FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18
Three narratives: Stephen Eckelberry’s Going Home from the U.S., starring Karen Black and Jeannette Nolan; Kirkham Jackson’s Pieces of the Moon from the UK; and Johannes Stjarne Nilsson’s Nowhere Man from Sweden. (Three Penny, 6:30)
Bitter Sugar
An honorable failure, this intelligent adaptation of one of Kurt Vonnegut’s best early novels falters in part because it rejects Vonnegut’s narrative structure of alternating several time frames for more chronological flashbacks. This plays havoc at times with the book’s delicate ordering of facts about Howard W. Campbell Jr. (Nick Nolte)–a successful German-American playwright living in Germany who decides during the rise of Nazism to work as an American spy, knowing that for security reasons his masquerade as a Nazi can never be revealed. The invaluable moral of the novel, placed in the first paragraph of the introduction, is “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” By placing it less prominently in the narration, director Keith Gordon and adapter Robert B. Weide grant it a lesser function, so that the powerful literary irony established in the film’s first half–all the more valuable in the context of Schindler’s List and its suggestion that there were good ways of being a Nazi–is eventually dissipated, and the improbabilities of the original become much more vexing without the author’s exquisite expositional strategies. But this has taste and soul before the contrivances become too obtrusive. With Sheryl Lee, John Goodman, Alan Arkin, Kirsten Dunst, and David Strathairn. (JR) (Pipers Alley, 9:30)
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“Queer cinema” is fashionable, and particularly this year, films about young male hustlers in Hollywood. Bruce LaBruce and Rick Castro (Hustler White) and Everett Lewis (Skin and Bone) have an inside knowledge of the gay milieu and enough flair to accurately represent it on-screen. But Scott Silver is an unoriginal imitator cashing in on gay chic. Take a cute actor from a well-known show-business family (David Arquette), a semisordid, semisexy subject (teenage gay prostitution on Santa Monica Boulevard), a love story (the hustler and his girl–of course he’s not really gay; he just does it for the money), and a friendship (between two young hustlers), then add a few mobsters (the kids owe them money), some predictable stock characters (a crazy black dude on coke, a shy and repressed customer, a cool porter at a chic hotel, a homeless man), and a few shreds of a cheap dream (leave this urban hell to work as security guards in the middle of a safe nowhere). When the Arquette character has finally solved all his problems and bought bus tickets to leave town, he decides to turn one last trick. By this point you’ll probably be thinking, “If this trick kills him I’ll scream.” But it’s not worth screaming about. (BR) (Music Box, 9:30)
The Letter
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