s floor and neglects to fill it up again. Periodically the man or the woman or both break into full-scale musical numbers that re-create Hong Kong musicals of the 50s, using both the voice and inspiration of Grace Chang; the rest of the time, they’re wrestling with the same sort of urban angst and alienation that consumes Tsai’s characters in Rebels of the Neon God, Vive l’amour, and The River. I like all of his films, but this one has given me the most pleasure. Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday, June 18, 6:45; Saturday and Sunday, June 19 and 20, 2:45 and 6:45; and Monday through Thursday, June 21 through 24, 6:45; 773-281-4114. Read more
Roughly the first half of this 95-minute sequel is even funnier, sillier, grosser, and more scatological than the original (Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery), making one hope that the further adventures of Mike Myers’s James Bond/Matt Helm/Derek Flint send-up will add up to something like genuine satire. But after a while it becomes apparent that this movie is too eager to please, too willing to sacrifice its point of view toward its targets to sustain itself for the length of a feature. Gags about product plugs eventually turn into just more product plugs, irreverence for other movies gives way to slavish imitation of movies no less questionableMyers’s impersonation of an obese Scottish hit man smacks more of Eddie Murphy than of anything originaland the anything-goes approach becomes too scattershot to allow laughs to build. But the first 40-odd minutes are a delight. Written by Myers and Michael McCullers, and directed by Jay Roach; with Heather Graham, Michael York, Robert Wagner, Seth Green, Mindy Sterling, and Rob Lowe. (JR) Read more
Bernardo Bertolucci’s sensual made-for-TV feature (1998), with dialogue in English, focuses on the attraction of a wealthy English pianist in Rome (David Thewlis) to his African housekeeper (Thandie Newton), a medical student whose husband is a political prisoner. As a story this is relatively slight for Bertolucci, and is carried mainly by the actors; and as an allegory about colonialism and guilt-ridden privilege it verges on the routine. But as stylistic expressiona mosaic of images and singular editing patternsit’s the most interesting thing he’s done in years, as well as the most pleasurable. It’s a story told mainly through images and music (ranging from African pop and McCoy Tyner to Mozart and Grieg)with dialogue kept to a minimum and looks and gestures exploited to the fullestand as a re-creation of silent cinema it’s much more achieved than The Thin Red Line, its only contemporary rival. R, 94 min. (JR) Read more
It’s hard to imagine a more uncharacteristic David Mamet project: an adaptation of a genteel Terence Rattigan play from the mid-1940s about family affection and loyalty (previously adapted for a 1948 film directed by Anthony Asquith), based on the real trial of English naval cadet George Archer-Shee in 1910. But this may well be the most accomplished Mamet movie since House of Games, not only because he works so fruitfully with his excellent cast (Nigel Hawthorne, Jeremy Northam, Rebecca Pidgeon, Gemma Jones, Guy Edwards, and Matthew Pidgeon) but also because he offers a sturdy object lesson in how to attack period material of this kind without self-serving irony or condescension. He doesn’t lose his stylistic identity either: in addition to the very Mamet-like delivery of unfinished sentences, his command of rhythm and flow remains flawless throughout. Evanston, Pipers Alley.
–Jonathan Rosenbaum
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still. Read more
Every bit as awkward as its title, this feature written by James Still and directed by Dan Ireland (The Whole Wide World) might have worked as a solo theater piece, its original form, though it’s so lugubrious one can’t be sure even of that. The title street hustler (Thomas Jane) is picked up by a porn star (Vincent D’Onofrio) in New York, and winds up in a menage a trois with a doughnut shop waitress (Salma Hayek). The hustler and waitress are rivals who hate each other, but when the porn star winds up in a hospital with AIDS and the waitress becomes pregnant, they’re forced to renegotiate their relationship. There’s an effort to poeticize the milieu of these characters, but they all come across more as types than as individuals. With Olivia d’Abo. (JR) Read more
A TV writer (executive producer Lona Williams) and a first-time director (Michael Patrick Jann) join forces with Kirstie Alley, Ellen Barkin, Kirsten Dunst, and Denise Richards in a uniquely mean-spirited skewering of teen beauty pageants. An intermittently enjoyable bad movie that never knows when to stop, this heaps scorn not only on every aspect of (and participant in) the pageant but also on mental defectives, signing for the deaf, and Japanese-Americans eager to assimilate. All the leads play their roles like strident amateurs (only Allison Janney, as Barkin’s best friend, emerges relatively unscathed), and the film’s so aggressive about its bad-taste agenda that the early John Waters seems a pussycat by comparison. There’s something bracing about the unleashing of so much unbridled negativity, especially for anyone who’s ever suffered through small-town pettiness and mediocrity, but this 1999 release eventually outstays its welcome. Still, if you come to it in a sufficiently foul mood, it might cheer you up. 98 min. (JR) Read more
