Jonathan Rosenbaum

Winner of the Camera d’Or at the 1991 Cannes film festival, this first feature by Belgian writer-director Jaco van Dormael leapfrogs between childhood, adulthood, and old age as it explores the memories and fantasies of a malcontent (Michel Bouquet) who has believed since childhood that he was switched at birth with the boy next door. Well crafted and easy to watch, this is at times like a mainstream version of an Alain Resnais feature (Je t’aime, je t’aime or Providence), but without a soupcon of Resnais’ style or poetryclever and effective on its own level, but ultimately fairly shallow. Mireille Perrier, Joe de Backer, and Thomas Godet costar. (JR) Read more

As Todd Gitlin has pointed out, even if all the mysteries about the John F. Kennedy assassination were cleared up tomorrow, nothing in our current political situation would change. This camp spin-off of the already campy JFK simultaneously deconstructs assassination countermyths and contrived movie packages through its very ineptness. Danny Aiello as Jack Ruby may sound like dream casting, but without a script or a character of any substance Aiello encounters trouble the moment familiar historical details loom into view, and so does the rest of the movie, whose cast includes Sherilyn Fenn as one of Ruby’s strippers and Arliss Howard as a CIA operative. Adapting his own play Love Field, Stephen Davis seems strapped for ideas about what made Ruby tick, and John Mackenzie’s sluggish direction only compounds the awkwardness. As a general principle, I don’t like to recommend bad movies, but this is such a hoot you might well find it as enjoyable as I did. (JR) Read more

The acting is raw and unglued, the guest-star appearances of aging 60s icons (Arlo Guthrie, Timothy Leary, David Carradine) are self-conscious and arch, and the sprawling episodic construction is underlined by conceptions that are sentimental to a fault. But this odd little road moviea first feature written and directed by Abbe Wool, who cowrote Sid & Nancystill got to me, mainly because of its sincerity and its relative novelty in trying to locate the dregs of American counterculture in various portentous and philosophical roadside encounters. The semifantastical plot concerns the absurdist journey of two bikers (John Doe and Adam Horovitz, members respectively of the bands X and the Beastie Boys) from southern California through parts of Nevada. Doe, the older biker, is a grizzled factory worker literally searching for a place called El Dorado, where he wants to scatter the ashes of an acquaintance (David Anthony Marshall) who died in a freak accident; Horovitz is a younger biker with a Motel 9 fixation who insists on tagging along. At its worst, this registers like an unconscious parody of Easy Rider; at its best, it suggests a flea-bitten yahoo version of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Hawks and Sparrows. It clearly isn’t for everybody, but if you like it at all you’ll probably wind up moved as well as charmed by its ambitions and conceits. Read more

Completing a loose trilogy that began with Red Sorghum and Ju Dou, Zhang Yimou’s grim 1991 adaptation of a novel by Su Tong once again stars Gong Li as a young woman who marries a much older man, and once again tells a story that explicitly critiques Chinese feudalism and indirectly contemporary China. This time, however, the style is quite different (despite another key use of the color red) and the vision is much bleaker. The heroine, a less sympathetic figure than her predecessors, is a university student in the 1920s who becomes the fourth and youngest wife of a powerful man in northern China after her stepmother can no longer afford to pay for her education. She quickly becomes involved in the various intrigues and rivalries between wives that rule her husband’s world and family tradition: each wife has her own house and courtyard within the palace, and whoever the husband chooses to sleep with on a given night receives a foot massage, several lighted red lanterns, and the right to select the menu for the following day. The film confines us throughout to this claustrophobic universe of boxes within boxes, where wives and female servants devote their lives to scheming against one another; the action is filmed mainly in frontal long shots. Read more

The biggest hit of Hong Kong comedy star and director Michael Hui is also considered his best movie, or his next best (after Security Unlimited), by many fans and critics. Having seen only an unsubtitled print of this episodic comedy, I still can say that I laughed a lot at the frenetic slapstick and rapid-fire bursts of rhythmic invention. Hui plays the mean-spirited head of a private detective agency, and among his employees are Hui’s likable brothers Sam and Ricky (1977). (JR) Read more

The unwary might regard this French Canadian feature as a blatant rip-off of Green Card, but in fact it’s the earlier filmand a much better one. Though lacking the yuppie preoccupations (such as real estate) and cute star mugging (Gerard Depardieu and Andie MacDowell) that were Green Card’s selling points, the basic plot is the same: a well-to-do single woman (Genevieve Bujold) is persuaded to marry a penniless Chilean (Manuel Arangiz) to save him from deportation, then is drawn to him while trying to convince the immigration authorities that their marriage is genuine. The director here is Michel Brault, best known for his brilliance as a cinematographer, and the sensitive low-key script is mainly the work of Jefferson Lewis. This isn’t a major work, but unlike Green Card it’s never a phony one; the characters and situations ring true throughout (1989). (JR) Read more

French colonial life in Algeria for three grown sisters (Nicole Garcia, Marianne Basler, and writer-director Brigitte Rouan) and their families in the 40s and 50s is the focus of this skillful semiautobiographical first feature. Rouan is both a graceful storyteller and a capable handler of actors (including herself), though, as with Diane Kurys, there are times when her style may seem too facile for what she wants to get across. This impressed me as I watched it, but it didn’t stick to my ribs (1990). (JR) Read more

Pyrotechnical action specialist Tsui Hark (Peking Opera Blues) delivers spirited choreography and humor in spades in this adventure epic set in 1875, when Western trade and the lure of California gold were both threatening Chinese culture. (The title points to a Sergio Leone influence.) The story involves a legendary kung fu fighter (Jet Li), his deadly opponent, his cousin (Rosamund Kwan) who was sold into prostitution, and a student (Yuen Biao) of his opponent who loves the cousin and hopes to save her; Jackie Cheung also figures in the cast (1991). In Cantonese with subtitles. R, 134 min. (JR) Read more

A soft-core comedy by Monika Treut (The Virgin Machine) about the problems encountered by a German bisexual (Shelley Kastner) working as a waitress in New York’s East Village when her conservative Bavarian father (Alfred Edel) comes to visit. He believes she’s a successful actress, so she tries to hide her job and pretend that her gay roommate (David Bronstein) is her husband; thanks to a New Age porn entrepreneur (Annie Sprinkle), her father winds up having a sexual adventure of his own. If Treut had more of a sense of where to place her camera and when to cut, this brief cruise past the New York sexual underground might have passed as a minor variant of early Almodovar. But apart from the likable presence of Kastner, this is basically simpleminded sexual tourism addressed to rubes. With Michael Massee, Mary Lou Graulau, and enough leather to support a small cattle ranch (1991). (JR) Read more

Two college students from New York (Ralph Macchio and Mitchell Whitfield) are wrongly accused of killing a clerk in a convenience store in Wahzoo City, Alabama, and one’s Brooklyn cousina rookie lawyer (Joe Pesci)arrives with his fiancee (Marisa Tomei) to defend them in what proves to be his first court case. While it’s easy to imagine an infinite number of bad courtroom comedies based on this scenario, this movie turns out to be wonderfulbroad and low character comedy that’s solidly imagined and beautifully played. Far from having a bone to pick with either side of the cultural collision, writer-producer Dale Launer (Ruthless People) and director Jonathan Lynn (Nuns on the Run), both surpassing their earlier work, are clearly equal-opportunity caricaturists, with affection for both the southern and northern factions in the movie. The cast (which also includes a very wry Fred Gwynne and Austin Pendleton in a cameo role) is uniformly good, but Tomei is especially worth noting as the lawyer’s smart and feisty girlfriend; her performance triumphs over an improbable number of costume changes (1992). (JR) Read more

A cheerful coconut picker (producer and cowriter Michael Hui) who lives on an island that belongs to mainland China comes to Hong Kong to live with his sister, who occupies a small flat with her husband and children. The cultural clash is catastrophic: the coconut picker’s smoking, eating habits, and overall yahoo behavior drive everyone, especially the brother-in-law, up the wall. But the focus of Hui’s satire is the corrupt city slicker as well as the innocent country bumpkin, and a lot of interesting points are made about the difference between mainland and Hong Kong values. Though directed by Clifton Ko, this film is full of Hui’s stylistic quirkssuch as sentimentality, food jokes, and dream sequences. It isn’t quite as funny as Hui’s best work, but it’s full of reverberations (1989). (JR) Read more

Eight Italian soldiers under Mussolini are sent to guard a Greek island. Believing the island is occupied by the enemy, they have many comic mishaps and eventually find themselves cut off from both the war and Italy. A pleasant if minor pastorale, this won the 1991 Academy Award for best foreign film, apparently because of a widespread conviction that toothless charmers are the best things that furriners are capable of nowadays in moviesa notion about as innocent as this picture. Directed by Gabriele Salvatores and written by Vincenzo Monteleone. (JR) Read more

Though writer-director Yim Ho (Homecoming) disowned this film after producer Tsui Hark took over the direction, it is still one of the most interesting and original Hong Kong pictures I’ve seen. Adapted from two different novels called King of Chess, by Chung Ah Shing and Cheung Hay Kwok, the story alternates between a rather bitter satire of capitalism centered on the Taipei TV industry and an equally critical look at the Cultural Revolution on the mainland many years earlier. Both stories involve the exploitation of chess mastersa boy with psychic powers in the Taiwanese story, a poor man in the mainland flashbacksand they are connected in terms of plot by the memories a character from Hong Kong in the Taipei story has about visiting a cousin in a reeducation camp. The powerful and talented Yim directed the mainland sections with a highly emotional lyricism that reminds me at times of Bertolucci; the slicker and more action-oriented Tsui handled the brittle Taipei sections. The results may not be what Yim wanted, but it’s still a singular and fascinating work, with a great deal of intelligence and feeling (1991). (JR) Read more

Directed by Camille Billops and James Hatch, this moving and highly personal 1991 film, which shared the prize for best documentary at Sundance, charts the reconciliation of Billops with her grown daughter Christa, whom Billops put up for adoption four years after she was born. The complex reverberations that this has in the entire family are explored in some depth; this film is one of the rare ones in which the issues of life and those of art and representation become inseparable. (JR) Read more

Misleadingly labeled by some as a documentary about anorexia and bulimia, Katherine Gilday’s highly provocative first feature from Canada (1990) might better be described as an essay on contemporary women’s obsession with body weight. A lot of intelligent women speak in this film, but perhaps the most impressive discourses are Gilday’s narration and her editing, both of which serve to link the disparate voices we hear into a powerful, unified statement. (JR) Read more