Daily Archives: January 23, 2022

Lost in the Woods [BOOK OF SHADOWS: BLAIR WITCH 2]

From the Chicago Reader (November 3, 2000). — J.R.

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2

rating: 0

Directed by Joe Berlinger

Written by Dick Beebe and Berlinger

With Kim Diamond, Jeffrey Patterson, Erica Geersen, Tristine Ryler, and Stephen Ryan Parker.

Call me naive, but unlike many of my colleagues I thought the unexpected runaway success of The Blair Witch Project in the summer of 1999 was encouraging, not depressing. I saw it as an indication that contemporary teenagers are far from the hardened cynics media “experts” make them out to be and that special effects and a handful of stars aren’t their sole reasons for wanting to see a movie. Its appeal offered a clear challenge to the studios and even forced the film industry to let it play in malls — an astonishing accomplishment for an independent pseudodocumentary that cost only $30,000.

I don’t consider the movie any sort of masterpiece and fully acknowledge its primitive conceptual and technical aspects, but I still think it expresses something about its young fans that’s authentic and powerful: a feeling of helplessness about their isolation and ignorance in relation to the world that’s central to its impact as a horror movie. If that isolation and ignorance led some viewers to initially see it as a real documentary, this is a tribute to the movie’s effectiveness — which makes it similar in some respects to Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary, a 1967 low-budget pseudodocumentary that also fooled many young viewers. Read more

The New Age

From the September 20, 1994 Chicago Reader. –J.R.

This new comedy by writer-director Michael Tolkin (The Rapture), which reunites the leads of Naked Lunch, Peter Weller and Judy Davis, as fashion-plate yuppies in Los Angeles who have spiritually lost their way, keeps promising to be a great satire. But the promise is only half kept; each time one expects some follow-through on a fruitful conceit (e.g., the couple opening a new boutique called Hipocracy, Patrick Bauchau as a mysterious guru), the movie stops dead in its tracks, just like the woeful couple. This is still great fun as far as it goes;, and serious as well; just don’t expect any structure. With Adam West as Weller’s father, John Diehl, Paula Marshall, and Samuel L. Jackson. (JR)

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Heartbreak Motel [on TAPE]

From the Chicago Reader (November 16, 2001). — J.R.

Tape ***

Directed by Richard Linklater

Written by Stephen Belber

With Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard, and Uma Thurman.

Tape

It seems that the less we know about a subject, the likelier we are to be assertive about it. And journalists play a big role in making people feel knowledgeable about what they don’t know. That’s why we keep encountering more and more twaddle about the state of world cinema even though the growth of digital video makes it impossible for anyone to keep up with the state of local cinema in any large city, much less any country, still less the world. All journalists can honestly say is that more and more works are being made and that keeping up with them is no longer possible. It was only days after an Iranian friend and I completed a book about Abbas Kiarostami that a New York critic E-mailed us about two new Kiarostami works we hadn’t even heard of — a ten-minute short for an episodic feature and a fiction feature in DV that he’s in the final stages of editing.

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DV equipment is so easy to shoot with –it’s compact, light, inexpensive, unobtrusive — that it’s hard to keep up with how filmmakers are using the technology. Read more

Lost in the Shuffle [THE DEEP END OF THE OCEAN]

From the Chicago Reader (March 12, 1999). — J.R.

The Deep End of the Ocean

Rating ** Worth seeing

Directed by Ulu Grosbard

Written by Stephen Schiff

With Michelle Pfeiffer, Treat Williams, Jonathan Jackson, Ryan Merriman, Whoopi Goldberg, Cory Buck, John Kapelos, and Michael McElroy.

The two best reasons for seeing The Deep End of the Ocean are the story and Michelle Pfeiffer, not necessarily in that order. But these two calling cards are sometimes at odds, so the film’s virtues and problems grow out of the same source. On the one hand, you’ve got the star system creating certain expectations about the story’s focus; on the other, you’ve got a narrative about a 12-year-old boy trying to figure out his identity by reconciling two sets of parents. Because these two factors are at cross-purposes, you start out watching a star vehicle and wind up watching a coming-of-age story; the transition from one to the other is what makes The Deep End of the Ocean feel somewhat uncertain.

Certainly one can rationalize this shift of gears. The late Dwight Macdonald — the film critic for Esquire back in the early 60s, when it was still possible to write for that magazine about movies as an art form rather than as a combination of sport and business — suggested in one of his columns that a shift of focus from one character to another is often a good thing. Read more