Jonathan Rosenbaum

Yojiro Takita’s 1986 satire about the snooping excesses of a scandal-hungry reporter has loads of energy, though some spectators may find this sensationalist look at sensationalism guilty of some of the attitudes it ridicules. With Yumi Asou, Yuya Uchida, and Seiko Matsuda. (JR) Read more

The fact that lower Manhattan’s Chinatown and Little Italy are adjacent to one another provides the basis for this 1987 exploitation bloodbath directed by Abel Ferrara (Bad Lieutenant), which has racial gang fights and old-boy networks to spare. Bojan Bazelli’s location photography is luminous and exciting, and the battle lines charted in Nicholas St. John’s script are fairly complex, but the characterizations in this Romeo and Juliet tale of an Italian-American (Richard Panebianco) and a Chinese-American (Sari Chang) caught in the cross fire are so minimal that it’s hard to get very involved in the proceedings. (The fact that St. John occasionally filches dialogue from West Side Story doesn’t help much either.) James Russo, David Caruso, Russell Wong, Joey Chin, and the Living Theatre’s Judith Malina also figure in the cast. (JR) Read more

This first feature by Polish stage director Yurek Bogayevicz stars Sally Kirkland and Paulina Porizkova, who play an emigre movie star down on her luck in New York and the idolizing refugee she takes in. The screenplay is by Andrzej Wajda associate Agnieszka Holland, from a story by her and Bogayevicz. A curious blend of the plot of All About Evewith an emphasis on the humiliations of acting and middle age that is appreciably more blunt than the originaland an account of the political and cultural alienation of Czech emigres, the film lives mainly through its performances: Kirkland is especially powerful as the eponymous lead, offering conceivably the most remarkable impersonation of an eastern European by an American on record. Although the film climaxes in some rather forced melodrama, the eastern European perspective on the New York theater world has much of the satirical sharpness that only an outsider’s viewpoint can bring to it. With Robert Fields, Ruth Maleczech, and Stefan Schnabel. (JR) Read more

The 37 items on view in this package, which range from 30 seconds to eight minutes, include TV commercials and logos, music videos, abstract work, old-fashioned cartoons, and documentary bits that explain how several segments (the Amazing Stories logo, a sequence from The Great Mouse Detective, an ad for the National Canned Food Information Council) were made. Two disturbing aspects of 90 minutes of this stuff in one go are: an overreliance on the same formal devices and stylistic models (including the same tacky colors), and an obsessive thematic interest in either objects resembling people/animals or people/animals resembling objects. Anthropomorphism has always been a basic part of animation, and Tanya Weinberger’s Kiss Me You Fool is a nice classic example: a funny version of the frog prince story. But most of the other animation seems hung up on robotics of one kind or another; after awhile all that heavy metal starts to clank. The dehumanized climate even extends to the narrator’s voice in the documentary sections; and in Philippe Bergeron’s French-Canadian Tony de Peltrie–featuring a digitized pianist who resembles the Elephant Man–the posthuman tendency assumes truly nightmarish proportions. Three of the better works–Luxo, Jr., Red’s Dream, and Oilspot and Lipstick–were already shown in the last International Tournee of Animation, and many others may be familiar from TV. Read more

Jose Alvaro Morais’s first feature, O bobo, winner of first prize at the Locarno Film Festival, is set in 1978 during the onset of the right-wing backlash against the Portuguese revolution. A group of friends are staging a play adapted from Alexandre Herculano’s novel The Jester–a mythic romance built around scenes from Portuguese history–in the abandoned film studio Lisboa Filmes. The film alternates between scenes from the play and intrigues among the friends who are putting it on–including the murder of the instigator of the project, whose body is discovered in the studio during the rehearsal of the final scene. Six years in the making, the film presupposes a certain knowledge about Portuguese culture and recent history that admittedly I don’t have; but even though I occasionally found myself at sea in following all the significations, the beauty of the mise en scene and Mario de Carvalho’s photography, and the grace with which Morais negotiates between different time frames and modes of narration, kept me entranced. Combining the meditative offscreen dialogue of a film like India Song with the use of a historical play to investigate national identity (as in Ruiz’s Life Is a Dream), The Jester offers a complex, multilayered view of revolutionary retrenchment that is worthy to stand alongside some of the best films of Manoel de Oliveira. Read more

Bernardo Bertolucci’s visually ravishing spectacle about the life of Pu Yi (1905-1967), the last Chinese emperor, is a genuine rarity: a blockbuster that manages to be historically instructive and intensely personal at the same time. Pu Yi (played by three children at ages 3, 8, and 15, and by John Lone as an adult) remained an outsider to contemporary Chinese history for most of his life, being confined to the Forbidden City for 12 years, seeking assistance from the Japanese after he was ousted in 1924, and winding up as the puppet ruler of the new state of Manchukuo in the early 30s; after Japan’s surrender in 1945, he spent five years in a Siberian prison camp and nine more as a political prisoner of the People’s Republic of China before he was released as an ordinary Chinese citizen in 1959, ending his days happily as a gardener and researcher. Interestingly, Bertolucci uses Pu Yi’s remoteness from China as an objective correlative of our own cultural distance as Westerners (virtually all of the dialogue is rendered in English), and, with scriptwriter Mark Peploe, brilliantly employs a dialectical flashback structure that shows Pu Yi’s life from the vantage point of his “reeducation” in the 50s. Read more

Jean-Luc Godard’s short feature about the PLO was initially shot with Jean-Pierre Gorin in the Middle East in 1970, but when he edited the footage with Anne-Marie Mieville several years later, many of the soldiers that had been filmed were dead. Reflecting on this fact, as well as on the problems of recording history and of making political statements on film, Godard and Mieville produced a thoughtful and provocative essay on the subject. Coming after the mainly and reaches of Godard’s “Dziga Vertov Group” period (roughly 1968-1973), when his efforts were largely directed toward severing his relation with commercial filmmaking and toward forging new ways to “make films politically,” this film assimilates many of the lessons he learned without the posturing and masochism that marred much of his earlier work. The results are a rare form of lucidity and purity. All proportions guarded, it is a little bit like hearing John Coltrane’s “Blues for Bessie” after the preceding explorations of “Crescent” and “Wise One” on his Crescent album. This film, which will be projected in a video copy, will be accompanied by a lecture by Dr. Julia Lesage. (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Tuesday, December 15, 6:00, 443-3737) Read more

To the editors:

Jonathan Rosenbaum screwed up in his review of the movie Cross My Heart [“A Time to Lie,” November 20]. Rick Moranis, not Martin Short, portrayed the unctuous and egocentric Dick Cavett on SCTV, including the SCTV skit in which Cavett interviewed himself, which was one of the most brilliantly conceived, written, and performed moments in the history of television. Short was probably backstage at the time, playing Kate Hepburn rearranging her privates.

President, Committee to Discredit Dick Cavett, Martin Short, and Jonathan Rosenbaum

Chicago Read more

Rita Moreno and Anne Francis were still in their teens when this 1950 melodrama about inhuman conditions in a girls’ correctional school was made. Paul Henreid plays a crusading doctor; Catherine McLeod and Anne Jackson are also in the cast; and Bernard Vorhaus directed. This is the concluding program in the Psychotronic Film Society’s They Hate You month. Read more

Jean-Luc Godard’s short feature about the PLO was initially shot with Jean-Pierre Gorin in the Middle East in 1970, but when he edited the footage with Anne-Marie Mieville several years later, many of the soldiers that had been filmed were dead. Reflecting on this fact, as well as on the problems of recording history and of making political statements on film, Godard and Mieville produced a thoughtful and provocative essay on the subject. Coming after the mainly arid reaches of Godard’s Dziga Vertov Group period (roughly 1968-1973), when his efforts were largely directed toward severing his relation with commercial filmmaking and toward forging new ways to make films politically, this film assimilates many of the lessons he learned without the posturing and masochism that marred much of his earlier work. The results are a rare form of lucidity and purity. All proportions guarded, it is a little bit like hearing John Coltrane’s Blues for Bessie after the preceding explorations of Crescent and Wise One on his Crescent album. (JR) Read more

This 1958 Pathecolor camp item pits the isle of Wongo (with beautiful cavewomen and ugly cavemen) against the nearby isle of Goona (with beautiful cavemen and ugly cavewomen). The film scholars of the Psychotronic Film Society have discovered that two versions of this film were madea serious release version, and a more obviously comic version designed to be shown at military bases; they will be showing the latter along with clips from the former as part of their They Hate You month. Cedric Rutherford wrote the script and James Wolcott directed; the cast includes Ed Fury and Adrienne Bourbeau (not to be confused with former nude model and TV star Adrienne Barbeau, according to Steven H. Scheuer). (JR) Read more

Oliver Stone’s follow-up to Platoondeveloped from a script by Stanley Weiser, who is credited as cowriter with Stonejuxtaposes an experienced multimillionaire corporate raider (Michael Douglas) and a young broker faced with moral conflicts (Charlie Sheen), set against the background of the bull market in 1985 and 1986. Structured like a morality play, the film flirts in its first part with a megabuck fantasy out of Ayn Rand, with comic book flourishes and campy macho initiations suggesting an urban western; the second half is a masochistic liberal fantasy that asks us to feel guilty about the first part. The oscillation of the young hero between bad father (Douglas) and good father (Martin Sheen) recapitulates the same metaphysics as Platoon, and the only function of women in this world is to serve as status symbols: Daryl Hannah as first prize is given such conflicting drives that she eventually cancels herself out of the movie; an unrecognizable Sean Young serves as Douglas’s parodically proplike wife, and the young hero’s mother is conspicuously absent. Stone and Weiser keep much of this entertaining with rapid-fire ticker-tape dialogue and brisk pacing; there’s an amusing montage sequence about outfitting a yuppie apartment, and other assorted scenic splendors along the way. Read more

Danny DeVito’s directorial debut (1987) stars himself and Billy Crystal as two writers who become embroiled, through a misunderstanding, in a comic plot of prefigured cross murders patterned after Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. For all his labors, DeVito can’t entirely transcend the silliness and dogged unpleasantness of Stu Silver’s script, although he intermittently squeezes some genuine laughs out of the material just the same. Perhaps more importantly, he shows a directorial inventiveness that becomes especially apparent in the editing and various flashy transitions, which augurs well for the future. As performers, Crystal gets a bit overheated while DeVito himself is a mite undercooked; but Kim Greist is delightful as Crystal’s tolerant girlfriend, Kate Mulgrew adequate as his scheming ex-wife, and Anne Ramsey suitably grotesque as DeVito’s tyrannical mother. PG-13. 88 min. (JR) Read more

Jose Nascimento’s first feature is a parody of paranoid film noir set in wartime Lisbon. The eponymous hero, played by Joaquim Alameida (who starred in the Tavianis’ Good Morning Babylon), investigates the case of a headless corpse found near the docks, and stumbles upon a worldwide conspiracy. Based on a character invented by journalist and novelist Reinaldo Ferreira, depicted in the film as a morphine addict, this comic spy thriller mixes Portuguese history with nostalgic cinephilia. Read more

Joao Botelho’s 1985 feature, shot by Raul Ruiz’s cinematographer Acacio de Almeida, intercuts two stories dealing in separate ways with Portugal’s colonialist past in Angola and Mozambique. In the first, set in 1973, a patrol of Portuguese soldiers looking for rebels becomes lost in an African jungle; in the second, set in 1985, an elderly couple leave their farm in the Minho region to visit the widow of their eldest sonkilled in Africa in 1973and their younger son in Lisbon. Reportedly influenced by both Ozu and Manoel de Oliveira, this film won first prize at the 1986 Rio International Film Festival. Read more