From the Chicago Reader in 2001. Reseeing, as if for the first time, in 2022, in its “original uncut version” on HBO, I like it even more, including its crazy ending, as a sort of Sternbergian fantasy overlay to Woolrich. — J.R.
A remake of Francois Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid — derived, like its predecessor, from Cornell Woolrich’s most perverse (and in some ways most interesting) novel, Waltz Into Darkness. Antonio Banderas plays a Cuban businessman who marries a mail-order bride (Angelina Jolie), then uncovers foul play even as he experiences infatuation at its most irrational and masochistic. This version is more sensual and atmospheric than Truffaut’s, and in many ways it’s a better film than its studio seems to think (judging from its nervousness about any reviews appearing before the film opened). It certainly retained my interest and sympathy — at least until the nonsensical ending, which looks as if it might have been imposed according to the voodoo science of test marketing. Written and directed by Michael Cristofer. 116 min. (JR)
This was reviewed at one point or another for the Chicago Reader. — J.R,
Monte Hellman’s remarkably hip avant-garde western (1967) was sold straight to television in the U.S.; while overseas it became a standard reference point for cinephiles, here, alas, it remains a cultist legend that’s never received the attention it deserves. A provocative and often witty head scratcher, it stars Jack Nicholson (who also produced) as a hired gun and Warren Oates, both at their near best, along with Will Hutchins and Millie Perkins. With its existentialist approach to treks through the wilderness, this is one of the key forerunners of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. (JR)
From the September 15, 1995 Chicago Reader. — J.R.
Though not directed by an auteurist-approved figure (Mark Robson has never attracted any cult to my knowledge), this is the greatest of producer Val Lewton’s justly celebrated low-budget chillers — a beautifully wrought story about the discovery of devil worshippers in Greenwich Village that fully lives up to the morbid John Donne quote framing the action. Intricately plotted over its 71 minutes, by screenwriters Charles O’Neal, De Witt Bodeen, and an uncredited Lewton, so that what begins rationally winds up as something far weirder than a thriller plot, this 1943 tale of a young woman (Kim Hunter in her first screen role) searching for her troubled sister (Jean Brooks) exudes a distilled poetry of doom that extends to all the characters as well as to the noirish bohemian atmosphere. (In a fascinating intertextual detail, the horny psychiatrist clawed to death by an offscreen feline in Lewton’s previous Cat People –played by Tom Conway, George Sanders’s brother — is resurrected here.) Mon 1/3, 6:30 PM, and Tue 1/4, 8:15 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center.
My column for a Spanish monthly film magazine, submitted in mid-December 2021. — J.R.
What first led me to Radu Jude’s provocative Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn wasn’t the Golden Bear it won in Berlin. Ever since Titanie received the Palme d’Or at Cannes, I’ve figured that any film, no matter how silly, can win the top prize at a major film festival. It was mostly the declaration of J. Hoberman in Artforum, who listed it first in his 2021 Top Ten and called it “the movie with the most relentless focus on the way we live now.”
In certain ways, Jude’s feature recalls Dušan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism half a century ago. A few of the parallels: an awkward two-part title; an Eastern European filmmaker examining the complex relationships between sex and politics, with pessimism about some of the consequences of sexual liberation and the brutal victimizing of a politically lucid heroine; a heady mix of various materials and different forms of discourse, including a bold fusion of fiction and documentary; a lot of footloose shooting on urban streets. But insofar as Hoberman’s claim for the film seems both apt and important, it isn’t really similar to Makavejev’s masterpiece because it comes out of a very different period—during a global pandemic, not during or just after the countercultural 1960s. Read more
Jean Eustache’s color follow-up to his black-and-white masterpiece The Mother and the Whore (1973), detailing his adolescence in the south of France, has never been distributed in the U.S., but some devotees of the director’s work actually prefer this 123-minute feature to its lengthy predecessor, and there’s no question that it seems to get better and better over time. Writing in these pages, Dave Kehr called its unsubtitled version “an original and disturbing treatment of that most commercial of themes, a young boy’s coming of age. Eustache’s protagonist (Martin Loeb) is a dark, lonely child who is taken from his grandmother’s home in the country to live with his mother (Ingrid Caven) and his Spanish stepfather in the city; he discovers not only sexuality but work, boredom, isolation, and — as in The Mother and the Whore — the unbreachable otherness of women. Photographed in summer colors by Nestor Almendros, the film is quiet and visual where Mother was verbal.” This 1974 feature also has one of the most memorably erotic film references in the cinema — a showing of Albert Lewin’s terminally romantic Pandora and the Flying Dutchman in a movie house. Read more
The usual limitation of director Costa-Gavras (Z,Missing) is that he makes well-crafted thrillers with liberal political themes that preach to the converted. The interesting thing about his latest movie, scripted by Joe Eszterhas (Jagged Edge), is that it does something rather different — more unsettling and morally ambiguous and, as a look at the underground white supremacist movement in the U.S., more disturbing and explosive. Debra Winger plays a federal agent who infiltrates a murderous group in the rural midwest in order to discover the murderer of a racist-baiting Chicago radio talk-show host (inspired in part by Alan Berg, the Jewish radio personality who was murdered in Denver). She becomes involved with one of the leaders (Tom Berenger) and his homespun all-American family, and is forced by her Chicago-based operative (John Heard) to hang on for dear life. Rather than give us stock racist villains, the film offers a relatively three-dimensional view of their life, their community, and their all-American eccentricities. (Berenger’s character, for example, hunts down blacks in cold blood and teaches anti-Semitism to his cute little girl, but he won’t shake the hand of an American Nazi.) Read more
In this 1988 movie, Alan Parker’s taste for simpleminded, sordid fantasy is trained on the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964, and the feast for the self-righteous that emerges has little to do with history, sociology, or even common sense. The glorification of the FBI (which conveniently ignores the FBI’s hostility toward the civil rights struggle), the obfuscation about jim crow laws, and the absurd melodramatics may all have been well-intentioned, but the understanding about the past and the present of racism that emerges is depressingly thin. (The blacks in the plot, for instance, are depicted exclusively as noble sufferers who sing a lot of spirituals — they aren’t even accorded the status of characters.) Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe star as antagonistic FBI agents who disagree about how to proceed with their investigation; Brad Dourif, Frances McDormand, and R. Lee Ermey are among the local yokels, and Chris Gerolmo is responsible for the primitive script. (JR)
The least that can be said for Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie, made nine years earlier than his 1980 masterpiece, Out of the Blue, is that no other studio-released film of the period is quite so formally audacious. After the surprise success of Easy Rider, Hopper was given carte blanche by Universal Pictures to make this disjointed epic in Peru; although it was given a special prize at the Venice film festival, the film was withdrawn from circulation in the U.S. after a couple of weeks and has rarely been screened since. After working in a western directed by Samuel Fuller (playing himself), during which one of the lead actors (Dean Stockwell) has been killed, an American stuntman (Hopper) remains behind with a Peruvian woman. He is eventually drafted into an imaginary movie being made by the Indian villagers; before or after this — the film isn’t very explicit about chronology — he is enlisted in a scheme to find gold in the mountains. The curious thing about this freewheeling allegory is that it is simultaneously about many things (the fakery of moviemaking, mutual exploitation, ugly Americans in the third world, Hopper as Jesus) and nothing at all. Read more
This 1975 satire about a Young American Miss beauty pageant and the middle-class mentality of small-town southern California is Michael Ritchie’s best feature, though it hasn’t won anything like the reputation it deserves. Dave Kehr’s original Reader review was less than enthusiastic (Ritchie’s rage doesn’t bring much insight with it) but conceded that a few of the supporting performances are surprisingly deep — Michael Kidd, Annette O’Toole, Barbara Feldon, to which I’d add Bruce Dern, the lead. (The film also features early performances by Melanie Griffith and Colleen Camp.) Screenwriter Jerry Belson supplies an unexpected amount of pain and even horror as well as comic nuance; Martin Rubin of the Gene Siskel Film Center aptly notes that Waiting for Guffman owes a lot to this picture, and I might add that in certain respects it also anticipates American Beauty. 113 min. (JR)
Backstage backstabbing and other forms of skulduggery on a daytime soap opera called The Sun Also Sets are the main bill of fare in this 1991 satirical farce, written by Robert Harling (The First Wives Club) and Andrew Bergman (Honeymoon in Vegas) and directed by Michael Hoffman. It’s full of bizarre twists designed to prove that the cast of such a soap opera would generate juicier material than anything a writer could come up with. As the star of both the soap and this movie, Sally Field can’t quite keep up with the hamming of the rest of the frenetic cast — Kevin Kline, Robert Downey Jr., Cathy Moriarty, Whoopi Goldberg, Elisabeth Shue, Carrie Fisher, Garry Marshall, and Teri Hatcher — but as the center of a hurricane, she does nicely enough. This movie certainly has its dopey moments, but if you’re feeling indulgent you’re likely to have a good time with it. 95 min. (JR)
More ambitious than Menace II Society, this second feature (1995) by youthful codirecting twins Allen and Albert Hughes starts in 1968, a few years before they were born, when three friends from the Bronx (Larenz Tate, Chris Tucker, and Freddy Rodriguez) enlist in the marines. Back from Vietnam but not treated as heroes, they eventually find themselves plotting an armed robbery. Written with Michael Henry Brown, this 1995 picture shows flashes of political savvy and has some decent performances, and the period evocations are nothing to be ashamed of. But gratuitous gore and violence and a huffing and puffing heist sequence eventually compromise the movie’s claim to seriousness. With Keith David, N’Bushe Wright, and Bokeem Woodbine. R, 119 min. (JR)
My column for the April 2015 issue of Caimán Cuadernos de Cine. Although I didn’t have the space to discuss this, it seems to me in retrospect that Jack Nance, even as a relatively minor character (Pete Martell), is as much the realistic backbone of Twin Peaks as he is the realistic anchor of Eraserhead — and, as such, he stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from such supernatural pasteboard characters as Bob (Frank Silva) and Windom Earle (Kenneth Welsh). — J.R.
The news that David Lynch and Mark Frost are preparing nine new Twin Peaks episodes — all to be directed by Lynch and set in the present, and to air on cable TV’s Showtime in 2016 — has coincided with the release of a beautifully designed Blu-Ray box set with ten discs, Twin Peaks: The Entire Mystery and The Missing Pieces, devoted to the 29 episodes broadcast in 1990 and 1991 and the subsequent prequel theatrical feature, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), and many extras. All this has prompted a re-evaluation of the series as a whole, which I’ve now seen in its entirety for the first time. A few critics have aided me in this quest—especially Michel Chion in his 1992 French book on Lynch, Martha P. Read more
To preserve and present the best world cinema, France has the Cinematheque Francaise and England has the British Film Institute; we’ve got the American Film Institute, which doesn’t even have a clue about the best Hollywood movies. Consequently most younger American viewers have never seen a film by Alain Resnais, probably the greatest living French filmmaker, who’s never made an indifferent or unadventurous film and who’s much more talented and innovative than Francois Truffaut. From Resnais’ first three features, all masterpieces — Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Muriel (1963) — to dazzling later works — Stavisky (1974), Providence (1977), Mon oncle d’Amerique (1980), Melo (1986) — he’s remained a master. On connait la chanson (1997), a more accurate translation of which might be “I Recognize the Tune,” was inspired by British screenwriter Dennis Potter (Pennies From Heaven); its characters frequently break into lip-synched French pop songs, which serve as cross-references to their moods and aren’t always bound by gender. (When Resnais made similar use of French film clips in Mon oncle d’Amerique, contemporary actress Nicole Garcia was cross-referenced with Cocteau’s actor Jean Marais.) A comedy about real estate and class differences, Same Old Song was the biggest hit of Resnais’ career in France at that point; it’s less popular among viewers unfamiliar with the music, but even if you can’t follow all the nuances, this is fun and different and at times mysterious (periodically revealing Resnais’ Surrealist roots), and it superbly captures Paris in the 90s. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (November 17, 2006). — J.R.
Alain Delon stars in what may be the last truly great theatrical feature by Jean-Luc Godard to date (1990), though it’s never had a U.S. distributor. It’s also one of his most challenging and difficult films, which helps to explain its scarcity, but it’s also hard to think of many films in Godard’s career that look as beautiful. Filmed in lush Swiss locations that are very close to where Godard grew up, the film is in part a sustained reverie on what it means both to be rich and not to be rich, and the contrapuntal role played here by the wealthy characters and their servants is part of what makes this film so operatic in feeling. In keeping with Godard’s compulsive practice of quoting, every line of dialogue is purportedly traceable to a literary source, with Raymond Chandler and William Faulkner among the many authors utilized. In French with subtitles. 84 min. (JR)
