Neither fish nor fowl, Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s touching yet compromised depiction of the persecution of gays in 1979 Havana was directed in collaboration with Juan Carlos Tabio when Alea became ill. It opts for an extremely broad depiction of gay mannerisms and tastes in its treatment of a campy but committed dilettante whom the hero, a university student and ardent communist, comes into contact with. Controversial in Cuba yet only mildly polemical by American standards, this 1993 movie is entertaining and evocative both as storytelling and as a description of intellectual life in Havana, but it also borders on the obvious in certain particulars. Written by Senel Paz; with Jorge Perrugoria, Vladimir Cruz, Mirta Ibarra, and Francisco Calorno. 110 min. (JR) Read more
Adapted from a lecture given at the Filmmuseum Pottsdam, July 6, 2016.
It’s unfortunate that Agnès Varda only began to assume the status of a major filmmaker after her husband died and she became known as the custodian of Jacques Demy’s precious legacy. Prior to that, she was mainly known, affectionately but somewhat condescendingly, as a sort of mascot of the French New Wave whose public profile remained almost as superficial as that of her eponymous heroine in Cleofrom 5 to 7 (1962). And the troubling, ironic sting at the end of La Bonheur (1965) tended to be either misunderstood or ignored. Thanks to the diversity of her films, stylistic and otherwise, she was easy to overlook due to her reluctance to brand herself, unlike her male colleagues.
One fascinating trait that Varda shared with her late husband, however, was the compulsion to become a tireless indexer and cross-referencer of her own work. But instead of bringing back her fictional characters in subsequent films, as Demy did, she more often brought back her locations and her interview subjects. And she went far beyond Demy in becoming her own explicator and analyst, in effect telling her audience what to look for and even how to find it. Read more
The last completed essay film of Orson Welles, and the last of his features to be released during his lifetime (1979), this wonderfully candid, rarely screened account of the making of his first wholly independent feature offers a perfect introduction to that movie and to Welles’s second manner of moviemaking that was necessary once he parted company with the studios and mainstream media. Significantly, the only part of Othello we see and hear in its original form is from the opening sequence; everything elseusually shown silently with Welles’s narrationinvolves an intricate reediting of the original material. Whether he’s addressing us beside his moviola, delivering new versions of Shakespearean speeches, chatting with his old Irish friends and collaborators Micheal MacLiammoir (his Iago) and Hilton Edwards, or speaking to college students, Welles is at his spellbinding best. (JR) Read more
Derek Jarman’s rarely seen, highly personalized 1979 version of the Shakespeare play, in an assortment of period styles; Caliban is an Edwardian butler, the settings are crumbling abbeys and mansions, and Elizabeth Welch is on hand to sing Stormy Weather. (JR) Read more
Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: The Complete Fourth Season (Warner Archive, four DVDs)
The Complete Films of Agnès Varda (Criterion, fifteen Blu-Rays).
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel (Second Run Features, two Blu-Rays)
Kira Muratova’sSecond Class Citizens (one Russian DVD).
Patrick Wang’s A Bread Factory (Grasshopper Film, one Blu-Ray, one DVD)
I’ve ignored precise dates because Johnson-Trump have brought history to an impasse, and one country’s 2019 release might not even arrive in the mail before 2020. I’ve included A Bread Factory even though it includes my own public interview with its writer-director. Teaching a course in Varda made me appreciate that she knew how to generate her own best extras (none of which, alas, I could show on Zoom). The final season of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend deserves recognition for resurrecting the Hollywood musical to serve the specific needs of the present while triumphantly proving that sitcom characters can actually grow. English subtitled Muratova is most easily tracked on YouTube, and I can’t even identify the Russian label of this welcome DVD release.
This obviously wouldn’t be an appropriate time to revive my negative review of Hopper’s Colors in the Chicago Reader 22 years ago, which can easily be accessed by anyone who might be interested. But I’d like to reproduce a couple of short paragraphs from it about my favorite Hopper film, which I continue to cherish:
To make sure my memory wasn’t playing tricks on me, I recently took another look at Hopper’s previous film, Out of the Blue (1980). Here was proof, if any is needed, that a celebrated burnt-out case came back to establish himself as the legitimate American heir to the cinema of Nicholas Ray — a cinema of tortured lyricism and passionate rebellion that reached its fullest flower in the 50s, as if to match the action painting that was roughly contemporary with it. Hopper managed to remake Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (the film in which Hopper made his acting debut) in terms of a working-class punk (Linda Manz), an androgynous heroine whose grim fate suggested an Americanized version of Robert Bresson’s Mouchette. Casting himself, moreover, as her dissolute father, Hopper gave himself a disturbing part that seemed to update his role as Billy in Easy Rider. Read more
Like many such efforts, this leaden 1990 cold-war thriller, adapted from Tom Clancy’s best-selling novel, tries to make the CIA more competent and sophisticated than it is. Here CIA analyst Alec Baldwin tries to figure out why the Soviet nuclear submarine Red October, commanded by renegade Sean Connery, is approaching North America’s eastern seaboard without authorization. Adapted by Larry Ferguson and Donald Stewart and directed by John McTiernan (Predator, Die Hard), the film mechanically uses the crosscutting technique made famous by Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove without any of its wit or focused energy. With Scott Glenn, James Earl Jones, Sam Neill, Joss Ackland, Tim Curry, Peter Firth, and Courtney B. Vance. 135 min. (JR) Read more
Bob Rafelson’s ambitious and elusive 1990 account of the African explorations of Richard Burton (Patrick Bergin) and John Speke (Iain Glen) in the mid-19th century, based on the biographical novel Burton and Speke by William Harrison and the journals of Burton and Speke, and scripted by Harrison and Rafelson. The search for the source of the river Nile, filled with adventures and hardships, makes up most of the film, and it works fairly well (with attractive location photography by Roger Deakins). What works less well is the elliptical account of the two men’s troubled friendship, which eventually supplants the first storysome debatable liberties have been taken with the historical facts to further muddle matters. (Making Burton an anticolonialist and Speke a repressed homosexual are two examples; the depiction of Burton’s wife Isabelnicely played by Fiona Shawis a third.) Rafelson appears to be attempting to make a comment on Burton’s heroic distance from Victorian England, but only certain parts of this strategy register with any persuasiveness. With Richard E. Grant, John Savident, and James Villiers. (JR) Read more
Gregory Hines stars as Maxwell Washington, the son of a famous hoofer, who’s torn between following in his father’s footsteps and continuing a life of crime. This 1989 dance musical, written and directed by Nick Castle, isn’t everything it might have been—the numbers tend to be disappointingly short, often promising more than they deliver—but on the whole it’s a respectable revival of a sadly neglected genre (very nicely shot by David Gribble) with a lot of lively tapping (choreographed by Henry Le Tang and Hines). Among the strong secondary cast are Suzzanne Douglas, Savion Glover, Dick Anthony Williams, “Sandman” Sims, and Bunny Briggs, and there’s an especially enjoyable turn by Sammy Davis Jr. as Max Washington’s mentor Little Mo. 110 min. Read more
The third list to be posted, in a series of six. –J.R.
Chicago Reader, 1990 (ranked):
Sweetie (Jane Campion)
City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
To Sleep With Anger (Charles Burnett)
White Hunter, Black Heart (Clint Eastwood)
The Icicle Thief (Maurizio Nichetti)
Pump Up the Volume (Allan Moyle)
The Plot Against Harry (Michael Roemer)
Texasville (Peter Bogdanovich)
Mr. Hoover and I (Emile De Antonio)
tied: The Freshman (Andrew Bergman), Miami Blues (George Armitage)
Chicago Reader, 1991: L’Atalante (restoration)(Jean Vigo) An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion) White Dog (Samuel Fuller) Ju Dou (Zhang Yimou) My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant) Chameleon Street (Wendell B. Harris, Jr.) Europa Europa (Agnieszka Holland) Camp Thiaroye (Ousmane Sembene) Hangin’ With the Homeboys (Joseph P. Vasquez) For the Boys (Mark Rydell)
Chicago Reader, 1992: A Tale of the Wind (Joris Ivens) Actress (Stanley Kwan) Rhapsody in August (Akira Kurosawa) Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami) + Life and Nothing More (Abbas Kiarostami) The Famine Within (Katherine Gilday) Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (Mark Rappaport) Naked Lunch (David Cronenberg) Close My Eyes (Stephen Poliakoff) La Belle Noiseuse (Jacques Rivette)
Chicago Reader, 1993: Nouvelle Vague (Jean-Luc Godard) The Puppet Master (Hou Hsiao-hsien) Night and Day (Chantal Akerman) + From the East (Chantal Akerman) Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg) Bitter Moon (Roman Polanski) The Story of Qiu Ju (Zhang Yimou) The Passing (Bill Viola) + Histoire(s)du Cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard) Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (Mark Achbar/Peter Wintonick) + It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles (R. Read more
A corporate mogul from Wall Street (Richard Gere) rents, woos, and wows a street hooker from Hollywood Boulevard (Julia Roberts) in this 1990 romantic comedy, which proves that the Disney people can sell just about anythingincluding a misogynistic celebration of big business and prostitution. In this case, prostitution’s OK because the hooker’s a likable bimbo who works without a pimp or a boss, grateful for the little crumbs of high culture the suave company buster can sweep her way, and perfectly willing to offer a little therapy for his patriarchal hang-ups in return. He pays her $3,000 and they fall in loveain’t Hollywood grand? Garry Marshall directed a script by J.F. Lawton; with Ralph Bellamy, Jason Alexander, and Laura San Giacomo. 117 min. (JR) Read more
Commissioned by and published in Frank Films: The Film and Video Work of Robert Frank, a 2009 German retrospective catalogue published in English. You can see a few brief glimpses of the video in the fascinating recent documentary Don’t Blink — Robert Frank. It was produced by Philippe Grandrieux for French television. — J.R.
“I’ve seen La chouette aveugle seven times,” Luc Moullet once wrote of Raúl Ruiz’s intractable masterpiece, “and I know a little less about the film with each viewing.” Apart from being both intractable and a masterpiece, I can’t say Robert Frank’s One Hour [also sometimes known as Sixty Minutes) has anything in common with the Ruiz film, yet what makes it a masterpiece and intractable is the same paradox: the closer I come to understanding it, the more mysterious it gets.
My first look at this single-take account of Frank and actor Kevin O’Connor either walking or riding in the back of a mini-van through a few blocks of Manhattan”s Lower East Side — shot between 3:45 and 4:45 pm on July 26, 1990 — led me to interpret it as a spatial event capturing the somewhat uncanny coziness and intimacy of New York street life, the curious experience of eavesdropping involuntarily on strangers that seems an essential part of being in Manhattan, an island where so many people are crammed together that the existential challenge of everyday coexistence between them seems central to the city’s energy and excitement. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (February 1, 1989). — J.R.
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1970 midnight cult hit from Mexico, which made quite a few waves in its time, is an extravagant hodgepodge of hand-me-down surrealism, mysticism, Italian westerns, theater of cruelty, and Buñuel — more enjoyable for its unending string of outrages than for its capacity to make coherent sense. The writer-director plays the lead, wandering through the Mexican desert in search of enlightenment from a series of enigmatic masters, and leaving behind (or experiencing) a great deal of grotesque violence. This was the first genuine midnight-movie hit, and if you’re looking for pure sensation with intimations of pseudoprofundity, this is the place to go. In Spanish with subtitles. Read more
A film adaptation of Christopher Hampton’s play, which is based in turn on Choderlos de Laclos’ classic 18th-century epistolary novel Les liaisons dangereuses. Aiming for a mixture of erotic decadence and upscale artiness a la The Draughtsman’s Contract, the film seems a bit studied, but the creepy plot still holds a certain fascination, and Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Michelle Pfeiffer, Swoosie Kurtz, and Keanu Reeves all do their best with it, though Mildred Natwick in a cameo manages to steal the show (1989). (JR) Read more
Lawrence Kasdan’s comedy-drama, based on Anne Tyler’s novel, reunites the two stars of Body Heat, Kasdan’s first feature, William Hurt and Kathleen Turner. The plot concerns a writer of guidebooks for reluctant travelers (Hurt) whose wife (Turner) leaves him; Geena Davis plays the unusual dog trainer he meets. Unlike Body Heat, the interest here is wholly a matter of story and character rather than style, and Hurt’s character is so inert and unemotional that some spectators may find it difficult to stay interested in him. A dog, a ten-year-old boy, and several eccentrics do give things a bit more flavor. The locations include Paris, London, and Baltimore; Amy Wright, David Ogden Stiers, Ed Begley Jr., and Bill Pullman are among the stars (1989). (JR) Read more
