From the Chicago Reader (February 17, 1989). I was extremely disappointed in the revised version of this film that was released about sixteen years later, which I also reviewed in the Reader, because I believe it essentially effaced or distorted many of the virtues I found in the original film. (One can find my arguments about this here.) — J.R.
GOLUB
**** (Masterpiece)
Directed by Jerry Blumenthal and Gordon Quinn.
By and large, painting and cinema have always tended to be uneasy bedfellows. To film a stationary canvas with a stationary camera is to deprive the viewer of both the movement possible in film and the movement possible to the viewer of a painting in a studio or gallery. On the other hand, to find a stationary canvas with a camera in motion is to impose an itinerary on the painting in question, thereby limiting the reading of the individual viewer.
While there are a handful of interesting and respectable art documentaries in the history of film, such as Alain Resnais’ Van Gogh (1948) and Gauguin (1950), and Sergei Paradjanov’s recent Arabesques Around a Pirosmani Theme — all three of which significantly happen to be shorts — the overall failure of film to record a painter’s work without recourse to a gliding Cook’s tour or a mincemeat dissection of the work in question has been far from encouraging. Read more
It often happens that shortly after I file my latest column for Cinema Scope (“Global Discoveries on DVD”), an especially notable release lands in my mailbox. This happened most recently with Flicker Alley’s Laurel & Hardy Year One: The Newly Restored 1927 Silents, a two-disc Blu-Ray package containing thirteen two-reelers and countless extras that illustrate in detail how Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy became the comedy team that we know for the remainder of their lives.
From the beginning, Stan Laurel, the more creative member of the duo, had most of his own comicpersona down pat, whereas “Babe” Hardy already had many of his own defining mannerisms and gestures but not yet a single character to display them. Frequently cast as a villain, he’s a thief in The Lucky Dog (financed by cowboy star Bronco Billy) and a house detective in 45 Minutes from Hollywood (the first of their many Hal Roach shorts, this one costarring the Our Gang kids and Theda Bara playing themselves in brief cameos) whereas Laurel plays respectively a “brash young man” and (unrecognizably mustachioed) “starving actor” in these two films. But in their third short, recently rediscovered and restored after being lost for over half a century, and titled Duck Soup (six years prior to the Marx Brothers masterpiece), they’re already a team — recognizable as “Stan and Ollie” to us if apparently not to their contemporaries, because they both turn up in at least six more two-reel comedies before they finally emerge as the familiar comic duo.Read more
With both a year and a decade now drawing to a close, the number of lists indicating the best and the most seems greater than ever. So pronounced, in fact, is this listomania concerning the 80s that in many cases it had already moved into full gear by late October, while the decade still had a good nine or ten weeks to go. The Tribune‘s Sunday arts section, for example, got its critics to come up with their ten-best lists for the 80s in time for an October 22 publication date, while the movie magazines Premiere and American Film, which plan their issues much further in advance, hit the stands with their own hit parades in early November.
Should we attribute these premature evaluations to a general eagerness to have the 80s over and done with? Whatever the reason, a recent movie list issued by Baseline, “the entertainment industry’s information service,” based in New York and Beverly Hills, offers some additional causes for gloomy reflection. The list in question gives us “the top ten turkeys of the 80s.”
Talking Turkey
Once upon a time, a “turkey” was a bad film, and a movie that lost money was a “bomb.” Read more
With Val Kilmer, Joanne Whalley, Warwick Davis, Billy Barty, Gavan O’Herlihy, Jean Marsh, Pat Roach, and Patricia Hayes.
As one of those spoilsports who actively disliked Star Wars when it burst on the scene 11 years ago, enjoyed The Empire Strikes Back (1980) even less, and happily managed to miss both Return of the Jedi (1983) and Labyrinth (1986), I can’t say that I approached George Lucas’s latest ecumenical blockbuster with expectations of much pleasure. Nevertheless, now that his latest fantasy epic has confirmed my nonexpectations, I can’t help but wonder why Willow has been getting such a drubbing from the same reviewers who responded to the early Lucas mega-hits with such enthusiasm. Is it really all that different from its predecessors?
Lucas’s reputation seems to be passing through the same sort of vicissitudes as Ronald Reagan’s: a few years of euphoric tub thumping while the future was getting steadily sold away under our feet, followed by recriminations and icon bashing, which seem motivated less by second thoughts than by certain automatic principles built into an economy of planned obsolescence. Read more
