From the Chicago Reader (September 7, 1994). — J.R.
Robert Redford’s best and richest directorial effort (1994, 130 min.) unpacks the TV quiz show scandal of the late 50s, when glamorous intellectual Charles Van Doren, star contestant on the quiz show Twenty-One, belatedly confessed that he’d been fed all the questions in advance. As played by Ralph Fiennes (Schindler’s List), Van Doren is lamentably not much more than a shallow icon (though Paul Attanasio’s script works overtime making him appear sympathetic), stripped of the real-life ambiguities and hidden depths that were apparent to everyone who followed the story at the time. Despite these and other predictable simplifications, the story is allowed to retain much of its resonance and suggestiveness — as an instance of ethnic and class conflict as well as a landmark in media bamboozlement — and even some of the network and corporate culprits in the original fraud are singled out and named. Rob Morrow is especially good as Richard N. Goodwin, the feisty and ambitious House subcommittee member who helped to uncover the scandal, even though it meant fingering a man he admired (though the film, based on a chapter in Goodwin’s book Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties, exaggerates Goodwin’s role in the investigation), and John Turturro is effective as Herb Stempel, another Twenty-One contestant whose disgruntlement as an involuntary loser on the show was crucial in bringing Van Doren down. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (January 21, 1994). — J.R.
The late River Phoenix, Samantha Mathis, Dermot Mulroney, and Sandra Bullock all play young country-music hopefuls in a touching romantic comedy-drama inspired by Nashville’s Bluebird Cafe. For perverse reasons known only to itself, Paramount has elected to bury this movie, but the Music Box, bless it, has decided to open it anyway. It bears as little relation to the real Nashville as Altman’s 1975 feature, but director Peter Bogdanovich, the talented cast, and the credited (Carol Heikkinen) and uncredited screenwriters (Bogdanovich, cast members, and Pump Up the Volume‘s Allan Moyle) are so busy conjuring up a charming world of their own that I certainly didn’t mind. Mathis and Bullock are especially good, and Phoenix and Mulroney do a fair job of playing out a jealousy-prone friendship as if they were Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms in Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show. With Trisha Yearwood. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, January 21 through 27.
One of my first long reviews for the Chicago Reader (September 11, 1987). Reseeing the movie almost three decades later, shortly before being flown to New York to be interviewed about it for a Japanese documentary, I liked it even more, and would give it four stars if I was reviewing it today. — J.R.
TAMPOPO
*** (A must-see)
Directed and written by Juzo Itami
With Tsutomu Yamazaki, Nobuko Miyamoto, Koji Yakusho, Ken Watanabe, Nobuo Nakamura, and Mariko Okada.
True, we eat to preserve ourselves from dying. But cooking, the moment of preparing foods . . . is a pause in the most relentless of natural processes, a moment when the process is retarded, when the food exists as itself, no longer a dead thing, not yet assimilated to a living thing. It exists in a moment out of time, and can therefore become a source of esthetic pleasure — small, fleeting, often deceptive, yet a true esthetic object. So brief is its moment of objectivity, this bit of food, that it quivers with the life it came from and with the life it goes toward — and yet, always, it partakes of a stillness that transforms time. The raw stuff has become food — worked upon, transformed by love and care, made proper with a name — and it is a part, if of a stew, of all other stews ever made and ever yet to be made.Read more
This hour-long documentary (2002) about one of the great jazz bassists — who was also a major photographer of jazz musicians and performances — has a fascinating story to tell as well as a charismatic subject. In his youth Hinton was injured in a car accident in Chicago while running prohibition liquor and was saved by his boss, Al Capone, from having a finger amputated; as a bassist he quickly rose to the top of his profession, and the clips here show how indispensable he could be as a sideman. Unfortunately, like most other fashioners of jazz documentaries, directors David G. Berger, Holly Maxon, and Kate Hirson can’t resist laying voices over some of the best solos after teasing us with a chorus or two, so that, like Jean Bach’s A Great Day in Harlem (1994), this works better as a historical chronicle and an appreciation of personalities than as a presentation of the music. (JR) Read more
From the Chicago Reader (November 7, 1997). — J.R.
The Films of Edward Yang
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
Taiwan is somehow within the world system as its citizens are in their city boxes: prosperity and constriction all at once; the loss of nature….What is grand and exhilarating, light itself, the hours of the day, is nonetheless here embedded in the routine of the city and locked into the pores of its stone or smeared on its glass: light also being postmodern, and a mere adjunct to the making of reproducible images.
— Fredric Jameson, “Remapping Taipei,” in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System
These people have so much money stuffed up their ass it’s beyond belief! You know, in ten years this place [Taipei] will be the center of the world. The future of Western civilization lies right here. And you know what the odd thing is? We used to study history–the 19th century was the glorious age of imperialism, right? Just wait till you see the 21st century… — English character in Edward Yang’s Mahjong
The bombs we plant in each other are ticking away. — Edward Yang
During those rare moments of reflection when I’m not doing what film critics are supposed to be doing — watching and evaluating movies that propose various escapes from modern life — I wonder what a different kind of cinema might be, a cinema that would lead us back into the modern world and teach us something about it. Read more
Any documentary about the eccentric late cofounder of the Cinematheque Francaise is bound to be watchable, but Jacques Richard’s lumpy 210-minute talking-headathon obfuscates as much as it clarifies. The factionalism in the French film world guarantees that Richard has to choose sides, but he fails to acknowledge this problem, picks the wrong side, favoring fans and bureaucrats over scholars (he fails even to mention Langlois’ principal successor, Dominique Paini), and never owns up to his omissions. His choice of clips is unforgivably hackneyed, and such matters as Langlois’ Turkish past (beautifully handled in Edgardo Cozarinsky’s 1994 documentary Citizen Langlois) and his homosexuality are almost completely bypassed, making a passing allusion to his male lover at his funeral seem a non sequitur. And his poor way of illustrating the visual qualities of nitrate prints only confuses the issue. In French with subtitles. (JR) Read more
The visionary, transgressive art of director Kira Muratova might be described as bipolar, and these two eccentric comedies, both big successes in Russia, may be her lightest and her darkest. The Felliniesque Passions (1994, 112 min.) considers the wistful dreams of its characters, chiefly a nurse and a circus performer, while the episodes of Three Stories (1997, 109 min.) all deal with cold-blooded murders in postglasnost, posthumanist Russia. Both feature Renata Litvinova, an icy, statuesque blond with the beauty and power of a Hollywood icon; she was a screenwriter by profession, but Muratova turned her into a star (both women won Russian Oscars for their work on Passions). And both exemplify Muratova’s long-standing fascination with animals: Passions revolves around racehorses and takes place partly at a track, while in Three Stories the first episode is set near a zoo, the last one includes a good many cats, and the middle one, scripted by and starring Litvinova, is about an avenging murderess who prefers animals to people. In Russian with subtitles. (JR)
After the film’s festival showings, scissors-happy Miramax trimmed eight minutes from this lively 1994 piece of exploitation about the travails of a gay priest in Liverpool, but it still packs a wallop; whether it can sustain much reflection afterward is another matter. It started out as a four-part TV miniseries scripted by Jimmy McGovern, who spent a day cutting away two-thirds of it when it got approved as a feature; director Antonia Bird (Safe) serves up the telegraphic remains in punchy docudrama style. Apart from the inner conflicts of a young priest (Linus Roache) who’s actively gay, the movie throws in his dilemma at being unable to expose incestuous child abuse revealed to him during a confession — a subplot handled in the style of a lurid horror thriller — and generally manages to whip up feelings of righteous indignation about the moral hypocrisy of various Catholic officials while adhering closely to the manner of 50s Hollywood-liberal agitprop. If entertainment passing as deep-dish soul searching is what you’re after, you won’t be disappointed — though with the use of You’ll Never Walk Alone on the sound track, it’s debatable whether the filmmakers know how to stop when they’re ahead. Read more
A “Critic’s Choice” from Chicago Reader, June 5, 1998:
The social status of filmmaking among ordinary people, central to Abbas Kiarostami’s wonderful Close-up and Life and Nothing More, is equally pertinent in this entertaining and sometimes beautiful film. Through the Olive Trees (1994) concludes a trilogy begun with Where Is My Friend’s House?, which focused on the adventures of a poor schoolboy in a mountainous region of northern Iran. Life and Nothing More, the second and best film of the three, fictionally re-created Kiarostami and his son’s return to the area, which had recently been devastated by an earthquake, to look for two child actors from the earlier film. Through the Olive Trees is a comedy about the making of a film, mostly emphasizing the persistent efforts of a young actor to woo an actress who won’t even speak to him. Like Kiarostami’s more recent Taste of Cherry, all three films strategically elide certain information about the characters, inviting audiences to fill in the blanks and in this case yielding a mysteriously beautiful and open-ended conclusion. If you’re unfamiliar with Kiarostami — one of our greatest living filmmakers and certainly the greatest in Iran–this is an excellent introduction. Read more
Terry Zwigoff’s penetrating, thoughtful, and disturbing 1994 essay about the great underground comic artist Robert Crumb, best known for Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural as well as his Keep On Truckin’ drawings, though also a semiprofessional musician and connoisseur of early jazz and blues. Made over a six-year period by a longtime friend and fellow musician, the film’s intimate, multifaceted portrait is exceptional in many respects. For starters, it presents Crumb not as a cartoonist but as an artist, plausibly described by critic Robert Hughes as the Brueghel of the second half of the 20th century. It then shows how difficult it is to assess artists, exploring in considerable depth Crumb’s dysfunctional family background, sexual obsessions, working methods, and political positions. By the end of two hours we’re persuaded that if Crumb weren’t drawing constantly and compulsively he’d probably be as doomed as his brothers Charles and Max, both of whom are also comic-book artists. Never letting his participants or his audience off the hook, Zwigoff traces Crumb’s ideological and psychological ambivalence toward his art through the perceptions of friends, acquaintances, relatives, former lovers, and Crumb himself. Zwigoff not only presents a complex human being and the range of his art but also guides us through a profound and unsettling consideration of what it means to be an American artist. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (October 12, 1999). — J.R.
This outrageous comic fantasy may not sustain its brilliance throughout its 112 minutes, but it keeps cooking for so much of that time that I don’t have many complaints. The first feature of both screenwriter/executive producer Charlie Kaufman (who’s written for several TV series) and director Spike Jonze (who’s directed commercials, music videos, and short films), it charts the complications that ensue when an out-of-work puppeteer (John Cusack) gets a filing job on the surrealistically cramped seventh and a half floor of an office building, where he discovers a hidden tunnel that allows its occupant to become actor John Malkovich (playing himself, natch) for 15 minutes before being ejected onto the New Jersey Turnpike. Things get even wilder when the filing clerk and his wife (Cameron Diaz as a pet-store employee) both get the hots for the same woman (Catherine Keener), who has comparable lust for the wife as long as she’s inside Malkovich. What’s great about this lunatic farce isn’t only its premises about sexual and professional identity but also the spirited way the actors and filmmakers flesh them out. With Orson Bean and Mary Kay Place. (JR)
Director Jonathan Nossiter and screenwriter James Lasdun, who collaborated on the very promising Sunday (1997), reunite for this ambitious and ambiguous thriller (2000) involving an Americanized businessman in Athens (Stellan Skarsgard) who has twice left his Greek-American wife (Charlotte Rampling at her best) for another woman (Deborah Kara Unger) but still hasn’t given up on their marriage. Shot in digital video as if it were a documentary, the film at separate junctures evokes Nicolas Roeg, Graham Greene, and Richard Lester’s Petulia, even as it takes up multinational corporations, political amnesia, the mixed blessing of American idealism, and some of the monstrous ways love can turn sour. Clearly it bites off more than it can possibly chew, and ultimately it winds up in a pretentious heap. (Some may feel it starts off that way as well.) But Nossiter, an American who grew up in Europe, and Lasdun, an Englishman who currently lives in the U.S., share a sense of cultural displacement that allows them to create something original and provocative. 104 min. (JR)
I guess I must have been simply naïve when I concluded, after seeing and flipping out over Richard Linklater’s The Newton Boys 14 years ago, that everyone else would like it as much as I did. But frankly, I’m even more bewildered by the critical coolness being shown now in some quarters towards Bernie, a masterpiece which might be regarded as a kind of companion piece to The Newton Boys, only one that runs still deeper and is in some ways even more accessible: another edifying film about locals from a part of East Texas that Linklater obviously knows like the back of his hand and deeply cherishes, and another one that ponders the notion of justifiable or defensible crime without ever deserting a sturdy moral code.
The writing (by Linklater and Skip Hollandsworth, whose non-fiction article, which first appeared when The Newton Boys was in post-production, inspired the movie) is so good that the humor can’t be reduced to simple satire; a whole community winds up speaking through the film, and it has a lot to say. In fact, it’s hard to think of many other celebrations of small-town American life that are quite as rich, as warm, and as complexly layered, at least within recent years. Read more
In its story line, this wacky tale from Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums) about estranged wealthy brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, cowriter Jason Schwartzman) reunited for a strained spiritual journey through India is pretty unconvincing as character development. Every bit as precious as Anderson’s preceding features, it differs this time from late Salinger only in the way that these spoiled neurotics are implicitly ridiculed as both ugly Americans in the third world and spiritual poseurs — unlike their more committed mother (Anjelica Huston). What this movie has going for itself in spite of its cloying pleas for indulgence is a playful and interesting narrative structure that precludes much development and comes to the fore only toward the end. The whole thing may drive you batty, but as with Rushmore, the melancholy aftertaste lingers. With Amara Karan and Bill Murray. R, 91 min. a Century 12 and CineArts 6, Renaissance Place. — Jonathan Rosenbaum
From Moving Image Source, April 8, 2011, where it appeared under the title “Sea Change”….Allan Sekula’s untimely recent death remains an incalculable loss. — J.R.
I’m sure that I learned a lot more from The Forgotten Space — an essay film by Allan Sekula and Noël Burch about sea cargo in the contemporary global economy — than I did from any other feature that I saw last year, fiction or nonfiction. In more ways than one, I’m still learning from it, and its lessons start with the staggering but elemental fact that over 90 percent of the world’s cargo still travels by sea — a fact that seems all the more important precisely because so many of us don’t know it.
You can tell a great deal about a nation’s anxieties and aspirations by the discrepancy between reality and popular perception. Polls last year showed that in the US 61% think the country spends too much on foreign aid. This makes sense once you understand that the average American is under the illusion that 25% of the federal budget goes on foreign aid (the real figure is 1%).Read more
