Film
Seitz, Michael H.
FILM Michael H. Seitz The Unhyped Despite recent record box office receipts, all is not well in Hollywood. High interest rates have cast a pall over the industry, production starts have dropped...
...So silly and unconvincing that the gay community has not even bothered to mount a protest against it...
...Realized with relatively limited resources and on a necessarily limited scale, The Chosen looks much like the best British and American made-for-television movies...
...Assimilation is also a theme of The Chosen, a close film adaptation of Chaim Potok's novel...
...The first was Donaldson's Sleeping Dogs, a political thriller...
...Wrong Is Right Splashy political satire, focusing on the all-pervasive influence of television in world affairs, Presidential politics, international terrorism, and the deranged shenanigans of the CIA...
...The fathers, who represent opposite poles of Twentieth Century Judaism in America, never meet...
...Miller and Benson are more than adequate, Schell gives a sensitive and restrained portrayal of the liberal Jewish intellectual, and Steiger (despite a Yiddish accent the likes of which I've never heard before) is extraordinary as the charismatic leader...
...Clues proliferate—an enigmatic photograph, a gun, a rumor of an "other woman"—but Chan's disappearance remains unresolved, and one begins to understand that this is not really a missing-person mystery...
...Richard Brooks's film aims to be the Dr...
...But good old inscrutable Charlie Chan, Hollywood's beloved Chinese stereotype, is also notably missing from this film...
...Marianne and Juliane A gripping and extraordinarily engaging film of politics and personal relationships in contemporary Germany...
...they will get more than enough attention in the mass media...
...Too bad, because there was an opportunity here to make an interesting political allegory...
...The production was funded by grants totaling less than $20,000 from the American Film Institute and the National Endowment for the Arts...
...Smash Palace is the name of the auto wrecking yard inherited by the protagonist, as well as a reference to the violent marital breakup...
...I do not mean this as a critical slight...
...And of course there is Annie, the film version of the musical comedy hit, which is being desperately promoted by Columbia in the hope of recouping the $52 million Variety claims has been invested in it...
...The film's weakest points, it seems to me, result from fidelity to Potok's novel: less than subtle exposition and a tidy denouement that stretches one's credulity...
...That's why we are to be treated to an extraordinary number of movie sequels in the months ahead: Star Trek II, Grease 2, Friday the 13th Part3, Airplane 2, The Sting II, Halloween III, Superman II, Revenge of the Jedi (call it Star Wars III), not to mention Trial of the Pink Panther (seventh or so in the series) and Octopussy (James Bond No...
...Kramer) that a cheap play is being made for my sympathy...
...We are introduced, instead, to an amazingly varied set of characters, from every age group and walk of life, encountered by Joe and Steve in the course of their search...
...Good use of desolate outback landscapes, super-kinky costuming, razzle-dazzle camera work, and explosive action sequences—but it is all flash and spectacle, without making the slightest bit of sense...
...The breach is so serious that Danny is forbidden to see or speak to his friend...
...It is only the second product of the newly emerging New Zealand cinema to enjoy release in this country...
...Strangelove of the 1980s but lacks the latter's antic brilliance and inspired casting...
...Chan's disappearance, as one character suggests, is "a very Chinese mystery: Nothing is what it seems to be...
...The movie focuses on the relationships of two teen-aged boys, Reuven Malter (Barry Miller) and Danny Saunders (Robby Benson), with each other and with their fathers...
...We are made aware of the conflicts and tensions that pervade the Chinese-American community—between the Taiwanese, for ,example, and those who identify with the People's Republic—and we learn of the internal stress of oriental Americans who, despite their best efforts at assimilation (Chan's adolescent daughter spouts black jivetalk with a Chinese accent), are still regarded as foreigners...
...With such sums at stake, the studio moguls are less and less willing to take a chance on anything that has not been successfully pretested in the market...
...Among its principal virtues are attention to period detail and generally fine performances...
...Making a major studio-financed movie now costs, on the average, more than $11 million...
...Reuven's father is Professor David Malter (Maximilian Schell), a liberal teacher and journalist concerned with world Jewish affairs...
...Based on the personalities and life histories of the real-life Ensslin sisters: Gundrun, imprisoned as a terrorist in the Stammheim prison where she died a "suicide" in 1977, and Chris-tiane, an editor for a feminist magazine, who undertook an investigation of her sister's death and concluded she was murdered...
...it is a film that takes us on a search for personal and cultural identity...
...I'll look forward to further work from each of them, but no sequels, please...
...I prefer Donaldson's film to the two other works, in fact, because its narrative turns are less predictable, and because it seems to say more with fewer words...
...But Chan is clearly the work of a talented and inventive filmmaker—a visually engaging, funny movie that displays remarkable insight...
...Danny's father, Reb Saunders (Rod Steiger), is the revered leader of a devout, culturally insular Ha-sidic sect...
...But as a third-generation American Jew several degrees more assimilated than the Malters, I found The Chosen fascinating in its portrayal of an important segment of Jewish American life, and moving...
...High interest rates have cast a pall over the industry, production starts have dropped way off, and the motion picture craft unions report unusually high unemployment levels...
...Professor Malter becomes a militant Zionist, devoted to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, and Reuven, much influenced by his father, helps smuggle guns to the Hagganah...
...Unlike Kramer vs...
...It was shot on what seems to have been unmatched bits of sixteen-millimeter black-and-white film stock, the acting is uneven (it uses both professionals and amateurs), the camera work is occasionally jerky, and the sound recording is less than state-of-the-art...
...A laudable effort, nonetheless, in a genre rarely essayed by American filmmakers...
...Kramer and Shoot the Moon, it deals with the palpable process of breakup, not just the aftermath...
...Things come to a dramatic head at the end of World War II, when a full awareness of the Holocaust reaches the United States...
...And Wayne Wang's accomplishment in his film—its structural complexity, inventiveness, and open-ended conclusion—is something of a Chinese-American Citizen Kane on a shoestring...
...The work, set in the 1940s in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, takes us into the world of another ethnic minority that has been poorly represented in Hollywood movies—that of religiously committed American Jews, both black-garbed Ha-sidim and Zionist intellectuals...
...It puts on display, as does Wang's Chan Is Missing, the work of an imaginative young filmmaker who has talent and something to say...
...and a lawyer who delivers a brilliant deadpan disquisition on "cross-cultural misunderstandings...
...Chan was shot in San Francisco's Chinatown and Manilatown...
...Chan Is Missing, produced, directed, edited, and co-scripted by thirty-three-year-old Wayne Wang, is one of the best films I've seen this year...
...Also recommended: Roger Donaldson's Smash Palace, an intimately scaled but wrenching drama of family breakup...
...It is the first feature-length American film produced entirely by an Asian-American cast and crew...
...Instead, I want to draw attention to a few small, less lavishly confected movies that risk passing unnoticed amid the feverish hype surrounding the big-studio megafilms...
...But I don't want to devote this space to Annie or any of the retreads...
...There's a hip young philosopher-cook in the Golden Dragon restaurant who wears a "Samurai Night Fever" T-shirt and while working over his wok sings, "Fry me to the moon...
...But the values and ideas they project are joined, moderated, and, in a sense, transferred, in the sons...
...The passions aroused by this issue are depicted in full fervor when several young Hasidim accost Danny and his Zionist friends, accusing them of being "worse than the Nazis...
...The Road Warrior Futuristic biker-fantasy-flick from Australia, unlikely to appeal to anyone past fifteen...
...Well, not entirely: Joe admits to watching the old films once in a while for "cheap laughs...
...a social worker who discourses on the virtues of Chinese-American apple pie...
...And it doesn't give me the feeling (as does Kramer vs...
...This intelligent, economical film confirms that writer-director Margarethe von Trotta is one of the world's foremost woman filmmakers...
...The plot, a mere narrative pretext, is that of a conventional gumshoe mystery: Joe, a middle-aged cab driver, and his extrovert nephew, Steve, who prides himself on his street smarts, set out in search of one Chan Hung, a mysterious Taiwanese-American who has apparently made off with the $4,000 in savings that they had given him to procure an illegal taxi medallion...
...The story turns as much on what is not shown (Yin) as on what is (Yang...
...M Hits and Misses Partners A witless cinematic embarrassment, attempting to combine police thriller and comedy of manners (in which snickering homophobia is passed off as humor)—from the author of La Cage aux Folks...
...To Reb Saunders, however, Zionism is blasphemy, for the Talmud states the Jews will not be allowed to return to their homeland until the coming of the Messiah...
Vol. 46 • July 1982 • No. 7
