A coming-of-age gay story, set in Sandusky, Ohio, during the summer of 1984 and featuring a working-class teenager (Chris Stafford) struggling to define his relations with his alleged girlfriend (Tina Holmes) and his libido, as well as with what to tell his mother (Stephanie McVay). Apart from McVay and Lea DeLaria (as a lesbian who befriends and advises the hero), the actors mainly come across as movie types rather than characters, and despite the obvious sincerity of the project, deja vu seems written into the conception. (Writer-producer Todd Stephens admits that he wrote the first draft of the script fueled by a video marathon consisting of Risky Business, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and the John Hughes trilogythough even these models can’t be blamed for the film’s unceremonious dumping of Holmes’s character.) David Moreton directed; with Andersen Gabrych. 99 min. (JR) Read more
As filmmaker Peter Thompson puts it, this 1987 diptych deals with three main themes: the emotional thawing of men by women, the struggle to disengage remembrance from historical anonymity, and nonrecoverable loss. In the first film, Thompson describes his involved research about medical experiments in deep cold conducted on a Polish prisoner and a German prostitute by Dr. Sigmund Rascher at Dachau in 1942; photographs culled from seven archives in six countries, as well as a subjective dream set in the Universal Hotel, form the main materials. In the second film, the filmmaker’s offscreen meetings with a Libyan Jew and former inmate of Dachau who works as a smuggler in Guatemala yield a complex personal travelogue that leads us not only to the Universal Hotel (a real place, as it turns out), but also to the public square in Siena that appears at the beginning of the first film. These are all films that have grown out of years of reflection, and Thompson’s background as a still photographer serves him well in his haunting and original historical meditations; these works reverberate powerfully with a sense of the passage of time and the mysterious coalescence of disparate strands in a varied life. Read more
In this 1946 noir thriller, generally considered well above average, Pat O’Brien plays an art critic who remembers a train wreck that may have never taken place. Directed by Irving Reis from a John Paxton script; with Claire Trevor, Herbert Marshall, and Ray Collins. Read more
The best Wim Wenders documentary to date and an uncommonly self-effacing one, this 1999 concert movie about performance and lifestyle is comparable in some ways to Latcho Drom, the great Gypsy documentary/musical. In 1996 musician Ry Cooder traveled to Havana to reunite some of the greatest stars of Cuban pop music from the Batista era (who were virtually forgotten after Castro came to power) with the aim of making a record, a highly successful venture that led to concerts in Amsterdam and New York. The players and their stories are as wonderful as the music, and the filmmaking is uncommonly sensitive and alert. 105 min. (JR) Read more
A 1945 thriller directed by Robert Siodmak and produced by Joan Harrison (who scripted several Hitchcock features during the 40s and produced his 50s TV show). A small-town bachelor (George Sanders) dominated by his two sisters plans to kill one of them after falling in love with a city woman. This has been described as a good melodrama marred by a cop-out ending that resulted from 40s censorship; Stephen Longstreet and Keith Winter wrote the script, adapted from a play by Thomas Job. With Geraldine Fitzgerald, Ella Raines, and Sara Allgood. 80 min. (JR) Read more
Dick Powell plays a French-Canadian pilot in Buenos Aires tracking down the collaborationist who killed his French wife during World War II. By reputation, an effective noir thriller (1945), adapted by John Paxton from a John Wexley story and directed by Edward Dmytryk; the same screenwriter, director, and star had filmed the Raymond Chandler adaptation Murder, My Sweet the previous year. With Micheline Cheirel, Walter Slezak, and Morris Carnovsky. (JR) Read more
Mike Figgis contemplates the various stages of a filmmaker’s life, the Garden of Eden story, and guilt over the state of the third world in one of the most pretentious movies ever made, a textbook example of what James Agee used to refer to as rigor artis. Figgis, a sometimes (or at least onetime) enterprising filmmaker, deserves credit for using the freedom and commercial clout he won from Leaving Las Vegas to make relatively edgy and high-risk projects, but that, alas, doesn’t make them interesting or good. For an ambitious mess of this kind, Bill Forsyth’s Being Human (1995), even with all the studio tampering, is substantially more nourishing and original; this is gold-plated navel gazing in the worst 60s style. With Julian Sands, Saffron Burrows (as twins in the most bearable segments), Stefano Dionisi, Kelly Macdonald, and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers. (JR) Read more
Another virtual-reality SF movie. The main thing that distinguishes this one from the others is the fact that several of the people behind it (including director and cowriter Josef Rusnak, coproducer Roland Emmerich, executive producers Michael and Helga Ballhaus, and actor Armin Mueller-Stahl) are Germanthough a flat boilerplate English is spoken by everyone throughout. Mueller-Stahl and Craig Bierko play inventors who have simulated 1937 Los Angeles on a computer chip; when one is murdered in present-day LA shortly after returning from 1937, the other enters the same simulation to get to the bottom of things. But of course the bottom in this ponderous romp is more simulation: simulated past and present in terms of metaphysics, poorly simulated Blade Runner and Vertigo in terms of story structure and style, and simulated human beings instead of charactersa simulated movie, in short. When the hero finds himself doing the lindy hop in 1937, you don’t know whether the anachronism belongs to Mueller-Stahl or to the screenwriters (adapting Daniel Galouye’s Simulacron 3), and you’re not likely to care. With Gretchen Mol (a pale simulation of Kim Novak), Vincent D’Onofrio , Dennis Haysbert, and Steven Schub. (JR) Read more
Activist-filmmaker Maggie Hadleigh-West got so tired of being stared at and harassed on the street that she decided to fight back and started filming as well as interrogating the men bugging her. Usually she held one camera while behind her a camerawoman held another, and she carried out this counteraggression in several American cities, meanwhile recounting the experiences of other women who didn’t have cameras at their disposal. To the filmmaker’s credit, she doesn’t always select the confrontations in which she comes off best and the men come off worst; just about everything she shows, however, is fascinating, revealing, and provocative. The encounters are also interspersed with some striking experimental and free-form interludes about city street life, and fragments of an autobiographical statement are subtly woven into the mix. Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday, May 21, 7:00 and 9:00; Saturday and Sunday, May 22 and 23, 3:00, 5:00, 7:00, and 9:00; and Monday through Thursday, May 24 through 27, 7:00 and 9:00; 773-281-4114. –Jonathan Rosenbaum
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still. Read more
If you’re interested in learning what the Star Trek craze is all about, this facetious cheap-shot documentary by Roger Nygard isn’t the place to go; it’s merely a freak show that invites the audience to ridicule the show’s fans and fanatics. The flavor of a daytime TV talk show is so thick that even some of the show’s creators and stars are slimed in the process. Denise Crosby serves as hostess. (JR) Read more
New York actors moonlight as violent money collectors. One (Barbara Hershey) is the ex-wife of a gang leader (Robbie Coltrane) who wants to stage a production of American Buffalo. I assume writer-director Amos Poe, an independent associated with Manhattan’s SoHo and Lower East Side, must have thought this was a funny and not simply ridiculous premise, and that someone else liked the idea enough to finance itor maybe the gore and sadism reminded somebody of Tarantino and somebody else needed a tax write-off. Go figure. A lot of good actors get wasted heretypes as diverse as John Leguizamo and Taylor Mead in a cameoand so does the time anybody spends watching this. PS: The title music is a bad reorchestration of Elmer Bernstein’s main theme for The Man With the Golden Arm; I hope that at least Bernstein received a royalty. (JR) Read more
A tender and sometimes very funny romantic comedy set in a New England seaside town, this is also something of a parable about what overheated summers can do to romantic imaginations. An unsigned love letter falls into the hands of various individuals who make creative assumptions about the author and intended recipient; many of them work at a secondhand bookstore. I suspect that a fair amount of the wit derives from Cathleen Schine Read more
An intelligent and informative feature-length documentary by Canadian filmmaker Nettie Wild about the Zapatista movement and uprising in southern Mexico, concentrating on events that occurred between 1994 and 1997. The film focuses mainly (and cogently) on the struggles of the Zapatista National Liberation Army in Mexico and in cyberspace, but it also allows the government-allied, paramilitary group north of Chiapas, which calls itself Peace and Justice, to speak on its own behalf (when it isn’t assaulting the film crew). This is sturdy as well as stirring political filmmaking that asks all the right questions, including ones about the role of the U.S. in the outcome. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, May 14, 8:15; Saturday, May 15, 6:00 and 8:00; Sunday, May 16, 4:00 and 6:00; and Tuesday and Thursday, May 18 and 20, 6:00 and 8:00; 312-443-3737.
–Jonathan Rosenbaum
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still. Read more
In his bunker but outside of historical time, Adolf Hitler (Norman Rodway) dictates his memoirs, ruminates on his life while screening various documentaries and home movies, chats with Joseph Goebbels (Joel Grey) and Hermann G Read more
Wu Tianming (Old Well)the former godfather of mainland China’s Fifth Generation filmmakers when he headed the Xian film studio and green-lighted such innovative pictures as The Horse Thief, Red Sorghum, and King of Childrenreturned to filmmaking in 1996 after an extended stint in the U.S. This beautifully inflected and wholly accessible tale, set in Sichuan in the 30s, concerns an aging street performer (Zhu Xu) who unknowingly purchases and adopts a little girl (Zhou Ren-ying), thinking she’s a boy, with the intention of training an heir. Though the premise sounds hokey, the storytelling and performances are so expressive that one might not even notice the subtle and detailed commentary being offered on gender politics. An actor and female impersonator (Zhao Zhigang) plays a pivotal role in the proceedings. In Mandarin with subtitles. 101 min. (JR) Read more
