This 2005 video offers a bracing lesson in global economics, crosscutting between a bead factory in Fuzhou, China (a kind of internment camp where teenage girls work 12-hour shifts for ten cents an hour), and the New Orleans Mardi Gras festivities where the beads end up (including a ritual in which women flash their breasts in exchange for them). Video maker David Redmon repeatedly asks each group about the other and discovers that both are usually clueless. No surprise there, nor in the factory boss’s spin on how happy everyone is, the recycling of the beads in care packages sent to Baghdad, or the fact that the styrene used to manufacture them causes cancer. In English, Cantonese, Fujianese, and Mandarin with subtitles. 72 min. (JR) Read more
Sincere, square, and interminable, this World War II adventure (1949) stars Gregory Peck as a hard-as-nails brigadier general who takes command of a U.S. bombing squad in England, works his men to the limit, dispatches them to bomb the hell out of Germany, and flips out from the strain. Peck and director Henry King teamed up again the next year for The Gunfighter, a masterpiece that undermined the same sort of macho cliches presented here at face value. With Hugh Marlowe, Gary Merrill, Millard Mitchell, Paul Stewart, and Dean Jagger, who copped an Oscar. 132 min. (JR) Read more
A two-hour program of shorts selected and hosted by Gregory Lukow, chief of the Library of Congress’s Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division. On the basis of two classics in the program that I’ve seenGjon Mili’s great jazz documentary Jammin’ the Blues (1944, 10 min.), with a priceless appearance by Lester Young, and Chuck Jones’s 1957 Bugs Bunny cartoon What’s Opera, Doc?this should be well worth checking out. Also screening are The House I Live In (1945), a piece of liberal propaganda on behalf of racial and ethnic tolerance starring Frank Sinatra, and The Happy Hottentots (1930), a one-reel comedy. (JR) Read more
The masterful feminist documentarian Kim Longinottowho’s previously focused on women in Japan (Shunjuku Boys), Iran (Divorce Iranian Style), and Kenya (The Day I Will Never Forget)directed this absorbing 2005 account of three Cameroon court cases involving rape, wife beating, and child abuse. As in some of Longinotto’s earlier efforts, the camera seems to increase the participants’ desire to perform, but the authority and common sense of the two central figures, Judge Beatrice Ntuba and state prosecutor Vera Ngassa, are mesmerizing. Florence Ayisi codirected. In English and various subtitled dialects. 104 min. (JR) Read more
Two delicate videos about wartime loss, both directed by Palestinian women. In Kings and Extras (2004, 63 min.) video maker Azza al-Hassan investigates the mysterious disappearance of the PLO film archive, three rooms’ worth of precious materials that vanished when Israel invaded Beirut in 1982. It’s an important subject, but her journey through four countries yields so little that she’s reduced to poeticizing her failure and interviewing random pedestrians. The loss in Nahed Awwad’s The Fourth Room (2005, 25 min.) is more personal: an amiable shopkeeper, traumatized by a past military invasion, guards a locked room from everyone, including Awwad, to prevent its being torn apart again. Both films are in Arabic with subtitles. (JR) Read more
Produced for the BBC in 2004, Adam Curtis’s three-hour polemical essay about the conceptually nonsensical but mythically potent “war on terror” is the most informative and stimulating film treatment of the subject to date. Curtis begins with the collapse of liberal idealism, charts the parallel development of radical Islamism (starting with Egyptian author Sayyid Qutp) and American neoconservatism (starting with Leo Strauss), and argues that Osama bin Laden encourages the lies and hype of Bush and Blair. The symmetries are too neat to be entirely persuasive, and as Curtis approaches the present, his arguments are more open to dispute (like his assertion that Al Qaeda doesn’t really exist). Yet the film is witty, intelligent, and brilliant in its use of archival elements, ranging from Egyptian TV commercials to images from The Thief of Bagdad and music from Citizen Kane. This is the first area screening, though the documentary can be downloaded at www.archive.org. DVD projection. Sat 5/20, 2 PM, Evanston Public Library, 1703 Orrington, Evanston, 847-866-0300. Read more
Andy Garcia’s first feature as director, an abortive anti-Marxist epic about the Cuban revolution, follows the fortunes of a wealthy Havana family, with Garcia as one of the sons, a nightclub owner. The script is credited to the late, great Cuban expatriate novelist G. Cabrera Infante, but the only traces of his wit are in a closing title and the treatment of Che Guevara (Jsu Garcia) and gangster Meyer Lansky (Dustin Hoffman); Infante also appears as a character of sorts, though casting Bill Murray as such a multicultural figure goes beyond grotesquerie to incoherence. Garcia seems to be aping the Godfather movies and Warren Beatty’s Reds, but the movie’s gracefulness is limited to its handling of the music (some of which Garcia wrote). With Ines Sastre, Tomas Milian, and Lorena Feijoo. R, 143 min. (JR) Read more
Attending a party, a young Manhattan executive with nothing but good luck (Lindsay Lohan) meets a young janitor with nothing but bad (Chris Pine), and when they kiss, they involuntarily exchange fortunes. Whimsical fantasy tends to work best when its premise is used sparingly, but in this case the fantasy element takes over the story, becoming mechanical and often confused (for instance, simple clumsiness is often conflated with bad luck). No less than five people are credited with the pile-driver script, but the two leads hold up the picture and the New York locations are nicely used. Daniel Petrie directed. PG-13, 108 min. (JR) Read more
I wasn’t looking forward to the prospect of a bar mitzvah comedy in which glitzy Brentwood parents (Jeremy Piven and Jami Gertz) try to outdo their neighbors, with voice-over narration provided by the dubious son. But the real focus of Mark Zakarin’s script is the dad’s resentment of his own father (Garry Marshall), a new age hippie who abandoned the family years earlier and now shows up with a girlfriend many decades his junior (Daryl Hannah). Maybe because director Scott Marshall is Garry’s son, he allows his affable father to steal the movie from everyone else, and his performance proves to be a small gift worth having. PG-13, 99 min. (JR) Read more
A rebellious working-class teenager in southern California (Evan Rachel Wood) gets involved with an emotionally disturbed if charismatic young man who fancies himself a cowboy (Edward Norton). Both actors work hard to give this disturbing crime story some flavor and substance, but the narrative is overextended and poorly organized. Writer-director David Jacobson (Dahmer) has reportedly recut the movie since its Cannes premiere; it still feels too long. With David Morse and Bruce Dern. R, 114 min. (JR) Read more
Chuck Kleinhans, professor of film at Northwestern University, will screen and discuss two essential structural films, both in 16-millimeter, that challenge the viewer’s sense of equilibrium: Michael Snow’s 52-minute Back and Forth (1969) and Ernie Gehr’s 41-minute Side/Walk/Shuttle (1991). (JR) Read more
A program of 16-millimeter experimental films, including at least two essential itemsHollis Frampton’s Nostalgia (1973) and Paul Sharits’s T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968)and two films by the neglected English filmmaker John Smith, Associations (1975) and The Girl Chewing Gum (1976). 67 min. (JR) 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 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. Music Box. Read more
Screenwriter John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck) made his directorial debut with this whimsical contemporary fairy tale (1990). Tom Hanks plays a former fireman who’s told by his doctor (Robert Stack) that he has only a short time to live. A wealthy businessman (Lloyd Bridges) offers him red-carpet treatment if Hanks will sail to a remote Pacific island (where the businessman wants to gain mineral rights) and dive into a volcano to appease the natives. Meg Ryan plays all three leading ladies, and Abe Vigoda, Amanda Plummer, Barry McGovern, and Ossie Davis are around for other offbeat parts. Borrowing liberally from Delmer Daves’s Bird of Paradise, Shanley manages to achieve some striking pictorial effects and a few goofy gags and plot turns; he also tries for some uplift that’s less convincing but easy enough to take. PG, 102 min. (JR) Read more
This unscripted British feature by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross uses documentary interviews and dramatizations to tell the story of the Tipton Three, British Muslims en route to a wedding who were arrested by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and held for more than two years at the U.S. Naval Detention Center at Guantanamo Bay. The problem with making a docudrama out of this material is that blurring the lines between the real and the simulated only confuses the considerable issues surrounding the U.S. treatment of detainees. The film is compelling to the extent that the subject is, but also unimaginative and unsurprising. R, 95 min. (JR) Read more
