However great Julie Christie might be, she’s not generally regarded as a tragedienne. Yet after seeing this wonderful adaptation of Alice Munro’s story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” I began to think of Christie’s roles in Petulia (1968) and McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) as way stations toward this career-defining performance. She plays a stylish woman in a successful 44-year marriage who struggles to keep her dignity after finding herself afflicted with Alzheimer’s. The other leads (Michael Murphy, Olympia Dukakis, and Gordon Pinsent as Christie’s husband) are fine as well, but it’s Christie who places this powerful love story about the cruelties of aging within hailing distance of Leo McCarey’s sublime Make Way for Tomorrow. This is a film I expect to be carrying around with me for quite some time. Canadian actress Sarah Polley wrote and directed, in her feature debut. 110 min. Reviewed by J.R. Jones this week in Section 1. a Landmark’s Century Centre. Read more
At the time of writer-director Mitsuo Yanagimachi’s Fire Festival (1985), Dave Kehr in the Reader called him the leading Japanese filmmaker of his generation. Made 20 years later, this recent Yanagimachi featureset at a Tokyo film school, and focusing on the lives of students who are about to shoot a featurehas stimulated a lot of favorable buzz since it showed at the Directors Fortnight at Cannes in 2005. In Japanese with subtitles. 115 min. (JR) Read more
Czech director Vaclav Vorlicek’s black-and-white slapstick fantasy is from 1966, the same year as Vera Chytilova’s Daisies, and it’s hard to think of two more gleefully anarchic comedies made under a communist regime. This one is slighter and more conventional, but its premise is still pretty outrageous. A scientist develops a formula that transforms bad dreams into good. She tests it on a sleeping cow, whose nightmare of being attacked by flies (viewed on a TV monitor) gives way to an idyll of lounging in a hammock. But things go awry when she tries the serum out on her wimpy husband, who, under the influence of a comic book, is dreaming of being rescued from the clutches of an overweight Superman clone and an ornery Wild West gunslinger by a sexy sci-fi heroine a la Barbarella. All three fantasy characters materialize in the real world, bringing their dialogue bubbles with them. The ensuing pandemonium is exceptionally silly and mostly delightful. For the record, the mistranslated title should have been Who Wants to Kill Jessie? In Czech with subtitles. 80 min. (JR) Read more
The popular literary biopic is mainly a hopeless subgenre, but this account of Sylvia Plath and her husband and fellow poet Ted Hughes manages to test the rule thanks to its unusual seriousness and first-rate performances by Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig. Director Christine Jeffs and writer John Brownlow scrupulously avoid taking sides in the volatile marriagea delicate task given the four decades of verbal and legal warfare between the couple’s partisans, not to mention the aura of myth that surrounds Plath’s suicide at 30, which brought her a level of recognition she never achieved in life. Though constrained from quoting Plath’s work at length, the film manages to convey that the sexiness of poetry itself was the honey that drew the couple together and made them, at least initially, inseparable. (This is rated R, though I suspect the same film from a major studio would have won a PG-13.) Paltrow’s mother, Blythe Danner, plays Plath’s mother with such insight that I was sorry the role wasn’t made bigger, proportionate to the importance she had in Plath’s life. Jared Harris and Amira Casar fare much better in their respective roles as poet Al Alvarez and Hughes’s lover, Assia Wevill. 100 min. Read more
Even though I haven’t read the Philip Roth novel on which Nicholas Meyer based his screenplay, I sensed while watching this that I was in the presence of an especially meticulous attempt at translation. The film retains Roth’s habitual alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise), a storyteller-within-the-story, like Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Through this narrative filter we learn the story of a widowed classics professor (Anthony Hopkins) wholike literary critic Anatole Broyardwas born black but has lived most of his life on the other side of the color line. Director Robert Benton allows the cast (which includes Ed Harris and, as a janitor Hopkins has an affair with, Nicole Kidman) to shine, but I was left wondering why such a very literary construction as this needed to be made into a movie. R, 106 min. (JR) Read more
Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino return as married secret agents whose son (Daryl Sabara) and daughter (Alexa Vega) have become junior spies. Series regulars Alan Cumming and Tony Shalhoub are back as well, joined on this outing by Salma Hayek, George Clooney, and Elijah Wood. Sylvester Stallone costars as the evil Toymaker, who imprisons Vega inside his surrealistic 3-D video game (viewers are instructed when to don glasses). Working as writer, producer, director, production designer, cinematographer, editor, and composer, Robert Rodriguez has a sure sense of scale and pacing as well as an artisan’s relaxed control of the material. PG, 85 min. (JR) Read more
Down With Ford! Long Live Wyler! was the title of a 1948 article by French writer and filmmaker Roger Leenhardt, and I’m hard-pressed to think of a more dubious pronouncement by a major critic. But it starts to become plausible if one compares William Wyler’s gritty and beautifully photographed western Hell’s Heroes (1929) with John Ford’s sentimental remake, 3 Godfathers (1948). Three escaping bank robbers find themselves caring for an orphaned baby in the cruel desert, and Wyler does a matchless job of keeping this Christian allegory life-size and unsentimental without ever diluting its emotional power. With Charles Bickford, Raymond Hatton, and Fred Kohler. 68 min. (JR) Read more
Like The Hustler, this absorbing Las Vegas story about a professional poker player (Eric Bana) uses gambling to tell a tale of moral regeneration. But Bana can’t carry a picture like Paul Newman, and poker proves less photogenic than pool, so one’s attention gets diverted to Drew Barrymore, playing Bana’s goody two-shoes love interest, a fledgling nightclub singer. As the hero’s father (and poker rival), Robert Duvall is good as usual, though I couldn’t quite buy him as a former English teachereven if he did name his son Huckleberry. Curtis Hanson (Wonder Boys) directed a script he cowrote with Eric Roth (Munich, Forrest Gump). PG-13, 124 min. (JR) Read more
This remarkable program collects four pioneering shorts by Iranian writer and filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan, who began producing industrial films for the oil companies in the 50s and evolved into an ambitious and accomplished artist; in some ways his documentaries are comparable to the early work of Alain Resnais. The Wave, Coral and Rock (1961, 40 min.), the most conventional, chronicles the building of a jetty and the laying of pipelines, while A Fire (1961, 25 min.), edited by the great poet Forough Farrokhzad, chronicles a protracted oil fire. The Hills of Marlik (1963, 15 min.) beautifully and suggestively documents archaeological excavations, and The Iranian Crown Jewels (1965, 15 min.), commissioned and then banned by the shah’s cultural ministry, is a formally dazzling and politically provocative brief on its subject. The first three are in English and subtitled Farsi; the last is unsubtitled, but copies of the English text will be provided. (JR) Read more
Having moved to London in 1967, the distinguished Iranian writer, translator, producer, and director Ebrahim Golestan returned to his homeland to make this unpleasant allegorical comedy (1972), his second and final feature to date. A bitter satire about the shah’s corrupt regime, it centers on a poor peasant who plunges into a hidden cave, discovers a cache of valuable antiques, and becomes a grotesque nouveau riche tyrant. Golestan tackled a related theme in his exquisite 1965 short The Iranian Crown Jewels (see listing for Documentaries by Ebrahim Golestan), which was commissioned and then banned by the shah’s cultural ministry, but that film attacked the very elitism that subsumes this one. The print being shown is badly faded, but the period ambience is still vivid. In Farsi with subtitles. 118 min. (JR) Read more
A brooding auto upholsterer (Paul Giamatti), living in central Florida with his divorced sister (an effective Rusty Schwimmer) and plagued with guilt after the death of his autistic nephew (Michael Pitt), becomes obsessed with training, or at least taming, a red-tailed hawk. Giamatti is commanding as ever (without attempting a regional accent anything like Schwimmer’s), and writer-director Julian Goldberger, adapting a novel by Harry Crews, impressed me with his lighting, framing, and minimalistic use of his own music. But these strengths seldom mesh persuasively, and the movie’s southern grotesquerie pales beside something like Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter (1974). With Michelle Williams. 106 min. (JR) Read more
A high point of Iran’s first new wave, this 1965 masterpiece by Ebrahim Golestan takes its title from the classical Persian poet Sa’adi, who wrote, “What the old can see in a mud brick, youth can see in a mirror.” The philosophical implications of this are fully apparent in Golestan’s tale of a young man who finds a baby girl in his cab and spends a night with his girlfriend debating what to do with the infant. Though this black-and-white ‘Scope film superficially resembles Italian neorealism, especially in its indelible look at Tehran street life and nightlife in the 60s, its spirit is a mix of Dostoyevsky and expressionism: minor characters periodically step forward to deliver anguished soliloquies, contributing to an overall lament both physical and metaphysical. In Farsi with subtitles. 124 min. Golestan will take part in a discussion after the Saturday screening. Reviewed this week in Section 1. a Sat 5/5, 7:45 PM, and Thu 5/10, 6 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
Ebrahim Golestan: Lion of Iranian Cinema
WHEN The Secret of the Treasure of the Jinn Valley Fri 5/4, 7:30 PM, Mon 5/7, 7:45 PM; early documentaries Sat 5/5, 3 PM, Wed 5/9, 8:15 PM; Brick and Mirror Sat 5/5, 7:45 PM, Thu 5/10, 6 PM
WHERE Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State
PRICE $9, $7 students
INFO 312-846-2800
MORE Ebrahim Golestan in attendance on Friday and Saturday
A Symposium on Ebrahim Golestan
WHEN Sun 5/6, 1:30-4:30 PM
WHERE Northwestern Univ. Block Museum of Art, 40 Arts Circle Dr., Evanston
PRICE Free
INFO 847-491-4000
MORE Ebrahim Golestan in attendance
Imagine how different our understanding of film history would be if we were denied access to everything made before the so-called sound revolution. A much more profound revolution interferes with our grasp of the history of Iranian film. During the fundamentalist revolution of 1979, the Islamic clergy said cinema was a form of Western exploitation as corrupt as prostitution and over 100 movie theaters were burned to the ground.
Much of what we know today as the Iranian New Wave — the films of Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Jafar Panahi — reflects some of that anxious background. But there were actually two new waves: most of the major figures from the first were driven into exile, their films rendered practically invisible in the process. Read more
Golden links
As more and more buried treasures have been brought to light on the Internet, half a dozen recent finds seem especially worthy of notice:
1. We still don’t have access to the original version of John Cassavetes’ Shadows after critic Ray Carney tracked down the only existing print and showed a video of it twice at the Rotterdam Film Festival in early 2004. I was lucky enough to see it at the time, and even though I regard it more as a fascinating and historically important curiosity than as a lost masterpiece, I agree with Carney, and disagree with Cassavetes’ widow, Gena Rowlands, that it should be available to the general public. In the meantime, however, Carney has posted three clips of this version on his website (scroll down a bit). What he’s made available is only a little over four and a half minutes from the film, and Carney’s name and URL are stamped on every frame, but it’s still enough to give one a taste of Charlie Mingus’s eccentric original score (especially during the credit sequence) — and enough to support Carney’s thesis that this is a finished film, flaws and all, and not a mere work print.
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Even longer than its predecessors, 3 piles on the series’s usual comedy scenes and action sequences while adding some black slime from outer space and a few new actors (Thomas Haden Church, Topher Grace) to the more familiar faces (Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, J.K. Simmons, Rosemary Harris). And a pile is what it feels like, especially when two superheroes ultimately join forces to defeat three supervillains. Given how bogus the movie is whenever it departs from formula, it’s not surprising that the funniest bit (in which Peter Parker becomes a disco smoothie) is stolen from Jerry Lewis’s The Nutty Professor or that the best special effects, involving a gigantic Sandman, dimly echo King Kong. Director Sam Raimi tries to pump some life into this dutiful enterprise but seems more than a little bored himself, especially when he’s getting mushy about Spider-Man’s moral decline and regeneration. PG-13, 140 min. (JR) Read more
