Jonathan Rosenbaum

In Frank Tashlin’s first CinemaScope comedy (1956), which pulses with his characteristically vivid colors and bittersweet observations, a Beverly Hills writer and World War II hero expects to be drafted back into the air force, so his leggy young wife reenlists to be near him; he winds up 4-F, and she becomes a lieutenant. He dutifully follows her to Hawaii, and much gender confusion ensues. The casting is pure 50s and includes Tom Ewell, the poet laureate of male sexual anxiety (The Seven Year Itch, The Girl Can’t Help It), and the unjustly forgotten, mellow Sheree North; with Rita Moreno and Rick Jason. 99 min. (JR) Read more

Despite the title, this is less a soccer documentary than a corporate hagiography along the lines of The Last Mogul or The Kid Stays in the Picture; its real hero isn’t Cosmos star Pele (who wisely declined to be interviewed), but Steve Ross, CEO of Warner Communications, which owned the team. The most important secondary figures are Ross’s associates, sycophants, and acquisitions, some of whom happened to play soccer and are intermittently paraded before us as prize pets. (Henry Kissinger makes a guest appearance too, as he does in The Kid Stays in the Picture, though it’s unclear whether he’s supposed to enhance Ross or vice versa.) The distributor is Miramax, so maybe this is just a dry run for The Harvey Weinstein Story. PG-13, 97 min. (JR) Read more

The Gene Siskel Film Center’s retrospective on the brilliant comedy director Frank Tashlin continues with this 1954 feature about a Hollywood screenwriter (Dick Powell) and his misadventures with a volatile teenager (Debbie Reynolds). In some ways an early version of Tashlin’s Bachelor Flat (1962), which screens later this month, it’s narrated by the hero’s Oscar statuette, and some of the gags about 50s Hollywood are priceless (among them a parody of Gene Kelly’s dream ballets). With Anne Francis. 98 min. Archival IB Technicolor print. Sat 7/15, 5 PM, and Tue 7/18, 6 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more

Ridley Scott’s loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; the studio mucked about with this original version released in 1982, adding a noirish voice-over by hero Harrison Ford and actually purchasing outtakes from The Shining to illustrate the peculiar tacked-on finale. But this is still the most remarkably and densely imagined and visualized SF film since 2001: A Space Odyssey, a hauntingly erotic meditation on the difference between the human and the nonhuman. Set in a grungy LA of the 21st century characterized by nearly constant rain and a good many Chinese restaurantsyielding textures worthy of Welles or Sternbergthe plot involves a former cop (Ford) hired to track down and kill a series of androids. The results are largely a triumph of production design, but as in Forbidden Planet and 2001, it’s often hard to determine where production design leaves off and direction begins. With Sean Young, Rutger Hauer, Edward James Olmos, Daryl Hannah, Joe Turkel, and Joanna Cassidy. 118 min. (JR) Read more

This 1964 Jerry Lewis vehicle is the sixth and last directed by his gifted mentor, Frank Tashlin, though it resembles Lewis’s own directorial efforts in its focus on pain (it’s set almost exclusively in a hospital) and its trading of satire for surreal fantasy, improbably infused with brassy showbiz gusto (Sammy Davis Jr. sings the title tune). There’s also a Lewis-like emphasis on bizarre sound gags and abrasive villains (Everett Sloane as a Scrooge type) that contrasts with Tashlin’s cartoonish imagery and relative tolerance for fools and assholes. But Lewis’s infantile mannerisms are overtaken by the director, who treats the hero as a grown-up struggling with neurotic identification empathy, and the movie’s finale, with its cascading shopping carts, could only have come from Tashlin. With Glenda Farrell, Karen Sharpe, Kathleen Freeman, and Susan Oliver. 89 min. (JR) Read more

Chris Paine’s documentary about General Motors’ development and withdrawal of the innovative, environment-friendly EV1 automobile is bound to reverberate with anyone who’s fallen in love with a product only to see it irrevocably yanked from the market. Nihilistic greed was the major factor when GM terminated the car in 2001, though Paine is also careful to note the passivity of the general public. Among his interviewees are Mel Gibson and Phyllis Diller, both EV1 enthusiasts, as well as GM spokespeople and ordinary customers. Martin Sheen narrates. PG, 91 min. (JR) Read more

The best documentary to date about the military occupation of Iraq, this digital feature was shot there by five national guardsmen from New Hampshire. The narrative focuses on three of them: one grew up in Lebanon, speaks Arabic, and plans to reenlist; another thinks the war is about oil and describes his nightmares and post-traumatic stress disorder; the third argues that he’s fighting for democracy, but he’s taking medication for his nerves and his wife insists he’s no longer the same person. Director Deborah Scranton and producer-editor Steve James (Hoop Dreams) don’t foist any particular thesis on us, but they arrange the material so that we’re obliged to think about it, and the feeling of immediacy is constant. 97 min. Music Box. Read more

Richard Linklater returns to the animated aesthetic of Waking Life for this adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s dystopian SF novel about slacker drug addicts and double agents in the Orange County of the future. Critic Gary Indiana has called Linklater the Dostoyevsky of movie dialogue, and certainly the compulsive jabber here can be as expressionist as the visuals. Compared to Waking Life, Bob Sabiston’s upgraded rotoscoping yields a steadier image and a more ambiguous blend of the drawn and the filmed, its uncertainty only complicated by the use of stars (Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder). The result is deliberately confusing but also mesmerizing and politically provocative. R, 100 min. Reviewed this week in Section 1. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Esquire, Pipers Alley. Read more

Gabriel Garcia Moreno’s 1927 action thriller, shot in Veracruz, is the first silent Mexican feature I’ve seen—a fascinating period look at such things as trains and bullfights. Its dreamlike action, characters, and props show a clear debt to the great Louis Feuillade serials of the previous decadea cigarette-smoking street urchin is modeled on Feuillade’s Bout de Zan, a robber uses a black-mask disguise, the actors do all their own stunts. Unfortunately it lacks the kinetic energy and invention of Feuillade as well as his subversive handling of class and gender. About 100 min. (JR) Read more

This sequel to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl reunites the first movie’s director (Gore Verbinski) and screenwriters (Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio) and much of its cast (Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Jonathan Pryce), and they’re desperate to knock our socks off. I was worn down by the excess: Depp’s fruity impersonation of Keith Richards (or William F. Buckley) as pirate Jack Sparrow; too many bottomless chasms on an island with too many jungle savages (after the fashion of Peter Jackson’s King Kong); Bill Nighy playing too squishy a villain with a beard of too many crawling octopus tentacles; too much violence, pop nihilism, and sick humor. But the Disney logo at the beginning is neat. PG-13, 140 min. (JR) Read more

A sort of spin-off of Reefer Madness, put out by the same stock-footage-happy exploitation producer and sometime director Dwain Esper a couple of years later, in 1938. A burlesque queen (Vivian McGill) contracts syphilis, gets pregnant, and infects her husband; also known as Human Wreckage and They Must Be Told, this runs only 57 minutes. (JR) Read more

A likable sprawl, this 2004 French feature by Cedric Klapisch brings back five of the young characters who hung aroung Barcelona in his L’Auberge Espagnole (played by Romain Duris, Audrey Tautou, Cecile de France, Kelly Reilly, and Kevin Bishop). Now pushing 30, Xavier, the hero, is a successful hack screenwriter and bored lady-killer who drifts between Paris, London, and Saint Petersburg in a fog, and Duris manages to make him sympathetic despite his overall cluelessness about what it means to grow older without attachments. Klapisch self-consciously throws fistfuls of quirky film style at us, as if he were Francois Truffaut, but his characters are still interesting and his party sequences are especially good. In English and subtitled French, Russian, Spanish, and Italian. 129 min. Music Box. Read more

The underrated and potent noir specialist Phil Karlson directed this 1952 action thriller about a bank heist, and though it isn’t a patch on his 99 River Street or The Phenix City Story, it’s still well worth checking out. With John Payne, Coleen Gray, Preston Foster, Neville Brand, and Lee Van Cleef. (JR) Read more

From the

The three episodes of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s exquisite 2005 feature, his best in many years, are set achronologically in Taiwan, in 1966, 1911, and 2005; each is about 40 minutes long and stars Chang Chen and Shu Qi. The structure may make the film sound like Hou’s greatest hits, echoing not only his trilogy about Taiwan in the 20th century (City of Sadness, The Puppet Master, and Good Men, Good Women) but the nostalgia about adolescence in A Time to Live and a Time to Die, the ritzy period bordello in Flowers of Shanghai, and the contemporary club scene in Millennium Mambo (which also starred Shu). But it’s the intricate formal and thematic relation of the three parts that defines the film’s beauty and makes it such a passionate meditation on youth, love, and freedom in relation to history. The ironic Chinese title translates as “The Best of Times.” In Mandarin and Taiwanese with subtitles. 135 min. Reviewed this week in Section 1. Music Box.

Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Ed Lederman. Read more

The MPAA rating of this underground car-racing sequel could be used in the ads: PG-13 for reckless and illegal behavior involving teens, violence, language, and sexual content. The way these combine is of course part of the fantasy: babes are the prizes for winning races, and cars get compared like dicks in a locker room. Fleeing to Tokyo to avoid jail, the smiling hero (Lucas Black) picks up enough Japanese to attend high school the very next morning. But despite all the silliness the drift races are gripping, and director Justin Lin captures Tokyo’s energy and glitter far better than Sofia Coppola. With Bow Wow, Brian Tee, Nathalie Kelley, and a cameo by Sonny Chiba as a head yakuza. 104 min. (JR) Read more