Jonathan Rosenbaum

I’m sorry I haven’t been able to preview this 1994 first feature by German filmmaker Fred Kelemen, a former cameraman for Bela Tarr; Susan Sontag has called it a visionary, one-of-a-kind achievement, and others whose taste I respect have been praising it for years. Consisting of a dozen sequences, many of them shot and choreographed in single takes, the film unfolds in a single evening in a grim, post-cold-war Europe populated by displaced people. Groping for comparisons, partisans of this film have mentioned Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky; if I were in town, I’d certainly check it out myself. (JR) Read more

Made for the prestigious and long-running French TV series Cinema de notre temps (originally known as Cineastes de notre temps), this 1996 self-portrait by the highly talented Belgian-born filmmaker consists mainly of clips from her previous films, but the selection and arrangement of these are canny and subtle, and Akerman’s on-camera introduction is touching and revealing. It’s an excellent introduction to her work, though the many glimpses offered here of her best filmsnotably Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, From the East, and Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 1960s in Brusselscan’t really take the place of seeing these works whole. (JR) Read more

Not to be confused with the Yasujiro Ozu film of the same title, this is a two-part, two-and-a-half-hour made-for-TV video by Edward Yang, supreme modernist of the Taiwanese New Wave. His first work as a director, this 1981 video is the tale of a girl from the country town of Joufen (subsequently used in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s City of Sadness) who comes to to Taipei with dreams of entering the entertainment industry. (JR) Read more

Expectations (1982), also known as Desires, is a first film of Edward Yang, a major filmmaker of the Taiwanese new wave, along with Hou Hsiao-hsien. A suggestive and affecting sketch made for the episodic feature In Our Time, it concerns a girl in primary school during the 60s who harbors a secret crush on a university student staying at her house. The Terrorizers (1986),Yang’s evocative and deliberately ambiguous third feature, pivots around a chance encounter between a rebellious Eurasian girl and a novelist and housewife who decides to leave her husband, a lab technician. As Taiwanese film critic Edmund Wong has noted, the film offers a refreshing look at Yang’s theme of urban melancholy and self-discoverya preoccupation running through Yang’s early work that often evokes some of Antonioni’s poetry, atmosphere, and feeling for modernity. Well worth checking out. (JR)

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Forugh Farrokhzad’s black-and-white documentary (1962, 19 min.) about a leper colony in northern Iran is the most powerful Iranian film I’ve seen. Farrokhzad (1935-’67) is widely regarded as the greatest Persian poet of the 20th century; her only film seamlessly adapts the techniques of poetry to its framing, editing, sound, and narration. At once lyrical and extremely matter-of-fact, devoid of sentimentality or voyeurism yet profoundly humanist, the film offers a view of everyday life in the colonypeople eating, various medical treatments, children at school and at playthat’s spiritual, unflinching, and beautiful in ways that have no apparent Western counterparts; to my eyes and ears, it registers like a prayer. (JR) Read more

Not the Thornton Wilder stage play, but a broad and laid-back comedy, about a Boston political aide (Janeane Garofalo) who travels to Ireland to trace the alleged roots of the hypocritical U.S. senator she’s working for and lands in the middle of a matchmaking festival. Evoking at times an English comedy from Ealing Studios in its relaxed feeling for character, this is a fairly pleasant if unexceptional piece of whimsy with only a modicum of dog reaction shots. The script by Karen Janszen, Louis Nowra, and Graham Linehan is based on a screenplay by Greg Dinner, which suggests this may be a remake, but who knows of what? Mark Joffe directed; with Denis Leary, David O’Hara, and Milo O’Shea. R, 96 min. (JR) Read more

Unmade Beds

This fascinating and highly original nonfiction feature by Nicholas Barker, shot in New York City, portrays two men and two women who search for mates via classified ads. Not simply a documentary in any conventional sense, it’s a highly stylized affair that works from a script generated by interviews with all four individuals, who then wind up “playing” themselves. The results are both disturbing and funny, often revealing the plight of singles in urban American culture, and the characters themselves are unforgettable. (Interestingly enough, the men here are much more bitter than the women.) On all counts, one of the most interesting films I’ve seen this year. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Sunday, September 28, 4:00, 312-443-3737. –Jonathan Rosenbaum

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Pretty Vacant

“The movie’s all told in voice-over–it’s cheaper that way.” The last words in this energetic, low-budget, 33-minute film by Jim Mendiola, spoken by its narrator, Molly (Mariana Vasquez)–a 21-year-old Chicana who drums for an all-girl punk band and is working on the fifth issue of her zine, this one in Super-8–are a pretty fair description of what Mendiola is up to, technically speaking. Culturally this black-and-white effort is even more interesting, especially as it describes what alienates Molly from her more traditional, Mexican-oriented dad (David Mercado Gonzales). To be shown with other short films; Mendiola will lead a discussion. Tres en Uno, 1769 W. Greenleaf, Friday, September 12, 7:00, 773-764-8634; also Calles y Suenos, 1900 S. Carpenter, Sunday, September 14, 7:00, 312-243-4243.

–Jonathan Rosenbaum

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This 1997 thriller is fairly entertaining nonsense if all you’re looking for is 128 minutes of diversion. But if you’d like something more from David Fincher, the director of Seven, don’t get your hopes up; in retrospect, one wonders how much of the previous film came from Fincher’s collaborators. A wealthy, jaded, self-centered businessman (Michael Douglas) gets enlisted in a mysterious game as a birthday present from his wastrel younger brother (Sean Penn). A conspiratorial manipulation of everything around him, including even the newscast he watches on TV, it winds up consuming and perhaps even destroying his life. Though a paranoid plot of this kind has clear metaphysical implications, most of them prove to be fairly banal, and on a plot level screenwriters John Brancato and Michael Ferris don’t even try to make the details add up. What emerges is a very poor man’s North by Northwest without much moral nuance and a decreasing number of thrills. Most of the kicks have to do with seeing Douglas’s unpleasant character get his comeuppance, along with some OK turns from the other actors: Deborah Kara Unger (Crash), Armin Mueller-Stahl, James Rebhorn, Carroll Baker, and Peter Donat. (JR) Read more

Gabbeh

Is it possible for a movie to be intoxicatingly pretty without quite attaining beauty? Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s fantasy about the nomadic Ghashghai of southern Iran, who weave colorful carpets that tell stories, is a delightful treasure chest of colors, costumes, landscapes, magical-realist details, and very simple characters–all of whom tend to have the allure of trinkets and living legends. This romantic parable seems less personal than Makhmalbaf’s more troubled urban dramas (The Peddler, Marriage of the Blessed, A Moment of Innocence), but it’s also more accessible, and the magical moods keep one fairly spellbound. Hints of a lament about the sacrifices made by a young woman for her family and against her romantic nature (she longs to marry a mysterious stranger who rides after her tribe) are never supported with a clear take on the patriarchy that oppresses her, but the fairy-tale seductiveness piques one’s imagination throughout. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, September 5 through 11. –Jonathan Rosenbaum

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A romance between a transsexual born as a man (Steven Mackintosh) and a straight 34-year-old punk (Rupert Graves) who were friends at school 15 years earlier is the unlikely but exclusive focus of this British comedy-drama, directed by Richard Spence from an original screenplay by Tony Marchant. The script shows some sensitivity and the performances are good (Miriam Margolyes and Saskia Reeves figure in the secondary cast), but as moviemaking this is fairly dull and conventional stuff. (JR) Read more

When I saw this 141-minute ‘Scope biopic about Franz Liszt (played by Dirk Bogarde) in my teens, the title seemed appropriate, even though I enjoyed the music (the score received an Oscar) and lush settings (photographed by James Wong Howe). Started by director Charles Vidor and then completed by George Cukor after Vidor’s death, the film costars Capucine and Genevieve Page (1960). (JR) Read more

Given that most homicidal movie fantasies are rated G or PG, it’s baffling that this harmless 1997 movie about surviving in the Alaskan wilderness was assigned an R. I can say without irony that it’s an excellent, rousing adventure film for ten-year-old boyswith sincere moral lessons about self-reliance, self-respect, marital fidelity, and money (the latter mainly as a signifier of wisdom) that seem perfectly suited for that age group. David Mamet’s original script reeks with macho awe of wealth and nature, and the landscapes are often stunning. Anthony Hopkins plays a bookish billionaire superman who decides to accompany his fashion-model wife (Elle Macpherson) on an exotic shoot in Alaska. On a side trip with her photographer (Alec Baldwin) and his assistant (Harold Perrineau) their plane crashes, and the three men struggle to survive in the wilderness, matching wits, courage, and poundage with a humongous killer bear. Some of the individual details are far from plausible, but as this is a boys’ fantasy and parable it hardly matters. Too bad only grown-ups with the innocence of ten-year-olds can enjoy it. Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors, Mulholland Falls) directed. (JR) Read more

A troubling and fascinating if not entirely satisfactory film documenting the 1993 clash between federal agents and the Branch Davidians, which it argues was almost completely misrepresented in the press at that time. Despite strong investigative journalism, the film suffers from David Hamilton’s unnecessarily pushy musical score and what appears to be a sloppy reedit trimming about half an hour from the original 165-minute cut. Directed by William Gazecki; written by Gazecki and coproducer Dan Gifford. (JR) Read more

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