Joris Ivens’s fine and powerful The Spanish Earth (1937, 52 min.)possibly the best documentary we have about the Spanish civil war, along with Andre Malraux’s L’espoirhas music by Virgil Thomson and Marc Blitzstein and commentary written as well as read by Ernest Hemingway (it was originally read by Orson Welles, and at least one print of that version still exists). Hemingway, Lillian Hellman, John Dos Passos, and Dorothy Parker raised money to make the film, which is showing with the equally celebrated 1939 Ivens documentary The 400 Million, a 53-minute account of China preparing to struggle against the Japanese invasion of Manchuria that includes rare footage of Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek. (JR) Read more
A high school outcast (D.J. Qualls of Road Trip) decides to get himself expelled and winds up in prison, where a street-smart cell mate (Eddie Griffin) teaches him how to whip people with nothing but a dirty look. This dumb little comedy, the first feature of director Ed Decter, sometimes suggests Jerry Lewis’s The Nutty Professor. It isn’t very good, but it doesn’t seem to care, which turns out to be rather refreshing. David Kendall wrote the script; with Zooey Deschanel, Eliza Dushku, Illeana Douglas, and Lyle Lovett as the hero’s father. 100 min. (JR) Read more
I’ve only seen three of these five short films, but all three are exciting and essential viewing, displaying Ivens’s talent as a poetic as well as socially conscious filmmaker. The Bridge (1928, 11 min.), his first famous film, focuses on a bridge in Rotterdam, while the brilliant 13-minute Rain gives equal attention to a rainfall in Amsterdam. Ivens had to hide from police to make Borinage (1934, 30 min.), about a coal miners’ labor struggle in Belgium, and though he was commissioned to make Philips Radio (1931, 30 min.), his first sound film, by the Dutch factories of the eponymous electronics company, the film is a critique as well as a celebration of the industrial processes involved (and surely one of the greatest industrials ever made). New Earth (1933, 30 min.), partly about the creation of a new lake in the Netherlands, is similarly ambivalentand equally impressive. (JR) Read more
Two early and key sound documentaries by the great Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens. Komsomol (1932, 50 min.), which I haven’t seen, is a tribute to young workers in the Soviet Union as they build a blast furnace in the Ural Mountains. Also known as Song of Heroes, it was the first collaboration between Ivens and composer Hanns Eisler, and reportedly the first film ever made by a foreigner in the USSR. Power and the Land (1940, 33 min.), the first of Ivens’s many American films during the 40s, was commissioned by Pare Lorentz for the U.S. Film Service, cowritten by Ivens, Edwin Locke, and Stephen Vincent Benet, shot in part by the great Floyd Crosby, and scored by Douglas Moore. A stirring look at the coming of electricity to post-Depression farms, it concentrates on a particular family in Ohio that Ivens lived with, and it’s not unworthy of James Agee and Walker Evans’s classic book about Depression sharecroppers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Critic Elliott Stein has rightly called it Norman Rockwell without the mush. (JR) Read more
Sad to say, this strident satire about media hypocrisy and overkill, by French-Canadian writer-director Denys Arcand, makes Bamboozled look pretty good. It follows a model (Jessica Pare) on her rapid rise up the ladder to successyou can’t describe any part of this movie without landing in clichesand its contempt is so overpowering it’s hard to laugh at anything. Sitting through this barrage of all-purpose insults aimed at obvious targets was an unenlightening chore. With Dan Aykroyd, Charles Berling, Robert Lepage, Camilla Rutherford, Thomas Gibson, and Frank Langella. 100 min. (JR) Read more
A charming, albeit slightly overextended (even at 81 minutes) multiracial sex comedy, this first feature by writer-director Kwyn Bader works as well as it does mainly because of its charismatic cast, starting with Hill Harper as the hero who recounts his youthful adventures with various Jezebels (i.e., other men’s women). Among the women who stand out are Nicole Ari Parker, Sandrine Holt, and Laurel Holloman. Nothing extra special, but I had a nice time. (JR) Read more
Francisco J. Lombardi’s 2000 adaptation of a Mario Vargas Llosa novel, also known as Captain Pantoja and the Special Services, reminds me of some of the duller John Ford hagiographies of the 50s about military men, such as The Wings of Eagles. A rather stiff captain in the Peruvian army, happily married and regarded as a moral exemplar, is ordered to put together a unit of young prostitutes to service soldiers stationed in remote parts of the Amazon jungle, once it’s tacitly decided by the higher-ups that local rapes diminish when the men are less sexually frustrated. The captain eventually loses his cool after falling for one of the women, and his failure to bribe a corrupt radio journalist leads to a potential scandal. This is nicely put together as storytelling, but the degree to which the prostitutes are sentimentally patronized by the film while the army officials are defended even in their hypocrisy smacks of the worst middle-class conformity. In Spanish with subtitles. 137 min. (JR) Read more
Is it possible for a movie to be intoxicatingly pretty without quite attaining beauty? Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s 1997 fantasy about the nomadic Ghashghai of southern Iran, who weave colorful carpets that tell stories, is a delightful treasure chest of colors, costumes, landscapes, magical-realist details, and very simple charactersall of whom tend to have the allure of trinkets and living legends. This romantic parable seems less personal than Makhmalbaf’s more troubled urban dramas (The Peddler, Marriage of the Blessed, A Moment of Innocence), but it’s also more accessible, and the magical moods keep one fairly spellbound. Hints of a lament about the sacrifices made by a young woman for her family and against her romantic nature (she longs to marry a mysterious stranger who rides after her tribe) are never supported with a clear take on the patriarchy that oppresses her, but the fairy-tale seductiveness piques one’s imagination throughout. In Farsi with subtitles. 75 min. (JR) Read more
I’ve never been persuaded that Jacques Demy’s second feature (1962, 79 min.) ranks alongside the masterpiece that preceded it (Lola) or those that followed (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort). It was made during a preproduction delay on Umbrellas and has all the advantages as well as the drawbacks of a relatively hasty preparation. Alternately lighthearted and melancholy, it’s a striking look at obsessional behavior, as a bank clerk on holiday in Nice (Claude Mann) gets involved with a compulsive gambler (Jeanne Moreau); even Michel Legrand’s theme music has a hint of repetition compulsion. The film was clearly influenced in certain particulars by Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, and in many ways it’s darker than the other early Demys, even the explicitly tragic Umbrellas. Moreau gives an interesting performance despite — or is it because of? — the fact that she’s dressed like a camp icon, whereas the sheer drabness of Mann’s character makes him a very Demy-like exemplar of the quotidian. After Raoul Coutard’s exquisitely lit black-and-white ‘Scope work in Lola, cinematographer Jean Rabier fills the wide-screen frame with sadder gray tones — beautifully restored in 2000 by Demy’s widow, Agnes Varda — that provide an ironic counterpoint to the lush casino, hotel, and beach settings of the Cote d’Azur. Read more
