The title of this 64-minute, 2003 video by Guy Maddin (Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary) refers to its having been commissioned as a gallery installation for the Rotterdam film festival, to be watched through a succession of arcade-style peep-show machines. Screening here as a self-contained work, it seems Maddin’s most personal project yet: the hero is a hockey player named Guy Maddin; his mother, like Maddin’s, runs a beauty salon; and Maddin even casts some of his own family members. But the overall feel is phantasmagoricpitched, like most of Maddin’s work, in the style of a half-remembered late silent feature or early talkie. (JR) Read more
One of my all-time favorites, this beautiful 12-minute short by Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep, The Glass Shield), made for French TV in 1995, is a jazz parable about locating common roots in contemporary Watts and one of those rare movies in which jazz forms directly influence film narrative. The slender plot involves a Good Samaritan and local griot (Ayuko Babu), who serves as poetic narrator, trying to raise money from his ghetto neighbors for a young mother who’s about to be evicted, and each person he goes to see registers like a separate solo in a 12-bar blues. (Eventually a John Handy album recorded in Monterey, a “countercultural” emblem of the 60s, becomes a crucial barter item.) This gem has been one of the most difficult of Burnett’s films to see; it screens with his fine feature To Sleep With Anger (see separate listing). Northwestern Univ. Block Museum of Art. Read more
I’m sorry to say that Anne Misawa’s direction of her actors didn’t allow me to believe in Hart Monroe and Jerry Meadors’s story about a hunky, innocent freshman at a ritzy Virginia college juggling relationships with his troubled roommate, the roommate’s girlfriend, and his handsome poetry professor. The problem isn’t so much the plot as the labored performance style, though the crude dialogue didn’t help. A striking camera style and the blurry, leafy textures of the setting provide some visual distraction. 93 min. (JR) Read more
Jean Cocteau’s filming of his 1938 play ten years later is both a lesson in mise en scene and an illustration of the paradox that accentuating the theatrical aspects of theater on-screen makes them quintessentially cinematic. (To my knowledge, the only other film that does this to the same degree is Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge.) The accomplishment becomes all the more impressive if one considers how mannered and affected Cocteau’s material is. The sheltered son of a middle-aged couple living with the wife’s unmarried sister falls in love with a young woman without realizing that she’s his father’s mistress, and the terror faced by the mother at the prospect of losing her son is matched by terror faced by the mistress in being exposed. The characters may seem outlandish individually, but collectively they bring credence to one another as the plot unfolds in two claustrophobic flats, and the cast is masterful: Jean Marais, Josette Day, Yvonne de Bray, Marcel Andre, Gabrielle Dorzoat. Cocteau cuts and moves his camera in ways that are both eccentric and definitive. In French with subtitles. 98 min. (JR) Read more
As a lover of musicals, I’m generally sympathetic to filmmakers who pay tribute to them, even when their emulations of the genre are more emotional than cinematic (or even musical). But Robert Cary’s tale of an aspiring nightclub singer (cowriter Isabel Rose) who’s nostalgically tied to her parents’ era is so lackluster both as an homage and as a story in its own right that I was already forgetting it before it was over. Andrew McCarthy is OK as a rehearsal pianist, resembling Steven Spielberg, who wins the singer’s heart from an insensitive phony (Cameron Bancroft), but the only reason for seeing this is Eartha Kitt, who performs an electric nightclub number before dispensing a few clumsy lines of worldly wisdom. 99 min. (JR) Read more
Winner of two top prizes at Cannes, Gus Van Sant’s fictionalized drama about the Columbine massacre was generated by conversations with the teenage actors about their own lives, and reportedly none of the dialogue was scripted. Perhaps as a result this offers little insight into the motivations of teenage mass murderers, unless one counts such threadbare ideas as a TV documentary about Nazism idly watched by the killers. What interests Van Sant is why no one saw the massacre coming, and his exciting and rigorous structure follows several characters in overlapping trajectories and time frames (a method derived from Bela Tarr’s Satantango) so that we’re constantly noticing details we missed earlier. The effect is riveting and tellingnot always realistic (none of the characters carry cell phones) but often enlightening. 81 min. (JR) Read more
Dawoud Abdel-Sayed’s 2001 hit Egyptian musical about three men who trade mistresses, information, and destinies over two decades has only half a dozen numbers over 135 minutes, but each one is pivotal to the thematic development and the satirical treatment of class difference and corruption. Undoubtedly the strangest occurs after the citizen’s maid and mistress steals the manuscript of his first novel and turns it over to the thief (Egyptian pop star Shaaban Abdel-Rehim), who burns it because he finds it Islamically incorrect and then has his eye gouged out by the enraged novelist; nurses and fellow hospital patients provide Abdel-Rehim’s musical and dancing backup as he laments his two-dimensional sight. As ambitious in its way as Scorsese’s Casino and no less violent in its abusive details, this is social criticism with a vengeance. In Arabic with subtitles. (JR) Read more
Writer-director Jay Craven adapted this indie feature from a novel by Scott Lax about the 1970 Kent State shootings and their aftermath, tracing the lives of many students as well as a local high school teacher (Marin Hinkle) who loses her job as a result of her antiwar activism. There are moments of awkward exposition, choppy continuity, and long-windedness, yet the overall feeling for the period is just right, and the performances are highly affecting, with old hands like Henry Gibson, Fred Willard, and Martin Mull interacting with younger players as deftly as the fictional story with the archival footage. This is more believable than most depictions of the period because the politics are informed by historical reflection; prompted by his own research, Craven changes one of Lax’s major characters into an agent provocateur on campus. With Jonathan Woodward, Charlie Finn, Lucas Ford, Sean Nelson, Jonathan Brandis, and Kiera Chaplin (granddaughter of Charlie). 104 min. (JR) Read more
If you can figure out all the intricate and incestuous family backstory of this domestic melodrama by Claude Chabrol, there’s a certain amount to appreciate, though most of it’s more cerebral than emotional. Caroline Eliacheff, a child psychiatrist who worked with Chabrol on The Ceremony and Merci pour le chocolat, both of which I found more enjoyable, collaborated on the script with Louise Lambriches and Chabrol. The present-day plot circulates around an anonymous broadside delving into the Vichy family connections of a woman running for mayor in a town in Bordeaux (Nathalie Baye)a catalyst recalling the poison-pen letter in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1943 Le corbeauas well as the budding romance between her daughter and stepson, protected by a sympathetic aunt (Suzanne Flon), and the growing estrangement of her philandering husband (Bernard Le Coq). This kept me absorbed, but I was less than fully satisfied at the end. In French with subtitles. R, 104 min. (JR) Read more
This 1965 period yakuza thriller by Seijun Suzuki (Pistol Opera) is something of a disappointment. Aside from a few striking visual fancies (including the eccentric ‘Scope framings behind the credits and a few flashy uses of color later), this is a routine exercise about a gangster and his artistic kid brother seeking refuge in a rural mining outpost during the early 20th century. In Japanese with subtitles. 87 min. (JR) Read more
This black-and-white yakuza thriller (1958) has a few elements of Seijun Suzuki’s signature weirdness and baroque imaginationchiefly the stolen diamonds swallowed by one character shortly before dying, whose corpse then has to be sliced open to retrieve them. Suzuki also makes interesting surrealistic use of a studio where department-store mannequins are sculpted and baked, where the corpse’s sister (the title cutie) works as a model, and where the diamonds are hidden once more. (It’s highly unlikely that he saw Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss, which exploits a similar setting, but the parallels are striking.) In Japanese with subtitles. 87 min. (JR) Read more
Although I gave up reading the New Republic with any regularity long before it acquired master fabricator Stephen Glass as a reporter in the late 90s, I appreciate writer-director Billy Ray’s agenda, which is to show how ready and willing Glass’s colleagues and readers were to be duped by himand how we as spectators are too. Hayden Christensen plays Glass with just the right amount of flattering charm, and Peter Sarsgaard, Hank Azaria, and Chloe Sevigny all do well as his fellow staffers. Given recent similar incidents of young con artists posing as journalists, this is a timely and compelling film, but I wish the filmmakers had widened their focus to address the kinds of journalistic corruption that go beyond simple fibbing. 99 min. (JR) Read more
