Screening as the opening-night program of the 19th annual Onion City festival, these eight shorts might seem to be all over the place–Manoel de Oliveira’s The Improbable Is Not Impossible (2006), an eclectic tribute to Portugal’s Gulbenkian Foundation, isn’t even experimental. But many of them share the same alienated fascination with history: Jean-Luc Godard’s archival, corpse-laden Origin of the 21st Century (2000), Guy Ben-Ner’s Moby Dick (2000), which comically restages Melville’s novel in the filmmaker’s kitchen, and Bill Morrison’s Outerborough (2005) and Ken Jacobs’s The Surging Sea of Humanity (2006), which both use footage from the 1890s, all seem to poeticize the weight of the past. Also showing are Kyle Canterbury’s Man (2006), a world premiere; Olivo Barbieri’s Sevilla –(_) 06 (2006), with abstract aerial views of Spain; and Michael Robinson’s The General Returns From One Place to Another (2006), derived from a Frank O’Hara play. 94 min. The festival continues June 15 through 17 at Chicago Filmmakers; for a schedule visit www.chicagofilmmakers.org. a Thu 6/14, 8 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
A small-time crook (Jamel Debbouze of Days of Glory), about to be rubbed out in Paris for an unpaid debt, decides to jump into the Seine, but when a leggy blond (Rie Rasmussen of Femme Fatale) jumps first, he promptly saves her. She turns out to be the title angel and accompanies him around the city, showing him how to clean up his act. Given my antipathy toward Luc Besson’s glib and nihilistic early features, I didn’t expect to like this 2005 mix of romantic fantasy and screwball comedy. But his attractive black-and-white ‘Scope compositions, strong Paris locations, and effective handling of the actors makes this captivating throughout, and wholly undeserving of the drubbing it’s received from many critics. In French with subtitles. R, 91 min. (JR) Read more
The title hero (Kevin Costner), a successful and beloved executive, husband, and father, is secretly addicted to committing gratuitous murders and voices his inner doubts to an alter ego (William Hurt) while being tracked by a similarly compulsive millionaire cop (Demi Moore). When he forgets to close the blinds before killing a couple, a voyeur (Dane Cook) spots him and blackmails him, demanding to be brought along on the next caper. This is one of those slick, violent, ridiculous Hollywood jobs that make little sense as a story, a comment on life, or a depiction of characters, but are moderately enjoyable in their spinning of movie conventions. There’s even a good De Palma-style fake shock ending. Bruce A. Evans directed a script he wrote with Raynold Gideon. R, 120 min. (JR) Read more
Hilary Brougher follows up her highly original debut feature The Sticky Fingers of Time (1997) with this grim, intensely realized psychological thriller (2006) about an alienated 16-year-old (Amber Tamblyn) in denial about both her secret pregnancy and having murdered the baby after delivering it alone in a public restroom. That’s a pretty loaded premise, but the pregnant forensic psychologist (Tilda Swinton) hired to question the teenager has issues as well, her first pregnancy having ended with a stillbirth. Apart from Swinton’s fine performance, what largely distinguishes this is Brougher’s sharp narrative focus. With Timothy Hutton, Denis O’Hare, and Melissa Leo. R, 92 min. (JR) Read more
Sergei Bondarchuk’s epic 1967 adaptation of the Tolstoy novel, screening in four parts, is the most expensive movie ever made, and though it can be bombastic and mind-numbing, it’s often lively and eye filling. The balls and battle scenes are monumental, and Bondarchuk (who plays the bumbling Pierre, as Orson Welles would have in the 40s if he’d realized his own version with Alexander Korda) moves his camera a lot, incorporating some expressive 60s-style flourishes. Even at 415 minutes (over an hour shorter than the Soviet release) this rarely suggests the vision behind Tolstoy’s set pieces or populist polemics; his feeling for incidental detail is more evident in (non-Tolstoyan) films like The Leopard and The Magnificent Ambersons. This is a landmark in the history of commerce and post-Stalinist Russia, but not cinema. If you’d like to merely sample it, try parts one and three. With Lyudmila Savelyeva (graceful as Natasha), Vyacheslav Tikhonov (suitably morose as Andrei), and more than 100,000 extras. In Russian and French with subtitles. Part one: 147 min. Part two: 86 min. Part three: 83 min. Part four: 98 min. a Part one: Fri 6/1, 6 PM, Sat 6/2, 2:30 PM, and Mon 6/4, 6:30 PM; part two: Fri 6/1, 8:45 PM, Sat 6/2, 5:15 PM, and Tue 6/5, 6:15 PM; part three: Sun 6/3, 2:30 PM, Tue 6/5, 8 PM, and Wed 6/6, 6:15 PM; part four: Sun 6/3, 4:15 PM, Wed 6/6, 8 PM, and Thu 6/7, 6:15 PM; $9 per part or $30 for all four; Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
Vintage MGM hokum (1935) with more assets than you can shake a swizzle stick at: Clark Gable (as a sea captain sailing from Hong Kong to Singapore), Rosalind Russell (for upscale romance), Jean Harlow (for downscale romance), C. Aubrey Smith (for colonialist nostalgia), Robert Benchley (for drunk jokes), plus character turns by Wallace Beery and Lewis Stone. Pirates and a hidden cache of British gold notwithstanding, the raucous action is more diversion than plot. Jules Furthman wrote the salty, snappy dialogue, and Tay Garnett, a specialist in studio-bound sea yarns, directed. 87 min. (JR) Read more
An eight-part serial running about 12 and a half hours, this 1971 comedy drama is Jacques Rivette’s grandest experiment and most exciting adventure in filmmaking. Balzac’s History of the Thirteen, about a few Parisians who hope to control the city through their hidden interconnections, inspired its tale, dominated by two theater groups and two solitary individuals. Some of the major actors of the French New Wave participated (Juliet Berto, Francoise Fabian, Bernadette Lafont, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Michel Lonsdale, Bulle Ogier), creating their own characters and improvising their own dialogue, and Rivette juxtaposes their disparate acting styles; acting exercises dominate the first episodes (including one 45-minute take) until fiction gradually and conclusively overtakes the documentary aspect. What emerges is the definitive film about 60s counterculture: its global and conspiratorial fantasies, its euphoric collective utopias, and its descent into solitude, madness, and dissolution. Out 1 has always been the hardest of Rivette’s films to see, so this screening, spaced over two days with breaks for food and rest, is a major event. Reviewed this week in Section 1. a Sat 5/26, 2:30 (episodes 1 and 2) and 7 PM (3 and 4), and Sun 5/27, 2:30 (5 and 6) and 6:45 PM (7 and 8), Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
Hal Hartley’s fall from fashion seems to correspond to his shift away from emulating 60s Godard and toward more ambitious contemporary satire (though his underrated The Girl From Monday managed to balance the two). Shot in New York, Berlin, Paris, and Istanbul, this sequel to Henry Fool (1997) is a cloak-and-dagger pastiche that sometimes asks to be taken halfway straight as it comments on American paranoia toward the Muslim world. The involved backstory and Hartley’s own generic music both prove burdensome; the main attraction is the cast’s amusing way of handling Hartley’s mannerist dialogue and conceits. With Parker Posey, James Urbaniak, Saffron Burrows, and Jeff Goldblum, occasionally hilarious as a CIA operative. 118 min. (JR) Read more
Former Chicagoan Paul Chan curated this hour-long program of video documentaries about remarkable, patriotic Americans who’ve been persecuted for their political convictions, partly thanks to the Patriot Act. All the shorts are experimental in their pairing of sound and image yet plainspoken in their address, and their portraiture is partly concerned with the glory of particular ways of being alive. The first and best is Chan’s Untitled Video on Lynne Stewart and Her Conviction, the Law, and Poetry (2006), in which the human-rights lawyer reads poetry and reflects on her life, work, and prospects. The others are Jim Fetterley and Angie Waller’s Steve Kurtz Waiting (2006); Susan Youssef’s For the Least, about Catholic Workers who marched to Guantanamo, and Mary Billyou and Annelisse Fifi’s Mohamed Yousry: A Life Stands Still (2006), about an academic who worked as Stewart’s translator. (JR) Read more
Made in 1935 and set 11 years later, Vasil Zhuravlev’s silent Soviet feature is a space opera about a privately financed and successfully launched rocket to the moon, with hero, heroine, and scientist on board. Furnished with charming constructivist sets and miniatures and quaint-looking intertitles that weren’t translated in the version I previewed (unlike the one to be screened), this exudes the slightly campy innocence one associates with SF movies made a decade earlier, though the science appears to be less silly than in Fritz Lang’s 1928 Woman in the Moon. (Here, at least, the cosmonauts wear space suits equipped with oxygen.) 70 min. (JR) Read more
Deftly combining actual and ersatz archival footage, Alexei Fedorchenko’s 2005 Russian pseudodocumentary maintains that the first flight to the moon occurred in 1938 but remained a secret after the rocket crash-landed in Chile. A deadpan satire about Stalinist secrecy and surveillance that draws upon diverse sources, including the 1936 Cosmic Voyage (see separate listing), this video is more ingenious than absorbing, perhaps because it’s twice as long as it needs to be. It isn’t really a mockumentary because it mainly exploits rather than unpacks the potential deceptions of the documentary form. I might have enjoyed its cynical gallows humor more if I’d seen it with an audience. In Russian with subtitles. 76 min. (JR) Read more
One of Nagisa Oshima’s very best, this Japanese feature from 1968 is concerned with the death penalty and the public’s understanding of a rape and murder committed by a Korean youth. The inventive staging is not merely dazzling but purposeful: a group of Japanese officials discovers, through a fantasy conceit, that the Korean prisoner refuses to die because the issues of his crime and his punishments aren’t understood, and the film works through a series of imaginative reconstructions of the events leading up to the rape and murder. (The issue of Japanese persecution of Koreans is also pertinent to the proceedings.) The results are Brechtian in the best sense: entertaining, instructive, gripping, mind-boggling, often humorous, and very much alive. In Japanese with subtitles. 117 min. a Tue 5/22, 7 PM, Univ. of Chicago Doc Films. Read more
This weekend four special screenings of Guy Maddin’s latest piece of deranged heterosexual camp feature live onstage narration by Crispin Glover, sound effects by a trio of Foley artists, music by the ten-piece Ensemble Noamnesia, and vocals by an alleged castrato. (The rest of the screenings this week will feature a recorded soundtrack with narration by Isabella Rossellini.) A house painter named Guy Maddin comes home after 30 years to fulfill his dying mother’s request that he repaint the sinister orphanage she runs inside a lighthouse. The kids all have mysterious holes in their heads, and additional intrigues involve a teenage sleuth and a harpist posing as her brother. Enhanced by Jason Staczek’s superb score, this is characteristically intense and, unlike most of Maddin’s silent-movie models, frenetically edited. 95 min. Tickets for the special screenings are $30; to order visit www.musicboxtheatre.com. a Music Box. Read more
The unpredictable and provocative Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady) offers a mysterious and beautiful experimental feature (2006) based on memories of his parents, who were both doctors. It’s divided into two parts, both set in the present, with many rhyme effects between them. The first, set in and around a rural clinic, centers on his mother; the second, set in the vicinity of a Bangkok hospital, focuses on his father, though it’s a kind of quizzical remake of the first and both characters appear in each section. There’s nothing here that resembles narrative urgency, but this is a quiet masterpiece, delicate and full of wonder. In Thai with subtitles. 105 min. a Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
French director Patrick Cazals will attend this screening of his excellent video documentaries Sergei Paradjanov, the Rebel (2004, 52 min.) and Rouben Mamoulian: The Golden Age of Broadway and Hollywood (2006, 63 min.), which look at two very different directors born in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. The Paradjanov portrait skimps on the more conventional early features, but it’s priceless for its interviews with the eccentric director (shot during production of his last feature, Ashik Kerib) and its sampling of the collages he produced during his long prison terms. The Mamoulian documentary also features fascinating interviews with its subject, covering both his stage and his movie work, and it confirms that Mamoulian, remembered mainly as a technical innovator, was an underrated and highly cultivated filmmaker. Clips are limited to trailers (from Mamoulian’s Becky Sharp and Blood and Sand) and audio from the directors’ features, but Cazals proves that excerpts aren’t essential if the insights are sufficiently sharp. In English and subtitled French and Armenian. a Wed 5/16, 6:30 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
