Various rapes and murders ensue after a scientist transplants the heart of a gorilla into his son’s dead body. Rene Cardona directed this 1968 Mexican item and coauthored the script with Rene Cardona Jr. Even the tolerant Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film deems this totally tasteless and amateurish, but gore buffs should be alerted to real open-heart surgery footage. (JR) Read more
After playing the ghost in Michael Almereyda’s underrated modern-dress-Manhattan film of Hamlet (2000), Sam Shepard invited Almereyda to film his own rehearsals for the San Francisco stage production of his autobiographical play The Late Henry Ross, featuring Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, James Gammon, and Cheech Marin. The play holds relatively little interest for me even after this unpacking, yet Almereyda’s judicious observation and careful editing keep Shepard’s serious work with actors and honest wrestling with personal demons fascinating and instructive throughout. 89 min. Facets Cinematheque. Read more
For all my desire to celebrate the 40th Chicago International Film Festival as it moves into its second week, one thing sticks in my craw. Festivals are supposed to reflect what’s going on in the world of cinema, and one of the most important things going on right now is the astonishing and unprecedented success of muckraking documentaries. This year a remarkable number of films critical of the Bush administration have been released, including an astute French documentary by William Karel, The World According to Bush (which just showed up on Amazon). Yet not one of them is in the festival, a lamentable lost opportunity.
Chicago isn’t the only U.S. festival to help marginalize these works. The biggest concentration of anti-Bush films I’ve heard about all year turned up in Rotterdam rather than in this country. Are festivals unconsciously duplicating the self-censorship of network and cable TV, which has made these documentaries so necessary? The most conclusive evidence I’ve seen so far of why the American war strategy in Iraq has been disastrous is an account by a Swedish journalist of an army raid in Samarra, but the only place it’s available so far is as an “extra” on the DVD of Fahrenheit 9/11–with the unforgivable addition of guitar accompaniment. Read more
Despite the title, this arty piece of punk porn belongs less to Bataillewhose elegantly transgressive 1928 novel supplies only a few snippets of dialoguethan to Philadelphia-based underground video maker Andrew Repasky McElhinney (A Chronicle of Corpses). It’s beautifully lit and shot, making fine use of color, and critics as discerning as Dave Kehr and Bill Krohn have praised its challenging, dreamlike mix of hard-core sex (gay and straight) and fantasy rituals staged in an abandoned house. I was intrigued by one extended sequence in which a ravaged woman in a slip continually climbs the same staircase, but much of this seems disappointingly familiar for a work so bent on shock. Maybe seeing it in public would be a more confrontational experience. 81 min. (JR) Read more
A 123-minute program of shorts by Jonathan Nix (from Australia), Jun Watanabe (Japan), Matthew Gravelle (UK), Richard Goleszowski (UK), Rachel Davies (UK), J.J. Villard (U.S.), Chris Cherot (U.S.), Robert Mowen (U.S.), Laurence Coriat (UK), Andrew Gura (U.S.), Seth Grossman (U.S.), and Jay Rosenblatt (U.S.), the only one I’ve seena documentary about his little girl devouring an ice cream cone that’s much less compelling than his previous work with found footage. (JR) Read more
Raymond Depardon’s riveting documentary about various routine cases brought before a woman judge in a Paris courtroom may be as brilliant as some of its advocates claim, but only if one’s sufficiently alert to read at least some of the proceedings against the grain of her judgments. Through this procession of middle-class drunk drivers, alienated and/or dysfunctional individuals, and illegal aliens ranging from a pickpocket to an African whose only crime is never having the correct papers, a fascinating glimpse of contemporary France emergesmade apparent as much through the weary responses of Judge Michele Bernard-Requin and various fatuous court-appointed defenders as by the accused. The editing is brilliant. In French with subtitles. 105 min. (JR) Read more
A heroic effort by critic Richard Schickel to reconstruct Samuel Fuller’s most ambitious featurea semiautobiographical account of his own fighting unit during World War II, severely truncated by distributors when first released (in 1980). This isn’t a director’s cut, and the offscreen commentary that Fuller objected to is retained (if reduced), but it’s 50 minutes longer than the original release, with 15 previously missing scenes and 23 extensions of existing scenes supplied from surviving footage, with Fuller’s script and notes used as guidelines. Starring Lee Marvin, Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine, and Bobby Di Cicco as well as Stephane Audran and Christa Lang (with a cameo by Fuller himself), this multifaceted, earthy, and philosophical reflection on war runs the gamut from realism to surrealism. What it lacks in cohesion it more than makes up for in comprehensiveness, as it follows Fuller’s combat experience from North Africa to Sicily, France, Belgium, Germany, and Czechoslovakia. R, 163 min. (JR) Read more
I wrongly assumed that this venerated 1969 film, a founding gesture of the Iranian new wave, would be humanist and sentimental. In fact, Dariush Mehrjui’s second feature, written with the late playwright Gholam-Hossein Saedi and shot in stark black and white, is a cruel allegory whose meanings are far from obvious. The owner (Ezzatolah Entezami) of the only cow in a village that’s terrified of potential invaders goes mad and comes to believe he’s a cow after the animal dies for unexplained reasons during his brief absence from home. Ultimately this is a film more about community and scapegoating than about aberrant individualityfull of dark implications, powerfully acted, and graced by a striking modernist score. 100 min. In Farsi with subtitles. (JR) Read more
Benoit Delepine and Gustave de Kervern’s 2004 Belgian comedy in black-and-white ‘Scope follows a couple of feuding farmers paralyzed in a tractor accident who travel together to confront the company that built the machine. I saw this alleged crowd-pleaser around the time it came out and can barely remember it now. In French, German, and Finnish with subtitles. 90 min. (JR) Read more
One of the two schlocky horror comedies Paul Morrissey made in Italy in 1974; Blood for Dracula is the sexier and funnier, while Flesh for Frankenstein is the gorier (and in 3-D). Both were released with Warhol’s name attached for advertising purposes, though apparently that was his only connection. Joe Dallesandro, a fixture of Morrissey’s movies in that period, costars with Udo Kier and (I kid you not) Vittorio De Sica and Roman Polanski. Also known as Andy Warhol’s Dracula; various versions range from 93 to 106 minutes. (JR) Read more
Novelist Giuseppe di Lampedusa was a conservative, and filmmaker Luchino Visconti was a communist. But both men were aristocrats, and when Visconti adapted the posthumously published Il gattopardo to the screen in 1963, he created one of the movies’ richest portrayals of fading aristocracy since Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons. The 205-minute version that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes probably no longer exists, but this dazzling new 183-minute restoration of Visconti’s greatest feature is so superior to the dubbed and faded 161-minute version released in the U.S. that it feels complete. Burt Lancaster stars as Don Fabrizio, a gentlemanly landowner in mid-19th-century Palermo who realizes that the old world is dying. The painterly peripheral detail of Visconti’s epic exteriors is surpassed only by the extended ball sequence in the last third, in which realistic details double as Fabrizio’s stream of consciousness. With Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale. In Italian with subtitles. Music Box. Read more
I just know how this world works. — George W. Bush, first presidential debate
The recent news that three years after the 9/11 attacks 123,000 hours of potentially useful recordings related to terrorism have yet to be translated by FBI linguists is a grim reminder of how limited our ability to know our enemies is. That President Bush thought it was OK to ridicule an American reporter for speaking French to French people in France suggests that we also have a problem when it comes to knowing our friends.
Fortunately, the desire in this country to understand others is intense. One of the easiest ways to learn about foreign cultures is to watch their movies, and over the next two weeks the Chicago International Film Festival–one of the oldest festivals in North America, now celebrating its 40th anniversary–is offering films from more than 40 countries. With 119 programs, including 14 revivals, this is a rare opportunity to learn more about how the world works.
Some of the features portray aspects of more than one foreign culture. Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre musique, a beautiful, oddly serene reflection on war set and filmed in Sarajevo, counts among its characters the French-Swiss Godard himself, a French-Jewish journalist based in Israel, Algerians, Vietnamese, and even Native Americans. Read more
An agile thief (Parviz Parastoie) escapes from an Iranian prison in the stolen garb of an Islamic cleric, but while he’s waiting to secure a passport he begins to draw followers, and the ensuing complications make him wonder whether prison was so bad after all. With its earthy, populist blasphemy, this satire by Kamal Tabrizi won the audience prize at the Fajr film festival and was subsequently banned, though neither development should come as any surprise. Most of the laughs are pretty obvious, but a few gags (a television cleric holding forth on the religious wisdom of Pulp Fiction) are endearingly wacky. In Farsi with subtitles. 115 min. (JR) Read more
Chris Smith and Sarah Price (the cocreators of American Movie) and Dan Ollman chronicle the inspired and highly educational pranks of Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano, who pose as representatives of the World Trade Organization on the Web, on television, and at big-time international conferences. Their easygoing conviction fools everyone, even when they sing the praises of shitburgers, propose selling votes for profit, or unveil a grotesque worker’s suit with a pop-up penis containing a surveillance camera. More good-natured than Michael Moore, these guys score by raising the issue of just how much their amateur antics exaggerate the neocon principles of the WTO. R, 83 min. a Landmark’s Century Centre. Read more
This brilliant and often hilarious 2003 essay film by Thom Andersen (Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer) assembles clips from 191 movies set in Los Angeles, juxtaposing their fantasies with the real city as seen by a loyal and well-informed native. That might sound like a slender premise for 169 minutes, but after five viewings I still feel I’ve only scratched the surface of this epic meditation. Andersen focuses on the city’s people and architecture, but his wisecracking discourse is broad enough to encompass a wealth of local folklore, a bittersweet tribute to car culture, a critical history of mass transit in southern California, and a song of nostalgia for lost neighborhoods and lifestyles. Absorbing and revelatory, this is film criticism of the highest order. To be projected from Beta SP video, with a ten-minute intermission. Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more