Jonathan Rosenbaum

Guy Maddin, responsible for Tales From the Gimli Hospital, comes up with an even stranger black-and-white feature (1990), made on a heftier budget, that involves amnesiac victims of mustard gas during World War I and the Russian Revolution. The hero, a Canadian soldier (Kyle McCulloch), mistakes a nurse (Kathy Marykuca) for his dead love; she’s married to a Belgian aviator (Ari Cohen) who can’t remember he’s married, and she gets so confused that she winds up mistaking the Canadian for the Belgian. There are other complications, but this film often appears to be about nothing at allexcept perhaps Maddin’s obvious love for late silent and early talkie studio productions with kitschy pictorial effects, as well as offbeat surrealist conceits, such as a hailstorm of bunny rabbits falling into trenches. What comes across is a fascinating fetishist delirium, where memories of remote war movies get recycled into something that’s alternately creepy and beautiful. 90 min. (JR) Read more

Mother Courage and Her Children and History Lessons

One of the most abused critical terms we have is “Brechtian,” and the weeklong series “Brecht and Film” offers the rare opportunity to discover what that adjective really means. As it turns out, Brechtian practice and Brechtian theory are different matters entirely, occupying opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum, and this series offers superb examples of both. To understand and experience Brechtian practice at its finest, hightail it to Peter Palitzsch and Manfred Wekwerth’s intelligent and resourceful 1961 filming in black-and-white ‘Scope of the most celebrated Berliner Ensemble production, Mother Courage and Her Children, starring Helene Weigel and directed by Brecht and his longtime associate Erich Engel. It’s a play with musical interludes about the psychology of war profiteering, viewed from the inside; shot in a studio, the film employs all the stage scenery and skillfully masks different portions of the frame to honor and enhance the original mise en scene. For the more challenging rigors of Brechtian theory–which argues against the emotional engagement of the audience, something Brechtian practice never fully abandons–try History Lessons. One of the most beautiful and difficult features of Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, this 1972 filming of portions of Brecht’s novel The Business Affairs of Mr. Read more

An incoherent title for a less than coherent satire originally known as just An Alan Smithee FilmAlan Smithee being the pseudonymous directing credit conferred when a real director has his name taken off a film, usually due to interference from the producer. Ironically, this labored send-up of Hollywood greed and foolishnessscripted by Joe Eszterhas in what appears to have been uncontrolled rage rather than recollected tranquillitywas apparently directed by Arthur Hiller, who had his own name removed from the credits, yielding a clear case of the pot calling the kettle black. The premise of this muddled, hit-or-miss comedy, done in pseudodocumentary form, is that an Englishman (Eric Idle) whose name actually is Alan Smithee becomes the director of an action-adventure blockbuster starring Sylvester Stallone, Whoopi Goldberg, and Jackie Chan, then flips out and steals the negative. I laughed a couple of times but can no longer remember at what; mostly I was simply amazed that the aforementioned actors, Ryan O’Neal, Coolio, Chuck D, Sandra Bernhard, and a good two dozen industry insiders ranging from Harvey Weinstein to Larry King to Eszterhas himself, could disgrace themselves with such submoronic material as if it were the height of hipness. If you harbor an interest in watching so-called industry smarts autodestruct, this carries a certain morbid appeal, but that’s about the extent of it. Read more

I haven’t read Margaret Rosenthal’s biography, The Honest Courtesan, which formed the basis of Jeannine Dominy’s script, but I found this a much more enjoyable, enlightening, and intelligent treatment of Venice and sex than the specious movie version of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove. Set in the 16th century, it’s about a beautiful and brilliant woman (Catherine McCormack) who’s unable to marry the aristocrat she loves (Rufus Sewell) because of her family background. Trained as a courtesan by her mother (Jacqueline Bisset), she becomes a formidable political figure through her liaisons with the most powerful men in Venice as well as visiting royalty, until the Inquisition threatens to brand her as a witch. (The title’s something of a misnomer, by the way, since she’s much more a feminist heroine than a bitch goddess.) Though the dialogue is predictably anachronistic in flavor, producer-director Marshall Herskovitz, best known for his work on Thirtysomething, gives this a narrative sweep and polish that makes it consistently entertaining. The city is used beautifully, and so, for the most part, is the cast (though Fred Ward seems a bit uncomfortable with his part). With Oliver Platt and Moira Kelly. 112 min. (JR) Read more

An astonishingly beautiful and hypnotic 1996 video by Alexander Sokurov, most of it in black and white, but with brief patches in color and sepia. Basically it’s a 45-minute mood piece with a disembodied narrator who moves through a village on a remote Japanese island that’s wreathed in mist; the sound track consists of Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Wagner, and traditional Russian and Japanese music. At times the vague narrative suggests a gothic novel, though the ending recalls one of the final images in Tarkovsky’s Solaris. One shot of the mist rising over the village is worthy of Murnau’s Faust, and most of the rest resembles a series of fine engravings in constant, dreamlike flux. In Russian with subtitles. (JR) Read more

Oriental Elegy

An astonishingly beautiful and hypnotic 1996 video by Alexander Sokurov, most of it in black and white, but with brief patches in color and sepia. Basically it’s a 45-minute mood piece with a disembodied narrator who moves through a village on a remote Japanese island that’s wreathed in mist; the music consists of Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Wagner, and traditional Russian and Japanese music. At times the vague narrative suggests a gothic novel, though the ending recalls one of the final images in Tarkovsky’s Solaris. One shot, of the mist rising over the village, is worthy of Murnau’s Faust, and most of the rest resembles a series of fine engravings in constant, dreamlike flux. Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday and Saturday, February 13 and 14, 7:00 and 9:00, and Sunday, February 15, 5:30 and 7:30, 773-281-4114. –Jonathan Rosenbaum Read more

Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore make an appealing couple in this silly but very likable 1998 romantic comedy set in 1985. The focus is on the budding relationship between a suburban wedding singer and aspiring songwriter who’s been stood up at the altar and a waitress with uncertain wedding plans of her own. The movie has more heart than head, but the cast makes a fine mesh. Directed by Frank Coraci from a script by Tim Herlihy; with Christine Taylor, Allen Covert, Angela Featherstone, Matthew Glave, Alexis Arquette, and cameo appearances by Billy Idol and Steve Buscemi. 96 min. (JR) Read more

An especially lamentable example of a good novel (in this case, Truman Capote’s first) adapted to the screen in such a way that its major significance appears to be the light it throws on the author’s life. Capote was in his early 20s when he wrote his third-person southern gothic about a 13-year-old boy sent to a remote plantation to live with his father, whom he’s never met. Director and cowriter David Rocksavage (best known for his British TV documentaries) makes the fatal errors of having an actor imitate Capote in middle age to narrate in the first person and of treating a highly unrealistic world in a realistic manner. The novel, by Capote’s own account, was written intuitively, and its autobiographical meanings were mainly unconscious. This 1994 feature, backing away from the novel’s politically incorrect and darkly ambivalent treatment of homosexuality, also reverses the book’s ending. Lothaire Bluteau does a fair job in the lead as the boy’s gay role model, and some of the South Carolina locations seem well chosen, but overall this is a mishmash of inauthentic accents, uncertain performances, and original material mangled beyond recognition. Cowritten by Sara Flanigan; with Anna Thomson, David Speck, April Turner, and Frank Taylor. Read more

Like the three accompanying Jack Smith shorts in this programReefers of Technicolor Island (1967), I Was a Male Yvonne De Carlo (1970), and Song for Rent (made at some point in the 70s)this 50-minute Smith feature of the late 60s, which has been shown in many different versions, is less a finished work than an arrangement of footage with nonsynchronized musical and voice accompaniment, so you may have trouble telling where one work leaves off and another one begins. While no Flaming Creatures, this is still chock-full of weird and wonderful stuff, and the sound elements, all found material, are often as arresting as the images. Some of the ingredients include Smith in a wheelchair, sporting a red wig, red satin gown, and orange-rimmed sunglasses, as Kate Smith sings God Bless America; lovely black-and-white footage of New York traffic punctuated by jets of steam and exhaust; voluptuous color double-exposures of lagoon and shellfish fantasies; Wendell Willkie addressing the Future Farmers of America and the 1940 Republican Convention; lengthy instructions on how to dance the male part in a tango; staged and costumed fantasies in Smith’s cluttered loft; and a diverse selection of arcane found footage shown without its original sound. Consider it a kind of banana split of the imagination, put together by a blindfolded soda jerk. Read more

A two-hour program stretching from the 50s to the 70s, most of it films by Ken Jacobs featuring Jack Smith as a performer: in The Death of P’Town: Fragment of a Movie That Never Was (1961) Smith cavorts in a cemetery; in Saturday Afternoon Blood Sacrifice and Little Cobra Dance (both 1957) he cavorts in drag for kids and cops in Tribeca; in Little Stabs at Happiness (1962) he nibbles on a doll and a balloon, the latter while dressed as a harlequin; excerpts from Jacobs’s unfinished magnum opus Star Spangled to Death (1962) feature more kids and some extended play with a Rockefeller-for-governor poster. Of the Jack Smith shorts, only one qualifies as a completed workthe lovely, three-minute color Scotch Tape (1959), a costumed frolic around a demolition site. The othersthe silent, black-and-white Overstimulated (1963); the silent 70s fragment Hot Air Specialists; the tedious, silent, black-and-white mid-60s fragment Wino; and the sound and color Respectable Creatures (1966), featuring everything from banal touristic footage of Rio’s Mardi Gras to scenes from an apparent Maria Montez remakeare at best suggestive fragments, none of them a patch on either Scotch Tape or Smith’s magnificent Flaming Creatures. His finished work is too alive to belong in a museum, but unfortunately most of the other stuff doesn’t look like it could belong anywhere else. Read more

Kundun

Recounting the life of the 14th Dalai Lama prior to his departure from Tibet, this highly uncharacteristic feature by Martin Scorsese is his best since The King of Comedy, but you can’t profitably approach it expecting either the violence or the stylistic punchiness of something like GoodFellas. Scripted by Melissa Mathison (in close consultation with the Dalai Lama and his family) and cast almost exclusively with Tibetan exiles, this nonreligious movie about a religious leader is beautiful, abstract, charged with mystery, but never pretentious. Far from dictating a position on the Dalai Lama, the film doesn’t even define a particular point at which the spoiled toddler is transformed into a holy man; a good deal of the historical, political, and religious context is implied rather than explained, and most of the major events occur offscreen. Despite the somewhat questionable wallpaper score by Philip Glass, Scorsese’s delicate, inquisitive style has an inevitability and a rightness all its own. Gardens, Lake, Pipers Alley. –Jonathan Rosenbaum

Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still. Read more

Jour de fete

Jacques Tati’s first feature, a euphoric comedy set in a sleepy village, was meant to be the first French feature in color; it was shot in 1947 using two cameras, one color and one black-and-white. But the new Thomson-Color process failed to yield results that could be printed, so in 1949 the film was released in black and white. Fifteen years later Tati released a recut version in which a few details were colored by means of stencils, the version generally available ever since–at least until Tati’s daughter Sophie, a professional film editor, and film technician Francois Ede decided to restore the original color in 1994. Their meticulous work took well over a year, and what emerges is truly precious: a color print that looks not like the films of 1947 but like 1947 itself. As in all of Tati’s features, the plot is minimal: during Bastille Day festivities, Francois (Tati), the local postman, encounters a newsreel about streamlined postal delivery in America and attempts to clean up his act accordingly. But the exquisite charm of this masterpiece has less to do with individual gags (funny though many of them are) than with Tati’s portrait of a highly interactive French village after the war–a view of paradise suffused with affection and poetry. Read more

The desperate measures in question are those taken by a San Francisco police officer (Andy Garcia) hoping to save his little boy’s life with a bone-marrow transplant. After discovering that the only available donor is a mass murderer (Michael Keaton) held under maximum security, he contrives to strike a deal, but it isn’t long before the killer gets loose in the hospital. Early on, Keaton manages to appear fairly creepy while settling into a Hannibal Lecter mode; then the formulaic nonsense escalates, and he along with everyone else is reduced to going through the usual motions. Henry Bean, Neal Jiminez, and David Klass are the credited screenwriters and Barbet Schroeder directed; with Marcia Gay Harden and Joseph Cross. (JR) Read more

The generic elements in this horror thriller from Disney are all quite familiar: jewel thieves, luxury liner, a South China Sea monster that seems conceived as a deep-sea equivalent to Alien’s. But writer-director Stephen Sommers (Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book) is so efficient in placing and executing his cliches that he gives you a chilling run for your money. The monster itself, designed by the estimable Rob Bottin, makes a belated appearance, but there’s plenty of well-timed suspense in the meantime, and Treat Williams, Famke Janssen, Wes Studi, Kevin J. O’Connor, and Anthony Heald make up a highly serviceable cast. Predictably overextended, this is a creepy jaunt that occasionally wears one out but never flags. (JR) Read more

Though slightly trimmed by director-writer Emir Kusturica for American consumption, this riotous 167-minute satirical and farcical allegory about the former Yugoslavia from World War II to the postcommunist present is still marvelously excessive. The outrageous plot involves a couple of anti-Nazi arms dealers and gold traffickers who gain a reputation as communist heroes. One of them (Miki Manojlovic) installs a group of refugees in his grandfather’s cellar, and on the pretext that the war is still raging upstairs he gets them to manufacture arms and other black-market items until the 60s, meanwhile seducing the actress (Mirjana Jokovic) that his best friend (Lazar Ristovski) hoped to marry. Loosely based on a play by cowriter Dusan Kovacevic, this sarcastic, carnivalesque epic won the 1995 Palme d’Or at Cannes and has been at the center of a furious controversy ever since for what’s been called its pro-Serbian stance. (Kusturica himself is a Bosnian Muslim.) However one chooses to take its jaundiced view of history, it’s probably the best film to date by the talented Kusturica (Time of the Gypsies, Arizona Dream), a triumph of mise en scene mated to a comic vision that keeps topping its own hyperbole. In German and Serbo-Croatian with subtitles. Read more