I’m not sure what the title means, but this is an affecting heartbreaker about a con man (Harvey Keitel) trying to raise two daughters in Oregon during the 50s and early 60s after his wife (Kelly Lynch) dies, adapted by Kristine Johnson and Davia Nelson from a book by Sheila Ballyntine and directed by Anthony Drazan (Zebrahead). The script is brave enough to jump around in time but not always accomplished enough to bring it off, and for all his sensitivity Drazan sometimes seems to be taking on more than he can handle; nevertheless the movie leaves a poignant aftertaste. With Fairuza Balk and Elisabeth Moss (as the two sisters), Chris Penn, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Seymour Cassel. (JR) Read more
A conventional, dull soap opera (1992) by Diane Kurys about middle-class adultery as a way of life. Isabelle Huppert plays a novelist married to an architect with a long-term mistress and two kids from that relationship; she becomes involved with a pop musician who’s married as well, and various recriminations and complications ensue. The French title is Apres l’amour, but the U.S. distributor apparently wanted to make it sound more upbeat. (JR) Read more
An hour-long documentary (1993) by Marianne Trench about cyberculture and its many spin-offs, including some fascinating interviews with William Gibson, Michael Synergy, Timothy Leary, In Living Color’s Vernon Reid, and others. It looks like a cross between a commercial and a music video, but if you can get past the irritating breeziness, which places far-flung speculations and no-brain promos on the same level, this offers plenty of food for thought. Gibson in particular makes a fine interview subject. (JR) Read more
Tim Burton’s Ed Wood concludes with the statement that no animals were harmed during the making of his reverential, if fanciful, biopic, apparently because of some adventures with a rubber octopus during the shooting of this grade-Z 1955 Wood opus. This stupid and inept but unwaveringly personal horror effort stars Bela Lugosi, in his last speaking role, as a scientist who uses atomic energy to create superbeings in a swamp, including Tor Johnson, Tony McCoy (whose father supplied the film’s budget), and Loretta King. Incidentally, contrary to the Burton film, a stunt double wrestles here with the rubber octopus, not Lugosi, proving that Wood was more considerate of his ailing friend than legend would have it. Also known as Bride of the Atom. 69 min. (JR) Read more
A program of independent and industrial videos, all winners of a festival-run competition: Will Vinton’s clay animated God Down Death, Ted Kay and Allen Secher’s Holocaust documentary Choosing One’s Way, Mark Pedersen’s corporate sales video We’ll Be Right Back, and Tom Gliserman’s A Diversity Tale. Read more
Tim Burton’s charming black-and-white fantasy biopic about the late Edward D. Wood Jr. (Johnny Depp), a writer-director-actor at the lowest reaches of Z-budget filmmaking who won posthumous cult status by virtue of his eccentric personality (as a straight transvestite) and his very personal form of ineptitude. Such a project requires the historical imagination to re-create a time before camp had entered the mainstream sensibility as an attitude of affection; instead Burton and writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski opt for a pie-eyed postmodernist fancy that in effect transports today’s audience back into the 50s (derisive at a premiere of Bride of the Monster, respectful at a premiere of Plan 9, absurdly set in Hollywood’s plush Pantages Theater). As a result Wood’s singularly miserable and abject career, which ended in alcoholism and indigence, is magically transformed into the feel-good movie of 1994, budgeted for a cool $18 million and radiating tenderness (at least for the guys; nearly all the women are regarded as betrayers and spoilsports). Yet the movie still manages some remarkable achievementsin particular, a tour de force performance by Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi (whose friendship with Wood becomes the film’s emotional center) and some glorious cinematography by Stefan Czapsky. Read more
Scripted by Ingmar Bergman and directed by his son Daniel, this autobiographical reverie about the older Bergman’s childhood and family life is set mainly in the country during the summer of 1926, though there are flash-forwards to 1968, when Bergman’s pastor father, nearing death, undergoes a crisis involving his relationship to his late wife. Shot in beautiful locations and often affecting, this can’t be called a Bergman film in the sense that Fanny and Alexander can, apart from its subject matter. The direction of Daniel Bergman is competent rather than inspired; it’s also relatively detached, but insofar as Bergman fils is wrestling with his father’s demons rather than his own, the distance seems understandable. With Thommy Berggren, Henrik Linnros, Jakob Leygraf, and Lena Endre. (JR) Read more
A ramshackle underground SF satire (1993) set and shot in the self-absorbed art world of lower Manhattan, written, produced, and directed by Joe Gibbons, who also plays one of the lead parts; Emily Breer was the editor and took charge of the postproduction, yet the film lacks the freshness and weirdness of her own work. Gibbons plays a mad scientist who’s developed a technique for transferring personalities from one person’s body to another; he becomes obsessed with an outlaw artist (played by performance artist Karen Finley) who destroys paintings in various galleries as a form of anarchist, anticapitalist protest. The main limitation here, apart from some dopey dialogue and an exposition dominated by mechanical crosscutting, is a substitution of performance art for acting, which leads to a certain crudeness in propping up the fiction. Among the other performers are Tony Conrad, Tony Oursler, and Adolfas Mekas, who seemed to be having more fun than I was. (JR) Read more
Another adaptation of a John Grisham best-seller (after The Firm and The Pelican Brief), this one involving an 11-year-old boy who unwittingly learns from a Mafia lawyer the whereabouts of a missing U.S. senator’s body just before the lawyer shoots himself, which sends both the crime syndicate and the federal government after the boy. Figuring in are the boy’s younger brother (who’s traumatized by the suicide), their single mother (Mary-Louise Parker), a lawyer (Susan Sarandon) who seeks to protect the boy, and a federal prosecutor (Tommy Lee Jones, of course). Joel Schumacher directed from a script by Akiva Goldsman and Robert Getchell. This isn’t much of a thrillerthe villains are all straight from central casting, and most of the suspense sequences aren’t very suspensefulbut a certain amount of goodwill is stirred up by the gradual bonding between the working-class boy and the lawyer, despite some directorial overemphasis; Sarandon is good as always, though an underscripted Jones just walks through his part. With Anthony LaPaglia, Anthony Edwards, Ossie Davis, and Brad Renfro. (JR) Read more
Enjoyable thriller hokum in the form of a theme-park ride (1994) from first-time director Jan De Bont (a Dutch-born cinematographer best known for his work with Paul Verhoeven), with a script from Graham Yost, also making his feature debut. All the action derives from the untiring efforts of a standard-issue mad bomber (Dennis Hopper), who demands enormous ransoms in order to avert planned disasters but, like John Malkovich in In the Line of Fire, seems principally motivated by Hollywood script conferences. His main scheme, taking up most of the movie’s running time, involves planting a bomb under an LA bus, which will blow up if the bus is driven any slower than 50 miles an hour. Keanu Reeves is the courageous cop who comes to the rescue, assisted by gutsy civilian Sandra Bullock. The deft arabesques of cinematographer Andrzej Bartkowiak juice up the suspense, and if you’re not too put off by the sheer ridiculousness of the story you won’t be bored. With Joe Morton and Jeff Daniels. (JR) Read more
This 1993 black comedy is the least effective work in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy. A Polish hairdresser (Zbigniew Zamachowski) living in Paris, whose French wife (Julie Delpy) divorces him because he’s impotent, is stripped of his job, his money, his passport, and his dignity, and winds up returning to Poland incognito inside a trunk. But taking advantage of the new everything-for-sale economy, he becomes wealthy and hatches a perverse revenge plot. As good as Zamachowski is in the part, his character, like the others in this mordant Polish allegory about equality, seems tailored to fit the message. Moreover, the message, which appears to be that capitalism gives you a hard-on (and that working in a foreign culture, even Paris, leads to impotence), is rather glibly and cursorily spelled out by the slender plot; if we accept it at all, we have to do so mainly on faith. With Janusz Gajos and Jerzy Stuhr, who turn in very able performances. In French and Polish with subtitles. 92 min. (JR) Read more
The best of the so-called Generation X movies I’ve seen so far, this charming first feature by Rory Kelly about a circle of friends in their 30s, and the various complications that ensue when one of the bunch falls helplessly in love with a friend’s wife, owes much of its spark to collective effort, in the script as well as the performances. The film was written by Kelly and five of his own friends–Duane Dell’Amico, Roger Hedden (author of Bodies, Rest & Motion), Neal Jimenez (writer and codirector of The Waterdance), Joe Keenan, and Michael Steinberg (director of Bodies, Rest & Motion and codirector of The Waterdance)–with each of the six scripting a separate scene organized around a specific gathering. A limitation of the collective social portrait drawn is that one never learns what most of the characters do for a living, but the behavioral interplay is often funny and observant. The able cast includes Craig Sheffer (A River Runs Through It), coproducer Eric Stoltz (who starred in both The Waterdance and Bodies, Rest & Motion), and Meg Tilly (Valmont, The Body Snatchers); the striking and effective score is by David Lawrence. Watch for a funny cameo by Quentin Tarantino in a party scene; he claims to be offering a theory about Top Gun, but seems in fact to be describing his own films. Read more
This 1933 film focuses on life in a huge department store from the vantage point of the employees, whose lives are made miserable by a heartless, amoral manager (Warren William). As an attack on ruthless capitalism, it goes a lot further than more recent efforts such as Wall Street, and it’s amazing how much plot and character are gracefully shoehorned into 75 minutes. Adapted by Robert Presnell from a play by David Boehm, and directed by the reliable Roy Del Ruth; with Loretta Young, Wallace Ford, Alice White, and Allen Jenkins. To be screened as part of a zippy double feature with Baby Face, which launches a series of Warner double and triple features–two dozen movies in all–that demonstrates how much you could expect from a night at the movies in the early 30s. Music Box, Friday, September 23. Read more
A 21-year friendship between a lifer (Morgan Freeman) and a New England banker convicted of murder (Tim Robbins) is the focus of this gripping 1994 prison drama, capably directed and adapted by Frank Darabont from Stephen King’s short novel Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. A passing reference to The Count of Monte Cristo offers a partial clue to what makes this movie compelling: though its events occur between the late 40s and late 60s, the film’s 19th-century storytelling mode shows how lives, personalities, and personal agendas develop over years, and how various individuals cope with the dynamics of prison life and totalitarian systems in general. Robbins and Freeman both shine; with Bob Gunton, William Sadler, Clancy Brown, Gil Bellows, and James Whitmore. R, 142 min. (JR) Read more
In an effort to save their marriage, a couple (Meryl Streep and David Strathairn) leave with their son on a white-water raft trip and encounter trouble from a pair of strangers (Kevin Bacon and John C. Reilly). Curtis Hanson (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle) directed this 1994 thriller effectively from a fairly routine script by Denis O’Neill; what really makes this movie worth seeing are the stunning Oregon and Montana locations (filmed in ‘Scope), as well as Streep’s sexy pluck in playing the most capable and resourceful character around. (JR) Read more
