Werner Herzog’s surprisingly slim and relatively impersonal 1999 feature charts his relationship with the mad actor Klaus Kinski on the five features they made together. Though Herzog has plenty to say about Kinski’s tantrums on the Peru locations of Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo and even interviews other witnesses on the same subject, he says next to nothing about his own involvementsuch as why he hired Kinski in the first place or how the overreaching heroes Kinski played for Herzog were clearly modeled after the director, metaphorically speaking. Like many other Herzog features, this carries a certain morbid fascination but provides little edification; Kinski’s extensive career apart from Herzog is barely acknowledged. 95 min. (JR) Read more
This 1998 Portuguese film is a searing cri de coeur on behalf of Lisbon’s homeless children. Rejected by dysfunctional families, often escaping from heartless institutions, they’re victimized by others (Pedro and Ricardo by pornographers, Andreia by a boyfriend who leaves her pregnant) and not surprisingly victimize one another as well. Director Teresa Villaverde makes their plight come alive with a variety of isolating compositions: a boy arriving home appears framed in the front doorway against the landscape, his family invisible, and more than once a kid riding in a vehicle is shot from above, the character’s head backed by the moving roadway. In one terribly painful sequence a variety of unbalanced compositions show Andreia screaming as she gives birth to her child in a lavatorywhere she then abandons it. These decontextualizations convey the children’s separation from society, making them the pained subjects of our gaze, and the film’s warped visual spaces make that separation seem unnatural, even wrong. (FC) Read more
Lasting only 65 minutes, The Little Thief, Erick Zonca’s lean and purposeful 1999 second feature (after The Dreamlife of Angels), confirms his talent while pointing it in a somewhat different direction. He continues to focus on the lower economic strata, but this time he explores the progress of a baker’s assistant who decides to join a band of thieves. The results are gripping. (JR) Read more
A major washout. One might think that a campy, 50s-style showbiz biopic about best-selling sleaze novelist Jacqueline Susann written by Paul Rudnick, directed by Andrew Bergman, and starring Bette Midler couldn’t miss, but in fact this misses on just about every level. Maybe it’s because camp is defined by lack of self-consciousness, or because coherent comedies of any kind have to be built on consistent premises, or because biopics that lie or evade the truth about their subjects have to come up with some other story to tell. This seems at times to be trying to emulate John Waters’s Female Trouble (with Midler standing in for Divine), and it periodically comes up with bouts of WASP bashing (David Hyde Pierce, as Susann’s editor, is the butt of most of these jokes), but without much passion or unity of purpose; the signs of studio committeethink are everywhere. Everyone must have been afraid of a lawsuit, because genuine irreverence and vulgarity are ultimately avoided like the plaguewhich is not to say that we get reverence or good taste eitherand nothing of substance from Susann’s work is ever really evoked. Check out the 1975 movie Jacqueline Susann’s Once Is Not Enough for a few clues about what this could and should have been like. Read more
A laughless, brainless, styleless, and clueless comedy about a hairdresser from Glasgow (cowriter Craig Ferguson) who winds up in Los Angeles to compete in an international competition. (Guess who wins.) But it has at least two limited virtues: it’s good-natured, and it has a cameo by Russ Meyer axiom Charles Napier. Somebody must have had some other reason in mind for making it. Directed by Kevin Allen, cowritten by Sacha Gervasi; with Frances Fisher and Mary McCormack. (JR) Read more
Set in the Kingston ghetto, this 1997 reggae crime musical is reportedly the highest grossing movie in Jamaican history and the first to be shot on digital video. Its heroine, a street vendor and single mother, comes into her own after entering a dance-hall contest in hopes of keeping various thugs and potential protectors from controlling her life. The narrative isn Read more
D.W. Harper directed this 1996 feature about the infamous Charles Whitman, who climbed a Texas tower in the mid-60s and shot people at random. Screenwriter Stephen Grant (who also plays the crazed killer) updates the story to the present and tries to milk it for absurdist humor, telling it from the bemused viewpoint of the killer’s nerdish roommate. Ambitious and inventive, but unevenly acted and overextended, this will certainly hold one’s interest, despite its hit-or-miss qualities. (JR) Read more
A penniless musician wins a lottery in a 45-minute film by the late, highly talented Djibril Diop Mambety. This 1994 release isn’t up to the level of his extraordinary Touki Bouki or Hyenas, but it’s highly distinctive and creditable all the same. (JR) Read more
