Winner of the jury prize at Cannes, this third feature by writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Blissfully Yours, Mysterious Object at Noon) confirms his status as the most adventurous filmmaker in Thailand and one of the most creative and unpredictable currently working anywhere. Part one chronicles with a sometimes ironic tastefulness the budding romance between a soldier on leave and a shy country boy; part two turns folkloric and allegorical as the soldier travels through a dark forest, alternately stalking and being stalked by his lover in the form of a tiger spirit, with a talking baboon offering sage advice. Both parts are leisurely paced and beautifully shot. In Thai with subtitles. 118 min. Landmark’s Century Centre. Read more
A gimmicky documentary by Penn Gillette and Paul Provenza built around the ultimate obscene joke, which depends on a performer’s style and a certain amount of embroidery to achieve maximum impact. The idea is to set about 100 stand-up comics loose on this material, but the results are predictably so sound-bitey that only a few of them get to tell the joke all the way through, and many just offer commentaries. One sympathizes with Don Rickles’s complaint that this is the sort of movie whose performers don’t get paid. But with such participants as Hank Azaria, Shelley Berman, George Carlin, Carrie Fisher, Whoopi Goldberg, Eric Idle, Bill Maher, Michael McKean, Chris Rock, Jon Stewart, Dave Thomas, and Robin Williams, you won’t be too bored. R, 92 min. (JR) Read more
Following the last hours of a junkie rock star (Michael Pitt) doing nothing in particular in and around his country mansion before he kills himself, Gus Van Sant’s experimental feature, nicely shot by Harris Savides, purports to be inspired by the death of Kurt Cobain, though mainly it’s a shrewd invitation to the audience to fill in the hagiographic blanks. Less dreary than Van Sant’s Gerry but far less interesting than Elephant, this suggests both of its predecessors in its mannerist doggedness; even the time overlaps of Elephant are pointlessly reprised. The best moments come when other characters turn up (Lukas Haas, Asia Argento, Ricky Jay, and Thadeus A. Thomas as a door-to-door salesman) or the camera becomes as indifferent as the hero, slowly backing away from it all. R, 97 min. (JR) Read more
Moderately watchable but awfully predictable, this 2003 documentary chronicles the efforts of one of its three directors, Brian Herzlinger, to score a date with Drew Barrymorewho ever since E.T. has been the girl of his dreams. As quickly becomes obvious, his real passion isn’t to go on a date but to make a movie about it, which results in our distrusting the authenticity of the feelings of everyone involved in this project, including Barrymore. While constantly bemoaning his shrinking budget, Herzlinger at one point pays $75 for a psychic’s advice. Is he sincere, or does he just think it will make a good sequence? Jon Gunn and Brett Winn codirected. PG, 90 min. (JR) Read more
Apart from the even more obscure silent film Second Youth, this early talkie (1931) is the only time the famous acting couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne starred in a moviea Molnar comedy about a jealous husband testing his wife, later remade as The Chocolate Soldier and Lily in Love. Sidney Franklin directed; with Roland Young, ZaSu Pitts, and Herman Bing. 89 min. (JR) Read more
Suggesting at different moments a backstage musical, a failed love story, a surreal comedy, and even a cartoon fantasy, this beautiful, corrosive, visionary masterpiece by Jia Zhang-ke (2004) is a frighteningly persuasive account of the current state of the planet. Set in an eerie Beijing theme parka kind of Chinese Las Vegas, with scaled-down duplicates of the most famous global landmarksit follows a bunch of workers as they labor, carouse, couple, and uncouple, but it’s really about propping up extravagant illusions through alienated labor. Though Jia is one of the most respected directors in mainland China, this film was his first to get an official release there. In Mandarin and Shanxi dialect with subtitles. 139 min. (JR) Read more
By now Ingmar Bergman has concocted many a postscript to his illustrious career. What makes this masterful if sprawling 2003 sequel to Scenes From a Marriage (1973) remarkable is that at the director’s insistence it was shot and is being shown on digital video. This matters because, in spite of Bergman’s consummate skill with his actors (chiefly Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson), he makes no attempt whatever to hide his contempt for the medium apart from its usefulness as a recording device. The lack of stylistic finesse that results, whether deliberate or inadvertent, becomes a kind of shocking honesty about the creepiness of Bergman’s sensibility: solipsistically self-pitying, spiritually constipated, and utterly without interest in overcoming these flaws. R, 120 min. In Swedish with subtitles. Reviewed this week in Section 1. Music Box. Read more
Bill Murray’s minimalism as an actor combines with Jim Jarmusch’s as a writer-director to yield a certain redundancy, making this comedy Jarmusch’s starkest feature to date. The tragedy of Dead Man and Ghost Dog is missing, but there’s genuine poignancy in the attempts of Murray, who plays a wealthy retiree in perpetual denial, to discover which of his former girlfriends (played by Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange, and Tilda Swinton) is the mother of the 19-year-old son who he’s been told may be looking for him. The sadness of his life (and theirs) is palpable; still, there’s an undeniable sweetness to Murray’s friendship with his next-door neighbor (Jeffrey Wright), a working-class Ethiopian who facilitates his quest. R, 105 min. Reviewed this week in Section 1. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Pipers Alley, River East 21. Read more
I haven’t seen this 1933 hard-luck story, told in flashback, about a character who’s orphaned at 9, seduced at 16, and eventually sent to prison. But director William Wellman was generally at his best in the 30s, and I’d expect it to be tart and lively. Written by Anita Loos; with Loretta Young, Ricardo Cortez, Franchot Tone, Andy Devine, and Una Merkel. 74 min. (JR) Read more
As soon as it became clear that this remake has nothing to do with real Georgia moonshiners and everything to do with car chases, smashups, and explosions, I could sit back and enjoy it as good, stupid funa celebration of lawlessness in a crooked county, with Burt Reynolds figuring (a little uncomfortably) as the top villain. Cousins Bo (Seann William Scott), Luke (Johnny Knoxville), and Daisy (Jessica Simpson) outwit and outdrive the cops while helping Uncle Jesse (Willie Nelson) keep his farm. With Joe Don Baker and Lynda Carter. Chicago native Jay Chandrasekhar directed the script by John O’Brien. PG-13, 106 min. (JR) Read more
In my review of Karen Severns and Koichi Mori’s Magnificent Obsession: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Buildings and Legacy in Japan [July 22] I said that Arata Endo was the only person with whom Wright ever agreed to share architectural credit, information I got from the documentary. But my brother Alvin Rosenbaum, author of the 1993 book Usonia: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Design for America, tells me that Wright shared credit with at least one other person, Aaron Green, “on their joint San Francisco office,” adding that “their major collaboration, the Marin County Courthouse, was finished after Wright’s death.”
Jonathan Rosenbaum Read more
Many repeat performances are being sought in this remake of Michael Ritchie’s 1976 comedy about unpromising Little Leaguers with an alcoholic coach and a star female pitcher, with its sound track of four-letter words and themes from Bizet’s Carmen. But this is also a spin-off of Bad Santa (with both that movie’s writers as well as its star, Billy Bob Thornton) and The School of Rock (with Richard Linklater back as hired-hand director). Fortunately almost everyone acquits himself coolly and admirably; only costars Greg Kinnear and Marcia Gay Harden ham it up. PG-13, 111 min. (JR) Read more
Actress Johnnie Hill plays the title role in this 1976 blaxploitation mystery, cowritten by novelist Leonard Michaels (The Men’s Club), of all people. Michael L. Fink directed. R, 93 min. (JR) Read more
One neglected aspect of Frank Lloyd Wright’s career is his involvement with Japanincluding a series of visits that spanned 17 years in the early 20th century, the abiding influence of Japanese art and architecture on his work, and the impact of his own work on Japanese architects. This informative documentary by Chicagoan Karen Severns and her Japanese husband, Koichi Mori, doesn’t give the whole story; it favors the view from Japan and skimps on the Japanese influences on Wright’s American buildings. But it offers fascinating material about Wright assistants Arata Endo (with whom Wright even shared architectural credit on occasion) and Antonin Raymond (who became a leading Japanese modernist), and its account of the now-vanished Imperial Hotel, one of Wright’s masterpieces, is priceless. 128 min. (JR) Read more
Magnificent Obsession: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Buildings and Legacy in Japan
** (Worth seeing)
Directed by Karen Severns and Koichi Mori
Written by Severns
Narrated by Azby Brown and Donald Richie
Frank Lloyd Wright readily acknowledged the influence of Japanese art–particularly the abstract shapes, lively colors, and unusual perspectives of wood-block prints–on his work. He soft-pedaled or denied the influence of Japanese architecture–but then he was always reluctant to admit any direct architectural influences. Both predilections are examined in Magnificent Obsession: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Buildings and Legacy in Japan, a 2004 documentary Chicago native Karen Severns made with her Japanese husband, Koichi Mori. The film also shows that Wright had a profound influence on Japanese architecture. “At one point,” Severns says in her narration, read by Azby Brown, “there were 32 Wright-related terms in the [Japanese] architectural lexicon.”
The story of the two-way cultural traffic between Wright and Japan is so intricate that even a 128-minute film can barely scratch the surface. And the surface that’s scratched is mainly in Japan, not here. Wright’s visits to Japan spanned 17 years, starting with his very first trip abroad–in 1905, when he was 37–and culminating with his work on Tokyo’s awesome Imperial Hotel. They weren’t exactly casual visits. Read more
