Daily Archives: January 27, 2025

The People Vs. Larry Flynt

It’s somehow characteristic of director Milos Forman that his 1979 version of the prohippie musical Hair bordered on being a conservative attack on the counterculture, whereas, in these conservative times, his tragicomic all-American saga about the life and times of Hustler publisher Larry Flynt (1996) borders on being a piece of hippie irreverence. Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski’s script may in spots be as much of a skim job as their one for Ed Wood, but it’s almost as sweet and as likable, and if the movie can’t ever practice what it and its hillbilly hero preachthe only beaver shot in the movie involves a corpseits heart is certainly in the right place. Woody Harrelson plays Flynt with energy, and Courtney Love does at least as well as his wife; others in the capable cast include Edward Norton, James Cromwell, Crispin Glover, and James Carville. 127 min. (JR) Read more

The Surf Is At Rest

A 1997 video documentary by Reza Allamehzadeh, an exiled Iranian filmmaker living in Holland, about the persecution of Iranian intellectuals by the shah’s secret police. Most of the testimonies here from other Iranian exiles living in Europe relate to the arrest of a dozen writers, artists, and filmmakers in 1972 for an alleged plot to kidnap the crown prince and queen; two were executed, and three others, including Allamehzadeh, received life sentences that were suspended during the 1979 Iranian revolution (although Allamehzadeh’s further difficulties with the new Islamic government led to his exile four years later). Dutch students who protested the original arrests are also interviewed, as are such writers as Ali Akbar Saidi Sirjani, Faraj Sarkuhi, and Abas Maroofi. (JR) Read more

F for Fake

The first of Orson Welles’s two essay films to be completed and released (the lesser-known 1979 Filming “Othello” was the second), this breezy, low-budget 1973 montage–put together from discarded documentary footage by Francois Reichenbach as well as new material filmed by Welles–forms a kind of dialectic with Welles’s never-completed It’s All True; as Welles himself implied, an equally accurate title for this playful cat-and-mouse game might have been It’s All Lies. The main subjects here are art forger Elmyr de Hory, Clifford Irving, Howard Hughes, Pablo Picasso, and Welles himself; and the name of the game is the practice and meaning of deception. Some commentators have speculated that this film was Welles’s indirect reply to Pauline Kael’s subsequently disproven contention that he didn’t write a word of the Citizen Kane script; his sly commentary here–seconded by some of the trickiest editing anywhere–implies that authorship is a pretty dubious notion anyway, a function of the even more dubious art market and its team of “experts.” Alternately superficial and profound, hollow and moving, simple and complex, this film also enlists the services of Oja Kodar, Welles’s principal collaborator after the late 60s, as actor, erotic spectacle, and cowriter. Joseph Cotten, Richard Wilson, and other Welles cronies put in brief appearances; Michel Legrand wrote the wonderful score. Read more