An American doctor (Blair Brown) living and working in London meets a mysterious and romantic stranger (Bruno Ganz) while vacationing on the Continent, and he proceeds to woo her back in London. Eventually she discovers he’s not everything he seems to be, and under the additional pressures of Thatcher cutbacks in national health and a faltering relationship with her younger sister (Bridget Fonda) who lives with her, her life gradually spins out of control. Written and directed by David Hare (Plenty), this is the sort of so-called woman’s picture that could only have been conceived by a man; although it remains sincere, fairly watchable, well acted, and otherwise competent throughoutat least up to a somewhat muddled conclusionit proves to have more windup than delivery. With Alan Howard and Hugh Laurie (1989). (JR)
This 1989 feature by Alejandro Jodorowsky is just as silly and pretentious as his previous El topo and The Holy Mountain, but it’s similarly watchable and fun in a campy, sub-Fellini sort of wayif only because of its dogged devotion to surrealist excess. (The Mel Brooks of vulgar surrealism, Jodorowsky’s basic principle is that if you throw 30 outrageous ideas at the audience, 2 or 3 are bound to make an impression.) It’s basically a sadomasochistic circus story about a crazed former magician (played at different ages by Jodorowsky’s sons Axel and Adan) whose father (Guy Stockwell) ran a circus and whose mother (Blanca Guerra) is a religious fanatic who worshiped an armless saint and lost her own arms. Many years after a traumatic (if, for Jodorowsky, characteristic) family incident that involves the mother’s mutilation and the father’s mutilation and suicide, the mother compels her son to become her lost hands, forcing him, among other things, to murder lots of women (Thelma Tixou, Zonia Rangel Mora, Gloriella). A deaf-mute the son loved as a child (Sabrina Dennison and Faviola Elenka Tapia) turns up later to redeem him. Scripted by Jodorowsky, Roberto Leoni, and Claudio Argento, and filmed in Mexico in English. (JR)
Hit-or-miss is Mel Brooks’s middle name, and this set of period sketches runs the gamut from wonderful to awful, as is usual with his work. But the wonderful stuff is so funny that it makes most of the awful stuff tolerable; the big production number called The Inquisition, for instance, goes beyond The Producers’s Springtime for Hitler in outrageousness. Keep in mind that Brooks is more verbal than visual in orientation and you’ll be amply rewarded. With Brooks, Dom DeLuise, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Harvey Korman, Ron Carey, Sid Caesar, Pamela Stephenson, Henny Youngman, and Orson Welles (as narrator). (JR)
A distinctive adaptation of Sandra Bernhard’s off-Broadway show, directed and coscripted by John Boskovich. Bernhard’s acta mixture of comic monologues and songs that parody such figures as Nina Simone, Diana Ross, and Patti Smithis planted in a black nightclub in Los Angeles similar to the places she played at the beginning of her career, where she performs for a totally unenthusiastic audience. A parody of show-biz mannerisms and phoniness that at times seems as slick and fabricated as what’s being attacked, this is certainly entertaining and provocative. It’s a matter of debate how deep this movie digs, but you won’t be bored for an instantand it’s entirely possible that your hair will be raised (1990). (JR)
A shocking and powerful documentary (1990) by Nina Rosenblum about the experimental torture and attempted brainwashing of three women prisoners in a federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky. Each woman was arrested for political activity, given an unusually long prison sentence, and then isolated in a basement cell for almost two years, kept under 24-hour surveillance, periodically awakened several times a night, and strip-searched daily. Though this horrific unit was eventually shut down by court order after the protests of human-rights groups, the ruling was then overturned. The three prisoners who underwent this ordeal because of their radical political involvement (in support of civil rights, Puerto Rican nationalism, and the antiwar movement) show a great deal of lucidity and resilience about their ordeal, in spite of the severely debilitating psychological and physical effects of the torture. One regrets the use of simulations, even though they’re identified as such, to demonstrate some of the prisoners’ treatment, because their use shows so little trust in the imagination of the audience. But this is still a remarkable look at part of what Bush the elder’s kinder, gentler nation was (and still is) up to, and something you aren’t likely to hear about elsewhere. Narrated by Susan Sarandon; the cinematographer is Haskell Wexler. 77 min. (JR)
