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
Kenneth Branagh’s superb 1989 version of the Shakespeare play, which he directed and adapted as well as stars in, is distinctly different from Laurence Olivier’s 1944 movie. The earlier film was intended to whip up patriotic sentiment, but Branagh’s version has a much darker view of England’s defeat of France, more relevant in certain respects to World War I. (The climactic battle is muddy, gory, and marked by the looting of corpses, and after it’s over, Henry’s face is streaked with blood and grime like a Jackson Pollock painting.) Olivier’s vantage point seems more that of the Renaissance, while Branagh’s, like Orson Welles’s in Chimes at Midnight (1966)an obvious influence and reference pointis closer to the Middle Ages. The castincluding Derek Jacobi as the modern-dress chorus, Paul Scofield, Judi Dench, Ian Holm, Emma Thompson, and Robbie Coltrane in an effective cameo as Falstaffis uniformly fine without any grandstanding. 137 min. (JR) Read more
Screenwriter Jeff Nathanson (The Terminal) makes his directing debut with this unfunny and instantly forgettable comedy about an FBI agent (Alec Baldwin) who poses as a movie producer in order to bust a mob boss. Joan Cusack, in a small part, gets to be hilarious, but other members of the talented castMatthew Broderick, Toni Collette, Tony Shalhoub, and Calista Flockhartprove less lucky. R, 93 min. (JR) Read more
An itinerant Palestinian projectionist, living with his wife near Ramallah and screening cartoons for children in refugee camps, resolves to hold an outdoor screening in Jerusalem despite it being illegal for him to enter the city. The hero, who suggests a stocky George Clooney, is a memorable figure, and in some ways his project recalls Susan Sontag’s 1993 staging of Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo. Directed by Rashid Masharawi, this touching Palestinian feature (2002) is shaped and inflected at every turn by its locations; much of the absorbing narrative is concerned with the nitty-gritty of passing checkpoints and repairing a rickety projector. In Arabic and Hebrew with subtitles. 85 min. (JR) Read more
I haven’t seen Kenji Mizoguchi’s rarely screened first talkie (1930), also known as Home Village. But the plot — an ambitious opera tenor (Yoshie Fujiwara) becomes conceited and neglects his faithful, self-sacrificing girlfriend — suggests some resemblance to The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939), one of his greatest films. In Japanese with subtitles. 86 min. (JR) Read more
Writer-director James Toback (The Pick-up Artist) tries his hand at soft-core porn in this comedy-drama revolving around Neve Campbell as a rich kid in a swank new loft, which makes it a tad more visually interesting than his usual. I suspect he thinks his story about various interacting Manhattan hustlersincluding himself as a Columbia professor, Fred Weller as a would-be pimp and movie producer, Dominic Chianese as an Italian count and billionaire, and the conniving Campbell character herselfis more profoundly motivated. But the slapdash plot, paper-thin characters, misogynist undertones, and mechanical crosscutting are all soft-core standbys, and the philosophical platitude of everybody being a hustler (just like Toback himself while pitching movies like this one) actually seems closer to Russ Meyer than to Dostoyevsky. Mike Tyson and Lori Singer contribute cameos as themselves. R, 81 min. (JR) Read more
This experimental video documentary (2003, 54 min.) by the talented Harun Farocki takes a subtle and provocative look at industrial photography and automation, especially as they relate to the launching, monitoring, and recording of missile strikes. Farocki begins by considering the “smart bombs” used during the first gulf war, which provided precise video imagery without any sign of human casualties. From there he examines the wider technological developments in factories as well as military systems, and the elimination of people from both. Especially telling is Farocki’s focus on the kinds of images used to represent these innovations and what they implicitly reveal about the people using them. Also on the program is his minimalist but precise Inextinguishable Fire (1969, 22 min.), about the manufacture and effects of napalm. A chilling moment occurs near the beginning, when Farocki, tonelessly reading the testimony of a Vietnamese victim, suddenly extinguishes a cigarette on his forearm and calmly explains that the temperature of napalm is seven and a half times greater. Both works are in German with subtitles. a Chicago Filmmakers. Read more
John Pierson, an impresario of American independent cinema who helped launch Spike Lee and Michael Moore, took his family to a remote Fiji island for a year to run a movie theater with free admission and hired Chicagoan Steve James (Hoop Dreams, Stevie) to document the project, particularly its final month. Pierson’s wife and teenage son and daughter seem more sensible about and more integrated into the local culture than he is, and James gives them ample opportunity to question Pierson’s missionary zeal. The results are fairly entertaining if not exactly profound. R, 110 min. (JR) Read more
From the Chicago Reader (April 16, 2004). — J.R.
The title leads — screenwriter Nia Vardalos, star of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and Toni Collette — are lifelong best friends and semiskilled lounge singers who accidentally witness a Russian mob killing. They flee for their lives to LA, where they disguise themselves as drag queens and become a hit at a gay cabaret. The script, which borrows plenty from Some Like It Hot, Ishtar, and maybe even Sylvia Scarlett, is more slapdash than its sources, but it’s full of high spirits and good vibes. The secondary cast — including David Duchovny and Debbie Reynolds, camping even more than the leads — also seems to be having fun. Michael Lembeck directed. PG-13, 98 min. (JR) Read more
The talented experimental documentary filmmaker Harun Farocki takes a subtle and provocative look at industrial photography and automation, especially as they relate to the launching, monitoring, and recording of missile strikes. Farocki begins by considering the smart bombs used during the first gulf war, which provided precise video imagery without any sign of human casualties. From there he examines the wider technological developments in factories as well as military systems, and the elimination of people from both. Especially telling is Farocki’s examination of the kinds of images used to represent these innovations and what they implicitly reveal about the people using them. 2003. In German with subtitles. 54 min. (JR) Read more
