![[fearful face graphic]](angst.gif)
John Waters' "Serial Mom". Kathleen Turner plays June Cleaver with a meat cleaver. Sardonic (and sometimes sick) humor, good for a couple of laughs. Less than enthusiastically, Roger Ebert goes into more detail.
"City of Lost Children" (a.k.a. "La Cité des enfants perdus"), set in the future past like Terry Gilliam's "Brazil", caused my viewing companion to assert that she has trouble with films in which there is no narrative line. It's a darkly trippy picture loosely structured around a weirdo who is stealing children's dreams, more "weird" and "interesting" than satisfactory or coherent. Roger Ebert speaks for me, as is typical.
"Born in East L.A." Cheech Marin plays a Chicano caught in an INS raid and sent to Tijuana where he copes minus Spanish language skills. With my mind thickened by flu, this widely panned comedy was actually mildly entertaining.
Richard Harrington review (Washington Post) .
Watching Zhang Yimou's "To Live" (1994), a.k.a. "Huozhe," was a bit unsettling, since I'd labeled the video "The Story of Qiu Ju" and that's what I was expecting to see. Instead of a 100-minute film about a woman farmer's seach for justice, we got an epic about one Chinese family's difficult transition from the 40s to the 60s. While the film is beautiful to the eye and lead actor Ge You always interesting to watch, "To Live" is a bit tedious. Its critical treatment of Maoism and the cultural revolution seem cartoonish or even delirious, as if suddenly Luis Bunuel had taken control. This is easy for me to say. Chinese censors banned Zhang Yimou for two years for making this film, and forbid him and actress Gong Li from speaking about it in public.
Ken Loach's "My Name is Joe"(1998) cements my sense that here is a filmmaker whose works are consistently compelling and true. (See "Riff-Raff" review below.) Joe Kavanagh is a working class recovering alcoholic in Glasgow-coach of a ragtag soccer team that fancies themselves the German national squad circa Franz Beckenbauer. After serendipitously meeting a woman social worker (her wallpaper-laden car nearly collides with the soccer team's van), he offers to remodel her flat. Love ensues, but so do divided loyalties, and a string of bad decisions. What begins as romantic comedy turns nightmarish, tension level spiking dramatically, dreams bursting. At its worst a warning against against heroin and alcohol, "My Name is Joe" is much more.
"Il Ladro di bambini" (1992), a.k.a."Stolen Children" is a slow, gentle, quiet film set in contemporary Italy. Its story follows a member of the Italian national police as he escorts a young brother and sister to a children's home after their mother is arrested for selling the girl into prostitution. Poignant and offering no easy resolution, it examines a slowly budding trust in the wary children and one decent young man's naïve attempt to convey them to safety.
Christine Choy's "Who Killed Vincent Chin?" (1988) documents a case study in injustice. While mostly "talking heads," it's still a psychologically compelling production. After the baseball bat bludgeoning death of a Detroit auto engineer by an assemblyine supervisor after a bar tussle, the killers pleaded guilty to manslaughter and went free. Had it been a simple drunken fight that got out of hand? Was there a racial element to the crime? The filmmakers interview eyewitnesses-- dancers at the club where the fight broke out and police who saw the beating (which took place only after Chin and a companion had been followed to a nearby fast food restaurant)--as well as the bat-wielder and his friends. We also hear from Chin's tearful mother and the organizer of an Asian-American campaign for justice. Only due to pressure from the latter, it seems, were federal charges eventually brought against one of the killers. Found guilty on one of four counts of violating Chin's civil rights, he never served a day and the conviction was overturned after a retrial held in Cincinnati.
More on the Chin case, from Contraband.
Luis Bunuel's "Diary of A Chambermaid" (1964), adapted from the Octave Mirbeau novel (and earlier interpreted on film by Jean Renoir), is watchable mostly thanks to always-interesting Jeanne Moreau. Partly about French fascism circa the 1930s from a personal level, it isn't a particularly coherent or great film. A reasonable assessment from one Gregory P. Dorr via the Internet Movie Database:
"This is the most straight-forward film I've seen by the surrealist master Bunuel, and despite its cryptic turn in the final moments, is funny, chilling, and a bit nasty. The story follows an urbane chambermaid from Paris who comes to work at the country estate of a repressed bourgeosie family. She weathers passes from every man in sight and deflects them, but for morally ambiguous reasons. Moral ambiguity is rampant, as it is so often in Bunuel's films, and spread liberally amongst all classes. It's subtly a film about selling out, except that nobody seemed to have any principles to begin with. Good fun. Now tell me what the ending was all about."
"Taylor's Campaign" (Raindog Films, 1997), a feature-length documentary on homelessness, both humanizes the problem and confronts the political impediments which keep it in place. Focusing specifically on Santa Monica, California, and an articulate community of homeless people there who are systematically harassed by police, leveraged by politicians, and reviled by yuppies, it also follows Ron Taylor's run for city council there, a campaign on which the former truck driver spent $333.
Not just a sad story about the criminalization of poor people constantly forced to move from one place to another, and not simply an ennobling picture in which homeless people are revealed to be humans with character, dignity, and intelligence, "Taylor's Campaign" is a critique of the system under which homelessness is institutionalized.
Ron Taylor was not elected and he has subsequently given up hope of change taking place governmentally. While the Just Us food distribution program shown in the film doesn't address housing, it provides--like the Food Not Bombs movement--one model of how to operate from outside.
Star Maps (1997) is about a young Chicano street prostitute in Los Angeles and his family controlled by a brutal father. Its sex, violence, and humor make for an unsettling combination, but the whole thing seems a bit superficial.
Roger Ebert's review rightly describes it as "not boring," but rather wildly unfocused, mentioning its elements of tragedy, magic realism, and near parody.
The Big Sleep (1946), with Bacall and Bogart. Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z.
Red Sorghum (1987) was Zhang Yimou's first film. While its cinematography is often beautiful, its plot--involving arranged marriage, rape, and the brutalities of war--is violent and semi-coherent. Metaphor-of-the-movie: wine as blood.
Uh-huh, Gong Li is gorgeous.
Roger Ebert lauds its "voluptuous" look, but notes the "naive and...didactic" story in his review.
Tampopo (1986), an amusing takeoff on spaghetti westerns, literally follows one woman's quest to create the perfect ramen. As lagniappe, a half dozen or so food-related scenes are tacked on, some utterly unrelated to the plot. A homeless wine connoisseur loving describes the 5 centimeters of a fine vintage he decanted from a bottle; a young businessman commits a serious breach of restaurant etiquette; a woman skulks around a grocery store squeezing fruits, cheeses, and pastries.
From Juzo Itami (director of "A Taxing Woman" and "The Funeral"), this was better the first time around, in the theater. The version broadcast on cable TV network Bravo censored its sole sex scene. Fuck that.
Though made in Hong Kong, Red Firecracker, Green Firecracker (1994) might have starred James Stewart in the role of hick who charms chick. Barely lit and sl-o-o-o-o-o-w getting started, watching it on video entertained me about as much as it made me squirm. Its plot sometimes lacks sense ("James Stewart" goes from painter to firecracker maker somehow), its English subtitles are often difficult to read, and its political viewpoint is--if anything--reactionary.
Roger Ebert thought it was fair, though its plot "sort of silly" (he noted scenes which seemed "slipped in from a martial arts movie"). Once again his review is more or less on target.
Ju Dou (1990) is the third strong film I've seen this year which ended in flames. Set in rural China during the 1920s, it follows a story of sadism, love, repression, and a "love child" who looks (and acts) like a gangbanger. Waves of cloth dyed scarlet and gold ought to have been given acting credits, so central are they to the film (which, by the way, answers the question, "Can the same person commit patricide twice?")
Now it's time to scout down a copy of director Zhang Yimou's "Red Sorghum" (1987).
In his review, Roger Ebert says the film appealed to him "because of its unabashed, lurid melodrama." Whatever. It is certainly riveting, beautiful and horrible at once.
Sergio Leone's "For a Few Dollars More" (1966) engenders such questions as "How does Klaus Kinski achieve that facial tic?" and "Is dialogue really necessary?" Entertaining as camp and for its Ennio Morricone score, this lacks the all out tongue- in-cheek of the original. Watching it is like reading the Old Testament: both are fascinating, of dubious moral value, influential, and full of dead bodies. (Only three women in the entire film, one a prostitute.)
I found Charlie Chaplin's Gold Rush (1925) tedious and would've asked for my money back, except that the video was checked out for free from the library. Heresy? Uh-huh. It does include an amusing scene with dancing potatoes. I laughed aloud. Once.
Pupi Avati's "Storia di ragazzi e di ragazze" (1989) --a.k.a. The Story of Boys and Girls--is a sort of an understated Italian version of "Cold Comfort Farm" (the latter was too over-the-top and hammy for me). The gist of this slight film: rich urban family meets working class rural family at a wedding engagement dinner on the farm.
The Washington Post review is mostly on target, on the one hand noting that "we never quite get over our initial trouble of figuring out who's who, and what their true relationships are," but allowing that there are memorable scenes, "such as when ... children, who've confessed to their priest that they often hear the beating of angel's wings above them, gallop down a hillside elated by the presence of the hovering spirits." I identified with the kids.
Oh, yeah: add this to the list of food films: Tampopo, Babette's Feast, Like Water for Chocolate, et al.
Gary Ross's Pleasantville is a fable about pecksniffery and cultural repression cloaked in the guise of a comedy about a contemporary brother and sister transported into the bland world of a Fifties-era situation comedy. ("Honey, I'm home!"). In many ways seditious (and feminist), the film's analogy between "colored people" and ethnic minorities is problematic. When things get colorful in the all-white town of Pleasantville, music by Miles Davis and Etta James can be heard on the jukebox. In a scene near the end of the film, sis boards a bus for "Springfield," emblematic of the new world beyond the borders of town. It would've been nice to see a bus arrive from Springfield with one or two brown-skinned passengers.
Thematic connections exist between this film and Big (for which Ross wrote the screenplay). Read Roger Ebert's review. I see Ebert uses the F word: fascism. Yep, cryptofascists will hate this movie.
"Without Limits", a treacly Hollywood biopic of Steve Prefontaine, could have been called Without Brains or Without Reason. Three words: difficult to stomach. Last year's "Prefontaine" was some better, but your best bet is a documentary.
Ingmar Bergman's "Wild Strawberries" (1957). Usually it's more satisfying to create art than to consume it. Still, after a museum or gallery visit one often sees things anew. Such it was with Wild Strawberries in which an old doctor reflects on the moral emptiness of his own life, through memories come alive during a road trip with his daughter-in-law. Compelling from the start, a creepy and surreal nightmare sequence, its emotional range encompasses tenderness, humor, and cruelty. No simple questions and answers are provided. Instead psychological complexity, ambiguity, and subtlety are presented with cinematographic simplicity. Perhaps the best indicator of the film's power is that personal memories of my own came flooding back to mind after watching it. (Dougie Amadon, I cheated at pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey at your birthday party.) Watch for Max von Sydow's cameo as a young filling station proprietor.
At it's best, Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times" presents sabotage as ballet. Featuring laugh-out-loud slapstick with the Tramp as assembyline worker, it thumbs its nose at high-tech management control techniques. (These include a video-monitored restroom and an "auto-feeder" designed to do away with lunch breaks.) Thumbs down for the stereotypical portrayal of thuggish unionism, though. Spunky Paulette Goddard's "gamin" participates in amusing scenes, one portraying the Tramp's gig as department store night guard and another where she's recruited him as a singing waiter. Still, he'd rather be in jail, it seems (watch there for an extended cocaine joke). Generally amusing and sometimes hilarious, if occasionally dated. As the closing credits roll in this, Chaplin's last silent film, the Tramp and the "gamin" walk off into the sunset.
August 1, 1998
"Strapped" (1993), a film made for HBO, was Forest Whitaker's directorial debut. It aired on BET recently and I taped it for later viewing. That turned out to be home alone on a Saturday night with remote control device in hand to fast forward through commercials. Not only was the film edited for television, but copious dialogue had obviously been redubbed in order to turn "ass" into "act" (as in "You better watch your act!"), "fuckin'" into "freakin'," and the like. Amazingly, it still worked. Nothing too deep, but fresh and real.
The plot? Oh, yeah. Take Public Enemy (Jimmy Cagney edition), give it a rap score (Public Enemy, Chuck D edition), and set it in contemporary Brooklyn with a cast of young black actors. The theme: desperation. While he swears to Moms that he's not going back to prison, when his pregnant girlfriend screws up and is arrested, Diquan gets into selling guns to make bail.
The annual PBS summer documentary series P.O.V. (for "Point of View") is the best thing on television. Programs I've viewed in the past weeks have examined the lives of tobacco farming families and the ethical decisions they make ("Tobacco Blues"), murderers of gay men ("Licensed to Kill"), and a young Mien couple in East Bay ("Kelly Loves Tony") who struggle between the traditional world of their parents and an "American Dream" grail. Taped but not yet viewed: "If I Can't Do It" (disability-related), "Barbie Nation" (for camp lovers), and "The Vanishing Line" (about moral issues in the nexus of medicine and death). This week's film, "Sacrifice," is about the sex industry in Thailand.
"Smoke Signals" at Minneapolis' Uptown Theater is a slight road movie about two young Coeur d'Alene men. One searches for a connection with his now-dead father, the other--an Urkel with braids--accompanies him and tells stories. Despite some amusing moments and the compelling presence of Gary Farmer, the dramatic aspects of this film seem heavyhanded and trite. Has it really been nine years since "Powwow Highway"? One highlght: a powerful song by Ulali played over the closing credits.
Mark Anthony Rolo writes in The Circle, "It doesn't matter how short 'Smoke Signals' falls on a creative level. Because what it fails to deliver in production values, it makes up for in heart, cultural authenticity, and most of all, social relevenace."
It's true. I haven't seen a film since April. What I've been watching instead:
1. Fantastic billowy clouds in the western sky at sunrise today
2. Children on bikes
3. A cat who, in turn, is watching birds and squirrels
4. Progress of a neighbor's fence
5. A high school track meet (and people watching the meet)
6. Pages of the calendar flipping
Lina Wertmüller's "Seduction of Mimi" is a tale of cuckolds, four times over. A black comedy, it has something to offend almost everyone: woman-bashing, fat-people bashing, looksism, Mafia-bashing, bad teeth, gay-bashing, Sicilian-bashing...(don't get me started). Giancarlo Giannini's Mimi ping pongs between lust, radical sympathizing, "honor," cowardice, and the jaws of organized crime. Look for icons of JFK, Marx, Lenin, and Mao. (Watched this film on video while home with a cold.)
Mimi (wearing hair net): You've got to learn to show
some respect.
Fiore: I can't work you out. You have such lovely curls,
why straighten them?
Mimi: Don't you like it?
Fiore: You look like Gus, Donald Duck's cousin.
Mimi: Yes, I am Gus, Donald Duck's cousin. You're a
woman. A man's toilet is not your concern. You were born to knit...to
make these Harlequin suits you make me wear. And you were born to make
love.
Fiore: Not with that net on.
Mimi: Don't I look like Valentino?
Fiore: And I don't want to miss the construction
workers' march.
Mimi: Why don't you want to miss it?
Fiore: You can't leave those poor comrades in the lurch.
They say there'll be 30,000. Imagine 30,000 in the square.
Mimi: I'm a metalworker. I march with the metalworkers.
Fiore: Well, I'm off.
Mimi: Off, my arse. You're a metalworker's woman. Your
solidarity's with me. You don't know them. 30,000 ruffians. Sicilians and
Calabrians. They won't be marching. They'll be touching up the women.
Fiore: Come off it. You can't be jealous of 30,000
construction workers.
Mimi: That's not the point. I'm against the march for
political reasons.
Fiore: Sure, come on. Tell it the way it is. You're
ashamed to admit you're eaten with jealousy.
Mimi: I can't help it. Imagining them looking at your
backside sends me wild.
Fiore: Communists shouldn't be so jealous.
Mimi (feeling Fiore's pregnant belly): A little kick. I
just felt it kick. (Singing): Little teeny-weeny one. Sleep, sleep like a
tweety bird in a nest. Sleep little Mimi, sleep all warm in there. Your
daddy will buy you everything you need. I'll buy you a milk shake
maker...and I'll buy you a tricycle.
Fiore: It's in the consumer society before it's even
born.
John Sayles' "Men With Guns" (Lagoon Theater, Minneapolis). This sensitive, political, occasionally brutal account of repression in Latin America follows the quest of a naive doctor searching Indian country for the young people he has trained and sent to battle "disease and ignorance." If you've seen and appreciated Sayles' "Matewan," "Brother From Another Planet," "Passionfish," or "Lone Star," don't miss the opportunity to catch his latest. In Spanish and Indian languages (with hyper-legible English subtitles), except for a few lines featuring stereotypical (if sadly realistic) Ugly American touristas.
"Journey of Hope" (a.k.a. Reise der Hoffnung) viewed for the second time. This compassionate and harrowing portrait of a Turkish family's attempt to make it to the promised land (Switzerland) won the Academy Award for best foreign film of 1990. Having just read Bohumil Hrabal's Too loud a solitude, I think the recurring image of the week is "lost books."
Read Roger Ebert's review. I don't know why he's so luke warm about this film.
Clint Eastwood's "Pale Rider" (1985).
Edited version taped off television many moons ago. This muy macho,
two-dimensional western delivers again the disempowering lesson that has
made its director rich: pray for a miracle, a tall dark hero will save
us. Bad guys attempt to run "tin pan" miners off their claim, but lone
"preacher"/gunfighter Eastwood protects them, breaking hearts of
mother-daughter duo in process (Carrie Snodgrass as Mom, Sydney Penney as
doe-eyed fourteen-year-old Megan). This film begs for parody.
Death toll summary:
1) bad guys: lots (including marshall and six deputies)
2) good guys: one man and Megan's little dog.
"People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like." Attributed to Abraham Lincoln, this quotation appears as a chapter epigraph in G. Lawson Drinkard's Retreats: handmade hideaways to refresh the spirit which is itself a pretty cool book about people's tree houses, converted sheep wagons, straw-bale cabins, and other handmade structures. The quote also applies to John Huston's "Wise Blood" (1979).
They key word here is irony. Black humor meets southern gothic in this film featuring Brad Dourif (stuttering b-b-b-Billy b-b-b-b-Bibbit in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest") as Hazel Motes, obsessed founder of the Church of Christ without Christ (as Hoover Shoats refers to it). Also notable: Harry Dean Stanton as Asa Hawks and Amy Wright as Sabbath Lily Hawks. A recent review by Godfrey Cheshire of Robert Duvall's "The Apostle" notes that Huston "didn't understand the importance of red clay to Flannery O'Connor, and cluelessly filmed the last scene of "Wise Blood" on a pretty green hillside."
After watching this I was compelled to read Flannery O'Connor's novel upon which the film was based. Herewith, some quotes from and thoughts about the book.
How about a list of films which end in flames? Besides "Riff-Raff" there is Luis Bunuel's "That Obscure Object of Desire." While I've seen that film twice, I don't expect to be watching Bunuel's "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972) again. "It was only a dream." Right! It was no dream that I have now survived a video viewing of that dated, unfunny, pretentious film. My biggest cinematic disappointment since "The Big Night." Oh, well.
"The Full Monty" (Lagoon Theater, Minneapolis)
Yes, I've finally gotten around to seeing this working class comedy set in Sheffield, the Pittsburgh of the UK. Reminded me of my hometown. Why did I wait so long? I've been, uh, busy. The film is funny and a bit poignant. If pressed to criticize, I'd note the not-quite-cloyingness of a few brief scenes. Lead actor Robert Carlyle is impressive--he was Steve in "Riff-Raff" (and, Roger Ebert notes, "the alarming Begbie in 'Trainspotting'").
Dave: "Anti-wrinkle cream there may be, but anti-fat-bastard cream there is not."
Read Ebert's review of The Full Monty.
Viewed on video: "Sidewalk Stories," the silent (except for music) black-and-white film shot in New York City in 1989. This is the second feature film I've seen recently in which the main character is a squatter. (The other--even more highly recommended--is the 1990 British film with English subtitles, "Riff Raff.") Is this the start of a filmography? Jean Heriot points out two other candidates: Agnes Varda's terrific "Vagabond" (a.k.a. "San toit ni loi"), and "Sammy and Rosie Get Laid." And what about "The Roy Campanella Story"?
Roger Ebert reviews: Sidewalk Stories, Riff Raff, and Vagabond.
Interested in squatting? Here's a primer: Squatting 101
Back to Who Is Street Librarian? or home.
Mail me: streetlibrarian@bigfoot.com
Do it yourself: geOcitiEs.