From the November 1, 1995 Chicago Reader. — J.R.
Simultaneously quite watchable and passionless, Martin Scorsese’s three-hour dissection of power in Las Vegas (1995), set principally in the 70s, sometimes comes across like an anthology of his previous collaborations with Robert De Niro — above all GoodFellas, though here the characters are high rollers to begin with. By far the most interesting star performance is by Sharon Stone as a classy hooker destroyed by her marriage to a bookie (De Niro, in the least interesting star performance) selected by the midwest mob to run four casinos. There’s an interesting expositional side to the film, with De Niro and Joe Pesci’s characters both serving as interactive narrators, but the film never becomes very involving as drama, and the appropriation of Georges Delerue’s theme from Godard’s Contempt is the tackiest hommage since the use of Singin’ in the Rain in A Clockwork Orange. With James Woods, Don Rickles, Alan King, Kevin Pollak, and L.Q. Jones. (JR)
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Written for the January/February 2011 Film Comment. — J.R.
Dave Brubeck: In His Own Sweet Way
(Bruce Ricker, U.S.)
Ironically, the most popular American jazz musician is also one of the most undervalued among the cognoscenti. As the leading distributor of jazz documentaries (and Clint Eastwood’s jazz consultant), Bruce Ricker may be the ideal filmmaker to re-introduce Brubeck to a wider public. Although he regrettably doesn’t include a full performance of any song before the final credits, Ricker conveys what a wonderful person Brubeck is and gives a fine notion of some of the richness of his music.—Jonathan Rosenbaum
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From the Chicago Reader (February 11, 2000). — J.R.
My Best Fiend
Rating * Has redeeming facet
Directed and written by Werner Herzog.
What’s the difference between artistry and bravado? This isn’t a question I generally feel inclined to ask, but I’m compelled by the work of Werner Herzog, who scrambles the two until it’s difficult to tell which is which. My Best Fiend — Herzog’s documentary feature about his tumultuous collaborations with Klaus Kinski, the mad actor with whom he made some of his most notable films — also compels questions about Kinski’s bravado and artistry, and suggests that it might not always be easy to distinguish his from Herzog’s.
One might call My Best Fiend, which is playing this week at Facets, the art-movie equivalent of writer-director Blake Edwards’s Trail of the Pink Panther. Edwards and Peter Sellers reportedly were at each other’s throats throughout their many collaborations on Pink Panther comedies — largely, it appears, because of Sellers’s hyperbolically neurotic behavior. Herzog and Kinski had a similarly volatile relationship, which ended only after Kinski died, in 1991. Herzog got his revenge by releasing outtakes of his difficult star, much as Edwards continued to fiddle around with unreleased footage of Sellers as Inspector Clouseau in Trail of the Pink Panther. Read more
