Sergei Eisenstein once described the ideas of Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky as a string of pearls without a string. This ambitious 2002 first feature by Chicagoan Ines Sommer, a cinematographer who can conjure up more arresting images with digital video than most industry professionals can with 35-millimeter, is tenuously centered on a young woman (Terri Reardon) who does temporary cleaning work. She’s deliberately defined by her lack of definition (which is apparently what inspires her to change her name from Therese to Joan halfway through her lonely odyssey), but she provides only a slender thread for Sommer’s essayistic pearls, which document the city in terms of real estate, Native American origins (alluded to in the title), and invisible lower-income working women. The improvised performances are persuasive, and the heroine’s dreams are eerie and suggestive despite their seeming to develop independent of her personality; unfortunately not even the inserted text crawls explaining her background and supplying various statistics can make a satisfying narrative of this multifaceted collage. 85 min. (JR) Read more
A dry run for The Thin Man, with W.S. Van Dyke directing Myrna Loy in a comedy thriller (1933) about a hatcheck girl caught up in a murder. With Warner Baxter, Mae Clarke, and Charles Butterworth. 90 min. (JR) Read more
Set at a Spanish film school, this 1996 thriller about a snuff movie kept me on the edge of my seat. It’s the second feature by Alejandro Amenabar, and I’d rank it higher than his subsequent and artier Open Your Eyes (as well as its American remake, Vanilla Sky). It never got a proper U.S. release, possibly because people in the industry are reluctant to show subtitled movies in multiplexes and seem to think genre films are the domain of Hollywood studios. In any case, though I usually avoid slasher movies, I’d recommend this one without hesitation. The title translates as thesis. In Spanish with subtitles. 121 min. (JR) Read more
No, this 1931 adaptation of the Dashiell Hammett novel isn’t as good as John Huston’s a decade later, but it has a few quirky virtues of its own, including brevity (at 80 minutes, it’s 20 minutes shorter than the Bogart version). The underrated Roy del Ruth, a fixture at Warners, directed quite capably, and the cast is offbeat if not always convincing: Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade, Una Merkel as his secretary, Bebe Daniels as his lovely client, and Dudley Digges as the scheming Casper Gutman. (JR) Read more
Cast against type, Christina Ricci plays a blond princess from Pasadena with a hunky tennis champ (Sam Ball) as a boyfriend. She’s horrified when her college sorority selects Challenged Games as its off-campus charity, and frustrated when her naive ploy to match up the challenged athlete named Pumpkin she’s been assigned to mentor (Hank Harris) with an overweight friend ends in disaster. But then she falls in love with Pumpkin herself, her world falls apart, and all sorts of melodramatic developments ensue. This nervy feature starts off as satire, then turns into campy, hyperbolically overdetermined soap opera that might be even more purposeful insofar as one can’t hoot at it without considering what a more reasonable approach to such a subject might be, unpacking one’s own complacency in the process. Ricci herself is one of the producers and Francis Ford Coppola one of the executive producers, Brenda Blethyn (Secrets & Lies) plays Pumpkin’s misguided mother, and Adam Larson Broder and Tony R. Abrams, as codirectors of Broder’s script, make the weird transition from satire to camp as if there were no distinction between the two. It’s a bracing if at times bewildering experience. With Dominique Swain, Marisa Coughlan, Harry Lennix, and Nina Foch. Read more
This late CinemaScope western (1958, 100 min.) by the great Anthony Mann achieves a tragic intensity and a monumental scenic splendor despite some serious handicaps: a stagy villain (Lee J. Cobb), an awkward lead actress (Julie London), and a screenwriter accustomed to working with confined spaces (TV dramatist Reginald Rose), none of whom complement the film’s quintessentially cinematic hero (Gary Cooper in one of his last and best performances). Cooper plays a reformed outlaw with a wife and kids (whom we never see); accidentally reunited with the gang he despised (including Jack Lord of TV’s Hawaii Five-O and Royal Dano of Johnny Guitar), he pretends to plan a new bank robbery in order to protect a saloon singer (London) and a card sharp (Arthur O’Connell). Mann, a master of framing figures against the landscapea farmhouse in a valley, a mountain range, an eerie ghost townand of subtly charting various kinds of psychological warfare, is so inventive in his treatment of this grim tale that he anticipates Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura, released two years later. (JR) Read more
Jon Jost’s gorgeous, mesmerizing digital video consists of very slow overlapping dissolves between various exterior walls in Rome. Since the festival screening I saw in 2000, Jost has increased the length (to 80 minutes) and added an ambient sound track, but even the earlier version proved that Jost had finally made his painterly experiments in DV as rich as his films: despite what might seem a minimalist palette and framework, the gradual transformations of one wall into another are mysterious and all-enveloping. (JR) Read more
This interesting and effective spy thriller (1995), directed by Damian Harris from a script by mystery novelist Ross Thomas, starts out as an upscale Deep Cover: industrial espionage financed by big business takes the place of police undercover work in drugs, and Laurence Fishburne again ably plays a sort of double agent. But this film confounds most of the usual expectations. Though the atmosphere is predictably cynical, not all the characters are quite as cynical as they first appear. It might be argued that the personal stories ultimately overwhelm the political message (a common occurrence in Hollywood thrillers of this kind, excepting Deep Cover), but the overall theme of former CIA operatives going to work for big business is both plausible and eerily suggestive (as is the bunkerlike building where they work). Ellen Barkin is first-rate as Fishburne’s coworker and lover, and the secondary castincluding Frank Langella, Michael Beach, Gia Carides, David Ogden Stiers, Daniel Hugh Kelly, Spalding Gray, and an uncredited Michael Murphyadds flavor and piquancy. (JR) Read more
The best argument for a sequel to Men in Black (1995) was Linda Fiorentino as the plucky morgue pathologist, but this new installment replaces her with Rosario Dawson, whose function is more decorative than comic. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are back as Jay and Kay, government agents who monitor the high jinks of extraterrestrials on earth, and though director Barry Sonnenfeld (or somebody) has added a lot more beasties and other conceptual doodling (as well as product placements), the down-home satire of how we cope with cultural difference has evaporated, replaced by jazzy effects that wear out their welcome by the halfway mark. (The earth’s fate hanging in jeopardy near the end seems less urgent than whether Hope or Crosby will get Dorothy Lamour at the end of a Road comedy.) Michael Jackson has a cameo, Rip Torn and Tony Shalhoub reprise their original bits, and Lara Flynn Boyle as the head alien sprouts zillions of wormlike tentaclesbut a talking bulldog named Frank steals the show. 82 min. (JR) Read more
Based on an Inuit legend and made almost entirely by Inuit filmmakers, this totally absorbing 172-minute feature (2001), winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes, is exciting not as ethnography but as storytelling, as drama, and as filmmaking. In this respect, one might even wind up perversely missing the exoticism and implied critique of Western values found in Nanook of the North or The Savage Innocents, but only if one insists on finding arctic natives interesting because of their relation to other cultures and not on their own terms. Certainly the plot elements are universal: sexual competition, adultery, murder, pursuit, subterfuge, and justice, all seen in relation to the needs and preservation of a particular community and way of life. This story is set at the dawn of the first millennium, but the fact that we tend to forget about historical time frames entirely while watching it is a tribute to its power to grab and hold us. Directed by Zacharias Kunuk and written by Kunuk and Paul Apak Angilirq; with Natar Ungalaaq, Sylvia Ivalu, and Peter-Henry Arnatsiaq. In Inuktitut with subtitles. (JR) Read more
Earth (1930) is the most famous of Alexander Dovzhenko’s masterpieces, but this white-hot war film, made the previous year and screening only once in the Gene Siskel Film Center’s invaluable Dovzhenko retrospective, is in many ways his most dazzling silent picture. Though it was commissioned to glorify the 1918 struggle of Bolshevik workers at a Kiev munitions factory against White Russian troops, Dovzhenko’s view of wartime and battlefront morality is too ambiguous and multilayered to fit comfortably within any propaganda scheme. More clearly influenced by Sergei Eisenstein than any of Dovzhenko’s other pictures, it’s certainly the one that uses fast editing in the most exciting fashion, and some of the poetic uses of Ukrainian folklore that were Dovzhenko’s specialty have an almost drunken abandon here–as in the singing horses. A 35-millimeter print will be shown, and David Drazin will provide live piano accompaniment. 92 min. Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, Saturday, June 15, 4:15, 312-846-2800. Read more
This is the most accessible film to date by Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, though some people have been mistakenly scared away by its subject matter: the enormous number of Ugandan children orphaned by the AIDS crisis. In fact, much of this 2001 digital-video documentary focuses on the kids singing and dancing–at times it resembles a musical–which has led some critics to fault Kiarostami for failing to address the crisis adequately. But the video is only superficially superficial, and it grows in meaning and resonance as it progresses. A brief scene in a hospital and a few interviews tell us all the disturbing facts we need to know, and the second half moves beyond conventional documentary into Kiarostami’s brand of provocative philosophical inquiry. One scene set in almost complete darkness recalls Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us, and a sequence set in a ruined house in the rain is as lovely as anything in Life and Nothing More. Like virtually all of Kiarostami’s mature work, this centers on the issues raised when a well-to-do filmmaker interacts with poor people and expresses his admiration for their resilience. This is Kiarostami’s first film that’s mainly in English; the balance is subtitled. Read more
My favorite Eric Rohmer features are mainly his period films–Percival, then The Marquise of O (despite its emotional toning down of the Heinrich von Kleist novella), and now this fascinating antirevolutionary take on the French Revolution. Inspired by the memoirs of Scottish royalist Grace Elliott (beautifully played by Lucy Russell), it centers on her relationship with Philippe Egalite, erstwhile duke of Orleans (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), who brought her to France in 1786. Their romance had ended well before the revolution (and before this picture begins), but they remained close friends in spite of their growing political differences. Percival was shot on studio sets, The Marquise of O on location; for the exteriors of this film, Rohmer uses digital-video technology to superimpose the actors against painted landscapes, and the results are charming as well as historically plausible. Influenced by the use of stationary camera setups in D.W. Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm, this is absorbing throughout–not just a history lesson but, as always with Rohmer, a story about individuals (2001, 129 min.). Music Box, Friday through Thursday, June 7 through 13. Read more
Actor Ethan Hawke turns to directing, in digital video, in Nicole Burdette’s 2001 adaptation of her own play. This consists of five separate downbeat stories happening on the same day at New York’s artist-friendly Chelsea Hotel. The cast is certainly impressive, and probably reason enough for seeing this; it includes, among others, Kevin Corrigan, Rosario Dawson, Vincent D’Onofrio, Kris Kristofferson, Robert Sean Leonard, Natasha Richardson, Jimmy Scott, Uma Thurman, Mark Webber, Tuesday Weld, Harris Yulin, and Steve Zahn. The main problem is the film’s inability to stay with any one story or character for long: too many ideas compete for attention without any clear through line. Hawke, who gets some very interesting visual effects and sound overlaps, is hardly alone in failing to solve this difficulty; for me, much of Robert Altman’s workreflecting his TV background and the reliance on sound bites that it entailsshows comparable limitations. Many of the smaller moments of both directors are priceless, but the larger picture tends toward either vagueness or banality (such as the American flag at the end of Altman’s Nashville). 109 min. (JR) Read more
A striking demonstration of how adroit and creative Alexander Dovzhenko was as a commercial director just before he started making his own more personal and sometimes more difficult films, the first of which was the 1927 Zvenigora. Diplomatic Pouch (1927, 72 min.) is said to have some remote connection to the director’s stint as a diplomat, but in fact it’s an entertaining spy thriller with British villains, inspired by the assassination of Soviet diplomat Teodor Nette. It’s the only Dovzhenko film in which he appears as an actor (stoking the engine on a ship), and the editing is very inventiveas it is in the lively half-hour comedy Love Berry (1926), about a vain barber trying to dispose of his illegitimate offspring, which shows the influence of Chaplin. (JR) Read more
