(Belgium; 88 min.) There’s genuine horror in this Dutch import, which shows a Shyamalanesque use of the uncanny to weigh moral character. Maybe part of the horror is the city backdrop: Rotterdam, which is infamous as the one of the first places of “total war.”
Articles by Richard von Busack
It seemed like a good idea at the time (1958). Conceited aliens in a flying saucer, peeved at human violence, decide to give Earthlings a good scare by resurrecting their dead. When the dead consist of wrestler Tor “The Big Swede With a Heart of Gold” Johnson, the late, lamented TV hostess Vampira and chiropractor-turned-actor Dr. Tom Mason, you can see why Earth fails to take notice.
(Romania; 90 min.) Calin Peter Netzer’s film is your classic woebegone Balkans fable. It’s 1995: the new faceless bureaucracy running Romania awards the aged and confused Ion I. Ion (Radu Beligan) a medal commemorating his valor in the Big War 50 years ago.
(Belgium; 74 min.) Certainly Gust Van den Berghe was put on Earth so that Harmony Korine will have someone to talk to at film festivals. With hand-drawn titles and a cast of actors with Down syndrome, this sometimes shining, sometimes aggravating experimental film recasts of the story of the Three Kings.
(U.S.; 72 min.) Nathan Silver’s debut has slaved-over visual and audio surfaces, from the classic-era film titles to the soundtrack of ‘50s show tunes. Kate (Josette Barchilon) exists in a fugue state that would do a Stepford Wife proud; she’s the live-in of an emotionally shuttered young architect (Jonas Ball) who does his best to ditch her whenever possible.
(Chile, France; 84 min.) Back in Chile after 10 years of rootless hackdom as a travel writer, Andres (Santiago Cabrera) is attending a party at a house where so much happened to him.
(Romania; 60 min.) Made for HBO Romania, this documentary profiles an outsider artist in the literal sense: Ion Barladeanu actually lived outside.
Geoff Alexander’s book ‘Academic Films for the Classroom: A History’ is an extraordinarily well-researched and necessary history of educational film between World War II and the Gulf War.
There may never have been a book quite like Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954–1981),’ in which an 80-year-old songsmith takes an X-ray to his work, while evaluating predecessors too dead to complain.
In his book “The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto,” tt’s bourbon that literary historian Bernard DeVoto praises the most highly: bourbon and its lighter cousin rye, as American as the Washington Monument and far more useful.
