Pamela Berger, screenwriter and producer on Suzanne Schiffman’s Sorceress, wrote and directed this first feature about Jewish immigrants in Boston at the turn of the century; it is based on a story by Abraham Cahan, and was shot cheaply and independently. Worrying about the fate of his soul, a wealthy widowed landlord (Second City’s Eugene Troobnick) imports a Talmudic scholar (Avi Hoffman) from Poland to marry his Americanized and recalcitrant daughter (Greta Cowen), and various comic complications ensue. The movie’s strongest suit is Troobnick’s robust performance; less endearing is the tinny sound track, including a pounding and nudging piano score. (JR) Read more
This pre-Cabaret adaptation of John van Druten’s playbased in turn on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Storiescaused a minor flutter in 1955 when it was condemned by the Legion of Decency for the following line, delivered by Julie Harris: What do you want to do first, have a drink or go to bed? Otherwise, it’s fairly tame stuff, reasonably well directed (if memory serves) by Henry Cornelius; Laurence Harvey, Shelley Winters, and Patrick McGoohan costar. (JR) Read more
Chris Marker’s 179-minute video essay about revolutionary events between 1966 and 1977 is his own 1993 English adaptation for England’s Channel Four of an even longer worka film made in 1979 and known in French as Le Fond de l’Air Est Rouge. (The film’s original subtitle translates as Scenes From World War III1966-1977.) Among the subjects addressed are Vietnam, political battles throughout Europe, Asia, and South America, Che Guevara, Nixon, and Eisenstein’s Potemkin; the images are drawn mainly from rarely shown footage shot by others, chiefly outtakes from other documentaries. This is often thoughtful and informative, but it assumes a grasp of political struggles of the period that some American viewers won’t share. Marker’s poetic notations are generally quite effective and welcome when they appear (e.g., of May 1968: For France, it was the rude awakening of a sleepwalker crash-landing into history), but there are often long stretches between them. In French with subtitles. (JR) Read more
Silly but energetic, this feature-length music video by Adrian Lyne with a Giorgio Moroder score stars Jennifer Beals as a welder who spends her nights wowing blue-collar customers with her fancy erotic dances. Glitz with no mind and lots of fancy visuals, edited with a pounding beat. With Michael Nouri, Lilia Skala, and Sunny Johnson (1983). (JR) Read more
A fascinating and masterful melodrama from Japan, written by Goro Nakajima and directed by former independent Shunichi Nagasaki, that may remind you in spots of both Vertigo and Lilith, although the treatment is strictly Japanese. A Tokyo psychiatrist (Masao Kusakari) who’s engaged to his receptionist (Kiwako Harada) becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with a beautiful tour guide (Kumiko Akiyoshi) who claims to have been beaten by her lesbian lover; further events reveal that this lover is dead and that her identity is being schizophrenically re-created by the tour guide. A film that juxtaposes two kinds of obsession and implicitly asks the spectator to determine which is sicker (or healthier); it’s all done with effective plot twists and a sure storytelling hand (1989). (JR) Read more
As usual, Peter Greenaway, helped by Sacha Vierny’s cinematography, offers an eyeful, as well as a series of conceptual brainteasers, in this odd 1988 tale about three womena grandmother, mother, and granddaughter, all named Cissy Colpittswho drown their respective husbands. But beyond a certain point, this English black comedy becomes so reductive and predictable it might as well be called Filming by Numbers. Greenaway’s fascination with numbers and his obsession with sagging middle-aged male flesh proceed as if by rote. Not even the talents of actors Joan Plowright, Bernard Hill, Juliet Stevenson, Joely Richardson, and Jason Edwards can breathe life into the film’s smarmy conceits, informed here by a hint of misogyny that makes the banter seem especially heartless. 118 min. (JR) Read more
From the title this sounds like a leftover from the heyday of American International Pictures, but it was released in 1989. Featuring tight jeans, black leather, female bonding, old-time religion, explosions, and a mad-scientist mortician with a dwarf assistant; you can figure out the rest. Dan Hoskins directed; with Jamie Rose, Catherine Carlen, Lycia Naff, Vicki Frederick, and an early appearance by Billy Bob Thornton. (JR) Read more
Silly but nicea marijuana farce featuring Cheech Marin and Thomas Chong as spaced-out dealers working out of an ice-cream van, Stacy Keach as the cop on their trail, and Evelyn Guerrero as the romantic/sexual interest. Chong directed (1981). (JR) Read more
Perhaps the biggest revelation here is how advanced the British are in the specialized area of claymation, particularly when it comes to using this technique to delineate character. (A substantial amount of this work comes from TV commercials, though perhaps the best in the lot, saved for last, is Nick Park’s 1989 Oscar nominee Creature Comforts, a short in which zoo animals describe their living conditions.) Unfortunately, the length of the program presents some problems; 110 minutes of compressed bombardment ultimately becomes a kind of punishment, regardless of how good the work is. But taken in reasonable doses, this is mainly delightful. Among the more prominent animators are David Stone, Peter Lord, Candy Guard, Joanna Quinn, David Anderson, and Richard Ollive, who contributes a lovely re-creation of a turn-of-the-century comic strip that recalls Winsor McCay. (JR) Read more
A threadbare comedy from Universala sequel to Bedtime for Bonzo without Ronald Reagan but with the same chimp and the same director (Frederick de Cordova). With Maureen O’Sullivan, Charles Drake, and Edmund Gwenn (1952). (JR) Read more
Kurt Russell and William Baldwin star as fire-fighting brothers in Chicago carrying on the tradition of their late father, in an action picture written by former firefighter Gregory Widen and directed by Ron Howard. While Russell is at his best, creating a character of some density and mystery, Baldwin mainly registers like a cavity on the screen; his character seems both underwritten and uninhabited. Howard, as usual, seems bent on mixing genres to make several movies at oncemonster movie, crime movie, coming-of-age movie, and action-adventure movie (among others)yielding an overall narrative that’s not boring but not especially suspenseful or focused either. Visually speaking, the film does pretty well with fire-as-spectacle, less well with everything else (Howard tends to trot out fuzzy-toned Spielbergian backlighting on any pretext). With Scott Glenn, Jennifer Jason Leigh (basically wasted), Rebecca De Mornay, and Donald Sutherland and Robert De Niro, both working minor wonders with their limited parts. (JR) Read more
This time Woody Allen’s irresolute, neurotic, and masochistic stand-in protagonist is Alice Tate (Mia Farrow), a very upscale housewife and lapsed Catholic with an unappreciative husband (William Hurt). She goes to a Chinese herbalist for a bad back and gets more than she bargained forincluding hypnosis and a magic potion that makes her invisiblewhich finally pushes her into having a tentative affair with a musician (Joe Mantegna). The thematic sources this time appear to be Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits and Topper, although when the heroine briefly sprints off to India to join Mother Teresa, Allen borrows a clip from Louis Malle’s Calcutta. Weak and predictable, this comedy differs from earlier Allen forays only in that its ethnocentric limitations are more glaring than usual: the Chinese sage, played by one of Charlie Chan’s number one sons (Keye Luke), is encouraged to speak a kind of pidgin English that would have been offensive even in the 30s, and needless to say, we hear a lot of Limehouse Blues on the sound track. As usual, there are many good actors present in small rolesincluding Blythe Danner, Bob Balaban, and Gwen Verdonand they’re invariably wasted (1990). (JR) Read more
Chicago filmmaker Tom Palazzolo’s sequel to his semiautobiographical Caligari’s Cure, featuring Chicago performance artists Carmella Rago, Jim Grigsby, Lynn Book, Michael K. Meyers, Ellen Fisher, Jack Helbig, Kapra Fleming, and Liam Hayes. I haven’t seen its predecessor, but this free-form fan-tasy/absurdist vaudevillewhich leads its affectless young hero through some striking surrealist and expressionist sets as well as some Chicago locationsis much more enjoyable to look at than to think about or to follow as a consecutive (or even nonconsecutive) narrative. References to such movie landmarks as Les vampires, Un chien andalou, and The Blue Angel are scattered through this picaresque free-for-all (along with confetti, a painted lunch pail, and a bird cage, among other significant images), but the loosely satirical SF framework promises more than it delivers, and Palazzolo’s deft cutting and sense of visual extravagance rarely matches his dialogue or his direction of actors. On the same program, Hey Girls, a ten-minute short by Palazzolo and Heather McAdams described as a live-action comic strip. (JR) Read more
