This independent American comedy tries very hard to be weird and transgressive, but frankly I had trouble staying interested. The gun of a 24-year-old suburban security guard (Marc Palmieri) is stolen on a bus, and his efforts to recover it lead him on an extended absurdist quest from one character and non sequitur to the next. I enjoyed Pasquale Gaeta’s Peter Falk-ish performance as a relative who helps out, but otherwise I was mainly looking at my watch. David Maquiling wrote and directed, and must have had something or other on his mind. With Nicol Zanzarella. 86 min. (JR) Read more
I’ve never much cared for the films of Volker Schl Read more
Adapted from a Marguerite Duras story that’s read offscreen by J.D. Trow, about sexual encounters between a man and woman, this 1994 film by Jeffrey Skoller explores the male body like a landscape, softly intercutting ocean waves, a bit of found footage, and a lot of very Durasian black leader; the overall effect is legato, lyrical, hypnotic, and incantatory. 43 min. (JR) Read more
Set in the late 18th century, this dazzling epic by Im Kwon-taek (Fly High Run Far) concerns the love between a prostitute’s daughter and the son of a provincial governor, who marry in secret but are then driven apart. Im is Korea’s most prestigious filmmaker (with about 100 features to his credit), and his stirring 2000 drama is both historically resonant and strikingly modern, remarkable for its deft and spellbinding narrative, its breathtaking color, and above all its traditional sung narration, which he periodically shows being performed with drum accompaniment before a contemporary audience. This is one of those masterpieces that would qualify as a musical if Hollywood propagandists hadn’t claimed the genre as their personal property. A must-see. 120 min. (JR) Read more
Danny Glover and Angela Bassett are highly impressive as a quarrelsome derelict couple in this 1999 film adaptation of Athol Fugard’s play about the internal damage caused by racism and poverty in South Africa. Director-screenwriter John Berry staged a successful production of the play off-Broadway in 1970, starring James Earl Jones, and his film, shot on location in and around Cape Town, plays rather daringly with the similarities and differences between theater and cinema, making the locales seem stagy yet using the ‘Scope format in an exciting, dynamic manner that recalls the 50s mise en scene of Nicholas Ray. Berry died shortly after the film was completed, and it stands as a deeply affecting conclusion to a stage and screen career that included acting with Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre in the 30s and being blacklisted by Hollywood in the early 50s. A white man whose family had its ups and downs, economically speaking, Berry always had a particular feeling for what it means to be poor as well as black, and with the help of his wonderful actors he makes the most of it here. 88 min. (JR) Read more
Basically an episodic comedy, Jean-Luc Godard’s Soigne ta droite (1986, 82 min.), a French-Swiss coproduction, features Godard himself as the comic lead, rehearsals of the rock group Rita Mitsouko, a good many gags (some involving golf and travel), and a lot of cameos from well-known French actors, including Jane Birkin, Bernadette Lafont, and Jacques Villeret. The biggest surprise here though is Godard’s modification of his own persona: in contrast to the grumpy, would-be sages of First Name: Carmen and King Lear, his benign and ethereal character is positively Keatonian, with echoes of Tati’s Monsieur Hulot as well. (Early in the film, he executes a surprisingly deft Keaton-like gag of diving through a car window.) The main comic inspiration, by Godard’s own admission, is Jerry Lewis — specifically the airplane sequence in Cracking Up, though what Godard does with it seems even more quizzically eccentric than the model. Godard is also seen grasping a copy of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, which may provide some clues about what he’s up to. This isn’t one of Godard’s best features, though it certainly has its moments, and I much prefer it to his more recent For Ever Mozart. (JR)
Read more
This fundamentalist SF, based on a best-seller by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, is (or was) billing itself as The Christian Entertainment Event of 2000, but seems perfectly timed to coincide with the ascension to office of George W. Bush. It’s a clunky effort Bush could have written and directed. Over 142 million people on the planetincluding all the childrenhave vanished and gone to heaven because they’re true believers. Meanwhile, the Antichrist turns out to be Russian, proving that Joseph McCarthy must have been right all along. The credited director is Vic Sarin and the credited writers are Allan McElroy, Paul Lalonde, and Joe Goodman. Among the cast are Kirk Cameron, Chelsea Noble, Clarence Gilyard, and Brad Johnson, doing what they can with hopeless if weirdly sincere material. 95 min. (JR) Read more
Dopey but charming, this romantic comedyabout a San Francisco wedding planner (Jennifer Lopez) experiencing love at first sight vis-a-vis a pediatrician (Matthew McConaughey) who turns out to be the expectant groom in one of her assignmentsdraws much of its allure from the two leads. Most of the remainder comes from a clear desire to emulate and approximate various second-tier studio musicals and comedies that one might associate with the early 50s. This never rises above such treacle but happily lives up to it every chance it gets. With Bridgette Wilson-Sampras, Justin Chambers, Judy Greer, and Kathy Najimy; written by Pamela Falk and Michael Ellis and directed by Adam Shankman. 100 min. (JR) Read more
A silly but fairly harmless industrial espionage thriller in which Tim Robbins plays a ruthless software billionaire transparently based on Bill Gates. Ryan Phillippe (Cruel Intentions) is the pretty-boy genius programmer in Silicon Valley who gets enlisted into the tycoon’s Portland-based company and satellite communications program, where he starts to become aware of foul play long after the viewer has figured everything out. The paranoid romantic subplot, delirious and intermittently good campy fun, suggests that this movie might have been called I Married a Capitalist, though the nonstop product placementsplus the fact that, given the nonenforcement of antitrust laws, you aren’t likely to see this studio effort in many independent theaterstend to interfere somewhat with this purity of intention. Peter Howitt unexceptionally directed the unexceptional Howard Franklin script; with Rachael Leigh Cook, Claire Forlani, and Yee Jee Tso. 108 min. (JR) Read more
I certainly wanted to like this belatedly released comedy, about the bumbling inefficiency of the CIAthe organization that under the inspired auspices of George Bush sponsored and promoted Saddam Hussein, and also inspired Elaine May’s underrated satire Ishtar. But this is the unfunniest comedy I can recall seeing in ages, and considering that it was copyrighted in 1999, many others must have felt the same way; why it’s being released now is anyone’s guess. The star is cowriter and codirector Douglas McGrath, who also cowrote Bullets Over Broadway; he plays a wimpy grammar teacher who finds himself working for the CIA in Cuba in the early 60s, trying to overthrow Castro (Anthony LaPaglia). As an actor he isn’t bad, and as a scriptwriter he’s no slouch, but when it comes to the direction that’s credited to him and cowriter Peter Askin, the CIA itself might have done a better job. The main instruction to the cast appears to have been Overactperhaps the unfortunate legacy of Askin’s stage backgroundwhich has a murderous effect on the performances of John Turturro, Woody Allen, and Sigourney Weaver, among others. 81 min. (JR) Read more
The English national hair championships pit a former prizewinner (Alan Rickman), who works with his son (Josh Hartnett), against his former wife (Natasha Richardson), who’s been involved with his former model (Rachel Griffiths) for the past decade. This comedy-drama was written by Simon Beaufoy, who brought us The Full Monty, and it has some of the same gamy mix of alternative sexuality and working-class heart; Paddy Breathnach furnishes the adequate direction. 100 min. (JR) Read more
Adrian Fulle wrote and directed this independent feature, though I can’t imagine what differentiates his competently made teenage-sex movie from Hollywood teenage-sex movies, apart from the absence of a studio logo at the beginning. Maybe it’s the independent sense of humor expressed in its dialogue: Women are like Democrats, man. You can’t live with them, but you can sure get fucked by them. Just as you have to rule out the existence of female Democrats to find this funny, you’ll probably have to rule out the existence of independent films unencumbered by studiothink to find this even halfway bearable. Once you’ve accomplished that, you may or may not find that the skillful camera work and adequate performancesby Michael Muhney, Mary Kay Cook, Jon Collins, Jim Slonina, Heidi Mokrycki, and Jeff Andersonenhance this familiar tale of sexual rivalry between roommates and sexual confidence triumphing over insecurity, complete with elevator music. (JR) Read more
Akihiko Shiota’s first feature (1999, 100 min.), improbably based on a Japanese comic strip, is a disturbing look at a teenage boy’s sadomasochistic relationship with a 17-year-old girl he worships. At first he becomes fetishistically attached to her socks, photographs he takes of her legs, and sounds he records in her bathroom; eventually he volunteers to become her slave, which leads to cruel exploitation and diverse humiliations and traps both of them in the same compulsive games. Shiota seems uncertain whether to play this story for laughs or to treat his characters more compassionately, so the film starts wavering and wobbling toward the end, but it’s pungent and unsettling nonetheless. Interestingly, his second feature, Don’t Look Back, made the same year, took on very different material, a sensitive and unsensational story about two ten-year-old boys. (JR) Read more
Made for Austrian TV, Michael Haneke’s serious and reasonably faithful 1997 adaptation of Kafka’s best novel isn’t the best or most interesting film made from the writer’s work; I’d give that honor either to Orson Welles’s flawed but fascinating The Trial (1962) or to Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet’s eccentric rendition of Amerika, Class Relations (1983). But this is almost certainly the truest interpretation of one of Kafka’s novels, all of which were left unfinished; it even literally ends in the middle of a sentence. If memory serves, there’s plenty of Kafka’s humor here as well. 123 min. (JR) Read more
The third feature directed by Sean Penn and the first one that I’ve liked. Adapted by the couple Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski from a 1958 Friedrich D Read more
