I don’t believe in fixing things that aren’t broken. Sandra Nettelbeck’s wholly accessible Mostly Martha (2001) is one of the most delightful comedies of recent years, so the idea of a remake with English instead of German dialogue is already pretty dubious, an insult to the capacities of both audiences and the original filmmakers. Catherine Zeta-Jones plays a neurotic chef trying to get along with both her eight-year-old niece (Abigail Breslin), whose mother has been killed, and a sous chef (Aaron Eckhart) who joins her kitchen staff. She’s miscast, but she can’t be blamed for lacking the verve and smarts Martina Gedeck showed in the original: Carol Fuchs’s silly, mushy script has her character swerve without warning between obtuse rigidity and sweet normalityto make her believable would have been all but impossible. Scott Hicks directed, and even the usually adept Patricia Clarkson as the heroine’s boss is set adrift. PG, 103 min. (JR) Read more
Writer-director Steve Buscemi fulfills a cherished project of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker assassinated by an Islamic extremist in 2004, with this English-language remake of van Gogh’s hastily done two-hander Interview (2003), written by van Gogh’s friend Theodor Holman. Van Gogh was a deliberately unpleasant provocateur, and his hand is evident in this playlike encounter between a political reporter (Buscemi) and the schlock TV actress he’s assigned to interview (Sienna Miller). But the good direction and performances seem wasted on limited material; despite a few interesting twists and ambiguities, the main revelationthat the reporter is an insufferable snobdoesn’t seem worth the 84 minutes devoted to spelling it out. R. (JR) Read more
This 2001 German feature is the fourth adaptation of Erich Kastner’s 1928 novel, about a 12-year-old boy who gets robbed en route to Berlin and enlists a team of street kids (the detectives of the title) to recover his money. I haven’t seen the celebrated first version, released in Germany in 1931, though I suspect its time and place are more hospitable to the tale’s collectivist feeling (the plot has some interesting parallels to Fritz Lang’s M). This version favors action and sight gags over characters or milieu, and it updates the story to include skateboarding, hip-hop, and a different family setup for the young hero. It’s a pretty good kids’ movie, nothing more. In German with subtitles. 111 min. (JR) Read more
D.H. Lawrence wrote three versions of the novel that we know as Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Pascale Ferran adapts the second version, John Thomas and Lady Jane (the pet names of Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper lover for their sex organs) into a masterful 168-minute piece of storytelling (2006) that never ceases to be gripping in spite of its measured pace. Ferran proves that a distinction between sensual and sexual art is worth making. There are also class issues: the heroine (Marina Hands) is happily married to an invalid, impotent war veteran (Hippolyte Girardot) who signals his acceptance of someone else from the same class fathering his heir. But since it’s his gamekeeper (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h), the affair’s kept secret. Ferran’s sureness in charting every step in the couple’s discovery of each other never falters; when they eventually find the opportunity to remove their clothes before having sex, it’s a major achievement, and celebrated as such. In French with subtitles. (JR) Read more
A 1928 silent feature by Mikhail Kalatozov, who years later directed the remarkable I Am Cuba and The Letter That Was Not Sent. In Russian with subtitles. 55 min. (JR) Read more
Ironically, the feeling of almost random drift that periodically recurs in Michelangelo Antonioni’s filmsbringing mysterious density and poetry to his narratives even when the source of this drift appears to be touristicbecomes disastrous when it forms the shaky basis for his only extended documentary. His three-part 1972 miniseries about China, attacked by the Chinese government at the time for both defensible and indefensible reasons, looks rather formless today because it lacks a coherent agenda. The best sequence, in part one, shows a successful cesarean section performed on a cheerful, conscious woman, with acupuncture used as the sole anesthetic; the one with least point, in part three, shows acrobats and jugglers performing onstage. Made at the onset of what now seems like Antonioni’s artistic decline, this documentary can’t hold a candle to Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan-Ivens’s less politically skeptical but more focused How Yukong Moved the Mountains (1976). In Italian with subtitles. 217 min. (JR) Read more
D.H. Lawrence wrote three versions of the novel that we know as Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Pascale Ferran adapts the second version, John Thomas and Lady Jane (the pet names of Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper lover for their sex organs) into a masterful 168-minute piece of storytelling (2006) that never ceases to be gripping in spite of its measured pace. Ferran proves that a distinction between sensual and sexual art is worth making. There are also class issues: the heroine (Marina Hands) is happily married to an invalid, impotent war veteran (Hippolyte Girardot) who signals his acceptance of someone else from the same class fathering his heir. But since it’s his gamekeeper (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h), the affair’s kept secret. Ferran’s sureness in charting every step in the couple’s discovery of each other never falters; when they eventually find the opportunity to remove their clothes before having sex, it’s a major achievement, and celebrated as such. In French with subtitles. a Music Box. –Jonathan Rosenbaum Read more
As someone who’s been developing an allergy to Robin Williams over the years, I didn’t exactly welcome the idea of his playing the clergyman from hell as he conducts a souped-up version of a rigorous marriage preparation course for a Chicago couple (Mandy Moore and John Krasinski). But even if I could have put up with the unpleasantness of this as comedy, I still would have balked at the eventual portrayal of this monster as an angel in disguiseeven as he’s monitoring the couple’s every move from a surveillance van to make sure they don’t indulge in premarital sex. Director Ken Kwapis (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) gives this script by many hands a certain gloss it doesn’t deserve. PG-13, 100 min. (JR) Read more
Susan Minot adapts her own novel with the help of Michael Cunningham (The Hours) about a dying woman (Vanessa Redgrave) coming to terms with her two daughters (Natasha Richardson and Toni Collette) and memories of her youth in the 50s (where she’s played by Claire Danes). Despite the show-offy cast, it took me a while to warm to these people and their self-consciously idyllic settingsas well as to the slick direction of former cinematographer Lajos Koltaibut I was eventually won over. With Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Patrick Wilson, and Hugh Dancy. PG-13, 118 min. (JR) Read more
Indy director T. Arthur Cottam stiffly plays an obnoxiously quirky indie director of the same name who’s shooting a supposedly serious movie in a trailer park. It seems like large chunks of this dull 2006 mockumentary are supposed to be funny, but I’m not sure whyunless one automatically assumes political incorrectness (in this case the sexual exploitation of a mentally disabled character in the film within the film) automatically equals comedy. I also found the storytelling hard to follow, though maybe that’s just because I was never engaged. But Filthy Food (2006), the five-minute Cottam short playing with this featurean audacious bit of comic porn featuring pieces of fruitis a blast. 89 min. (JR) Read more
Asked who the greatest French poet was, Andre Gide said, “Victor Hugo, alas.” I feel the same way about Michael Moore. He qualifies, sometimes lamentably, as our most important political filmmaker, in part just because the media do such a poor job of delivering basic news to us. His blistering attack on the American health care system and the abuses of medical insurance companies offers eye-opening contrasts with national health services in Canada, England, and France, and, atypically, he delays appearing on-screen for some 40 minutes to keep the focus on this country’s victims. When his comic persona finally does come in, there’s something a bit irritating about him asking so many questions he already knows the answers to, sometimes paying more heed to the audience members he perceives as clueless than to the people he’s talking to (like when he asks some Cubans on the street, “Is there a doctor here in Cuba?”). But this is still essential viewing–informative, corrosive, and even sometimes hilarious. PG-13, 123 min. Reviewed this week in Section 1. a Century 12 and CineArts 6, Crown Village 18, Davis, Gardens 1-6, Landmark’s Century Centre, River East 21, ShowPlace 14 Galewood Crossings. –Jonathan Rosenbaum Read more
A pretty but not very distinctive singer-composer (Heather Graham) moves to LA from Cleveland to find fame and fortune. She winds up getting involved with an unbalanced drug addict (Jeremy Sisto) and leaves him to wait tables. Most of this dreary downer, directed by Alan White from a Drew Pillsbury script, is as banal as it sounds, and needlessly complicated rather than enhanced by a fractured chronology. Things are only minimally enlivened by the customers who frequent the graveyard shift at the diner where the heroine worksthe dregs of the music industry and related fringe groups. With Tess Harper, Linda Hamilton, and Jake Busey. R, 97 min. (JR) Read more
John Dahl’s previous neonoirs have been too cynical for me, but this crime comedy has such a goofy script (by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely) and such an eccentric cast that it kept me curious about what would happen next. An alcoholic Polish-American hit man in Buffalo (Ben Kingsley) gets sent to San Francisco by his uncle and boss (Philip Baker Hall) to dry out. Thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous and the funeral home where he gets a job, he winds up with a strange assortment of company, including a gay man (Luke Wilson), a real-estate broker (Bill Pullman), and a well-to-do lover (Tea Leoni). Even if you can’t accept all the movie’s curveballs, you might still be amused. With Dennis Farina and Alison Sealy-Smith. R, 92 min. (JR) Read more
Expanded from a half-hour comedy sketch, Zhenya Kiperman’s over-the-top knockabout farce (2005) about an opera star playing Iago (Larry Pine), his wife (Michi Barall), a psychotic audience member (Keith Nobbs), a burglar (Kate Hodge), and various others might have made me laugh if the characters were sufficiently compelling or believable to transcend their plot functions. But it’s typical of Kiperman that the moment the Empire State Building appears to establish the New York setting, we also hear a snatch of Rhapsody in Blue on the soundtrack; the occasional patches of Dixieland are no less Woody Allenish, at least in aspiration. 95 min. (JR) Read more
If you’ve ever wondered about the backstory behind all the fine print on containers of E.H. Bronner’s peppermint soap, Sara Lamm’s 2006 documentary tells you everything you’d want to know and then some. And the story being told is certainly a singular one. Bronner, a German Jewish immigrant and onetime mental patient, abandoned his children to produce and sell his soap and spread his ideas about humanitarianism. Today his son Ralph qualifies as one of his most ardent disciples. For better and for worse, this is a movie that raises almost as many questions as it answers. 88 min. (JR) Read more
