Reviewing Paul Verhoeven’s 1979 Dutch feature The 4th Man, Dave Kehr objected to conceptions of women as castrating harpies and of gays as predatory beasts that are insulting to all the sexualities involved. Working from a script by Joe Eszterhas, Verhoeven did an even better job of hammering home those notions 13 years later with Basic Instinct. I hated this movie when it was released, but on reflection I think that his appreciation of Sharon Stone as dominatrix/superwoman had a lot to do with what made her a star. Verhoeven also treats Michael Douglas, playing a gullible cop, with the kind of comic-book flourishes that might easily pass for derisiveness and sometimes come across as just plain hilarious. Despite (or maybe because of) his obligatory nods to Hitchcock, this is slick and entertaining enough to work as thriller porn, even with two contradictory denouements to its mystery (take your pick—or rather, ice pick). George Dzundza and Dorothy Malone are among the other actors along for the ride. R, 127 min. (JR)
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From the March 1, 2002 Chicago Reader. — J.R.
Leaner and meaner than usual, Maggie Cheung plays the dominatrixlike manager of an inn that caters to rowdy thieves during the Ming dynasty. The action editing in this 1992 Hong Kong comedy adventure can be as pleasurably incoherent as the subtitles (Don’t you scare of death? . . . I don’t give it a damn! . . . I can tell you are bad eggs from the first sight). Apart from the hyperbolic bloodletting in the final explosion of violence, in which one character is partially reduced to a skeleton, discontinuity reigns supreme as far as character, plot, and sometimes even gesture are concerned. (The stunt doubles probably deserve to share billing with the stars.) Cheung’s romantic rival for Tony Leung (the tall Tony Leung, not the one who costarred with her in In the Mood for Love) is her frequent cohort Lin Hsing-hsia. Raymond Lee directed this remake of a film by King Hu, and Tsui Hark produced. 90 min. (JR)
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From the Chicago Reader (April 12, 2002). — J.R.
Like Yasujiro Ozu’s features with seasonal titles, Alexander Sokurov’s hallucinatory video elegies tend to be so similar, even in their running times, that they blur together in memory. Elegy of a Voyage (2001, 47 min.) — which might be more idiomatically titled Elegy for a Voyage — is a journey, a dream, a first-person narrative (visibly as well as audibly) that evokes the 19th century, and a hypnotic study in textures relating to fog, snow, and water that often entails a breakdown in the usual divisions between color and black and white (as well as fiction and documentary). It was commissioned by the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, which asked Sokurov to look at a work of art in their collection “like a night watchman in a deserted museum.” By the time Sokurov creeps into the museum to reflect on Brueghel’s The Tower of Babel and seven other paintings, he seems to have trekked across substantial portions of his native Russia as well as the Helsinki harbor. I was less captivated by Laura Waddington’s minimalist video diary Cargo (2001, 29 min.), which uses many still and slow-motion shots and similarly fragmented narration to illustrate a trip she took from Venice to the Middle East on a freighter whose exploited crew was an international assortment of men without landing papers. Read more
