Ang Lee’s follow-up to Brokeback Mountain is a surprisingly monotone and overextended period spy drama set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai in 1942 and Hong Kong a few years earlier; the mainly inexpressive cast (Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Tang Wei, Joan Chen, Wang Leehom) specializes not only in stiff upper lips but stiff lower lips as well. Based on a short story by Eileen Chang, this tale of a college student (Tang) who joins the resistance and sets herself up as sexual bait to help assassinate a wealthy Chinese collaborator (Leung) disappoints even in its incidentals (the fancy clothes and the settings pale beside those in period efforts by Stanley Kwan and Wong Kar-wai), and the bursts of sex and violence that earned this picture an NC-17 rating offer only temporary respite from the encroaching dullness. In English and subtitled Cantonese, Japanese, Mandarin, and Shanghainese. 157 min. (JR) Read more
Directed by Maria Finitzo, this excellent Kartemquin Films documentary profiles Dr. Jack Kessler, a stem cell expert at Northwestern University whose work is motivated partly by a desire to regenerate the damaged spinal cord of his teenage daughter. Finitzo’s long-term investigation widens to include other patients with spinal-cord damage and their everyday ways of coping, as well as a couple of Kessler’s graduate assistants as they follow up on lab experiments. What emerges is a multifaceted unpacking and demythification of a loaded subject. 90 min. (JR) Read more
The hapless overweight hero played by Jeff Garlin in this mild but likable Chicago comedy lives with his doting mother, works at Second City, won’t budge from his perfect parking place across from Wrigley Field, and hasn’t gotten laid in a long time. So his hopes are lifted when he meets a racy and kooky ice cream parlor waitress (Sarah Silverman). Meanwhile, he’s miffed that he can’t even get a tryout for the lead in a remake of Martya movie that he thinks describes his life, though he seems to forget that Ernest Borgnine played a butcher in that film, not an actor. The story ultimately lands in incoherence; but the cameos and local details, and even some of the gags, keep it perky. R, 80 min. (JR) Read more
Though less well-known than Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thai filmmaker Pen-ek Ratanaruang is in many ways as impressive a figure in his versatility, in features that usually work with more commercial genres (as in his 6ixtynin9 and Invisible Waves). This masterful art film is an exception, charting a few hours in the lives of several characters in which their fantasies and actual events are given equal amounts of attention. Returning to Bangkok for a funeral after a decade’s absence, a couple whose marriage seems to be foundering check into a luxury hotel in the middle of the night, and things grow especially edgy between them after the husband meets a teenage girl named Ploy in the bar downstairs and invites her to come upstairs while she waits for her mother to arrive. A film that perfectly captures the look and mood of jet lag and early dawn, with erotic tension to spare. In Thai with subtitles. 107 min. (JR) Read more
I haven’t been able to preview this restoration of a silent comedy starring Colleen Moore, directed by the prolific Marshall Neilan and rediscovered by chance in the Czech Film Archive. But 1927 (a date curiously missing from the festival flyer) was clearly a much better year for Hollywood movies than 2007 has been so far, and David Drazin will be offering piano accompaniment, which alone should make this worth the price of admission. The story follows an orphaned tenement dweller (Moore) as she blows her savings by living it up at a beach resort, where she gets misidentified as a duchess. 90 min. (JR) Read more
Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Cristian Mungiu’s masterful chronicle of two young women negotiating for an illegal abortion in 1987 Romania over a 24-hour period, near the end of Ceausescu’s communist regime, is impressive above all for the way it respects the audience, expecting them to follow the implications of its multifaceted tale without always spelling them out. (When one of the women has to prostitute herself with the abortionist before he’ll agree to proceed, and pointedly keeps this fact from her boyfriend, we can already see their relationship foundering as a consequence.) Filmed in ‘Scope, largely in long takes, this is moving and gripping throughout. In Romanian with subtitles. 113 min. (JR) Read more
Nick Redman’s uneven documentary about the great American filmmaker from his silent days through My Darling Clementine in 1946 — almost all of it in black and white and devoted to Ford’s films at Fox — often feels like a rough cut. Talking heads are identified belatedly or not at all while sometimes echoing one another, backtracking, and offering alternately solid scholarship (from Joseph McBride and Janet Bergstrom, among others), lazy misinformation (such as the claim that Pinky didn’t show anywhere in the south, or Ford’s own absurd boast that he eliminated farce from his films), and odd mixtures of the two. We hear both real and alleged statements by Ford (read by Walter Hill) and Darryl F. Zanuck (read by Ron Shelton), whose sources are never cited. With many glaring omissions en route (including Judge Priest at Fox and Stagecoach at RKO), this patchy survey does, however, have many incidental pleasures: Peter Fonda offers a great John Wayne imitation, and some of the clips are fabulous even when they aren’t identified. 94 min. (JR) Read more
One of Shohei Imamura’s most ribald films (2001)a well-told fantasy about a young woman in a fishing village on the Noto peninsula (The Eel’s Misa Shimizu) with a strange physical condition that essentially turns her into a sexual geyser when she’s aroused. She gets involved with a middle-aged businessman (The Eel’s Koji Yakusho, also a familiar lead in Kiyoshi Kurosawa films) who loses his job and wife, then turns up in the village looking for a golden Buddha stolen from a Kyoto temple that’s said to be in the young woman’s house. Things get much more complicated after that, but interest never flags over 119 minutes. This isn’t a major effort, but it’s an enjoyable one. In Japanese with subtitles. (JR) Read more
