A historic black-and-white TV show, broadcast live in 1957, that brought together Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Henry Red Allen, Jimmy Rushing, Gerry Mulligan, the Jimmy Giuffre Trio, and Mal Waldron, among others. Young, making one of his last appearances, was well past his prime, but Holiday watching him play is reason enough to see thisand there are plenty of other reasons. Curiously, the LP album of this show released in the 50s wasn’t the actual broadcast but a re-creation. (JR) Read more
In her first feature, High Art (1998), writer-director Lisa Cholodenko created a convincing milieu of media professionals who were both sexy and unpredictable. This sophomore effort is even better, confronting two uptight lovers (Christian Bale and Kate Beckinsale) with the rock music scene when they graduate from Harvard Medical School and head west to complete their studies. Bale’s mother (Frances McDormand), a famous record producer, is sleeping with the lead singer (Alessandro Nivola) of the British band she’s recording at her Laurel Canyon home, and after she invites her son and his fiancee to move in, all sorts of unexpected things happen. McDormand has never been better, but all the performances are interestingly nuanced, including Natascha McElhone’s as one of Bale’s fellow psychiatric interns. I was put off by the inconclusive ending, but the rest of this movie more than makes up for it. 103 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre. Read more
A Hollywood entertainment that lived up to its hype, this zany detective story (1988), set in Tinseltown 1947, follows the efforts of gumshoe Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) to clear the name of cartoon character Roger Rabbit when he becomes the main suspect in a murder case. The movie, which combines live action and animation with breathtaking wizardry, was coproduced by the studios of Disney and Steven Spielberg; Robert Zemeckis is the director, and the script is by Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman (based on a novel by Gary K. Wolf). As a labor of love it’s deeply moving: cartoon characters are treated as a repressed minority threatened by genocide, and gumshoes out of Raymond Chandler (or even Robert Towne) are almost equally archaic. Giving them all one last, delirious fling, the filmmakers create a densely upholstered universe where the denizens of both worlds mingle and learn from one another; a villain from the days of silent movies (Christopher Lloyd’s Judge Doom) is thrown in for good measure. Alternately hilarious, frightening, and awesome. PG, 103 min. (JR) Read more
While in rural southern Illinois in 1995, Chicago filmmaker Steve James (Hoop Dreams) contacted the abused, rejected kid he’d been a Big Brother to ten years earlier, Stevie Fielding. This remarkable documentary charts the renewal of their friendship, explores Stevie’s past, and attempts to come to terms with him as an adult — a more difficult task after he’s charged with sexually molesting a little girl. Taking nothing and no one for granted, including himself, James looks at his subject with admirable honesty, and the tragic tale that emerges is full of powerful lessons and impenetrable mysteries. In the process, we get to know something about the people closest to Stevie — his relatives and fiancee and some of the people in his community — as well as the abused girl’s mother. 140 min. (JR) Read more
A punchy, engaging promo by Raphael Lyon and Andres Ingoglia for Indymedia, a grass-roots media activist network that took root at the time of the Seattle riots, with particular attention to the chapter founded in Buenos Aires. (JR) Read more
At first I was put off by the hagiographic and metaphoric aspects of this 2002 Canadian documentary about communications essayist Marshall McLuhan (1911-’80); director Kevin McMahon and screenwriter David Sobelman seem to regard their subject as Moses, Hegel, and Northrop Frye rolled into one. But I was won over by the film’s mimetic process, as McLuhan’s endlessly suggestive (if sometimes fruitless) probes are matched by fragmented voices intoning all the praise and criticism that have circled his work (among the commentators are Gerald O’Grady, Lewis Lapham, Neil Postman, Laurie Anderson, and McLuhan’s son Eric). Ultimately this adds up to a comprehensive and highly ambitious study of McLuhan’s life, thought, and influence. 94 min. (JR) Read more
A creepily effective French documentary by David Korn-Brzoza (2002, 82 min.) about the international surveillance networks that have proliferated since the mid-1940s, featuring interviews with former spies from Canada, England, New Zealand, and the U.S. With its cloak-and-dagger music, percussive electronic signals, jazzy computer graphics, and deft split-screen effects in ‘Scope, this film sometimes seems to enjoy the terrifying visions it illustrates. But I couldn’t tear my eyes from the screen, and some of the epigrams are memorable (Too much power can be synonymous with loss of control; Everyone’s at it, so you can’t denounce your neighbors). Understandably, American snooping gets the most attention, though the French aren’t excludedmight one concoct a paranoid scenario explaining why Australia gets so little play? In English and French with subtitles. (JR) Read more
Stanley Nelson’s 2002 documentary retells the powerful story of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Chicago boy who visited Mississippi in 1955, made the mistake of insulting a white woman, and was abducted, tortured, and killed. I was grateful for the attention paid to Till’s mother, Mamie, whose insistence on displaying her son’s mangled corpse to 50,000 fellow Chicagoans dramatized the miscarriage of justice when a Mississippi jury acquitted the known killers. But Nelson’s frequent use of spirituals on the sound track is needlessly sappy, and Marcia A. Smith’s script is parochial in some respects. She concludes that the Till case sparked the civil rights movement, which is certainly accurate, yet many subsequent horror stories fanned the flames. She also implies that white southerners unanimously supported such atrocities, omitting any mention of Alabama reporter William Bradford Huie, who bribed Till’s killers into confessing and later made a career of defying southern racism. 53 min. (JR) Read more
Ken Loach’s 2002 feature about a poor 15-year-old boy living in a seaside town in western Scotland is a real heartbreaker; like The Bicycle Thief and Rebel Without a Cause, it confronts the tragedy of someone trying to be a good person who finds that the world he inhabits won’t allow it. Liam (played by teenage soccer pro Martin Compston) has a mother in prison; his sister loves him but can’t understand why he gets into so many fights, just as his mother’s lover can’t understand why he refuses to slip drugs to his mother in prison. Paul Laverty’s script, which won the best screenplay prize at Cannes, never sentimentalizes Liam, yet it fully draws us into his world. I’m not prone to like socially deterministic films of this kind, yet Loach is so masterful at squeezing nuance and truth out of the form that I was completely won over. The Scottish brogue is subtitled. 106 min. Gene Siskel Film Center, Saturday, March 22, 5:30, and Monday, March 24, 6:15. Read more
I guess I do too, which is why I chose to review this program. But Micaela O’Herlihy’s 14-minute Thunder Perfect Mind, a choppy experimental film mixing found footage with elliptical glimpses of a cavorting New Age prostitute, is too arch and self-conscious for my taste. In her 58-minute video documentary Bad Girls, Marielle Nitoslawska interviews smart and articulate women on the subject of porn, including film theorist and former Chicagoan Linda Williams, French feminist Luce Irigaray, filmmaker Catherine Breillat, performance artist and porn star Annie Sprinkle, and several directors of erotic films, including some who work for Lars von Trier’s Danish porn studio. Much of this is fun and interesting, though only occasionally both at the same time. (JR) Read more
Two video documentaries. The shorter of the two, Tanaz Eshaghian and Sara Nodojoumi’s I Call Myself Persian: Iranians in America (2001, 27 min.), takes on a fascinating topic, but the execution is pedestrian talking-head stuff. Among the better heads on display are Edward Said and the artist and filmmaker Sharin Neshat. Lu Lippold’s The Unapologetic Life of Margaret Randall (2002, 59 min.) is an absorbing portrait of the bohemian writer and activist, an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy in Central and South America. After living in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Mexico for decades, Randall sued to have her American citizenshipwhich she had previously renouncedreinstated, incurring a lengthy deportation battle with the U.S. government. Randall, her mother, her daughters, and poet Adrienne Rich are better at telling Randall’s story than the awkward narration. (JR) Read more
Jerry Lewis’s fourth solo feature directed by his gifted mentor Frank Tashlin (1963) takes place in a department store that Lewis’s ditzy character winds up destroying. The backup cast is unusually good (Agnes Moorehead, Jill St. John, John McGiver, Ray Walston), and Tashlin exploits to the fullest his vision of appliances running amok. 90 min. (JR) Read more
Adapted from a book of stories by A.M. Homes, this third feature by Rose Troche is a series of interlocking tales about dysfunctional families and individuals living in one suburban neighborhood. Three weeks after seeing this film, I could barely remember it, and given Troche’s precise grasp of character and milieu in her much more cheerful Go Fish, it’s difficult to fathom why this movie is so flat and unconvincing. Maybe the stories work individually on the page, but collapsed together as they are here, and played like too many wild cards, they come across as contrived and forced; not even the highly stylized opening, which introduces us to the various families by way of a few dollhouses, makes the contrivances any more palatable. Among the sad characters are a mother (Glenn Close) doggedly nursing her comatose son while her teenage daughter (Jessica Campell) enters her in a silly radio contest in a mall, an alienated lawyer (Dermot Mulroney) who winds up playing cheerleader to the mother in the contest, a teenager (Alex House) in love with his sister’s Barbie doll, and the bored kidnapper of a little boy. The actorsincluding Mary Kay Place, Robert Klein, Moira Kelly, Patricia Clarkson, Kristen Stewart, and Timothy Olyphantare skillful, but what they’re given to work with mainly defeats them. Read more
I still haven’t seen or read Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 German play The Deputy, which caused quite a stir when it first appeared and has intrigued me ever since I read Susan Sontag’s essay about it. But whether or not this English-language adaptation, scripted by Jean-Claude Grumberg and director Costa-Gavras, is faithful to the play, it’s an absorbing and compelling account of a historical episode that should be better known. Like the play, the film focuses on the efforts of SS officer Kurt Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur) and a young Jesuit priest (Mathieu Kassovitz, playing a composite of several people) to enlist the Vatican in exposing the Nazi death camps to the world. The most controversial part of the story is Pope Pius XII’s failure to take a stand against the camps as he did against Nazi euthanasia, which the film examines in detail. A sober and serious docudrama, this follows the example of Shoah in refusing to show or represent any of the death-camp horrors, leaving this up to the viewer’s imagination. 130 min. (JR) Read more
David Gordon Green follows up his George Washington with something similar yet also somewhat better. Again the setting is a North Carolina mill town, the milieu mainly working-class, and the period contemporary only in the broadest sense. (Perhaps the surest sign of the present is the heroine’s telling the hero not to smoke in her bedroom.) But this time most of the characters are somewhat older, none is black, the cast includes veteran actors as well as talented first-timers, and the plot is more focused: an offbeat love story between a 22-year-old ladies’ man who’s never left town (cowriter Paul Schneider) and an 18-year-old virgin and recent boarding-school graduate (Zooey Deschanel). This is a lyrical heartbreaker that skirts most love-story cliches and is brave enough to be as inconclusive as the characters. Green’s poetic sensibility and Tim Orr’s lush ‘Scope cinematography give this drifting story a pungent aftertaste. 108 min. (JR) Read more
