Daily Archives: December 2, 2022

Bag of Tics [the 1991 CAPE FEAR]

From the Chicago Reader (November 22, 1991). — J.R.

CAPE FEAR

* (Has redeeming facet)

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Written by Wesley Strick

With Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange, Juliette Lewis, Joe Don Baker, Illeana Douglas, Fred Dalton Thompson, and Robert Mitchum.

I have nothing against pornography when it’s good, clean sex, but I don’t enjoy watching a cat play with a mouse, and I got no pleasure from seeing Mr. Mitchum — huge, brawny and sweatily bare-chested — toy first with the frantically terrified ten-year-old daughter and then move on to conquer her shrinking, pleading mother. — Dwight Macdonald

Cape Fear is heavy on Spanish moss and sick behavior, a classic demonstration of the differences between rich and poor; to say nothing of the typical good ol’ Southern boy’s view of women. Unfortunately, there aren’t many of ’em have very much good to say. You won’t forget this movie, especially if you’re a Yankee Jew. — Barry Gifford

/wp-content/uploads/1991/11/mitchum-robert.jpg

These remarks come from reviews of the original Cape Fear. Macdonald’s was written the same year the movie came out, 1962, and Gifford’s a couple of decades later; together, they help to show how we’ve increasingly come to view nastiness as a form of high art. Read more

My 2022 Sight and Sound List

Name: Jonathan Rosenbaum
Job title: film critic, teacher
Country: USA

Your votes

  1. Greed
    Year: 1924
    Director: Erich von Stroheim
  2. M
    Year: 1931
    Director: Fritz Lang
  3. Spring in a Small Town
    Year: 1948
    Director: Fei Mu
    Comment: The most neglected great film on my list, at least in the Western world.
  4. Ordet
    Year: 1955
    Director: Carl Dreyer
  5. A Man Escaped
    Year: 1956
    Director: Robert Bresson
  6. Ivan the Terrible, Part II
    Year: 1958
    Director: Sergei Eisenstein

  Comment: Like Welles’ equally worthy Touch of Evil, a monument to hyperbolic excess.

  • PlayTime
    Year: 1967
    Director: Jacques Tati
  • Vagabond
    Year:1985
    Director: Agnès Varda

Comment: Like Resnais’ Providence and Françoise Romand’s Mix-up, a masterpiece of magisterial juxtapositions.

  • Satantango
    Year: 1994
    Director(s): Bela Tarr
  • A.I. Artificial Intelligence
    Year: 2000
    Director: Steven Spielberg

Comment: Not only Spielberg’s best picture but also Kubrick’s;  a collaboration between a dead director and a friend who survived him seems appropriate for a meditation on the differences between human and nonhuman, living and dead that comprises a searing allegory about cinema itself.

Further remarks: I’ve omitted Chaplin (City Lights, Monsieur Verdoux) Hitchcock (Rear Window, North by Northwest), and Welles (Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight) as “goes without saying”. Read more

Life Is A Dream

From the Chicago Reader (April 1, 1989). — J.R.

Also known as Memory of Appearances, this ambitious feature by the extraordinary and prolific Raul Ruiz relocates portions of both versions of Calderon’s Life Is a Dream — the sacred and profane versions, written many decades apart — in a provincial movie theater, where a Chilean revolutionary tries to recall portions of a secret code drawn from the text, gets interrogated by the police behind the movie screen, and imagines himself as a participant in some of the genre films he’s watching. If this sounds confusing, it’s nothing compared to the multileveled games with the imagination that Ruiz plays throughout this intriguing labyrinth, where vestiges of science fiction, musical comedy, western shoot-outs, and costume dramas rub shoulders with themes and lines from Calderon. The important thing to keep in mind is that, however murky the proceedings may get, Ruiz is basically out to have fun, and as one of the supreme visual stylists in the contemporary cinema, he can guarantee more visual surprises and bold poetic conceits than we are likely to find crowded together elsewhere. Cheerfully indifferent to the modernist notion of a masterpiece, he conflates the profound with the tacky in a liberating manner that turns both into a witty carnival of attractions (1986). Read more

Edinburgh Encounters

From Sight and Sound, Winter 1975/1976; also reprinted in my first collection, Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism. — J.R.

Edinburgh Encounters:

A Consumers/Producers Guide-in-Progress to Four Recent Avant-Garde Films

 

The role of a work of art is to plunge people into horror. If the artist has a role, it is to confront people — and himself first of all — with this horror, this feeling that one has when one learns about the death of someone one has loved.

 — Jacques Rivette interview, circa 1967

 

For interpersonal communication, [the modernist text] substitutes the idea of collective production; writer and reader are indifferently critics of the text and it is through their collaboration that meanings are collectively produced . . .

The text then becomes the location of thought, rather than the mind. The mind is the factory where thought is at work, rather than the transport system which conveys the finished product. Hence the danger of the myths of clarity and transparency and of the receptive mind; they present thought as prepackaged, available, given, from the point of view of the consumer . . .Within a modernist text, however, all work is work in progress, the circle is never closed. Read more

A Cut Above [HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER]

From the Chicago Reader (April 14, 1989). — J.R.

HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER

** (Worth seeing)

Directed by John McNaughton

Written by Richard Fire and McNaughton

With Michael Rooker, Tracy Arnold, and Tom Towles.

Properly speaking, the slasher movie made its debut almost 30 years ago, with two features by middle-aged Englishmen, which coincidentally opened on separate continents within a few months of each other — Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, which premiered in England in May 1960, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which opened in the United States three months later. The parallels between these two movies remain striking — especially their puritanical and voyeuristic underpinnings, which give us sexually repressed heroes whose morbid scopophilia (pleasure in gazing) leads directly to their brutal murders of women. And both occasioned critical protests of rage and disapproval when they first appeared.

But it was Psycho and not Peeping Tom that went on to launch a subgenre and receive exhaustive (and exhausting) analysis. And from the vantage point of the present, it is probably the shower murder of Psycho rather than the Odessa Steps sequence of Potemkin that has become the most chewed-over montage sequence in the history of cinema. But how much concrete edification has grown out of this close study? Read more