Stanley Kubrick’s second feature (1955, 67 min.) is one of only two with a New York setting, and unlike Eyes Wide Shut, it was shot entirely on location, on what looks like the lowest of low budgets. A noirish thriller with experimental trimmings that holds back most of the emotions, sensitive as well as otherwise, that threatened to make Kubrick’s first feature mawkish, it views all its low-life characters from a considerable distance. Starring Frank Silvera (as a boxer), Irene Kane, and Jamie Smith. (JR) Read more
The Seattle uprising in December 1999, occasioned by the World Trade Organization’s convention there, seems to have politicized Rustin Thompson, director of the highly watchable personal video documentary 30 Frames a Second (2000). His analysis of the issues behind the demonstrations is minimal, but the sense of what it was like to be there is pungent throughout, and Thompson includes brief clips from Medium Cool, Godard’s Le petit soldat, and The Grapes of Wrath to pinpoint his own subjectivity. His main discovery, which he conveys in affecting detail, is the continuing capacity of all sorts of Americans to feel passionate about political issues; his principal blind spot is treating opposition to the WTO, and multicorporate greed in general, as an American phenomenon rather than as a global movement. (As a corrective, check out Naomi Klein’s recent book No Logo.) 73 min. (JR) Read more
Stand-up comic and stripper Julia Query collaborated with Vicky Funari on this 1999 documentary, about unionizing Query’s coworkers at San Francisco’s Lusty Lady, a North Beach peep show. However groundbreaking the labor struggle, at no point does the resulting movie ever threaten to become truly interesting, perhaps because the feminist discourse, prostripping and antistripping alike, remains fairly primitive and sound-bitey. This is somewhat more serious than the recent Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, but the exhibitionism trivializes and vulgarizes the investigative journalism, so that when Query decides to videotape herself telling her feminist mother for the first time that she’s a stripper, at a conference on prostitution at which they’re both giving presentations, the ploy makes her look fairly shallow and heartless while her mother comes across with considerable dignity. The closing epigraph from Emma GoldmanIf I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolutionepitomizes this documentary’s tendency to piggyback on the serious work of others to score its not terribly well-defined points. 70 min. (JR) Read more
A major American independent who has lived in Europe for the past several years, Jon Jost has recently been reinventing himself in digital video, with results that have ranged from the soporific (London Brief) to the endlessly fascinating and beautiful (the silent Muri Romani). Six Easy Pieces evokes both these extremes. In his films, Jost has worked in narrative, essayistic, and experimental modes. Here the mode is mainly experimental, albeit with some strong documentary elements. Shooting in Portugal and Italy, training his camera on such subjects as a museum, a car trip, street kids, cobblestones, and little girls swimming, and employing various kinds of narration and music, Jost is exploring video as a sort of painting. At times the material seems either touristic or alienated to a fault; at its most engaging, Jost Read more
Guy de Maupassant’s brilliantly unsettling Le Horla, transmuted into a routine 1963 horror picture with Vincent Price. Directed by Reginald Le Borg. 96 min. (JR) Read more
Better than you might imagine, though it still has its silly aspects. Bela Lugosi plays the Frankenstein monster and Lon Chaney Jr. is the wolf man; Roy William Neill directed. With Maria Ouspenskaya and Lionel Atwill (1943). 72 min. (JR) Read more
Not the German silent extravaganza by Ernst Lubitsch but William Dieterle’s 1934 remake, with Dolores Del Rio as the courtesan of Versailles. Considered daring when it came outthe Legion of Decency condemned itit has mainly been noted since then for its period decor. With Reginald Owen (as Louis XV), Victor Jory, Anita Louise, and Osgood Perkins (Tony’s father); Edward Chodorov wrote the script. 77 min. (JR) Read more
Senegalese master Djibril Diop Mambety made these two 45-minute films as parts of a triptych called Tales of Little People but died of cancer before he could make the third. They’re closer to neorealism and less intellectually complex and ambitious than his remarkable features Touki Bouki and Hyenas, but these stories about the urban poor are still pungent, buoyant, and often funny, with wonderful performances by nonprofessionals. Le franc (1994) follows the misadventures of an impoverished musician with a winning lottery ticket, and The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (1999), described by Mambety as a hymn to the courage of street children, is a fable about a crippled 12-year-old who sells newspapers in Dakar despite her male competitors’ cruel efforts to discourage her. (The title is a pun on the newspaper she sells, Le soleil.) If you’re unfamiliar with Mambety, one of the greatest of all African filmmakers, these excellent featurettes may whet your appetite for his stunning features. (JR) Read more
I didn’t get to the end of this morbid tale when I went to a festival screening, but I can’t say that what I saw was badly done. Based on a story by Geza Csath, the 1997 film focuses on two young brothers in 1914 who lose their father and become obsessed with death; shortly before I split, they began their research by murdering a cat. Janos Szasz directed. (JR) Read more
A program devoted to erotic films by lesbian filmmakers, including Maria Beatty’s The Black Glove, a celebrated S-M work, as well as several contemporary short films and excerpts. (JR) Read more
An ex-con in Queens (Christopher Walken), struggling to survive as an auto mechanic, agrees to pull off one last heist, enlisting the services of a youth (Peter McDonald) who claims to be a distant relative. One way or another, you’ve probably seen everything in this picture before, but writer-director Myles Connell reconfigures the various pieces with a fair amount of grit and charm; with Cyndi Lauper (especially good), John Ortiz, and Tom Noonan. 89 min. (JR) Read more
The Internet Movie Database lists five theatrical features with this title that have been made since 1982, four of them since 1996, at least three of which have made it to Chicago. Michael Winterbottom, an English director so versatile (Welcome to Sarajevo, Jude, Butterfly Kiss) that he seems anonymous, directed this one, based on a Laurence Coriat script that follows the initially disconnected lives of a mother (Kika Markham) and her four children (Enzo Cilenti, Shirley Henderson, Gina McKee, and Molly Parker) over a London weekend. As an interweave of crosscut miniplots, this isn’t nearly as interesting or as pleasurable as Jeremy Podeswa’s recent The Five Senses, but fans of English kitchen-sink realism at its most depressing may relish the opportunities given the cast memberswho also include Jack Shepherd, Peter Marfleet, Ian Hart, Stuart Townsend, and John Simmto strut their stuff. 108 min. (JR) Read more
Leonard Maltin (or one of his movie-guide staffers) finds this Edward D. Wood Jr. thriller about crime and plastic surgery (1954, 70 min.) less inept and therefore less funny than his better-known features. If memory serves, it has Wood’s inimitable clunky dialogue, but his visuals are too pedestrian to be recognizable, unless you count actors like Timothy Farrell, Dolores Fuller, Lyle Talbot, and Steve Reeves (the latter two playing cops). If you’re looking for a bad movie, there’s plenty to choose from — some of them first-run. (JR) Read more
This 1999 documentary by Gough Lewis (pronounced guff?), which seems to be showing across the globe more for its exploitation value than any other merits, is vacuous filmmaking of a very familiar kind. It deals with University of Southern California gender studies major Grace Quekbetter known as porn star Annabel Chongwho decided to have sex with 251 men over ten hours, apparently in order to prove that women can be deranged show-offs just like guys. She didn’t receive any money for doing this and didn’t contract AIDS, but the film isn’t very clear about what’s supposed to make her interesting or exemplary or pathetic or noble or some combination thereof. Like so many undernourished features nowadays, fiction and nonfiction alike, it proceeds from the principle that if you shoot a lot of varied and seemingly contradictory material and then cut it all together, the truth will somehow emerge from the colliding sound bites. Maybe it did in this case, but if so I was too bored and alienated to notice. The material includes Quek/Chong happily and cheerfully defending her activities in feminist terms, desperately cutting her arm with a knife, visiting her family in Singapore (who don’t know she’s a porn star), sitting on the toilet, and quittingand then returning tothe porn industry; Lewis also presents men in the industry saying and doing various things, most of them fairly doltish but not especially funny. Read more
A bewildering blend of self-promotion, ridicule, hagiography, camp, and character study (2000), put together with blotchy video dubs as if producer-directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato couldn’t tell the difference between these contradictory approaches. Jim Bakker and Jerry Falwell remain relatively shadowy and mysterious figures in the story insofar as they’re defined only in relation to the colorful title heroinewhose various adventures are introduced by puppets reciting chapter headings with mulish regularitywhich ultimately means that this made-for-cable opus, halfway between documentary and docudrama, is willing to try anything and everything except for a consistent relationship to its material. RuPaul Charles intones the narration, and we learn a lot about eye makeup. 79 min. (JR) Read more
