A teenage girl (Addie Land) and her mother (Cara Seymour) are forced to move in with the mother’s mom, who owns a rickety shack on the outskirts of a Pacific northwest town. Miserable at home, the girl becomes involved with a boy at school (Noel Fleiss) and begins to idolize his rich parents (Bruce Davison and Mary Kay Place), overlooking their problems. This sincere first feature by writer-director Enid Zentelis is enlivened by Gary Farmer’s wonderful performance as the mother’s boyfriend, but it’s ultimately hamstrung by storytelling that seems both underdeveloped and overdetermined. PG-13, 86 min. (JR) Read more
I missed the notorious Cannes premiere, when many critics trashed the film. After that, Vincent Gallo cut his highly self-regarding, handcrafted road movie by 26 minutes, and I have to admit I find the results more interesting than not. The film’s flaws are the exclusive property of its producer, director, writer, cinematographer, editor, and star, and if some elements are irritating, at least they’re not borrowed goods. The character Gallo playsa semiautistic motorcycle racer driving back to the west coast from a New England event, picking up ravenous stray women and trying to deal with a traumatically concluded relationshipisn’t very interesting, but what Gallo does with sound, image, chutzpah, Ted Curson’s Tears for Dolphy, and the windshield of his own van has its moments. With Chloe Sevigny and Cheryl Tiegs. 90 min. (JR) Read more
Ernst Lubitsch’s first talkie and first operetta, costarring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, shares with the other two 1929 features showing at the Music Box on Thursday the excitement of movies being reinvented, so that silence as well as sound becomes a brand-new plaything (in contradistinction to “silent” movies, which usually had musical accompaniment). A study in playfulness, this fantasy about a country preoccupied with its queen getting married actually has a dog barking out half a chorus of one number, perfectly in tune, and the pre-Code erotics and sexual politics seem pretty advanced in spots. Secondary leads Lillian Roth and Lupino Lane offer some acrobatic low comedy as servants whose best song is called “Let’s Be Common.” 110 min. Also on the program is the silent short Big Business (1929), Laurel and Hardy’s classic grudge match with Jimmy Finlayson. Read more
