Daily Archives: December 1, 1987

So Young, So Bad

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

Here And Elsewhere

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

The Wild Women Of Wongo

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

Wall Street

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

Throw Momma From The Train

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

Reporter X

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

A Portuguese Farewell

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

Partner

Bernardo Bertolucci’s third and seldom-shown feature is very much a reflection of its period1968but no less fascinating for that. Loosely based on Dostoyevski’s The Double, and starring the remarkable Pierre Clementi, who also plays his own doppelganger, the film was made at the height of Godard’s influence on younger European directors, and Bertolucci’s first color film reflects his master in its loose narrative structure, its focus on student radicalism, its satire on consumerism (which also shows the influence of Frank Tashlin), and its rampant cinephilia (F.W. Murnau being the most important and frequent citation). A bit all over the place, the film lacks the heartbreaking conviction of Before the Revolution, but it soars with manic, runaway energy. 105 min. In Italian with subtitles. (JR) Read more

Overboard

This old-fashioned and enjoyable romantic comedy relies on a Hollywood staple that was more or less minted in the 30sthe spoiled heiress who becomes humanized by mingling with the common folkalthough significantly this 80s update feels that it has to give the lady amnesia before she can enjoy getting her hands dirty. Goldie Hawn plays the wealthy shrew in question; Kurt Russell is a carpenter she mistreats, a widower with four sons who eventually gets even by subjecting Hawn to working-class wifely chores after she falls off her yacht and loses her memory. This scenario sounds potentially nasty, and certainly both classes are caricatured. But in fact both Leslie Dixon’s script and TV sitcom specialist Garry Marshall’s direction are basically warm, funny, and lighthearted, and the relaxed amiability of the two leadsas well as Chicagoan Michael Hagerty and Roddy McDowall (who doubles as executive producer)helps to make this good family entertainment. (JR) Read more

Leonard Part 6

Bill Cosby produced, furnished the story, and plays the lead in this comedy-action movie, written by Jonathan Reynolds and directed by Paul Weiland. Cosby is a retired secret agent and restaurateur who pits his skill against a female vegetarian villain (Gloria Foster) who manipulates lobsters, frogs, ostriches, and other animals in a plot to take over the world. Joe Don Baker is the hero’s boss, Tom Courtenay is his English butler, and Elmer Bernstein supplies the music. Full of Coca-Cola ads, the film was something of an embarrassment for many of its participants; Cosby himself apologized for it on TV. (JR) Read more

A Girl In Summer

Vitor Goncalves’s first feature is a tale of disillusionment: after an aimless summer, Isabel (Isabel Galhardo) returns to her father’s house and begins to contemplate a romantic involvement with Diogo (Diogo Doria), a radio director who directs her father’s scripts, but nothing much happens. Despite effusive praise for this film by Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal’s premier filmmaker, I was rather disillusioned along with the heroine; while the filmmaking itself is graceful and subtle in its handling of moods, the script left me feeling undernourished. (JR) Read more

The Computer Animation Show

The 37 items on view in this package 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 objects resembling people/animals and 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 a while 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 Peltriefeaturing a digitized pianist who resembles the Elephant Manthe posthuman tendency assumes truly nightmarish proportions. Three of the better worksLuxo, Jr., Red’s Dream, and Oilspot and Lipstickhave been shown in the International Tournee of Animation, and many others may be familiar from TV. Read more

Comedy!

The main problem with Jacques Doillon’s 1987 filmdevoted exclusively to the problems encountered by a couple when the woman starts to imagine the man’s previous affairs in his country houseis that the script doesn’t offer us or the actors more to work with. Jane Birkin and Alain Souchon both attack the premise gamely, but the fact remains that two-actor films are notoriously difficult to sustain, even with the best talent available: The Four Poster, Sleuth, and even Carl Dreyer’s seldom seen Two People all have related difficulties, and it doesn’t seem coincidental that all three are adaptations of plays. Comedy! was written for the screen, but nevertheless seems just as stagy as the others. Still, for those interested in following Doillon’s development, it remains an instructive and occasionally enjoyable experiment. (JR) Read more

Broadcast News

Writer-director-producer James L. Brooks’s romantic comedy, his first film after Terms of Endearment, takes on the world of network news in one of the best entertainments of 1987. Holly Hunter plays a gifted and idealistic producer, and her performance is something of a revelation: her short, feisty, socially gauche, aggressive-compulsive character may be the most intricately layered portrait of a career woman that contemporary Hollywood has given us. Albert Brooks as a bright, caustic behind-the-scenes reporter and her best friend, who hankers after something more in both departments, gives the performance of his career. Completing the triumvirate and romantic triangle is William Hurt, also at his best, as a rapidly rising anchorman who lacks the creativity and intelligence of his two colleagues, but beats them hands down in public charisma. The movie is at its finest when it shows all three working together to produce the evening newsan exciting and instructive look into the processes involvedand at its worst when it saddles them with a pat prologue and epilogue showing the characters years before and after the film’s main events. Shot entirely in Washington, D.C., the film is full of relevant insights into the kinds of compromises, trade-offs, and combinations of skills and personalities that produce media, and the personal stories are deftly integrated. Read more

Bell Diamond

The strengths of maverick independent Jon Jost’s seventh featurecharting the marital breakup of a Vietnam veteran (Marshall Gaddis) and his frustrated wife (Sarah Wyss) in Butte, Montanaare antithetical to what one would expect from a Hollywood feature on the same subject. Shot on a $25,000 budget, with a story developed by the filmmaker and cast and completely improvised dialogue, the film deals with characters who are neither articulate nor particularly attractive, but pays them the kind of respect and attention that they wouldn’t normally receive. Jost’s feeling for landscapes and domestic interiors remains fresh and unpredictable, and his mise en scene comprises a string of perpetual discoveries. Because Jost eschews the kind of dramatic developments and climaxes that commercial films have taught us to expect, the impact of the film’s original form of realism arrives only gradually, but once it registers, it becomes indelible. The title, incidentally, refers to the abandoned copper mine in Butte where a significant portion of the action is set. (JR) Read more