Much of the liveliness of Capote (2005) derived from the built-in fascination of following Truman Capote from Manhattan high society to rural Kansas while he wrote his true-crime thriller In Cold Blood. This feature by writer-director Douglas McGrath, made around the same time as Capote but only released this year, covers the same subject with a provocatively different tone, starting out as a flip comedy and making more of an issue of Capote’s homosexuality. Its putative source is Truman Capote (1997), George Plimpton’s nonbook of gossipy quotes, and much of the story seems invented, especially the tragic relationship between Capote (Toby Jones) and Perry Smith (Daniel Craig, excellent). More ambitious than Capote yet wildly uneven, this finally has too many competing agendas, though it certainly held my interest. With Peter Bogdanovich (as Bennett Cerf), Sandra Bullock (as Harper Lee), Jeff Daniels, Sigourney Weaver, and Hope Davis. R, 110 min. 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. (JR) Read more
Joey Lauren Adams, who played the bisexual heroine in Chasing Amy, writes and directs her first feature, which I hope won’t be her last. A personal and thoughtful look at her southern Baptist background, it centers on a promiscuous thirtysomething barfly (Ashley Judd) trying to negotiate various parts of her life. The plot points verge on the familiar and obvious, but Adams’s work with the actors (especially Judd and among the others Jeffrey Donovan, Diane Ladd, Tim Blake Nelson, and Scott Wilson) is so resourceful and focused that she makes them shine. R, 97 min. (JR) Read more
Peter O’Toole stars as a septuagenarian British actor pursuing a mainly chaste romance with the unschooled 20-year-old grandniece (Jodie Whittaker) of one of his cronies (Leslie Phillips). Directed by Roger Michell (Persuasion) from a script by Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette), this comedy drama is an exercise in self-indulgence for O’Toole, but an enjoyable and touching one. Vanessa Redgrave livens things up briefly as O’Toole’s ex-wife, but this is basically about the complex negotiations, adjustments, and exchanges between the actor and the young woman, and more generally a meditation on growing old gracefully. R, 94 min. (JR) Read more
According to this documentary, 24 people jumped to their death from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in 2004. Eric Steel contrived to film as many of them as possible, and the schedule for the Chicago International Film Festival stated that he captured 23 successful suicides and one survivor. He also interviews many suffering friends and relatives. This is a new form of obscenity that might be called suicide porn. It’s not just the voyeuristic surveillance that’s obscene, but the use of suicide footage as counterpoint to other stories as they’re told. Steel shows no special insight into the subject, though even that couldn’t justify such hideousness. 93 min. (JR) Read more
The great countercultural novelist Rudolph Wurlitzer has talked of writing a Buddhist thriller in which the action gets progressively slower. There’s some of that in this movie, Thai maestro Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s fifth feature, which moves from Macao to Thailand. Though this time the director doesn’t take a script credit, he returns to the genre basics of his first two films, Fun Bar Karaoke (1997) and 6ixtynin9 (1999), to give us a moody, philosophically downbeat, cryptically stylish thriller about a Japanese hit man (Tadanobu Asano) assigned to kill his own lover (and his boss’s girlfriend). The lush cinematography is by the great Christopher Doyle. In English and subtitled Thai, Japanese, and Korean. 115 min. (JR) Read more
Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady, Blissfully Yours), who studied at the School of the Art Institute, ranks as one of the most creative and unpredictable film artists working anywhere. With a few notable exceptions, all his work is experimental, though these seven lovely shorts, made between 1994 and 2003, are experimental in the classic sense of being painterly, musical, and nonnarrative. The stories that do surface come from such sources as a comic book (Malee and the Boy), a radio play (Like the Relentless Fury of the Pounding Waves), and an offscreen conversation (Thirdworld). (JR) Read more
This story about a TV comedian (Robin Williams) who’s elected president due to a faulty new computerized voting machine was written and directed by Barry Levinson, but it’s no Wag the Dog and not even a satire, political or otherwise. It’s not exactly a love story either, although the president-elect falls for the woman (Laura Linney) who’s discovered the mechanical error. Nor is it a thriller, despite some slam-bang skulduggery involving a corporate villain (Jeff Goldblum), or a buddy film, despite the warmth between the comic and his manager (Christopher Walken). Mainly it’s a shambles, though for once Williams gets to do what he’s best at (his stand-up shtick), and the absurd story, no matter how carelessly assembled, keeps moving. With Lewis Black. PG-13, 102 min. (JR) Read more
John Cassavetes’s first feature (1959), shot in 16-millimeter, centers on three siblings living together in Manhattan; the oldest, a third-rate nightclub singer (Hugh Hurd), is visibly black, while the other two (Ben Carruthers and Lelia Goldoni) are sufficiently light skinned to pass for white. This is the only Cassavetes film made without a full script (it grew out of acting improvs), and rarely has so much warmth, delicacy, and raw feeling emerged so naturally and beautifully from performances in an American film. It’s contemporaneous with early masterpieces of the French New Wave and deserves to be ranked alongside them for the freshness and freedom of its vision; in its portrait of a now-vanished Manhattan during the beat period, it also serves as a poignant time capsule. With Tony Ray (son of director Nicholas Ray), Rupert Crosse, Dennis Sallas, Tom Allen, and Davey Jonesall very fineand a wonderful jazz score by Charles Mingus. It’s conceivable that Cassavetes made greater films, but this is the one I cherish the most. 87 min. (JR) Read more
It’s hard to understand why Martin Scorsese wanted to remake a nasty, formulaic 1962 thriller whose only classic credentials are a terrifying performance by Robert Mitchum and a Bernard Herrmann score. The score has been reorchestrated by Elmer Bernstein, and Mitchum is back briefly, in a cameo that carries enough reality and conviction to blow the other actors off the screen. But most of the rest of this 1991 taleabout a psychotic ex-con (Robert De Niro) who turns up in a North Carolina town to take revenge on the lawyer (Nick Nolte) partly responsible for his long sentence, focusing on his wife (Jessica Lange) and daughter (Juliette Lewis)has been inadequately scripted by Wesley Strick, and even as a simple genre picture it works only in fits and starts. With Joe Don Baker, Fred Dalton Thompson, Illeana Douglas, and, in cameos, two other refugees from the original, Martin Balsam and Gregory Peck. R, 128 min. (JR) Read more
The Iraq war makes perfect sense for defense contractors like Blackwater USA, Halliburton KBR, and Titan Corporation, which pocket billions of tax dollars as they demonstrate capitalism at its most remorseless. Protected from prosecution, their personnel sometimes trained by U.S. soldiers, these companies pull off such scams as charging $99 for each bag of poorly washed laundry (soldiers are forbidden to clean their own) and making dangerous delivery runs to needy soldiers even though the trucks are empty. MoveOn house director Robert Greenwald (Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price) is a mediocre filmmaker, but this expos Read more
The original version of Orson Welles’s landmark 1952 independent featurenot the so-called restoration released in 1992, but the film as it originally looked and sounded, courtesy of a 16-millimeter print owned by cinematographer Gary Graver, one of Welles’s key collaborators during the last phase of his career. For all the liberties taken with the play, this may well be the greatest Shakespeare film (Welles’s later Chimes at Midnight is the only other contender)a brooding expressionist dream of the play made in eerie Moorish locations in Morocco and Italy over nearly three years, yet held together by a remarkably cohesive style and atmosphere (and beautifully shot by Anchisi Brizzi, G.R. Aldo, and George Fanto). Welles, despite his misleading reputation in the U.S. as a Hollywood filmmaker, made about 75 percent of his films as a fly-by-night independent in order to regain the artistic control he’d had on Citizen Kane; Othello, the first of these features, is arguably an even more important film in his career than Kane, since it inaugurated the more fragmented shooting style that dominates his subsequent work. The most impressive performance here is that of Micheal MacLiammoir as Iago; Welles’s own underplaying of the title role meshes well with the somnambulistic mood, but apart from some magnificent line readings makes less of a dramatic impression. Read more
Ever since Benito Mussolini invented the film festival, in Venice in 1932, art and industry have merged at festivals to create strange bedfellows. Now the workings of film culture are highlighted by incongruous blends of polemics and test marketing, promotion and education, displays of power and tributes to art and artistry.
The fascist splendor of the outdoor screenings in Venice, involving grandiose fountains and light displays, lasted for at least a half century (I saw one with Philip Kaufman’s The Wanderers in 1979). Now they’re gone, but vestiges of the portentous atmosphere linger, including elaborate security measures this year–every viewer was searched thoroughly before entering any of the festival’s half-dozen venues. But the seriousness of the jury, headed by Catherine Deneuve, was no less striking, as it gave the two top prizes to the best films I saw there, Alain Resnais’ Hearts and Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life.
Both movies were shown at the Toronto film festival afterward, but neither is coming to the Chicago International Film Festival, whose programming this year seems to suffer, as usual, from minimal clout, bad timing, disorganization, and the tendency of its better programmers to move on. (This year’s notable loss was Helen Gramates.) Of the other ten best features I saw in Venice and Toronto–Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book, Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako, Jafar Panahi’s Offside, Garin Nugroho’s Opera Jawa, Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth, Ron Mann’s Tales of the Rat Fink, Manoel de Oliveira’s Belle Toujours, Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Invisible Waves, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century–only the last three have made it into the Chicago festival. Read more
Canadian filmmaker Ron Mann (Grass, Go Further) may be more a fan of pop culture than a critic, but he’s also a closet art historian, as evidenced by this documentary about the eccentric and influential hot-rod designer and outsider artist Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. Seeing Roth’s goofy imagery in everything from comic books to beach party movies to the shapes of electric guitars, Mann enlists writer Solomon Vesta to adapt Roth’s prose as narration, John Goodman to deliver the result, and Michael Roberts to turn Roth’s visions into animated cartoons. Some of Roth’s cars become characters, their voices furnished by Ann-Margret, Jay Leno, Brian Wilson, Matt Groening, Tom Wolfe, and others. The pace never flags, and the enthusiasm is infectious. 76 min. a Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
Three screenings this week showcase the work of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady, Blissfully Yours), who studied at the School of the Art Institute and now ranks as one of the most creative and unpredictable film artists working anywhere. With a few notable exceptions, all Weerasethakul’s work is experimental, though the seven lovely shorts (1994-2003) screening at Chicago Filmmakers are experimental in the classic sense of being painterly, musical, and nonnarrative. The stories that do surface come from such sources as a comic book (Malee and the Boy), a radio play (Like the Relentless Fury of the Pounding Waves), and an offscreen conversation (Thirdworld). In more recent works screening at the Gene Siskel Film Center, the presence of nature begins to overwhelm the more formal elements; one of them, Worldly Desires (2005), was inspired by “memories of the jungle, 2001-2005” and wittily juxtaposes the shooting of a soap opera and a music video there. Weerasethakul’s latest feature, Syndromes and a Century, also screens as part of the Chicago International Film Festival (see Section 1 pullout). a Wed 10/11, 7:30 PM, Chicago Filmmakers; also Thu 10/12, 6 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
