Jazz clips from the collection of Bob Koester, owner of Jazz Record Mart, including performances by Billy Eckstine and the strange and irreplaceable low-budget concert feature Jivin’ in Bebop (1947), featuring, among others, Dizzy Gillespie and all the original members of the Modern Jazz Quartet. (JR) Read more
This 1999 feature won an Oscar for best documentary, but it’s jazzed up to give a true storythe kidnapping of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympicsthe pacing, punctuation, and suspense of a Hollywood action film. Director Kevin Macdonald (the grandson of producer Emeric Pressburger) knows how to put on a grand show, if you’re entertained by real-life carnage; frankly I’m not, and when the offscreen voice of one witness declares, It wasn’t a James Bond, it was the real thing, I had to wonder why the music suggested nothing so much as a James Bond thriller. To be fair, the film’s treatment of the Palestinians is a little less rancorous than one might expect from an academy favorite, even if home-movie footage of the wedding of one Jewish victim is brandished with all the subtlety of Roberto Benigni. But I felt throughout that I was being asked to participate in something indecent; this is the perfect evidence for anyone wishing to prove just how bloodthirsty Americans have become. Perhaps Series 7: The Contenders, the recent satire of reality TV, isn’t so excessive after all. 92 min. (JR) Read more
A fitfully employed videographer in Shanghai, who never appears on-screen, gets involved with a go-go dancer and then meets a motorcycle courier who’s convinced that the dancer is actually his girlfriend, who’s vanished mysteriously after jumping off a bridge. This moody Chinese independent (2000, 83 min.), the debut feature by Lou Ye, at first seems like a Wong Kar-wai remake of Vertigo, but in fact it’s something much stranger, drawing on not only Hitchcock and Chungking Express but also Hollywood noir and Hans Christian Andersen to create something relatively fresh from the confluencea postmodern fairy tale about romantic obsession. This is well worth checking out. (JR) Read more
Raoul Walsh directing Joan Collins and Richard Egan in the title roles? I haven’t seen this 1960 ‘Scope feature, but it sounds like it would be hilariousespecially in a synagogue shortly before Purim. With Dennis O’Dea. 109 min. (JR) Read more
Short films and clips featuring the jivey swing conductor and singer between 1931 and 1951, all drawn from the jazz film collection of Bob Koester, owner of the Jazz Record Mart. Doc Cheatham and Jonah Jones are among the many featured artists. Read more
Jerry Garcia proclaimed this 1965 Polish feature his favorite movie, having seen a pared-down version in San Francisco’s North Beach during the 60s, and a few years back he, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola helped to restore it to its original three-hour length. It’s easy to see how it became a cult film: toward the end of the Spanish Inquisition a Napoleonic military officer (Zbigniew Cybulskithe Polish James Dean, though pudgier than usual here) is morally tested by two seductive Muslim princesses, incestuous sisters from Tunisia, and no less than nine interconnected flashbacks recounted by various characters figure in the labyrinthine plot, its tales within tales imparting some of the flavor of The Arabian Nights and occasional echoes of Kafka (mainly in the eroticism). Krzysztof Penderecki’s score runs the gamut from classical music to flamenco to modernist electronic noodling, and the stark, rocky settings are elegantly filmed in black-and-white ‘Scope. The late Wojciech Has was a good journeyman director, but a film of this kind really calls for someone more obsessive, like Roman Polanskior at least someone more personally engaged with the material. Adapted by Tadeusz Kwiatkowski from Jan Potocki’s 1813 novel, it’s certainly an intriguing fantasy and a haunting reflection on the processes of storytelling. Read more
Eight 35-millimeter cartoons, dating from 1948 to the mid-60s, that chart the character development of Daffy Duck (the brilliant Duck Amuck, 1953), Elmer Fudd, the Road Runner, Bugs Bunny, Pepe Le Pew, and Porky Pig. The program closes with Jones’s TV adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966), narrated by Boris Karloff. 85 min. (JR) Read more
White goddess Leni Riefenstahl, who later directed such ideological entertainments as Triumph of the Will, starred in this silent 1929 mountain-climbing epic, codirected by the great G.W. Pabst and the more modestly pictorial mountain film specialist Dr. Arnold Fanck. It’s reputed to be one of her best early efforts as an athletic actress. 150 min. (JR) Read more
John Brahm, a baroque stylist of the 40s best known for The Locket and his remake of Hitchcock’s The Lodger, directed this striking Victorian gothic (1944) about a high-strung and temperamental composer (Laird Cregar) who goes nuts when his mistress (Linda Darnell) betrays him. Bernard Herrmann, himself a high-strung and temperamental composer, contributed the score, and curiously Cregar is made up to look very much like him. With George Sanders and Glenn Langan; the lush and striking cinematography is by Joseph LaShelle. 77 min. (JR) Read more
Olivier Assayas wrote and directed this dark, brittle French comedy (1996) about a film company remaking Louis Feuillade’s silent 1916 serial Les Vampires. This unexpected masterpiece was assembled so quickly that it has an improvisational feel and a surrealist capacity to access its own unconscioustraits it shares with Feuillade’s work. A once prestigious French director of the 60s (Jean-Pierre L Read more
An exceptionally glib satire about reality TV, by writer-director Daniel Minahan, that puts most of its effort into looking as much as possible like a real TV showone that offers a cash prize to the survivor among several contenders picked at random to kill each other. We’re carried through several episodes of death dealing in banal suburban locations, the last a shopping mallthough the film as a whole mercifully lasts only 86 minutes. With Brooke Smith, Glenn Fitzgerald, Marylouise Burke, and Richard Venture. (JR) Read more
Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts are movie stars, so regardless of whether you find their screaming at each other amusing or their characters full of contradictions (he’s a rube sent on a mission by the mob who keeps turning efficient and street-smart, she’s a world-weary hysteric) you should be able to manage, especially if you keep going out for popcorn. For that matter, a seemingly mad dog that periodically turns into a well-trained pet and the title Mexican, an antique pistol that occasionally inspires a heavenly choir, offer even more contradictions and alternate back stories. J.H. Wyman’s plot-heavy and corpse-ridden script gives us a fresh twist every ten minutes or so, on the assumption that we’ll get restless otherwise, the result being that we wind up relatively indifferent to the characters and what happens to them (though James Gandolfini, who isn’t a movie star, manages to be quite touching at times as a gay hood, and Roberts certainly gives it her all, acting up a storm in a vacuum). Directed by Gore Verbinskithe same guy who directed Mouse Hunt, here offering the standard greasy Mexicans favored by Hollywood (who don’t inspire heavenly choirs)with sinister cameos by Bob Balaban and Gene Hackman. Read more
Chris Rock plays an aspiring stand-up comic who dies in an accident and is permitted by the authorities in heaven (Eugene Levy and Chazz Palminteri) to temporarily occupy the body of a middle-aged white millionaire. Then he falls in love with an activist (Regina King) who regards the millionaire as the enemy. This is a remake of a remake (Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait, which remade Here Comes Mr. Jordan), directed by the Weitz brothers (Chris and Paul), whose previous feature was American Pie. It’s slight but likable, and diverting enough as light entertainment. Rock worked with Lance Crouther, Ali Le Roi, and Louis CK on adapting a screenplay by Elaine May and Beatty; also in the cast are Mark Addy, Frankie Faison, Greg Germann, and Jennifer Coolidge. 87 min. (JR) Read more
This dazzling program of work by Michigan artist Kyle Canterbury features two dozen experimental videos, all but one silent, ranging in length from 34 seconds to 11 minutes. Most feature some play between representation and abstraction, with subjects encompassing nature, domestic and public spaces, and politicsA Video depicts George W. Bush’s features decomposing. I don’t feel fully qualified to evaluate Reader critic Fred Camper’s claim that Canterbury has already done for video something like what [Stan] Brakhage has done for film. But such pieces as Color Shifts, Building in Detroit #2, 7 New Videos #3, 7 New Videos #7, and LX evoke for me some of the graphic power of the very different Oskar Fischinger, which goes to show the diversity of Canterbury’s work. And he does some things with rhythm and texture I haven’t seen before in film or video. What’s all the more astonishing is that he was only 16 when he made most of these pieceshe’s 17 now. (JR) Read more
The emotions of purchased sexreal, imagined, manufactured, faked, and rationalizedappear to be the focus of this stark, explicit, pungent tale, shot in varying grades of digital video, about a computer engineer named Richard (Peter Sarsgaard) who pays a lot of money to a woman named Florence (Molly Parker) in return for three days in Las Vegas with her. At various times Florence is shown to be a drummer in a rock band, a stripper, and a prostitute; whether she’s all three or we’re simply seeing Richard’s views of her isn’t always clear, but confusion of this kind is central to the movie. The script is by Ellen Benjamin Wong, based on an original story by director Wayne Wang, Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, and Miranda July. The metaphorical thrust of the story suggests that it might be about the fiction-making processes of writers and filmmakers as well as the delusions of capitalist buying power. It’s also about pain, which both tempers and complicates the eroticism. 86 min. (JR) Read more