A nicely shaped script by Chicagoans Rick Shaughnessy and Brian Kalata makes this independent comedy drama (2000) a pleasure to watch. Directed by restaurateur Bob Giraldi, it unfolds over a winter evening at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan’s Tribeca (though it was originally set in Chicago). Danny Aiello stars as the owner, who’s the father of the nouvelle cuisine chef (Edoardo Ballerini). Others on the staff include Kirk Acevedo and Summer Phoenix; among the restaurant guests are an art critic (Mark Margolis), a restaurant reviewer (Sandra Bernhard), and a couple of crooks trying to muscle in on the business. The action is nicely paced, and the story has a very satisfying payoff. With Vivian Wu, Mike McGlone, John Corbett, and Polly Draper. 98 min. (JR) Read more
Completing a loose trilogy of revisionist horror films that’s already seen Habit (about vampires) and No Telling (which works with the Frankenstein myth), writer-director Larry Fessenden’s loose take on the wolf man movie (2000) is stylistically lively and generally well acted. Thematically, however, it’s somewhat incoherent. When a photographer (Jake Weber) and a psychotherapist (Patricia Clarkson) from New York City drive upstate with their eight-year-old son (Erik Per Sullivan) to spend a weekend in a friend’s farmhouse, their car hits a deer being tracked by local hunters, antagonizing one of them. Over the course of the weekend the boy is introduced to the Native American myth of the Wendigo, a spirit that combines man, animal, and vegetation, but the film sends mixed signalssometimes it simply seems to want to be a horror remake of Deliverance. The bold editing keeps things visually interesting throughout. 90 min. (JR) Read more
Started in 2000 near the Afghan border in Iran, shot in rough and haphazard conditions, and completed the following spring, this is one of Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s strangest films. An Afghan woman (Nelofer Pazira), exiled to Canada, returns to look for her sister, who still suffers under the Taliban and has threatened to kill herself during the forthcoming solar eclipse. This may sound like a setup for action and suspense, but the narrative is much more splintered than that, combining poetry, black comedy, social protest, and a sharp sense of actuality. The acting is mainly horrendous and the English dialogue is frequently awkward, but they’re overcome by the beautiful colors and settings and a grim sense of the uncanny spilling over into twisted humor. I didn’t even mind when the narrative stopped abruptly; in retrospect, Kandahar seems like an experimental film, a horror story, and a slapstick comedy–sometimes all at once. In Farsi with subtitles; also known as The Sun Behind the Moon. 85 min. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, February 22 through 28. Read more
Written and directed by Steve DeJarnatt, this taut, apocalyptic thriller shows some improvement over DeJarnatt’s previous direction of Cherry 2000 (which was released in this country only on videotape), apart from some faulty continuity in the final reel. Most of the film concerns what happens when the young hero (Anthony Edwards) accidentally intercepts a phone call that announces an impending nuclear holocaust only 70 minutes away, and is desperate to find the woman (Mare Winningham) he has just fallen in love with. The action all unfolds in and around the stretch of Wilshire Boulevard that constitutes LA’s “miracle mile,” nearly all of it in the middle of the night, and the strongest B-film virtues here (apart from a running time of only 87 minutes) mainly have to do with a very nice feel for the particulars of this time, milieu, and place; the biggest drawback is that the film doesn’t wind up going anywhere in particular. Among the many interesting costars (including Lou Hancock, Danny de la Paz, Robert Doqui, Kelly Minter, and Denise Crosby), there’s a particularly nice cameo by John Agar as the heroine’s grandfather. (McClurg Court, Ridge, Oakbrook Center, Bricktown Square, Webster Place, Evanston) Read more
It’s tempting to call this low-budget, independent 1991 feature by Chicago stand-up comic Greg Glienna (who directed and cowrote the script) the ultimate worst-case-scenario comedy. Glienna plays an unassuming young adman who drives from Chicago to Indiana with his fiancee (Jacqueline Cahill) to meet her folks (Dick Galloway and Carol Whelan) and sister (Mary Ruth Clarke, Glienna’s cowriter). The cascade of nightmares that results may not always make you laugh, but you’ll be impressed by the singularity of Glienna’s dark approach. Some of the incidents work better than othersI could have done without the encounter with the fiancee’s former boyfriend, and there are bits about the maniacally starstruck sister that seem overworkedbut overall you’re likely to be taken with the purity and relentlessness of this picture’s vision. Remade in 2000 (to great commercial success) with Ben Stiller as the fiance and Robert De Niro as the father. (JR) Read more
Iranian filmmaker Bahman Farmanara produced one of Abbas Kiarostami’s early features and won praise for his own work, including Prince Ehtejab (1974). But state officials began rejecting his film proposals in the mid-70s, and for much of the past 30 years he’s lived in the West. In this welcome comeback (2000) he plays a middle-aged director, rather like himself, who ruefully agrees to make a documentary about Iranian death rituals for Japanese TV. His wife has been dead five years (Farmanara’s wife, to whom he dedicated the film, was alive and well), and after discovering that their cemetery has planted someone else next to her, he has the strange experience of witnessing his own funeral, one of many fantasy sequences. This oddball comedy is full of wry asides and unexpected details; ultimately it’s more memorable for its ideas than its sounds and images, but it’s still fascinating and entertaining. In Farsi with subtitles. 93 min. (JR) Read more
Written in January 2006 for 1000 Films To Change Your Life, an anthology edited by Simon Cropper for Time Out. — J.R.
Wonder is closer to being a feeling than a thought, and one that we associate both with children and with grown-ups recapturing some of the open-mouthed awe and innocence that they had as children. Many of us experienced some of this as kids watching the classic Disney cartoon features or certain live-action fantasy adventures like King Kong (1933) or Thief of Bagdad (1940).
Other generations, for that matter, might recall feeling a comparable emotion before the vast spaces of the 1916 Intolerance (whose gigantic Babylon set would eventually be redressed for Kong’s Skull Island) or the 1924 Thief of Bagdad or the 2005 King Kong —- or even in that hokey opening line, “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…” Or what about the hushed sense of reverence that we bring to the virgin wilderness of The Big Sky (1952), whose very title expresses our feeling of astonishment? It’s a primal emotion, particularly as it relates to cinema in the old-fashioned sense: 35-millimeter projection in palatial theaters, the screen invariably much larger than us (‘Bigger Than Life,’ as the title of a Nicholas Ray melodrama in CinemaScope has it). Read more
Last year the Film Center screened Last Dance, the 69-minute film directed by Tsai Ming-liang for the French TV anthology “2000 Seen By”; this 95-minute version is the one Tsai prefers, though the film is well worth seeing in any form. An SF story set in the present, wryly postapocalyptic and gorgeously shot and framed, it charts the effects of an epidemic on a Taipei man and the woman who lives in the apartment directly below his. After the rest of the building has been vacated, a plumber drills a hole in the man’s floor and neglects to fill it up again. Periodically the man or the woman or both break into full-scale musical numbers that re-create Hong Kong musicals of the 50s, using both the voice and inspiration of Grace Chang; the rest of the time, they’re wrestling with the same sort of urban angst and alienation that consumes Tsai’s characters in Rebels of the Neon God, Vive l’amour, and The River. I like all of his films, but this one has given me the most pleasure. Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday, June 18, 6:45; Saturday and Sunday, June 19 and 20, 2:45 and 6:45; and Monday through Thursday, June 21 through 24, 6:45; 773-281-4114. Read more
From the December 11, 2000 Chicago Reader. — J.R.
Writer-director David Mamet emulates Kaufman and Hart. A Hollywood film unit prepares to shoot a feature in a small town in Vermont, occasioning the sort of comic mishaps found in The Man Who Came to Dinner, though without comparably juicy characters. What Mamet serves up are a generically crass director (William H. Macy), a principled screenwriter (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who becomes romantically involved with the woman who runs the local bookstore (Rebecca Pidgeon), a starstruck mayor (Charles Durning), a lead actor who lusts after teenage girls (Alec Baldwin), and so on. I laughed a lot at the anti-Hollywood humor and generally had a fine time, in spite of the holier-than-thou hypocrisy that makes this movie easily and even intentionally Mamet’s most Hollywoodish picture to date. With Patti LuPone, Sarah Jessica Parker, David Paymer, and Julia Stiles. 106 min. (JR)
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From the Chicago Reader (January 17, 2000). — J.R.
Even when his work is at its most contrived, which it certainly is here, writer-director Ron Shelton is the best purveyor of jock humor around. He extracts it endlessly from this comedy about two boxers (Woody Harrelson and Antonio Banderas), best friends but romantic rivals , who are driving to Las Vegas with their mutual girl (Lolita Davidovich) to fight each other before the Mike Tyson main event. Instead of providing closure the movie just evaporates, but Shelton’s wit and sass keep it flowing, after a fashion. Plot is nothing and character is everything in this sort of setup, and speaking as someone who would rather watch paint spill than blood, I was glued to my seat during the protracted, fairly gruesome climactic slugfest. With Lucy Liu, Robert Wagner, Tom Sizemore, Richard Masur, and lots of pointless cameos of stars glimpsed in ringside seats. (JR)
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If you can put up with all the archness and self-consciousness—there’s quite a bit of both—this is an enjoyable romantic comedy (2000) about a pop music junkie (John Cusack) in Wicker Park who runs an old-fashioned record store and can’t seem to sustain a long-term relationship. Cusack joined forces with fellow producers D.V. DeVincentis and Steve Pink as well as Scott Rosenberg on the script, an adaptation of Nick Hornby’s English novel that transposes settings with ease, and director Stephen Frears keeps things simmering. Two pluses: the humor about male neurosis doesn’t try to remind you of Woody Allen at every turn, and the Chicago settings and atmosphere are made to seem relatively cutting edge for a change, rather than appropriate only for car chases. With Jack Black and Lisa Bonet. 113 min. (JR) Read more
From the Chicago Reader (June 1, 2000). — J.R.
“All” is right; Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, and other apocalyptic Japanese SF monsters converge in this 1968 ‘Scope opus from Toho Studios. Inoshiro (aka Ishiro) Honda directed. 88 min. Read more
This likable comedy-drama from mainland China cogently demonstrates that some of the best old-style Hollywood pictures nowadays are apt to come from almost anywhere except Hollywood. This is a nostalgic look at the last days of a traditional bathhouse before it’s leveled for urban renewal, a movie about community that actually calls to mind something like The Last Picture Show. Zhu Xu (who turned up recently in the title role of The King of Masks) is very effective as the old man who runs the bathhouse, and so are the actors playing the mentally challenged son who lives and works with him and an older son who comes to visit. Writers Liu Fen Dou and Cai Xiang Jun and director Zhang Yang move freely and gracefully between fantasy and reality in this sentimental 2000 film, which never becomes as trite or calculated as you might fear, maybe because mentally challenged characters aren’t the same kind of standbys in Chinese cinema as they are on Oscar night. In Mandarin with subtitles. 92 min. (JR) Read more
This feature-length film (2000) of Margaret Cho’s potent one-woman show recalls the early stand-up films of Richard Pryor 20 years ago. There’s the same confessional fervor and pain-ridden comedy deriving from a restaging of traumas having to do with identity crises and substance abuse. As a 31-year-old Korean-American, former alcoholic, star of a discontinued sitcom, and self-described fag hag, Cho has plenty of issues of her own. But there’s a similar kind of hilariously cathartic autocritique as she examines her efforts to lose weight and become less Asian when her sitcom was in jeopardy, and her priceless impersonations of her mother offer a pungent concentrate of her complex responses to racism. It’s hard to think of many more galvanizing definitions of what it means to be an American than Cho’s volcanic self-assessments. 90 min. (JR) Read more
Written in mid-February 2013 for the publication of the Chinese edition of James Naremore’s Acting in the Cinema, which was originally scheduled for publication in China in 2014. It finally came out much later. This is the second Introduction I’ve written for a Chinese translation of a Naremore book; my previous one was for More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts. — J.R.
In film criticism, acting tends to be the most neglected single aspect of cinema — one that’s especially difficult to describe and also easy to confuse with other skills and effects in filmmaking, to cite only two of the reasons for its neglect. Often not knowing whose creativity and whose creative decisions are the most relevant, we easily become confounded over issues of intentionality, agency, credit, and defining precisely what it is that we’re responding to, which becomes all the more difficult due to the mythological auras that surround famous actors.The few times that I’ve tried to write about actors myself in any detail, such as Kim Novak, Marilyn Monroe, Eric von Stroheim, and Charlie Chaplin, I’ve concentrated mainly on those auras, and in the case of the latter two, I’ve even found it hard to separate their acting from their writing and directing. Read more
