A 15-year-old girl (Emily Rios) in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles gets pregnant and, despite her conviction that she’s technically a virgin, is kicked out of the house by her religious father. Taken in by her kindly great-great uncle (Chalo Gonzalez), a street peddler, she becomes part of another family with him and her cousin (Jesse Garcia), who was thrown out by his parents for being gay. Despite some awkwardness, this feature by writer-directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland is a fascinating look at the area’s Mexican-American milieu and other local subcultures, full of feeling, insight, and touching performances. In English and subtitled Spanish. R, 90 min. (JR) Read more
A Cleveland executive (Parker Posey) finally achieves orgasm after acquiring a vibrator, which drives her already disgruntled husband (Paul Rudd), a high school biology teacher, into the arms of an A student (Mischa Barton). Director Billy Kent seems to have instructed most of his actors to behave like robotic sitcom characters; the principal exception is Danny DeVito, who simply behaves like Danny DeVito. I couldn’t predict where this unrated comedy was going but didn’t much care. With Miranda Bailey and (in an embarrassing cameo) Liza Minnelli. 88 min. (JR) Read more
Oliver Stone’s effective if hokey 9/11 docudrama focuses on the two Port Authority policemen (played by Nicolas Cage and Michael Peña) who were rescued from the rubble of the Twin Towers, their families as they wait for news, and a former marine (Michael Shannon) who winds up on one of the rescue teams. An exercise in flag-waving, it evokes nostalgia for World War II epics and the camaraderie of Stone’s Platoon, stroking Americans’ egos about their innate generosity but overlooking, except for a brief end title, all the citizens of 86 other countries who died in the attacks. Able newcomer Andrea Berloff wrote the script. With Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal. PG-13, 125 min. Read more
Chicago filmmaker Usama Alshaibi grew up in Iraq and the U.S., and although he recently became an American citizen, his personal video documentary has plenty to say about the day-to-day existence of his Baghdad relatives, whom he visited in 2004. Distance tends to simplify our view of anything, and this video humanizes the situation on the ground mostly by complicating it: in a voice-over Alshaibi says he’s often asked what “the Iraqis” think, but by the end this question has become as meaningless as asking what “the Americans” think. Much of his previous work has been experimental, but this becomes formally adventurous only near the end, as he converses by phone with a cousin who tells him how much worse the situation has grown this year. 92 min. Alshaibi, executive producer Studs Terkel, and Christie Hefner of Playboy, whose foundation helped fund the film, will answer questions after the screening, which kicks off the Chicago Underground Film Festival. See next week’s issue for a complete festival schedule. Thu 8/17, 8 PM, Music Box. Read more
After peaking with My Favorite Season (1993), Wild Reeds (1994), and Thieves (1996), French director Andre Techine went into decline with Alice and Martin (1998), Far (2001), and Strayed (2003), often biting off more than he could chew. This 2004 feature also overreaches, especially in its metaphorical moments (a mud slide at a construction site that frames the action), but it’s his strongest film since Thieves, a characteristic effort to juxtapose various cultures, generations, and sexualities as people converge and diverge in Tangier. Volatile and sometimes daring performances by Catherine Deneuve, Gerard Depardieu, Gilbert Melki, Malik Zidi, and Lubna Azabal (as twins) contribute to the highly charged and novelistic experience. In French with subtitles. 90 min. Music Box. Read more
Robin Givens plays an unhappy, self-centered housewife who gets her husband to move out without giving him a reason, then slaps a restraining order on him and slowly drives him mad. Usually there are two sides to every failed marriage, yet the wife here is so detestable one wonders whether writer-director Reggie Gaskins (who costars as the couple’s lawyer friend) is working off some sort of grudge. The lack of perspective makes this 2005 drama depressing and not especially edifying. With Sean Blakemore. 106 min. (JR) Read more
As Joel and Ethan Coen demonstrated with their fraudulent based on a true story caption in Fargo, the supposed veracity of a movie’s plot can obscure the truth more than reveal it. The same caption appears in this thriller adapted from an Armistead Maupin novel, in which a radio personality (Robin Williams) who’s recently broken up with his male lover becomes obsessed with a young fan (Rory Culkin) who’s been calling him but who may be the invention of a blind woman (Toni Collette) claiming to be his mother. It’s a relief to see Williams underplaying for a change and letting us fill in the blanks, but the movie’s suggestiveness gives way to a certain thinness and lassitude. Patrick Stettner directed; with Joe Morton, Bobby Cannavale, and Sandra Oh. R, 82 min. (JR) Read more
Adapted by Tony Grisoni from a novel by Brian Aldiss, this arty UK mockumentary charts the musical career of incestuous twins (played by Harry and Luke Treadaway) born conjoined at the chest in a remote corner of England and recruited by a promoter in 1974 as lead singer and lead guitarist for a band called the Bang Bang. Directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (Lost in La Mancha) are too preoccupied with hip cleverness to have much else on their minds, and the music is so-so. Among the phony talking heads are Aldiss and director Ken Russell. R, 93 min. (JR) Read more
Provocative but also infuriating, this alarmist documentary argues that the levying of a federal income tax in 1913 was unconstitutional and set America on the road to fascism. Filmmaker Aaron Russo (Bette Midler’s former manager and the producer of Trading Places) shows no interest in the social, cultural, medical, or educational benefits of the income tax, or in the world outside the U.S., which he seems to regard as tainted by communism in the past and the international banking community in the present. He lacks the humor and polemical skill of Michael Moore as he ambushes some of his interview subjects, and he uses far too many intertitles and epigraphs. But his crude agitprop clearly identifies the threat to civil liberties posed by the Patriot Act, electronic voting, national ID cards, and implanted microchips, and his sense of urgency is contagious. 105 min. (JR) Read more
Woody Allen follows up his best film (Match Point) with another story set in London and starring Scarlett Johansson as an American greenhorn among the English gentry, but this mystery comedy is tired, labored, and lazy. A journalism student (Johansson), drafted by a stage magician (Allen) to take part in a vanishing act, winds up in a hidden compartment and meets the ghost of a journalist (Ian McShane), who informs her that a wealthy playboy (Hugh Jackman) may be a notorious serial killer. This is hardly Allen’s worst film (I might go with Shadows and Fog or Hollywood Ending), but he’s definitely going through the motions. The score consists of classical chestnuts (Grieg and Tchaikovsky), which Allen seems vaguely to associate with upper-class Brits. PG-13, 96 min. (JR) Read more
Three teens (Ashanti, Sophia Bush, Arielle Kebbel) discover they’ve been sharing the same boyfriend (Jesse Metcalfe) and conspire to make him fall for a reclusive pal (Brittany Snow) who’s bound to break his heart. Betty Thomas, directing a script by TV veteran Jeff Lowell, seems uncertain whether to sympathize with her three heroines or with the title cad, but there’s something mildly charming about this cheerful revenge comedy’s lack of any straightforward moral agenda. PG-13, 87 min. (JR) Read more
After an anesthetist in Biarritz (Catherine Deneuve) accidentally runs down a local layabout (Patrick Dewaere), the two edge uncertainly toward romance, though it’s periodically blocked by the former’s grief over a dead lover and the latter’s ambiguous friendship with a self-involved musician (Etienne Chicot). French director Andre Techine has called this 1981 feature his first to break free of film references and explore emotions directly; the bisexual issues and Bergman-esque psychodrama that characterize his later work are all evident here, though the characters’ novelistic backstories are less assured than in the magisterial My Favorite Season (1993) or Thieves (1996). The use of ‘Scope is resourceful, and Deneuve, in her first collaboration with Techine, is impressive. Techine cowrote the script with Gilles Taurand. In French with subtitles. 95 min. (JR) Read more
Tashlin’s live-action comedies reflect his earlier career as a studio animator, and this program of Warner Brothers items, dating from 1937 to 1944, recalls live-action features of the same period (racial stereotypes and all). Porky’s Double Trouble (1937) references gangster pictures and Mae West; The Major Lied ’til Dawn (1938) lampoons the Gary Cooper drama The General Died at Dawn; Speaking of the Weather (1937), which charts the interactions among magazine covers on a newsstand, includes Tarzan and the Thin Man; and the cavorting book jackets of Have You Got Any Castles? (1938) feature Cab Calloway, Clark Gable, Charles Laughton, and two John Ford movies. Most of the other cartoons reek of their wartime context, with depictions of Churchill (Brother Brat) and Hitler (Plane Daffy). Total running time is about 90 minutes. (JR) Read more
Critic Andrew Sarris labeled this 1962 comedy Frank Tashlin’s best, probably because its tone is so warm and its characters so likable, though it lacks the satirical edge of his 50s classics. A British professor of archaeology (Terry-Thomas), staying in the Malibu beach house of his fiancee (Celeste Holm), finds himself chaperoning her teenage daughter (Tuesday Weld), who’s being romanced by a handsome neighbor (Richard Beymer of West Side Story). Meanwhile a dachshund’s fondness for a huge dinosaur fossil provides Tashlin with an ideal comic use for the CinemaScope frame. 91 min. (JR) Read more
The best Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis movie (1955) is also Frank Tashlin’s best feature at Paramount, a satire about the comic book craze with explosive uses of color and VistaVision, better-than-average songs, and much-better-than-average costars, especially Dorothy Malone and Shirley MacLaine (the latter giving Lewis a run for his money in terms of goofy mugging). Martin and Malone are comic book artists, MacLaine is a model for the Bat Lady, and Lewis is a deranged fan whose dreams wind up inspiring (or is it duplicating?) comic book stories and the coded messages of communist spies–or something like that. Five cowriters are credited along with Tashlin, but the stylistic exuberance is seamless, and this film eventually wound up providing the inspirational spark for Jacques Rivette’s late, great New Wave extravaganza Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974). With Eva Gabor and Anita Ekberg. 109 min. Archival IB Technicolor print. Sun 7/30, 3 PM, and Tue 8/1, 7:45 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
