It’s a bad sign when a sizable portion of a preview audience starts lurching for the exit before the final fade-out. This thriller involving a plot to assassinate a genocidal African dictator has Nicole Kidman in the title role as a UN interpreter and Sean Penn as a Secret Service agent. I suppose the absence of heat between them could be taken as a sign of the movie’s seriousness, but without a spark to ignite the proceedings even the actors’ craft and Sydney Pollack’s direction don’t count for much. Five people worked on the script; if there was ever any inspiration behind it, there isn’t now. PG-13, 128 min. (JR) Read more
Amanda Peet and Ashton Kutcher meet cute by having offscreen sex in an airplane lavatory as they’re flying from Los Angeles to New York. After that it’s all downhill, for them and for us. This interminable contest between two narcissists, stretched out over many miles and years, is supposed to have something to do with romance. Nigel Cole, the British director, also helmed Calendar Girls, but in that case he had a better cast and script to work with. With Kathryn Hahn and Kal Penn; written by Colin Patrick Lynch. PG-13, 107 min. (JR) Read more
French writer-actress Agnes Jaoui has a keen sense of middle-class aspirations and cultural self-consciousness, and though her work may be decidedly middlebrow, its verve and sensitivity make it entirely honorable. This follow-up to her 2000 debut, The Taste of Others, delves into the milieu of a well-known, self-centered author suffering from writer’s block (well played by Jean-Pierre Bacri, Jaoui’s writing partner and former husband) and his chubby grown daughter (Marilou Berry), who’s frustrated by his inattention. Jaoui plays the daughter’s voice teacher, and the movie is acute in its observation of how she and other characters are bent out of shape by their deference to the famous monster. The French title is Comme une image (like an image), but Tennessee Williams’s phrase the catastrophe of success seems more appropriate. In French with subtitles. PG-13, 110 min. (JR) Read more
The work of director Maurice Pialat (1925-2003) is sufficiently celebrated in France to have generated an exhaustive Web site (www.maurice-pialat.net) and two DVD box sets. But his name is far from familiar here, and this complete retrospective of his dramatic features–running Friday, April 22, through Tuesday, May 3, at Facets Cinematheque–is long overdue. Some fans prefer Pialat’s more mannerist late work, but I’d give the edge to his 70s output, covered this week. All films are in French with subtitles; for more information and a complete schedule visit www.facets.org.
A volatile realist who’s often been compared to John Cassavetes, Pialat started out as a painter and a documentary filmmaker, though in contrast to most realist works (as well as most paintings) his movies are too intimate to date very much. He was 43 when he made his first feature, Naked Childhood (1968, 82 min.), a nonjudgmental and unsentimental look at a troubled, abandoned ten-year-old boy who’s shuttled between foster parents. (Francois Truffaut served as coproducer, though Pialat was a sworn enemy of the New Wave.) Pialat adapted his own autobiographical novel for We Will Not Grow Old Together (1972, 107 min.), a devastating chronicle of a long-term affair that can neither survive nor end, powerfully played by Jean Yanne and Marlene Jobert. Read more
This 2003 erotic thriller, the first feature by writer-director Matthew Parkhill, coasts along pretty well on the strength of its attractive Latino leads, Gael Garcia Bernal and Natalia Verbeke, until it gets around to showing its hand with a repulsive plot twist that bends the characters out of shape. Its trickery might seem cute or clever to viewers who don’t take either movies or people very seriously, but to me it recalled cynical puzzle films like Memento and Irreversible, with no reason to exist apart from its gimmick. With James D’Arcy. R, 92 min. (JR) Read more
Jean-Luc Godard’s edgy, moribund reflection on the “children of Marx and Coca-Cola” had an exemplary vitality when it came out in 1966, with its currency, its mainly nonprofessional cast, and its determination to address anything and everything. It’s still a lively and interesting artifact, limited by its sexual politics, which are manifested in Godard’s attraction toward and contempt for women. Jean-Pierre Léaud, in one of his most touching roles, and his communist sidekick are the children of Marx, while Léaud’s girlfriend (rock singer Chantal Goya) and her pals are the children of Coca-Cola (few of the females are asked or even allowed to think). The jagged form should keep you on your toes; as Dave Kehr has noted, “Godard is very strict in his sloppiness.” In French with subtitles. 103 min.
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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
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
