Janusz Kaminski, the cinematographer of Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, directs his first feature, a supernatural thriller that seems bent on remaking The Exorcist with some of the stylish look of Seven. Alas, look is everything here and storytelling and characters are next to nothing, so what emerges is oddly ineffectual and uninvolvingvisually striking set pieces set loose in a void. The plot has something to do with a famous writer (Ben Chaplin) who doesn’t believe in the devil but who gradually learns from a believer (Winona Ryder) that he’s scheduled to turn into the Antichrist himself. With Philip Baker Hall, Elias Koteas, and John Hurt; Pierce Gardner and Betsy Stahl are credited with the script. 97 min. (JR) Read more
Not a rerelease of Jerry Lewis’s second-best feature, alas, nor even a remake, though it comes from the same studio. Instead, Paramount deemed it wiser to give us a stridently unfunny minstrel show, insulting to audience and cast alike, starring Tim Meadows as a talk-show host and philandering black stud who has a lot of angry husbands chasing him. When the husbands briefly break into a musical comedy number, I thought for a moment that director Reginald Hudlin was giving Kenneth Branagh in Love’s Labour’s Lost a run for his money, but I suspect the challenge here was different: to see if he could direct a movie blindfolded and wearing earplugs. With Karyn Parsons, Billy Dee Williams, Tiffani Thiessen, Lee Evans, and Will Ferrell; Meadows, Dennis McNichols, and Andrew Steele worked on the script. 96 min. (JR) Read more
I haven’t read Herman Melville’s Pierre, or the Ambiguities, but it’s reportedly director Leos Carax’s favorite novel. What there is of a plot to this 1999 modern-dress adaptation, which Carax wrote with Lauren Sedofsky and Jean-Pol Fargeau, concerns a wealthy author (Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gerard) living in Normandy in semi-incestuous content with his mother (Catherine Deneuve). Upon encountering a soulful eastern European war refugee (Katerina Golubeva) who claims to be his half sister, he runs out on his wealthy fiancee (Delphine Chuillot) and retreats to a funky part of Paris to write another novel. There’s clearly some sort of self-portraiture going on here. A 19th-century romantic inhabiting a universe as mythological as Jean Cocteau’s, Carax (Boy Meets Girl, Bad Blood, The Lovers on the Bridge) has a wonderful cinematic eye and a personal feeling for editing rhythms, and his sense of overripeness and excess virtually defines him. He’s as self-indulgent as they come, and we’d all be much the poorer if he weren’t. Characteristic of his private sense of poetics is this film’s final dedication, near the end of the closing credits, “to my three sisters”–it appears on-screen for less than a second. Pola, incidentally, is the acronym of the French title of Melville’s novel; X alludes to the fact that Carax used the tenth draft of the script. Read more
What defines a successful film festival? Judging by the noises the media make about this topic, a successful festival is one that launches some Hollywood producer’s latest studio release–and allows him to expand his swimming pool. Anything that might get in the way of such a project–the art of film, say, or the curiosity of a festival audience about what’s happening elsewhere in the world–is to be discouraged in the pages of the trade papers, which generally set the tone for the mainstream.
By this standard, out of the seven festivals I’ve attended so far this year–in Rotterdam, Austin, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Pesaro, Montreal, and Toronto–only the last was a solid success, and the 36th Chicago International Film Festival, which begins screening its hundred or so programs this weekend, will be another flop. No swimming pools will be expanded as a result of any of its screenings–not even its few prerelease showings of Hollywood movies, most of which will open commercially a week or so later.
I’m grateful. I won’t be bugged by local publicists or any of their west- and east-coast associates who in late August start deluging me with calls, E-mails, and faxes about interviewing actors and directors in Toronto in September–publicists who know that I don’t do infotainment junkets but are apparently so browbeaten by their bosses they feel they have to ask me anyway, sometimes repeatedly. Read more
After making what are still probably their two best features, the Coen brothers came up with their worst (2000), a piece of pop nihilism about three convicts (George Clooney, Tim Blake Nelson, and John Turturro) on the run. Fargo dealt with their home state (Minnesota) and the present and The Big Lebowski with LA at the time of the gulf war. But when it comes to Mississippi and the Depression, the Coens are so contemptuous they can’t even come up with characters. What they really seem to care about are yuppie collectibles, like Robert Johnson albums. A movie’s in trouble when its best sequence is a whimsical musical number featuring the Ku Klux Klanwhich the Coens seem to regard as yet another antique. With John Goodman, Holly Hunter, and Charles Durning. 106 min. (JR) Read more
Fans of Woody Allen’s noncomic features might well go for this glum spiritual study of a physician adjustingmainly with dignity and common senseto his own death from inoperable cancer. Despite the jokey title, this has only a modicum of wisecracks, and its mordant Polish wisdom, while genuine, mainly seems all too familiar. It begins with a medieval-looking film-within-the-film about a horse thief and the religious guide who prepares him offscreen for death by hanging, then shifts to the doctor on the movie’s location; he remains the focus thereafter, as he gradually learns about his terminal illness. I’ve never seen any of Krzysztof Zanussi’s most famous films, which are highly respected, and perhaps I approached this picture with the wrong kind of expectations. It certainly isn’t a bad film, but it doesn’t hold a candle to Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Zbigniew Zapasiewicz is commanding as the hero; Krystyna Janda costars. 99 min. (JR) Read more
If you’re intrigued by notions of virtual sex in cyberspace, this Belgian-French SF effort by Pierre-Paul Renders seems calculated to exhaust that fascination. The eponymous, agoraphobic hero in the not-so-distant future hasn’t left his home in eight years, and after his on-line psychoanalyst signs him up with a dating service and his insurance broker hooks him up with specialized prostitutes, a procession of real or virtual potential sex partners appears on his computer screen. The minimalist conceit of this movie is that Thomas is heard but never seen; his subjective stand-inas in Robert Montgomery’s 1946 Lady in the Lake and in Orson Welles’s unrealized screenplay adapting Heart of Darknessis the movie camera. Such a gimmickcamera eye equals Ibecomes particularly monotonous when the camera doesn’t move: Thomas is a couch potato as well as a recluse, and a terminal bore to boot. The women, real and simulated, are only slightly more interesting, and then only when they talk back. 97 min. (JR) Read more
The original French title of Melvin Van Peebles’s crudely overblown farce means The Tale of the Full Belly, referring both to the name of the provincial bistro (Le Ventre Plein) run by a middle-aged couple (Andrea Ferreol and Jacques Boudet) with an unmarried, pregnant daughter and to the faked pregnancy of the poor black woman (Meiji U. Tum’Si) they hire as a waitress. That hoax eventually allows the couple, posing as racially tolerant liberal employers, to pass off their daughter’s baby as hers. The flamboyant manner of this feature puts it in the category of the cinema of vulgar excess, and the highly eclectic visual style (leering wide-angle close-ups, fast action in the manner of silent slapstick, arbitrary superimpositions) seems to reflect Van Peebles’s boredom with the material. I’m not clear why the story is set in 1967; one possible reason is that Van Peebles wrote it back then and had to wait 30-odd years to find financing for it. In French with subtitles. 102 min. (JR) Read more
As a 13-year-old, I liked this low-budget Universal-International production (1956) about ancient Sumerians, but older people told me it was bad and, roughly a decade later, lots of others decided it was camp. Virgil Vogel directed; with John Agar. 78 min. (JR) Read more
Samira Gloor-Fadel’s nonfiction feature about Berlin drifts in more ways than one, and the sense that it’s a notebook is captured by the French subtitle, which means provisional title. Mixing color with black and white, this 1999 Swiss-French coproduction is less a documentary or essay than a box full of loose objects, some of them fairly interesting. We see and hear Wim Wenders ruminating about Berlin, film and video, stories, texts, buildings, and absence, mainly in French and sometimes in conversation with architect Jean Nouvel. We hear (but don’t see) R Read more
Philippe Garrel’s silent, 35-millimeter black-and-white experimental feature of 1968. Shot in Munich and environs, it’s less a narrative than a series of allegorical scenes in which actors Bernadette Lafont and Laurent Terzieff (both of whom Garrel had just met at a film festival) and a little boy portray a kind of hippie nuclear family. Beautifully filmed and inflected (the lighting and camera movements are especially striking and intense), often totally enigmatic, this haunting and poetic work helps to explain why Garrel has been a key influence on Leos Carax. Cinematographer Michel Fournier, who often worked with Garrel during this period, considers this their best collaboration, and it’s easy to see why, especially in the ingenious filming of both natural settings and interiors to give this low-budget effort a studio flavor. (Some moments of sped-up action suggest that Garrel may have intended this to be seen at 18 frames per second, the traditional silent-film speednot an option, alas, for this screening, at which the film will run a little over an hour.) (JR) Read more
This 1968 feature was one of the first Zanzibar films, a group of low-budget experimental works made in France during the late 1960s. By turns fascinating and frustrating, it mixes playful nihilism with political exhortation. At one point an abstraction of a flashing ambulance light leads to a flicker sequence of black and white frames, and later a dialogue plays out in voice-over against a black screen. Though the film has minimal dialogue, a number of monologues shot in long takes seem crucial: in one sequence, filmed at the University of Nanterre only a month before the revolutionary action of May 1968, art critic Alain Jouffroy lectures on the need for revolution to a large hall with only four people in it. Director Serge Bard made this first film at age 21 and directed two more before converting to Islam and renouncing cinema in 1969. 75 min. (FC) Read more
Alain Resnais’ film maudit in more ways than one, this haunting and rarely seen 1984 feature, his third and final collaboration with screenwriter Jean Gruault, is one of his boldest experiments in musical form. Resnais commissioned avant-garde composer Hans Werner Henze, who previously wrote the score to Muriel, to write a chamber piece consisting of 52 discontinuous short sections; until the film’s final shot, when this music is finally combined with the action, it is performed exclusively between scenes, over a black background that is most often traversed by drifting motes resembling snowflakes. The plot, featuring the same actors as Resnais’ subsequent Melo, is a love story about an archaeologist (Pierre Arditi) who is pronounced dead by a doctor in the film’s first scene only to come back to life a few moments later; though he and his devoted wife (Sabine Azema) are atheists, they are subsequently preoccupied with the meaning and reality of death and how this will or won’t separate them, which they discuss with a couple who are their friends and neighbors (Andre Dussollier and Fanny Ardant), both Lutheran ministers. A creepy film that was being written while Francois Truffaut (whom Gruault worked with often, on films including Jules and Jim and The Green Room) was dying, this recalls certain efforts of Ingmar Bergman in both its austerity and its morbidity; the music functions basically as a zone of meditation as well as a kind of metaphor for death and nonbeingthough many of these passages are quite brief and sometimes the motes are simply distracting. Read more
Prior to its hyperbolic final act, this is one of Robert Altman’s most skillful and least bombastic features in some time. But I’m uncomfortable with the blatant misogyny at its center, which isn’t mitigated by the fact that the script was written by a womanAnne Rapp, who also wrote Cookie’s Fortune. This comedy about a devoted gynecologist in Dallas, well played by Richard Gere, takes much of its energy from enumerating the ways that most of the women in Dr. T’s upper-class orbit turn out to be basket cases: his patients, his wife (who has a nervous breakdown and regresses to her girlhood early in the picture), his receptionist, and at least one of his daughters (a closet lesbian about to get married). The most prominent exception is the golf pro he falls for (Helen Hunt), and though the film doesn’t quite fault her for her independence, it confusedly treats the hero’s desires as far more important than hers. Dallas is lampooned as glibly and creatively as Nashville was in the Altman film of that title, and the mise en scene and overlapping dialogue are both handled deftly. With Farrah Fawcett, Laura Dern, Shelley Long, Liv Tyler, and Kate Hudson. 122 min. Read more
This grim 1970 film by David and Albert Maysles documents the Rolling Stones concert in Altamont, California, where one spectator was stabbed to death by the Hell’s Angels. It’s been widely applauded as a more truthful look at the counterculture than Woodstock offered earlier that year, but Woodstock is a great film and Gimme Shelter, despite some great Stones footage, is crippled by its rhetorical pretensions. As Dave Kehr wrote in his original Reader capsule, The film is a strong example of the cinema verite style at work, yet few films of the school show up the crisis of its ‘noninvolvement’ policy more tellingly. There is a horrible sense of helplessness as the Maysleses’ camera looks on while the Hell’s Angels stab an unruly fan to death, and the implications of hippie fascism contained in that image are not meaningfully developed in light of the film’s own excessive idolization of Jagger and company. The camera that looks up too easily looks down. 91 min. (JR) Read more
