Maurice Tourneur adapted Joseph Conrad’s novel when it was still contemporary, in 1919. I haven’t seen it, but given the castLon Chaney in his first major role, Jack Holt, and Seena Owenand Tourneur’s uncommon talent and intelligence, I would imagine that this hour-long feature is well worth watching. (JR) Read more
I haven’t seen David Henry Hwang’s much-praised play, based on an implausible-but-true story, but it’s easy to see how the audience’s imaginative participation in the central premise could make it work. An accountant at the French embassy in Beijing in 1964 falls in love with the male diva who plays Puccini’s Madame Butterfly at the Peking Opera, thinking he’s a woman, and over the course of a lengthy affair gets coerced into spying for the Chinese government. The fundamental problems with David Cronenberg’s disastrous 1993 adaptation, written by Hwang himself, are twofold: the unsuitability of such a premise for film, where the actors and audience no longer share the same space, and the miscasting of Jeremy Irons as the accountant and John Lone as the diva. The bravura final sequence gives some indication of the movie that might have been. With Barbara Sukowa and Ian Richardson. R, 101 min. (JR) Read more
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Director Maurice Tourneur (father of Jacques) was far more than a cinematic pioneer; his pictorial and painterly genius (including his use of deep focus, his mastery of decor, and his refined feeling for light and shading) make him one of the creative giants of the silent era. Subtitled An Idyll of Old England, this lovely 1914 feature follows the adventures of an earl’s flighty son (Chester Barnett) who gets expelled from college and, pretending to be a gardener, romances a parson’s daughter (Vivian Martin in her screen debut, doing a nice spin on Mary Pickford). Tourneur and Owen Davis adapted this from Davis’s stage comedy, and though the movie runs only 54 minutes, there’s never any sense of rush. (JR) Read more
The title of this 2005 Swedish video is meant literally: directors Pea Holmquist and Suzanne Khardalian spent two years following Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva on her various travels and learned, among other things, that bullshit has its practical uses. The same lesson applies figuratively to this documentary, which is clumsily assembled but worth seeing for its information about Shiva’s antiglobalization arguments and activities. 73 min. (JR) Read more
Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara is best known for his second feature, Woman in the Dunes (1964), a collaboration with novelist-playwright Kobo Abe and modernist composer Toru Takemitsu. But Pitfall (1962), the trio’s first project, is no less arty, allegorical, or bold. Combining elements of agitprop, ghost story, and police procedural, it focuses on the murder of an out-of-work coal miner (identified in subtitles as a deserter, but only from the enslavement of his former job) by an enigmatic killer dressed in white. Teshigahara’s visual flair, evident in his sculptural use of wastelands and remarkable superimpositions, is matched by the singular assault of Takemitsu’s unorthodox score, though the film attempts too many things at once to have the impact of its successor. In Japanese with subtitles. 97 min. (JR) Read more
Director Maurice Tourneur adapted this celebrated 1915 silent from a Paul Armstrong play based on O. Henry’s story A Retrieved Reformation. Robert Warwick plays the title character, a famous safecracker. This must have been commercially successful, because it was remade twice during the silent era. 50 min. (JR) Read more
The rationale behind this unattractive animated comedy, a U.S.-German coproduction, seems to be that since it can’t create a fairy-tale world of its own, it might as well riffle through many of the more familiar ones, with particular emphasis on Cinderella’s, pretending to deconstruct them with postmodernist glosses, adolescent wisecracks, and a few high-tech anachronisms. Prince Charming is a vain doofus and his androgynous pretty-boy valet takes over as hero, while the equally androgynous Ella gets menaced by her curvy stepmother and protected from trolls by the seven dwarfs. Paul J. Bolger directed Robert Moreland’s script, and some of the familiar voices belong to George Carlin, Sigourney Weaver, and Wallace Shawn; I believe I also heard Bob Hoskins, though he’s uncredited. PG, 87 min. (JR) Read more
An animated Japanese feature about good and evil deities whose existence has been hidden by the Japanese government. Read more