Mathieu Kassovitz’s second feature (his first was Hate) was easily the most despised film in competition at Cannes, although there were relatively few walkouts. Like Michael Haneke’s Funny Games though much more lowbrow, this 1997 French thriller exploits affectless violence to the utmost while attacking the exploitation of affectless violence, as a 25-year-old punk (Kassovitz) is trained in fatherly fashion by a seasoned hit man (Michel Serrault). But it lacks the icy distance of Haneke’s film, and its flagrant borrowings from Taxi Driver, GoodFellas, and Natural Born Killers also testify to the puritanical hypocrisy of those sources. Scorsese and Stone can get away with this sort of doublethink better than Kassovitz, however, because they put more emphasis on entertaining the audience than on preaching; Kassovitz, through sheer confused sincerity, too clearly exposes the muddled hypocrisy of his undertaking. Still, Assassin(s) has a certain dramatic voltage and communicates an underlying despair. And even when Kassovitz alternates between crass product placement and attacks on TV commercials, he’s merely giving the mainstream press what it usually asks for from movies. Maybe part of the rage this film provoked at Cannes had to do with the near-accuracy of its calculations. (JR) Read more
Organized by filmmakers Paula Froehle and Carolyn Faber and musician Ken Vandermark, this program combines silent shorts by Buster Keaton and D.W. Griffith with improvised music, presented not as accompaniment but as a concurrent event. The Keaton films are all superbOne Week (1920), The Playhouse (1921), and Cops (1922), about 20 minutes each. I’ve seen only the first of the Griffiths, which are each about 15 minutesA Corner in Wheat (1909)and that’s quite remarkable as well. The other two are The Unchanging Sea (1910) and The Female of the Species (1912). The tentative musical lineup includes Vandermark and Mats Gustafsson (reeds), Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello), Michael Zerang (drums), and Jeb Bishop (trombone). (JR) Read more
An unsold pilot (1961) for a TV series about jazz, this half-hour film is set in a nightclub (or at least on a nightclub set). The dramatic setup is predictably square and self-conscious, but once the musicians (including Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge) get going, none of this matters, and things really swing. (JR) Read more
A 1993 John Woo gangster feature with comic interludes that reportedly moralizes against violence even as Woo choreographs it with his usual enthusiasm. With David Chang and Danny Lee. (JR) Read more
This robust belated sequel to Friday (1995), a comedy that found Ice Cube in South Central LA, relocates him in the suburbs, where he’s gone to live with his lottery-winning uncle and cousin. For me it’s one of the rare sequels that are better than the original, which I basically recall as an endless assembly line of scatological gags. This starts off with the same emphasis, but quickly turns to humor based more on hyperbolic characters and pungent dialogue. Nothing miraculous, but it’s time pretty well spent. With Tamala Jones, Tom Tiny Lister Jr., Justin Pierce, and John Witherspoon; directed by Steve Carr from a script by Ice Cube. 98 min. (JR) Read more
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first fiction feature, Maborosi (1995), was about a woman gradually adjusting to her husband’s death. His second (1998, 118 min.) is very different, an allegorical fantasy set at an abandoned school that represents a halfway house between earth and heaven. Guides have a few days to help the recently deceased find a key memory to take with them to heaven, then they film each memory, with the person’s input, shortly before his departure. A distinguished documentarist before he turned to fiction, Kore-eda bolstered his conceit in this feature by recording the memories of hundreds of elderly Japanese people, some of whom he cast in this film. Though it comes across as labored in spots, it also yields a good many beautiful and suggestive moments, and an overall film experience of striking originality. In Japanese with subtitles. (JR) Read more
Not only one of Greta Garbo’s finest performances, but one of her very best films (1933) — a fictional story in which the 17th-century Swedish queen gives up her throne for a Spanish ambassador (John Gilbert). The underrated Rouben Mamoulian directed, and Salka Viertel and S.N. Behrman both worked on the script. Erotic, romantic, and a feast for the eyes. 100 min. (JR) Read more
Jan Sverak’s 1996 feature from the Czech Republicscripted by his father, who plays the lead rolecharts the unlikely bonding between an aging bachelor cellist in Russian-occupied Prague and a six-year-old Russian boy he becomes saddled with after agreeing to a utilitarian marriage with the boy’s mother, who disappears. Not as sentimental as it might have been, and an enormous commercial success in eastern Europe, this is well crafted and touchinga solid piece of humanist realism, ably performed. In Czech with subtitles. 105 min. (JR) Read more
