With no prior training in film, 21-year-old Londoner Marc Singer set out to make this 16-millimeter black-and-white documentary (2000) about the homeless people living in the tunnels under New York’s Penn Station. Singer’s six-year questincluding a brief stint of being homeless himselfdeserves notice, and in a way I’m disappointed that the film doesn’t go into greater detail about it. But what’s most remarkable and fascinating here are the squatters, who do a pretty good job of explaining themselves without any outside narrator (and who, in countless ways, assisted Singer in shooting the film). The lives of these people inside their shacks are full of surprises (one keeps several dogs as pets, another shaves with an electric razor and a broken mirror) as well as grim confirmations (the self-loathing misery of a crackhead who lost her children in a fire), but the things we don’t know about them also significantly shape our experience of the film. 84 min. (JR) Read more
This seminal 63-minute experiment by French director Jackie Raynal was part of a group of radical films financed by heiress Sylvina Boissonnas between 1968 and ’70. Raynal, a film editor at the time, made this 35-millimeter film starring herself during a visit to Barcelona. Instead of a story it offers a flow of sequential events, mainly without dialogue, that formally rhyme, so that the title (two times) refers to her methodthough some things in the film appear three, four, or five times, always with distinct variations. Years later, faced by a team of feminist film theorists, Raynal admitted that the film is partially about the representation of the image of woman as a sign, but apparently in the more footloose, less gender-conscious 60s she was more interested in exploring the sexy forms of duplicity between various sequences, their secret points of accord and strongest points of tension. If I wanted to convey the excitement of France in 1968, this brave, pleasure-driven provocation would undoubtedly carry me part of the way. (JR) Read more
I found this 2000 follow-up to Waiting for Guffman funnier than its predecessor, in part because the characters are regarded with more affection and less snobbery, even if most are still yokels. The putative plot turns on the 125th annual Mayflower Kennel Club Dog Show in Philadelphia, where the various comic grotesques converge. Christopher Guest, who directed from a script he wrote with costar Eugene Levy, expertly plays one of the less funny characters, a southern fishing and hunting expert with a hound; Levy is funnier as a yahoo suburbanite salesman accompanied by his once promiscuous wife (Catherine O’Hara). Funniest of all is Fred Willard, as an inane TV commentator who speaks exclusively in non sequiturs. Parker Posey and Michael Hitchcock play a hysterical young couple who treat their pet like a neurotic child, and even more overdone are the gay and lesbian contestants. PG-13, 90 min. (JR) Read more
In his second feature, which like the first deals with presidential politics, writer-director Rod Lurie, a former film reviewer, doesn’t ask us to take seriously the idea of nuking Baghdad. He made that mistake the first time, in a thriller laughably entitled Deterrence. Here he wisely keeps to domestic matters, specifically to the question of whether a senator (Joan Allen), selected by the president (Jeff Bridges) to replace a deceased vice president, will be able to take office despite allegations of a sexual scandal during her college days. The movie takes a convincing stand about this matter, arguing that the truth is nobody’s business but the senator’s. Gary Oldman plays the villain, a McCarthyite senator and all-around meanie who thinks otherwise and mounts a Starr-like investigation. Bridges and Allen are so bracingly good (especially the former) that you’re encouraged to overlook how manipulative the proceedings are. Deterrence was no less ruthlessly mechanical and effective in its operations, but this time what’s being marketed isn’t the mass slaughter of innocents but some version of feminism, and as a consequence I enjoyed having my pockets picked a lot more. Nevertheless, the overall process remains theft. And not only are our reflexes exploited but also other movies, starting with Advise and Consent. Read more
An excellent documentary by Mark Jonathan Harris (2000), narrated by Judi Dench, that chronicles the experiences of a few members of the Kindertransportabout 10,000 children from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, most of them Jewish, who were saved from the Holocaust by parents who packed them off to England in the late 30s. Contemporary interviews have been combined with highly evocative home movies and still photographs of the children with their real as well as their adopted families, and the strength of this epic story rests above all in the experiences and personalities of the men and women they have become. Emerging from their collective accounts is a sense of a lost paradise. To my taste, the only serious drawback to this absorbing film is Harris’s unimaginative adherence to documentary convention, which obliges him to illustrate the voice-overs even when the material matches the narratives only in fictional terms; unless we try to sort out the genuinely illustrative documents from the fanciful, we get stuck in an alienated zone of bland acceptance that serves neither the subject nor the people involved. 122 min. (JR) Read more
Recent American movies have been so impoverished in their treatment of moral issues that when one actually tries to say somethinganythingabout the way we live, I’d like to encourage it. But the truth is that this programmatic Christian parable is pretty unbearableglib, often myopic, and reeking with sentimentality and self-pity. Any recent Iranian feature that comes to mind could teach this movie lessons in ethics and common sense. The model here is obviously American Beauty, right down to the musical score, whose suggestion of New Age wind chimes is apparently explained by the presence of Kevin Spacey in the cast. Challenged by his mysteriously scarred teacher (Spacey) to make the world a better place, an 11-year-old boy (Haley Joel Osment) takes in a homeless heroin addict (James Caviezel), to the consternation of the boy’s struggling mother (Helen Hunt), a sometime go-go dancer and waitress who is trying to overcome her own alcoholism. What the title means is that the world would be a wonderful place if you started performing good deeds for strangers, expecting nothing in return. Mimi Lederwho previously directed The Peacemaker, about the virtues of American butt kickingapparently believes in this message too. Leslie Dixon adapted a novel by Catherine Ryan Hyde. Read more
As far as I can tell, the closest the Chicago International Film Festival comes to having what the French call a politique is its willingness or determination to show all the films of Claude Lelouch (A Man and a Woman). This one, a comedy called Une pour toutes in French, features both Anne Parillaud and Anouk Aimee in its cast, and is about thee actresses and an airline attendant who hatch a scam to seduce wealthy men out of their money. 123 min. (JR) Read more
Judging from the scene excerpted in Kevin Brownlow and David Gill’s documentary Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow, this 1932 feature is a disheartening example of how the great comedian was misused and abused at MGM. Though he shared star billing, Keaton plays second fiddle to Jimmy Durante, whose aggressive verbal comedy overwhelms his more subtle silent style. Edward Sedgwick directed this adaptation of the stage comedy Her Cardboard Lover; among the supporting players are Irene Purcell, Gilbert Roland, and Polly Moran. 73 min. (JR) Read more
