If you think Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are so cute they’d be watchable in anything, this stupid action comedy-romance may be just the acid test youand theydeserve. Over $110 million was lavished on Simon Kinberg’s script about an unhappily married couple of secret assassins, working for rival organizations that assign them to bump each other off. Expect 120 minutes of unfunny, self-ingratiated shtick, punctuated by explosions, cynical mass slaughter, and a few fancy effects. Director Doug Liman also made Go (1999), but then he had characters and a plot. With Vince Vaughn. PG-13. (JR) Read more
Even as commercial moviemaking becomes more geared to teens and preteens, this crackerjack survey, the opening-night program of the 18th Onion City festival, shows how some contemporary experimental work approaches and interacts with the mainstream. Among the shorts screening are Soul Dancing (2004), a weird video by Japanese cult horror director Kiyoshi Kurosawa; Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005), a 35-millimeter ‘Scope reworking of a Sergio Leone western by Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky; Here (2005), in which Fred Worden shuffles images from Georges Melies and the Laurence Olivier Henry V; and Andy Warhol’s 1966 screen tests featuring Bob Dylan. Best of all is Roads of Kiarostami (2005, 32 min.), in which Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami introduces his black-and-white landscape photography but also includes a startling and topical finale in color. The program’s running time is 95 minutes. (JR) Read more
Robert Rodriguez’s charmingly low-tech fantasy, similar to his Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over and written with his son, Racer, forsakes obvious 3-D effects for puns and literalized metaphors–a Stream of Consciousness flowing through a land of milk and giant cookies, a Train of Thought that keeps jumping off its tracks, a thundering brainstorm. They’re all located on the planet Drool, where the imaginative kid hero (Cayden Boyd) accompanies the title characters on their quest to defeat Mr. Electricity (George Lopez), a dreamlike version of the boy’s bossy grade school teacher. This gets a bit preachy in its defense of imagination, but its homemade, anticorporate spirit–Rodriguez’s trump card ever since El mariachi–gives it energy and grit. PG, 94 min. Reviewed this week in Section 1. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, Crown Village 18, Ford City, Gardens 7-13, Lake, Lawndale, Norridge, River East 21, 62nd & Western, Webster Place. Read more
The opening-night program of this experimental film and video bash is unusually star-studded, with short works by Kenneth Anger, Peter Kubelka, Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, and Ernie Gehr. Anger’s Mouse Heaven (2004) does for Disney creatures what his Scorpio Rising did for bikers. In Poetry and Truth (2003), Kubelka plays with the phoniness of advertising footage. Mekas’s Williamsburg, Brooklyn (2003) works with sorrowful and pungent home movies from two distant periods. And in Sshtoorrty, Snow repeatedly superimposes the first and second halves of one long take that records a lively narrative in subtitled Farsi. But of the works available for preview, the real gem was superficially the most conventional: Michelangelo Antonioni’s 35-millimeter Michelangelo Eye to Eye (2004). The Italian filmmaker was incapacitated by a stroke in 1985, but through digital magic he’s restored to his old self, entering San Pietro church in Rome to admire and caress Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses–one magnificently restored Michelangelo confronting another. In its deceptive simplicity and enduring mystery, this could be Antonioni’s most arresting tour de force since the 1960s. The festival continues June 17 through 19 at Chicago Filmmakers; see next week’s issue for details. Thu 6/16, 8 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki follows up his international hit Spirited Away with this adaptation of a British novel by Diana Wynne Jones; I haven’t read the book, but the movie’s dreamlike spaces and characters are sometimes worthy of Lewis Carroll. One thing that makes this highly cinematic is the radical fluidity of both age and character: people and objects are constantly transforming, and wisdom doesn’t so much succeed callowness as peacefully coexist with it. The heroine, a teenage hatmaker, runs afoul of a wicked witch and gets turned into a 90-year-old woman; she becomes housekeeper for a youthful magician named Howl, tending to the gigantic walking castle where he lives. Whenever she feels romantic stirrings for him, she becomes a teenager again. Voices are by Emily Mortimer, Jean Simmons, Billy Crystal, and Lauren Bacall, among others. PG, 118 min. Reviewed this week in Section 1. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Pipers Alley, River East 21. Read more
In this provocative first feature (2003), French director Siegrid Alnoy asks us to accept the premise that an insecure and awkward provincial office temp (Sasha Andres), suggestively called Christine Blanc, becomes transformed overnight into a confident and successful executive after gratuitously murdering a contact at work and getting away with it. Even if, like me, you can’t buy this premise and read it as a studied spin-off of Albert Camus’ The Stranger, Alnoy creates such a visual and aural tour de force of show-offy stylistic gestures that you can’t help but sit up and take notice. In French with subtitles. 100 min. (JR) Read more
Jean Gabin plays the title hero, a dapper Parisian gangster hiding out in the casbah until passion tempts him toward doom. Along with the colonial atmospherics and some crude sadism, Gabin’s probably the reason for the enduring success of this 1937 exercise in poetic realism, adapted from a 1931 novel and directed by Julien Duvivier. At least three American remakes derive from it (including the Orson Welles radio version)not to mention aspects of Casablanca and even a Warner Brothers cartoon character, Pepe Le Pew. This has a lot to do with the romantic fatalism that would be called film noir after it crossed the Atlantic. An early voice-over segment about the casbah itself, before Gabin makes an appearance, is so pungent you can almost taste the place, even though the filming was clearly done in a studio. With Mireille Balin. In French with subtitles. 93 min. (JR) Read more
Ron Howard, an exemplar of honorable mediocrity, reunites with actor Russell Crowe and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman of A Beautiful Mind for this epic treatment of a seven-year stretch in the career of New Jersey boxer James J. Braddock. The story culminates in Braddock’s near miraculous defeat of Max Baer (Craig Bierko), which made Braddock world heavyweight champion, but despite the effective fight sequences, this is more about what it means to have your electricity shut off, enhanced by detailed re-creations of working-class misery during the Depression. Paul Giamatti is a particular standout as Braddock’s manager. Cliff Hollingsworth cowrote the screenplay; with Renee Zellweger, Paddy Considine, and Bruce McGill. PG-13, 144 min. (JR) Read more
A Dreamworks computer-animated feature (2005) about a lion (the voice of Ben Stiller), a zebra (Chris Rock), a hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith), and a giraffe (David Schwimmer) in a Manhattan zoo that get shipped to Africa, then find themselves unequipped for the wilds. Philosophical confusion abounds about the identity of both characters and places (apart from New York): the multiethnic beasts (including some hilarious penguins) oscillate between being kids and grown-ups, being animals and humans, while Madagascar itself veers from Africa to Hawaii and from nature to civilization. The music blithely bounces from New York, New York to Chariots of Fire to Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World to the wind chimes from American Beauty. The whole thing feels throwaway, but some of the gags are funny. Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath directed. PG, 86 min. (JR) Read more
Samuel Fuller’s 1982 masterpiece about American racism–his last work shot in this country–focuses on the efforts of a black animal trainer (Paul Winfield) to deprogram a dog that has been trained to attack blacks. Very loosely adapted by Fuller and Curtis Hanson from a memoir by Romain Gary, and set in southern California on the fringes of the film industry, this heartbreakingly pessimistic yet tender story largely concentrates on tragic human fallibility from the vantage point of an animal; in this respect it’s like Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar, and Fuller’s brilliantly eclectic direction gives it a nearly comparable intensity. Through a series of grotesque misunderstandings, this unambiguously antiracist movie was yanked from U.S. distribution partly because of charges of racism made by individuals and organizations who had never seen it. But it’s one of the key American films of the 80s. With Kristy McNichol, Burl Ives, Jameson Parker, and, in cameo roles, Dick Miller, Paul Bartel, Christa Lang, and Fuller himself. PG, 89 min. Thu 6/2, 6 PM, Northwestern Univ. Block Museum of Art. Read more
There’s something about the goofy sprawl of French writer-director Arnaud Desplechin–his obscure uses of “Moon River” and Greek mythology, his unlikely casting of a black woman as a famous psychotherapist–that irks me even when he’s being brilliant. But this powerhouse 2004 movie lingers, and maybe, like his characters, Desplechin needs his eccentricities. Costarring two of his favorite actor-creatures, Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric, as a single mother and her deranged ex-husband, this melodrama follows their narratives separately (she learns her father is dying; he gets committed to a sanitarium) before allowing them to commingle. It adds up to more than the sum of its parts, but you may not realize it for a day or so. With Catherine Deneuve. In French with subtitles. 150 min. Music Box. Read more
The visionary, transgressive art of director Kira Muratova might be described as bipolar, and these two eccentric comedies, both big successes in Russia, may be her lightest and her darkest. The Felliniesque Passions (1994, 112 min.) considers the wistful dreams of its characters, chiefly a nurse and a circus performer, while the episodes of Three Stories (1997, 109 min.) all deal with cold-blooded murders in postglasnost, posthumanist Russia. Both feature Renata Litvinova, an icy, statuesque blond with the beauty and power of a Hollywood icon; she was a screenwriter by profession, but Muratova turned her into a star (both women won Russian Oscars for their work on Passions). And both exemplify Muratova’s long-standing fascination with animals: Passions revolves around racehorses and takes place partly at a track, while in Three Stories the first episode is set near a zoo, the last one includes a good many cats, and the middle one, scripted by and starring Litvinova, is about an avenging murderess who prefers animals to people. In Russian with subtitles. Video projection. Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
Eight FBI trainees are sent to a deserted island by their bossy instructor, who wants to test their abilities as psychological profilers, but as they’re bumped off one by one, they begin to wonder who’s really calling the shots. Wayne Kramer and Kevin Brodbin scripted this gory thriller-whodunit, whose premise is loosely derived from Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. The plot twists are so preposterous that you can enjoy this only if you reject any relation to the real world, yet director Renny Harlin (Cliffhanger) is so adept at delivering this nonsense that you may find your task an easy one. With Eion Bailey, Clifton Collins Jr., Val Kilmer, Jonny Lee Miller, Christian Slater, LL Cool J, Patricia Velasquez, and Cassandra Bell. R, 106 min. (JR) Read more
William A. Wellman’s 1948 western, beautifully shot in Death Valley by Joe MacDonald, is gritty and ambitious, but the story, adapted by producer Lamar Trotti from a short story by W.R. Burnett, grows more conventional as it develops. A group of bank robbers fleeing the law (among them Gregory Peck, Richard Widmark, John Russell, and Harry Morgan) happen upon a ghost town where a prospector (James Barton) and his tough granddaughter (Anne Baxter) have been mining gold; some nearby Apaches serve to heighten all the tensions and conflicted loyalties. 98 min. (JR) Read more
Pared down from a French TV miniseries, this cagey and compelling 2004 documentary looks at the world of wine, but it’s actually a nuanced, provocative piece of journalism about globalization and its discontents. Filmmaker Jonathan Nossiter contrasts various vineyards as well as philosophies of wine making around the world, concentrating on France, Italy, and California. (Considering his eccentric focus on the dogs at each vineyard, he might well have titled this Mondo cane, but that’s already taken.) An American who grew up in Europe and India, Nossiter is mainly known for fiction features like Sunday and Signs & Wonders, which show some of the same political savvy displayed here. In English and subtitled French and Italian. Rated PG-13 for its fleeting image of a nude pinup. 135 min. (JR) Read more
