Daily Archives: August 31, 2022

Does Choosing “The Year’s Best” Compromise the Truth? (Slate post)

Posted on Slate, December 27, 2005. — J.R.

 

Does Choosing “The Year’s Best” Compromise the Truth?

By Jonathan Rosenbaum

Dec 27, 2005 2:13 PM

Holiday Greetings, David, Scott, and Tony,

David, I appreciate your invitation to “shake hands and come out punching,” though I suspect our disagreements this time around may wind up having more to do with Steven Spielberg and Munich than they do with Terrence Malick and The New World. (See Edelstein’s top-20 list of 2005 films here.) Just to be contrary, however, let me start off with four agreements. Me and You and Everyone We Know, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, William Eggleston and the Real World, and Homecoming all belong somewhere on my own extended list of favorites — and I’d need an asterisk of my own for the penultimate title, David, because Michael Almereyda is a friend whom we share.

To be contrary in another way, I haven’t yet composed my full list for Slate —although I’ve already filed separate lists for the Chicago Reader (which will appear online on Jan. 6) and the Village Voice (which has already appeared online). With your patience and indulgence, I’d like to delay this ritual for another day or so, concentrating for the moment on the issue of what the four of us actually do for a living. Read more

My Ten Best List for IndieWire (2021)

I no longer remember the order of this list (apart from the fact that BAD LUCK BANGING, MEMORIA, and PASSING were all near or at the top), so here’s an alphabetical listing: — J. R.

BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN (Radu Jude)

BENEDETTA (Paul Verhoeven)

CRY MACHO (Clint Eastwood)

HER SOCIALIST SMILE (John Gianvito)

JOHN FARROW HOLLYWOOD’S MAN IN THE SHADOWS (Claude Gonzalez & Frans Vandenburg)

MARTIN UND HANS (Mark Rappaport)

MEDIUM (Edgardo Cozarinsky)

MEMORIA (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)    

PASSING (Rebecca Hall)

TIANG BAHRU SOCIAL CLUB (Tan Bee Thiam)

 


P.S. MEDIUM came out in 2020, but I only caught up with it in 2021.
       

 

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Welles’s Anguish and Goose Liver: CONFIDENTIAL REPORT

This essay, a revised and updated version of my article “The Seven Arkadins,” was commissioned by the Australian DVD label Madman for their DVD of Orson Welles’ Confidential Report, released in 2010. — J.R.

Mr. Arkadin “was just anguish from beginning to end,” Orson Welles told Peter Bogdanovich in their coauthored This is Orson Welles, and probably for this reason, Welles had less to say about this feature — known in a separate version as Confidential Report — than any of his others, either to Bogdanovich or to other interviewers. Editing This is Orson Welles in its two successive editions took me the better part of a decade (roughly, 1987-1997), and one of the biggest obstacles I faced throughout this work was the paucity of specific details that Welles was willing to offer about this film. It was plainly too painful a memory for him to linger on, and he even spoke of being blocked in remembering certain particulars.

Broadly speaking, the features of Welles fall into two categories: those he finished and released to his satisfaction and those he didn’t. In the first category are Citizen Kane, Macbeth, Othello, The Trial, Chimes at Midnight, The Immortal Story, F for Fake, and Filming “Othello”. Read more