Last Chants for a Slow Dance, Jon Jost’s “Gary Gilmore film” (metaphorically, not literally), proceeds by set-pieces, switching between color and black and white, sound and silence, static and moving camera, realism and moody dreaminess, script (by Jost and Peter Trias) and improvisation. A haunting evocation of some interior male American landscape, the film follows […]
Daily Archives: June 29, 2008
Erzsébet Szõnyi, a 24-year-old textile factory worker in Budapest, grew up in an orphanage. She and her long-ago unwed mother now reunite; Zsámbokiné lives in a rural village, which Erzsi visits in search of her identity. But she already has an identity that is apparent to everyone there: Budapest. Her mother’s husband feels Erzsi epitomizes […]
Because Grand Hotel (1932) had won for it the best picture Oscar, M-G-M needed a follow-up, another star-crammed multi-character entertainment in which people’s lives crisscross, intersect. George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s play Dinner at Eight, which Herman J. Mankiewicz and Frances Marion adapted, with Donald Ogden Stewart adding dialogue, and which George Cukor sensitively […]
Fusing elements of the Theaters of Cruelty and the Absurd, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Satansbraten—never has a film been more aptly titled—is a dazzling, riotously funny assault on German bourgeoisism. Denied advances from his publisher, Walter Kranz (Kurt Raab, brilliant), an anarchist poet, screws and manipulates a variety of women to extract money as wife Luise […]
Dennis Grunes 