From the July 1, 2005 Chicago Reader.To celebrate a lovely new restoration coming out. — J.R.
Bert Stern’s film of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival (1960; his only film) features Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong, Eric Dolphy, Chuck Berry, Dinah Washington, Mahalia Jackson, Anita O’Day, Gerry Mulligan, Chico Hamilton, and many others. Shot in gorgeous color, it’s probably the best feature-length jazz concert movie ever made. Despite some distracting cutaways to boats in the opening sections, it eventually buckles down to an intense concentration on the music and the audience’s rapport with it as afternoon turns into evening. Jackson’s rendition of “The Lord’s Prayer” is a particularly luminous highlight. Stern doesn’t seem to know what distinguishes mediocre from good or great jazz — he didn’t even bother to film Miles Davis at the same festival, and he allows a stupid announcement about boats to cover up part of a Monk solo — so all three get equal amounts of his attention. But he’s very good at showing people listening. 85 min. Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (January 14, 2005). — J.R.
Wong Kar-wai’s idiosyncratic style first became apparent in this gorgeously moody second feature (1991), whose romantic vision of 1960 Hong Kong as a network of unfulfilled longings would later echo through In the Mood for Love. Leslie Cheung, Hong Kong’s answer to James Dean (in fact the movie appropriates its Cantonese title from Rebel Without a Cause), plays a heartless ladies’ man, raised by a prostitute, who eventually leaves for the Philippines in search of his real mother. Maggie Cheung is a waitress at a soccer stadium whom the man woos with his philosophical ruminations on a wall clock, and Andy Lau is a lonely cop who yearns for her. This was conceived as the first of two movies, and its puzzling coda was intended as a teaser for the second part; the box office failure of Days of Being Wild precluded a sequel and delayed its stateside release for years, though its lack of dramatic closure now seems almost appropriate. As critic Tony Rayns has noted, it’s “the first film to rhyme nostalgia for a half-imaginary past with future shock.” In Cantonese with subtitles. 94 min. Music Box.
With Gretchen Mol, Chris Bauer, Jared Harris, Sarah Paulson, Cara Seymour, David Strathairn, Lili Taylor, and John Cullum
Basic Instinct 2
** (Worth seeing)
Directed by Michael Caton-Jones
Written by Leora Barish and Henry Bean
With Sharon Stone, David Morrissey, David Thewlis, Charlotte Rampling, Hugh Dancy, Flora Montgomery, Indira Varma, and Heathcoate Williams
The Notorious Bettie Page — about the pinup and soft-core-bondage film and magazine star of the 50s — mixes archival black-and-white and color footage with re-creations. The mix of materials evoking the period is far from seamless, and we can’t always be sure what’s archival and what’s simulated because sometimes the filmmakers are trying to fool us. But their preoccupation with the manufacture of images keeps this exercise in exposure and concealment interesting.
Page, effectively played by Gretchen Mol, is shown as a cheerful airhead who loves her work as a model and maintains a good-natured innocence about it. That is, until the puritanical Senate porn investigation of Estes Kefauver (whom David Strathairn makes almost interchangeable with his Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck) drives her back to the religion of her childhood, which the movie persuasively suggests was the only logical place for her to go at that point. Read more
With Stellan Skarsgard, Charlotte Rampling, Deborah Kara Unger, Dimitris Katalifos, Ashley Remy, and Michael Cook.
+
The Fourth Dimension
Rating *** A must see
Directed, written, and narrated by Trinh T. Minh-ha.
Broadly speaking, Signs & Wonders, an ambitious thriller set in contemporary Athens, and The Fourth Dimension, a documentary about Japan, derive most of their strengths from being meditations by American tourists. Signs & Wonders, running this week at Facets Multimedia Center, is a 35-millimeter feature shot on digital video, and it’s directed by Jonathan Nossiter, a quirky and talented son of a journalist who grew up in France, England, Italy, Greece, and India and has made only one previous narrative feature, Sunday (1997). Nossiter wrote both films with James Lasdun, a Londoner now based in the U.S. who also wrote the story on which Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1998 Besieged was based.
It’s a gorgeous mess of a movie, brimming with provocative ideas about the state of the planet, multinational corporations, political amnesia, American idealism, and some of the monstrous ways love can turn sour, and demonstrating how these ideas can converge and inform one another. Read more
Written by Ozon, Emmanuele Bernheim, Marina de Van, and Marcia Romano
With Charlotte Rampling, Bruno Cremer, Jacques Nolot, and Alexandra Stewart.
Ghost World
Rating *** A must see
Directed by Terry Zwigoff
Written by Daniel Clowes and Zwigoff
With Thora Birch, Steve Buscemi, Scarlett Johansson, Brad Renfro, Illeana Douglas, Bob Balaban, and Stacey Travis.
The Deep End
Rating ** Worth seeing
Directed and written by Scott McGehee and David Siegel
With Tilda Swinton, Goran Visnjic, Jonathan Tucker, Peter Donat, Josh Lucas, and Raymond Barry.
It’s often said that strong roles for women are rare nowadays, but three new movies — Under the Sand, GhostWorld, and The Deep End — have the virtue of handing a juicy, sympathetic part to a talented actress and letting her run with it. All three are directed by men, which raises the question of whether women will find these portraits as potent and sensitive as I do. Yet even if they qualify to some degree as male fantasies, I’d argue that they’re more in touch with our everyday reality and our history than a male fantasy like Apocalypse Now Redux. Read more
Steven Spielberg’s shamelessly hokey version of the 1898 H.G. Wells yarn about murderous invaders from outer space starts off as a nimble scare show like Jaws. The special effects are good, and Tom Cruise isn’t bad as an alienated father fleeing with his kids. But such virtues are overtaken by a surfeit of narrow escapes and meaningful reflections about people’s behavior in war, complete with allusions to 9/11 and the Holocaust. Spielberg’s calculations turn out to be more prominent than any effects they could possibly produce, and the less pretentious 1953 version by producer George Pal emerges as more likable. With Tim Robbins, Dakota Fanning, Justin Chatwin, and Morgan Freeman in the offscreen James Earl Jones ”This is CNN” role. PG-13, 118 min. (JR)
Argentinean filmmaker Lucrecia Martel follows up her distinctive debut feature, La cienaga (2001), with another tale whose feeling of lassitude conceals a subtle but deadly family dysfunction. It’s set in a specifically Catholic milieu, hovering around a medical convention at a small-town hotel, and once again a swimming pool serves as a kind of center for floating libidos. As Martel points out, the movie is about the difficulties and dangers of differentiating good from evil, and it requires as well as rewards a fair amount of alertness from the viewer. A theremin plays a prominent role in the story. In Spanish with subtitles. R, 106 min. (JR)
This essay about Noah Baumbach’s first feature was commissioned by Criterion for their DVD of Kicking and Screaming, and was written around May 2006. — J.R.
“There’s plenty of wit on the surface,” I wrote in my capsule review of Kicking and Screaming when it was released a little over a decade ago, “but the pain of paralysis comes through loud and clear.” Having voluntarily spent five years as an undergraduate myself, I could and still can find plenty of reasons to identify with the four desperate antiheroes of this brittle comedy, who graduate from college and then proceed to spend the next half year on or around campus, doing as little as possible.
Grover (Josh Hamilton), expecting to live in Brooklyn with his girlfriend, Jane (Olivia d’Abo), is so dumbstruck and angry when she accepts a scholarship to study in Prague that he won’t reply to any of her phone messages, and can only brood over their past in five strategically placed flashbacks, each one heralded by a black-and-white snapshot of her. Otis (Carlos Jacott) finds himself incapable of flying to grad school in Milwaukee, only one time zone away, and reverts to living with his mother. Max (Chris Eigeman), who’d rather label broken glass as such on the floor than sweep it up, finds nothing better to do than chide Otis, do crossword puzzles, and have sex with Miami (Parker Posey), the girlfriend of Skippy (Jason Wiles). Read more
This essay was proposed to Another Gaze, an excellent feminist journal based in the U.K., in June 2020, lightly revised with their helpful suggestions over the next several months after I received a go-ahead from them, and still hadn’t appeared by October 8, 2021. I wished them well, but the editor was no longer responding to my emails, which is why I posted this essay here. P.S. My thanks to Scott Moore for pointing out several typos in the original posting of this piece, now corrected.
P.P.S. (12/16/21): I’m reposting this to celebrate the arrival in my mailbox of the hefty new issue of Another Gaze, including my essay, where I find myself among such fellow contributors as my old pal Lizzie Borden and A.S. Hamrah. My apologies to the editors for my journalistic impatience; it was well worth the wait. — J.R.
,
Long before the Coronavirus pandemic set in and many of us suddenly had more time to explore new modes of online viewing and even canon-building, I had been trying to develop and expand my limited acquaintance with the films of Kira Muratova (1934-2018), initially sparked by my 1989 encounter with her masterpiece The Asthenic Syndrome (1989) at the Toronto film festival, two years after I began my twenty-year stint as the principal film reviewer for the Chicago Reader. Read more
Take No Prisoners: The Bold Vision of Kira Muratova
at the Gene Siskel Film Center
The most original filmmakers working today tend to be identified more with their respective national cultures than with the world at large. The work of directors such as James Benning, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jia Zhang-ke, Abbas Kiarostami, Kira Muratova, Jafar Panahi, Béla Tarr, Tsai Ming-liang, and Edward Yang is seen as specialized, local, and esoteric. But I’d argue that what they have to say about their countries is secondary to their larger concern: the bewildering, tragicomic, and often disastrous effects of modernity on traditional modes of life and thought.
The dozen obstinately weird and wild films of Kira Muratova, seven of which are playing this month at the Gene Siskel Film Center, are described by some critics as Russian to the core, and I wouldn’t hesitate to call her the greatest living Russian filmmaker. (I’d link Alexander Sokurov’s work to the 19th century rather than to the 20th or the 21st.) Yet I’m not entirely sure what “Russian” means these days or how it applies to her.
Born in 1934 in Romania to a Romanian mother and a Russian father, Muratova went to both Romanian and Russian schools, often hiding her Russian identity at the former and her Romanian identity at the latter. Read more
A great movie (1989), but not a pleasant or an easy one. Directed by the transgressive Kira Muratova in her mid-50s, it has been rightly called the only “masterpiece of glasnost,” though it was banned by the Russian government for obscenity. Beginning as a powerful black-and-white narrative about a middle-aged woman doctor in an exploding, aggressive rage over the death of her husband (who resembles Stalin), the film eventually turns into an even more unorthodox tale in color about a schoolteacher (cowriter Sergei Popov) who periodically falls asleep regardless of what’s happening around him. (The title alludes to a form of disability that encompasses both the doctor’s aggressiveness and the schoolteacher’s passivity.) Though this tragicomic epic has plenty to say about postcommunist Russia, it also deals more generally with the demons loose in today’s world. It may drive you nuts — as it was undoubtedly meant to do — but you certainly won’t forget it. In Russian with subtitles. 153 min. (JR)
From the Chicago Reader (September 9, 2005). — J.R.
The debut feature of Louis Malle, this efficient but soulless 1957 thriller is often classified as part of the French New Wave, though that reputation seems unwarranted. The defining situation — an adulterer who’s just committed a murder (Maurice Ronet) patiently tries to pry his way out of a stuck elevator — shows the influence of Robert Bresson, for whom Malle worked as an assistant. There’s also some of the youthful insolence of Roger Vadim (And God Created Woman) when two young lovers take the killer’s car for a joyride. But the incompatibility of these influences suggests how little Malle’s absorbed them, though he gives Jeanne Moreau a juicy early role as the murder victim’s wife and engages Miles Davis to play the score (used conventionally as mood music). Also known as Frantic. In French with subtitles. 88 min. (JR)
From the Chicago Reader (September 30, 2005). The last illustration, incidentally, is from the graphic novel that this film is based on.,,,See below for screenwriter Josh Olson’s recent response to this review. — J.R.
A History of Violence
**** (Masterpiece)
Directed by David Cronenberg
Written by Josh Olson
With Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, Ashton Holmes, William Hurt, and Heidi Hayes
Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) is a happy family man running a diner in idyllic small-town Indiana, with a lawyer wife (Maria Bello), a teenage son (Ashton Holmes), and a little girl (Heidi Hayes). One night he responds so deftly and definitively to the violent threats of two killers that he becomes a local hero. A Philadelphia mobster named Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris) hears of the story and soon arrives in town claiming that Tom has another name and background — that he was once a gangster himself who mutilated one of Fogarty’s eyes with barbed wire.
Is A History of Violence a popular genre movie, soliciting visceral, unthinking responses to its violence while evoking westerns and noirs? Or is it an art film, reflecting on the meaning, implications, and effects of its violence, and getting us to do the same? Read more
The September 16, 2005 issue of the Chicago Reader ran a somewhat different edit of this piece. I’ve opted for restoring much of my original submitted draft in the first section, as well as my original title. –J.R.
Lord of War
*** (A must see)
Directed and written by Andrew Niccol
With Nicolas Cage, Ethan Hawke, Bridget Moynahan, Jared Leto, and Ian Holm
Winter Soldier
*** (A must see)
Directed by the Winter Film Collective
“Memory believes before knowing remembers,” begins the sixth chapter of my favorite novel, William Faulkner’s Light in August. This odd but accurate observation perfectly describes my misremembering of Winter Soldiers —- an account of the Winter Soldier investigation held by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in Detroit in 1971. I saw it in Cannes shortly after it was made, in 1972, and haven’t seen it since until recently.
It’s almost as potent today as it was when I first saw it. But I recalled it being full of emotional breakdowns from the participants when in fact, apart from one Native American fighting back tears (who receives a standing ovation from many of the others), most of the soldiers’ testimonies are calm, thoughtful, and measured, in spite of the horrors they’re recounting. Read more
This appeared in the November 18, 1988 Chicago Reader. I’d probably rank this film higher now. — J.R.
THEY LIVE
** (Worth seeing)
Directed by John Carpenter
Written by “Frank Armitage” (John Carpenter)
With Roddy Piper, Keith David, Meg Foster, George “Buck” Flower, Peter Jason, and Raymond St. Jacques.
John Carpenter has managed to remain one of the few genuinely personal writer-directors left in genre moviemaking, having returned to relatively low-budget features with last year’s Prince of Darkness after the debacle of Big Trouble in Little China. From his clean ‘Scope compositions to his throbbing minimalist scores, he projects a simplicity of conception and a usually deft approach to story telling and straight-ahead action that are both refreshing and reassuring in an era of filmmaking when these modest virtues can no longer be taken for granted. As a disciple of Howard Hawks, he might even be said to preserve a scaled-down version of some of the familiar Hawks trademarks: cranky individualist heroes, flaky male/female relationships, camaraderie among professionals, confined spaces, and usually clear lines of demarcation between friends and foes.
All of these qualities are present to some degree in They Live, a paranoid science-fiction thriller about alien invaders loosely based on a short story by Ray Nelson. Read more
