John Carpenter at his most enjoyable generally means ‘Scope, working-class sass, kick-ass anti-establishment heroes, typecast villains who individually suggest quiet serial killers and collectively resemble hordes of whooping savages, a minimalist music score by Carpenter himself, and an overall affection for the way action movies looked and sounded 50 years ago. This movie — an action romp in which cops and prisoners go up against vengeful Martian spirits on a colonized Mars in the year 2176 — adds a few more likable ingredients: a flashback structure with several overlapping points of view, great use of Ice Cube and Pam Grier, lap dissolves, and a notion of shifting alliances that keeps things hopping. (Natasha Henstridge as the head cop is pretty lively too.) As in many other Carpenter movies both good and bad, a lot of the cramped settings can be traced back to the original version of The Thing. With Jason Statham, Clea DuVall, and Joanna Cassidy; Larry Sulkis collaborated with Carpenter on the script. 98 min. Burnham Plaza, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, City North 14, Crown Village 18, Ford City, Gardens 7-13, Lawndale, Lincoln Village 1-6, Norridge, North Riverside, 600 N. Michigan, 62nd & Western. Read more
A monster (Jonathan Breck) who likes to eat body parts terrorizes the American heartland — in particular a brother and sister (Justin Long and Gina Philips) on their way home for spring break. The story (what there is of it) doesn’t make much sense, but this is a very scary horror thriller that should keep you either on the edge of your seat or halfway under it. Written and directed by Victor Salva; Francis Ford Coppola is one of the five executive producers. 90 min. (JR) Read more
An unintentional parody of a particular kind of European art moviethe kind that often garners Oscar nominations, as this 1998 film did. An illiterate, overweight, virginal Swedish farmer in his early 40s (Rolf Lassgard) advertises for a young housekeeper who might also keep him company. Lo and behold, a beautiful, mysterious, compliant woman from the city (Helena Bergstrom) turns up. Her presence threatens the farmer’s much younger friend (Johan Widerberg), an insensitive lout who’s been swindling him blind. To be fair, all three lead actors are adroit; but the story, adapted from a short story by H.E. Bates, is both contrived and not very well told. Director-producer-cowriter Colin Nutleywho, incidentally, is married to Bergstromseems to cut away to extraneous details whenever he doesn’t know what to do next, which is often. There’s also a very hard-sell Irish music score by Paddy Maloney of the Chieftains, sex in the rain, and loads of decorative nature photography. 118 min. (JR) Read more
Writer-director Eva Gardos, best known as a film editor, takes on a fascinating autobiographical subjectthe Americanization of a little girl (Kelly Endresz Baniaki) who arrives in the U.S. in the 50s from communist Hungary and grows up during the 60sand treats it competently, though without much freshness or imagination. The movie becomes more interesting when the heroine insists on visiting Budapest as a teenager, and Ghost World’s Scarlett Johansson manages to make her character something more than the usual rebellious movie adolescent. With Nastassja Kinski and Tony Goldwyn. 106 min. (JR) Read more
Two short films featuring Sun Ra, the avant-garde jazz artist whose big band the Arkestra got its start in Chicago. In John Coney’s video Space Is the Place (1974, 63 min.), Sun Ra turns up in Oakland after years in outer space, rapping with ghetto youths and playing cards with the devil. Its lighthearted surrealist high jinks, dressed up with SF trappings and black-power rhetoric, make for pleasant enough viewing, but the music seems strictly incidental. In contrast, the music in Edward O. Bland’s eccentric Chicago-made short Cry of Jazz (1959, 31 min.) is absolutely essential. The paradox here is that Bland’s film centers on jazz and needs various kinds of performance to illustrate its points, yet what’s being played is only adequate; if the music were good enough to distract one from the talk, the film wouldn’t work as well. Lucid and provocative, this is recommended viewing for any jazz novice, one of the best social readings of jazz form I know. (JR) Read more
The prolific Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been at work for nearly two decades, sometimes making straight-to-video features but more recently receiving some belated international recognition. Eyes of the Spider (83 min.) and Serpent’s Path (85 min.), rhyming companion pieces made in 1997, both star Shoh Aikawa and involve yakuza intrigues and a father tracking down the men who kidnapped and killed his little girl; I often couldn’t figure out who was doing what to whom, but I didn’t much care, because the visual sweep of the former and the claustrophobia of the latter were both compelling. Stylistically these are among the most inventive Japanese features I’ve seen in some time, much more unpredictable than Takeshi Kitano’s recent yakuza exercises. (JR) Read more
The prolific Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been at work for nearly two decades, sometimes making straight-to-video features but more recently receiving some belated international recognition. The engrossing Cure (1998, 111 min.) stars Koji Yakusho (Shall We Dance?, The Eel) as a troubled detective exploring a series of murders committed through hypnotic suggestion (as in The Manchurian Candidate), and while its creepy mystery plot is easy enough to follow even when it turns metaphysical, it’s unsatisfying as a story precisely because it aspires to create a mounting sense of dread by enlarging questions rather than answering them. Like other recent thrillers by this director, it’s fairly grisly, though Kurosawa’s frequent long shots impart a cool, detached tone to the cruelty and violence. Stylistically it’s the most inventive Japanese feature I’ve seen in some time, much more unpredictable than Takeshi Kitano’s recent yakuza exercises. (JR) Read more
A middle-aged Parisian who teaches English literature (Charlotte Rampling) loses her husband (Bruno Cremer) when, vacationing with her in the country, he goes off for a swim and never comes back. This impressive feature by Francois Ozon (Water Drops on Burning Rocks) is less concerned with solving the mystery than with charting the wife’s gradual adjustment to the loss, something it handles with both confidence and a remarkable feeling for psychological nuance. Rampling is extraordinary, and the screenplay (by Ozon, Emmanuelle Bernheim, Marcia Romano, and Marina de Van) gives her plenty to work with. Others in the cast include Jacques Nolot and Alexandra Stewart. In French with subtitles. 95 min. (JR) Read more
The first feature of academically minded American indies Scott McGehee and David Siegel was an odd black-and-white ‘Scope thriller predicated on film theory (Suture, 1993). This one is a remake of Max Ophuls’s potent 1949 melodrama The Reckless Momentupdated in some of its gender politics and its fancy water imagery, and watchable enough on its own terms, but not a patch on the original. A housewife, mother, and all-around workhorse in Lake Tahoe (Tilda Swinton) finds she has to cope with a blackmailer (Goran Visnjic) after her gay son appears to have committed a murder that she decides to cover up. This starts off like a Claude Chabrol fable about the criminal impulses needed to preserve a bourgeois home and winds up a would-be love story; it holds one’s interest, but all of it’s been conceived at one remove. 99 min. (JR) Read more
Tony Richardson directed this competent 1959 adaptation of John Osborne’s archetypal (and, alas, archetypally misogynist) Angry Young Man play. Richard Burton (a bit too old for his role) is the antiestablishment Jimmy Porter, Mary Ure is his dumped-on wife, and Claire Bloom is her best friend (and his lover). Probably still watchable today, if only for the brittle dialogue and kitchen-sink realism, but undoubtedly dated as well. Nigel Kneale wrote the script; with Edith Evans and Donald Pleasence. 100 min. (JR) Read more
A star vehicle, not only because its leads were two of the hottest stars in Hong Kong cinema (Tony Leung and the late Leslie Cheung) and a Taiwanese pop star (Chang Chen, who played the 14-year-old hero of Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day), but also because writer-director Wong Kar-wai is something of a star himself. In fact his aggressive mannerist stylethe use of different characters as narrators, the variable speed of Chris Doyle’s frenetic cinematography, the shifts between color and black and whiteforms the core of this 1997 story of doomed love between two men in Buenos Aires, one of whom befriends a straight Taiwanese youth in the same city. Structurally and dramatically this is all over the place, but stylistically it’s gripping, and thematically it suggests an oblique response to the end of Hong Kong’s colonial rule. Incidentally, a friend of mine from Buenos Aires tells me that this film captures that city better than any other. In Cantonese, Mandarin, and Spanish with subtitles. 97 min. (JR) Read more
Chen Kaige’s seldom screened third feature (1987), about the experiences of an uneducated young man who’s assigned to teach at a village school in Yunnan and gets fired after he throws out the Maoist textbook and gains his students’ confidence. It sounds well worth checking out. (JR) Read more
Bert Stern’s film of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival (1960; his only film) features Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong, Eric Dolphy, Chuck Berry, Dinah Washington, Mahalia Jackson, Anita O’Day, Gerry Mulligan, Chico Hamilton, and many others. Shot in gorgeous color, it’s probably the best feature-length jazz concert movie ever made. Despite some distracting cutaways to boats in the opening sections, it eventually buckles down to an intense concentration on the music and the audience’s rapport with it as afternoon turns into evening. Jackson’s rendition of The Lord Read more
The entertaining if facile 1968 original was cowritten by Rod Serling, and though this fancy new version claims to be neither a remake nor a sequel, I’d call it the formerthough one that tries to reconfigure the various commercial elements (SF adventure story, satire, action, surprise ending) rather than duplicate them. The problem is that Serling was a liberal satirist and fabulist (as presumably was Pierre Boulle, author of the source novel Monkey Planet), while the gifts of Tim Burton are chiefly visual. Pictorially, this is sometimes wonderful (and some of the credit should go to production designer Rick Heinrichs). But as satire it’s toothless and at times close to incoherent; its predictable swipes are aimed equally at conservative racists and bleeding-heart liberals, and the screenplay by William Broyles Jr., Lawrence Konner, and Mark Rosenthal doesn’t seem terribly invested in anything. The tone swerves between satire and straight-ahead action and frequently into bits of unintentional camp, such as the snorts and growls (complete with martial-arts flying and lots of pounding violence) of the simians, Charlton Heston’s cameo as a dying Yoda-type ape, and Estella Warren in cavegirl-jailbait attire that’s worthy of black-and-white 50s drive-in fodder. Even a few standard-issue explosions are folded into the mix, reminding us repeatedly that this isn’t so much a story as a set of attractions for kids. Read more
These days, most accounts of John Cassavetes’s work and career tend to be either uncomprehending dismissals, which often wrongly assume that his scripts were mainly improvised by his actors, or uncritical hagiography. At least the hagiography is better informed, and this is especially true of Charles Kiselyak’s 200-minute video documentary, finished last year–possibly the most complete look at the man we’ve had yet and much easier to follow than most of the books published about him. The narration is drawn from Cassavetes’s own words–a drawback as well as a plus, because sometimes he created as much confusion around his work as his detractors–but the biggest value of this chronicle lies in the interviews with most of the writer-director’s main actors, including Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, Seymour Cassel, Lelia Goldoni, and Lynn Carlin, who perceptively discuss their own performances and those of their colleagues. We even get some insights into Cassavetes’s theater work, from Jon Voight and Carol Kane, among others, and into his handling of music in his films–subjects that are usually neglected in other accounts. There’s also a generous supply of clips, many of which will mean a lot more to those who already know the films. To be shown on DigaBeta video as part of the Film Center’s ongoing Cassavetes retrospective. Read more
