I put off seeing Abel Ferrara’s second feature (which came after his pseudonymous Nine Lives of a Wet Pussy) for years because of its title, but when I finally caught up with it I found it a lot more interesting and substantial than I’d imagined — and only incidentally the exploitation horror item it was apparently supposed to be. Ferrara stars (again pseudonymously) as a painter sharing a downtown Manhattan loft with two women who, gradually driven insane by money problems, a punk band located on the floor below, and other frustrations, starts murdering street derelicts with a power drill. The script by Nicholas St. John (who would become a Ferrara regular) not only anticipates American Psycho but offers a fascinating look at New York’s bohemian art scene circa 1979. 96 min. (JR) Read more
Two of the greatest works by Catalan underground filmmaker Pere Portabella. The Franco-era black-and-white Umbracle (1970, 85 min.) is a provocation and protest composed of many dissimilar parts, ranging from Christopher Lee touring Barcelona to aggressive repetitions of sound and image. The more opulent, post-Franco color film Warsaw Bridge (1990, 85 min.) threads its own anthology of attractions (including operas, concerts, a lecture, a novel, a swank party, a forest fire, and sex) into something resembling a single narrative. Both are in Spanish and Catalan with subtitles. a Fri 11/17, 8 PM (Warsaw), Sat 11/18, 5 PM (Umbracle), Mon 11/20, 6 PM (Warsaw), and Wed 11/22, 8 PM (Umbracle), Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
This angry and persuasive piece of agitprop by writer-director Richard Linklater (Before Sunrise, A Scanner Darkly) and writer Eric Schlosser, adapting the latter’s nonfiction book of the same title, isn’t simply an account of how shit gets into our hamburgers. It’s also about Mexican immigrants who sneak across the border and wind up enslaved (or literally ground up) by meat packers, teenagers who work for fast-food companies and want to fight the system but don’t know how, and many other social as well as environmental factors. Many reviews have suggested that this is as politically mild as a John Sayles movie, but Linklater clearly agrees with the frustrated kid who says, “Right now, I can’t think of anything more patriotic than violating the Patriot Act.” The strong cast spelling this out includes Ashley Johnson, Patricia Arquette, Luis Guzman, Bruce Willis, Kris Kristofferson, Greg Kinnear, Ethan Hawke, and Catalina Sandino Moreno (Maria Full of Grace). R, 114 min. a Century 12 and CineArts6, Crown Village 18, Landmark’s Century Centre, River East 21. Read more
Maria Montez gave socialistic answers to a rented world, declared underground filmmaker, photographer, and performance artist Jack Smith (1932-’89) in a statement that was reportedly printed and handed out at his funeral. It’s to the credit of Mary Jordan’s documentary that whatever else it overlooks, it makes that pronouncement comprehensible. Smith was a visionary anarchist artist whose pansexual and exotic utopian fantasies yielded only two finished films, Scotch Tape and Flaming Creatures, the first of which is mentioned only in Jordan’s final credits. He resisted commodification by continuously reediting his other films and reworking his live performancesa dazzling legacy that influenced everyone from Warhol to Fellini to John Waters. In some ways Smith’s art became commodified only after he died and his estranged sister gained control over his work, though that did lead to this documentary, a fascinating introduction to his special world. 94 min. (JR) Read more
Let’s see if I have this straight: in an animated tribe of penguins who talk and sing like inner-city residents, Mumble (voiced by Elijah Wood) can’t sing but can tap-dance like crazy. When the tribe starts ailing due to lack of fish, he follows the aliens netting the fish all the way to the city, where he discovers that his dancing just might persuade them to stop overfishing. This curious ecological parable was directed by George Miller (Babe: Pig in the City), who still has an eye and a sense of humor but on this particular outing can’t get the script he wrote with three others to make much sense. Other voices include those of Hugh Jackman, Robin Williams, Nicole Kidman, and Brittany Murphy. PG, 98 min. (JR) Read more
Ludwig van Beethoven never had a woman copyist, much less the gifted and attractive 23-year-old student and aspiring composer played by Diane Kruger, which might tempt one to scoff at this romantic biopic as eyewash. But Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa, The Secret Garden) directs with obvious feeling rather than cynicism, and I was swept away by it despite the story’s anachronisms. Ed Harris, offering another mad-genius portrait after playing Jackson Pollock, goes to town with his hokey part, and one gets to hear a sizable chunk of the Ninth Symphony at its 1824 premiere. Writer-producers Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson won’t win over any purists, but if they introduce a few people to the excitements of Beethoven, they can hardly be accused of wasting their time. PG-13, 104 min. (JR) Read more
A 1996 feature by the talented Tunisian filmmmaker and film critic Ferid Boughedir (Halfaouine) focusing on teenage girls during the summer of 1967. In French, Arabic, and Italian with subtitles. 100 min. (JR) Read more
The second word in the title of Pere Portabella’s ravishing 1970 underground masterpiece, made in Spain while General Francisco Franco was still in power and shown clandestinely, means both worm’s tail and the unexposed footage at the end of film reels. The film is a silent black-and-white documentary about the shooting of Jesus Franco’s Count Dracula, with Christopher Lee, that becomes much more: the lush, high-contrast cinematography evokes deteriorating prints of Nosferatu and Vampyr, and the extraordinary soundtrack by composer Carles Santos intersperses the sounds of jet planes, drills, syrupy Muzak, and sinister electronic music, all of which ingeniously locate Dracula and our perceptions of him in the contemporary world. Moving back and forth between Franco’s film (with Dracula as an implicit stand-in for the generalissimo) and poetic production details, Portabella offers witty reflections on the powerful monopolies of both dictators and commercial cinema. The only words heard are in English, spoken by Lee and written by Bram Stoker. 75 min. (JR) Read more
Like The Ceremony (1995), Claude Chabrol’s previous adaptation of a Ruth Rendell novel, this 2004 French feature seems concerned not so much with the psychopathology of everyday life as with psychopaths who lurk behind the everyday. On a more obvious level the hero (Benoit Magimel) falls in love with his sister’s bridesmaid (Laura Smet) but gradually discovers how weird she is; on a more subtle and in some ways more interesting level he lives in denial of how weird his own supposedly normal family is. Chabrol develops both stories with a great deal of finesse. With Aurore Clement. In French with subtitles. 111 min. (JR) Read more
Documentary filmmaker James Longley (Gaza Strip) has a flair for cinematography and editing and a poetic sensibility that informs both these talents. He’s also responsible for this film’s music. But the most significant credits for this examination of Iraqi Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds may be the dozen translators listed. (“The future of Iraq will be in three parts,” says one Kurd. “How can you cut a country into three parts?” asks another.) Much as Emile de Antonio’s neglected In the Year of the Pig (1968) may be the only major documentary about Vietnam that actually considers the Vietnamese, this film allows the people of Iraq to speak, and what they say is fascinating throughout. In Kurdish and Arabic with subtitles. 94 min. a Landmark’s Century Centre. Read more
The first word in the title of Pere Portabella’s ravishing 1970 underground masterpiece, made in Spain while General Francisco Franco was still in power and shown clandestinely, means both “worm’s tail” and the unexposed footage at the end of film reels. The film is a silent black-and-white documentary about the shooting of Jesus Franco’s Count Dracula, with Christopher Lee, that becomes much more: the lush, high-contrast cinematography evokes deteriorating prints of Nosferatu and Vampyr, and the extraordinary sound track by composer Carles Santos intersperses the sounds of jet planes, drills, syrupy Muzak, and sinister electronic music, all of which ingeniously locate Dracula and our perceptions of him in the contemporary world. Moving back and forth between Franco’s film (with Dracula as an implicit stand-in for the generalissimo) and poetic production details, Portabella offers witty reflections on the powerful monopolies of both dictators and commercial cinema. The only words heard are in English, spoken by Lee and written by Bram Stoker. 75 min. Reviewed this week in Section 1. a Sat 11/11, 5 PM, and Wed 11/15, 8 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center. I will introduce the Wednesday screening and lecture on Portabella afterward. Read more
Directed by Thomas Fitzgerald (The Hanging Garden), this sprawling and ambitious three-part Canadian film (2005) traces the spread of AIDS on three continents, but it gets off to a confusing start: its South African story of infected teenage boys being treated by three nuns (Chloe Sevigny, Olympia Dukakis, Sandra Oh) is interrupted to recount how an entire Chinese village is stricken after farmers sell their blood to a naive government worker (Lucy Liu). Then a Canadian porn actor (Shawn Ashmore), eager to keep working, tries to hide his condition by stealing his father’s blood, while his mother (Stockard Channing) devises even more baroque ways of coping with the problem. By the time the movie returned to Africa, it had lost me despite its talented cast and its noble intentions. In English and various subtitled languages. 124 min. (JR) Read more
Documentary filmmaker Doug Block was still mourning the death of his beloved mother when his father, a relatively remote figure, startled him and his sister by marrying the woman who’d been his secretary 40 years earlier. After learning that his parents’ 54-year marriage hadn’t been nearly as happy as he’d assumed, Block started reading his mother’s voluminous diaries, and this film charts his discoveries during that period, when his father was packing up his belongings and preparing to move from Long Island to Florida with his new wife. This isn’t always adept as storytelling, and Block’s coming to terms with his own denseness occasionally tries one’s patience, but he manages to make the overall process of his reeducation fascinating and compelling. 90 min. (JR) Read more
I welcomed the prospect of a documentary about Edward Said, the Palestinian-American critic, theorist, activist, and pianist, and this 2005 tribute by Makoto Sato addresses most facets of his career. But I was put off by the video’s fetishistic attachment to places where Said lived and worked, ranging from a family summer home outside Beirut to his former office at Columbia University, which have few secrets to reveal. The interviews with Said’s family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances are a bit haphazard and unfocused, suggesting at times that Sato is more interested in Said’s life than his work. (Passages from his writing are read as voice-over, but most of them are autobiographical.) Gradually, however, the movie begins to generate a kind of thumbnail sketch of the contemporary West Bank and other concerns of Said. In English and subtitled Arabic and Hebrew. 138 min. (JR) Read more
This is the first feature of Pere Portabella, the remarkable Barcelona-based Catalan filmmaker. He started out as a producer of art films by Carlos Saura, Marco Ferreri, and Luis Buñuel, and Buñuel’s first Spanish feature, Viridiana, so angered the Spanish government that it took away Portabella’s passport for many years. Nocturno 29 is a narrative film that refuses to tell a story and an underground anti-Franco film that was most often shown clandestinely (its title refers to the number of years Franco had then been in power), and it evokes both European art films of this period (its star is Lucia Bosé, an actress associated with Antonioni and Bardem) and the bolder experimental cinema Portabella would embark on soon afterward. Coscripted by poet Joan Brossa, it has the kind of moody provocation that captures its period indelibly. In Spanish with subtitles. 83 min. (JR) Read more
