Twenty years after its release, Albert Brooks’s third feature is still such a hilarious send-up of yuppie mentality that it might have been made yesterday. Brooks plays an obnoxious west-coast ad executive who’s so enraged when he fails to get an expected promotion that he quits his job, persuades his wife (Julie Hagerty) to do the same, and, spurred by fond memories of Easy Rider, takes off with her in a newly purchased Winnebago. As they travel cross-country with their $200,000 nest egg, an unforeseen disaster sends them deeper into the heart of the heartland than they’d counted on. All of Brooks’s comedies are good, but he hasn’t yet surpassed the first threeReal Life (1979), Modern Romance (1981), and this one. Director Garry Marshall has a great cameo as a Las Vegas casino owner, and Monica Johnson collaborated with Brooks on the script. R, 91 min. (JR) Read more
Hal Hartley’s previous feature, No Such Thing (2001), had a clever philosophical premise, but its style was so theatrical that many of the best speeches withered into pontification. This futuristic follow-up, resourcefully shot in DV, is even wilder in its social satire, and its deadpan dialogue is hilarious. Suggested in part by Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, it imagines a “dictatorshp of the consumer” in which citizens carry bar codes on their wrists and are regarded as “investments with growth potential” (especially when they have sex). This has a frenetic visual and editing style all its own, and an appealing cast: Bill Sage, Sabrina Lloyd, Tatiana Abracos, and Leo Fitzpatrick. 84 min. Reviewed this week in Section 1. Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
This 2003 Brazilian melodrama is more mainstream than the others I’ve seen by director Carlos Reichenbach (Suburban Angels, Buccaneer Soul, Two Streams), but his visual flair is still very much in evidence. Set in ABCthree suburban outposts that border Sao Paoloit focuses on the racially mixed working class, chiefly the young women who work the looms in a textile factory and the young toughs who hang out in a cafe pool hall. Racist attitudes and efforts to unionize the factory are highlighted, along with bouts of hot sex, violence, and singing and dancing at a local club. In Portuguese with subtitles. 125 min. (JR) Read more
William Wellman’s arty film version of Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s anti-lynching novel packed a punch for many spectators in 1943 but has subsequently been written off by many reviewers as awkward and heavy-handed. I remember it as being somewhere between those extremes, and given the unheralded power of Wellman’s equally arty adaptation of Clark’s Track of the Cat (1954), I would imagine that this warrants a second look. With Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Mary Beth Hughes, Harry Morgan, and Anthony Quinn. 75 min. (JR) Read more
Alexander Kluge’s celebrated first feature (1966), regarded by some as the beginning of the New German Cinema, follows the hard times of a young woman from East Germany trying to establish herself in the West. Kluge’s sister Alexandra plays the title lead, and the writer-director himself, generally known as the preeminent filmmaker of the Marxist Frankfurt School, established himself with this film as a Brechtian social analyst. In German with subtitles. 88 min. (JR) Read more
John Boorman directs a potent, moving, liberal-minded docudrama about South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation hearings of the mid-90s, adapted by Ann Peacock from Antjie Krog’s novel Country of My Skull. The plot focuses on two journalists, an Afrikaner poet (Juliette Binoche) who firmly believes in the South African concept of ubuntu (collective unity) and a Washington Post reporter (Samuel L. Jackson) who’s a lot more skeptical, seeing the hearings chiefly as a way for guilty whites to be pardoned for their crimes. Though the opposition between these characters as well as their growing rapport may seem somewhat diagrammatic at times, the story as a whole is sufficiently nuanced to develop in unforeseeable directions, and Boorman gets the most out of the material. R, 104 min. Esquire. Read more
Chicago-based Kartemquin Films has added a 25-minute update and a subtitle to its documentary masterpiece (1988) about the Chicago-born leftist painter Leon Golub. I’m grateful for the new material, which documents the fatalistic yet playful later phase in Golub’s work up to his death in 2004 and fills another gap by better conveying the paintings of his wife, Nancy Spero. But I’m somewhat dismayed by the way the overall emphasis of the original has shifted away from the social reception of Golub’s political paintings toward a more conventional biographical approach. Tom Sivak’s music throughout remains striking and original. 80 min. (JR) Read more
An irritating and frustrating 52-minute account (2004) of the woman I regard as the greatest Czech filmmaker, offering a meager sense of her transgressive and innovative work while allowing her to rattle on about her family and current domestic life without revealing much that’s distinctive about either. Clips from Chytilova’s films aren’t identified by Czech director Jasmina Blazevic until the closing credits, and even viewers who have some acquaintance with her workwhich apart from the 1966 classic Daisies can be difficult to findare set adrift with few signposts about the shape of her prolific and varied career. In Czech with subtitles. (JR) Read more
An absorbing and intelligent Brazilian documentary about the legendary 1964 Soviet-Cuban coproduction I Am Cuba, a monumental revolutionary epic that was disastrously received, then shelved before being revived in the early 90s. Interviewing Cubans as well as Russians who worked on the film, directed by Mikhail Kalatozov, Vicente Ferraz clarifies some facts about the productionrevealing among other things that cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky’s wife, Bella Friedman, played a significant creative role. He’s also attentive to the ironies implicit in the film’s fate without being derisive or uncritical. In Spanish, Russian, and Portuguese with subtitles. 90 min. (JR) Read more
Judy Irving’s graceful and laid-back 2003 documentary deals with at least three subjects, separately and in conjunction with one another. One is indicated by the title: the 45 or so wild parrots from South America that have mysteriously found their way to Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. A good many of them have been befriended, as it were, by the second subject: Mark Bittner, a jobless and sometimes homeless local bohemian who teaches us a lot about them and himself. The third subject is the citya sturdy and loving portrait of San Francisco and its people emerges from the details. The film is both wise and tender in its treatment of relationshipsbetween birds, between people, and between birds and people. G, 83 min. (JR) Read more
A schoolteacher (Jimmy Fallon) finds his fanatical attachment to the Boston Red Sox getting in the way of his budding relationship with a business consultant (Drew Barrymore) in this slightly-better-than-average romantic comedy by Peter and Bobby Farrelly (There’s Something About Mary). It doesn’t require any knowledge of baseball and in fact does a pretty good job of exploring the more regressive aspects of sports fandom, though it doesn’t advance very far beyond predictable formula. To call this Farrelly brothers lite may be a little redundant, but aside from the odd vomit gag, it goes relatively easy on their usual working-class taboo busting. Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel wrote the script, adapting Nick Hornby’s memoir about his addiction to English soccer. PG-13, 105 min. (JR) Read more
This program includes Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed (66 min.), about which Dave Kehr writes, Reiniger was the master (and perhaps the sole practitioner) of an elaborate form of cutout animation in which silhouetted characters perform before filigreed backgrounds. This film, released in 1926 after three years’ work, is her only feature; it is charming, accomplished, and somewhat arcane. Completing the program are Berthold Bartosch’s L’idee (1932), Fernand Leger and Dudley Murphy’s classic Ballet mecanique (1924), the great Oskar Fischinger’s Wax Experiments (1927) and Muratti Marches On (1934), and Walter Ruttmann’s Opus II (1921), Opus III (1924), and Opus IV (1925). 140 min. (JR) Read more
John Boorman directs a potent, liberal-minded drama about South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation hearings of the mid-90s, adapted by Ann Peacock from Antjie Krog’s book Country of My Skull. The plot focuses on two journalists, an Afrikaner poet (Juliette Binoche) who firmly believes in the South African concept of ubuntu (collective unity) and a Washington Post reporter (Samuel L. Jackson) who’s a lot more skeptical, seeing the hearings chiefly as a way for guilty whites to be pardoned for their crimes. Though the opposition between these characters as well as their growing rapport may seem somewhat diagrammatic at times, the story as a whole is sufficiently nuanced to develop in unforeseeable directions, and Boorman gets the most out of the material. R, 104 min. (JR) Read more
For spectators who haven’t seen the original and don’t know all the donnees of the characters and situations, the makers of the sequel aren’t as forthcoming as they might have been. But there’s still a fair amount of disreputable amusement to be found from the eponymous, carnivorous rolling fur balls from outer space and the extraterrestrial bounty hunters on their trail. This minor Gremlins spin-off can’t boast much in the acting department, and most of the special effects are decidedly cut-rate, so good-natured nasty fun is the main bill of fare. Its not nearly as imaginative as Beetlejuice, but its callow little heart and its overbite are still both in the right place. With Don Opper, Scott Grimes, Liane Curtis, Barry Corbin, and Terrence Mann; directed by Mick Garris, written by Garris and David Twohy. (JR) Read more
128 minutes of slow-motion torture. Bertrand Tavernier’s misconceived catalog of suffering and squalor during the Middle Agesspecifically his grim account of incest and humiliation after a lord (Bernard Pierre Donnadieu) returns from the Hundred Years’ War to rape his daughter (Julie Delpy), berate his son (Nils Tavernier), curse God, and abuse a few othersis worthy of Woody Allen in one of his unfunny, self-flagellating moods. The toneless script is by Colo Tavernier O’Hagan, who previously collaborated with her ex-husband on that oatmeal manifesto known as A Sunday in the Country. If the earlier film was a square celebration of mediocrity, this one is an equally square and gutless attempt to do something down and dirty without knowing precisely how or why. A fine original score by jazz bassist Ron Carter and some good cinematography by Bruno de Keyzer get wasted in an art film that, like the worst of Allen, manages to bore you (and bore into you) with its relentless determination to be as depressing as possible for no reason in particular. (JR) Read more
