Caro Diario

COMING SOON

Named Best Director for "Caro Diario" at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival, Nanni Moretti is writer, director and star of the unusual and deceptively simple film.

Told in three-part vignette, Moretti's life is filmed as a "visual diary." The first section, "On My Vespa," shows his views on cinema and media through a series of defining scenes: getting depressed upon viewing an Italian film; running into Jennifer Beals on the street to tell her the significance of "Flashdance" in his life.

In "Doctors," Moretti goes to a battery of dermatologists trying to find a cure for his overwhelming bodily itch.

Hailed as the enfant terrible of Italian cinema, Nanni Moretti has long been seen in Europe as a director of radical will, a refreshing departure from traditional filmmaking. 

--excerpted from "Angelika Film-bill," September/October 1994.

The Blue Kite

When director Tian Zhuang-zhuang was refused a visa to attend the 1993 Cannes Film Festival, it was really nothing new for the least known of the big three fifth-generation directors who have taken China's cinema into the international spotlight. His earlier works, "On the Hunting Ground," and "The Horsethief," were banned for their starkly realistic portrayals of China's ethnic minorities, thus denying him the accolades of his contemporaries, Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, have deservedly received from the rest of the world.

But "The Blue Kite" is such an outstanding achievement that even the authorities have not managed to keep it from appreciative audiences. Finished outside the country through detailed notes and communications between the director and the foreign sales agent, Fortissimo, the film examines a family over the decade and a half from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution (1953-1967).

It is narrated in flashbacks by the child Tietou, who recalls how he and his mother lived through three marriages and the successive events and political turbulence that were primarily responsible for their difficulties. The scenes depicting the communal kitchen omnipresent during the hard economic times of the 1950s and the persecutions of the Red Guard are vivid and compelling.

"The Blue Kite" is not focused on history. It is a story of personal struggle during the Communist revolution.

--by Geoffrey Gilmore in "Sundance Film Festival '94."

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The Commitments 

November 11 & 12

Alan Parker's "the Commitments" is a loud, rollicking, comic extravaganza about a rock band from the poorest precincts of North Dublin that decides to play soul music.

The organizer of the band is the lean, ingenious Jimmy Rabbitte (Robert Arkins), whose suggestion is greeted with puzzlement by his friends. They like soul music, yes, but they don't particularly identify with it. Rabbitte's logic is persuasive: "The Irish are the blacks of Europe. Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. North Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin."

The movie is based on a novel by Roddy Doyle, a North Dublin schoolteacher, but is founded on charm. Parker introduces a Dickensian gallery of characters, throws them all into the pot, keeps them talking, and makes them sing a lot. The result is a movie doesn't lead anywhere in particular and may not have a profound message--other than that it's hell at the top, however low the op may be.

The Commitments is one of the few movies about a fictional band that's able to convince us the band is real and actually plays together.

--excerpted from a review by Roger Ebert

The Carrier

November 18 & 19

A strange plague that dissolves people on contact strikes a small town and locals relentlessly pursue possible disease-carriers.

"The Carrier" is an independent film directed by local auteur Nathan J. White. This weird, violent, cult flick was filmed in Manchester, Michigan in 1987. 

Spinal Tap

Nov. 25 & 26, Dec. 2 & 3

The children born at Woodstock are preparing for the junior prom, and rock'n'roll is still here to stay. "this is Spinal Tap" is a movie about a British rock group that is rocketing to the bottom of the charts. It is, in fact, a satire. The rock group does not really exist, but the best thing about this film is that it could. The music, the staging, the special effects, the backstage feuding, and the pseudo-profound philosophizing are right out of a hundred other rock groups and a dozen other documentaries about rock.

--excerpted from a review by Roger Ebert.

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OCTOBER 1994--AGENDA--15