Ira Sachs likes to approach his hometown of Memphis through an alien perspective: his previous feature, The Delta (1996), was about the son of a Vietnamese woman and a black American soldier, and this new one, which won the grand jury prize at Sundance, is about a young Russian woman (Dina Korzun of Last Resort) who’s moved in with an aging and neglectful rock star (Rip Torn), the father of her three-year-old son. The star’s grown son (Darren Burrows) comes home for a visit, throwing various oedipal issues into relief, and Sachs, who wrote the script with Michael Rohatyn, creates a fresh and unpredictable portrait of the mother. But the narrative doesn’t keep building on what it starts out with and stalls toward the end. 107 min. (JR) Read more
Even in its censored 70-minute version, this 1933 feaure has long been celebrated as one of the Depression era’s raciest movies, and this recently discovered uncut version, with six minutes of extra footage, is even more explicit and sordid. Sexy, steely Barbara Stanwyck is a small-town prostitute initially pimped by her bootlegger father; with her only friend (Theresa Harris), a black woman who eventually becomes her maid, she moves to the city, and armed with nihilist sayings by Nietzsche, starts screwing her way up the corporate ladder (though she rebuffs John Wayne, seen in an early bit part). Darryl F. Zanuck supplied the original story, and the underrated Alfred E. Green directed. (JR) Read more
German filmmaker Thomas Riedelsheimer worked famously with alternative sculptor Andy Goldsworthy in Rivers and Tides (2001), but here he’s found a more provocative and interesting subject: Evelyn Glennie, a celebrated classical percussionist from rural Scotland who is deaf. As the title of this fascinating portrait might suggest, she’s taught herself to identify and distinguish between notes through vibrations, working with different areas of sensitivity throughout her body. She’s worked with everyone from Bjork to Brazilian samba groups and also gives solo concerts, and the best segments simply show her at work in her mid-30s, explaining what she does. 99 min. (JR) Read more
Around the same time he was making Shadows, John Cassavetes was starring in a pretty good TV series about a jazz pianist who makes ends meet by working as a private detective, a sort of black-and-white spin-off of Peter Gunn (he even directed three episodes). The music was composed by Elmer Bernstein and performed by a classic west-coast ensemble including Pete Candoli, Barney Kessel, Red Norvo, Red Mitchell, and Shelly Manne. The Jazz Institute of Chicago is presenting a jazz-oriented sampling of the series. (JR) Read more
Writing in the New York Times, Dave Kehr called Bruce Posner’s 19-hour box set Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941 “one of the major monuments of the DVD medium.” Yet one peculiarity of this medium is that its monuments are easily overlooked, and this 174-minute program, part of a touring series that also stops at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center later this month, offers a rare chance to sample Posner’s uncommon discoveries on the big screen, most in their original formats. The box set defines avant-garde broadly enough to include Busby Berkeley production numbers and home movies, though some of the latter come from seminal experimental filmmakers Rudy Burckhardt, Lewis Jacobs, and Joseph Cornell (whose efforts from the 1930s have recently been brought to presentable completion by Lawrence Jordan). This program is anchored in the mid-30s and provides splendidly offbeat evocations of that era, but it also includes sound tests from the mid-20s that were sold to Fox’s Movietone, and most of the silent films have been furnished with excellent musical scores. Thu 10/20, 8 PM, Northwestern Univ. Block Museum of Art. Read more
Even in its censored 70-minute version, Baby Face (1933) has long been celebrated as one of the Depression era’s raciest movies, and this recently discovered uncut version, with six minutes of extra footage, is even more explicit and sordid. Sexy, steely Barbara Stanwyck is a small-town prostitute initially pimped by her bootlegger father; with her only friend (Theresa Harris), a black woman who eventually becomes her maid, she moves to the city, and armed with nihilist sayings by Nietzsche, starts screwing her way up the corporate ladder (though she rebuffs John Wayne, seen in an early bit part). Darryl F. Zanuck supplied the original story, and the underrated Alfred E. Green directed. Rounding off this dynamic double bill, which launches the Music Box’s “Forbidden Hollywood” matinee series, is Mervyn LeRoy’s Two Seconds (1932, 68 min.), adapted from an Elliott Lester play; though stagy, it stars Edward G. Robinson in his most bravura performance, as a condemned murderer reliving his doomed marriage and the accidental death of his best friend on a construction site. Fri 10/14 and Sun 10/16, Music Box. Read more
The last day and night in the life of a cranky, ailing 63-year-old widower in the Bucharest suburbs, with an ambulance carting him from one overtaxed hospital to another, may sound like an ordeal, but this 154-minute Romanian odyssey (2005) is anything but. Both sad and darkly funny, the film is so sharply conceived and richly populated that it often registers like a Frederick Wiseman documentary, even though everything is scripted and every part played by a professional. This is only the second feature of Cristi Puiu, who claims to have been inspired by his own hypochondria, but he’s already clearly a master. In Romanian with subtitles. R. (JR) Read more
The visual effects in this Mexican extravaganzawith orgies staged like music videos and lavish conceits involving devils, mirrors, vampires, and filmmakingare so attention grabbing it takes a while to see how shallow their narrative pretexts are. It’s hard to know whether writer-director Alejandro Valle and codirector Felipe Gomez love decadence because of how it looks or because they want to squeeze some esoteric content out of their images, but the atmosphere is psychedelic 60s minus the cruelty of El topo and the sheer nerve of Performance. Basically it’s all nonsense, but I thoroughly enjoyed it until it wore me down. In Spanish with subtitles. 120 min. (JR) Read more
From the October 7, 2005 Chicago Reader:
The first Tsai Ming-liang film I’ve disliked recycles its predecessors’ main actors (Lee Kang-sheng, Chen Shiang-chyi), physical elements (water, Taipei), themes (loneliness, alienation), and stylistic tropes (symmetrical compositions, absence of dialogue). It does offer more lavish musical numbers than The Hole, including choreographed Chinese versions of Sixteen Tons and The Wayward Wind, and two key additions are watermelons and hard-core sex, sometimes used in conjunction. Tsai’s obvious disgust at the sex is part of what makes the film so unpleasant; he remains a brilliant original, but this is a parody of his gifts. In Mandarin with subtitles. 112 min. (JR)
Read more
Kohei Oguri (Muddy River) directed this story about a high school student in a mountain village who starts a storytelling relay with her girlfriends Read more
A Pakistani engineer in Paris (cowriter Ayad Akhtar) is kidnapped by the CIA, turned over to Pakistani interrogators, and tortured at length. This intelligent, well-made drama deliberately keeps us in the dark about the engineer’s involvement in fundamentalist terror before the torture but leaves no doubt that the experience further radicalizes him. Arriving in New Jersey with a cover story about having driven a cab in Canada, he lodges with an old friend and his family, all the while preparing a suicide bombing for Grand Central Station. A few plot details strain credibility, but the characters (particularly the friend’s sister and little boy) are persuasively depicted. Joseph Castelo (American Saint) directed and cowrote the script. 90 min. (JR) Read more
Three key American experimental films that all resemble guessing games. Hollis Frampton’s (Nostalgia) (1971), one of his greatest works, is a profound and profoundly tricky meditation on photography and memory. Remedial Reading Comprehension (1971) by George Landow, who has since renamed himself Owen Land, is one of his funnier structural puzzles. And Bleu Shut (1970), according to Fred Camper, engages the viewer in a peculiar brand of ‘participatory’ cinema: clock hands on the screen supposedly tell us when the film will end, while we hear two voices on the sound track trying to guess the names of the small pleasure boats whose pictures we see, in a parody of multiple-choice quiz shows. (JR) Read more
American expatriate Jon Jost returned to the Pacific northwestthe locale of his shattering Sure Fire (1990) and The Bed You Sleep In (1993)for this 2004 drama about a confused and jobless 26-year-old whose kid brother comes back from Iraq in a body bag. Like the earlier movies, it casts nonprofessional actors as the dysfunctional family members, but apart from the bold and original use of split screen at the beginning, it’s mawkish and unconvincing. I share much of Jost’s anger and despair over the war’s impact on our national health, but he forces his hand by making all the characters unsympathetic fuckups. 104 min. (JR) Read more
Celebrated in Iran for his theater work as much as his early role in the Iranian new wave, Bahram Bayzai has cited Alfred Hitchcock as an important influence on his film work, but there’s little evidence of it in this 2001 thriller. The heroine (well played by Mozhdeh Shamsai) returns to Tehran from a trip to confront her husband for his infidelities and discovers that he’s been involved in various criminal activities, and Bayzai allows her to dispense violence with a freedom usually reserved for men in Hollywood action thrillers. This was a commercial success in Iran, not an art-house release, which makes it of interest despite a discouraging reliance on cliches. In Farsi with subtitles. 135 min. (JR) Read more
This noirish 1946 feature was efficiently directed by Jean Negulesco, but the real auteur is John Huston, whose script (with Howard Koch) was one of many partial spin-offs from his career-making The Maltese Falcon. (The dark icon this time represents a Chinese goddess.) Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, and Geraldine Fitzgerald are the title trio, who wind up sharing a sweepstakes ticket in prewar London, their destinies governed by Huston’s misanthropic gallows humor and cruel sense of irony. 92 min. (JR) Read more
