An alienated and politically disaffected teenager (Christian Slater) in an Arizona suburb makes pirate radio broadcasts venting his spleen and libido, and finds himself heading a student revolution in an exciting and affecting comedy-drama (1990) with a genuine lift. Written and directed by Canadian independent filmmaker (Montreal Main, The Rubber Gun) and sometime actor (Outrageous!) Allan Moyle, this powerhouse, euphoric entertainment was probably the best radical youth movie since Over the Edge (1979), thanks to an excellent script and cast (including Samantha Mathis, Scott Paulin, Ellen Greene, and Annie Ross) and a driving, rebellious sound track of about a dozen pop and rock singles by everyone from Leonard Cohen to Liquid Jesus. A clarion call for freedom and collective action both hopeful and energizing, it qualifies as a generational statement as Rebel Without a Cause did in the 50s, but without the defeatism and masochism. Not to be missed. 100 min. (JR) Read more
Chris Marker’s 179-minute video essay about revolutionary events between 1966 and 1977 is his own 1993 English adaptation for England’s Channel Four of an even longer worka film made in 1979 and known in French as Le Fond de l’Air Est Rouge. (The film’s original subtitle translates as Scenes From World War III1966-1977.) Among the subjects addressed are Vietnam, political battles throughout Europe, Asia, and South America, Che Guevara, Nixon, and Eisenstein’s Potemkin; the images are drawn mainly from rarely shown footage shot by others, chiefly outtakes from other documentaries. This is often thoughtful and informative, but it assumes a grasp of political struggles of the period that some American viewers won’t share. Marker’s poetic notations are generally quite effective and welcome when they appear (e.g., of May 1968: For France, it was the rude awakening of a sleepwalker crash-landing into history), but there are often long stretches between them. In French with subtitles. (JR) Read more
A fascinating postmortem on the making of Francis Coppola’s 1979 Apocalypse Now, mainly consisting of footage shot by Eleanor Coppola in the 7Os that has been intelligently selected, augmented, and arranged by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper. Like the Coppola film itself, this documentary at times seems to value self-styled profundity and rhetoric over observation and common sense–one especially regrets the absence of any thoroughgoing political or historical critique of Apocalypse Now in relation to the Vietnam war–but the various personalities involved–including Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, Dennis Hopper, and Coppola himself–keep this compulsively watchable. Too bad that Michael Herr, who wrote Apocalypse’s effective narration after the film was shot, is overlooked in the kaleidoscopic clashes of male egos, but it’s nice to see that Orson Welles’s radio and screenplay adaptations of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness are acknowledged as precedents and probable influences. (Fine Arts) Read more
