Bette Gordon’s strange and singular American independent feature (the follow-up to her 1983 debut, Variety) premiered at the Locarno film festival in 1998so why have we had to wait two years to see it in Chicago? The Locarno crowd can’t be any stranger or smarter than we are, so perhaps the director of the festival simply trusts and respects his patrons more than American distributors trust and respect us. Like Time Regained, an even better film that’s playing this week at the Music Box, Luminous Motion explores a mental landscape with some visual flair, according equal status to imagination and reality. Its hero and narrator is a precocious ten-year-old (Eric Lloyd) who’s unwilling to share his beautiful, seductive, dysfunctional, and drifting mother (Deborah Kara Unger of Crash) with anyone, including his father (Jamey Sheridan), whom she left years ago. After she settles down with a suburbanite (Terry Kinney), the son poisons him, though the man returns as a ghost to offer the boy advice. Part oedipal scenario, part dreamy road movie, the film offers so many left curves (including bouts of petty theft and black magic) that you may not always know how to respond, but Gordon is so visually and stylistically inventive and the actors are so skillful that you aren’t likely to lose interest. Read more
As the neo-Freudian title suggests, this Robert Zemeckis thriller starts off as a psychological horror movie in which a central role is played by the viewer’s imaginationit’s in the sort of zone where Val Lewton’s low-budget horror films of the 40s excelled. A somewhat edgy Vermont housewife (Michelle Pfeiffer) married to an ambitious geneticist (Harrison Ford) begins to suspect foul play in their neighborhood, and that’s coupled with the possibility that their house may be haunted. While the guessing game continues the movie sustains a certain elegance, but as things start getting explained one swallows increasing amounts of guff, and when all the important facts are known the movie loses every ounce of integrityheaping contempt on characters and spectators alike while stretching out its climax to absurd lengths. Once upon a time, commercial filmmakers concluded movies in a hurry after shaky denouements in the hope that spectators wouldn’t notice; today, it seems they cynically assume that viewers are too hungry for mindless thrills to care whether dead characters spring back to life or live ones change their personalities according to the needs of the moment. With Diana Scarwid. Written by Sarah Kernochan and Clark Gregg. 126 min. (JR) Read more
The title monster’s heart is removed and shipped to Japan, where radiation from the Hiroshima bomb causes it to grow; years later a giant monster terrorizes the countryside. Ishiro Honda directed this low-grade Japanese monster film from 1965, shot in Toho ‘Scope; with Nick Adams. 87 min. (JR) Read more
An early (1972) George A. Romero horror item about a neglected suburban housewife dabbling in witchcraft. The editing is bold and original, the satirical tone and raw style distinctly un-Hollywood, but while it anticipates Romero’s Martin (1978) by locating the supernatural in the midst of middle-American banality and boredom, its dramatic inflections are relatively low-key. Also known as Season of the Witch and Hungry Wives. 104 min. (JR) Read more
A businesswoman (Kay Francis) hires a male secretary (David Manners) in this 1932 romance. William Dieterle directed a script by Charles Kenyon; with Andy Devine and Una Merkel. 60 min. Read more
This Russian feature directed by Valery Priemykhov is a good example of a mediocre foreign film that’s worth seeing because of what it shows us about the country it’s set in. Two Russian youths from the sticks loot a department store in Moscow and head back home on a raft; one of them gets caught and sent to prison for a year. The performances are variable, the lip sync is lousy, the story less than enthralling. I also didn’t warm to the disco version of Albinoni heard on the sound track or the hokey use of slow motion. But the opening sequence, set in a huge and opulent shopping mall where the boys encounter a drag queen, made my jaw drop, giving me an image of Moscow that contradicted most of what I imagined about the place, and other details of contemporary Russian life kept me interested most of the way through. (JR) Read more
Alejandro Agresti’s 1998 Argentinean feature, set in a small town in Patagonia in the 70s, sounds intriguing. It’s about the strange cultural life that develops at the small local cinema, where films that have outlived their usefulness elsewhere are shown with their reels scrambled. The locals form a cult around a French actor whose films are especially incoherent, and after receiving a lot of fan mail from these admirers the actor, now retired and living in Paris, decides to pay them a visit. 91 min. (JR) Read more
Jacques Tati’s first feature (1947), a euphoric comedy set in a sleepy village. As in all of his features, the plot is minimal: during Bastille Day festivities, the local postman (Tati) encounters a newsreel about streamlined postal delivery in America and attempts to clean up his act accordingly. But the exquisite charm of this masterpiece has less to do with individual gags (funny though many of them are) than with Tati’s portrait of a highly interactive French village after the wara view of paradise suffused with affection and poetry. 79 min. (JR) Read more
Meg Myles plays a burlesque dancer in a carnival who moves to New York, starts working in a ritzy nightclub, and sleeps with both her boss and his son. Jerald Intractor directed this low-budget sleaze item (1962, 90 min.) from a script by John T. Chapman. (JR) Read more
A recent black comedy from France (1998) that has been compared to Todd Solondz’s Happiness; considering the unpleasantness of the other longish Francois Ozon film I’ve seen. See the Sea (1997), this is probably apt. The plot concerns a repressed family whose repressions go away after the members are bitten by a pet rat: the son reveals he’s gay, the daughter shows she’s suicidal and sadomasochistic, and so on. (JR) Read more
Alison Maclean (Crush) directed Elizabeth Cuthrell’s sharp adaptation of Denis Johnson’s collection of short stories about a young junkie (Billy Crudup) in the 1970s. As a rule, I don’t much like movies about junkies because they tend to fall into dull and predictable patterns, like junkies themselves, but this is easily the liveliest and most inventive I’ve seen since Drugstore Cowboy (1989)which, coincidentally or not, was set during the same decade. Divided episodically into chapter headings and narrated by the hero, who occasionally backtracks to fill in details he’s missed, this is a deceptively rambling script that is actually carefully put together while adroitly showing the patterns of a disheveled mind. The ‘Scope framing is attractive, and the backup castheaded by Samantha Morton, and also including Denis Leary, Jack Black, Will Patton, Greg Germann, Dennis Hopper, and Holly Hunteris first-rate. 109 min. (JR) Read more
Two Berkeley undergraduates (Freddie Prinze Jr. and Claire Forlani) who first meet as kids on a plane start off as antagonists, become friends, and wind up as lovers. The material is familiar, the Berkeley locations are strictly boilerplate, and there are times when the characters seem more like high school students than college kids. But the cast is so charming and assured that it puts across most of this with a reasonable amount of conviction. Robert Iscove (She’s All That) directed this romantic comedy, from a script by a screenwriting team known as the Drews (i.e., Andrew Lowery and Andrew Miller); with Jason Biggs and Amanda Detmer. 94 min. (JR) Read more
Samuel L. Jackson stars as the title New York police detective in this 2001 feature, which seems less a remake than a retooling of the original 1971 blaxploitation thriller. It’s more street-smart, more PC, less dictated by sexist fantasy, and a lot closer to Dirty Harry, at least until a plot twist near the end turns it away from the other film’s indictment of the justice system. After arresting a spoiled white college kid (Christian Bale) who’s committed a blatantly racist murder, only to see him escape on bail, Shaft hopes to nab the kid when he returns to the city a couple of years later. Director John Singleton, who collaborated on the script with Richard Price and Shane Salerno, has some bitter observations to make about police corruption, though neither a consistent social critique nor any developed sense of character is ultimately allowed to intrude on the usual muddled studio committeethink. But as an action thriller with music by Isaac Hayes it’s not bad. With Vanessa Williams, Jeffrey Wright, Busta Rhymes, Dan Hedaya, and Toni Collette. 99 min. (JR) Read more
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1987 Taiwanese feature is less powerful than the preceding A Time to Live and a Time to Die (showing at the Film Center Tuesday and Thursday, June 20 and 22) but much better than his subsequent Daughter of the Nile (which isn’t included in the center’s current retrospective). It follows two young lovers who move to the city (Taipei) to find work because they can’t afford to finish high school, and slowly but irrevocably their relationship is torn asunder. Hou’s feeling for the textures of everyday life, caught mainly in long takes and intricately framed deep-focus compositions, gives this unhurried but deeply affecting drama a deceptively subterranean impact that gradually rises to the surface. The very natural and, for the most part, underplayed performances by nonprofessionals are especially impressive. 109 min. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, June 9, 8:15, and Saturday, June 10, 6:00, 312-443-3737.
–Jonathan Rosenbaum Read more
It’s the mid-31st century, and A.E. stands for after earth in this brisk animated extravaganza directed by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman. Much of it is Starship Troopers without the irony, mixed together with the usual predictable sources (Star Wars, 2001, This Island Earth, Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination), a lot of lousy rock, enough military hardware to destroy several planets (most of it rusty in more ways than one), and better-than-average action sequences that characteristically become monotonous through overkill. The modeling of human figures and the sense of depth are both impressive; the characters themselves are mainly idiotic. Five people are credited with the story and script; among the voices used are those of Matt Damon, Drew Barrymore, Bill Pullman, Nathan Lane, John Leguizamo, and Janeane Garofalo, all obviously enlisted to make this intergalactic adventure sound as familiar as possible. 94 min. (JR) Read more
