From the Chicago Reader (May 23, 2003). — J.R.
Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men, Nurse Betty) delivers his most interesting and powerful film to date, though it’s also his most unpleasant and disturbing. Set at a small college, it concentrates on the evolving relationship between a shy nerd (Paul Rudd) and a brazen artist (coproducer Rachel Weisz), as well as his best friend (Frederick Weller) and the latter’s fiancee (Gretchen Mol) — and the less said about the plot the better. LaBute originally wrote this as a play while directing Possession (its opposite in every respect), and it often betrays its theatrical origins, though never to its disadvantage. LaBute has a lot of troubling things to say about both relationships and artists, and the writing and ensemble playing are so ruthlessly focused they hurt. 97 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Esquire, Landmark’s Century Centre.
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From the Chicago Reader (March 14, 2003). — J.R
Reeking with allegory, Andrew Wyeth landscapes, undigested Flannery O’Connor, variable performances, and all kinds of ambition and pretension, this 1990 first feature by English writer-director Philip Ridley is an American gothic melodrama set in the Idaho prairies. It’s typical of the overall conception that mass murderers and child molesters figure as incidental characters and as a collective deus ex machina for a plot already so full of grotesqueries that they’re barely noticed. The plot centers on an eight-year-old boy whose playmates are abused and murdered and who thinks a neighboring English widow is a vampire; his father is a weakling with a homosexual incident in his past who commits suicide, his mother is a borderline psychotic, and the local sheriff is a veritable catalog of mutilations. The story opens with an exploding frog and also makes room for an alcoholic religious fanatic and stillborn child that the hero uncovers and thinks is one of his murdered playmates. With Viggo Mortensen, Lindsay Duncan, Jeremy Cooper, and Sheila Moore. 95 min. (JR) Read more
From the Chicago Reader (March 14, 2003). — J.R.
David Cronenberg isn’t credited often enough for his literacy, which anchors him as a filmmaker much as Method acting can anchor some performers: he seems to immerse himself so deeply in the warped visions of certain writers that he re-creates their work whereas most literary filmmakers would simply imitate it. This tour de force, which Patrick McGrath adapted from his own novel under Cronenberg’s supervision, draws us into the consciousness of a schizophrenic (Ralph Fiennes) who’s been incarcerated for most of his life and whose boyhood traumas merge seamlessly with his current existence in an east London halfway house; apparently Cronenberg’s model is not only McGrath but Samuel Beckett in his early novels. The film asks us to piece together what really happened in the past, and even after two viewings I haven’t entirely succeeded, but I was floored by Cronenberg’s mastery of the material. Fiennes gives one of his finest performances; Miranda Richardson, playing at least three characters in the protagonist’s twisted vision, is no less impressive; and Gabriel Byrne, Lynn Redgrave, and John Neville do excellent backup work. A lean and densely packed 98 minutes, this minimalist chamber thriller is at once hallucinatory and terrifyingly real. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (January 24, 2003). — J.R.
Super Sucker
* (Has redeeming facet)
Directed and written by Jeff Daniels
With Daniels, Matt Letscher, Harve Presnell, Dawn Wells, John Seibert, Guy Sanville, Kate Peckham, Sandra Birch, Michelle Mountain, and Will Young.
Super Sucker, the second indie comedy feature written and directed by actor Jeff Daniels, is a terrible movie. But that doesn’t prevent it from being interesting and even admirable as a grassroots phenomenon. I haven’t seen its predecessor, Escanaba in da Moonlight (2001) — based on Daniels’s play, which he produced at his own 160-seat theater in Chelsea, Michigan, the Purple Rose (named after the Woody Allen movie The Purple Rose of Cairo, which Daniels has cited as a turning point in his career). The movie version of Escanaba passed through Chicago at some point and received a listing but not a review in this paper. In fact, Escanaba received few reviews anywhere (although the making of the film was the subject of an article in Harper’s in late 2000). The longest notice appeared in the Detroit News, whose Tom Long wrote that the film “is decidedly a Michigan experience, and there are questions as to how it will fly in lands that know nothing of the Mackinac Bridge, pasties, and the Department of Natural Resources.” Read more
From the February 21, 2003 Chicago Reader. — J.R.
The skillful writer-director Henri-Georges Clouzot is mainly known for his corrosive misanthropy. Yet surprisingly, this accomplished 1947 noir turns that misanthropy precisely on its head without ever resorting to sentimentality or stereotypes. The milieus of a seedy music hall and police station in Paris are delineated with such richness and attentiveness toward the postoccupation climate that when the murder of a licentious film producer brings a police inspector (the great Louis Jouvet) into the music hall, Clouzot is able to reveal a complex and interactive working-class world in which cops and criminals are sometimes difficult to tell apart. The principal epiphanies in this tale emerge from Jouvet’s expressions of kinship with a flirtatious singer (Suzy Delair) and a lesbian photographer (Simone Renant), but there are also memorable portraits of the singer’s mousy pianist husband (Bernard Blier), a music publisher (Henri Arius), and several others. In French with subtitles. 106 min. (JR)
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This appeared in the January 6, 2006 issue of Chicago Reader. For some reason, it appears to have eluded the Reader’s web site archive, apart from its title, and therefore escaped this web site as well, until I found a way of pasting it in. — J.R.
The Best Film of the Past Two Years
And 24 more picks from what the industry thought us yokels could handle in 2005
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
To choose the best movies of 2005 is to compromise. I limit my list of candidates to films that have screened in Chicago, but I could easily fill it with movies that haven’t screened in the U.S. at all, and God knows what I’ve missed altogether. I’m at the mercy of studio heads, distributors, and publicists, whose decisions about what to release and when defy comprehension.
I saw Woody Allen’s Match Point in Madrid in mid- November, believing the distributor’s announcement that it would open in Chicago in December. Surprised at how much I liked it, I decided it probably belonged on my list, but then some industry executives decided that only the people in New York and Los Angeles should get to see it this year (in time for Oscar nominations), not the less discriminating moviegoers in the Chicago boondocks. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (March 21, 2003). I’m sorry that I’ve unable to find a single image illustrating The Last Conversation. — J.R.
The Murder of Emmett Till
* (Has redeeming facet)
Directed by Stanley Nelson
Written by Marcia A. Smith
Narrated by Andre Braugher.
Oporto of My Childhood
**** (Masterpiece)
Directed, written, and narrated by Manoel de Oliveira.
The Last Conversation
**** (Masterpiece)
Directed by Sally Banes
Written by Noel Carroll
With Galina Zakrutkina and James Sutton
Narrated by Patricia Boyette.
McLuhan’s Wake
*** (A must-see)
Directed by Kevin McMahon
Written by David Sobelman
Narrated by Laurie Anderson.
Echelon: The Secret Power
*** (A must-see)
Directed and written by David Korn-Brzoza
Narrated by Francois Devienne.
It’s notoriously difficult to evaluate the way most documentaries treat their subject matter, because one has to assess what’s included in light of what’s left out — something we aren’t usually qualified to do. I’m much more comfortable evaluating documentaries on how well they draw us into their subject matter and on how well they work as cinema. On these terms I can confidently say that I’ve seen and heard about a lot of exciting new documentaries recently, including an American work I really want to see, Charles Burnett’s Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (January 3, 2003). — J.R.
Ernst Lubitsch’s first talkie and first operetta, costarring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, contains the excitement of movies being reinvented, so that silence as well as sound becomes a brand-new plaything (in contradistinction to silent movies, which usually had musical accompaniment). A study in playfulness, this fantasy about a country preoccupied with its queen getting married actually has a dog barking out half a chorus of one number, perfectly in tune, and the precode erotics and sexual politics seem pretty advanced in spots. Secondary leads Lillian Roth and Lupino Lane offer some acrobatic low comedy as servants whose best song is called “Let’s Be Common”. 110 min. (JR)
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From the Chicago Reader, July 25, 2003. Having just reseen Coppola’s One From the Heart (1982) for the first time since it came out, I experienced a similar ambivalence to this subsequent anti-musical, for related reasons. — J.R.
A Woman Is a Woman
** (Worth seeing)
Directed and written by Jean-Luc Godard
With Anna Karina, Jean-Claude Brialy, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Marie Dubois.
Even after 40 years I’m still not sure how I feel about A Woman Is a Woman (1961), Jean-Luc Godard’s third feature. The first time I saw it, as a college junior in New York, it was an unmitigated delight. But that had a lot to do with its arrival at a time when it seemed to validate ideas I and other cinephiles had about French and American film culture. It was the fourth Godard feature to open in New York (after Breathless, Vivre sa vie, and Contempt, his first, fourth, and sixth films), and the second in color and ‘Scope (after Contempt). The very notion of someone subverting the way big-budget Hollywood used canvas and palette while also taking pleasure in those elements carried an enormous charge (Contempt had been a bit too close to big-budget Hollywood to look like subversion). Read more
From the August 2, 1991 Chicago Reader. — J.R.
The last film of F.W. Murnau, who was probably the greatest of all silent directors (he didn’t live long enough to make sound films, as he died in an auto accident only a few days after work on the musical score of this masterpiece was completed). Filmed entirely in the South Seas with a nonprofessional cast and gorgeous cinematography by Floyd Crosby (fully evident in this fine restoration), this began as a collaboration with the great documentarist Robert Flaherty, who still shares credit for the story, though clearly the German romanticism of Murnau (Nosferatu, The Last Laugh, Sunrise) predominates, above all in the heroic poses of the islanders and the fateful diagonals in the compositions. The simple plot is an erotic love story complicated by the fact that the young woman becomes sexually taboo when she is selected by an elder (one of Murnau’s most chilling harbingers of doom) to replace a sacred maiden who has just died. The two “chapters” of the film are titled “Paradise” and “Paradise Lost,” and another theme is the corrupting power of “civilization” — money in particular — on the innocent hedonism of the islanders. Read more
From the August 22, 2003 Chicago Reader. — J.R.
The screenwriter hero of Barton Fink is assigned to script a Wallace Beery wrestling picture: this 1932 feature — directed by John Ford and scripted by Edmund Goulding, Moss Hart, and an uncredited William Faulkner, among others — is the only real-life movie matching that description. Beery, a good-hearted dope working as a waiter in a German beer garden, falls for an American ex-convict (Karen Morley) linked to a gangster (Ricardo Cortez). They delude and exploit him even after he marries Morley, becomes a big-time wrestling champ, and moves with her to the U.S. Ford was still under the spell of F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1928) when asked to take over this project at MGM, and some traces of German expressionism linger in his pictorial style. He wrests a lot of feeling out of Beery’s cheerful dim-wittedness, making his muddle seem almost enlightened and avoiding the masochism an Emil Jannings would have brought to the part. The strong secondary cast includes Jean Hersholt, Vince Barnett, and Ward Bond. 95 min. (JR)
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Written for Volume 34, Number 3, Issue No 135 of the Winnipeg-based Canadian arts journal Border Crossings in Fall 2015 (see below). — J.R.
I’m frequently troubled these days by the growing absence of global perspectives in what passes for news and other forms of mainstream discourse in the U.S. — the perpetually shrinking definitions of what we mean by ‘we’. A good many of the congealed stereotypes of foreign cultures that crop up in both Hollywood blockbusters and Internet chatter — ranging from the notion that ‘the French’ are crazy about Jerry Lewis to the pop images we still have of Latinos, Italians, Russians, Arabs, and Asians in SF blockbusters whenever ‘the world’ has to be represented — can paradoxically be traced back to the 50s and 60s, when the Cold War and all of its most rigid either/or assumptions were still in force. One might suppose that the combined resources of the Internet and digital viewing would widen our cinematic and other cultural reference points rather than shrink them. But the tendency of even respectable, adult media pundits to speak about ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ in the world at large suggests a metaphysics tailored to the dimensions of a Star Wars saga or a video game, where the cultural givens plunge back even further into the mythical past: Flash Gordon serials and Triumph of the Will from the mid-1930s, Roy Rogers Westerns and airborne World War 2 epics of the mid-1940s. Read more
This is the second of my bimonthly columns written for Cahiers du Cinéma España, which ran in their third (July-August 2007) issue. It seems fitting to post it three years later because I’m back at the same festival again, serving again on the FIPRESCI jury. It’s hard not to feel an immense sadness about the intervening death (by murder, in Manila, along with his Slovenian partner Nika Bohinc) of Alexis Tioseco, my fellow juror, who can be seen here in the first photo, on the far right. This was most likely taken by Olaf Möller, one of the festival’s programmers, who can be seen in the second photo below, taken by Alexis.
Amit Dutta, incidentally, whose Kramasha won our FIPRESCI prize three years ago, will be attending the festival for the first time this year, and presenting a program tomorrow night. (Update, a day later: Unfortunately, Dutta had to cancel his visit due to health reasons, but two programs of his films will still be presented.) — J.R.
The prospect of attending a festival of short films has always seemed difficult to me because of the number of aesthetic gear changes involved in moving from one film to the next. Read more
A Chicago Reader blog post, dated Saturday, December 1, 2007, 1:46 PM. — J.R.
Two of the more interesting programs that I saw at the just-concluded Torino Film Festival consisted of films by LA filmmaker and Cal Arts alumnus Anna Biller, who writes, directs, stars in, designs the costumes and sets for, and sometimes helps to perform the music in her films, none of which has a distributor at this point. Her first feature, Viva (2006), is a pastiche of 1970s soft-core porn, theoretically reconfigured to support a woman’s viewpoint — an interesting curiosity, but a bit long for my taste (at 120 minutes, longer than any ’70s soft-core flick that I’m aware of), and perhaps not sufficiently aware of its own grotesqueness to qualify as either a critical commentary on its elected genre or as a wholly convincing entry in that genre.
I found her program of earlier 16mm shorts more interesting: Three Examples of Myself as Queen (1994), The Hypnotist (2001 — her only film in which she doesn’t act and which she didn’t write herself, written instead by her partner and frequent collaborator Jared Sanford), and, above all, A Visit from the Incubus (2001, see photos above), a 27-minute horror-western-musical that I regard as her masterpiece.
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Commissioned by Sight and Sound, and written for their August 2006 issue. — J.R.
Considering how much admiration I have for the films of Philippe Garrel, it’s hard to avoid some feelings of guilt and consternation for not liking them more — especially when I consider how much they mean to others whose tastes I admire. Why do I find myself preferring the work of his best-known disciple, Leos Carax?
This is a problem I’ve been wrestling with for a quarter of a century. For the past decade, I’ve been trying to theorize my disaffection by ascribing the passion of my younger friends for this melancholy star of the French underground to a generational taste I can’t share. In some respects, I even like the way they like Garrel’s films more than I like the films themselves. They generate a kind of awe that few other filmmakers inspire, and the fact that he’s a minority taste in no way disqualifies him from being a major talent.
These far-flung cinéphiles, all born around 1960, include Nicole Brenez, based in Paris; Alexander Horwath, based in Vienna; Kent Jones, based in New York; and Adrian Martin, based in Melbourne —- all of whom share similarly acute feelings for John Cassavetes, Abel Ferrara, Monte Hellman, and Maurice Pialat. Read more
