The Ontario Film Review Board banned this history of U.S. marijuana laws because it contains 20 seconds of archival footage showing rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees smoking dope in a lab experiment. Apparently this violates the Ontario Theatres Act, which forbids abuse of an animal in making a film, although the board showed no concern about mice falling off a table or fish swimming sideways in the same sequence (at least the simians seem to be enjoying themselves). A better example of animal abuse might be compelling a filmmaker to submit his work to censors or incarcerating untold thousands of kids for having harmless fun while hypocritical state agents and presidents show an almost total lack of interest in the truth or falsity of their own antidrug propaganda. Director Ron Mann specializes in documentaries celebrating countercultural forms and practices (Comic Book Confidential, Twist, Poetry in Motion, Imagine the Sound); this hilarious yet frightening piece of agitprop, using found footage, period music, jaunty animated titles, and narration by Woody Harrelson (written by Solomon Vesta), is as entertaining and informative as anything Mann’s ever done and as good an example of grass humor as you’re likely to find. 80 min. (JR) Read more
Danny Setton’s hour-long Israeli documentary (1996), also known as Revenge, focuses on the Kovner Group, a band of Holocaust survivors who wreaked revenge on the German people after the war by poisoning the water supplies of several large cities and then by poisoning Nazi officers incarcerated in a prison camp. Reportedly this film is concerned less with the historical facts than with the group’s emotional experience. Read more
Two medium-length Israeli films about difficult relationships between parents and children. Mooly Landsman’s My Own Daughter (1998, 50 min.) is a documentary in which a 22-year-old kibbutz member confronts memories of abuse from her father, and Nitzan Aviram’s Son (1997, 47 min.) is a fiction film about an aging poet and his son, who suffers from Down’s syndrome. Read more
In case, like me, you’ve never heard the title expression before, it refers to the psychological phenomenon of a work of art making the spectator swoon (which is apparently more common overseas). Italian horror director Dario Argento characteristically uses this condition as a pretext for fancy visual cadenzas, as a police detective who’s especially susceptible to paintings (the director’s daughter, Asia) tries to track down a serial rapist and killer, and they’re the main reason for seeing this poorly acted, over-the-top, and generally out-of-control bloodbath (1996, 114 min.). With Thomas Kretschmann. (JR) Read more
Like the other small musicals Douglas Sirk directed at Universal in the early 50s, this is better than it was supposed to have been at the time, a nicely mounted and nostalgic turn-of-the-century story about a sideshow medicine man (Dan Dailey) who helps to hide a runaway orphan (Chet Allen) while romancing the woman who’s looking for him (Diana Lynn). Hugh O’Brian plays a corrupt politician, and Scatman Crothers is one of the performers in the musical numbers (1953, 87 min.). (JR) Read more
The disappointing second feature (1998) of Lodge Kerrigan (Clean, Shaven), starring Katrin Cartlidge as a New York prostitute: her performance is good, but the material is painfully familiar. With Vincent D’Onofrio and Colm Meaney. (JR) Read more
Brian De Palma, who revitalized his box-office clout by glamorizing the FBI in The Untouchables, turned to glamorizing the CIA with this 1996 adaptation of another popular 60s TV series. Tom Cruise (who doubled as producer and assumed final cut) heads a team of intelligence operatives who do battle with Russian spies and arms dealers. Robert Towne and David Koepp did separate drafts of the script, and they might as well have been working on separate movies for all the narrative interest and concern for the characters that they generated, but I was entertained by the mise en scene and the action. With Emmanuelle Beart, Jon Voight, and Ving Rhames. 100 min. (JR) Read more
At first glance, this Hollywood feature produced by cowriter Ron Bass (Rain Man, When a Man Loves a Woman) and directed by Alain Berliner (Ma vie en rose) deals with the same theme as Shattered Image (1998), a mainstream feature written by Duane Poole and directed by Raul Ruiz, in which a Seattle hit woman dreams she’s a newlywed honeymooning in the Caribbean, who dreams in turn she’s a Seattle hit woman, etc. In Passion of Mind, a widow living with her two daughters in a French village and being courted by a novelist (Stellan Skarsgard) dreams she’s a New York literary agent being courted by an accountant (William Fichtner), and vice versa. But in fact the two movies are polar opposites. The two women in Shattered Image are both played by Anne Parillaud, and the point of the exercise isn’t psychological but a Ruizian mind fuck; in Passion of Mind, both women are played by Demi Moore (who isn’t bad, by the way), and the story is designed as a psychological puzzle, offering two romantic love stories for the price of one. The Ruiz film is fun but leads nowhere; Passion of Mind is slick and effective escapism with a touch of poetry (a la The Sixth Sense) that left me vaguely dissatisfied once the mystery was supposedly resolved. Read more
This isn’t Woody Allen at his nadir (cf A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, September, Shadows and Fog, and Celebrity), but there are moments when this comedy threatens to die of anemia. Featuring Allen and Tracey Ullman as a whiny working-class couple who decide to rob a bank, it starts off, like most Allen pictures, by emulating a European art-house picture of his youthin this case Big Deal on Madonna Street (a much funnier picture about a failed bank heist). After Ullman’s flair for baking cookies unexpectedly makes the couple rich, Allen falls into one of his most tired story ideas, the vulgar nouveau riche heroine who tries to buy her way to culturerepresented in this movie, to show you how desperate things are, by Hugh Grant. The others in the cast have a better time; Elaine May as Ullman’s cousin is especially funny. With Michael Rapaport, Tony Darrow, George Grizzard, Jon Lovitz, and Elaine Stritch. 94 min. (JR) Read more
Lea Pool’s sensitive coming-of-age feature (1999, 94 minutes), set in and around Montreal in 1963, is apparently autobiographical in inspiration. The 13-year-old heroine (Karine Vanasse), who has her first period while visiting her grandmother in the opening sequence, is the illegitimate daughter of a struggling Jewish writer (Miki Manojlovic) and a Catholic who works as a seamstress to help support the family (Pascale Bussieres); her unlikely role model is the prostitute heroine played by Anna Karina in Godard’s Vivre sa vie, and her sexual stirrings gravitate toward both her older brother and a female classmate, who also attract each other. Nicely acted and inflected, this is a very fresh piece of work. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, May 12 through 18. –Jonathan Rosenbaum
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): . Read more
Adapted from the TV series Thunderbirds, this 1966 British feature anticipated The Dark Crystal with its all-marionette cast. David Lane directed. Read more
Despite a welcome attention to the brutal facts of celluloid deterioration, Mark McLaughlin’s 1999 documentary about film preservation, written with producer Randy Gitsch, is basically Movie Restoration 101, a fund-raiser with a lot of emphasis on the sociological and historical reasons for this activity and almost none at all on the aesthetic reasonsor the aesthetic issues raised by different kinds of restoration and/or revision of primary materials. The fact that the interview subjects include Forrest J. Ackerman, Alan Alda, Stan Brakhage, Herb Jeffries, Roddy McDowell, Leonard Maltin, and Debbie Reynolds, along with a few techies, archivists, and bureaucrats, gives a pretty good idea of the spread involved. But critical perspectives on film restoration are few and far between: the overall message is that it’s a good thing, even though we don’t get a clear position about how such an activity might be carried out well or badly. 70 min. (JR) Read more
If this country were a more sensible place, John Waters would be hosting the Tonight Show. Barring such a possibility, Steve Yeager’s entertaining 1997 documentary about the making of Waters’s first midnight-movie hit, Pink Flamingos (1972), has the advantages of a proud Baltimore perspective and interviews with Jeanine Basinger, Steve Buscemi, Hal Hartley, J. Hoberman, Jim Jarmusch, the Kuchar brothers, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Jonas Mekas, Paul Morrissey, the local film censor, countless cast and family members, and Waters himself. (As a closing title tartly points out, only Kenneth Anger and Russ Meyer declined to appear.) This affectionate piece of historiography snubs practically everything after Pink Flamingosincluding my two favorites, Female Trouble and Hairspraybut it’s so deliciously exhaustive about Waters’s humble beginnings that I can’t really complain. 105 min. (JR) Read more
This video by former Golden Gloves boxer David the Rock Nelson sounds like an even lower-rent version of the guerrilla film produced in Bowfinger. Nelson captures famous individuals in publicincluding Hillary Clinton, Roger Corman, and Svengooliefor use in this impromptu monster flick, parts of which were shot in Chicago, Cleveland, New York, and Pittsburgh. (JR) Read more
Two early films by G.W. Pabst. Sigmund Freud refused to have anything to do with Secrets of a Soul (1926, 97 min.), an early silent attempt to deal with psychoanalysis via German expressionism. The results are dated, but this is still an intriguing period piece. The 107-minute Crisis, made two years later, is said to be a relatively minor work, though it stars the memorable Brigitte Helm (the blind woman in Pabst’s previous film, The Love of Jeanne Ney) as a middle-class woman, ignored by her ambitious husband, who gets involved with bohemians. (JR) Read more
