Charles Burnett directed this 1998 TV docudrama for the Disney Channel, about the emotionally charged 1965 voter registration drive Martin Luther King led in Selma, Alabama, just before the Selma-to-Montgomery march. Despite the sincerity of the project and some touching moments, this doesn’t measure up to the marvelous Nightjohn (1996), an earlier Disney feature directed by Burnett. The script (adapted by Cynthia Whitcomb from a childhood memoir by Sheyann Webb and Rachel West Nelson, as told to Frank Sikora) is too pedestrian, though it does have the virtue of contextualizing some of the major events that led to the famous march. Presumably because of clearance problems, James Reeb, the white Unitarian minister from the north who was clubbed to death while working on voter registration, has been turned into a white priest in training named Jonathan Daniels (MacKenzie Astin), who is shota change that leads to some confusion at the end, when a printed title informs us that Daniels was eventually canonized. With Jurnee Smollett and Clifton Powell (as King). (JR) Read more
Sincere but foolish, this clunky Bolivian SF effort concerns a man whose wife gets swallowed up by a parallel universe via the Bermuda Triangle, somewhere east of Atlantis, and who enlists a wise old parapsychologist to help him retrieve her (with a little help from hypnosis and a laptop computer). Like one character who can’t tell the difference between Mozart and Ray Conniff, director Mauricio Calderon can’t seem to distinguish between philosophical notions and generic standbys. I enjoyed some of the tatty special effects, gratuitous low angles, and Ed Wood profundities in this New Age nonsense, but its sluggish storytelling defeated me. (JR) Read more
Edgardo Cozarinsky’s 68-minute documentary about Henri Langlois, the idiosyncratic cofounder of the French Cinematheque and spiritual father of the French New Wave, was awarded the 1995 Forum prize at the Berlin gathering of the International Federation of Film Critics; the jury (of which I was a member) cited it as a brilliant essay revealing a multifaceted grasp of a major pioneer for whom cinema was the ultimate nationality. Langlois (1914-1977), a Turkish exile, was forced to flee Izmir when the Turks reclaimed it from Greek troops in 1922, setting off fires that destroyed three-fifths of the city, and Cozarinsky (One Man’s War), himself an exile who left Buenos Aires for Paris, uses film images bursting into flames as a recurring motif — not so much Langlois’ Rosebud as the furnace consuming his beloved sled. Langlois’ passion for film preservation and multifaceted hatred for state bureaucracies were the traits of a complex individual, and Cozarinsky’s portrait is far from exhaustive; in keeping with a certain French etiquette, there’s nary a word about Langlois’ homosexuality, and aspects of his paranoia are skimped. But the man is there and recognizable, and so is his divine madness, as reflected in the words of his companion Mary Meerson — that Josef von Sternberg’s lost The Case of Lena Smith will reappear one day when mankind deserves it. Read more
This charming and evocative period piece about Greenwich Village in the 40s is also a subtle cautionary tale for writers against the danger of losing all your work in talk. The delicate and wryly witty screenplay by Howard A. Rodman, perhaps best known for his work with Steven Soderbergh, tells the true story of shy southern New Yorker editor Joseph Mitchell (Stanley Tucci, who also directed) discovering and profiling the legendary Joe Gould (Ian Holm in a career-defining performance). Gould, a homeless bohemian and raging lunatickind of a Mr. Natural before the factprofesses to be writing something called The Oral History of Our Time, but it never quite materializes. The fact that Mitchell himself retreated into silence after writing a second Gould profile in the 60s suggests either that Gould’s dissipation had a snowball effect or that Mitchell became Gould’s doppelganger. Either way, this is a movie to savor, not one to scarf. 104 min. (JR) Read more
Two of the earliest surviving works by F.W. Murnau, one of the giants of 1920s cinema, both presented in beautiful restorations carried out by Enno Patalas, former director of the Munich Film Archive. Journey Into Night (1920) is Murnau’s sixth feature but the earliest to survive; I’ve seen this melodrama only in incomplete form, but even in that condition it prefigures Nosferatu (1922) in many ways. Phantom is more interesting; made the same year as Nosferatu, it’s like an anthology of tropes illustrating the tradition of the German romantic novel. One insanely irrational and beautiful image, of a motorcyclist spinning over the heads of characters in a nightclub, anticipates the complex rendering of mental states in Murnau’s Sunrise. (JR) Read more
The Munich Film Archive’s invaluable restoration of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1923), the first and probably the greatest of all vampire films, which at around 95 minutes is a good ten minutes longer than previous versions. Henrik Galeen scripted this unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and the film shows Murnau’s uncanny mixture of expressionism and location shooting at its finest. (JR) Read more
Part of Elvis Presley’s comeuppance for his fame was having to make films like this 1965 musical, in which he chaperones a mobster’s daughter (Shelley Fabares) in Fort Lauderdale. (If only the Colonel had allowed him and Sammy Davis Jr. to costar in The Defiant Ones, history might have been different.) Boris Sagal directed, and the secondary cast includes Paramount standby Harold J. Stone, Gary Crosby, and Jackie Coogan. (JR) Read more
West Beirut
Quentin Tarantino’s cameraman, Lebanese filmmaker Ziad Doueiri, wrote and directed this autobiographical first feature (1998) about his early teens in Beirut–set in 1975, during the onset of the country’s civil war–and cast his younger brother Rami as himself. In fact, Doueiri scores with every member of his wonderful cast, which consists of nonprofessionals in the child roles and seasoned veterans playing the grown-ups. This is one of the best coming-of-age movies I’ve seen, largely because the characters are so full-bodied and believable without falling into predictable patterns. The excellent score is by Stewart Copeland. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, March 31 through April 6.
–Jonathan Rosenbaum Read more
Writer-director James Toback manages to combine the worst traits of his own braggadocio style of formless filmmaking with those of Henry Jaglom and Robert Altman, in an extravagant mess that awaits exegesis from Pauline Kael’s disciples regarding its Dostoyevskian qualities. Expect a lot of improvisation or semi-improvisation from the actors and just as much crosscutting from the director. Wealthy white teenage girls in New York lust after hip-hop black crime, a documentary filmmaker (Brooke Shields) with a gay husband (Robert Downey Jr.) follows them around, and the gay husband comes on to Mike Tyson, who plays himself. The point is to create a few desultory sparks, all of them unrehearsed, and land a piece of promo in the New Yorker’s The Talk of the Town. Among the other actors are Oli Power Grant, Ben Stiller, Knicks guard Allan Houston, Claudia Schiffer, Stacy Edwards, and Toback himself. 98 min. (JR) Read more
If you assumed, as I did, that this feature by Tom Tykwer (1997, 122 min.) followed his monstrously successful and seemingly less personal Run Lola Run, you’d be wrong. An odd, ambitious melodrama about two couples who share an Alpine villa in scenic Berchtesgaden, this is very much a rural film, and though it’s every bit as striking visually and self-consciously contrived in terms of storytelling as Lola, it’s a lot likelier to leave you querulous. A translator (Floriane Daniel) becomes involved with a ski instructor (Heino Ferch) and her housemate, a nurse (Marie-Lou Sellem) who becomes involved with a film projectionist (Ulrich Matthes); there’s also a local farmer (Josef Bierbichler) whose daughter is critically injured in a car accident in the film’s opening moments. None of these characters is standard issue, and Tykwer works overtime with his ‘Scope framing, elaborate color coding, and metaphysical thematics to make their interactions seem significant, and at times erotic as well. I can’t yet decide whether the film works or not, but it certainly held me for its full two hours. (JR) Read more
An unlikely 70s romance between a Catholic activist (Jennifer Connelly) working with Chileans and a young mainstream liberal politician (Billy Crudup) ends when she’s killed in a car bombing, but he can’t shake her memory. Keith Gordon’s haunting and heartfelt feature, adapted from a Scott Spencer novel by Robert Dillon, may be rough around the edges, and the allegorical and political aspects of the story won’t be to everyone’s taste, yet Connelly’s unshowy performance is so sensational that it makes up for lots of problems. The story ricochets between the 70s and 80s with such purity of emotion that the storytelling never falters, even when some of the secondary characters fail to convince. Jodie Foster served as executive producer, and she and Gordon should both be commended for getting behind an offbeat project of this kind. (JR) Read more
Nobody’s Business
Alan Berliner’s essayistic documentary (1996) about his crotchety father, his relationship with him, and family memories in general is a wonderful piece of work that’s every bit as entertaining, thoughtful, and distinctive as Intimate Stranger (1992), Berliner’s earlier feature about his maternal grandfather. This long-overdue Chicago premiere is well worth checking out. St. Xavier Univ. McGuire Hall, 3700 W. 103rd St., Friday and Saturday, March 17 and 18, 7:00, 773-298-3193.
–Jonathan Rosenbaum Read more
Try to imagine a noncomic remake of Dr. Strangelove in which the title hero becomes the voice of reason; hold that thought and imagine a remake of the gulf war in which Saddam Hussein’s son invades Kuwait and the acting U.S. president (Kevin Pollak) threatens to drop a nuclear bomb on Baghdad. You’ve still only got the beginnings of what makes this stagy thriller, set in a snowbound roadside diner, so repellent. According to Rod Lurie, the onetime film critic who wrote and directed this, nuking Baghdad may be questionable because the site was once the Garden of Eden, but not because people happen to live there; it even becomes a brilliant strategic macho move if the victims are incapable of retaliating. The fact that this movie functions reasonably well as a suspense thriller only makes it more vile, as do such ideological escape clauses as the black woman who acts as the president’s top adviser and the redneck who shows his true class colors by calling Iraqis sand niggers. Foreigners who argue that Americans are Neanderthal savages can point to this movie as persuasive evidence. With Timothy Hutton, Sheryl Lee Ralph, and Sean Astin. (JR) Read more
I’ve never been much of a Julia Roberts fan, but I have to admit that director Steven Soderbergh coaxes a very lively performance out of her in this docudrama, which intermittently reminds me of Silkwood (1983). Roberts plays a young divorced mother and former beauty queen who rounds up 600 plaintiffs to sue the power company that’s been contaminating the water. The script by Susannah Grant is standard-issue liberal feel-good fodder that in former decades might have been directed by Martin Ritt; Soderbergh deals with it respectfully and effectively without ever transcending its generic limitations. With Albert Finney as the heroine’s boss and Aaron Eckhart as her biker lover. 130 min. (JR) Read more
Carmen Maura stars as a housewife in flight from her well-to-do family who convinces a Portuguese video and CD salesman to give her a lift to Portugal before they catch up with her. This 1999 Spanish film teases a lot of intrigue from the family’s involvement in some sort of business corruption, and the mutual enmity and nastiness between family members is as thick as anything in middle-period Claude Chabrol, though not nearly as interesting. On the other hand, director Antonio Hernandez’s ‘Scope compositions are so inventive and engaging that this action thriller held my attention long after I ceased caring about any of the characters. (JR) Read more
