April 27–May 4, 2000
movies|pfwc
Fest Shorts
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Jesus’ Son |
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* Bajo California: The Limit of Time
We don’t learn much about the Latino from Los Angeles who is traveling in the otherworldly land of Baja California, searching for inner peace, his grandmother’s grave and mysterious ancient cave paintings. The pace of Carlos Bolado’s feature debut is slow, and long stretches pass without dialogue. But this dreamlike, hypnotic tale, with a soundtrack reminiscent of Philip Glass, casts an uncanny spell, all the more impressive for its minimalist simplicity. —Stuart Semmel (4/28, 9:30 IH; 5/3, 5:30, R5)
The Big Kahuna
Director John Swanbeck starts with a workmanlike script (Roger Rueff’s play Hospitality Suite) and a trio of sterling performances: Kevin Spacey, Danny De Vito, and newcomer Peter Facinelli are top-notch as three industrial-lubricants salesman attending a convention in Wichita. Their interplay is sharp and fairly clever, if not as deep as Rueff apparently hopes. But Swanbeck breaks up the play’s structure with silly fantasy sequences — and provides pointless slow-motion and an inappropriate New Agey soundtrack whenever we leave the hospitality suite. Perhaps the play should have stayed on the stage. —SS (4/29, 9:30 PMT; 5/6, 7:45 R5)
Bossa Nova
Forcing its amiability a trifle too hard, this romantic comedy of chance casts Amy Irving (wife of director Bruno Barreto) as a widowed English-language teacher in Rio who stumbles ever closer to romance with a Brazilian lawyer (Antonio Fagundes). Music from various Gilbertos helps immeasurably, but Bossa Nova is still more layer cake than soufflé. —Sam Adams (4/29, 4:00 PMT; 4/30, 4:30 RE)
* The Carriers are Waiting
Mixing wacky behavior, bathetic melodrama and a protagonist who elicits our sympathy despite his irresponsibility, The Carriers are Waiting (directed by Benoît Mariage) belongs to the genre of farcical horror. Roger (Man Bites Dog’s Benoît Poelvoorde) is a bully who forces his teenage son to try to set a record that will win him a car. Tragedy ensues when the pressure causes the boy to break down. Ending with an ironically happy family millennium portrait, the film captures the bizarreness of ordinary people swept into the bourgeois whirlpool of competitive acquisition. An edgy comedy in lustrous black and white. —Ruth & Archie Perlmutter (4/29, 7:45 IH; 5/2, 9:00 RE)
* The Charcoal People
This powerful documentary follows a migrant group of Brazilian laborers who cut down trees, build kilns and burn wood to create charcoal for the pig-iron industry. Interviewed as they labor, these agents of Amazonian deforestation reveal almost unbelievably bleak, precarious and exhausting lives. The fact that the iron in question ends up in First World cars makes us complicit in this human and ecological damage — and the filmmakers’ restraint in presenting this dreadful truth makes the film all the more unsettling. —SS (5/2, 5:30 R5; 5/3, 7:30 RB)
Checkpoint
A clubfooted attempted at satire, this Russian farce has little of the wit and none of the savvy of Wounds, the Serbian film that was one of the highlights of last year’s PFWC. Following a group of soldiers banished to the sticks for a slapsticky escapade which leaves a child blown up and a babushka shot down, the film might be an oblique satire of Russia’s heavy-handed imperialism, but the subject is addressed so obliquely and with so many winks that Checkpoint simply feels generic. —SA (5/1, 6:15 RE; 5/2, 9:45 R5)
* Compensation
Directed by Philadelphian Zeinabu irene Davis, Compensation uniquely fuses silent film techniques with contemporary concerns. Set both at the turn of the century and in the present day, the film flips between two love stories, each involving a deaf woman (Michelle Banks) and a hearing man (John Jelks). Taking on subjects as varied as the AIDS crisis and the uniqueness of black deaf culture, Davis sometimes stuffs the film too full, occasionally giving in to didacticism. (She’s also an academic.) But her clever use of inter- and subtitles, her witty commentary on past stereotypes, her inventive use of sound and perceptive juxtapositions make Compensation a thought-provoking experience not likely to be had outside the festival circuit. —SA (5/2, 7:30 RB; 5/5, 7:15 RB)
* Crane World
The strength of Pablo Trapero’s Crane World lies in its character-driven minimalist story. A Ken Loach-like working-class drama photographed in grainy black and white, the film has a disquieting power. It concerns Rulo, a once-successful rock musician who journeys through Argentina to work on cranes and earthmovers. With his map-like face, beer belly and perennial optimism, Rulo epitomizes the decent working stiffs who operate the engines of the industrial world. Neo-realism resurgent. —R&A P (4/29, 5:00 RE; 5/1, 7:30 R5)
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Checkpoint |
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* Feeling Sexy
Partly autobiographical, this film by Australian artist Davida Allen concerns an erstwhile artist-turned-homemaker with an overburdened husband who fails to satisfy her need "to have that butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling." Despite its familiarly narcissistic plot, the film is retrieved by the filmmaker’s painterly sensibility and a sensuous performance by voluptuous Susie Porter. Exuberant color and pace expressively convey the couple’s need for sexual fantasy to invigorate their marriage. —R&A P (4/29, 9:45 IH; 5/4, 9:30, IH)
* The Five Senses
Clearly influenced by Atom Egoyan, Jeremy (Eclipse) Podeswa’s film brings together the stories of five characters, each rediscovering a "sense." Widowed masseuse Gabrielle Rose has lost her touch; her adolescent daughter (the excellent Nadia Litz) comes to terms with her voyeurism; commitment-phobic cake-maker Mary-Louise Parker must recover taste, etc. The narrative crux is the disappearance of a young girl, with inevitable media hysteria. Thoughtful and stylized, it mostly overcomes the titular gimmick. —Cindy Fuchs (4/28, 9:45 RE; 4/30, 5:15 PMT)
* Genesis
Biblical lore devoted to Esau’s feud with Jacob is re-enacted in a stark African setting. Although prone to long stretches of heavy-handed melodrama, the film is a poetic allegory of great visual beauty. A stunning landscape resembling the supernatural architecture of Monument Valley and tribal rites that include a hilarious adult circumcision, add a dimension of African authenticity to a sacred mythology. A lavish epic that resonates with the timeless cycle of the human saga. —R&A P (4/28, 7:30 IH; 4/30, 3:00 IH)
I Forgot I Don't Remember
Touched with lyricism, this challenging, moody film is an elegy to the aged. A group of elderly people try to remember their connection to writer Juan Rulfo, the filmmaker’s father, who was considered the originator of magic realism. Snatches of song, recitations of Rulfo’s words, and shots of the natural landscape are interspersed with people trying to recall their own sexual pleasures as well as memories of an elusive Juan, who seems, like them, to be "enveloped in legend and the aura of magic." —R&A P (4/28, 5:15 RE; 5/1, 5:30 R5)
I’ll Take You There
Ally Sheedy plays a skittish heroine whose talents enliven this screwball comedy. She is Bernice, a desperate, wifty gal, doggedly pursuing — at gunpoint — mopey sad-sack Bill, whose wife has left him. In a high point of the film, Bernice’s wacky grandma does a star turn with her doting ex-vaudevillian boyfriend. Thereafter, the film ticks down into anti-climactic showdowns. Adrienne Shelly, who wrote and directed the film, brings some of her own breezy charm to the dialogue. Sitcom cotton candy. — R&A P (4/30, 7:15 IH; 5/2, 7:15 RE)
* It All Starts Today
Bertrand Tavernier’s inspiring docudrama concerns a teacher in an underprivileged primary school in the north of France, where unemployment and poverty are pervasive. Tavernier, the passionate French humanist, is masterful with children and actors as he follows a frustrated headmaster trying to cope with daily crises — child abuse, alcoholism, suicide — and worst of all, the ineptitude and indifference of the authorities. The scenario was written by schoolteacher Dominique Sampiero from his own experience. A transcendent gem! —R&A P (4/29, 2:30 RE; 5/1, 8:30 RE)
* Jesus' Son
Directed by Allison Maclean (Crush), this weird fable taken from the short stories of Denis Johnson begins as one of the funniest movies about social disconnection since Drugstore Cowboy. As the man who can’t shake the nickname Fuckhead, Billy Crudup is a doe-eyed naïf surrounded by eccentrics who range from beautiful to grotesque, and are often both at once. The film’s last third is twice as long as it should be — a lengthy cameo by Dennis Hopper adds nothing except Hopper’s name to the credits — and robs Jesus’ Son of much of its precious energy. But with Samantha Morton creating her most vivid character yet and Jack Black’s gut-busting turn as a pill-popping orderly, it’s not a movie to be missed. —SA (4/27, 8:30 PMT)
* Journey to the Sun
Turkish director Yesim Ustaoglu was an architect, and her eloquent cinematography and feeling for environment match her powerful story. Moving between teeming, menacing Istanbul and the vast stretches of ravaged wasteland at the Turkish border, she relates the tragic effects of fear and racism on two outcasts — a politically subversive Kurd and an innocent Turk — who are accidentally thrown together. A truly cinematic odyssey grounded in compassion and moral integrity. —R&A P 5/2, 7:30 R5; 5/7, 8:OO RB)
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Shower |
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* Kikujiro
Admirers of last year’s Hana-Bi, with its alternating violence and serendipity, will discover a sentimental Takeshi Kitano in Kikujiro. As the immature eponymous hero, Kitano is the unlikely caretaker for Masau, an angelic 8-year-old whom he escorts on a fruitless odyssey to find his mother. Delightful pantomime skits, fanciful games, Daliesque dream sequences, angel imagery and antic romps are preceded by imaginative, painted chapter headings. A picaresque pleasure. —R&A P (5/3, 9:30 RE; 5/4, 10:00 R5)
Kimberly
This astonishingly crass and witless debut by one Frederic Golchan engenders nothing so much as the fervent hope that Golchan will never pick up a camera again. Opening with one character getting "shit on by the bird of love," Kimberly struggles to cram as many dick jokes as possible into its story of one woman (Gabrielle Anwar) who may have been knocked up by any one of all four members of a men’s crew team. Never addressing, let alone solving, the problem of how a woman who seems to be sleeping with four men at the same time qualifies as a romantic comedy heroine, this film plods ahead like a doped-up rhino, pausing only to sneak in cameos from Molly Ringwald and an uncomfortable-looking Patty Duke. —SA (4/29, 7:00 PMT; 4/30, 1:00 PMT)
* Kirkiou and the Sorceress
This utterly charming animation draws from African folklore to build the story of a precocious baby who takes on a village-menacing sorceress. Kirikou, who begins talking from inside his mother’s womb, has an adult’s cunning and a child’s persistence; though he’s toddler-sized and too young to wear clothes, he’s more determined than any of the adults to find out exactly what makes the sorceress so nasty — and unlike most adults, he refuses to accept the fact that some people are just mean. —SA (4/30, 3:30 PMT; 5/7, 1:00 IH)
Legacy
Well-intentioned but dull, this documentary about the lives of an inner-city black family explores the first five years of their effort to cope with the shooting death of young Tyrell, a promising 14-year-old who was gunned down in the street after a minor argument. You certainly feel for the mother who lacks the confidence to work herself off welfare, or the younger sister who wants to follow her brother’s example, but the film has no real shape. You just tag along watching things happen, and eventually the film pulls away from you. —SA (5/3, 5:15 RE; 5/7, 3:15 R5)
* Nang Nak
One of the festival’s oddest hybrids, Nang Nak takes a traditional Thai story and soups it up with Hollywood-style flash and even a touch of CGI. (No surprise it’s second only to Titanic at the Thai box office.) Something like Beloved reenvisioned by a Thai Sam Raimi, the film tells the story of a man who returns home from war only to find that the wife he thought was waiting for him isn’t who he thinks she is. It’s not exactly art fare, but Nang Nak is an interesting look at what’s big box office overseas, and perhaps a glimpse at how far American aesthetics have sunk into other countries’ film language. —SA (5/2, 5:15 RE; 5/4, 5:30 RB)
* Nowhere to Hide
By Korean cineaste Lee Myung-See, Nowhere to Hide is an highly stylized police thriller. Billed as an "art film masquerading as an action film," it’s an adventure in kinetic dazzle a la Lee’s credo of "stillness within movement" and motion pictures that "move." The two main characters are Korean national stars and perfect in realizing the director’s imagistic bravado. Reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s mysterious Dr. Mabuse and the poetics of Chungking Express, this flick is a visual delight. —R&A P (4/30, 8:00 PMT; 5/5, 10:30 R5)
The Opportunists
This pro forma heist flick has a nice performance by Christopher Walken, who takes his role as a domesticated safecracker seriously enough to play one scene wearing an apron. But the one-last-heist, guy-forced-into-the-life-he-thought-he’d left-behind thing is tired, even with Cyndi Lauper as Walken’s bartending squeeze. —SA (5/3, 7:15 RE; 5/6, 10:00 R5)
* Pripyat
Perhaps the slowest-moving documentary since Gates of Heaven, Pripyat uses long take after long take to investigate life inside the contaminated zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. While it uncovers the government’s deliberate attempts to misinform laborers who worked the cleanup crews after the reactor incident — many of whom apparently wore little or no protection over their street clothes — it more surprisingly uncovers a community of people who often seem to care little that they might be exposing themselves to radiation on a daily basis. Haunting and bizarre. —SA (5/3, 5:30 RB; R/R, 5:00 RB)
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I Forgot I Don’t Remember |
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You don’t need to live in the Swedish sticks and feel conflicted about your sexuality to feel keenly for Agnes, sixteen years old, unpopular, and drawn to the school sexpot Elin. The cast of this grainy, hand-held film impresses, and the story is vivid and compelling. But the problem with slice-of-life realism about teenagers is this: the more dead-on the portrayal, the more overpoweringly awful it feels to revisit the cliques, backbiting, self-hatred, cruelty, and hopelessness. —SS (4/30, 6:30 RE)
* Shower
Zhang Yang’s emotionally cleansing film is a nostalgic elegy to deteriorating communal values. As in Mifune, the protagonist abandons a yuppie lifestyle to take care of his retarded brother and learns the importance of family and tradition. An archaic bathhouse in Beijing about to be torn down is the setting for this moving story about the assumption of responsibility by a son thrust into his aging father’s community, where men stripped of social differences share their problems and help each other. —R&A P (4/29, 7:15 RE; 5/3, 7:30 R5)
The Trench
This stagy British drama is set in the hours leading up to the Battle of the Somme in WWI, reckoned by some as the greatest defeat in British military history. Filled with elegantly crafted moments and bits of precious symbolism, The Trench is often too clever by half and its style is dated. It’s the dramatic equivalent of the redcoats who marched into battle in lockstep while Minutemen were waiting to pick them off from behind trees. —SA (5/1, 9:30 R5; 5/7, 6:00 RB)
* Tuvalu
Veit Helmer’s virtually wordless German film concerns an old bathhouse threatened with demolition. Eccentric Anton goes to extremes to convince his blind father that people still patronize his beloved decaying spa. With physical capers and clunky machinery reminiscent of City Of Lost Children, what follows is a kind of madcap retro-fairy tale, nostalgic for the excitement of early cinema. The bathhouse even looks like an old movie palace gone to seed. More bizarre than involving, it’s for those who loved Delicatessen. We did. — R&A P (5/3, 9:45 RB; 5/7, 5:30 R5)
Wildflowers
It’s 1985 in a San Francisco full of aging poets and Indian-print fabric. As the 17-year-old child of hippie parents (one long absent, the other frequently truant), Clea Duvall becomes obsessed with an artistic free-spirit played by Daryl Hannah. Duvall is quite compelling, and a few early scenes feel fresh and authentic. But the meandering, molasses-slow script provides approximately one (predictable) plot twist, and requires Duvall to deal endlessly with the clichéd figures of her father and Hannah’s artist. —SS (4/28, 7:15 RE; 4/29, 9:15 RE)
Venue codes:IH International House, 3701 Chestnut St.
PMT Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St.
RB Ritz at the Bourse, Fourth & Chestnut Sts.
RE Ritz East, Second & Sansom Sts.
R5 Ritz Five, 214 Walnut St.
Single tickets are $8, $7.50 in advance. Tickets and ticket packages may be purchased over the phone at 215-569-9700 or 856-342-6535, or in person at the Prince Music Theater (1412 Chestnut St.) or Plays and Players (1714 Delancey St.) For information call 1-800-WOW PFWC or visit www.libertynet.org/PFWC.
