God save us when director Taylor Hackford decides to become a metaphysician and Al Pacino decides to demonstrate his genius by reading the phone bookor, to be precise, a script only slightly less repetitive and long-winded. Keanu Reeves plays a hotshot Florida lawyer who’s lured with his wife (Charlize Theron) to sin-filled Manhattan aka Babylon by a huge law firm overseen by Satan aka John Milton (Pacino), who rolls his eyes and gesticulates to show how clever and charismatic he is. Hackford makes this awkwardly told story go on forever, throwing in special effects whenever he suspects we might be napping, and eventually turns it all into a (you guessed it) cautionary fable with a couple of glib twists at the end. At half its present length it might make an OK midnight camp item. With Jeffrey Jones, Judith Ivey, and Craig T. Nelson; written by Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy from a novel by Andrew Neiderman. (JR) Read more
A charming, watchable, but ultimately unsatisfying British feature (1997) about celebrated photographs of fairies made by two little girls in 1917. The gullible Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (played here by Peter O’Toole) fell hook, line, and sinker for this hoaxconfessed to much later by one of the perpetrators on her deathbed. But rather than set about explaining or describing the hoax (as science writer Martin Gardner has cogently done), this film, as the title coyly suggests, prefers to treat it as fact or metaphor or fable about real fairiesanything but the actual boondoggle it was. If you can’t swallow this malarkey, at least you can enjoy the special effects and Harvey Keitel as Harry Houdini. Directed by Charles Sturridge from a screenplay by Ernie Contreras; with Elizabeth Earl, Florence Hoath, Paul McGann, and Phoebe Nicholls. PG, 97 min. (JR) Read more
The End of Violence
A cool contemplation of the relation of violence to American culture, this is easily Wim Wenders’s most watchable and entertaining movie since Wings of Desire (1988). Bill Pullman plays a wealthy producer of violent action movies who is kidnapped; Andie MacDowell plays his wife, and others in the cast include Gabriel Byrne as a surveillance expert, Traci Lind as a stuntwoman, Loren Dean as a police inspector, and K. Todd Freeman as a gangsta rap producer. The witty script is by Nicholas Klein, and the sense of LA space and drift is nicely caught. Fine Arts.
–Jonathan Rosenbaum
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still. Read more
The 33rd Chicago International Film Festival
When people ask me to compare the Chicago International Film Festival to other festivals, it’s hard to know how to respond. I attend some festivals as their guest, and for the past four years I’ve gone to Cannes as a member of the New York film festival selection committee. As part of that same stint, which just concluded, I’ve also spent two weeks in New York in late summer for the last four years previewing seven or eight dozen additional films. I go to some other festivals–Berlin two years ago, Vienna later this month–as a jury member. By contrast I don’t “attend” the Chicago festival in the same fashion, because I’m usually too busy coordinating the Reader’s coverage of the event, not to mention the paper’s coverage of current releases and the International Children’s Film Festival. The closest I’ve come to attending in any extensive way was in 1992, when I served on the main jury and therefore saw all the films in competition–creating a logistical nightmare that entailed staying at a downtown hotel with my fellow jurors and thus relating to Chicago and the festival as if I were a tourist.
Being what it is and coming when it does, the Chicago festival can’t help but be something of a hand-me-down event, skimming items from various international festivals that precede it and adding a few selections of its own. Read more
