A good cable-news feature tonight from Rachel Maddow on Countdown about the boondoggle of bulk sales pushing a lunatic-fringe book of abusive misinformation, Jerome R. Corsi’s Obama Nation, to the head of the New York Times best seller list. The best antidote–a detailed 40-page rebuttal, Unfit for Publication–can be accessed for free at Obama’s website. Check it out; it should be disseminated as quickly and widely as possible.
Too bad that John Kerry didn’t do something similar in 2004 with the Swift Boat smear campaign, another Corsi job. And the fact that Obama’s campaign has responded this quickly and this thoroughly is cheering –even if one knows that this will barely make an impression on those idiots who’ll believe anything that’s shoveled between hard covers that they want to believe. [8/14/08] Read more
One of the more puzzling features by the puzzling Manoel de Oliveira, this placid travelogue (2007) was adapted by him from an autobiographical book by Manuel and Silvia da Silva. A Portuguese man (Ricardo Trepa, the director’s grandson) emigrates to the U.S. in 1946, becomes a doctor, and returns home in 1960 to marry. In 2007, he and his wife (Oliveira and his own wife) tour various American and Caribbean historical sites to confirm his curious theory that Christopher Columbus was a Portuguese Jew; turning up at all these sites, and visible only to the viewer, is a mute, female angel carrying a sword and a Portuguese flag. Like some of Oliveira’s other minor works (The Letter, Belle Toujours), this intermittently suggests a poker-faced joke without a punch line. In English and subtitled Portuguese. 70 min. (JR) Read more
Manoel de Oliveira’s 1992 feature is his third related to Portuguese writer Camilo Castelo Branco, author of the novel Oliveira adapted for his masterpiece Doomed Love (1979) and a major character in Francisca (1981). Built around the author’s late correspondence before he shot himself in 1890, this is comparatively minor and minimalist, but it’s an affecting chamber piece. Oliveira slyly mixes documentary and fiction: actors appear in both contemporary and period dress, speaking alternately in first and third person, inside the author’s home (today a museum). The ironic treatment of aristocracy and romantic decadence found in Doomed Love is regrettably absent, but Teresa Madruga, as the most prominent character, Castelo Branco’s last mistress, delivers her lines with commanding passion. In Portuguese with subtitles. 74 min. (JR) Read more
Fred Camper (one-person exhibition, Caro d’Offay Gallery, 2204 W. North Avenue, Chicago, June 14th–August 1st, 2008).
I haven’t attended this yet because it doesn’t even start until tomorrow. But I’d like to call attention to this beautiful photograph, and to the series it concludes, “Details 1: Largo Argentina, Rome, sheet 13″. You can access the entire series by going to Fred Camper’s website and clicking on the first image in the series, here. If you keep clicking, you’ll be carried through the whole series. [6/13/08] Read more
The best works in this essential program of recent experimental shorts are the longest. Pedro Costa’s The Rabbit Hunters (2007, 23 min.), a follow-up to his 2006 Colossal Youth, performs comparable wonders with its exalted yet mournful portraits of Cape Verdeans in a Lisbon suburb. Phil Solomon’s black-and-white, animated Last Days in a Lonely Place (2007, 20 min.) magically and mysteriously combines rain, material from the video game Grand Theft Auto, and patches of sound from Nicholas Ray features. Almost as effective in bringing together the cosmic and the mundane are two ten-minute wonders, Bruce Conner’s Easter Morning (which Conner shot in 1966 and misplaced) and a 35-millimeter blowup of Larry Jordan’s 1969 Our Lady of the Sphere. And there’s provocative work by Jeanne Liotta, Gyula Nemes, and Ben Rivers. The festival continues through 6/22 at Chicago Filmmakers, the Nightingale, and other venues; see chicagofilmmakers.org/onion_fest/onion.html or next week’s Reader for more. 99 min. Thu 6/19, 8 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center. –Jonathan Rosenbaum Read more
Recommendation: Check out Naomi Klein’s article in the new Rolling Stone about surveillance in today’s China for some chilling enlightenment. [5/20/08]
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Genuinely global, multicultural, and multilingual in its urban perspectives, this lively documentary features graffiti artists talking about their work and illustrates their discourse with images shot in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Cape Town, Sao Paolo, Tijuana, and Tokyo. Filmmaker Jon Reiss also occasionally gives voice to people trying to eradicate graffiti. The relentless quick cutting and pop soundtrack are counterbalanced by the artists’ personalities and sociopolitical credos. Unlike Michael Glawogger’s more visionary Megacities (1998), this offers neither city symphonies nor overarching theses, but as the title suggests, the theme of rebellion predominates. Subtitled. 93 min. (JR) Read more
A Mexican illegal who’s been working in LA for four years (Kate del Castillo) scrimps and saves to hire a lawyer so she can become a citizen and send for her nine-year-old son (Adrian Alonso). He’s being cared for by his grandmother, but after she dies, the boy decides to sneak across the border. Your enjoyment of this picaresque tearjerker may depend on how much you can tolerate its shameless contrivances and didactic social realism, whereby the story exists only to illustrate the plight of illegal aliens. I was ultimately more moved than appalled, but it was a close contest. Patricia Riggen directed a script by Ligiah Villalobos. In English and subtitled Spanish. PG-13, 109 min. (JR) Read more
Writer Paul Laverty and director Ken Loach have produced some powerful dramas — My Name Is Joe, Bread and Roses, Sweet Sixteen — but this 2007 feature doesn’t compare with them despite its timely subject, the exploitation of illegal aliens. Newcomer Kierston Wareing is strong as the lead character, an unscrupulous but not entirely unsympathetic single mother who loses her job at a London employment agency and then partners with a flatmate (Juliet Ellis) to open her own such establishment. But Loach and Laverty’s didactic side ultimately becomes obtrusive, even as they challenge our identification with the heroine. I emerged from this story feeling sadder and wiser but was never fully engaged. 93 min. (JR) Read more
Relaxing at a friend’s empty country house, a reclusive New York novelist (David Thewlis) is inspired to write a new story and the next morning wakes up alongside a mysterious and seductive graduate student (Irene Jacob) who quickly becomes his muse and lover. Paul Auster, who made his directing debut with Lulu on the Bridge, provides the voice-over narration for this 2007 second feature, which was drawn and expanded from an interpolated story in his own novel, the engrossing Book of Illusions. The sad irony is that his storytelling gifts, Thewlis’s resourcefulness, and Jacob’s beauty only postpone one’s awareness that the material is too literary to work as cinema. The plot becomes increasingly arch (with the arrival of characters played by Michael Imperioli and by Auster’s teenage daughter, Sophie) and self-consciously metaphysical, and mannerism gradually overtakes visual and narrative invention. 94 min. (JR) Read more
A taciturn 16-year-old (Gabe Nevins) in Portland, Oregon, accidentally causes the gruesome death of a security guard and tries to deal with the psychological consequences in Gus Van Sant’s adaptation of a novel by Blake Nelson. This has something to do with guilt, alienation, and the loss of virginity but a lot more to do with skateboarding, and the emotional disassociation is underlined with Nino Rota’s theme music from Amarcord and Juliet of the Spirits. (Van Sant is a compulsive hijacker of other people’s material, from his Psycho remake to his appropriation of Chimes at Midnight in My Own Private Idaho, but he never enhances or illuminates what he filches.) There’s some striking camerawork by Christopher Doyle (in 35-millimeter) and Rain Kathy Li (in Super-8), though this doesn’t alter the overall feeling of random, nihilistic drift. Elephant said much more about teenagers and said it better. R, 84 min. Read more
Relaxing at a friend’s empty country house, a reclusive New York novelist (David Thewlis) is inspired to write a new story and the next morning wakes up alongside a mysterious and seductive graduate student (Irene Jacob) who quickly becomes his muse and lover. Paul Auster, who made his directing debut with Lulu on the Bridge, provides the voice-over narration for this 2007 second feature, which was drawn and expanded from an interpolated story in his own novel, the engrossing Book of Illusions. The sad irony is that his storytelling gifts, Thewlis’s resourcefulness, and Jacob’s beauty only postpone one’s awareness that the material is too literary to work as cinema. The plot becomes increasingly arch (with the arrival of characters played by Michael Imperioli and by Auster’s teenage daughter, Sophie) and self-consciously metaphysical, and mannerism gradually overtakes visual and narrative invention. 94 min. Read more
Two hypnotic and haunting 2007 features by Spanish experimental filmmaker Jose Luis Guerin, about the same romantic obsession. (The reference points are W.G. Sebald’s novel Vertigo and Alfred Hitchcock’s film of the same title.) The silent Some Photos in the City of Sylvia (65 min.) uses black-and-white stills with English intertitles to recount an unseen artist’s return to Strasbourg to search for a young woman he met briefly 22 years earlier while making a Goethe-related literary pilgrimage. The far more elliptical In the City of Sylvia (84 min.) tells the same story with color, carefully articulated sound, and minimal, subtitled French dialogue; in this film the artist returns only six years after his pilgrimage. Both works are mysterious, beautiful, and primal. It’s a pity the first, an intimate study and scenario for the second, is being shown after only one screening of its more languid successor. Read more
Arliss Howard, making his directorial debut, takes on the self-pity of 60s burnout with decidedly mixed and often sloppy results. Adapted from Larry Brown’s short story collection, the film focuses on a divorced Vietnam vet in Mississippi (Howard) who collects piles of rejection slips for his fiction, gets occasional house-painting jobs from an old war buddy (Paul Le Mat), and sporadically makes halfhearted, wistful efforts to win back his estranged wife (Debra Winger, who also produced). This recalls a lot of 60s novels fueled by internal monologue (particularly Herzog) as well as British and Hollywood films that tried to achieve the same effect, mostly by ripping off the French New Wave; unfortunately Howard lacks the sense of film rhythm (or literary rhythm, for that matter) required to make such an exercise work. Just about the only clear triumph here is an underplayed performance by Angie Dickinson, though Winger and Rosanna Arquette also provide welcome relief from Howard and Le Mat’s self-indulgent carousing. 111 min. (JR) Read more
Adapted from Adolf Burger’s memoir The Devil’s Workshop, this skillful, absorbing, Oscar-winning Austrian feature involves a Russian-Jewish counterfeiter (expertly played by Karl Markovics) who gets arrested in Berlin, winds up in a German concentration camp in 1944, and is put in charge of a secret forgery unit. Staffed by prisoners who’ve been granted special privileges, the unit counterfeits pounds and dollars in a plan to wreck the British and American economies, and one of the prisoners, a member of the communist resistance, attempts to sabotage the effort. Written and directed by the able Stefan Ruzowitzky (The Inheritors), this poses some tricky moral questions, and its troubling ambiguities rank a cut above the dubious uplift of Schindler’s List. In German with subtitles. R, 98 min. (JR) Read more
