From the Soho News (August 20, 1981). — J.R.
Film India: Indian Film Festival Museum of Modern Art, through August 23
Buster Keaton Film Festival Lincoln Plaza, through September 19
Directed for Comedy Regency, through October 17
Honky Tonk Freeway Written by Edward Clinton
Directed by John Schlesinger, opens August 21
AUGUST 7: The first movie I see for this column isn’t a light comedy, but it sure puts me in a sunny mood. The prospect of a three-hour Indian film in Temil with no subtitles is a little off-putting, I would say -– wouldn’t you? On my way into the sparsely populated auditorium of the Museum of Modern Art this afternoon, I hear not one but two separate senior citizens crack jokes about what a nice opportunity this is for a nap.
And yet, just as Indian film buff Elliott Stein has predicted, I have surprisingly little trouble following the plot and action of Chandralakha (1948). The quaintly illusionistic charm of a black-and-white movie like this, about a good and bad brother vying for the throne in a mythical kingdom – with a large palace protected by a drawbridge –- is part of its primal pull from the beginning. Read more
Trevor Vartanoff, one of the frequenters of this web site, has come up with an invaluable gift to me and to others — an alphabetical master index of all (or almost all) the postings here, complete with links. “I found it useful,” Trevor just wrote me, “maybe you or readers will too.” (2021 postscript: sorry for the links here that no longer work.) — J.R.
Featured Texts
*Corpus Callosum
*CORPUS CALLOSUM
12 Monkeys
12 and Holding
15th Annual Festival of Illinois Film and Video
2 Oxford Companion Entries (Albert Brooks and découpage)
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her
2001: A Space Odyssey
2046
20th International Tournee of Animation
29th Chicago International Film Festival: Mired in the Present
4 Little Girls
4
60s Wisdom
7 Women
8 1/2
8 Mile
84 Charlie Mopic
9 1/2 Weeks with Van Gogh
A Bankable Feast [BABETTE’S FEAST]
A Beauty and a Beast
A Bluffer’s Guide to Bela Tarr
A Breakthrough And A Throwback
A Brief History of Time
A Brighter Summer Day
A Bronx Tale
A Christmas Commodity: SCROOGED
A Cinema of Uncertainty
A Constant Forge
A Couple of Kooks [MY BEST FIEND]
A Cut Above [HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER]
A Depth in the Family [A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE]
A Dialogue about Abbas Kiarostami’s SHIRIN
A Different Kind of Swinger [GEORGE OF THE JUNGLE]
A Different Kind of Thrill (Richet’s ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13)
A Dry White Season
A Family Thing
A Far Off Place
A Few Eruptions in the House of Lava
A Few Things Well [A LITTLE STIFF]
A Film of the Future
A Fish Called Wanda
A Force Unto Himself [on Hou Hsiao-hsien]
A Great Day in Harlem
A History of Violence
A Home of Our Own
À la recherche de Luc Moullet: 25 Propositions
A Little Transcendence Goes a Long Way
A Lucky Day
A Major Talent [on SWEETIE]
A Man Escaped
A Midnight Clear
A Moment of Innocence
A New Leaf
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master
A Page of Madness
A Perfect World
A Perversion of the Past
A Place Called Chiapas
A Place in the Pantheon: Films by Bela Tarr
A Place in the World
A Price Above Rubies
A Prophet in His Own Country [Jon Jost retrospective]
A Quirky Cowboy Classic [on THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA]
A Radical Idea [HALF NELSON & THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED]
A Road Not Taken (The Films of Harun Farocki)
A Room With No View [ORPHANS]
A Russian in Hollywood [SHY PEOPLE]
A Scanner Darkly
A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love
A Single Girl
A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries
A Stylist Hits His Stride (ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND)
A Tale of Love
A Tale of Winter
A Tale of the Wind
A Tale of the Wind
A Thousand Words
A Time of Love
A Time to Lie (CROSS MY HEART)
A Time to Live and a Time to Die
A Touch of Class [GOSFORD PARK]
A Woman’s Tale
A World Apart
A Year at the Movies
A Zed and Two Noughts
A.I. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (January 6, 1995).
Many friends and colleagues have been moaning about what a bad year 1994 was for movies, but I disagree. The main issue, I think, isn’t so much how we feel about the same movies — though there are a few differences there, including in some cases where and when we happened to see them — as it is what we saw. If you’re lucky enough to be living in Chicago, you had loads of terrific movies to see last year, new as well as old, and if you didn’t see very many of them, it’s possible that you were looking in the wrong places — where the mass media was telling you to look. Because of their running times, my two favorite films, the seven-hour Satantango and the nearly 26-hour The Second Heimat, received only limited exposure, yet I refuse to accept the standard alibi of most critics who neglected to see them — that they were too difficult or esoteric for the general public. I found them easier to sit through and vastly more involving and pleasurable than such overhyped and overattended European monoliths as Germinal and Queen Margot, which to the best of my knowledge gave little enjoyment to most people. Read more
