This essay was written for That Magic Moment: 1968 Und Das Kino Eine Filmschau, a film program and publication organized by the Viennale and Stadtkino in late May and early June, 1998. Like some of the other pieces reproduced on this site as featured texts, this has various passages that have been recycled elsewhere in my work — in this case, both in the Chicago Reader and in my book Movie Wars — but it still seems worth reprinting, chiefly for its personal reflections on film history and, more generally, the 60s. — J.R.
My Filmgoing in 1968: An Exploration
by Jonathan Rosenbaum
In 1968, the year I turned 25, I bought my first appointment book — or at least the first appointment book that I’ve bothered to save, and I’ve saved all 30 of the appointment books that I’ve bought and filled since then. For the most part, I use these appointment books to list appointments of various kinds: meetings with friends, planned trips to other cities and countries, classes I plan to teach or lectures I plan to attend or deliver. But most of the entries concern films I plan to see and when or where they’re playing. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (January 1, 1998). — J.R.
Onetime independent producer James Schamus adapted this 1997 feature from Rick Moody’s novel about sexual confusion and hypocrisy in Connecticut, set during Thanksgiving 1973. Existentially speaking, this is puritanical Hollywood yuppie-think, right down to its inevitable retribution reel. Its characters ride the same commuter trains as Whit Stillman’s, but the higher forces placing them there are less up-front about their neocon refusal to see beyond their own class-bound hides. I can’t deny director Ang Lee’s sensitivity with actors or the fine cast strutting its stuff (including Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Christina Ricci, and Sigourney Weaver); some of the period details are fun, and Lee offers some nicely observed moments. But the tragic and highly “symbolic” death toward the end, which is supposed to illustrate the sins of the parents being visited upon their children, barely resonates at all, because most of the insights are strictly incidental. The film elicits guilty, lascivious chuckles, not analysis. (JR)
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From the Chicago Reader (August 31, 1990). — J. R.
TWISTER
*** (A must-see)
Directed and written by Michael Almereyda
With Suzy Amis, Dylan McDermott, Crispin Glover, Harry Dean Stanton, Lindsay Christman, Charlaine Woodard, Lois Chiles, and Jenny Wright.
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The second part of the opening sentence of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina applies pretty well to the eccentric Kansas family in Michael Almereyda’s oddball comedy Twister, but in a way that’s only half the story. Not only is the family as a whole unhappy in its own particular way, most of its members are out of whack with themselves, each other, and everybody else too.
The father is Eugene Cleveland (Harry Dean Stanton), a distracted, long-divorced retired multimillionaire who made his fortune in soda pop and miniature-golf courses. His main distraction is courting Virginia (Lois Chiles), the born-again hostess of “Wonderbox,” a local Sunday-morning TV kiddie show that teaches toddlers about “the weather, animals, and God.” Maureen, or Mo (Suzy Amis), his 24-year-old chain-smoking alcoholic daughter, is a crabby recluse who hasn’t quite grown up or broken away from home; she occasionally camps out in the backyard of the family mansion, which borders a golf course. Read more
