Anne-Sophie Birot’s psychologically acute first feature (2000), which explores the passionate but foundering friendship between two teenage girls, would have made a swell entry in the excellent mid-90s French TV series All the Boys and Girls in Their Time, for which Andre Techine, Chantal Akerman, and Claire Denis (among other filmmakers) dramatized stories set during the years they were teenagers. Though this film has a contemporary setting, it shares with the aforementioned directors’ entries a frankness about teenage sexuality that French filmmakers seem especially comfortable with. Birot’s disturbing scenario implies that the fathers of teenage girls complicate their developing sexuality, either through absence or excessive presence. The film begins with the more promiscuous girl (Isild Le Besco) as she spends her summer in a Brittany coastal village, then boldly switches to her troubled best friend back home (Karen Alyx) before bringing the two together for an uneasy reunion. 101 min. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, August 9 through 15. Read more
As a director Clint Eastwood often follows his own bent, but as an actor he seems more interested in following the whims of his audience. This detective thriller he directed and stars in often comes across as another Dirty Harry entry in disguise; the Eastwood hero may be a little different (an FBI man in forced retirement after heart transplant surgery who’s persuaded to hunt down his heart donor’s killer), but the serial killer he’s after is standard issue. This is a picture at war with itself: the ailing, aging hero performs with superhuman fitness and stamina, and his friends and coworkers tell him he looks like shit. Fun as long as it stays with its more mundane peripheral characters (Anjelica Huston, Tina Lifford, Alix Koromzay), this becomes tiresome whenever it falls back on generic types (e.g., Paul Rodriguez’s comic Mexican cop, Igor Jijikine’s Russian heavy); in between are Jeff Daniels and Wanda De Jesus providing the hero’s immediate backup. Brian Helgeland’s script adapts a novel by Michael Connelly. 111 min. (JR) Read more
No French people were harmed during the making of this film, reads a jokey disclaimer during the final credits, and since to all appearances no French person was associated in any way with this miserable attempt at a comedy, the filmmakers might have a point. Yet French people are, like Texans, a part of the human race; and out of self-disgust, it appears, rather than any satiric intent worthy of the label, this movie tries very hard to slime both these types despite knowing little about either. Jane McGregor plays a Texan high school cheerleader whose life is taken over by a French exchange student (Piper Perabo) who, for reasons never explained, takes the same French course as the heroine. The rest of the movie is equally thoughtful. Melanie Mayron directed the tiresome script by Lamar Damon and Robert Lee King; with Trent Ford, Julie White, Brandon Smith, and Michael McKean. 93 min. (JR) Read more
The last major work of the late, great American independent Shirley Clarke (The Connection, Portrait of Jason, The Cool World), this 1985 documentary about the innovative and singular jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman finds her straining at times to match his eclecticism. (Among the interview subjects are William S. Burroughs and Buckminster Fuller.) The film’s biggest limitation may be its focus on a single piece, Skies of America, through many performances and incarnations over a seven-year period, which stretch geographically from Fort Worth and Berkeley to Morocco and Italya good idea in theory, but the third-stream trappings of the piece make it less than ideal for this kind of workout. Still, this ambitious and affectionate effort to capture an elusive subject is undoubtedly worth a look. 90 min. (JR) Read more
Imagine combining bad imitations of the Ace Ventura and Austin Powers movies and you’ll have a rough idea of this feeble Dana Carvey farce about an Italian-American named Pistachio Disguisey who, like his father and grandfather, is supposedly a master impersonator. The movie has to enlist Bo Derek and Jesse Ventura to achieve imitations of them, and George W. Bush in the flesh would have been much funnier than this movie’s impersonation. The only time I chuckled was when Carvey tried to approximate a giant turtle. Percy Andelin Blake directed; with Jennifer Esposito, Mark Devine, and Harold Gould (2002). 80 min. (JR) Read more
If you ever suspected that assholes are running the world, this documentary adapting producer and former actor Robert Evans’s autobiography, narrated with relish by Evans himselfthe cinematic equivalent of a Vanity Fair article, complete with tuxes and swimming poolsoffers all the confirmation you’ll ever need. A particularly telling moment occurs when Evans boasts about convincing his pal Henry Kissinger to attend a premiere just before flying to Europe on a diplomatic mission, leading one to speculate whether the world would be different today if Evans had become secretary of state and won the Nobel Peace Prize in the mid-70s and Kissinger had been pegged to play Irving Thalberg and a matador, then star in The Fiend Who Walked the West. Evans is equally proud of having produced Love Story and Chinatown, and his friendship with such comrades in arms as Kissinger and Peter Bart, the current editor of Variety, is further evidence or how wideor how narrowhis talents are. He’s also not bad at impressionswhether he’s imitating Kissinger or his producer pals. Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein do a swell job of making this self-dramatization entertaining. 93 min. (JR) Read more
If you ever suspected that assholes are running the world, this 2002 documentary adapting producer and former actor Robert Evans’s autobiography, narrated with relish by Evans himself–the cinematic equivalent of a Vanity Fair article, complete with tuxes and swimming pools–offers all the confirmation you’ll ever need. A particularly telling moment occurs when Evans boasts about convincing his pal Henry Kissinger to attend a premiere just before flying to Europe on a diplomatic mission, leading one to speculate whether the world would be different today if Evans had become secretary of state and won the Nobel Peace Prize in the mid-70s and Kissinger had been pegged to play Irving Thalberg and a matador, then star in The Fiend Who Walked the West. Evans is equally proud of having produced Love Story and Chinatown, and his friendship with such comrades in arms as Kissinger and Peter Bart, the current editor of Variety, is further evidence or how wide–or how narrow–his talents are. He’s also not bad at impressions–whether he’s imitating Kissinger or his producer pals. Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein do a swell job of making this self-dramatization entertaining. 93 min. Read more
A dense and subtle masterpiece from Iran (1989, 97 min.) by the highly talented Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry), this documentary–or is it pseudodocumentary?–follows the trial of an unemployed film buff in Tehran who impersonated acclaimed filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Marriage of the Blessed, Gabbeh, Kandahar) and became intimate with a well-to-do family while pretending to prepare a film that was to feature them. To complicate matters further, Kiarostami persuades all the major people involved to reenact what happened, finally bringing the real Makhmalbaf together with his impersonator for a highly emotional exchange. A great deal of the implicit comedy here comes from the way “cinema” changes and inflects the value and nature of everything taking place–the original scam, the trial, the documentary Kiarostami is making, and so on. Much acclaimed in France for its fascinating take on the cinematic apparatus, the film combines fiction with nonfiction in a novel and provocative manner: Werner Herzog has called this the greatest of all documentaries about filmmaking, and he may not be far off–if only because no other film does more to interrogate certain aspects of the documentary form itself. In Farsi with subtitles; a 35-millimeter print will be shown. Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. Read more
The greatest film to date by poet, critic, curator, and director Jonas Mekas, this highly personal 1971 feature chronicles his first trip back to Semeniskiai, Lithuania, the village where he was raised, after an absence of 25 years. It’s a moving act of memory and self-scrutiny, reflecting in some respects the diary films he’s made since the 60s but clearly standing apart from them. Narrated by Mekas, the film opens with footage of his first years in America and closes with contemporary visits to a Hamburg suburb (site of a labor camp where he and his brother Adolfas spent a year during World War II) and Vienna (where he enjoys the company of several friends, including filmmaker-curator Peter Kubelka and critic Annette Michelson). But its centerpiece, entitled “One Hundred Glimpses of Lithuania, August 1971,” is the segment that shows his highly charged sense of film poetry at its most distilled and emotional. Essential viewing. 82 min. Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture, 6500 S. Pulaski, Friday, July 12, 7:00, 773-582-6500. Read more
Known less accurately as And Life Goes On…(to distinguish it from Bertrand Tavernier’s Life and Nothing But), this 1992 masterpiece by Abbas Kiarostami uses nonprofessional actors to restage real events. Accompanied by his little boy, a film director from Tehran drives into the mountainous region of northern Iran, recently devastated by an earthquake that’s killed more than 50,000 people. He searches through various villages for two child actors who appeared in Where Is the Friend’s House? (a 1987 Kiarostami feature), but what we find is more open-ended and mysterious: the resilience and in some cases the surprising optimism of people putting their lives back together, the beautiful landscapes, the alternating and overlapping viewpoints of the director and his son. A picaresque narrative with a profound sense of place and a philosophically weighted use of the long shot that occasionally calls to mind Tati, this haunting look at what does and doesn’t happen to people confronted by natural disaster won the Rossellini prize at the 1992 Cannes film festival, and it’s still one of the very best Iranian features I’ve seen. In Farsi with subtitles. 108 min. Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, Saturday and Thursday, July 13 and 18, 6:00, 312-846-2800. Read more
The intriguing novelty in this cold war thriller, based on a true story, is that we perceive everything from the Russian viewpointthough the fact that the two leading Russian characters are played by Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson somewhat undercuts this strategy. In 1961 in the North Atlantic, the reactor on the first Soviet nuclear ballistic submarine malfunctions during its first trip out, and the big question is how far the tyrannical captain (Ford) will go in sacrificing his men to prevent a nuclear explosion that could set off a world war. Kathryn Bigelow, who’s shown her gifts as an action director on other occasions, does a competent job with a hokey if serviceable script by Louis Nowra and Christopher Kyle. Perhaps the post-cold-war attitudes behind this film are progressive, but the old prenuclear worship of the military goes all but unchallenged. With Peter Sarsgaard and Ingvar E. Sigurosson. 138 min. (JR) Read more
A key Russian formalist text, Viktor Shklovsky’s remarkable novel Zoo, or Letters Not About Love (1923) was based on a correspondence between the author and fellow expatriate Elsa Triolet, which ensued after Triolet asked him not to write her love letters and he responded with many different kinds of lyrical sublimation. For this beautifully composed and poetically edited experimental film (1998, 58 min.), Jacki Ochs asked American poet Lyn Hejinian and Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko to start a correspondence based on ordinary words like home, poverty, book, violence, and window, a project that lasted five years while each poet learned the other’s language. In the film actors Lili Taylor and Victor Nord read excerpts from these letters (all of them in English), while Ochs accompanies them contrapuntally with documentary images. Her highly suggestive combinations of word and montage, at times evoking Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, are rich in surreal juxtaposition as well as functional illustration; music and sound effects play an important role, and Ochs fashions striking combinations of found footage and original camerawork. The result, as critic Ray Privett has noted, is a post-cold-war historical inquiry in which the imaginations of the correspondents, the filmmakers, and the spectators all interact. Read more
Jacques Charonne’s novel Les destinees sentimentales follows a Protestant minister turned factory owner over the first three decades of the 20th century, and one suspects that director Olivier Assayas (Cold Water, Irma Vep, and Late August, Early September) was attracted to the material partly as a way of exploring his own Protestant roots. The hero (Charles Berling), doubting the fidelity of his wife (Isabelle Huppert), asks her to leave their home in the Charente region of France, and she takes their daughter with her. Years later he decides he was wrong, gives his wife the fortune from his family’s porcelain factory, leaves the ministry, and marries a friend’s niece (Emmanuelle Beart); his life takes another unexpected turn after his uncle dies and he’s asked to take over the factory. Assayas is masterful in using offscreen sounds to conjure up a novelistic sense of milieu and in handling various ceremonies (from a cotillion to a young woman’s ordination as a deaconess), and the film’s lush texture explains why he called it his anti-Dogma film (one lap dissolve that links lovemaking to an Alpine lake seems to come straight out of F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise). Even at 173 minutes, this 2000 release is surprisingly brisk for a period picture: Assayas practically skips across the story, making his somewhat mysterious characters even more elusive. Read more
The greatest film to date by poet, critic, curator, and director Jonas Mekas, this highly personal 1971 feature chronicles his first trip back to Semeniskiai, Lithuania, the village where he was raised, after an absence of 25 years. It’s a moving act of memory and self-scrutiny, reflecting in some respects the diary films he’s made since the 60s but clearly standing apart from them. Narrated by Mekas, the film opens with footage of his first years in America and closes with contemporary visits to a Hamburg suburb (site of a labor camp where he and his brother Adolfas spent a year during World War II) and Vienna (where he enjoys the company of several friends, including filmmaker-curator Peter Kubelka and critic Annette Michelson). But its centerpiece, entitled One Hundred Glimpses of Lithuania, August 1971, is the segment that shows his highly charged sense of film poetry at its most distilled and emotional. Essential viewing. 82 min. (JR) Read more
Suggested by Ray Bradbury’s story The Fog Horn, this influential disaster movie from 1953 serves up a Godzilla-like tale of a prehistoric rhedosaurus resurrected by an atomic bomb. Directed by Eugene Lourie and enhanced by Ray Harryhausen’s special effects; with Paul Christian, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway, Kenneth Tobey (The Thing), and Lee Van Cleef. 80 min. (JR) Read more
