Richard Cheech Marin has expanded his video spoof of Bruce Springsteen’s anthem of the 80s, Born in the U.S.A., into a throwaway comedy that really delivers. Written, directed by, and starring Cheech himself and cheerfully indifferent to technique, the film follows a Mexican-American and his comic misadventures with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The picture gets a respectable number of laughs out of the parallel multiple misunderstandings of the non-Spanish-speaking hero stranded in Tijuana and his equally monolingual Mexican cousin in LA, with plenty of healthy digs at the crassness of white Americans in dealing with Latinos on both sides of the border; it’s down-home ethnic humor with lots of sentiment and sincerity. (Chong appears only as a painting of Christ on the cross with eyes that open and shut.) With a supporting cast including Daniel Stern, Kamala Lopez, Paul Rodriguez, and Jan-Michael Vincent. (JR) Read more
Coming from the same director (Stephen Frears), writer (Hanif Kureishi), and producers (Tim Bevan and Sarah Radclyffe) who gave us My Beautiful Laundrette, this lively film about social and political turmoil in Thatcher England bears the same relationship to that earlier film as Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip has to Richard Pryor Live in Concerti.e., a spontaneous gathering of forces whose energies and inspirations hit a raw nerve is succeeded by a more deliberate and self-conscious effort to bring the same powers into play. In this case, the return of corrupt, old-fashioned Rafi (Shashi Kapoor) to London to visit his son Sammy (Ayub Khan Din) and daughter-in-law Rosie (Frances Barber) reveals to him the cataclysmic changes the country has been undergoingrace riots, sexual warfare, and political upheavalsand he never quite recovers from the shock, even after he goes to see his old girlfriend Alice (Claire Bloom). When Sammy throws a dinner party for Rafi, he remarks to Rosie, We’ll round up the usual social deviants, communists, lesbians, and blacks, with a sprinkling of the mentally subnormal, and the rather stylized landscape of interracial couples, bombed-out streets, and multisexual adventurers goes beyond the relative naturalism of My Beautiful Laundrette to create a world more akin to the scene of 50s turmoil in the underrated Absolute Beginners. Read more
