Though the feeling persists that this movie wants to bring the spirit of Neil Simonmeaning the Jewish middle class and the New York suburbsto lesbian farce, this adaptation by costars Jennifer Westfeldt and Heather Juergensen of their own off-Broadway play is both better and worse than that description implies. Better because the cast is wonderful and the story is commendably free of the sectarian us-versus-them tone of many romantic gay movies, and worse because the jazzy vocals are too strident and Charles Herman-Wurmfeld’s direction lacks the polish of a well-mounted Simon comedy. Still, this is possibly the funniest lesbian romp since Go Fish. 94 min. (JR) Read more
Chantal Akerman’s greatest film–made in 1975 and running 198 minutes–is one of those lucid puzzlers that may drive you up the wall but will keep you thinking for days or weeks. Delphine Seyrig, in one of her greatest performances, plays Jeanne Dielman, a Belgian woman obsessed with performing daily rounds of housework and other routines (including occasional prostitution) in the flat she occupies with her teenage son. The film follows three days in Dielman’s regulated life, and Akerman’s intense concentration on her daily activities–monumentalized by Babette Mangolte’s superb cinematography and mainly frontal camera setups–eventually sensitizes us to the small ways in which her system is breaking down. By placing so much emphasis on aspects of life and work that other films routinely omit, mystify, or skirt around, Akerman forges a major statement, not only in a feminist context but also in a way that tells us something about the lives we all live. In French with subtitles. Admission is free; a new 16-millimeter print will be shown. Northwestern Univ. Block Museum of Art, 1967 South Campus Dr., Evanston, Monday, February 25, 7:00, 847-491-4000. Read more
A young Catholic in San Francisco (Josh Hartnett), still pining for his ex-girlfriend (Vinessa Shaw), takes a vow of sexual abstinence for the 40 days of Lent, and after his flatmate and coworkers place bets on whether or not he’ll make it, he meets the woman of his dreams (Shannyn Sossamon). Scripted by Robert Perez and stylishly directed by Michael Lehmann, the film doesn’t shy away from cheap gags when it runs out of good ones, and if I were a Catholic I might be offended in spots (after getting himself chained to his bed, the hero compares himself to Jesus). But this is smooth and at times even sensuala well-oiled machine. With Paulo Costanzo and Griffin Dunne. 93 min. (JR) Read more
This powerful feature by Laurent Cantet (Human Resources) probably generated more buzz in 2001all of it deservedthan any other European feature shown at Venice and Toronto. With uncanny precision and concentration, it follows the progress of a middle-class, middle-aged French businessman (Aurelien Recoing) who gets fired and hides the truth from his family, pretending to be away on business trips while spending much of his time in or near Switzerland. Written by Cantet and Robin Campillo and based very loosely on a true story, it manages to register as a resonant contemporary fable while sustaining narrative interest throughout its 132 minutes. In French with subtitles; the French title is L’emploi du temps. (JR) Read more
Started in 2000 near the Afghan border in Iran and completed the following spring, this is one of Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s strangest films. An Afghan woman (Nelofer Pazira), exiled to Canada, goes home to look for her sister, who still suffers under the Taliban and has threatened to kill herself during a forthcoming solar eclipse. This may sound like a setup for action and suspense, but the narrative is much more splintered than that, combining poetry, black comedy, social protest, and a sharp sense of actuality. The acting is mainly horrendous and the English dialogue is frequently awkward, but they’re overcome by the beautiful colors and settings and a grim sense of the uncanny spilling over into twisted humor. I didn’t even mind when the narrative stopped abruptly; in retrospect, Kandahar seems like an experimental film, a horror story, and a slapstick comedysometimes all at once. In Farsi with subtitles; also known as The Sun Behind the Moon. 85 min. (JR) Read more
Kon Ichikawa’s 1963 masterpiece, one of the most dazzling and stylistically audacious Japanese films ever made, has to be seen to be believed–though in Japan, interestingly enough, it’s never been regarded as anything but a potboiler. The film was putatively made to celebrate the 300th film appearance of box-office idol Kazuo Hasegawa, and is in fact a remake of a 1938 film by Teinosuke Kinugasa that featured Hasegawa in the same parts. Ichikawa uses it as an unprecedented opportunity for unbridled stylistic play (the film’s use of ‘Scope and color is breathtaking), Shakespearean complication (Hasegawa plays two parts, one of them in drag), and a fascinating investigation into the relationship between theater and cinema. The hero is a Kabuki female impersonator out to avenge the death of his parents, and the plot proceeds somewhat like a film noir (with revelatory flashbacks), while adroitly mixing onstage and offstage action. To make the campy mixture even weirder, Ichikawa periodically uses contemporary jazz on the sound track. One can easily see here why Disney is one of Ichikawa’s favorite filmmakers, but perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this singular experiment is its demonstration that theater and film are more kissing cousins than distant relations–the more stage bound the film gets, the more cinematic it becomes. Read more
The only time I find Britney Spears completely intolerable is when she starts to singthe soft-core number that practically opens this picture, which has her bouncing around in her underwear, being an exception. And this being a movie coproduced by MTV, Spears or someone else is singing full throttle every time a car begins to move or someone enters a club. It’s supposed to be a teen movie about three pals (blue-collar Spears, trailer trash Taryn Manning, and upscale Zoe Saldana) who take off from Georgia for Hollywood with a mysterious musician (Anson Mount) who has a car, yet despite the road markers, practically all of it could have been shot inside a couple of square miles. The characters are only slightly less boilerplate than the settings. Dan Aykroyd plays Spears’s dad and Kim Cattrall her estranged mom; a few awful sequences are devoted to a poem that Spears’s character writes and Mount’s sets to music, yielding the hit single I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman. Tamra Davis directed the formulaic Shonda Rhimes script, and when the cast is shown during the final credits repeatedly cracking up in blown takes, one would like to think they were laughing at some of the lines they were expected to deliver. Read more
The undisputed king of the cornball concept, Kevin Costner has an uncanny aptitude for gravitating toward the dopiest projects in sight, but this time he’s outdone himself. A Chicago doctor in charge of emergency services, he’s been traumatized by the loss of his saintly wife, who’s died on a medical mission to Venezuela; convinced that she’s trying to speak to him through various near-death patients, he awaits the confirmation of his mystic theories that only bad movies can bring. The clunky script is by David Seltzer, Brandon Camp, and Mike Thompson, and someone at Universal must have decided the ideal director for such a delicate topic was Tom Shadyac, best known for the inimitable fart jokes of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Eddie Murphy’s The Nutty Professor. The secondary cast includes such talented hands as Linda Hunt and Kathy Bates, who labor admirably but can’t save the patient. 103 min. (JR) Read more
Superior in many respects to the higher-profile Neil Jordan remake, this 1955 adaptation of what I’d call Graham Greene’s best novel costars Van Johnson and Deborah Kerr as doomed lovers during the London blitz. Edward Dmytryk directed; with John Mills and Peter Cushing. 105 min. (JR) Read more
In old-fashioned industry terms, this 2001 indie feature qualifies as a sleepera low-budget effort that’s much better than it has any right to be. Writer-director Daniel M. Cohen, a former Pennsylvania diamond salesman whose father and grandfather worked in the same trade, tells the quiet but absorbing tale of a middle-aged salesman (Robert Forster at his best) who’s forced to retire after a heart attack but trains a rookie (Donnie Wahlberg) to take on his clients before he leaves. The second part concentrates on the rookie’s protracted efforts to find a prostitute for the older man, and though this stretch has a few rough spots, the whole thing is resolved in a fairly satisfying (if unexpected) manner. This may not have gotten much publicity, but it’s a lot more engaging than most movies that have; Forster alone makes it unforgettable. 100 min. (JR) Read more
The original 1990 pilot for David Lynch’s mystery series, with 15 minutes of extra footage, including a solution of sorts. It’s a lot better than what followed. 113 min. (JR) Read more
Released in 1975, near the end of Arthur Penn’s most productive period (which began in 1967 with Bonnie and Clyde), this haunting psychological thriller ambitiously sets out to unpack post-Watergate burnout in American life. Gene Hackman plays an LA detective tracking a runaway teenager (Melanie Griffith in her screen debut) to the Florida Keys while evading various problems of his own involving his father and his wife. The labyrinthine mystery plot and pessimistic mood suggest Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald, and like them screenwriter Alan Sharp has more than conventional mystery mechanics on his mind. One of Penn’s best features; his direction of actors is sensitive and purposeful throughout. With Jennifer Warren, Susan Clark, Edward Binns, Harris Yulin, Kenneth Mars, and James Woods. 95 min. A 35-millimeter print will be shown. Northwestern Univ. Block Museum of Art, 1967 South Campus Dr., Evanston, Thursday, January 31, 9:00, 847-491-4000. Read more
Hearing in advance about the formal experimentation by independent writer-director Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness) in this feature raised my hopes, but I was disappointed to find that Solondz is now reduced to treating his characters like puppets. His lack of regard for them fits in fairly well with his division of the universe between sadistic predators and hapless victims, but not with the viewer’s desire to consider the fates of actual people. In the first and better episode, Fiction, sexual intrigues interface with a creative-writing class, and Solondz tweaks various PC reflexes about race and disability. The second, Non-Fiction, which is roughly twice as long and three times as loose, involves a disgruntled documentary filmmaker taking on a dysfunctional suburban family with a maid from El Salvador. There’s undoubtedly food for thought here if you dig for it, but the things Solondz does to his actors, supposedly in the interests of satire, didn’t make me want to reach for a shovel. With Selma Blair, Leo Fitzpatrick, Robert Wisdom, Paul Giamatti, Mark Webber, John Goodman, and Julie Hagerty. 88 min. (JR) Read more
Kon Ichikawa’s odd and magisterial docudrama of 1963 (also known as My Enemy, the Sea), beautifully filmed in ‘Scope and color, follows the true adventures of a young Japanese who sailed a 19-foot yacht from Osaka to San Francisco over 94 days in 1962. Alternating between scenes of this journey and flashbacks showing the hero’s various preparations and his overall estrangement from his family, Ichikawa makes this story a fascinating and often comic study of obsession and a striking portrait of a solitary consciousness, full of graphic and compositional brilliance. 97 min. A new 35-millimeter print will be shown. Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, Wednesday, January 23, 6:00, 312-846-2800. Read more
Dana Janklowicz-Mann and Amir Mann’s fascinating 2002 documentary focuses on a little-known historical sidebar of World War IIthe Jewish settlements in Shanghai, which included about 20,000 German Jews (who were able to emigrate there without passport control) and Jews from Baghdad and Russia who’d already settled there. Basically a talking-head film in English, augmented by period photographs and footage of a recent return trip by many German Jews, this was visibly shot on digital video, but that fact stopped bothering me once I became absorbed in the material, which was very quickly. Especially interesting are the complex relations among the residents of the ghetto, their amicable Chinese neighbors (many of whom were even poorer than the Jews), the Japanese soldiers occupying the city, and the more well-to-do Iraqi Jews (who were British subjects) and Americans; these last two groups eventually wound up in internment camps outside the city. 95 min. (JR) Read more
