The End of Violence
A cool contemplation of the relation of violence to American culture, this is easily Wim Wenders’s most watchable and entertaining movie since Wings of Desire (1988). Bill Pullman plays a wealthy producer of violent action movies who is kidnapped; Andie MacDowell plays his wife, and others in the cast include Gabriel Byrne as a surveillance expert, Traci Lind as a stuntwoman, Loren Dean as a police inspector, and K. Todd Freeman as a gangsta rap producer. The witty script is by Nicholas Klein, and the sense of LA space and drift is nicely caught. Fine Arts.
–Jonathan Rosenbaum
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The 33rd Chicago International Film Festival
When people ask me to compare the Chicago International Film Festival to other festivals, it’s hard to know how to respond. I attend some festivals as their guest, and for the past four years I’ve gone to Cannes as a member of the New York film festival selection committee. As part of that same stint, which just concluded, I’ve also spent two weeks in New York in late summer for the last four years previewing seven or eight dozen additional films. I go to some other festivals–Berlin two years ago, Vienna later this month–as a jury member. By contrast I don’t “attend” the Chicago festival in the same fashion, because I’m usually too busy coordinating the Reader’s coverage of the event, not to mention the paper’s coverage of current releases and the International Children’s Film Festival. The closest I’ve come to attending in any extensive way was in 1992, when I served on the main jury and therefore saw all the films in competition–creating a logistical nightmare that entailed staying at a downtown hotel with my fellow jurors and thus relating to Chicago and the festival as if I were a tourist.
Being what it is and coming when it does, the Chicago festival can’t help but be something of a hand-me-down event, skimming items from various international festivals that precede it and adding a few selections of its own. Read more
I still haven’t figured out why there’s an apparent necessity to transfer most of Henry James’s fiction to the screen, especially when it seems perfectly at home on the page. But in the mechanical run-through of the James oeuvre that’s been carried out in recent years by film companies stuck for ideas, this is the best English-speaking adaptation I’ve seennot nearly as good as The Innocents (1961), but still better to my taste than either Merchant-Ivory’s or Campion’s, not to mention a good many lesser lights. Directing a script by Carol Doyle, Agnieszka Holland coaxes a performance out of Jennifer Jason Leigh that’s less tic ridden and show-offy than usual, and veterans Albert Finney and Maggie Smith fare even better; the only serious mistake here is Ben Chaplin’s pointless impersonation of Montgomery Clift in The Heiress (a 1949 film based on the play derived from the same novella). The period flavor is charming and Holland’s feeling for the moral nuances seems fairly Jamesian; still, why exactly we need this movie when we already have the book is anybody’s guess. (JR) Read more
The X-Files’s David Duchovny plays a drug-addicted doctor who loses his license and is then hired by a drug lord (Timothy Hutton) to perform impromptu surgery after gunfights. Although Andy Wilson’s direction never gets beyond the pedestrian, the script by Mark Haskell Smith makes this slightly better than average as a crime thriller; back in the 50s it would have been strictly routine. With Angelina Jolie, Michael Massee, and Peter Stormare. (JR) Read more
The House Is Black
Forugh Farrokhzad’s 20-odd-minute, black-and-white 1962 documentary about a leper colony in northern Iran is the most powerful Iranian film I’ve seen. Farrokhzad (1935-’67) is commonly 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 colony–people eating, various medical treatments, children at school and at play–that’s spiritual, unflinching, and beautiful in ways that have no apparent Western counterparts; to my eyes and ears, it registers like a prayer. This beautiful 35-millimeter print, longer than the video that was a Critic’s Choice last March and recently subtitled for the New York film festival, will be sent back to Switzerland after these two screenings, so don’t expect to see it again in the foreseeable future. On the same program, four recent Iranian videos, all made for the same new private production company in Iran: The Day the Aunt Was Ill by Hannah Makhmalbaf (daughter of Mohsen); The Project by Abbas Kiarostami and his son Bahman, in which the father acts out the leading role in his masterpiece The Taste of Cherry as a “visual screenplay” for the film to come; Ardekoul, a documentary on the recent Khorasan earthquake by Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon); and Iraj Karimi’s Tehran’s World War Cemetery. Read more
Creosote and More: Videos by Eric Saks
Eight years have passed since Eric Saks released his remarkable first feature, the pseudodocumentary Forevermore: Biography of a Leach Lord, but judging from this eye-opening collection of videos, which he’ll present in person, he hasn’t been idle. Touch Tone (1995), reportedly also available in a graphic novel version, loosely recalls Forevermore in its overall form: a hallucinatory first-person monologue preoccupied with technology plays over a surreal collage of processed images. Combining all sorts of found materials, the film at times evokes the animated work of Louis Klahr. The sinister KNBR (1993) employs fatuous radio talk over home movies and obscure printed titles, all of it apparently grouped around the subject of Torrance, California. Gun Talk (Part 1) (1991) features Sluggo from the comic strip Nancy and various nightmarishly masked and voice-distorted individuals discussing firearm-related experiences. But none of these quite prepared me for Saks’s latest work, the 42-minute Creosote. In infernal black and white and spooky multiple exposure, it recounts a fractured narrative as creepy as any of the millennial visions found in Don DeLillo’s Underworld. A scary and essential program. Kino-Eye Cinema at Xoinx Tea Room, 2933 N. Lincoln, Friday, October 3, 7:00, 773-384-5533. Read more
Jean Bach, director of the remarkable A Great Day in Harlem, utilizes the same techniques of oral history and thumbnail jazz portraiture to tell the story of why Dizzy Gillespie was fired from the Cab Calloway band and how this transformed his career. This isn’t on the same level as Bach’s previous film, but it’s still a precious document, especially for its footage of Gillespie shortly before his death. 21 min. (JR) Read more
Born in 1908, Manoel de Oliveira is the only working director anywhere in the world who started his career in the silent era. For this meditative feature he enlisted the somewhat younger Marcello Mastroianniin what proved to be Mastroianni’s last performanceto play someone very much like de Oliveira, an aging film director named Manoel setting out on a car trip with a few of his coworkers. Basically an exploration of the director’s Portuguese roots and the French and Portuguese roots of one of the actors, the film is laden with memories both personal and historical, and associations both cultural and familial; a moving (as well as slow-moving) road movie, it resembles many of de Oliveira’s other works in its paradoxical combination of 19th-century modernism and aristocratic Marxism. Not the least of its oddities is the fact that it starts out as a film about Manoel, then shifts focus halfway through to the French actor Jean-Yves Gautier, whose father was Portuguese and who’s meeting his Portuguese aunt for the first time. On the basis of a single viewing, I wouldn’t call this a great film on the level of de Oliveira’s Doomed Love or his recent Inquietude, but it’s one of his best since Valley of Abraham and one of his most accessible. Read more
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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