Cinema

Rip It Up, Issue 179, 1 June 1992, Page 28

Cinema

FILMFEST 92 Bill Gosden, the man who decides the line-up of movies in our annual International Film Festival in Auckland, didn't go to London last year to check out the 70-plus movies on offer next month, chosing instead Berlin, Vancouver and Toronto as the main sources of the cinematic goodies we are about to see.

Gosden points out that there are many more American films in this year's festival, but with the exception of David Cronenberg's The Naked Lunch they are all independent productions. They range from John Sayles's City of . Hope, an engrossing tale of the insidious evils of civic corruption, to Swoon, a first feature from Tom Kalin, tackling the same Leopold-Loeb murders of the 20s that inspired Hitchcock's Rope. Where else but the Festival would one be able to see Park Kwang-Su's The Black Republic, a sampling of the new and lively South Korean cinema, or some of the mighty documentaries that Gosden chases up? Too few documentaries make it on to New Zealand cinema screens, and > when they're stunning 35mm prints, like Peter Cohen's The Architecture of Doom, a film about Nazi notions of artistic, medical and racial deformity, the loss is sorely felt. Many titles prove difficult to get hold of and some film makers are cautious — "many festivals are fly-by night operations, run by individuals purely to make money," says Gosden who has his frustrations with the major chains bidding for some titles (Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho was not available, but will receive a general release later this year). It's the distributors and not director

Peter Jackson who will say if the festival can screen Brain Dead, and two other local films, fresh from success at Cannes, Alison Maclean's Crush and Leon Narbey's The Footstep Man, have decided not to participate in the event. This is disappointing, as New Zealand premieres, from Ngati to Ruby and Rata, have invariably proved to be highlights of the festival. There will be a good number of Kiwi shorts, including Nicky Marshall's Mon Desire hot from Cannes, but not much is finalised yet, as "many of the film-makers are working flat out trying to get them finished in time".

New Russian films lined up include Viatcheslav Krichtofovitch's Adam's Rib and Lydie Bodrova's Hey You Wild Geese, but it's not as easy as it used to be getting Russian or Soviet films. These days the Russians are marketing, rather than handing out free samples. Gosden was particularly impressed with Bodrova's debut, calling it "a wonderful, personal film — the sort of thing that just couldn't happen under the old system". Gosden finds that different festivals reflect their countries — "all the people involved in the Berlin Festival had a vase of flowers on their desk" — but declines to comment on New Zealand audiences. He feels that we could be more film-literate than we are, and that television could be doing more to bring us up with the state-of-play by showing background material and more and better movies! Indeed, does anyone else remember the halcyon days of New Zealand television in the mid-60s when we had seasons of Preston Sturgess, Billy Wilder and Orson Welles films — four titles from each director! The newly-restored Welles Othello has been one of the great international successes of 1992, and Gosden agrees that the Festival could feature a greater selection of older films. This year

we're having a batch of Mumau classics, including the classic Nosferatu, with its amphetamine coach rides and Edward Scissorhands fingernails, in a superb print from the Munchen Stadtmuseum, Filmmuseum. This, together with the director's Sunrise and Tabu will all be accompanied by live music. Some of the highlights? Watch for Annie Lennox's stunning appearance in Derek Jarman's Edward 11, singing Cole Porter's 'Every Time You Say Goodbye' to the doomed lovers (Jarman directed Lennox's video for 1990's Red Hot and Blue television special). David van Taylor's The Story Behind James Vance vs Judas Priest looks at the legal issues stemming from a teenage suicide pact supposedly inspired by the lyrics of Judas Priest and Paul Yule's Damned in the USA has nought to do with Bruce Springsteen, but investigates censorship issues ranging from Richard Mapplethorpe photographs to Madonna's Pepsi commercial. Europa Europa is a delightfully picaresque and often very moving account of how to be Jewish and join the Hitler Youth Academy. Bill Gosden picked up Christopher Munch's The Hours and Times in Toronto, and he describes it as a "weird obsessive kind of film" dramatising a weekend that John Lennon and Brian Epstein spent together in Barcelona in 1963. Two Les Blank documentary shorts, Marc and Ann and Puamana offer tasty samplings of Cajun and Hawaiian music respectively and even though Spalding Gray's Monster in a Box isn't a patch on his 1990 Swimming to Cambodia, it comes with a synthly wonderful score by Laurie Anderson. Other soundtrack treats include Tom Waits' contribution to Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth, perhaps the ultimate taxi film with the casting coup of Winona Ryder and Gena Rowlands in the same cab. k.d. lang makes her big screen debut in Percy Adlon's

Salmonberries, a touching film, and a worthy companion piece for Martha Codigde's Rambling Rose which, with its Academy Award nominations, should have made it into mainstream movie houses months back, lang is also one of the featured artists in the soundtrack to Wim Wenders' Until The End of the Work! and the festival is giving us the three-hour print instead of the official two-and-a-half hour version. Who knows, there might be an extra song or two. WILLIAMDART MY COUSIN VINNY Director: Jonathan Lynn Joe Pesci won an Academy Award last year for his role in Martin Scorcese's Goodfellas and more recently was David Ferrie, the object of Oliver Stone's homophobia in JFK. Now, in black leather jacket and cowboy boots, Pesci plays an > inexperienced Brooklyn lawyer recruited to defend his cousin and a young friend in a trumped-up murder charge in Wahzoo City, Alabama. In this delightful comedy, Pesci is aided and abbetted by Marisa Tomei as his spandex-clad fiancee, a young woman whose prodigious knowledge of things mechanical eventually saves the day. Although Tomei is stunning, Pesci has strong support form Fred Gwynne as an irascible judge, and Austin Pendleton as a flustered DA. Jonathan Lynn is an Englishman with an undistinguished cinema record (his previous opus was Nuns on the Run—he's best known for the TV series Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister]. But then Dale (Ruthless People, Blind Date] Loaner's script does most of the work, feeding the actors many wonderful moments in this gentle study of culture clash as Brooklyn hits the Deep South. Tomei's last appearance on the witness stand is delicious. WILLIAM DART WHORE Director: Ken Russell Ken Russell's cinematic adaptation of David Hines' play about a day in the life of an everyday prostitute, is a startling film. Some will see its brashness and unabahsed outrageousness as a return to form L after Russell's literary dalliances of the last few years. Others, I suspect, will remain sceptical. Theresa Russell (no relation to the director) is Liz, the Shirley Valentine of

the hookers, taking us around her walks, tossing quips and snatches of philosophy at the camera. This is a woman who has trudged on the wild side — she can cheerfolly cope with all manner of distressful situation, from a colleague having her throat cut to her drunken husband throwing up in his dinner-plate. She's broad-minded too, thinking nothing of administering a little S&M to an elderly gentleman in a rest home (to the great amusement of the eavesdropping patients). For all its humour—and it would be unbearable without that humour— Whore has its bleak aspects. Liz's pimp, Blake (Benjamin Mouton) is an odious piece of work, cold and, unusually for a Russell film, unflamboyantly so. Outside of this, Russell the director deals mainly in rich caricature, such as a bicycle-riding young Indian who always asks Liz for condomless sex or indeed Russell's own over-the-top performance as an au fait waiter in an excruciatingly funny restaurant scene.

WILLIAM DART