D: Terry Gilliam; with Bruce Willis, Madeline Stowe, Brad Pitt, Christopher
Plummer.
VHS Home Video
Waterloo Videom, 1016 W. Sixth
Time travel movies are infuriating, especially good ones. With 12
Monkeys, Gilliam keeps his audience from experiencing continuity anxiety by
providing a decent mystery and allowing a semblance of deductive reasoning —
the information is dispersed in portions small enough so that each new
understanding comes right when it should, just before it is spelled out
clearly. Bruce Willis plays a prison inmate in the future who has “volunteered”
to be a science experiment of sorts, traveling through time to gather
information about the infectious disease that has wiped out most of the
population, sentencing the remainder to an underground existence. The future
holds many of Gilliam’s famous (and nicely cinematic) oddball anachronisms, and
both Willis and Pitt (who plays a deranged activist) are eccentric eyesores,
almost too deliciously ugly to look at. — Jen Scoville
La Jet�e
D: Chris Marker.VHS Home Video
Waterloo Video 1016 W. Sixth
This haunting little black-and-white film essay shot in 1962 entirely from
still photographs is credited as inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s recent 12
Monkeys. And rightly so, for the plot elements of elusive French director
Marker’s La Jet�e (The Pier) are almost exactly identical
with those of the remake. With a rhythm nearly poetic, the narrator describes
the apocalyptic underground “world of rats” Paris has become after suffering
World War III, and tells of the prisoner of this world who submits himself to
time-travel experiments, returning again and again to the airport runway where
as a child he witnessed a man’s death. Somehow, the soft-spoken steadiness of
the one voice in the film makes the character’s plight even more desperate, and
the halted motion of the stills provides an eerie metaphor for time taken out
of context. The simple execution of Marker’s futuristic tale allows deeper
inspection of man’s roles throughout time, and succeeds without the
convolution associated with films of this genre. — Jen Scoville
I, The Worst
of All
D: Maria Luisa Bemburg; with Assumpta Serna, Dominique Sanda, HectorAlterio.
VHS Home Video
Vulcan Video, 609 W. 29th
I, The Worst of All, tells the story of Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz
(Serna), a 17th-century Mexican poet and the most renowned denizen of a convent
in a remote outpost of the Spanish empire whose “unfortunate skill for writing
poetry” is thought by her spiritual overlords to be in conflict with her
monastic duties. Her more earthly superiors, the viceroy and vicereine, are far
more supportive and protective of her, and the film plays masterfully upon this
political tug-of-war between church and state. Juana’s love poems to the
vicereine amuse the viceroy and anger the archbishop to the point that he makes
life troublesome for Juana. Serna, perhaps better known for her performance in
Pedro Almodovar’s Matador, shines with nervous strength and brilliance.
For (or perhaps because of) the spare, haunting sets and the director’s
stylized storytelling, the film tells an absolutely riveting, lyrical tale.
— Clay Smith
Tales of Manhattan
D: Julien Duvivier; with Charles Boyer, Rita Hayworth, Thomas Mitchell,Henry Fonda, Ginger Rogers, Charles Laughton, Edward G. Robinson, W.C.
Fields.
VHS Home Video
The addition of 10 minutes of lost W.C. Fields footage to this 1942 film is
reason for celebration. It would be even better if that excised scene’s return
could have made this movie into a complete, fully-realized masterpiece.
Unfortunately, such is not the case. The film is an anthology, featuring seven
separate stories as we follow a tail (“tale”) coat from owner to owner. The
opening tale, featuring Rita Hayworth and Charles Boyer is by far the best, but
from there things start to slide, though the list of stars (Henry Fonda,
Charles Laughton, Edward G. Robinson, etc.) remains impressive. Fields’ scene
is a treat, but, as the studio realized back in 1942, distracts from the flow
instead of giving the film the boost it needs towards the end. I recommend
watching the individual scenes separately for best effect. Be forewarned of the
insulting, Green Pastures-style dialects in the all-black final
sequence.
— Ken Lieck
VR Soccer ’96
PC CD-ROMGremlin Interactive
Complete with bob-handed virtual reality fans and eight adjustable camera
angles from which to view the game (including aerial), the 3D sensation of
VR Soccer comes through. All aspects of “the other football” are
covered, including substitutions, bookings (yellow and red cards), and an
up-counting clock. The one drawback of the game may be the difficulty of play;
it took my stacked Argentine team going up against Tunisia for me to finally
win a match. League or cup play is possible with up to 20 people via modem and
four people on the same machine. Just ignore the biting commentary, strap on
your cleats, and you, too, can pummel a third-world country with a soccer
dynasty. — Carl Bacher
This article appears in October 4 • 1996 and October 4 • 1996 (Cover).