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AUTUMN
SONATA
****½
Sweden
Had Ingmar Bergman delivered this familiarly harrowing mother-daughter
confessional in the lead-up to his masterful Cries
and Whispers, it would have been held in much higher regard. Instead
it was [and is] often greeted as practically an anticlimax, since it
doesn't quite match the ferocity and lacerating insight of that other
work. This is particularly unfair since: a) what work could?; and b) the
layers, the questions, the conflicting and therefore revealing motives
with which Ingrid Bergman (in what is unquestionably her greatest
performance) and Liv Ullmann invest their roles are worth tears, adulation
and multiple viewings, at least.
wr/dir: Ingmar Bergman
cast: Ingrid Bergman, Liv Ullmann, Lena Nyman, Halvar
Björk
BLUE
COLLAR
****
USA
Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto play three downtrodden
Detroit car factory workers torn apart by the system they despise (and
which pointedly despises them). Several scenes feel overtly 'written' -
for their convenience to the plot trajectory more than their dialogue. But
the dynamic between the characters is easy and organic. It's the reason
the film is infinitely more likable and engaging than the glut of
ambitious, self-serious political exposés from this period.
dir: Paul Schrader
wr: Paul Schrader, Leonard Schrader
cast: Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto, Ed
Begley Jr., Harry Bellaver, George Memmoli, Lucy Saroyan, Lane Smith
LA CAGE AUX FOLLES
**½
France/Italy
A gay couple's straight son
brings home his future in-laws.
An overcooked, claustrophobic treatment of what is essentially a sitcom set-up.
It made an inordinate amount of money though, spawned a Broadway musical
and the inevitable Hollywood remake.
dir: Edouard Molinaro
cast: Ugo Tognazzi, Michel Serrault, Michel Galabru, Claire Maurier,
Remi Laurent
CALIFORNIA SUITE
***½
USA
Four groups of guests stay at
the Beverly Hills hotel during Oscar week.
A flawed intercutting of the problems of four couples. It's witty when
it's not going for broad jokes, and sometimes funny even when it is. The
gear-switching between comedy and drama though, isn't always smooth.
dir: Herbert Ross
wr: Neil Simon
cast: Alan Alda, Jane Fonda, Michael Caine, Maggie Smith,
Walter Matthau, Elaine May, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby
DAYS OF HEAVEN
*****
USA
Terrence Malick exclusively delivers
masterpieces and this, his second film
(preceding his third by twenty years exactly), is considered by many
respectable people to be his
best.
The story is vaguely concerned with a gradually
destructive love triangle that evolves in the idyllic wheat fields of the
Texas Panhandle pre-WWI. Precocious teen Linda Manz delivers the folksy
and possibly most successful of the gently meandering voiceovers that form
a driving force in every Malick movie. The great Nestor Almendros was
responsible for the lensing of the ethereal, paradisiacally beautiful
images. A streak
of nihilism underscores Malick's usual meditativeness here and ultimately
adds a chilling overtone to the picture's intoxication with fleeting,
day-to-day romanticism.
wr/dir: Terrence Malick
ph: Nestor Almendros
ed: Billy Webber
m: Ennio Morricone
pd: Jack Fisk
cast: Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard, Linda Manz,
Robert Wilke, Jackie Shultis, Stuart Margolin
DEATH ON THE NILE
**
UK
An heiress is killed on a Nile
steamer. Coincidentally Hercule Poirot is aboard.
A lavish, all-star attempt to cash in on the success of "Murder
on the Orient Express" (1974). Like its predecessor, better suited
to TV.
dir: John Guillermin
cast: Peter Ustinov, Bette Davis, Mia Farrow, Angela Lansbury, Jane
Birkin, David Niven, George Kennedy, Jack Warden, Lois Chiles, Jon Finch,
Maggie Smith, I. S. Johar
THE DEER HUNTER
*½
USA
Three small-town deer-hunting
steelworker pals go fight in Vietnam.
Sample dialogue: "This is this! This is not that! This is
this!" And then the boys get forced to play Russian roulette by
exceptionally evil Vietnamese and you side with the latter. Earnest,
shallow,
muddled, pretentious, and morbidly overpraised.
dir: Michael Cimino
cast: Robert de Niro, John Cazale, John Savage, Christopher Walken,
Meryl Streep
THE DRIVER
***
USA
A cop is determined to catch a
getaway driver.
Bleak and quite hypnotic in parts, and equally dull in others. The
acting is meant to be stylised but it feels more like wooden.
dir: Walter Hill
cast: Ryan O'Neal, Bruce Dern, Isabelle Adjani, Ronee Blakley
GATES OF HEAVEN
***½
USA
Erroll Morris' first feature takes a look at a few former pet
owners who either run or attend Southern California's two most prominent
pet cemeteries. For the first half-hour this documentary could practically
pass for absurdist comedy, but things take a more melancholic and
increasingly mystic turn as it progresses. You can sense Morris' lofty
ambitions as he is already trying to establish the pattern he was to follow
for the rest of his career: he takes a bunch of loosely related
borderline-crackpots and around their often rambling monologues weaves a
meditation on man's place in the universe. The crafting is still rather
basic (Robert Richardson and Philip Glass weren't around yet) and the
shifts in tone are jarring but the picture is still more blackly funny and
oddly affecting than most other things.
dir: Erroll Morris
GET
OUT YOUR HANDKERCHIEFS
***
France
A resolutely French absurdity, wherein a young and slim Gérard Depardieu
is unable to satisfy his wife, so he turns to the stranger at the next
table, a bookish primary school sports teacher. He also fails, as does his
next-door neighbour, but not his 13-year-old pupil... Writer-director
Bertrand Blier is after the giddy nightmare logic that Buñuel had brought
into fashion, and he succeeds to a point, though he lacks Buñuel's visual
flair and acuity.
wr/dir: Bertrand Blier
cast: Gérard Depardieu, Patrick Dewaere, Carole Laure, Riton,
Michel Serrault, Eleonore Hirt, Sylvie Joly, Jean Rougerie, Liliane Rovere
GREASE
***
USA
A teenage lothario that more
closely resembles a hazy egomaniac in his late 20s finds out his summer fling has
enrolled in his high school.
In cases like this, what purpose would criticism serve -
constructive or otherwise? Already cheesy and campy in 1978, it's feel-good
fluff bound to be re-embraced by each new generation precisely for its
cheese and camp.
dir: Randal Kleiser
cast: John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, Stockard Channing
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HALLOWEEN
***½
USA
Institutionalised for
committing a motiveless murder at the age of six, a knife-wielding
psychopath escapes to his hometown 15 years later to terrorize sexually
active teenagers.
You can blame this budgetless, plotless slasher flick for a large chunk
of 80s cinema. A screechy, restless, irritating score prompts you of every
sudden jolt and the acting is strikingly wooden, but there's still
plenty cheap fun to be had with it.
The ever multiplying sequels and imitations
though, have stripped it of whatever freshness or originality it had when
first released.
dir: John Carpenter
cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasence, Nancy Loomis, P. J. Soles
IN
A YEAR WITH 13 MOONS
***½
Germany
With brutal commitment Volker Spengler plays Elvira Weishaupt, a
transsexual with a mauled heart dissecting her past in search of the
cause[s] behind her present state of [utter and harrowing] destitution.
To brand this Fassbinder's 'darkest' or 'most personal' would
be an exaggeration, not to mention beside the point. But it is infused
with a sense of purging and a despairing search for answers, which it is
tempting to tie back to the then-recent suicide of Fassbinder's lover (the film
was openly mounted as a coping mechanism).
1978 was otherwise no less busy than other years for
Fassbinder - he had already delivered two features before this one was
conceived and the film does bear the marks of a fast job, both positive
and negative. The mad rush of invention and catharsis that comes from direct purging
onto celluloid crystallises into sequences of galvanising force. But then there are others, particularly in the film's later
sections, that don't really hold together, even if the concepts behind
them are touching.
wr/dir/ed/ph: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
cast: Volker Spengler, Ingrid Caven, Gottfried John,
Eilsabeth Trissenaar, Eva Mattes, Günther Kaufmann, Lilo Pempeit, Isolde
Barth, Karl Scheydt
INTERIORS
***
USA
Woody Allen's first stab at glum Bergmanesque drama is so meticulously
patterned after the work of his idol that he allows nothing of his own to
slip in. So, it's all artifice - hollow imitation, Bergman without the
tension. That it's compelling at all is thanks to the performers, but
Allen himself was onto something infinitely worthier when he reworked the
scenario into a comic melodrama eight
years later.
wr/dir: Woody Allen
ph: Gordon Willis
cast: Geraldine Page, E.G. Marshall, Mary Beth Hurt, Diane
Keaton, Kristin Griffith, Maureen Stapleton, Richard Jordan, Sam
Waterston, Henderson Forsythe
INVASION
OF THE BODY SNATCHERS
***
USA
The first of of the neverending stream of remakes of Don Siegel's
politically ambiguous cult B-movie is enjoyable and adequately eerie,
though the plot seems that much sillier in a contemporary context and the
means of deduction by which our heroes come to uncover
the invaders' horrifying takeover methods are even
less palatable.
dir: Philip Kaufman
cast: Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum,
Veronica Cartwright, Art Hindle, Lelia Goldoni, Kevin McCarthy, Don Siegel
MIDNIGHT EXPRESS
**½
USA
An American is arrested in
Turkey for possession of hash.
A forceful, disturbing but terribly contrived prison melodrama with an
overly earnest script and performances that induce welcome if inappropriate comic relief.
dir: Alan Parker
wr: Oliver Stone
cast: Brad Davis, Randy Quaid, John Hurt
NEWSFRONT
***
Australia
A warmly-regarded ode to the Aussie newsreel industry in its final years,
it incorporates into its well-worn tale of technological takeover actual
footage of things like the bloody, politically motivated scuffle between
the Hungarian and Russian water polo teams at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.
The bits of newsreel are fascinating and exciting, the rest is mostly
prosaic.
dir: Phillip Noyce
cast: Bill Hunter, Gerard Kennedy, Angela Punch McGregor, Wendy
Hughes, Chris Haywood, John Ewart, Don Crosby, Bryan Brown
NIGHTHAWKS
***½
UK
Considered Britain's first major 'gay' film, this is an impressively non-sensationalist portrait of the London gay scene.
dir: Ron Peck
wr: Paul Hallam, Ron Peck
cast: Ken Robertson, Tony Westrope, Rachel Nicholas James, Maureen
Dolan, Stuart Craig Turton, Clive Peters
SUPERMAN
***½
USA
It's 50 minutes into the movie by the time Superman gets to fly - and
roughly 45 of these are redundant - but it picks up significantly
thereafter (even if Lois Lane's out-of-body love poem is still to come).
It's a tack-fest but it's very enjoyable, and for having pretty much spawned the
mammoth-budget superhero movie, it warrants some interest, if not necessarily adulatory
gratitude.
dir: Richard Donner
ph: Geoffrey Unsworth
cast: Christopher Reeve, Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Margot
Kidder, Ned Beatty, Jackie Cooper, Glenn Ford, Trevor Howard, Maria
Schell, Terence Stamp, Susannah York
AN
UNMARRIED WOMAN
****
USA
Paul Mazursky's wry, seasoned, warm though unsentimental look into Jill
Clayburgh's divorce and recovery after a 16-year marriage. Mazursky's
grasp over the craft is rudimentary - he's shot it the way you would a
feature-length sitcom, with a cutesy, jazzy Bill Conty score and
everything - but he's working off a terrific script and his handling of
his actors is masterful. Clayburgh won laurels for her sassy, ballsy
divorcée, though hers is only one of an ensemble's worth of uniformly,
sensationally authentic performances.
wr/dir: Paul Mazursky
cast: Jill Clayburgh, Alan Bates, Michael Murphy, Patricia
Quinn, Kelly Bishop, Lisa Lucas, Linda Miller, Cliff Gorman, Andrew
Duncan, Penelope Russianoff
A WEDDING
**½
USA
Robert Altman was criticised for introducing too many characters into this
satire of matrimony and the nouveau riche, though that's in some ways the
least of its problems. You don't need character depth in a farce, so much
as the jokes to work and few here do.
dir: Robert Altman
cast: Carol Burnett, Paul Dooley, Lillian Gish, Desi Arnaz Jr.,
Nina Van Pallandt, Amy Stryker, Mia Farrow, Geraldine Chaplin, Ruth
Nelson, Vittorio Gassman, Benita Moreno, Virginia Vestoff, Dina Merrill,
Dennis Christopher, Mary Seibel, Peggy Ann Garner, Howard Duff, John
Cromwell
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