From the Chicago Reader (May 19, 1995). — J.R.
Mamma Roma
Rating *** A must see
Directed and written by Pier Paolo Pasolini
With Anna Magnani, Ettore Garofolo, Franco Citti, Silvana Corsini, Luisa Orioli, Paolo Volponi, Luciano Gonini, Vittorio La Paglia, and Piero Morgia.
Who can predict the changes in intellectual fashion over 20 years? In 1975, when the controversial Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was brutally murdered by a 17-year-old boy in a Roman suburb, he was no more in vogue than he had been throughout his stormy career. If any openly gay writer-director was an international star in the mid-70s, it was Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who at that point was spinning out as many as three or four features a year; he died in 1982 after an orgy of cocaine abuse.
Pasolini and Fassbinder were both maverick leftists who often alienated other leftists as well as everyone on the right, and both had a taste for rough trade, but in terms of their generations (Pasolini was born in 1922, Fassbinder in 1946) and cultural reference points they were radically different. The only reason to compare them now is to note how much their reputations and visibility have changed here over the last two decades. Read more
From the October 21, 2005 Chicago Reader. — J.R.
Good Night, and Good Luck
** (Worth seeing)
Directed by George Clooney
Written by Clooney and Grant Heslov
With David Straithairn, Clooney, Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson, Frank Langella, Ray Wise, Heslov, Jeff Daniels, and Dianne Reeves
Capote
*** (A must see)
Directed by Bennett Miller
Written by Dan Futterman
With Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Clifton Collins Jr., Chris Cooper, Bruce Greenwood, Bob Balaban, Mark Pellegrino, and Amy Ryan
Good Night, and Good Luck and Capote view journalism as an intricate mix of principles, bravado, and negotiation. Working in a minefield, their star journalists are victims of their vocations. Good Night, and Good Luck, set in the early 50s, celebrates Edward R. Murrow’s bravery, eloquence, and sense of justice in challenging Joseph McCarthy at the height of his power — a kind of heroism that evokes John Wayne’s in a western like Rio Bravo (a movie I cherish, though its view of good and evil is similarly unshaded). Good Night, and Good Luck — named for Murrow’s sign-off line — also explores how internal politics at CBS were shaped by the network’s relations with its sponsors. The victimization of Murrow can be seen in his early death from lung cancer — his chain smoking, like James Agee’s and Albert Camus’, was somehow connected in the public mind with his moral seriousness — and in the way his weekly show, See It Now, was bumped to a Sunday-afternoon slot after he challenged McCarthy. Read more
From the May 24, 2002 Chicago Reader. — J.R.
Bartleby
** (Woth seeing)
Directed by Jonathan Parker
Written by Parker and Catherine di Napoli
With David Paymer, Crispin Glover, Glenne Headly, Joe Piscopo, Maury Chaykin, and Seymour Cassel.
Jonathan Parker’s first feature adapts Herman Melville’s eerie 1853 novella “Bartleby” (also known as “Bartleby the Scrivener”) with the kind of fidelity to mood and feeling that’s rare among movie adaptations of literary classics. The action has been updated roughly a century and a half, the setting transferred from Wall Street to a building perched on a hilltop over a freeway in an unnamed American location. Characters have been added, significant plot details altered, and a strategic part of the exposition shifted from the end of the tale to near the beginning. Yet the story still has much of the same maddening mystery, conviction, and unsettling comedy that Melville gave it.
The added epilogue is harder to justify and much less successful, and the filmmaking throughout, starting with the early use of slow motion, is needlessly fussy and self-conscious. But these are forgivable flaws in a first feature, one that updates Melville’s story and conception without betraying it.
The nameless narrator of the original is a lawyer on the verge of retirement looking back on the events he describes from a distance of many years. Read more
From the June 9, 2006 Chicago Reader. I can happily report that Roads of Kiarostami has appeared as an extra on the DVD of Kiarostami’s Shirin released by Cinema Guild. — J.R.
Roads of Kiarostami
*** (A must see)
Directed and written by Abbas Kiarostami
The definition of what qualifies as commercial movie fare seems to have shrunk to works that appeal to teens and preteens. Meanwhile the definition of experimental film — which traditionally has meant abstract, nonnarrative, and small-format works produced in a garret — has been expanding to address wider audiences. An ambitious DVD box set released last year, “Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941,” includes lavish Busby Berkeley production numbers and juvenilia by Orson Welles. And last year’s Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival opened with a dazzling 35-millimeter short by Michelangelo Antonioni, Michelangelo Eye to Eye.
This year Onion City’s opening-night program reflects this tendency even more: it includes a video by cult horror director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Peter Tscherkassky’s radical reworking of footage from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in 35-millimeter and ‘Scope, Andy Warhol’s two 1966 “screen tests” with Bob Dylan, and best of all Abbas Kiarostami’s half-hour Roads of Kiarostami. Read more
From Film Comment, September-October 2001. — J.R.
Though I haven’t yet seen a 35mm transfer of A.B.C. Africa, Abbas Kiarostami’s first digital video, I’ve had the benefit of viewing his 92-minute rough cut and his 84-minute final version. It’s obvious that this documentary is a departure for him in many ways, being his first feature made outside Iran and his first work that’s primarily in English. It’s also possibly his most accessible picture to date, confirming that Kiarostami has become as “multinational” or as transnational as he is Iranian — which may help to account for his worldwide reputation.
Shot with two cameras by Kiarostami and his assistant Seifollah Samadian, who also helped with the editing, A.B.C. Africa was made at the request of the UWESO (Uganda Women’s Efforts to Save Orphans) program, part of the International Fund for Agricultural Development. A letter of thanks from the IFAD’S Takao Shibata, dated March 23, 2000, arrives in Kiarostami’s fax machine in the opening shot, explaining how civil unrest and AIDS have left Uganda with about 1.6 million children who’ve lost one or both of their parents — and how a film by him might “sensitize people around the world [to] the devastating dimensions of this tragedy.” Read more
From The Guardian (21 September 2002). I continue to find it frustrating that almost sixteen years later, what I regard as Kiarostami’s two best shorts, Two Solutions for One Problem (1975) and Orderly or Disorderly (1981), still aren’t available on any DVD or Blu-Ray (although Scott Perna has just emailed to remind me that the former can at least be accessed on YouTube). The principal reason was that Kiarostami himself didn’t like them. He once told me that even the second of these was made before he regarded himself as a film artist — something I continue to find baffling, and astonishing. But now that Criterion has announced that it will be restoring and releasing all his films, this lack of availability will apparently change. — J.R.
The eight short films made by Abbas Kiarostami between 1970 and 1982 offer an interesting riposte to critics who claimed during those years that they knew what was going on in world cinema. Even in Iran, where the shorts were made, none constituted much of an event. And considering how deceptively modest they are, they probably never would have attracted much notice anywhere if their director hadn’t gone on to make a string of masterful features over the past 15 years (the most recent of which, Ten, is about to open here). Read more
From the July 29, 1988 Chicago Reader. — J.R.
MONKEY SHINES: AN EXPERIMENT IN FEAR
*** (A must-see)
Directed and written by George A. Romero
With Jason Beghe, John Pankow, Kate McNeil, Joyce Van Patten, Christine Forrest, Stephen Root, Stanley Tucci, and Janine Turner.
You’ve got to get through a few layers of foam rubber before you reach what’s good (or better than good) about George Romero’s new feature. There’s a series of obstacles — cultural, corporate, ideological, stylistic, aesthetic, commercial — standing in the way of what the movie is doing at its best; they may not count for much in the long run, but it’s better to be forewarned and forearmed.
First there’s the problem of the title. I appreciate that the producers did not want to suggest that the movie is a comedy — as sticking to the title of Michael Stewart’s source novel, Monkey Shines, would have done. So a subtitle is understandable as a means of labeling the contents. But An Experiment in Fear? Whose experiment and whose fear? The phrase describes nothing in the film (except for a brief undeveloped scene with a rodent and a beady-eyed behaviorist) and nothing you can say about the film (except as an easy platitude). Read more
From the December 7, 2001 Chicago Reader. — J.R.
Band of Outsiders
Rating **** Masterpiece
Directed and written by Jean-Luc Godard
With Anna Karina, Claude Brasseur, Sami Frey, Daniele Girard, Louisa Colpeyn, and Ernest Menzer.
To gauge the historical significance of Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders (1964) — getting a week’s run in a lovely new print at the Music Box — it helps to know that it was made four years after François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player and three years before Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde. Both Band of Outsiders and Shoot the Piano Player are low-budget black-and-white French thrillers adapted from American crime novels translated into French for the celebrated Serie Noire collection, and they were abject box-office flops on both sides of the Atlantic — though today they embody the glories of the French New Wave in a good many people’s minds. By contrast, Bonnie and Clyde, a Hollywood movie in color that was profoundly influenced by these two films, was a huge success, and its lyrical depictions of violence changed the direction of American cinema.
All three films are mixtures of tragedy and farce, violence and romance, with an uncertain emotional tone. When Band of Outsiders and Shoot the Piano Player were first released, audiences didn’t know what to make of this mix, but when they saw Bonnie and Clyde they were exhilarated by its ambiguities. Read more
