In the Gospel According to Barry Levinson, it would appear that the universe — i.e., the world, i.e., America, i.e., Hollywood, i.e., Levinson’s own brain –is nothing but one gigantic toy factory. When factory owner (Donald O’Connor) dies, he leaves the business not to his elfin and playful son (Robin Williams) but to his military brother (Michael Gambon), who proceeds to install security systems and manufacture war toys. This is a movie Levinson wanted to make for a dozen years, and it’s possible that in the long career slide from the promise and coherence of Diner he’s forgotten why. Maybe with a smaller budget and less solipsism at its center this project might have retained certain possibilities. But in its present monstrous, cacophonous, and semicoherent form it constitutes a prime example of everything it is attempting to satirize. Coscripted by Valerie Curtin; with Joan Cusack, Robin Wright, LL Cool J, Arthur Malet, and Jack Warden (1992). (JR)
Intricately and cleverly plotted body-exchange movie, written by the sisters Perry and Randy Howze (Maid to Order, Mystic Pizza), and directed by Emile Ardolino (Dirty Dancing). I don’t want to give away too much of the story, which invites the spectator to flirt with the idea of at least two kinds of incest, but suffice it to say that the setup involves a happily married young lawyer (Christopher McDonald) who dies and is then reincarnated (as Robert Downey Jr.), and becomes involved with his former family. Because the presiding angel neglected to zap out his memory, he develops an advanced case of deja vu when he encounters his former wife (Cybill Shepherd) and best friend (Ryan O’Neal), while his 22-year-old daughter (Mary Stuart Masterson) poses still other complications. Despite the sudsy, overlit look of William A. Fraker’s cinematography and Downey’s varying success with sight gags, this is still a lot of fun. An additional kicker is provided by the picture’s crazed doublethink morality, which implies that incest is OK as long as you’ve got amnesia. (JR)
Commissioned by Arrow Video for their box set The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Collection, vol. III, released in summer 2022. -- J.R.
“Capitalism is the plague. Criminals are its gods.” --Fassbinder during the German trailer of Gods of the Plague
Rainer Werner Fassbinder was only twenty-four when he made his first four features in 1969, the third of which was Gods of the Plague. Years later, when he compiled a list of what he believed were his ten best features, Gods of the Plague made it into fifth place. The only other very early film on this list was his seventh feature, Beware of the Holy Whore — one of the six feature-length works he made in 1970 -– which figured in first place.
An inveterate list maker who plainly enjoyed that somewhat adolescent pastime, Fassbinder also ranked his ten favourite films made by others (topped by Luchino Visconti’s The Damned) and his ten favourite actresses and actors, both in the films of others and in his own films: Marilyn Monroe, Hanna Schygulla, Clark Gable, and Armin Mueller-Stahl. He also plausibly put himself at the top of his list of the ten most influential German New Wave directors.
One can argue that early Fassbinder is very much a matter of certain raw and irreducible basics – including the contradictions that would haunt the remainder of his prolific oeuvre, which ended, sadly yet predictably, with his drug-fueled death in 1982. Read more
I no longer remember the order of this list (apart from the fact that BAD LUCK BANGING, MEMORIA, and PASSING were all near or at the top), so here’s an alphabetical listing: — J. R.
BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN (Radu Jude)
BENEDETTA (Paul Verhoeven)
CRY MACHO (Clint Eastwood)
HER SOCIALIST SMILE (John Gianvito)
JOHN FARROW HOLLYWOOD’S MAN IN THE SHADOWS (Claude Gonzalez & Frans Vandenburg)
MARTIN UND HANS (Mark Rappaport)
MEDIUM (Edgardo Cozarinsky)
MEMORIA (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
PASSING (Rebecca Hall)
TIANG BAHRU SOCIAL CLUB (Tan Bee Thiam)
P.S. MEDIUM came out in 2020, but I only caught up with it in 2021.
“Unwitting omissions —- films I’ll eventually hate myself for having overlooked — are inevitable,” I wrote in December 2003, introducing my list of 1,000 personal favorites, “largely because I haven’t come up with any sure-fire method of recalling or tabulating everything I’ve seen, or even everything I can remember seeing.” Even when I wrote this, I could scarcely imagine I’d omit a film as important as Chimes at Midnight (1966) from my list —- an oversight that illustrates my point all too well. No less vexing was the absence of Flaming Creatures(1963), a film celebrated elsewhere in the same book, and the silly blunder of renaming Crimson Gold (2003) Crimson Red — though at least I was able to correct these latter gaffes, as well as restore a missing accent to Tangos volés (2002), in the book’s second printing. (In the case of Flaming Creatures, this addition was managed ecologically by omitting The Disorderly Orderly [1964] from my list on the same page.)
I discovered the omission of Chimes at Midnight later, from a blog, while cruising the Internet.Read more
Leaner and meaner than usual, Maggie Cheung plays the dominatrixlike manager of an inn that caters to rowdy thieves during the Ming dynasty. The action editing in this 1992 Hong Kong comedy adventure can be as pleasurably incoherent as the subtitles (Don’t you scare of death? . . . I don’t give it a damn! . . . I can tell you are bad eggs from the first sight). Apart from the hyperbolic bloodletting in the final explosion of violence, in which one character is partially reduced to a skeleton, discontinuity reigns supreme as far as character, plot, and sometimes even gesture are concerned. (The stunt doubles probably deserve to share billing with the stars.) Cheung’s romantic rival for Tony Leung (the tall Tony Leung, not the one who costarred with her in In the Mood for Love) is her frequent cohort Lin Hsing-hsia. Raymond Lee directed this remake of a film by King Hu, and Tsui Hark produced. 90 min. (JR)
One of the most debilitating facets of contemporary media discourse, at least in the U.S., is the unspoken assumption that serious discussion about such topics as torture, mass murder, and slavery can only enter the mainstream public sphere once it becomes tied to the sale of a current movie, regardless of how inane or or superficial or inadequate its treatment of that subject might be. If our discussion of American slavery can essentially be licensed by Django Unchained, which appeared to be the case last year, then I suppose 12 Years a Slave could be regarded as a partial corrective, even after one factors in the restrictive aspect of focusing on the relatively exceptional case of a non-slave forced to become a slave for many years. For me, the treatment of slavery as something relevant to both the present and more than just the U.S., in Pedro Costa’s sublime Sweet Exorcist (his half-hour episode in Centro Historico), is a more valid corrective and carries much greater force, not least because it has some access to poetry –- which, I would insist, is a crucial source of knowledge -– and beauty, and not merely to exploitation-movie assaults. Read more
Written for A Man Called Ermanno: Olmi’s Cinema and Works, published by Edições Il Sorpasso (in Lisbon) in May 2012. A French translation of this essay has been published in Trafic #91, automne 2014. — J.R.
For me, the cinema is a state of mind and a process of analysis from a series of detailed observations. — Ermanno Olmi, from a 1988 interview (1)
1
Ermanno Olmi first became well known as a filmmaker during the period in the early 1960s when the Nouvelle Vague and, more specifically, François Truffaut’s formulation of la politique des auteurs, were near the height of their international influence. Yet it seems that one factor that has limited Olmi’s reputation as an auteur over the half-century that has passed since then is his apparent reluctance and/or inability to remain type-cast in either his choice of film projects or in his execution of them. Indeed, the fact that he repeatedly eludes and/or confounds whatever auteurist profile that criticism elects to construct for him in its effort to classify his artistry results in a periodic neglect of him followed by periodic “rediscoveries”. And these rediscoveries are confused in turn by the fact that each rediscovery of Olmi’s work seems to redefine his profile rather than build on the preceding one. Read more
Michael Mann’s 2001 epic about Muhammad Ali during a key decade (1964-’74) boasts some unusually fine performancesby Will Smith in the title role, Jon Voight as Howard Cosell, Mario Van Peebles as Malcolm X, and Giancarlo Esposito as the hero’s fatherand displays Mann’s usual talent for holding narrative interest over the stretch of a long-winded movie. Furthermore, the boxing sequences seem carried out with a kind of care and fidelity that, based on what I’ve heard from aficionados, was absent from Raging Bull. What’s lacking here is a sustained thematic focusat least five people worked on the script, including Mann, which may account for the absence of a clear through linethough the spectacle and characters keep one absorbed. 158 min. (JR) Read more
Published with the screenplay by Santa Teresa Press in the fall of 1987, and reprinted in my 2007 collection Discovering Orson Welles (along with the introductory paragraphs that follow, tweaked and abridged somewhat). The photograph of Welles’s typewriter reproduced below was taken by Kodar’s nephew, Aleksander (“Sasha”), and Oja herself can be seen lurking indistinctly in a corner. (What I presume is one of her sculptures, on the desk, is more visible.)
When I presented [a] Welles tribute at the Santa Barbara film festival in 1986, one person in the audience who introduced himself to me afterwards was James Pepper, a local rare book dealer who, in response to my assertion that the Wellesscreenplay for The Big Brass Ring should be published, expressed some interestin bringing out a limited edition of 1,000 copies. Having already brought out a handsome volume devoted to Robert Towne’s original screenplay for Chinatownin a similar way, he seemed to know what he was talking about, and I conveyed his proposal to Oja Kodar [whom I had recently met at the Rotterdam Film Festival].
The following year, around the time I was preparing to make a permanentmove to Chicago to write for the Chicago Reader, the book appeared.Read more
From Sight and Sound, Summer 1986 and my 2007 collection Discovering Orson Welles. For the first half of this article, and a detailed account of how it came to be written, please go here.
In my synopsis of The Big Brass Ring, I erroneously identify Kim Meneker’s former lover as “a basket-case casualty from Vietnam” rather than from the SpanishCivil War. –- J.R.
THE DEEP.
Not to be confused with Peter Yates’s 1977 feature of the same title, this adaptation of Charles Williams’s thriller Dead Calm, scripted by Welles, was shot in color off the Dalmatian coast at Hvar, Yugoslavia, between 1967 and 1969, with Welles, Laurence Harvey, Jeanne Moreau, Oja Kodar and Michael Bryant. Most of this film was shot and edited, but gaps remain due to the death of Laurence Harvey in 1973 and the still undubbed part of Jeanne Moreau. Welles, Kodar and others have regarded this as the least of his features, so one imagines that it has a low priority on the list of works to be completed and/or released — although, as Kodar points out, priorities may change on any project if investment is forthcoming.
At the Rotterdam film festival last January, Kodar, Dominique Antoine and I compiled a 90-minute videotape of Wellesiana to be shown there, and among the clips we included was a two-minute trailer for The Deep — an early action sequence including brief glimpses of all five of the characters on two yachts and an effective use of percussive jazz (bass and drums) on the soundtrack. Read more
From Sight and Sound, Summer 1986 and my 2007 collection Discovering Orson Welles (the source of the following notes in italics as well).
I was living in Santa Barbara when Welles died on October 10, 1985, teaching what I believe was the first of the three Welles courses I taught at the Universityof California, Santa Barbara, and lecturing on The Magnificent Ambersons that same day. On November 2, I attended a lengthy Welles tribute held at theDirectors Guild in Los Angeles, and recall sitting with a few other Welles fans,including Todd McCarthy and Joseph McBride, at a restaurant for many hoursafterwards, holding what amounted to a kind of personal wake.
This wasn’t long after I’d managed to read and acquire xeroxed copies of two late, unrealized Welles screenplays, The Big Brass Ring and The Cradle WillRock, and one of the idées fixes I had after his death was that both of them shouldbe published, along with the Heart of Darkness script (another fixation that had persisted since the early 70s); if memory serves, I even wrote a letter soonafter Welles’ death to Paola Mori, Welles’ widow, expressing this wish, butnever got a response.Read more
The way the Internet Movie Database tells it, two pairs of writerly brothers worked with Josef von Sternberg on his first talkie, Thunderbolt (1929), recently released on a Kino Lorber Blu-ray (with a knowledgeable audio commentary by Nick Pinkerton that I’ve so far only sampled). Charles and Jules Furthman are both credited for “story,” though Jules, the younger of the two, gets a screen credit for the actual script; Herman J. Mankiewicz is credited for “dialogue,” while his younger brother, Joseph L., is credited for “titles.”
The question is: What titles? The Thunderbolt that I’ve seen and heard many times has none and needs none. Yet according to the American Film Institute’s online catalogue, there was also a silent version of the film—clearly one more missing Sternberg silent, along with The Exquisite Sinner (1926), the Chaplin-produced A Woman of the Sea(1926), The Dragnet (1928), and The Case of Lena Smith (1929), albeit one I’ve never heard mentioned before now.
John Grierson, one of the few people who saw A Woman of the Sea, concluded that “When a director dies, he becomes a photographer”—a verdict that I doubt Stanley Kubrick would have agreed with, although I’m sure that treating Sternberg strictly as a photographer and visual artist has led to the unwarranted critical downgrading of both Thunderbolt, his first sound film, and Anatahan (1955), his last (and a far greater achievement). Read more
This book is intended as a companion and sequel to an autobiographical experiment I carried out in the late 1970s, published in 1980 by Harper & Row as Moving Places: A Life at the Movies. The present volume doesn’t require a reading of that earlier book — long out of print, though recently reprinted by the University of California Press so as to reappear alongside this collection; however, since many of this volume’s premises are predicated on either extensions or inversions of the premises of its predecessor, a few words about that book and the material it covers are in order.
Most of Moving Places is concerned with my childhood in northwestern Alabama, specifically in relation to my family and what was known as the family business from around 1914 to 1960. This business began when my grandfather, Louis Rosenbaum, started operating his first movie theater in Douglas, Wyoming, and it existed until Rosenbaum Theaters, owned by my grandfather and managed by my father, was sold to a larger chain. I was born in 1943, and the family business afforded me a steady diet of free movies through the age of sixteen, when I went away to school in Vermont. Read more
Here is a chronological list of many of the book reviews and longer pieces on literary and related subjects found on this web site, with links added in a few cases; capsule reviews of films are omitted, and this list is otherwise far from complete, especially regarding many more recent posts:
