It’s infuriating to keep hearing people smugly and narcissistically remark on TV about what a “historic” period we’re currently living through. Presumably this is in sharp contrast to their (i.e., our) less significant predecessors. Yet truthfully, what these people really seem to mean by “historical” is “hysterical”. [12/18/20] Read more
From the Chicago Reader (October 4, 2002). — J.R.
The fourth feature of writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson (after Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia) is a stridently wacky romantic comedy that stands or falls on whether you find Adam Sandler funny as a small businessman working out of a warehouse in greater Los Angeles. He didn’t make me laugh once, and neither did his costar Emily Watson, though Philip Seymour Hoffman, in what amounts to a cameo, made me laugh once or twice. I tend to like quirkiness, but this arch effort is so eager to be quirky nearly everything winds up willfully mannered, from Jon Brion’s flashy percussive score to the hyperbolically absurdist plot. Still, I wouldn’t have minded the Hollywood schlock lurking behind the studied weirdness if I’d believed in any of the characters on any level. With Luiz Guzman. 91 min.[2020 postscript: This movie lingers in my memory more pleasantly than this capsule review suggests, which must mean something positive] (JR)
From the Chicago Reader (May 1, 1990). — J.R.
The four films to date of independent Chicago filmmaker Peter Thompson form two diptychs: not films to be shown simultaneously side-by-side, but successive works whose meanings partially arise out of their intricate inner rhymes and interactions. Two Portraits (1982), which has already had limited exposure in Chicago, describes the filmmaker’s parents: Anything Else, devoted to his late father, combines stop-frame images of the latter, in an airport and outdoors, with a painful recording of his voice taken in a hospital and a multifaceted verbal portrait delivered by his son; Shooting Scripts juxtaposes the filmmaker’s mother, Betty Thompson, reading from her own diaries with a minimalist view of her sleeping on a beach chair, alternating stop-frames with privileged moments of movement. Together these films create a rich tapestry, but the more recent hour-long pair, Universal Hotel and Universal Citizen (1987), receiving its premiere here, creates a still more ambitious and dense interweaving of objective and subjective elements. As Thompson puts it, this diptych deals with three main themes: the emotional thawing of men by women, the struggle to disengage remembrance from historical anonymity, and nonrecoverable loss. In the first film, Thompson describes his involved research about medical experiments in deep cold conducted on a Polish prisoner and a German prostitute by Dr. Read more
From the April 9, 1993 Chicago Reader. — J.R.
A masterpiece by Stanley Kwan, the greatest Hong Kong film I’ve seen (also known as Ruan Ling Yu and Center Stage). The story of silent film actress Ruan Ling Yu (1910-1935), known as the Garbo of Chinese cinema, it combines documentary with period re-creation, biopic glamour with profound curiosity, and ravishing historical clips with color simulations of the same sequences being shot — all to explore a past that seems more complex, mysterious, and sexy than the present. Maggie Cheung won a well-deserved best actress prize at Berlin for her classy performance in the title role, and a large part of what Kwan does as a director is to create a kind of nimbus around her poise and grace. (If I had to pick Kwan’s Hollywood equivalent, I’d opt for George Cukor.) Kwan also creates a labyrinth of questions around who Ruan was and why she committed suicide — a labyrinth both physical (with beautifully ambiguous uses of black-and-white movie sets) and metaphysical — and keeps these questions perpetually open. You should be prepared for a picture that lasts 146 minutes and invites you to relish every one of them — not only the stylish beauty of an imagined Shanghai film world of the 30s, but also the flat abrasiveness of Kwan chatting with Cheung on video about what all this means and coming up with damn little. Read more
From Sight and Sound (March 1992). –- J.R.
There was a discernible change of emphasis this year’s Rotterdam
Festival under its new director, Emile Fallaux. Certainly, there were
fewer intellectual and scholarly interests than in the reign of Marco
Müller, who has moved on to Locarno,although the creation of a new
organization called ‘The Limits of Liberty’ to promote free expression
for filmmakers (somewhat after the model of PEN) signaled a new
activist impulse. With selections now made by a team of Dutch
programmers rather than a single individual, Rotterdam has arguably
become more of a Dutch event than it was under the extended rule of
the late Hubert Bals, who tended to shun native product. But one welcome
constant is a passionate defense of the marginal and surreptitious, and
an overall sense of equality that puts studio tyros and independents on
the same footing.
One of the most striking films this year was Zhang Yuan’s Mama, an
independently Made, banned work from mainland China about
mentally handicapped children. Alternating between an emotionally
subdued fictional story in black and white about a mother and her
retarded son and highly emotional documentary interviews in color
video with the real-life counterparts, the film sets up a neo-Brechtian
strategy with complex dividends.
My column for Caimán Cuadernos de Cine, submitted in late April for their June 2020 issue. Happily, both Her Socialist Smile and A House is Not a Home: Wright or Wrong are both readily available now via streaming.– J.R.
I suppose one could say that the coronavirus has been “good” for my web site because more people visit it now. In much the same fashion, and with an equivalent amount of innocent perversity, Donald Trump is said to be “bad” for the United States (that is, most of the people in the United States) yet “good” for television —meaning the handful of billionaires who own and control television, all of whom are felt to be distinct from the United States.
What does it mean, really, to call anything in the media (television, radio, cinema, the Internet, my web site, your web site ) “good” without matching the interests of the people who go there or live there? Like the American delusion that only three kinds of people exist in the world — Americans, anti-Americans, and prospective Americans — this means excluding most of humanity from the playing field.
I once heard that when Jonas Mekas in 1970 received the news that Nasser had just died, his first thought was to ponder whether this was “good or bad for cinema”. Read more
This was written for a brochure to accompany a retrospective held by Northwestern University’s Block Cinema in January 2008. — J.R.
ZHANGKE JIA, POETIC PROPHET
by Jonathan Rosenbaum
What is it about Zhangke Jia that makes him the most exciting
mainland Chinese filmmaker currently working? It might be
oversimplifying matters to describe this writer-director, born in
1970, as a country boy. But the fact that he hails from the small town
of Fenyang in northern China’s Shanxi province clearly plays an
important role in all his features to date. (I’m less certain about what
role it plays in his two recent documentaries, Dong [2006] and
Useless [2007].) Like William Faulkner and Alexander Dovzhenko,
Jia is a hick avant-gardist in the very best sense — someone whose
outsider/minority status enhances both his humanity and his art.
Working in long, choreographed takes, and mixing realistic accounts
of working-class life with diverse forms of cultural shock and fantasy
ranging from animation to SF to rock, he already qualifies as a poetic
prophet of the 21st century, and not only for China.
He attended the Beijing Film Academy, where he
completed his first film, the one-hour Xiao Shan
(Going Home, 1995). I haven’t seen it, but according
to critic Kevin Lee, it’s about a country boy and
unemployed cook in Beijing who wants to go home for
the Chinese New Year and runs into numerous obstacles,
and it utilizes literary intertitles (which also crop up in
his last two features). Read more
Commissioned by New Lines magazine the day that Godard died (September 13, 2022), and published by them without this title two days later. — J.R.
“He wasn’t sick. He was simply exhausted,” someone close to Jean-Luc Godard told the French newspaper Libération. But not so exhausted that he couldn’t confound his public, including his fans, one last time, by deciding to end his life by assisted suicide — that is to say, to end it nobly, willfully and seriously, even existentially, rather than fatefully and inadvertently.
Godard was hated as much as Orson Welles by the commodifiers who could find no way of commodifying his art, of predicting and thereby marketing his next moves as they could with a Woody Allen or an Ingmar Bergman or a Federico Fellini. And in the end he fooled us one last time by following his own path rather than ours. Was his way of dying a selfish act? Yes and no. It yielded an honest and considered end rather than an involuntary one; it tells us who he was (and still is).
I first encountered Godard’s work when I was 17 and saw À Bout de Souffle (Breathless, 1960) in New York. But I didn’t meet him in person until 1972, when I tried to interview him and Jean-Pierre Gorin in Paris about their co-directed Tout va bien (Just Great). Read more
From the Chicago Reader (2000). — J.R.
Frederick Wiseman’s patient, four-hour unpacking of a small town in Maine confirms the impression of his previous masterpiece, Public Housing: that the masterful documentarian of High School (1968) and Welfare (1975) has now become a masterful essayist. Or maybe he’s been an essayist all along but has lately begun exercising his intelligence and organizing his documentary materials in increasingly subtle and nondidactic ways. What seems different and special about his recent work is its avoidance of easy theses. He picked as his subject this seaside community of 6,000 inhabitants, 99 percent of them white, because he lived a few miles away. He explains his approach as follows: “To document both change and continuity brought about by economic pressure on everyday life in Belfast, I examine its institutions and everyday practices. I also take a look at places where people interact: family life, commerce, public services, and public places.” My favorite scene is a high school teacher’s brilliant lecture on Moby-Dick that throws a great deal of light on everything else, but a lot of what I remember most vividly is the documentation of the daily work involved in preparing and packaging seafood — none of it boring to watch. Read more
From the August 1, 1992 Chicago Reader.
Despite a steady rise in his craft as both a writer and a director, Paul Schrader is still light years away from his mentor and model, Robert Bresson. His persistent ludicrous efforts to remake Diary of a Country Priest and Pickpocket in Hollywood terms have already given us Taxi Driver and American Gigolo, and they’re as doomed as ever in this portrait of a Manhattan drug dealer (Willem Dafoe) desperate to clean up his act. (Now Schrader appears to be trying to remake Taxi Driver, complete with excremental metaphors, nocturnal views of New York, and droning offscreen narration by the hero.) But Susan Sarandon (who improves even more with age than Schrader does) is so good as Dafoe’s boss, and the dialogue is so literate for such a familiar story, that there’s a lot to admire — it’s Schrader’s best film — as long as one can get past the transcendental claptrap (e.g., a New York Post headline reading a”Fall From Grace”) that Schrader sheds compulsively. With Dana Delany, David Clennon, Victor Garber, and Mary Beth Hurt. (JR)
From The Soho News (June 3, 1981). This is also reprinted in my first collection, Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism. 2022: This remains for me De Oliveira’s greatest work, albeit his most neglected. As a treatise on how to adapt a great novel, it is surpassed only by Greed. J.R.
How can I persuade you that the best new movie I’ve seen this year, the only one conceivably tinged with greatness, is a voluptuous four-and-a-half-hour Portuguese costume melodrama, shot in 16-millimeter? Obviously I can’t. So rather than make you feel guilty about missing a masterpiece — as a couple of my friends managed to do when it was at MOMA last spring — let me assume at the outset that you will miss DOOMED LOVE all ten times that it shows at the Public between May 26 and June 14. Bearing this in mind, the following notes are an account of what you missed, are currently missing, or will miss.
1. If it’s confusing and misleading for some to call DOOMED LOVE an avant-garde film, this seems mainly because of the widespread working assumption that “avant-garde” is a social category above and beyond an aesthetic one. As industry-oriented critics like Kael and Sarris are frequently reminding us (the former obliquely, the latter unabashedly), the crucial professional issue is not what movies we go to as critics but what parties, junkets, festivals, universities, grants, and other circuits of power we have easy access to — not what we see but what we have is our calling card, whereas “taste” is largely a rationalization for the personal erotics of self-gratification, cooperation, conflict, and flattery founded on such a system of exchange. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (May 1, 1991). — J.R.
Jean-Luc Godard’s third feature and first studio production (1960) starts with a subversive premise: a neorealist musical in which the major characters (Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, and Jean-Claude Brialy) can’t really sing and dance, much as they’d like to. Periodically ravishing to look at (it’s Godard’s first foray into both color and ‘Scope) and listen to (Michel Legrand did the nonsinging score), it’s also highly deconstructive in the way it keeps jostling us away from these pleasures and in the general direction of indecorous reality. (It’s also packed with both subtle and obvious references to other movies.) While its slender plot (stripper Karina wants a baby and turns to Belmondo when her boyfriend Brialy won’t oblige her) can irritate in spots, the film’s high spirits may still win you over. It’s perhaps most memorable for being a highly personal documentary about Karina and Godard’s feelings about her at the time, brimming with odd details and irreverent energies. In French with subtitles. 83 min. (JR)
A catalog entry for the 2022 Viennale. — J.R.
How could an experimental documentary about the dismantlement of the world’s largest nuclear plant encompass, among other things, a survey of 20th century painting, a political statement, a site for meditation, and a philosophical song about annihilation and creation being parts of the same process? Thirty-five-year-old Lithuanian filmmaker Emilija Škarnulytė shows us how, and her vision is so spellbinding that it demonstrates how the finest lessons of 2001: A Space Odyssey in merging art and science and the early films of Alain Resnais in executing slow, steady, and hallucinatory camera crawls across, into, and around documentary subjects can be creatively applied.
“In my films from the last ten years,” she has said, “I have mostly researched places where contemporary political issues are staged between human and non-human worlds, the shifting boundaries between ecological and cosmic forces. I want to feel out all kinds of non-human and post-human scales in the depths of space and time.” Thus her opening images offer rocks that resemble planets, a voluptuous nuclear explosion is rhymed with trees, an animated disassembly becomes a Constructivist dance, and a snake slithering around the same circuitry previously traversed by her camera becomes a bold Surrealist encounter. Read more
Gary Groth of Fantagraphics Books commissioned me to write this Introduction to the first volume of Charles Schulz’s Sunday color strips of Peanuts, covering the early 1950s, which was published in November 2013. — J.R.
“…I’ve made a lot of mistakes down through the years doing things I
never should have done. But fortunately, in a comic strip, yesterday
doesn’t mean anything. The only thing that matters is today and tomorrow.”
— Charles Schultz to Gary Groth (“At 3 O’clock in the Morning,”
Comics Journal #200, December 1997)
It was one thing to read Sunday color Peanuts comic strips from 1952 to 1955 at the rate of one per week, when they came out — and not only because they would have wound up in the trash like the rest of the Sunday paper, long before my brothers and I went to sleep that night. And it’s quite another thing to read them all today, piled together in the present volume, one after the other, seven or eight panels at a time, as if they’re the successive chapters of an ongoing serial — or maybe just the latest portions of an endless white picket fence that stretches towards some version of infinity or eternity (or at least roughly half a century of dependable continuity, in any case). Read more
From the Chicago Reader (November 1, 1992).
Spike Lee’s 1992 epic about the powerful black leader, adapted by Arnold Perl and Lee from Malcolm X’s autobiography (written with Alex Haley), benefits from a lively lead performance by the miscast Denzel Washington but doesn’t come within light years of the book, one of the greatest American autobiographies. It’s also sad to see that James Baldwin’s contributions to the original script (the late Perl was his collaborator) have been plundered with so little respect that his name was removed from the credits by his estate’s executor. The necessity of creating a pious official (i.e., middle-class) portrait squeezes out too many aspects of Malcolm’s varied experience and mercurial intelligence; even at 201 minutes, this often feels like a skim job. But if you’re too lazy to read the book, you probably should see this. With Angela Bassett, Albert Hall, Al Freeman Jr., Delroy Lindo, and Lee in a supporting role. (JR)
