Two Asian women who are best friends and a little boy, all realistically established characters, travel by train at night, disembarking at each stop to encounter enigmatic and highly unrealistic events. This feature by Trinh T. Minh-ha (A Tale of Love, Naked SpacesLiving Is Round) and Jean-Paul Bourdier unfolds as an avant-garde picaresque, though unlike other examples that spring to mind (Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus, Pasolini’s Hawks and Sparrows), it seems neither autobiographical nor ethnocentric, and tends to emphasize theatrical elements (including forthright use of music, choreography, and spoken text). Such seemingly unanchored work is obliged to entertain on some level, and this succeeds pretty well, aided by Bourdier’s lighting and production design. The credited inspiration is Kenji Miyazawa’s novel Milky Way Railroad, and the effective music is by the Construction of Ruins. 98 min. (JR) Read more
This striking and poetic experimental feature (2003) was shot in Morocco, but its maker, Hakim Belabbes, is a former graduate student at Columbia College who did much of the pre- and postproduction work in Chicago. This seems appropriate, because the film is constructed as an urgent dialogue between Moroccan traditionalism and Western modernityor should we say, given the current state of the world, between Moroccan modernity and Western traditionalism? This conversation is expressed formally as well as thematically through several interwoven stories. Beautifully shot in vibrant colors, the film shifts between characters, story lines, and perspectives with the prismatic grace of a kaleidoscope. In French and Arabic with subtitles. 92 min. (JR) Read more
The best work to date by screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation), this was developed from a story by director Michel Gondry and artist Pierre Bismuth. It has as much challenging originality as its predecessors as well as a more satisfying ending and a keener sense of lived experience. The SF premise has a ring of contemporary truth: emerging from a failed romantic relationship, the hero (a subdued Jim Carrey) discovers that his ex (an aggressive Kate Winslet) has hired a company to erase all her memories of him. He enlists their services too, but technical screwups send him into a kind of temporal free fall in which past and present consciousness bleed together. Brilliantly constructed and engagingly executed, this has quite a few tricks up its sleeve–the most impressive being that all concerned trim their talents to the particular needs of the movie. With Tom Wilkinson, Mark Ruffalo, and Elijah Wood. R, 108 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Crown Village 18, Davis, Gardens 7-13, Lake, Pipers Alley, River East 21. (Reviewed this week in Section One.) Read more
Directed by Barbara Albert, this 2003 Austrian feature tracks the fate of a woman after she survives a plane crash, weaving together numerous miniplots. At first I thought this was a Michael Haneke knockoff, but it’s more depressing and less edifying than most of those narrative experiments, which is why I eventually tuned it out. In German with subtitles. 120 min. (JR) Read more
D.J. Caruso (The Salton Sea) directed this competent but ultimately egregious thriller about an eccentric FBI profiler (Angelina Jolie) tracking a serial killer in Montreal. On the plus side, it isn’t boring, and Jolie and Ethan Hawke, who plays an art dealer and key witness, generate a certain amount of edgy chemistry. But eventually the filmmakers’ desire to shock and tease overtakes any feeling for character or common sense. Adapted by Jon Bokenkamp from a novel by Michael Pye; with Kiefer Sutherland, Gena Rowlands, Olivier Martinez, Tcheky Karyo, and Jean-Hughes Anglade. R, 100 min. (JR) Read more
A military officer (Val Kilmer) working in a top-secret special operations force is sent to find the missing teenage daughter of a big-time government official and uncovers a white slavery ring. It’s impossible to describe this story, government corruption and all, without producing a flood of cliches, yet writer-director David Mamet seems to regard it as mere fodder for another of his closed-universe genre exerciseseither that or he’s trying to lure Arnold Schwarzenegger back to Hollywood. The heroes (Kilmer, Derek Luke) are all totally good, the villains (Ed O’Neill, William H. Macy) are all totally bad, and the macho one-liners are sufficiently adolescent to produce the desired snickers. I tried very hard to imagine I was somewhere else. R, 106 min. (JR) Read more
David Koepp, much better and more experienced as a writer (Apartment Zero, Snake Eyes, Jurassic Park, Spider-Man) than as a director, adapted this psychological thriller from a Stephen King novella. It’s one more King story about an isolated writerin this case a popular novelist (Johnny Depp) in the middle of a messy divorce who, tucked away in a remote Mississippi cabin, is accused of plagiarism and stalked by a crazed hick (John Turturro). The tricky plot has an interesting payoff, but it’s a slow and bumpy ride getting there, and Koepp fares better with special effects than with generating either suspense or interest in the characters. With Maria Bello, Timothy Hutton, and Charles S. Dutton; the ubiquitous Philip Glass churned out the anxious score, and Fred Murphy is the able cinematographer. PG-13, 106 min. (JR) Read more
The Cinerama-like Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of CivilizationAfter Henry Darger and Charles Fourier (2001, 19 min.), originally made for an installation, and Now Let Us Praise Famous Leftists (2000, 4 min.) are provocative and cantankerous conceptual works employing computer animation. They’re both ripe for explication, so it’s fortunate that former Chicagoan (and Reader staffer) Paul Chan will be on hand to discuss them. But the most valuable work here is Baghdad in No Particular OrderPart I (51 min.), shot in that city in late 2002 and early 2003a freewheeling, inquisitive portrait of some of the people whose lives we’re supposed to be improving, with particular emphasis on their art and music. As visual constructions, all three videos are highly original. (JR) Read more
I approached this 2002 documentary with a keen desire to learn more about its subject, American experimental composer and saxophonist John Zorn, and came away only partially satisfied. German filmmaker Claudia Heuermann, who supplies autobiographical narration, is clearly a passionate Zorn fan and even lets some of his ideas about structure influence the titled sections, but she makes no effort to situate Zorn in relation to other avant-garde composers and musicians, instead using him as a stand-in for experimental music in general. This kind of hagiography does neither Zorn nor the audience any favors, but enough of his ideas and musical range (encompassing punk, free jazz, klezmer, Japanese noise bands, and film scores) come across to keep this lively and interesting; I especially enjoyed his reflections on all he learned from Carl Stalling’s music in the Road Runner cartoons. 82 min. (JR) Read more
Doubtless this tale of spirit possession in Georgetown packs a punch, but so does wood alcohol, wrote Reader critic Don Druker in an earlier review of this. I wouldn’t be quite so dismissive: as a key visual source for Mel Gibson’s depiction of evil in The Passion of the Christ, as well as an early indication of how seriously pulp can be taken when religious faith is involved, this 1973 horror thriller is highly instructive as well as unnerving. William Friedkin, directing William Peter Blatty’s adaptation of his own novel, aims for the jugular, privileging sensation over sense and such showbiz standbys as vomit and obscenity over plodding exposition. This is the original release version, which runs 121 minutes; with Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow, Jason Miller, Linda Blair, and Lee J. Cobb. R. (JR) Read more
Based on a French lieutenant’s account of his 1942 escape from a gestapo fortress in Lyon, this stately yet uncommonly gripping 1956 feature is my choice as the greatest achievement of Robert Bresson, one of the cinema’s foremost artists. (It’s rivaled only by his more corrosive and metaphysical 1970 film Au hasard Balthazar, playing next week.) The best of all prison-escape movies, it reconstructs the very notion of freedom through offscreen sounds and defines salvation in terms of painstakingly patient and meticulous effort. Bresson himself spent part of the war in an internment camp and subsequently lived through the German occupation of France, experiences that inform his magisterial grasp of what the concentrated use of sound and image can reveal about souls in hiding. Essential viewing. In French with subtitles. 101 min. Music Box. Read more
After giving prostitution the full Disney treatment in Pretty Woman, director Garry Marshall recommends mild doses of sadomasochism and bondage-discipline to the middle-class. As both a liberal project and a light tease, this carries a certain charm, though the star dominatrix here, Dana Delany, is so soft and malleable that one winds up feeling that the movie has backed away from its own agenda. The first and best part has its hero, Paul Mercurio, taking off for a therapeutic island named Eden, something halfway between summer camp and kinky theme park, where wisecracking undercover cops Rosie O’Donnell and Dan Aykroydfurnished with arch and awkward dialogue by Deborah Amelon and Bob Brunnerare trying to track down some central-casting villains (one of them played by the model Iman). Then Delany and Mercurio fly away to Louisiana, and the movie flies away with them. The source material, incidentally, is an Anne Rice novel. (JR) Read more
A Dutch film in English by Ian Kerkhof which sounds like an experimental docudrama on the subject of serial killers, to be shown with a short documentary from the U.S. by George Hickenlooper ( Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse) on the same subject (though only one measly serial killer in this case), Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade. Read more
Six short films by American film studentsEva Ilona Brzeski, Chris Macgowan, Lesllie McCleave, Daven Gee, Mark Yardas, and Debrah LeMattre. Read more
A presentation of the work of graphic designer and filmmaker Saul Bass, perhaps best known for his credit sequences designed for Otto Preminger films, his Oscar-winning short film Why Man Creates, and his s-f feature Phase IV. Bass himself will host the event. Music Box, 7:00) Read more
