Yearly Archives: 2025

Festival Journal: N.Y. Film Festival, 1981

From The Soho News, October 6, 1981. I’m embarrassed to confess that over three decades later, I have no recollection at all about Tighten Your Belts, Bite the Bullet apart from what I wrote about it, although I’m happy to report that the film is still in distribution, and available from Icarus Films. — J.R.

September 22: From a global or even a continental perspective, much of this year’s New York Film Festival belongs under the staunch division of Business as Usual. This basically means that the festival is involved in ratifying certain important discoveries (of ideas or filmmakers) that were made during the 60s or 70s, often by the very same members of the selection committee, rather than risking its self-image or self-composure in order to seek out many new challenges or talents.

This makes New York precisely the reverse of the more footloose, friendly, and unpredictable film festival in Toronto. There the specialty tends to be, rather, a flavorsome if occasionally warmed-over newness of look, sound, and/or signature: an underground movie about everyday life in the Watts ghetto (Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep), a corrosive and shocking black comedy about the mourning business in Israel in relation to war memorials (Yaky Yosha’s The Vulture), a flaky German film based on a French best seller about Proust by his maid, played by Fassbinder alumnus Eva Mattes (Percy Adlon’s Celeste). Read more

Cutter’s Way

This powerful paranoid thriller set in Santa Barbara, adapted by Jeffrey Alan Fishkin from Newton Thornberg’s novel Cutter and Bone (the film’s original title), is probably Ivan Passer’s best American feature (1981, 105 min.). Jeff Bridges and John Heard play two friends, the latter a crippled Vietnam war veteran, who stumble upon what looks like a murder committed by a wealthy local citizen. A major statement about post-60s disillusionment, with a wonderful performance by Lisa Eichhorn and shimmering, hallucinatory cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth. (JR) Read more

Basquiat

Painter Julian Schnabel’s 1996 biopic about Jean-Michel Basquiat (Jeffrey Wright), a black graffitist in New York who became famous in 1981 and died seven years later. Art critic Robert Hughes titled his obituary for Basquiat Requiem for a Featherweight, and part of what’s so interesting and unexpected about this picture is that it makes fresh observations without refuting that judgment. It’s also quite energeticthere isn’t a boring shot anywhere, and writer-director Schnabel is clearly enjoying himself as he plays with expressionist sound, neo-Eisensteinian edits, and all sorts of other filmic ideas. What emerges may be unfocused as narrative, but it’s lively as filmmaking. Others in the cast include David Bowie as Andy Warhol, Michael Wincott as Rene Ricard, Paul Bartel as Henry Geldzahler, and Elina Lowensohn as art dealer Annina Nosei; the actors playing fictional characters include Gary Oldman (as an apparent stand-in for Schnabel himself), Christopher Walken (in a brilliant bit as a slimy interviewer), Willem Dafoe, and Courtney Love. 108 min. (JR) Read more

Steve Lacy: Lift the Bandstand/Jackie McLean on Mars

The problem with most jazz documentaries is combining talk with music without allowing either to ride roughshod over the other. Peter Bull’s recent feature about Thelonious Monk disciple and soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy is a stirring object lesson in how to do this without compromising either the performances of Lacy’s inventive sextet or the interest in what Lacy has to say about his career. The mesh isn’t quite so fine in Ken Levis’s short about another postbebop saxophonist. Jackie McLean has some acute things to say about politics, racism, and the music business, but it’s a drag to hear them interrupting his solos; only in an outtake from Shirley Clarke’s The Connection is he allowed to stretch a little. (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Sunday, August 23, 6:00 and 8:00, 443-3737) Read more

Amazon Women On The Moon

Virtually a sequel to John Landis’s Kentucky Fried Movie, this collection of comic sketches (1987), most of them TV and grade-Z movie parodies, was written by Michael Barrie and Jim Mulholland and directed by several hands: Joe Dante, Carl Gottlieb, Peter Horton, Landis, and producer Robert K. Weiss. Like most such ventures, it’s pretty hit-or-miss, with Dante and Weiss providing most of the energy; Horton is competent (in a single bit with Rosanna Arquette and Steve Guttenberg), Gottlieb routine, and Landis is OK with sight gags but somewhat adrift in satire. Overall, too many of the ideas –e ven some of the better ones — are paranoid derivations from either Sherlock Jr. (by way of Woody Allen) or Paul Bartel’s The Secret Cinema, and too many of the objects satirized are easy targets. The strongest aftertaste is left by Dante’s bad-taste rendition of movie critics reviewing a failed life, a sequence that eventually turns into a celebrity roast for the dead person, attended by Slappy White, Jackie Vernon, Henny Youngman, Charlie Callas, and Steve Allentoo sinister for comfortable laughs, but queasy in the best Dante manner. (Other stars in cameos include Ralph Bellamy, B.B. King, Griffin Dunne, and Michelle Pfeiffer.) Read more

No Man’s Land

The title of Alain Tanner’s melancholy 1985 film refers to the rural zone between Swiss and French customs, where a group of small-time smugglers eke out a precarious, in-between existence. Films about border tensions (Grand Illusion, Touch of Evil, Luc Moullet’s unjustly neglected Les contrebandieres) tend to treat their locations metaphorically, and this one is no exception, although it’s equally a Losers’ Club movie in the manner of The Asphalt Jungle about a band of assorted malcontents who dream of escape to a better life. Decorously framed and shot, with lingering landscape shots, stately camera movements, and a wonderful Terry Riley score, this movie glides along with a kind of graceful inertia that eventually defeats its spectators as well as its characters by gradually leading both to the same inconclusive impasse. With Hughes Quester, Myriam Mazieres, and Jean-Philippe Ecossey. (Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday and Saturday, August 28 and 29, 7:00 and 9:00; Sunday, August 30, 5:30 and 7:30; and Monday through Thursday, August 31 through September 3, 7:00 and 9:00; 281-4114) Read more

Summer Night

The full title of this Lina Wertmuller effort is Summer Night With Greek Profile, Almond Eyes & Scent of Basil. It’s more or less Swept Away II, with Michele Placido’s Sicilian kidnapper replacing Giancarlo Giannini’s deckhand, and Mariangela Melato playing an even richer member of the ruling class, who has the kidnapper kidnapped and brought to her lushly appointed island to launch some retribution and, eventually, some sexual games. Wertmuller remains as cheerfully cynical and vulgar as ever about class warfare, but to call her a thinking director, as some American critics were wont to do in the 70s, would be like applauding Sylvester Stallone for his semiological insights. Try to imagine an Ayn Rand epic recast as bawdy farce and you might get a rough idea of the sensibility on view; the lack of self-consciousness, which lends a certain thrust to the opening reels, eventually leads to tedium as the central conceit gets spun out endlessly. With Roberto Herlitzka and Massimo Wertmuller. (JR) Read more

The Man Who Envied Women

It’s strange to recall that as a modern dancer and choreographer, Yvonne Rainer was known throughout the 60s and early 70s as a minimalist. For the past 15 years, she has been making experimental quasi-narrative films of an increasing multitextual density, culminating in this angry, vibrant film of 1985, which, in her own words, takes on “the housing shortage, changing family patterns, the poor pitted against the middle class, Hispanics against Jews, artists and politics, female menopause, abortion rights. There’s even a dream sequence.” Working with the speech and writing of over a dozen figures, ranging from Raymond Chandler to Julia Kristeva, Rainer also confronts and parodies male theoretical discourse (Michel Foucault in particular, sampled and discussed in extended chunks) as a mode of sexual seduction. Politics have been present in all her features, but usually folded into so many distancing devices that they mainly come out dressed in quotes. Here she allows the politics to speak more directly and eloquently, and it charges the rest of the film like a live wire–rightly assuming that we could all use a few jolts. (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Thursday, September 10, 6:00, 443-3737) Read more

Nice Girls Don’t Explode

Don’t be fooled by the promising title: despite the presence of Barbara Harris, this 1987 effort was one of the unfunniest youth comedies in years. A protective mother (Harris) who doesn’t want to part with her daughter April (Michelle Meyrink) secretly rigs up explosives so that she’ll think it’s her hormones that are telekinetically starting the fires. Whatever comic premises Paul Harris’s script might have had, we’ll never know, because the leaden direction of first-timer Chuck Martinez sinks them without a trace. With the ubiquitous Wallace Shawn, more lugubrious than usual, as a friendless, eccentric arsonist, and William O’Leary as the boyfriend. (JR) Read more

Hellraiser

What ever happened to movie plots? This 1987 first feature by celebrated English horror writer Clive Barker starts off with a potentially viable one, and shows some flair with cutting and framing that bodes well for the future. But at the point where the characters in this magic box/haunted house tale should be turning into something more than cardboard, Barker turns them into chocolate puddingpulling out all the stops, letting Bob Keen’s jazzy special effects take over, and asking plot, character, and logic to take an aimless walk around the block. None of this is the fault of the actors: Andrew Robinson, Clare Higgins, Ashley Laurence, and Sean Chapman are uniformly good for the little they’re asked to do. Minor grisly fun, but don’t expect the movie to linger when it’s over. R, 94 min. (JR) Read more

Hamburger Hill

The three critical questions to be asked of any movie are (1) what does it try to do? (2) does it succeed? and (3) is it worth doing? This film tries to make a conventional, apolitical combat story out of one of the most brutal battles fought in Vietnam, and succeeds impressively. Writer/coproducer Jim Carabatsos, drawing on his own Vietnam combat experience, trots out most of the cliches we remember from 40s and 50s war films and still manages to give them some ring of truth; director John Irvin leads 14 unknown actors through gritty action sequences and deft ensemble playing (Courtney B. Vance’s angry black medic is a particular standout). The question that remains is whether it’s worth doing another uncritical war-is-photogenic-hell excursionaccommodating the Vietnam experience to the same unquestioning, grunt-level perspective that sustained us through World War II and Korea while priming us for still more noble sacrifices by steadfastly refusing to look any further. Less pretentious than Platoon and more attentive to the Vietnamese than The Deer Hunter, this picture proposes with a great deal of skill and sincerity that we honor and respect the men who suffered on our behalf without even beginning to consider why they did so, or to what effect. Read more

Wolf At The Door

The wolf in question is painter Paul Gauguin, played by Donald Sutherland, and director Henning Carlsen is at pains to make him something of a stud. This French-Danish coproduction shot in English restricts its focus to Paris and Copenhagen, 1893-’94, between Gauguin’s two extended sojourns in Tahiti, when he is trying unsuccessfully to sell his work, hanging out with other Parisian artists (including August Strindberg, played with owlish wit by Max von Sydow), and coping with four womenhis former and present models (both of whom he is sleeping with), his unforgiving wife, and a 14-year-old neighbor with a powerful crush on him. Thoughtful and occasionally thought provoking, despite a rather patronizing treatment of the women, the film examines Gauguin’s jaundiced views of civilization and the high price paid for his own bohemianism. With Valerie Morea, Sofie Graboel, Fanny Bastien, Merete Voldstedlund, and a virtually unrecognizable Jean Yanne. (JR) Read more

The Wannsee Conference

A meticulous reconstruction of the meeting of 14 top German officials in a Berlin suburb on January 20, 1942, that set the Final Solution in motion. (Among those present were Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann.) Directed by Heinz Schirk from a screenplay by Paul Mommertz, this docudrama was financed largely by German and Austrian TV and shown overseas in 1984. Convincingly done and predictably chilling, though it isn’t clear from the credits how much of the meeting is drawn from existing records and how much comes from the filmmakers’ imaginations. But it doesn’t teach us anything we haven’t already learned from much better films on the subject, such as Shoah. In German with subtitles. (JR) Read more

Orphans

Alan J. Pakula’s spellbinding 1987 film of Lyle Kessler’s play, adapted by the playwright himself from a Steppenwolf production, focuses on three powerhouse performancesby Matthew Modine and Kevin Anderson as orphaned brothers holed up in a decrepit house in Newark, and Albert Finney as a big-time gangster who enters their world and transforms it. While the material never fully sheds its stage origins, Pakula and the actors play this all-male family romance for all it’s worth, and the tantalizing sense of unreality that hovers around the edges of the plot works as a kind of compression device for concentrating on the hermetically sealed world conjured up by the actors and decor, which begins in Algren-esque squalor and winds up as something resembling a middle-class household. Pakula works at his peak, and Finney has seldom been better. (JR) Read more

A Man In Love

Diane Kurys’s first English-language film concerns an adulterous love affair between a young American actor (Peter Coyote, resembling a young J.D. Salinger with Henry Fonda’s voice), playing the novelist Cesare Pavese in an Italian biopic, and an Italian-American actress (Greta Scacchi), whom he picks to play the last woman Pavese was involved with. Simultaneously romantic and silly, sincere and campy, the movie coasts along on the attractiveness of its leads and the flavor of its milieu, until it gets derailed by an oddball conclusion that conveniently sidesteps all the preceding dramatic conflicts. With Jamie Lee Curtis as the actor’s wife, Claudia Cardinale and director John Berry as the actress’s parents, and occasional weird echoes of Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful and Two Weeks in Another Town, as well as Truffaut’s The Last Metro. Israel Horowitz assisted Kurys on the script. (JR) Read more