There’s not much Miami but loads of vice in Michael Mann’s big-screen adaptation of the 80s TV series he created with Anthony Yerkovichin particular the vice of a gifted director letting his talent go to seed. The pacing and proportion of Heat (1995) and the feeling for place and character evident in Collateral (2004) have been tossed aside for a routine plot in which vice cops Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx pose as drug dealers. Mann creates some arresting ‘Scope compositions, but he’s so addicted to close-ups here, especially erotic ones involving Gong Li (hot) and Farrell (not), that he tends to neglect their visual contexts. Apart from a few sleek shots involving boats or helicopters, the action eventually devolves into a standard war-movie shoot-out. With Naomie Harris. R, 135 min. (JR) Read more
A half-dozen women friends meet in the Appalachians to explore a remote cave, hoping their outdoor adventure will rejuvenate one of them after a tragic accident a year earlier, but they’re attacked by blind subterranean beasties. Written and directed by Neil Marshall, this intermittently effective UK horror thriller carefully establishes the psychological relationships among the women, then squanders this calibrated and generally plausible setup with a series of crude, implausible, and scattershot horror effects. The two strains are supposed to merge but mix like oil and water as the narrative grows increasingly incoherent (the fact that so much of it transpires in darkness doesn’t help). Marshall changed the film’s ending after its successful British run, reportedly to dumb it down for the American audience. With Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid, Saskia Mulder, MyAnna Buring, and Nora-Jane Noone. R, 99 min. (JR) Read more
The tagline for this tolerable comedy, directed by Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters) from a script by Don Payne (The Simpsons), could be Hell hath no fury like a superwoman scorned. Uma Thurman plays a neurotic female version of Clark Kent who has trouble holding her superhero powers in check. A lot of superwimp gags executed by Luke Wilson grow out of this premise, as do some tacky 50s-style special effects. The movie’s too slapdash to keep its characters consistent, but this has its moments. With Anna Faris, Rainn Wilson, Eddie Izzard, and Wanda Sykes. PG-13, 95 min. (JR) Read more
This 100-minute DVD includes seven shorts, from Lynch’s earliest filmsSix Men Getting Sick (1967, 1 min.), The Alphabet (1967), and The Grandmother (1970, 34 min.)through the previously unreleased video The Amputee (1973, shown in two separate versions) and two French commissions, coyly quaint (The Cowboy and the Frenchman) and nightmarishly baroque (a contribution to the 1998 feature Lumiere and Company that runs less than a minute). I still regard Eraserhead (1977), Lynch’s first feature, as the summit of his work to date, and the best of these sketches have a similar if cruder hallucinatory and metaphorical power; the others are stray oddities. All are arguably better without Lynch’s homespun autobiographical introsbuy the boxed version and you can skip them. (JR) Read more
I can’t think of a better portrait of contemporary Paris or the zeitgeist of 2001-’04 than Chris Marker’s wise and whimsical 58-minute 2004 video. Marker, now in his 80s, shot the images on the streets of Paris and in its metro stations: graffiti, posters, demonstrations, musical performances, cats (real and cartoon). The original conveys Marker’s commentary only through pithy intertitles, but the English version screening here has an unfortunate voice-over delivered in a heavy French accent by actor Gerard Rinaldi that tries to explain as well as translate these titles. Still, no one can film people in the street better than Marker or combine images with more grace and finesse. Screening with Alice Arnold’s 30-minute To Be Seen (in Beta SP video), about “the battle between guerrilla art and corporate ads on the walls and sidewalks of New York.” Reviewed this week in Section 1. Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
Leave it to the nakedly cunning executive producers Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis to fashion a digitally animated scare show for kids predicated on what may be the most blatant evocation of vagina dentata in movie history: a spiteful, devouring haunted house driven by the angry spirit of a circus fat lady. The three neighborhood kids who venture inside this toothy trap are wittily conceived (as are other characters, like a goth babysitter), but though the overall conception suggests Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle, the frenetic pacing seems as American as an apple pie in your face. Gil Kenan directed; among the voices are those of Steve Buscemi, Nick Cannon, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Kathleen Turner. PG, 87 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, City North 14, Crown Village 18, Ford City, Gardens 1-6, Lake, Lawndale, Lincoln Village, Norridge, Pickwick, River East 21, 62nd & Western. Read more
Coproducer Owen Wilson is the title jerk-off, the best man at the wedding of a couple played by Matt Dillon and Kate Hudson. After losing his job and home, he winds up staying with the newlyweds, the houseguest from hell; meanwhile the husband is already buckling under the strain of working for his scornful father-in-law (Michael Douglas). The trailer suggested a Farrelly brothers-type gross-out complete with overflowing toilets, but working with a shapeless script, directors Anthony and Joe Russo (Welcome to Collinwood) can’t figure out what they’re making. They lunge in several directions, but fail to get around the central problem: most of their actors have little flair for comedy. I felt a twinge of envy for those in the preview audience who raced for the exit before the movie was over. They at least knew when to quit. PG-13, 108 min. Read more
Lian Lunson’s torturously dull 2005 documentary, which seems like an extended DVD bonus for a yet-to-be-made biography, shows the Canadian singer performing only once, with U2. Mostly it’s a tribute concert, with his repertoire performed by other singers, including Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Martha Wainwright, Beth Orton, Linda and Teddy Thompsonall of whom, like Cohen, are typically filmed in close-ups so extreme that we can’t even see their chins or foreheads. And we learn almost nothing about Cohen’s life, apart from the fact that he comes from Montreal and once trained as a Zen monk. PG-13, 105 min. (JR) Read more
In Frank Tashlin’s first CinemaScope comedy (1956), which pulses with his characteristically vivid colors and bittersweet observations, a Beverly Hills writer and World War II hero expects to be drafted back into the air force, so his leggy young wife reenlists to be near him; he winds up 4-F, and she becomes a lieutenant. He dutifully follows her to Hawaii, and much gender confusion ensues. The casting is pure 50s and includes Tom Ewell, the poet laureate of male sexual anxiety (The Seven Year Itch, The Girl Can’t Help It), and the unjustly forgotten, mellow Sheree North; with Rita Moreno and Rick Jason. 99 min. (JR) Read more
Despite the title, this is less a soccer documentary than a corporate hagiography along the lines of The Last Mogul or The Kid Stays in the Picture; its real hero isn’t Cosmos star Pele (who wisely declined to be interviewed), but Steve Ross, CEO of Warner Communications, which owned the team. The most important secondary figures are Ross’s associates, sycophants, and acquisitions, some of whom happened to play soccer and are intermittently paraded before us as prize pets. (Henry Kissinger makes a guest appearance too, as he does in The Kid Stays in the Picture, though it’s unclear whether he’s supposed to enhance Ross or vice versa.) The distributor is Miramax, so maybe this is just a dry run for The Harvey Weinstein Story. PG-13, 97 min. (JR) Read more
The Gene Siskel Film Center’s retrospective on the brilliant comedy director Frank Tashlin continues with this 1954 feature about a Hollywood screenwriter (Dick Powell) and his misadventures with a volatile teenager (Debbie Reynolds). In some ways an early version of Tashlin’s Bachelor Flat (1962), which screens later this month, it’s narrated by the hero’s Oscar statuette, and some of the gags about 50s Hollywood are priceless (among them a parody of Gene Kelly’s dream ballets). With Anne Francis. 98 min. Archival IB Technicolor print. Sat 7/15, 5 PM, and Tue 7/18, 6 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
Ridley Scott’s loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; the studio mucked about with this original version released in 1982, adding a noirish voice-over by hero Harrison Ford and actually purchasing outtakes from The Shining to illustrate the peculiar tacked-on finale. But this is still the most remarkably and densely imagined and visualized SF film since 2001: A Space Odyssey, a hauntingly erotic meditation on the difference between the human and the nonhuman. Set in a grungy LA of the 21st century characterized by nearly constant rain and a good many Chinese restaurantsyielding textures worthy of Welles or Sternbergthe plot involves a former cop (Ford) hired to track down and kill a series of androids. The results are largely a triumph of production design, but as in Forbidden Planet and 2001, it’s often hard to determine where production design leaves off and direction begins. With Sean Young, Rutger Hauer, Edward James Olmos, Daryl Hannah, Joe Turkel, and Joanna Cassidy. 118 min. (JR) Read more
This 1964 Jerry Lewis vehicle is the sixth and last directed by his gifted mentor, Frank Tashlin, though it resembles Lewis’s own directorial efforts in its focus on pain (it’s set almost exclusively in a hospital) and its trading of satire for surreal fantasy, improbably infused with brassy showbiz gusto (Sammy Davis Jr. sings the title tune). There’s also a Lewis-like emphasis on bizarre sound gags and abrasive villains (Everett Sloane as a Scrooge type) that contrasts with Tashlin’s cartoonish imagery and relative tolerance for fools and assholes. But Lewis’s infantile mannerisms are overtaken by the director, who treats the hero as a grown-up struggling with neurotic identification empathy, and the movie’s finale, with its cascading shopping carts, could only have come from Tashlin. With Glenda Farrell, Karen Sharpe, Kathleen Freeman, and Susan Oliver. 89 min. (JR) Read more
Chris Paine’s documentary about General Motors’ development and withdrawal of the innovative, environment-friendly EV1 automobile is bound to reverberate with anyone who’s fallen in love with a product only to see it irrevocably yanked from the market. Nihilistic greed was the major factor when GM terminated the car in 2001, though Paine is also careful to note the passivity of the general public. Among his interviewees are Mel Gibson and Phyllis Diller, both EV1 enthusiasts, as well as GM spokespeople and ordinary customers. Martin Sheen narrates. PG, 91 min. (JR) Read more
The best documentary to date about the military occupation of Iraq, this digital feature was shot there by five national guardsmen from New Hampshire. The narrative focuses on three of them: one grew up in Lebanon, speaks Arabic, and plans to reenlist; another thinks the war is about oil and describes his nightmares and post-traumatic stress disorder; the third argues that he’s fighting for democracy, but he’s taking medication for his nerves and his wife insists he’s no longer the same person. Director Deborah Scranton and producer-editor Steve James (Hoop Dreams) don’t foist any particular thesis on us, but they arrange the material so that we’re obliged to think about it, and the feeling of immediacy is constant. 97 min. Music Box. Read more
