This Alexander Sokurov feature (2002) is one of the most staggering technical achievements in the history of cinema–a single shot lasting 95 minutes while moving through 33 rooms in the world’s largest museum, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg (which also encompasses the Winter Palace). Part pageant and museum tour, part theme-park ride and historical meditation, it traverses two centuries of czarist Russia as smoothly as it crosses the Hermitage, with the offscreen Sokurov engaged in an ongoing dialogue with an on-screen 19th-century French diplomat (apparently suggested by Adolphe, marquis de Custine). Sokurov used close to 2,000 actors and extras and three live orchestras in making what may be the world’s only unedited single-take feature as well as the longest Steadicam sequence ever shot. This is also the first uncompressed high-definition film recorded on a portable hard-disk system rather than film or tape before being transferred to 35-millimeter. The problem with these feats is that they threaten to overwhelm the film’s content, both as complex historical commentary and as aesthetic and theoretical gesture. As critic J. Hoberman has suggested, this is an anti-October, challenging Eisenstein’s reliance on montage while using the Winter Palace as a gigantic set. All of which is to say that we’re only just starting to grasp the dimensions of this formidable achievement. Read more
This Japanese video documentary (2002, 74 min.) about the most acute American critic of U.S. foreign policy is conventionally made but valuable for its currency and its capacity (which matches that of Chomsky) to remain upbeat about a seemingly hopeless topic. Director John Junkerman, an American based in Tokyo, records Chomsky’s comments about the war on terror at speaking engagements in Berkeley and the Bronx and interviews him at some length in his office at MIT, yielding some of the professor’s best long-range insights. (JR) Read more
After reportedly making half a million dollars on his first indie comedy, Escanaba in da Moonlight, which played almost exclusively in the midwest, Michigan resident Jeff Daniels wrote and directed this feature about a grudge match between two small-town door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesmen (Daniels and Harve Presnell) and their respective teams to win a contest run by their company. The main plot twist involves one team’s idea to sell an archaic accessory to the Super Sucker as an aid to masturbation. Stridently overacted and very broadly directed, the movie is uninhibited and energetic, to say the least, but the giddiness tends to be too scattershot to work as either satire or farce. With Matt Letscher and Dawn Wells of Gilligan’s Island, playing herself. (JR) Read more
A first-rate 1979 documentary by Bruce Riker about Kansas City jazz and its most famous musicians, with particular attention devoted to Count Basie and the players who worked for him. Much of it was shot over a five-year period at the Mutual Musicians Foundation and other Kansas City locations, though vintage film clips abound. 91 min. (JR) Read more
Despite its misleading title, this is not a film by Michael Snow but a Canadian documentary by Teri Wehn-Damisch (2001, 56 min.) about some of Snow’s work. A sort of Michael Snow 101, it’s a catalog focusing on his camera-related works and his piano playing, touching only briefly on Wavelength and ignoring his painting and sculpture, his jazz group, and other important aspects of his career. It’s also fairly sketchy even on its chosen terrain, overlooking at least one major film (So Is This) and other major works involving photography (e.g., Two Sides to Every Story, A Casing Shelved, and Flight Stop). The best parts are Snow’s own lucid explication of his oeuvre, much of which emphasizes his critiques of photographic illusionism, but the clips from his films are far too skimpy to give novices a clear sense of what they’re like. (JR) Read more
The enormous success of Erich von Stroheim’s The Merry Widow led to a desire for spin-offs, and Ernst Lubitsch reluctantly took on this silent adaptation (1927) of Sigmund Romberg’s operetta after Stroheim turned it down. He did manage to infuse it with his own sort of wit, especially at the beginning, though the dorkiness of Ramon Novarro in the title role appears to have made this an uphill battle. Norma Shearer plays the lively barmaid with whom he has a fling. Approximately 105 min. (JR) Read more
This late, delicious comedy of manners by Ernst Lubitsch is a notch below his best, but the character acting is so good one hardly notices. A plumber’s daughter (Jennifer Jones) and a refugee (Charles Boyer) meet in England prior to World War II, and Una O’Connor, Peter Lawford, Helen Walker, Reginald Gardiner, C. Aubrey Smith, Reginald Owen, and Richard Haydn are around to take up what slack there is. This 1946 film is the last one Lubitsch completed. 100 min. (JR) Read more
Steve Martin plays an uptight tax lawyer whose on-line sweetheart turns out to be an escaped convict (Queen Latifah) trying to get some help disproving what she claims are false charges. Even though I expect glibness in a Disney comedy, I was rankled by the movie’s strategy of cheerfully ridiculing racial stereotypes that are already half a century out of date in order to revert to its own contemporary racial stereotypes (white as well as black) as if they were beyond criticism. In Jason Filardi’s sloppy script, characters undergo inexplicable changes in a flash (Martin can’t understand a word of hip-hop lingo until he decides to voyage into the hood, at which point he immediately becomes a master), though it may be quixotic to demand credibility from a screenwriter when almost every one of his characters is a liar. Eugene Levy is the only actor who emerges relatively unscathed in this fetid climate; as for Joan Plowright, I hope she took home a healthy check. Adam Shankman directed. 105 min. (JR) Read more
This rarely shown Ernst Lubitsch musical (1931), derived from the Oscar Straus operetta The Waltz Dream, matches up Viennese lieutenant Maurice Chevalier with both Claudette Colbert (as leader of an all-woman orchestra, whom he fancies) and Miriam Hopkins (as a king’s unglamorous daughter, whom he doesn’t know how to refuse). Eventually everything gets resolved when Colbert teaches Hopkins how to jazz up her lingerie (this is pre-Production Code, in the best sense), but before this happens, the proceedings are a bit brittlenot exactly dark and funereal like Lubitsch’s later The Merry Widow, but still rather heartless, what with Chevalier’s forced gaiety and his sexual rejection of Hopkins. This was shot in Paramount’s Astoria studio, which may explain why some of the interiors feel cramped, but it’s quintessential Lubitsch in the way it suggests sexual dalliance with the brightening or darkening of a gas lamp outside a bedroom. 88 min. (JR) Read more
At least since I Vitelloni and The Wild One in the 50s, movies about disaffected youth have constituted a kind of subgenre for filmmakers interested in historicizing the present. Distinguished practitioners of this undertaking in Chinese-language cinema include Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang; now they’re joined by the much younger Jia Zhang-ke, whose stunning epic Platform (2000) marks him as the most gifted Chinese filmmaker to have emerged in years. His third feature, shot on digital video, isn’t an achievement on the same order, though it takes on the same theme, in a story about two unemployed 19-year-olds. Jia’s virtuoso long takes, choreographed mise en scene, and feeling for character and behavior place him in a class by himself, yet in China his films have mainly circulated on black-market videosa point alluded to here in a sequence where his first two features are being sold, along with Pulp Fiction, by a vendor on a bicycle. In Mandarin with subtitles. 113 min. (JR) Read more
One of the most remarkable things about Manoel de Oliveira, now in his 90s, is the supple way in which he’s been shifting gears between features. This film follows I’m Going Home, which focused on France and the theater; here he takes up Portugal and the novel, adapting Agustina Bessa-Luis’s Joai de familia. This is the fourth Oliveira film based on Bessa-Luis’s workthe others are Francisca (1981), Valley of Abraham (1993), and the third episode of Inquietude (1998)and she also furnished the original idea for The Convent (1995) and the dialogue for Party (1996). Valley of Abraham was something of an update of Madame Bovary, and in some ways this feature suggests a gothic version of Henry James. Beautifully shot by Renato Berta, effectively accompanied by bursts of Paganini, it deals with a modern-day, apparently innocent young heroine (the film’s title refers mainly to the ambiguity of her innocence), the daughter of a compulsive gambler who compares herself to Joan of Arc and winds up in an arranged marriage with a corrupt, well-to-do man who brings her to live in the same house as his brothel-owning mistress. This is more difficult than other recent Oliveira films because of the slow, highly stylized mise en scene, with characters often looking past one another, which evokes Dreyer’s Gertrud, and because of its old-fashioned mannerist treatment of decadence, which suggests late Bressonand in one visual trope, Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Read more
With the exception of Kate McCabe’s somewhat interesting Das Neue Monster (2001), in color 16-millimeter, this program is devoted to creepy stuff in black and white. Well worth the price of admission is Dream Work (2001), which concludes the internationally celebrated Cinemascope trilogy of Austrian experimental filmmaker Peter Tscherkasy. The 35-millimeter films elaborately rework found footage, and this one, inspired by Man Ray, draws on Sidney J. Furie’s 1983 shocker The Entity. Unfortunately one also has to sit through Scott McAnally’s static and unpleasant video Yancy’s Kitchen and Deco Dawson’s Film (dzama), which is relatively pleasant but still just 22 minutes of elaborate doodling with nudes and animal costumes. (Dawson shot Super-8 footage for Guy Maddin’s The Heart of the World and clearly comes from the same arch Winnepeg mentality.) Somewhere in between are Marcel de Jure’s video And . . ., Mark Hejnar’s film 0502, and John Standiford’s unsettling 16-millimeter short Plain English, which is fairly original but also rather xenophobic in its still photographs of Japanese characters. 75 min. (JR) Read more
The Dutch-born Menno Meyjes, best known as the screenwriter who worked for Steven Spielberg in the 80s and cowrote The Siege in the 90s, makes his debut as writer-director with an ambitious but only fitfully successful account of Adolf Hitler during his failed-artist phase. The future fuhrer (Noah Taylor), already making headway in the beer halls with his racial and political invective, is befriended by a Jewish art dealer (John Cusack) who’s lost an arm during World War I and is an invention of Meyjes. The portrait of Hitler is convincing as a kind of intellectual conceit, but the fact that everyone speaks Englishand that period details veer toward postmodernist flourishes meant to remind us of the presentultimately disqualify this Canadian-German-Hungarian coproduction as history. With Leelee Sobieski and Molly Parker. 106 min. (JR) Read more
Many consider Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 musical remake of his groundbreaking silent The Marriage Circle (1924) inferior to the original, but I find it funnier and in some ways more sophisticated. Maurice Chevalier, who plays a doctor married to Jeanette MacDonald, becomes attracted to Genevieve Tobin (while Charlie Ruggles, as his best friend, goes after MacDonald) and periodically turns to the audience for advice. George Cukor was hired by Lubitsch to direct but almost had his name removed from the credits because Lubitsch did so many retakes; stylistically there’s never any question that Lubitsch, working with his favorite screenwriter, Samson Raphaelson, is the one in charge. 80 min. (JR) Read more
This 1951 version of Alan Paton’s novel about South African apartheid, directed by the underrated Zoltan Korda and starring Canada Lee and Sidney Poitier, is far better than the 1995 remake with James Earl Jones. The cinematography is by the accomplished Robert Krasker. Check it out. 111 min. (JR) Read more
