This feature-length documentary (1995, 89 min.) by Swiss filmmaker Daniel Schmid pays tribute to Kabuki performer and female impersonator Tamasaburo Bando, including a great deal of performance footage. It bears the visible influence of Roland Barthes’ wonderful and utopian short book about Japan, The Empire of Signs, and benefits greatly from this happy input. Like Tosca’s Kiss, this film suggests that the documentary may actually be the most suitable form for Schmid. A 35-millimeter print will be shown. Gene Siskel Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Thursday, November 16, 6:00, 312-443-3737.
–Jonathan Rosenbaum Read more
Nine friends from high school now in their 30s converge at a house on the lake for a weekend reunion, in a watchable but not very memorable comedy-drama written and produced by Jerome Courshon and directed by Paul Leaf. The professions range from model (Andrea Leithe) to postal worker (Phil Palisoul) to TV anchor (Mark Porro) to stockbroker (Greg Wrangler) to secretary (Maria McCann), and the routine construction gives us something close to one revelation per character. The cast of semiunknowns is game and likable, but a week or so after previewing this I could barely remember it. 97 min. (JR) Read more
Contemporary taste seems to favor either superexpensive SF movies made today or supercheap camp items from the heyday of Hollywood. I don’t know the actual budget of this adventure yarn, about the first manned expedition to Mars, but it feels like a middle-range effort whose heart is with the bargain-basement offerings of yesteryear. The dialogue’s worthy of Destination Moon half a century ago, and though there isn’t a member of the spaceship’s kitchen staff named Cookie, Val Kilmer plays a space janitor, which is almost as good. The story here has the expedition’s commander, played by Carrie-Anne Moss, orbiting Mars while crew members who’ve crash-landed on the planet discover it isn’t uninhabited. Most of the enigmas in the plot are never adequately explained, but a couple of shots on the planet’s surface have some of the distilled poetry of Edgar Ulmer’s The Man From Planet X. Despite a multifaceted obeisance toward 2001 that extends even to calling the commander Bowman, the film’s aspirations toward low-tech triumph are the main source of its charm. I confess that before I picked up on this I fidgeted a lot. Antony Hoffman directed from a screenplay by Chuck Pfarrer and Jonathan Lemkin; with Tom Sizemore and Terence Stamp. Read more
Despite the awkward title, I can fully understand Fine Line Features’ decision to rename this touching and erotic but not too explicit French movie, originally called Une liaison pornographique, because it really is a love story in spite of everything. There are interesting ground rules both to the film’s central relationship and to the story that describes it. A nameless couple (Nathalie Baye and Sergi Lopez) meet through the classifieds to explore a particular sexual fantasy that is never revealed to us; each week they have sex in a hotel but reveal nothing about their lives or identities to each other or to us. (The characters narrate the story by speaking separately to the same offscreen male interviewer.) Eventually they start to fall in love. Ironically, the only scene in the film featuring sex between them–it’s the one time they have traditional intercourse–is included because it charts the onset of their love. Director Frederic Fonteyne copes pretty well with the built-in restrictions of Philippe Blasband’s script, but this movie really belongs to Baye (best known for her work with Truffaut and Godard) and Lopez (best known for his work with Manuel Poirier), both so skillful that they almost make you forget that what you’re watching is close to a stunt–one oddly evocative of Graham Greene in its doomed romanticism but at times also minimalist to a fault. Read more
A quiet psychological thriller in the Val Lewton mode, about a young woman (Rosemary LePlanche) who may be murdering people and animals in her sleep. Frank Wysbar, a German filmmaker who emigrated to Hollywood in the 1940s, directed this low-budget 1946 horror picture for the PRC studio; the most notable thing about it is the performers’ low-key avoidance of cliches. 66 min. (JR) Read more
When it comes to TV commercials, I’m not sure what best means: so good that you forget the product, or so good that you remember? Whatever the distributors had in mind, they’ve announced that this will be the last of their annual compilations, and presumably it’s the best of the best because it includes stuff from the 70s and 80sover a hundred commercials from 19 countries. (JR) Read more
A disappointing follow-up to Little Odessa, James Gray’s second feature is one more sluggish, artfully framed thriller with Rembrandt lighting set in a New York borougha kind of picture that’s awfully hard to do in a fresh manner. The closest Gray comes is in coaxing strong performances out of his older actors (James Caan, Ellen Burstyn, and Faye Dunaway in a smaller part), much as he did with Vanessa Redgrave and Maximilian Schell in his previous film. He’s less lucky with his three leads (Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, and Joaquin Phoenix), who can’t manage to conjure up much sustained interest as characters or even as presences; there’s something about the lugubrious art-movie ambience that swamps them. 108 min. (JR) Read more
The angels are newDrew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, and Lucy Liubut the mythology of the old TV show, with John Forsythe intoning the offscreen Voice of God (i.e., Charlie), remains the same. The first third or so offers all the dominatrix fantasies one might wish for, but then fantasy gives way to the aggressiveness of the special effects and optical effects, which reflect the background of the director, McG, in commercials and music videos and offer something like mild but frequent electric shocks. The plot fluctuations guarantee a costume change every few minutesat least until the closing stretch, when the movie becomes simply another James Bond derivativeand they might be enough to keep you interested. Bill Murray makes a fairly funny Bosley, and Tim Curry, Kelly Lynch, and Crispin Glover all do pretty well as heavies. The script is credited to Ryan Rowe, Ed Solomon, and John August. 92 min. (JR) Read more
With no prior training in film, 21-year-old Londoner Marc Singer set out to make this 16-millimeter black-and-white documentary about the homeless people living in the tunnels under New York’s Penn Station. Singer’s six-year quest–including a brief stint of being homeless himself–deserves notice, and in a way I’m disappointed that the film omits it. But what’s most remarkable and fascinating here are the squatters, who do a pretty good job of explaining themselves without any outside narrator (and who, in countless ways, assisted Singer in shooting the film). The lives of these people inside their shacks are full of surprises (one keeps several dogs as pets, another shaves with an electric razor and a broken mirror) as well as grim confirmations (the self-loathing misery of a crackhead who lost her children in a fire), but the things we don’t know about them also significantly shape our experience of the film. Their underground sojourn came to an end when Amtrak evicted them and the Coalition for the Homeless found them normal housing. Despite its title, the film seems excessively (or at the very least prematurely) cheerful in its closing stretch. Still, this is an eye-opening tale of how part of our population lives, and as an authentic image of material suffering it makes something like Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark seem even more dubious. Read more
I had fun with this Harold Ramis remake of the 1968 Stanley Donen comedyabout an obnoxious nebbish who strikes a Faustian bargain with the devilas long as I didn’t worry about the character of the nebbish, played by Brendan Fraser, who starts off unbelievably stupid and winds up ridiculously enlightened. Much more believable and witty is the devil, incarnated by Elizabeth Hurley as a steamy babe, while the beautiful and ethereal woman the nebbish dreams about, adequately played by Frances O’Connor, isn’t much more than a prop. Each of the seven wishes the nebbish is granted yields a separate comic sketch in which he fulfills his fantasy but doesn’t gain his prizethe same structure as the original, which was British and basically consisted of sketch humor by Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. The only washouts are the sketches in which the hero is supposed to be sensitive or intelligent and witty, these being nothing but assemblies of stupid stereotypes. In other words, this is well crafted and mindless in the best Hollywood tradition. Larry Gelbart and Peter Tolan collaborated with Ramis on the script. 93 min. (JR) Read more
This seminal 63-minute experimental film by French director Jackie Raynal kicks off Facets Multimedia Center’s weeklong retrospective on the “Zanzibar collection,” a group of mainly political films financed by heiress Sylvina Boissonnas between 1968 and ’70. Raynal, a film editor working for most of the French New Wave directors, made Deux fois in black-and-white 35-millimeter during a visit to Barcelona and its environs, with herself as the main performer in practically every sequence. Instead of a story it offers a flow of sequential events that formally rhyme with each other, so that the title (“two times”) becomes a succinct reference to her method–though some things in the film appear three, four, or five times, always with distinct variations. Years later, faced by a team of feminist film theorists, Raynal admitted that the film is partially about “the representation of the image of woman as a sign,” but apparently in the more footloose, less gender-conscious 60s she was more interested in exploring the sexy forms of duplicity between various sequences, their secret points of accord and strongest points of tension. It’s a film about coupling (a man appears with Raynal in many of the sequences) but also about flirting with camera and spectator alike. Read more
Janusz Kaminski, the cinematographer of Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, directs his first feature, a supernatural thriller that seems bent on remaking The Exorcist with some of the stylish look of Seven. Alas, look is everything here and storytelling and characters are next to nothing, so what emerges is oddly ineffectual and uninvolvingvisually striking set pieces set loose in a void. The plot has something to do with a famous writer (Ben Chaplin) who doesn’t believe in the devil but who gradually learns from a believer (Winona Ryder) that he’s scheduled to turn into the Antichrist himself. With Philip Baker Hall, Elias Koteas, and John Hurt; Pierce Gardner and Betsy Stahl are credited with the script. 97 min. (JR) Read more
Not a rerelease of Jerry Lewis’s second-best feature, alas, nor even a remake, though it comes from the same studio. Instead, Paramount deemed it wiser to give us a stridently unfunny minstrel show, insulting to audience and cast alike, starring Tim Meadows as a talk-show host and philandering black stud who has a lot of angry husbands chasing him. When the husbands briefly break into a musical comedy number, I thought for a moment that director Reginald Hudlin was giving Kenneth Branagh in Love’s Labour’s Lost a run for his money, but I suspect the challenge here was different: to see if he could direct a movie blindfolded and wearing earplugs. With Karyn Parsons, Billy Dee Williams, Tiffani Thiessen, Lee Evans, and Will Ferrell; Meadows, Dennis McNichols, and Andrew Steele worked on the script. 96 min. (JR) Read more
I haven’t read Herman Melville’s Pierre, or the Ambiguities, but it’s reportedly director Leos Carax’s favorite novel. What there is of a plot to this 1999 modern-dress adaptation, which Carax wrote with Lauren Sedofsky and Jean-Pol Fargeau, concerns a wealthy author (Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gerard) living in Normandy in semi-incestuous content with his mother (Catherine Deneuve). Upon encountering a soulful eastern European war refugee (Katerina Golubeva) who claims to be his half sister, he runs out on his wealthy fiancee (Delphine Chuillot) and retreats to a funky part of Paris to write another novel. There’s clearly some sort of self-portraiture going on here. A 19th-century romantic inhabiting a universe as mythological as Jean Cocteau’s, Carax (Boy Meets Girl, Bad Blood, The Lovers on the Bridge) has a wonderful cinematic eye and a personal feeling for editing rhythms, and his sense of overripeness and excess virtually defines him. He’s as self-indulgent as they come, and we’d all be much the poorer if he weren’t. Characteristic of his private sense of poetics is this film’s final dedication, near the end of the closing credits, “to my three sisters”–it appears on-screen for less than a second. Pola, incidentally, is the acronym of the French title of Melville’s novel; X alludes to the fact that Carax used the tenth draft of the script. Read more
What defines a successful film festival? Judging by the noises the media make about this topic, a successful festival is one that launches some Hollywood producer’s latest studio release–and allows him to expand his swimming pool. Anything that might get in the way of such a project–the art of film, say, or the curiosity of a festival audience about what’s happening elsewhere in the world–is to be discouraged in the pages of the trade papers, which generally set the tone for the mainstream.
By this standard, out of the seven festivals I’ve attended so far this year–in Rotterdam, Austin, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Pesaro, Montreal, and Toronto–only the last was a solid success, and the 36th Chicago International Film Festival, which begins screening its hundred or so programs this weekend, will be another flop. No swimming pools will be expanded as a result of any of its screenings–not even its few prerelease showings of Hollywood movies, most of which will open commercially a week or so later.
I’m grateful. I won’t be bugged by local publicists or any of their west- and east-coast associates who in late August start deluging me with calls, E-mails, and faxes about interviewing actors and directors in Toronto in September–publicists who know that I don’t do infotainment junkets but are apparently so browbeaten by their bosses they feel they have to ask me anyway, sometimes repeatedly. Read more
