This isn’t Woody Allen at his nadir (cf A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, September, Shadows and Fog, and Celebrity), but there are moments when this comedy threatens to die of anemia. Featuring Allen and Tracey Ullman as a whiny working-class couple who decide to rob a bank, it starts off, like most Allen pictures, by emulating a European art-house picture of his youthin this case Big Deal on Madonna Street (a much funnier picture about a failed bank heist). After Ullman’s flair for baking cookies unexpectedly makes the couple rich, Allen falls into one of his most tired story ideas, the vulgar nouveau riche heroine who tries to buy her way to culturerepresented in this movie, to show you how desperate things are, by Hugh Grant. The others in the cast have a better time; Elaine May as Ullman’s cousin is especially funny. With Michael Rapaport, Tony Darrow, George Grizzard, Jon Lovitz, and Elaine Stritch. 94 min. (JR) Read more
Lea Pool’s sensitive coming-of-age feature (1999, 94 minutes), set in and around Montreal in 1963, is apparently autobiographical in inspiration. The 13-year-old heroine (Karine Vanasse), who has her first period while visiting her grandmother in the opening sequence, is the illegitimate daughter of a struggling Jewish writer (Miki Manojlovic) and a Catholic who works as a seamstress to help support the family (Pascale Bussieres); her unlikely role model is the prostitute heroine played by Anna Karina in Godard’s Vivre sa vie, and her sexual stirrings gravitate toward both her older brother and a female classmate, who also attract each other. Nicely acted and inflected, this is a very fresh piece of work. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, May 12 through 18. –Jonathan Rosenbaum
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): . Read more
Adapted from the TV series Thunderbirds, this 1966 British feature anticipated The Dark Crystal with its all-marionette cast. David Lane directed. Read more
Despite a welcome attention to the brutal facts of celluloid deterioration, Mark McLaughlin’s 1999 documentary about film preservation, written with producer Randy Gitsch, is basically Movie Restoration 101, a fund-raiser with a lot of emphasis on the sociological and historical reasons for this activity and almost none at all on the aesthetic reasonsor the aesthetic issues raised by different kinds of restoration and/or revision of primary materials. The fact that the interview subjects include Forrest J. Ackerman, Alan Alda, Stan Brakhage, Herb Jeffries, Roddy McDowell, Leonard Maltin, and Debbie Reynolds, along with a few techies, archivists, and bureaucrats, gives a pretty good idea of the spread involved. But critical perspectives on film restoration are few and far between: the overall message is that it’s a good thing, even though we don’t get a clear position about how such an activity might be carried out well or badly. 70 min. (JR) Read more
If this country were a more sensible place, John Waters would be hosting the Tonight Show. Barring such a possibility, Steve Yeager’s entertaining 1997 documentary about the making of Waters’s first midnight-movie hit, Pink Flamingos (1972), has the advantages of a proud Baltimore perspective and interviews with Jeanine Basinger, Steve Buscemi, Hal Hartley, J. Hoberman, Jim Jarmusch, the Kuchar brothers, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Jonas Mekas, Paul Morrissey, the local film censor, countless cast and family members, and Waters himself. (As a closing title tartly points out, only Kenneth Anger and Russ Meyer declined to appear.) This affectionate piece of historiography snubs practically everything after Pink Flamingosincluding my two favorites, Female Trouble and Hairspraybut it’s so deliciously exhaustive about Waters’s humble beginnings that I can’t really complain. 105 min. (JR) Read more
This video by former Golden Gloves boxer David the Rock Nelson sounds like an even lower-rent version of the guerrilla film produced in Bowfinger. Nelson captures famous individuals in publicincluding Hillary Clinton, Roger Corman, and Svengooliefor use in this impromptu monster flick, parts of which were shot in Chicago, Cleveland, New York, and Pittsburgh. (JR) Read more
Two early films by G.W. Pabst. Sigmund Freud refused to have anything to do with Secrets of a Soul (1926, 97 min.), an early silent attempt to deal with psychoanalysis via German expressionism. The results are dated, but this is still an intriguing period piece. The 107-minute Crisis, made two years later, is said to be a relatively minor work, though it stars the memorable Brigitte Helm (the blind woman in Pabst’s previous film, The Love of Jeanne Ney) as a middle-class woman, ignored by her ambitious husband, who gets involved with bohemians. (JR) Read more
Two aggressive, enjoyable, and highly original videos by Chris Petit, the English novelist and filmmaker (Radio On, Flight to Berlin). Both these portraits of somewhat legendary and cultish media figures were made for BBC TV, a much more enterprising purveyor of edgy television than anything found in this country. But otherwise the videos are quite different. The Falconer (1998, 56 min., codirected by Ian Sinclair) is the more eclectic and difficult of the two, a sort of pseudodocumentary about the countercultural English filmmaker (Daddy) and autodidact Peter Whitehead. Negative Space (1999, 39 min.) is about American film critic, painter, teacher, and carpenter Manny Farber (though American art critic Dave Hickey also appears, along with many film clips and western landscapes that are often glimpsed in Polaroid-framed split screens). Both videos are wild, thoughtful, invigorating, eye-filling, and unusually ambitious. Admission is free. (JR) Read more
Virtually all the works of Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman are worth seeing, and her 78-minute video documentary (1999) about Jasper, Texas, is no exception. But this meditation on the American south can’t be described as one of her finer efforts; so the implied link with From the East, one of her greatest films, is unfortunate. Akerman’s painterly instincts are as strong and rewarding as ever, but when she tries to move beyond them the results are often trite. Akerman’s theme was overtaken by a horrifying hate crime that occurred a few days before her arrival, in which a black man was beaten, chained to a truck, and dragged three miles to his death through a predominantly black neighborhood. Akerman interviews various locals about the incident (omitting her questions from the film), but apart from their defensiveness the responses are unilluminating. There’s a lovely shot moving through downtown Jasper at dusk, but on the whole Akerman seems to be floundering, unable to say or reveal anything fresh about the south. When she concludes with the camera moving down the three miles of road, there’s a disquieting clash between the beauty of the shot and the horror of what it signifies, but all she can do is bear mute witness to the crime. Read more
Lea Pool’s sensitive coming-of-age feature (1999, 94 min.), set in and around Montreal in 1963, is apparently autobiographical in inspiration. The 13-year-old heroine (Karine Vanasse), who has her first period while visiting her grandmother in the opening sequence, is the illegitimate daughter of a struggling Jewish writer (Miki Manojlovic) and a Catholic who works as a seamstress to help support the family (Pascale Bussieres); her unlikely role model is the prostitute heroine played by Anna Karina in Godard’s Vivre sa vie, and her sexual stirrings gravitate toward both her older brother and a female classmate, who also attract each other. Nicely acted and inflected, this is a very fresh piece of work. (JR) Read more
Russell Crowe stars as a Roman general asked by the dying emperor, Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris), to take over as ruler. The emperor’s wrathful son (Joaquin Phoenix) promptly orders the execution of the general and his family; surviving as a gladiator, the general fights his way back to Rome to take revenge and restore justice in the Colosseum. Though the digital effects lack the weight and conviction of their equivalents in old Cecil B. De Mille movies, Ridley Scott’s sword-and-sandal epic has some of the intensity of old Hollywood in terms of storytelling, spectacle, and violenceConnie Nielsen and Oliver Reed make especially strong contributions. But don’t expect anything as good as Spartacus or as enjoyably silly as Quo Vadis? The script, by producer David Franzoni, John Logan, and William Nicholson, is serviceable but not exactly inspired. 154 min. (JR) Read more
A beautiful restoration of the 1924 silent version, one of the loveliest movies for and about children ever made. Though he’s forgotten now, director Herbert Brenon was a formidable figure in the teens and 20s, also known for his work with Annette Kellerman and Theda Bara, his subsequent James Barrie adaptation A Kiss for Cinderella, and his 1926 adaptations of Beau Geste and The Great Gatsby. Peter Pan also benefits from a script by Willis Goldbeck, the superb cinematography of James Wong Howe, and some very charming special effects by Roy Pomeroy, the same man who parted the Red Sea in De Mille’s 1923 The Ten Commandments. The cast includes Betty Bronson in the title role, Ernest Torrence as Captain Hook, and Anna May Wong as Tiger Lily. (My own favorite is the only carryover from the stage production, George Ali as Nana the dog.) David Drazin will provide piano accompaniment and, judging from what he played at the preview, this will be a wonderful enhancement, especially sensitive when it comes to dealing with Tinkerbell. Children under 12 will be admitted free when accompanied by an adult. 105 min. Univ. of Chicago Doc Films, 1212 E. 59th, Thursday, May 4, 7:00, 773-702-8575. Read more
I’ve been late in catching up with Sadie Benning’s magnum opus to date (1998)–a 50-minute black-and-white video shot on both film and Pixelvision in Milwaukee, concentrating on the inner life of an androgynous 11-year-old girl–but it’s certainly everything I hoped it would be. It begins and ends with a montage of rusty urban landscapes that uncharacteristically recalls the work of her father, James Benning, but the really startling thing about this video is that all the characters wear strikingly painted, life-size masks, which gives a kind of surrealist overlay to the feeling of intimacy captured by Benning’s uses of Pixelvision. Her mode is still autobiographical/confessional, but the use of fiction gives her a lot more freedom, accounting for not only the masks but some animation as well. Gender issues are still at the forefront of her concerns, widened here to include the relations between family members and playmates as well as friends and lovers, and the lyricism of Benning’s angle of vision remains as weird and wonderful as ever. 57 min. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Thursday, May 4, 7:30, 312-443-3737. –Jonathan Rosenbaum Read more
A bold experiment from Mike Figgis, at once fun and infuriating. The film’s undercut by an overblown satirical plot and grotesquely thin characters that suggest Robert Altman at his worst; you can barely laugh without feeling either glib or stupid. In 93 minutes of real time, four digital cameras simultaneously shoot the trajectories of various characters who have some connection to auditions for a stupid-sounding movie on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard and a pitch being made for another movie (which approximates this one); we view the results of all four cameras at once while hearing enough to follow the main strands of the plot, which mainly have to do with who’s sleeping with whom. The action, which features a series of earthquake aftershocks, is synchronized with stopwatches, but the dialogue is improvised. The cast includes, among many others, Figgis regular Saffron Burrows, Holly Hunter (mainly wasted), Richard Edson, Salma Hayek, Kyle MacLachlan, Laurie Metcalf, Mia Maestro, Julian Sands, Stellan Skarsgard, and Jeanne Tripplehorn. (JR) Read more
From the December 11, 2000 Chicago Reader. — J.R.
Writer-director David Mamet emulates Kaufman and Hart. A Hollywood film unit prepares to shoot a feature in a small town in Vermont, occasioning the sort of comic mishaps found in The Man Who Came to Dinner, though without comparably juicy characters. What Mamet serves up are a generically crass director (William H. Macy), a principled screenwriter (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who becomes romantically involved with the woman who runs the local bookstore (Rebecca Pidgeon), a starstruck mayor (Charles Durning), a lead actor who lusts after teenage girls (Alec Baldwin), and so on. I laughed a lot at the anti-Hollywood humor and generally had a fine time, in spite of the holier-than-thou hypocrisy that makes this movie easily and even intentionally Mamet’s most Hollywoodish picture to date. With Patti LuPone, Sarah Jessica Parker, David Paymer, and Julia Stiles. 106 min. (JR)
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