This 1966 release could be as dumb as its title, but the planet is actually Venus, the footage mainly from a Russian movie (Planet of Storms), and the director Curtis Harrington, working under the pseudonym Jonathan Sebastian. With Basil Rathbone (whose scenes were shot on the sets of Planet of Blood) and Faith Domergue. 80 min. (JR) Read more
A creepy portrait of American helplessness (2001, 91 min.) by writer-director Tim McCann, whose only previous feature is Desolation Angels (1995). The title, taken from a sound collage on a Beatles album, refers to a TV commercial closely studied by a young schizophrenic in Manhattan (Michael Risley), who believes it’s sending him secret messages. As in his earlier film, McCann is something of a pathologist, but the object of his scrutiny is less the schizophrenic than the way practically everyone in his orbit tries or doesn’t try to cope with himfriends, relatives, acquaintances, employers, doctors, HMO bureaucrats (tellingly, many of the social functionaries are named after film noir directors: Karlson, Lang, Fuller, Hathaway). The only person who’s really attending to him is his fiancee (Hal Hartley discovery Adrienne Shelley), though she doesn’t get much help from anyone else. Spalding Gray has a hilarious cameo as the director of the commercial, whose vanity blinds him to the hero’s madness when he’s asked to give an interview, but in fact just about everyone in this sharp, passionate feature is chillingly good. (JR) Read more
Jean-Luc Godard’s devastating 1991 film about the collapse of the Berlin Wall is probably the most underrated and neglected of his major late films, perhaps because its hour-long running time makes it difficult to program theatrically. The basic conceit is that Lemmy Caution, the American-style tough guy of Godard’s Alphaville–Eddie Constantine in his last performance–has been working as a mole in East Berlin since the 60s; cast adrift in West Germany, he wanders through a puzzling post-cold war landscape littered with historical memories of various kinds. Sorrowful and funny, bittersweet and elegiac, Germany Year 90 Nine Zero has an emotional directness rare in Godard’s work, and it’s certainly the most accessible of his late films. Also on the program is Alain Resnais’ extraordinary documentary Night and Fog (1956, 32 min.), one of the first and still one of the best cinematic treatments of the Holocaust. Written by Jean Cayrol (who subsequently scripted Resnais’ Muriel), with music by Hanns Eisler, the film is both a formal and a philosophical precursor to Shoah in its use of contemporary death-camp locations. The Godard film, screening in a 16-millimeter print, is in French and German, the Resnais, screening in 35-millimeter, is in French; both are subtitled. Read more
Todd Haynes’s best feature to date–a provocative companion piece to his underrated Safe (1995), which also starred Julianne Moore as a lost suburban housewife but is otherwise quite different. This brilliantly and comprehensively captures the look, feel, and sound of glamorous 50s tearjerkers like All That Heaven Allows, not to mock or feel superior to them but to say new things with their vocabulary. The story, set in 1957 and accompanied by a classic Elmer Bernstein score, concerns a traditional if well-to-do “homemaker” who falls in love with her black gardener (a superb performance by Dennis Haysbert) around the time that she discovers her husband (Dennis Quaid) is a closeted homosexual. Frankly, I find this movie more emotionally powerful, more truthful about the 50s, and more meaningful than any of the Technicolor Douglas Sirk pictures it evokes, even though it trades in obvious artifice in a way that the originals never did. Though technically an independent feature, this is in fact the best Hollywood movie around, telling the kind of story that might have been told half a century ago if a contemporary filmmaker had been transported back to the studio system and given a free hand. Don’t miss it. 107 min. Read more