Renoir’s challenging and lovely last feature (1969) consists of three sketches and a brief song sung by Jeanne Moreau, with Renoir himself appearing to introduce each section. At the time of this film’s release critics tended to glide over or dismiss everything but the final sketch, a warm account of an old man learning to accept his young wife’s infidelity that summed up the generous and realistic manner that was all more conservative spectators expected from Renoir. But the film as a whole is a complex manifesto of his pluralistic approaches to both realism and style, and the other sketchesa highly artificial and sentimental fairy tale about a homeless couple and a bizarre, aggressive contemporary opera about a housewife’s burning desire for an electric waxerare essential. Indeed, what is most remarkable about Renoir’s swan song is the subtle interaction between these facets of his vision. Far from being a grab bag of unconnected pieces, as most critics have contended, it’s a musical suite in four movements, with each movement illuminating the others. If you want some notion of this great filmmaker’s range and breadth, here’s an essential key. (JR) Read more
Theo Angelopoulos (The Travelling Players), a Greek filmmaker of stature and talent whose works are scarcely known in this country, captured many hearts and minds with this melancholy road picture (1988), including those of many critics I respectbut not, I’m afraid, my own. If back in the 70s Angelopoulos seemed like an intelligent disciple of Antonioni, here he seems more like an intelligent disciple of early Fellini (which is not necessarily an improvement). There are some visually striking and dramatically effective moments in this film about two children who leave home for Germany in search of their father, but the 126 minutes seemed to last forever. With Tania Paleologou, Michalis Zeke, and Stratos Giorgioglou. In Greek with subtitles. (JR) Read more
Federico Fellini followed up his magisterial 8<4 with a similar stream-of-consciousness exercise (1965), this one in color and dealing with the alienation of a middle-aged housewife (Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife and the star of his earlier La strada and Nights of Cabiria). The results are unwieldy, uneven, and overlong to say the least. The charming fantasy sequences and use of psychedelic color can't make up for the structural looseness, which became the fatal flaw in many subsequent Fellini features, and one never feels that Fellini understands his heroine with any depth. With Mario Pisu, Sandra Milo, Valentina Cortese, and Sylva Koscina. 137 min. (JR)
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I’ve only sampled this nearly three-hour 1989 extravaganza by German filmmaker and performance artist Ulrike Ottinger (Ticket of No Return, Freak Orlando), but most of what I saw whetted my appetite for more. The film centers on four female travelers on the Trans-Siberian RailwayLady Windermere (one of the last performances by the great Delphine Seyrig), a German botanist (Fassbinder regular Irm Hermann), the Broadway star Fanny Ziegfeld, and a beautiful young student. (Peter Kern is also on board as a Catskills comic.) They get kidnapped by a band of wild Mongolian women riding camels, and what follows has been described as documentary combined with ironic narrative. In German with subtitles. 165 min. (JR) Read more
This 1989 documentary by Karen Thorsen touches on various aspects of James Baldwin’s life and writing. From a literary standpoint, one occasionally regrets the film’s efforts to illustrate some of its commentaries (including footage from various dramatizations of his work), which tends to shortchange the viewer’s imagination. (An ideal Baldwin documentary might have juxtaposed passages from his neglected and fascinating book about film, The Devil Finds Work, with clips from the films he writes about, which would have been more to the point.) Despite the value of many of these commentaries (from former lovers, friends, relatives, and colleagues, such as Ishmael Reed), which testify to the love and lucidity that Baldwin inspired, the material drawn from numerous interviews with the writer himself is the most beautiful: Baldwin was usually his own best explicator, and his passion and power as a speaker are given full rein. 87 min. (JR) Read more
Kevin Costner stars, coproduces, and makes his directorial debut in a three-hour epic (1990), adapted by Michael Blake from his novel of the same title, about a Union lieutenant in the 1860s who gradually becomes a member of a Sioux tribe in the Dakotas. In reward for an act of heroism in Tennessee, the lieutenant is allowed to select his own reassignment, and he chooses the western frontier. Finding himself in an abandoned fort, he slowly makes the acquaintance of the nearby Sioux (as well as of a prairie wolf, which eventually leads to his Sioux name, Dances With Wolves) and helps them find buffalo; eventually he falls in love with and marries Stands With a Fist (Mary McDonnell), a white woman adopted by the tribe as a child, who serves as interpreter. By the time he’s arrested as a traitor by the army, he has fully assumed a Sioux identity. Sincere, capable, at times moving, but overextended, this picture is seriously hampered by its tendency to linger over everythingespecially landscapes with silhouetted figures, and not excluding its own good intentions. For all the film’s respect for the Sioux, it has surprisingly little to tell us about their culture, and the implicit link between the hero’s wolf friend and his Sioux friends is rather emblematic of the sentimentality behind the overall conception. Read more
C’est la vie bourgeoise would be a better title, not only for this filmDiane Kurys’ autobiographical version of her parents’ breakup (also treated in Peppermint Soda and Entre nous)but for Kurys’ work as a whole. Like many other depictions of French middle-class life from within, it’s a view that equates this life with life in general, as the title implies. Set in the summer of 1958 in the French resort town of La Baule les Pins on the coast of Brittany, where the families of two half-sisters (Nathalie Baye and Zabou) are vacationing, the plot is mainly shaped around the viewpoint of Frederique (Julie Bataille), whose father (Richard Berry) is mainly away due to a marital crisis, and whose mother (Baye) turns up only belatedly, with a boyfriend (Vincent Lindon) in tow. While Kurys is adept as usual in handling the surface details of this world, the overall vision is neither fresh nor especially insightful, only familiar. Written with Alain Le Henry; with Jean-Pierre Bacri, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, and Didier Benureau (1990). (JR) Read more
A transitional work between Jonas Mekas’s beat and arty Guns of the Trees (1961) and his diary films (which began around 1966), this 1964 filming of the Living Theatre’s production of Kenneth H. Brown’s gritty and disquieting stage play about military discipline in a Marine Corps prison, utilizing cinema verite techniques, was a last-ditch effort to preserve the production after the theater was forcibly shut down. Widely mistaken abroad for a documentary about an actual prison. (JR) Read more
Ten years after a group of Stanford students take some bad LSD, they lose their hair and become psycho killers. Jeff Leiberman wrote and directed this nonsense, which stars Zalman King, Robert Walden, Mark Goddard, and Alice Ghostley (1978). (JR) Read more
Kathryn Bigelow’s stupid serial-killer movie (1990) dispelled the hopes of Near Dark and proved that a Dirty Harry rip-off, even one made by a woman and featuring a female cop (Jamie Lee Curtis) who happens to be dating the raving lunatic killer (Ron Silver with bulging eyes), is still just a Dirty Harry rip-off. The plot, coscripted by Bigelow with Eric Red, is based on a string of ridiculous premises leading up to a ludicrously protracted finale; suspense is generated in spots, but only by the characters uniformly behaving like imbeciles. Some effort is made to give the visuals (including the usual phallic gun worship) a bit of razzle-dazzle, but Bigelow never knows when to stop: the numerous close-ups have a deadening effect, and even the more perverse elements in the story are made to seem recycled and obligatory. With Clancy Brown, Elizabeth Pe Read more
This fabulous compilation of 20s and 30s cartoons by Max and Dave Fleischer, highlighting (but not devoted exclusively to) their Betty Boop cartoons, looks as wild and wacky now as when it was put together (1974). Over the years, it seems that Tex Avery has become the recognized surrealist master of the Hollywood cartoon, and with reason. But one shouldn’t forget that the Fleischers anticipated many of his free-form imaginative flights with charming and creepy fantasies and radical transitions that are in some ways even more dreamlike. The plots are minimal, but the intricate and integral uses of live action, Cab Calloway and his orchestra, bouncing-ball sing-alongs (complete with scat lyrics, in some cases), rampant and delirious anthropomorphism, and daffy wit make these cartoons enduring classics. The black-and-white (and triumphantly uncolorized) selections include Koko’s Earth Control (1928), the only silent film in the bunch; Koko’s Harem Scarem (1929); Bimbo’s Initiation (1931); Minnie the Moocher (1932); Stoopnocracy (1933); Boilesk (1933); and Betty Boop’s Rise to Fame (1934). Stoopnocracy, a demented concerto about insanity, is alone worth the price of admission. (JR) Read more
Not to be confused with either Alan and Susan Raymond’s documentary or the Hollywood Sean Penn vehicle, this is a 1961 fiction film utilizing documentary techniques by the resourceful and neglected Japanese filmmaker Susumu Hani. Recruiting real-life juvenile delinquents in Tokyo, Hani filmed a story based in part on their experiences, using actual detention areas and reform schools as locations. (JR) Read more
It seems scandalous that Charles Burnett, the most gifted black American director offering purely realistic depictions of black urban life, has had to wait for more than a decade to get any of his films distributed in this country, and that this one only got made because Danny Glover agreed to play a leading role in it. (He also served as an executive producer.) Unlike Burnett’s previous and undistributed Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding, his new feature is steeped in folklore, but that doesn’t prevent the film from giving us a depiction of contemporary black family life richer than we can find anywhere else. The plot concerns the arrival of one Harry Mention (Glover), an old friend from the rural south, on the doorstep of a family living in Los Angeles, and the subtle and not-so-subtle havoc that he wreaks on their lives. The family is headed by a retired farmer (Paul Butler) and his midwife spouse (Mary Alice), whose two married sons (Carl Lumbly and Richard Brooks) are in constant conflict. Babe Brother (Brooks) is married to an upwardly mobile realtor (Sheryl Lee Ralph), and his relative distance from the family’s traditional ways is further exacerbated by the outsider’s influence on him. Read more
The 26th Chicago International Film Festival moves into its second and final week with well over 60 programs to choose among. The range of selections, as usual, runs all the way from indispensable (Secret Love, Hidden Faces) to awful (The Mad Magician), from interesting and oddball (Vincent and Theo, Archangel, Recollections of the Yellow House) to slick and conventional (Superstar and Shaking the Tree).
It’s always a risk to go hunting at random with a festival as uneven as this one. But you’re almost certainly better off taking your chances with the films shown in the festival than lining up for an overpriced commercial release that will be out on video a few months from now anyway. By contrast, most of the foreign films showing this week at the festival are now-or-never propositions; if you don’t see them now, chances are you won’t get a second opportunity. And good or bad, most of them will tell you something about another part of the world that you probably didn’t already know. It’s also worth pointing out that most of the festival films are a dollar cheaper than the bad new Hollywood efforts that are currently clogging the multiplexes.
Reviews preceded by a checkmark are highly recommended by their respective reviewers. Read more
If Guy Maddin’s Tales From the Gimli Hospital whetted your appetite for more comic/nostalgic/facetious strangeness–or if you haven’t seen the Maddin film but have such an appetite anyway–you’ll probably get a kick out of this entertaining assortment of shorts by Maddin’s neighbors and colleagues, all members of the Winnipeg Film Group of Manitoba, Canada; producer Greg Klymkiw will introduce and discuss their work. The ones I’ve been able to sample include Tracy Traeger and Shawna Dempsey’s We’re Talking Vulva, a funny rap-music video featuring performance artist Dempsey in a vulva suit; John Paizs’s hilariously deadpan evocations of 50s educational shorts in Springtime in Greenland and The Obsession of Billy Botski; and Lome Bailey’s memorable The Milkman Cometh, about a businessman who becomes so entranced by the Alpine landscape on a can of evaporated milk that his life gradually becomes overtaken by it. Also to be shown are films by John Kozak (Two Men in Search of a Plot) and the Winnipeg Film Group as a whole (Rabbit Pie). (Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W. Belmont, Wednesday, October 10, 8:00, 281-8788) Read more
