Overwritten by Billy Crystal and Peter Tolan, overdirected by Joe Roth, overplayed by most of the cast, yet typically undernourished, this would-be satirical comedy, about a movie-star couple who have broken up but must give interviews together to publicize their final movie, seems very vaguely inspired by the screwball comedies of the 30s. Among the usually efficient actors (including John Cusack, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Hank Azaria, Christopher Walken, and Alan Arkin), only Julia Roberts and Crystal himself (who also produced) emerge relatively unscathed. They appear to be acting in a different, more reasonable movie than the others. 100 min. (JR) Read more
From the Chicago Reader (July 10, 2001). — J.R.
Talent means nothing if you don’t make the right choices, says a middle-aged heist artist and Montreal jazz club owner (Robert De Niro) to his prickly young assistant (Ed Norton). These words of wisdom might have been heeded by the filmmakers — four credited writers, director Frank Oz, and undoubtedly countless others, including four producers — who have needlessly inflated a modest thriller into a top-heavy monolith of wasted secondary actors (Angela Bassett, Gary Farmer, and even to some extent Marlon Brando, who manages to give something approaching a real performance this time rather than a specialty cameo) and fussy details. John Huston (The Asphalt Jungle), Jules Dassin (Rififi), and Stanley Kubrick (The Killing), working on two separate continents in the 50s, with many more characters and shorter running times, did much better jobs with heist thrillers, perhaps because they were creating movies rather than packages. This one’s slightly better than average these days, which means slightly diverting. Howard Shore, who’s done fine work in the past for David Cronenberg, did the derivative pseudojazz score, and there are brief musical cameos by Cassandra Wilson and Mose Allison. Read more
The first English-language feature of Quebecois filmmaker Lea Pool (Set Me Free), this is nicely written as well as filmed, at least if one can tolerate an excessive and rhetorical use of slow motion. It focuses on a girl at a boarding school (Piper Perabo) whose roommate and lover (Jessica Pare) aggressively turns to boys, and on the viewpoint of a third roommate (Mischa Barton) who’s caught between the turmoil of both girls. It’s one sign of the film’s sensitivity that two of the adult characters, played by the inimitable Jackie Burroughs (a teacher) and Graham Greene (a gardener), are every bit as intense as the students. Written by Judith Thompson, who adapted Susan Swan’s novel The Wives of Bath. 100 min. (JR) Read more
This 1946 domestic epic about three World War II veterans returning to civilian life, 172 minutes long and winner of nine Oscars, isn’t considered hip nowadays. Its director, William Wyler, and literary source, MacKinlay Kantor’s novel Glory for Me (adapted here by Robert Sherwood), are far from fashionable, and the real veteran in the cast, Harold Russell, who lost his hands in the war, has occasioned outraged reflections from critic Robert Warshow about challenged masculinity and even sick jokes from humorist Terry Southern. But I’d call this the best American movie about returning soldiers I’ve ever seen — the most moving and the most deeply felt. It bears witness to its times and contemporaries like few other Hollywood features, and Gregg Toland’s deep-focus cinematography is one of the best things he ever did. The rest of the cast — including Dana Andrews, Myrna Loy, Teresa Wright, Fredric March, Cathy O’Donnell, Virginia Mayo, Hoagy Carmichael, and Ray Collins — is strong too. (JR) Read more
This week Facets Multimedia Center kicks off a monthlong retrospective of work by the talented Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai (who will attend selected screenings Friday through Sunday). Pineapple (1983, 78 min.), a fascinating social history of the growing and processing of pineapple, extends back to 1898, when Sanford Dole became the first governor of Hawaii, and leaps geographically between the Dole headquarters in San Francisco, plantations in the Philippines, processing plants in Hawaii, and a wholly automated label-printing plant in Tokyo, contrasting the very different perceptions of management and workers. As in the subsequent Bangkok Bahrain, Gitai experiments with the sound track; here he concentrates on mixing discourses (particularly using a whispered chant and other kinds of music behind the various interviews), which reach a climactic cacophony in the final sequence. It’s an interesting and suggestive technique, though there are times when it becomes more distracting than illuminating. Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Tuesday, July 10, 7:00 and 9:00, 773-281-4114.
–Jonathan Rosenbaum Read more
Facets Multimedia Center is screening these two documentaries by Israeli-born filmmaker Amos Gitai on successive days, and though I don’t like American Mythologies (1981, 104 min.) nearly as much as Field Diary (1982, 82 min.), when viewed as a pair they show that one can often maintain a sharper focus from the center than from the sidelines. American Mythologies, made around the time of the Iranian hostage crisis and Reagan’s rise to power, is accurately described by Gitai as a montage of visual and aural fragments which represent America for me: a very brutal society with a few people on its periphery trying to behave like human beings. The alienation implicit in that remark points to the film’s limited viewpoint, despite fascinating interviews with Jane Fonda (who poignantly swears that her political radicalization is irreversible), the head of programming for NBC, a fashion designer, a Native American woman, and various hippies. The powerful Field Diary, on the other handwhose negative reception in Israel ultimately played a role in Gitai moving to Franceis coherent both formally and thematically, in part because Gitai is intimately acquainted with his subjects: the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank, the invasion of Lebanon, and the ways violence against the Palestinians is ‘legitimised.’ Read more
Ma vie en rose, the debut feature by Belgian filmmaker Alain Berliner, was one of the most popular films shown at the 1997 Cannes film festival, a delightful comedy about a six-year-old boy who decides he wants to be a girl and the various kinds of consternation this produces in his family and community. Significantly, Berliner cites both Tim Burton and Ken Loach as influences; the Burton input is most apparent in the boy’s favorite TV show, a tacky, surreal fantasy with a Barbie-doll heroine that occasionally suggests Pee-wee’s Playhouse, as well as the Burton spin-off feature, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. Rich in understanding and insight, this is some of the best Belgian filmmaking I’ve seen outside of Chantal Akerman’s, and it’s a good deal more accessible. 88 min. In French with subtitles. (JR) Read more
Like John Singleton’s other features, this is far from flawless; at 129 minutes it’s longer than it needs to be, and the music hits you like a sledgehammer at moments when any music at all is redundant and something of an insult. But the characters are so full-bodied and the feelings so raw and complex that I’d call this the best thing he’s done to date–by which I mean the most convincing and serious, telling us at least as much about everyday life in South Central Los Angeles as did Boyz N the Hood, his first movie. The title character, well played by Tyrese Gibson, is a 20-year-old with a pronounced Oedipus complex who lives with his 36-year-old mother (A.J. Johnson), has fathered two kids with separate girlfriends (Taraji P. Henson and Tamara LaSeon Bass), and starts to feel crowded when his mother falls for a reformed gangster (Ving Rhames, also especially good). Sexually explicit both visually and aurally, this shows rare inventiveness in exploring one character’s fantasies during an orgasm. With Omar Gooding and Snoop Dogg. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, City North 14, Crown Village 18, Esquire, Ford City, Gardens, Lawndale, Lincoln Village, Norridge, North Riverside, 62nd & Western. Read more
Does the title refer to the ex-con hero (Ray Winstone), happily retired on the Spanish Costa del Sol, or to his brutal ex-boss (Ben Kingsley), who turns up one day to browbeat him into helping with a bank heist? I don’t know, and after 91 minutes of this movie’s pile-driver aggression, I don’t care. My willingness to stay interested in the plot and be impressed by Kingsley’s show-offy performance as a staccato bully out of Harold Pinter was eventually undermined by the movie’s violent editing and violent sound, which, coming on top of the character, drove violence to the point of redundancy. The director is Jonathan Glazer, purportedly famous for commercials and musical videos and certainly unafraid to make a feature every bit as strident as these things normally are. Louis Mello and David Scinto wrote the script; with Ian McShane and Amanda Redman. (JR) Read more
Ridiculous but occasionally fun, which is more than can be said for Pearl Harbor. Don’t expect to find any recognizable human beings among the characters, but there are at least two fabulous movie starsJohn Travolta as the villain, Halle Berry as the double (or triple, or quadruple) agentand a fashionable Aussie (Hugh Jackman) as the hero, a hacker who breaks encryptions the way Schwarzenegger cracks walnuts. We also get Don Cheadle as an FBI agent and Sam Shepard as a corrupt senator. Also, this being coproduced by Joel Silver, there are all the car explosions you could hope for. The limited but unmistakable wit of Skip Woods’s screenplay hinges in part on trying to conjure up a secret organization that sounds sillier than the FBI or CIA, while Dominic Sena, the music-video specialist who brought us the Gone in Sixty Seconds remake, does a better job this time of directing absurdity in a diverting manner. 99 min. (JR) Read more
John Ford’s third feature with Will Rogers (1935, 80 min.) proved to be their last together, and was released only after the popular actor died in an air crash. Rogers plays a steamboat captain in the 1890s who commands a floating wax museum and dispenses patent medicine with a high alcoholic contentideal Ford material, with two of his favorite screenwriters, Dudley Nichols and Lamar Trotti, on board (adapting a novel by Ben Lucien Berman), as well as Stepin Fetchit, one of his favorite actors. But the movie is a distinct comedown from the previous Ford-Rogers pairing, the sublime Judge Priest, though it’s still an improvement on their first Dr. Bull. Ford complained 20 years later that producer Darryl F. Zanuck cut out most of the comedy, though the Americana that remains still carries a lot of flavor. With Irvin S. Cobb, Francis Ford, Eugene Pallette, and Charles Middleton. (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. This month the Film Center will show 35-millimeter prints of a half dozen of his recent thrillers, made between 1996 and 2000, and I can recommend all three that I’ve seenthough not without certain caveats. All three are fairly grisly, though Kurosawa’s frequent long shots impart a cool, detached tone to the cruelty and violence. And his plots can be difficult to understand, though his visual style is so riveting you might not mind. Eyes of the Spider and Serpent’s Path, 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. The engrossing Cure (1998), which is getting an extended run, 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. Read more
Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming wrote, directed, and star in this watchable, if at times familiar, comedy-drama about an LA couple throwing a dusk-to-dawn party to celebrate their sixth wedding anniversary. Predictably, the dramatic revelations come at periodic intervals and escalate after someone at the party passes out some drugs; less predictable are the revelations themselves and the interesting suggestion that none of them necessarily provides the last word on these people. Shot in digital video by John Bailey; with Jane Adams, Jennifer Beals, Phoebe Cates, Kevin Kline, Gwyneth Paltrow, Parker Posey, and John C. Reilly. 115 min. (JR) Read more
This 1981 release is one of Brian De Palma’s more interesting and better-made thrillers, though it’s even more abjectly derivative than his Hitchcock imitations (borrowing mightily this time from Antonioni’s Blowup, as the title suggests). John Travolta plays a sound-effects man working in Philadelphia who, like many a De Palma hero, finds himself stumbling into trouble. With Nancy Allen and John Lithgow. 107 min. (JR) Read more
Chicago-based Jerry Blumenthal and Gordon Quinn present a selective program of their political and social documentaries, among the best being made anywhere in this country. Only two of their films will be shown complete: What the Fuck Are These Red Squares? (1970, 15 min.) and Taylor Chain I: A Story in a Union Local (1980, 33 min.). The remainder will be excerpted: Home for Life (1967), The Last Pullman Car (1983), Hoop Dreams (1993), and Vietnam, Long Time Coming (1998). It’s too bad they’re not showing anything from their fascinating art documentary Golub (1989), but you can’t have everything. 160 min. (JR) Read more
