This potent Belgian feature (2002) by brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne is every bit as good as their La promesse and Rosetta. Unlike them it can’t be described in detail without telegraphing the plot’s carefully structured exposition, but it involves a carpenter and teacher at a vocational workshop (Olivier Gourmet) who takes on a 16-year-old boy as an apprentice, with cataclysmic consequences. Gourmet, who played the hero’s father in La promesse and the heroine’s employer in Rosetta, gives a strong and nuanced performance that deservedly won him the best actor prize at Cannes. The Dardennes’ extremely physical and visceral camera style plunges the viewer into an emotional maelstrom, and their subtle, unpredictable sense of character is predicated not on coercion of the audience but on an extraordinary respect for the viewer as well as the characters. To my knowledge there’s no one else making films with such a sharp sense of contemporary working-class lifebut for the Dardennes it’s only the starting point of a spiritual and profoundly ethical odyssey. In French with subtitles. 103 min. (JR) Read more
Showing as part of the lecture series The Cinema of Horror: Maya Deren’s first film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943, 18 min.), and four of the most famous short films of Kenneth Anger: Fireworks (1947, 15 min.), Scorpio Rising (1963, 29 min.), Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969, 12 min.), and Lucifer Rising (1980, 29 min.). If you’ve never seen these highly personal and essential works, this should be an excellent introduction. (JR) Read more
Not to be confused with the Ridley Scott thriller released the same year, this black-and-white 1989 feature by Shohei Imamura takes on the unpredictable physical and psychological aftereffects of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Based on a celebrated novel by Masuji Ibuse, it focuses on a young woman who’s just moved to a village across a wide bay from the city when the bomb falls. Most of the plot unfolds years later, yet Imamura repeatedly returns to the bombing’s immediate aftermath, and one of the more striking of these traumatic and haunting flashbacks is boldly rendered just with sound effects and changes in lighting. Imamura’s style here, for all its inventiveness, is uncharacteristically subdued and sober. Like his last worka devastating episode in the anthology film September 11this is one of the few movies that’s addressed Hiroshima without blinking. In Japanese with subtitles. 123 min. (JR) Read more
Gus Van Sant says this 2001 feature was inspired by Bela Tarr, James Benning, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jacques Tati, and Chantal Akerman, among others, but it’s far below the level of any of these filmmakers at their best. Within the commercial context suggested by the film’s only actorsCasey Affleck and Matt Damonit’s certainly a provocation, with a few funny moments, and it’s less phony and offensive than Finding Forrester. The two stars (who collaborated with Van Sant on the script), both playing characters named Gerry, wander across the desert for some reason, and if you enjoy watching them on any pretext, you’ll probably enjoy this; if you don’t, you won’t. Van Sant was an exciting filmmaker when he made his first three features (Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho) and some of his early shorts. The feature following this one, Elephant, reestablished him as an artist worth watching. 103 min. (JR) Read more
There’s something almost wearying as well as exhilarating about the perpetual brilliance of Bosnian-born filmmaker Emir Kusturica. As with some of Fellini’s late works, the energy and inventiveness, not to mention the juicy vulgarity, are so consistent in Black Cat, White Cat that you feel you can slice into the material at almost any point. In this 129-minute slam-bang farce (1999) about Gypsies living on the Danube and lorded over by two rival patriarchs, there’s plenty to cherish and enjoy (at least if you can put up with all the cynicism), but I was especially impressed by Bajram Severdzan, hilarious as a nouveau riche gangster. In German, Romany, and Serbo-Croatian with subtitles. (JR) Read more
I probably laughed harder at this collection of college slapstick sketches than I ever have at a film I didn’t really like, Dave Kehr once wrote in this paper about Animal House, and that’s pretty much my reaction to Old School. Directed, cowritten, and coproduced by Todd Phillips, this cheerfully vulgar low-comedy tale of three out-of-sorts 30ish blowhards (Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn) trying to rekindle the spark of their college days by setting up a frat house starts out silly, gets sillier by the minute, and frequently had me and most of the people around me in stitches. Don’t expect clever plotting or witty dialogue, but credit Phillips’s easy way with actors and his sharp sense of how to use or avoid pathos. (The film also shows the paw prints of Animal House producer Ivan Reitman.) With Ellen Pompeo, Juliette Lewis, Leah Remini, and Jeremy Piven. R, 91 min. (JR) Read more
The French title of Jacques Becker’s 1953 gangster thriller translates as “Hands Off the Loot,” but a much better English title used for this film is Honor Among Thieves. Jean Gabin wasn’t yet 50 when he starred as a big-time, high-style gangster hoping to retire, but he still looks pretty wasted, and this pungent tale about aging and friendship, adapted from a best-selling noir thriller by Albert Simonin, would be hard to imagine without his puffy features. Jeanne Moreau, in one of her first parts, plays a showgirl who two-times Gabin’s similarly aging partner (Rene Dary), and future star Lino Ventura also puts in an appearance. But it’s Gabin’s show all the way, anticipating the melancholy, atmospheric gangster pictures of Jean-Pierre Melville that started to appear a couple years later. In French with subtitles. 94 min. Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, Wednesday, February 19, 6:00, 312-846-2800. Read more
I was appalled to hear that writer-director Michael Petroni was obliged to reedit his Australian feature in order to receive American distribution from Paramount Classics, taking apart the chronological Australian cut so that the story now seesaws awkwardly between two periods. Given the deplorable willingness of so much of the American press to sanction this sort of Miramaxing, routinely trusting distributors over filmmakers, it’s not surprising that so many films wind up twisted pointlessly out of shape. This is a tale of romantic obsession with more than a whiff of Vertigo. It’s about a teenage boy (Lindley Joyner) who returns to his native Victoria from boarding school and falls for a crippled girl (Brooke Harman) who fancies poetry (occasioning the Eliot reference in the title). She drowns; decades later the boy, now a psychology teacher (Guy Pearce) returning from Melbourne to bury his father, saves a woman (Helena Bonham Carter) from drowning and begins to relive his traumatic experience. The story is full of unanswered questions and ultimately succeeds or fails according to the mood it conjures. I was seduced part of the time, thanks largely to Bonham Carter’s sensuality, but the whole is unsatisfying, and it’s tempting to see the imposed recutting as a major source of the problem. Read more
Philip Seymour Hoffman fails to carry this 2002 indie feature about a Web designer spiraling downward in the wake of his wife’s unexplained suicide. For all the possibilities inherent in such a premise, neither writer Gordy Hoffman (the actor’s brother) nor director Todd Louiso has found a way to realize any of them fully. Kathy Bates, who can do no wrong, is a rock of strength as Hoffman’s mother-in-law, and giving her more screen time might have been fruitful. With Wilson Joel and Mary Ann Bankhead. 93 min. (JR) Read more
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
