Elaine May’s hilarious, edgy first feature is her only one that differs substantially from what she intended. Her three-hour rough cut included two murders committed by the antihero (Walter Matthau), of a blackmailer and a crooked lawyer (Jack Weston), that the studio excised, yet A New Leaf registers with audiences as her sweetest, most tender picture. The irony is that Matthau’s character — a self-absorbed idler who exhausts his inheritance, then goes looking for a wealthy bride he can murder in order to keep his luxuries (and finding a clueless, clumsy botanist, deftly played by May) — is hardly the sort one expects to solicit such emotions, even without his two murders. But a specialist in creating lovable monsters, predators and innocents alike, May is clearly up to the challenge.
Reading Jack Ritchie’s short story “The Green Heart” that she adapted, included with the Olive Films Blu-Ray, clarifies the much blacker comedy she had in mind, achieving her sweet finale only after more challenging discomforts en route. And what she added to this story — such as the antihero’s Ferreri, butler, and uncle, and two potential brides preceding the botanist — may matter as much as what the studio removed. Read more
An obituary, written in February 2006 for Sight and Sound. — J.R.
Film history has always been at the mercy of technology and markets, yielding the brutal shifts from silent to sound pictures and from black and white to colour, as well as the reconfigurations of films on television. More recently, digital video and the Internet have ushered in a confusing transitional period that we’re still in the middle of, recasting our canons of films and film critics alike according to what’s available.
Improbably, most of Carl Dreyer’s major films —- which until recently were almost impossible to see anywhere in decent prints —- are now available in pristine form to anyone on the planet with a multiregional DVD player. Yet those of James Whale that don’t qualify as horror, including such 30s masterpieces as Remember Last Night?, Show Boat, and The Great Garrick, remain firmly out of reach. And the warm, mischievous, shy yet gruff, and dedicated critic who introduced me to all this and much else — Tom Milne, who died in Aberdeen last December — is barely known today because little of his prose has made it onto the Internet.
For those with backlogs of Monthly Film Bulletin and Sight and Sound from the 60s through the 80s, it’s hard to think of other London-based film writers during that stretch who wrote more cogently and passionately about film. Read more
Posted on Slate in late 2005. I’m sorry that the links no longer work. — J.R.
The New Global Movie Culture
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
Dec 29, 2005 4:52 PM
Hi, Everybody:
So many films and so little time! Consequently, I hope you’ll forgive me if I skate past most of the titles that we’ve all been citing lately and jump to some of the bigger issues broached by Tony in his first letter, and by David and Scott more recently —specifically, the transformations of film culture that are taking place these days thanks to DVDs, the Internet, globalization, and related pleasures, and conundrums.
In fact, David, I regard you as something of a pioneer in your inauguration of this Movie Club seven years ago. This helped to usher in the idea of critical exchanges in cyberspace that’s been developing so rapidly ever since that I find refreshing new instances of it virtually every day. The irreplaceable Dave Kehr reporting “from the lost continent of cinephilia” on his wonderful new blog and including responses from others is only one of the first examples that spring to mind. Another is the international, auteurist chat group over at Yahoo!, which has been around somewhat longer, where they’ve been raking me over the coals lately — and with a great deal of intelligence and pertinence, I might add — about my skeptical comments regarding Malick’s The New World, which I’ve been making in Movie Club as well as there. Read more
Here’s my promised list: 25 films in 20 entries, allowing for five ties. I’ve made it somewhat different from my Village Voice ballot and my forthcoming Chicago Reader list by changing some of the ground rules: The only criterion for inclusion is a public screening somewhere in the United States, and the order is strictly alphabetical rather than hierarchical. I’ve appended comments to each entry, including some remarks about performances (good idea, Tony) and some responses to other comments. Tony’s point that more films are becoming easier to see, at least on DVD, is well taken; this means that most (if not all) of my choices will be obtainable that way in the coming year, if they aren’t already.
Café Lumière and Fear and Trembling. Two first-rate alternatives to the dubious Lost in Translation, both showing how one can view Japan from a foreign viewpoint with some nuance and a bit more sensitivity than simple class blindness. Politesse isn’t the issue. Though I’ve yet to find a Japanese person who can bear Sofia Coppola’s film, I don’t know if Alain Corneau’s even more unflattering Stupeur et tremblement — about the suffering of a Belgian woman (Sylvie Testud) working for a corporation in Tokyo and trying to conform to the local protocol — has even shown in Japan. Read more
As a long-standing member of PEN, I’m periodically invited to participate in their “forums” for their occasional publication PEN America. This is my response to Issue 5 (volume 3) in 2004, devoted to “Silences”. –- J.R.
After my announcement in this magazine three years ago that the original negative of my all-time favorite Hong Kong feature (1992) was destroyed, and that the two-and-a-half-hour original version was virtually lost (see “Stanley Kwan’s Actress: Writing History in Quicksand,” Cinema Scope issue 7, spring 2001 —- about to be reprinted in my collection Essential Cinema, with the same misinformation), this ideal version has just come out on DVD in France, under the title Center Stage, in a lovely two disc-set distributed by Universal Pictures Video.
The bad news? It’s subtitled only in French — although an interview with Kwan comprising the only bonus, on the second disc, is conducted in English and can easily be followed that way.
Also subtitled in French —- or in French without subtitles —- are invaluable DVDs included in the last three issues of Bernard Eisenschitz’s indispensable, lavishly illustrated (and therefore pricey) two-issue-a-year journal Cinéma, published by www.leoscheer.com. Issue 05 (printemps 2003) has a restoration of a surviving fragment from Kenji Mizoguchi’s La marche de Tokyo (1929); 06 has two late TV documentaries by Jean Eustache, Offre d’emploi (1980) and Le jardin des délices de Jerôme Bosch (1979); and 07, scheduled to appear this spring, will have my all-time favorite Iranian film, Forough Farrokhzad’s 1962 La maison est noire, as well as Ebrahim Golestan’s 1959 Un feu, which she edited.Read more
I don’t get it. As Dave Kehr has noted, the 1962 original was an audacious mix of cold war paranoia and twisted cabaret humor. Any remake that scuttles both had better have something good to replace them with; this offers only a vague retread of anticorporate thrillers from the 70s. The story’s been updated to the first gulf war (Manchurian is now just the name of an evil conglomerate) and deprived of its major shocks (involving formal inventiveness, over-the-top dialogue, and the way the incest is presented). Oddly, it does retain some of the original’s political murkiness — the right-wing villainess (Meryl Streep) resembles Hillary Clinton — but there’s no mythic or comic payoff. If you don’t care much about the first version, or what director Jonathan Demme’s name once meant, the cast does an OK job with Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris’s routine thriller script. But the bite found in the best recent political documentaries is missing. With Denzel Washington, Liev Schreiber, Jon Voight, and Jeffrey Wright. R, 135 min. (JR) Read more
From the September 15, 1995 Chicago Reader. — J.R.
Though not directed by an auteurist-approved figure (Mark Robson has never attracted any cult to my knowledge), this is the greatest of producer Val Lewton’s justly celebrated low-budget chillers — a beautifully wrought story about the discovery of devil worshippers in Greenwich Village that fully lives up to the morbid John Donne quote framing the action. Intricately plotted over its 71 minutes, by screenwriters Charles O’Neal, De Witt Bodeen, and an uncredited Lewton, so that what begins rationally winds up as something far weirder than a thriller plot, this 1943 tale of a young woman (Kim Hunter in her first screen role) searching for her troubled sister (Jean Brooks) exudes a distilled poetry of doom that extends to all the characters as well as to the noirish bohemian atmosphere. (In a fascinating intertextual detail, the horny psychiatrist clawed to death by an offscreen feline in Lewton’s previous Cat People –played by Tom Conway, George Sanders’s brother — is resurrected here.) Mon 1/3, 6:30 PM, and Tue 1/4, 8:15 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center.
An eye-opening documentary (2003) by Nancy Kates and Bennett Singer about the most sophisticated and charismatic of the civil rights leaders, enhanced by insights about why he became the most neglected. A onetime singer in Josh White’s quartet, the Carolinians, a communist between 1938 and ’41, and a conscientious objector imprisoned during World War II, Rustin (1912-’87) helped to school Martin Luther King in pacifismand persuaded him at an early stage not to own guns. Ultimately Rustin was driven to the margins of the movement for being outspokenly gay and refusing (on tactical grounds) to oppose the war in Vietnam. Without overemphasizing either of these factors, this intelligently balanced account offers a complex and nuanced portrait of a complex and nuanced individual. 84 min. (JR) Read more
This fascinating personal essay (2003) by Canadian filmmaker Ann Marie Fleming investigates the life of her great-grandfather, the Chinese vaudeville performer Long Tack Sam (1895-1961) — one of the greatest magicians in the world (and one of the key mentors of Orson Welles), who was also an acrobat, though he’s mainly forgotten today. In fact, he circled the globe so many times and experienced so much that recounting his life in many ways means recounting the 20th century. Fleming, an animator and storyteller as well as a documentarian, draws extensively on her own varied talents to approach this elusive topic from many different angles, and her speculations are often as interesting as her findings. Indeed, the way Long Tack Sam keeps sliding out of her and our grasp, even though we wind up feeling that we know him in some fashion, is part of this film’s magic. 90 min. (JR) Read more
In this personal and poetic 2003 video documentary, Babette Mangolte—possibly the best cinematographer now working in experimental cinema (she’s also shot major films by Chantal Akerman, Richard Foreman, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Marcel Hanoun, Sally Potter, Jackie Raynal, Yvonne Rainer, and Michael Snow)—interviews the three leading performers from Robert Bresson’s wondrous 1959 Pickpocket. Bresson wanted to convey directly, without acting, the spiritual essence of individuals, which is why he called his performers interpreters or models. These three were clearly marked by the experience of working for him, and as Mangolte moves from France to Austria to Mexico meeting them she seems as responsive to their self-aware vibrancy and as respectful of their mysteries as Bresson was. 89 min. (JR) Read more
With Carl Lumbly, Lorraine Toussaint, Beau Bridges, Allison Jones, Bill Cobbs, Kathleen York, Gabriel Casseus, Tom Nowicki, and Joel Thomas Traywick.
Words are freedom, old man. ‘Cause that’s all that slavery’s made of: words. Laws, deeds, passes: all they are is words. White folks got all the words, and they mean to keep them. You get some words for yourself and you be free. — the character Nightjohn
I think a strong case can be made that Charles Burnett is the most gifted and important black filmmaker this country has ever had. But there’s a fair chance you’ve never heard of him because he isn’t a hustler, he’s never had a mainstream success, and all his work to date has been difficult to pigeonhole. Born in Mississippi in 1943, though raised since infancy in Los Angeles, he was one of several key black filmmakers — including Larry Clark, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, and Billy Woodbury — to attend UCLA’s graduate film program in the 60s and 70s. His first film to circulate widely, the remarkable 1977 Killer of Sheep, won prizes in 1981 at Berlin and Sundance (before it was known as Sundance) and was one of the first titles selected for the Library of Congress’s Historic Film Registry. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (January 25, 1991). — J.R.
THE SHELTERING SKY ** (Worth seeing)
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci
Written by Mark Peploe and Bertolucci
With Debra Winger, John Malkovich, Campbell Scott, Jill Bennett, Timothy Spall, Eric Vu-An, and Paul Bowles.
Ever since the 60s the adjective “personal” has been frequently used in relation to commercial movies, and it has almost always been used as an expression of praise. As a reaction to the relatively “impersonal” directorial styles of a Fred Zinnemann, Stanley Kramer, or David Lean, the celebration of the “personal” styles of directors such as John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock ushered in a critical bias that favored the director’s subjective involvement in his or her material — an involvement that is often autobiographical in its implications (such as Ford’s feelings for the Irish and the military, or Hitchcock’s sexual repression and his fear of imprisonment) — over the self-effacement that has often been regarded as both the norm and the ideal of conventional filmmaking.
But in order to argue that the films of supposedly “invisible” stylists like Hawks were highly personal, many auteurists wound up overstating their case, arguing in effect that any director with a discernible “personality” was automatically better than any director without one. Read more
From The Independent: Film and Video Monthly, November 1985 — J.R.
Having attended festivals of many shapes and sizes around the world, I can think of none that is more conducive to the serious viewing of original, offbeat work than the Rotterdam Film Festival. While Rotterdam lacks the global media coverage and accompanying hoopla of a Cannes, Toronto, Venice, Filmex, or Berlin, the festival offers filmmakers a congenial and sympathetic setting. Significantly, American independents as diverse as Jim Jarmusch and Mark Rappaport — as well as European figures like Manoel de Oliveira and Raul Ruiz — made their mark there long before they were treated to New York Film Festival premieres.
A cash prize is awarded each year to a film selected by the Dutch critics. Most recently, it went to Ruiz’s Manoel à l’ïle des merveilles (see two stills above), a French-Portuguese television co-productionshot in 16mm, comprising three 50-minute episodes. However, the overall spirit of the festival is anything but competitive, and as a rule the critics prize will go to a film that the critics feel is deserving of special attention rather than an audience favorite. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (November 24, 1995). — J.R.
Eyes Without a Face
**** (Masterpiece)
Directed by Georges Franju
Written by Jean Redon, Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Claude Sautet, Pierre Gascar, and Franju
With Edith Scob, Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel, Béatrice Altariba, François Guerin, Alexandre Rignault, and Claude Brasseur.
The Kingdom
** (Worth seeing)
Directed by Lars von Trier and Morten Arnfred
Written by von Trier, Niels Vorsel, and Tomas Gislason
With Ernst Hugo Jaregard, Kirsten Rolffes, Ghita Norby, Soren Pilmark, Holger Juul Hansen, Annevig Schelde Ebbe, Jens Okking, Otto Brandenburg, Baard Owe, and Birgitte Raabjerg.
They’re both arty European fantasy meditations on the medical profession — that’s about all that Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1959) and Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom (1993) have in common, apart from the fact that they’re both opening here the day after Thanksgiving. The differences between them are much more instructive. Franju’s Les yeux sans visage is a poetic, compact (88 minutes) black-and-white French horror picture about skin grafting that premiered inauspiciously in the United States 32 years ago in a dubbed and reportedly mangled version known as The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus; happily, Facets Multimedia is showing it in its original form and subtitled. Read more
