Monthly Archives: December 1990

The Third Animation Celebration

A better-than-average compilation of animated shorts from Czechoslovakia, England, France, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, the USSR, and the U.S., which predominates (12 shorts out of 20). Among the highlights are some excellent examples of claymation from England (Peter Lord’s War Story) and Czechoslovakia (Jan Svankmajer’s Darkness, Light, Darkness), two striking animal fables from the Soviet Union (Alexei Karaev’s Welcome and Mikhail Aldashin’s Poumse), and some funny and imaginative American efforts (Michael A. Kory’s Bonehead, Sylvie Fefer’s Personality Software, George Griffin’s New Fangled, Lidia Przyluska and J. Otto Siebold’s Istanbul (Not Constantinople), and John Kricfalusi’s Big House Blues). One has to put up with inevitable and relatively routine spin-offs from previous animation collections, but otherwise the level of achievement is quite high. (Music Box, Tuesday, December 25, through Thursday, January 3) Read more

Miserable Mistake

To the editors:

May I correct a gaffe that crept into the last sentence of my review of Misery [December 7]? While I originally concluded that “‘success’ in a movie of this kind mainly boils down to successful counterfeiting,” the phrase now reads, “‘success’ in a genre movie mainly boils down to successful counterfeiting” — an inadvertent charge that takes in musicals, westerns, and anything else that might be considered a genre movie. Actually, I was only referring to movies like Misery — psychological horror movies derived from Psycho — not genre movies in general.

Jonathan Rosenbaum Read more

Awakenings

A lot of boiling and scraping has been required to bring Oliver Sacks’s 1973 case studies of postencephalitic patients–victims of the “sleeping sickness” epidemic of the 20s–to the screen, and many of the standard Hollywood blunt instruments are used to perform this task: changing Sacks himself into an American with a different name (Robin Williams), concentrating almost exclusively on a single patient (Robert De Niro), and scenes and emotional reactions that seem designed at times to duplicate the successes of Rain Man and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (among other films). Director Penny Marshall (Big) often aims for slick effects, and Steven Zaillian’s script helps this process along by simplifying Sacks’s book to the point of banality. But the material is still powerful, and the offbeat story of the patients remains both engrossing and moving even after all this abridgment. One needs to raise certain questions about Sacks’s own talent for poeticizing neurological disorders, but at the same time it is difficult not to be affected by his talent. Randy Newman contributed the score, and John Heard, Julie Kavner, Penelope Ann Miller, and Max von Sydow costar. (Starts Thursday, December 20, Esquire) Read more

Phantom

F.W. Murnau made this feature the same year (1922) as his much better known Nosferatu, but it isn’t a fantasy or horror picture, as the title might suggest. Coadapted by Thea von Harbou (M) from a novel by Gerhart Hauptmann, it moves into high gear and becomes downright dazzling at a few privileged expressionist moments that convey the hero’s slightly deranged sensibility, as when surrounding buildings seem to collapse on him or a camera cranes over his head in a nightclub to reveal a motorcyclist. Otherwise somewhat stodgy in its seriousness, Phantom remains a secondary work by a great filmmaker. With Alfred Abel, Lil Dagover, and Lya De Putti. In German with subtitles. 125 min. (JR) Read more

Films By Louis Hock

Three early shorts by experimental filmmaker and School of the Art Institute graduate Louis Hock, who went on to make the remarkable video documentary The Mexican Tapes. All three shorts are structural in orientation: Elements (1972), Silent Reversal (1973), and Zebra (1974). Recommended. (JR) Read more

Havana

A professional Yankee gambler (Robert Redford) falls for the politically committed wife (Lena Olin) of a wealthy Cuban radical (Raul Julia) on the eve of the Cuban revolution (Christmas 1958), and finds himself, like Casablanca’s Rick, getting sucked into politics in spite of himself. The plot’s a lot skimpier than Casablanca’s, but the running time is 40-odd minutes longer, thanks to the film’s efforts (mainly successful) to re-create the place and period in some detailalthough Castro’s rebels don’t put in much of an appearance, and the movie’s determination to slip as many Sinatra tunes as possible into the sound track occasionally seems labored. (David Grusin’s score also features other period hits, romantic schmaltz, and the umpteenth rip-off of Sketches of Spain.) In fact, elaborate visual mounting and iconographic placement of the romantic leads are the movie’s preoccupation, with the overthrow of Batista merely providing local color; American fence-sitting may be part of what the liberal filmmakersscreenwriters Judith Rascoe and David Rayfiel and director Sydney Pollackhave in mind, but the revolution itself is scaled to the hero’s narrow vision, and consequently remains in the wings throughout. What emerges is watchable enough in terms of spectacle, with a good secondary castincluding Alan Arkin, Tomas Milian, Richard Farnsworth, Mark Rydell, and Fred Asparagus (the latter essaying a sort of Cuban Sydney Greenstreet)but is nonetheless thematically limited (1990). Read more

The Whole Of Life

Described as a Godardian semidocumentary, Bruno Moll’s Swiss film about a 50-year-old lesbian with a rocky past features both the woman herself and an actress (Serena Wey) portraying her. Read more

The Third Animation Festival

A better-than-average compilation of animated shorts from Czechoslovakia, England, France, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, the USSR, and the U.S., which predominates (12 shorts out of 20). Among the highlights are some excellent examples of Claymation from England (Peter Lord’s War Story) and Czechoslovakia (Jan Svankmajer’s Darkness, Light, Darkness), two striking animal fables from the Soviet Union (Alexei Karaev’s Welcome and Mikhail Aldashin’s Poumse), and some funny and imaginative American efforts (Michael A. Kory’s Bonehead, Sylvie Fefer’s Personality Software, George Griffin’s New Fangled, Lidia Przyluska and J. Otto Siebold’s Istanbul (Not Constantinople), and John Kricfalusi’s Big House Blues). One has to put up with inevitable and relatively routine spin-offs from previous animation collections, but otherwise the level of achievement is quite high (1990). (JR) Read more

Mermaids

An eccentric, promiscuous single Jewish mother (Cher) with daughters aged 15 (Winona Ryder) and 9 (Christina Ricci) keeps pulling up stakes and moving whenever her relationships with men go bad. Finally resettling with her girls in a small coastal town in Massachusetts, she becomes acquainted with the kindhearted proprietor of a shoe store (Bob Hoskins), while her older daughter, set on becoming a nun, becomes infatuated with the caretaker of the nearby convent (Michael Schoeffling). Adapted by June Roberts from Patty Dann’s novel and directed by Richard Benjamin, this comedy-drama set in 1963 is amiable enough and capably acted, but it never becomes as singular or as memorable as it wants to be. However, the interplay between Ryder and Cher is certainly well handled (1990). (JR) Read more

Freak Orlando

Virginia Woolf meets the German camp underground in this 126-minute extravaganza of performance art and oddity by Ulrike Ottinger. Actually, the political focus is closer to that of Tod Browning’s Freaks than to Woolf’s Orlando, though Ottinger has taken from Woolf the notion of an ideal protagonist [who] represents all the social possibilitiesman and womanwhich we normally do not have. The five episodes situate the hero/heroine in the Freak City department store (along with her seven dwarf shoemakers), in the Middle Ages, toward the end of the Spanish Inquisition, in a circus (where he falls in love with Delphine Seyrig, one of a pair of Siamese twins), and on a grand European tour with four bunnies (during which she appears at an annual festival of ugliness). The whole movie is as variable as a circus, but there are some priceless bits, including a virtuoso solo performance of Christ on the cross (1981). (JR) Read more