Jonathan Rosenbaum

From the Chicago Reader (September 28, 2007). The second photograph below is by Pamela Gentile. — J.R.

Sometimes the most powerful and influential people are protected by their relative obscurity, and it’s hard to think of a better illustration of this principle in the film world than the multifaceted, eccentric, controversial Pierre Rissient, whom I’ve known for 35 years. Among other achievements, he’s probably discovered more important filmmakers than anyone else I know — figures ranging from Cy Endfield to Lino Brocka to Jane Campion to Abbas Kiarostami. It takes most of Todd McCarthy’s well-used 110 minutes in this lively documentary to explain all the creative, behind-the-scene activities Rissient generates in relation to criticism, filmmaking, distribution, exhibition, and programming, and even though this is mainly the sympathetic view of a friend, the portrait is complex and nuanced. Among the many interviewees, Olivier Assayas is especially perceptive when he describes Rissient as being like a teenager. In English, French, and Mandarin with subtitles. (JR)

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From the Chicago Reader (July 14, 2007). — J.R.

Paul Giamatti plays a stuttering everyman, an apartment-building janitor who’s itching for redemption and finds it in the shape of a new age allegory by M. Night Shyamalan. More specifically, he finds a fairy-tale nymph named Story (Bryce Dallas Howard) living under the building’s swimming pool and menaced by occult beasties until the tenants join forces against them. It’s hard to think of a deadlier shotgun marriage than Jacques Tourneur’s poetry of absence and Spielbergian uplift, but Shyamalan has patented the combo, adding pretentious camera movements that are peculiarly his own — even the jokes are pretty solemn. But count on Christopher Doyle’s lush cinematography and a lively cast to take up the slack. With Bob Balaban, Jeffrey Wright, Sarita Choudhury, Freddy Rodriguez, Bill Irwin, Jared Harris, and Shyamalan, playing a writer. PG-13, 110 min. (JR) Read more

From the Chicago Reader (June 1, 2007). — J.R.

Just a way station between Ocean’s Twelve (2004) and the inevitable Ocean’s Fourteen, this third installment in the franchise is outlandish even as fantasy, a labyrinthine revenge caper undertaken after evil lug Al Pacino double-crosses sweet-tempered lug Elliott Gould (part of the usual crew) out of his share of a Vegas hotel-casino. George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Bernie Mac, and Carl Reiner are all back, though Julia Roberts has taken a powder as designated sex object and been replaced by a villainous Ellen Barkin, the butt of much ageist ridicule. Predictably adolescent and smarmy, with the mix of sentimentality and cynical flippancy that’s becoming Steven Soderbergh’s specialty (even when he’s pretending to make art films), this is chewing gum for the eyes and ears, and not bad as such. PG-13, 122 min. (JR) Read more

From the Chicago Reader (February 16, 2007). — J.R.

I spent only an afternoon in East Germany before the Berlin Wall fell, but the fearful silence in public places left a lingering impression. The reasons behind it are explored by writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck in his accomplished first feature, about the Stasi, the country’s secret police, which had a staff of over 90,000, plus countless informers, and spied on friend and foe alike. The fictional story here, set between 1984 and 1991, focuses on the investigation of a popular and patriotic playwright (Sebastian Koch); that the captain assigned to his case (touchingly played by Ulrich Muhe) is mainly sympathetic and working surreptitiously on the playwright’s behalf only makes this more disturbing. With Martina Gedeck (The Good Shepherd). In German with subtitles. R, 137 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre.

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Here’s the substance of two emails I recently sent to an obit writer at the Tribune:

From the Chicago Reader (October 21, 2007). — J.R.

I haven’t seen David Mamet’s controversial two-character play on the stage, but his own film adaptation (2007) is easily his best movie since House of Games. The two characters are a pontificating, bullying male college professor (William H. Macy) up for tenure and his initially cowed, eventually empowered female student (Debra Eisenstadt), who winds up charging him with sexual harassment. The stage versions have often been attacked for siding with the professor, but what seems most impressive about the movie, which may have benefited from certain refinements in the material, is that the two characters are so evenly matched by the dramaturgy that they become Strindbergian antagonists in a life-and-death struggle — equally odious in their authoritarian reliance on institutions to define their own identities and equally crippled by what might be described as their political impotence, which drives them to reach desperately for whatever institutional weapons are available to them. Within this context, education becomes as much an alibi as political correctness, and the most telling aspect of the struggle is that the two characters, even in their carefully coded sexual roles, become two different versions of the same blocked individual. Read more

Jonathan Rosenbaum was film critic for the Chicago Reader from 1987 to 2008. Born in Alabama in 1943, the son and grandson of movie exhibitors, he grew up in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. While living in Paris (1969-1974), he worked as an extra for Robert Bresson and as a script consultant for Jacques Tati, before working as assistant editor for Monthly Film Bulletin and staff writer for Sight and Sound in London (1974-1977).

His books include IN DREAMS BEGIN RESPONSIBILITIES: A JONATHAN ROSENBAUM READER (forthcoming in early 2024), CINEMATIC ENCOUNTERS 2:PORTRAITS AND POLEMICS (2019), CINEMATIC ENCOUNTERS: INTERVIEWS AND DIALOGUES (2018), GOODBYE CINEMA, HELLO CINEPHILIA: FILM CULTURE IN TRANSITION (2010), THE UNQUIET AMERICAN: TRANSGRESSIVE COMEDIES FROM THE U.S. (2009), DISCOVERING ORSON WELLES (2007), ESSENTIAL CINEMA: ON THE NECESSITY OF FILM CANONS (2004), MOVIE MUTATIONS: THE CHANGING FACE OF WORLD CINEPHILIA (coedited with Adrian Martin, 2003), ABBAS KIAROSTAMI (with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, 2003, expanded second edition 2018), MOVIE WARS: HOW HOLLYWOOD AND THE MEDIA LIMIT WHAT FILMS WE CAN SEE (2000), DEAD MAN (2000), MOVIES AS POLITICS (1997), PLACING MOVIES: THE PRACTICE OF FILM CRITICISM (1995), THIS IS ORSON WELLES by Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich (edited, 1992), GREED (1991), MIDNIGHT MOVIES (with J. Read more

From the August 3, 2007 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

The first feature (1977) of the highly talented black filmmaker Charles Burnett, who set most of his early films in Watts (including My Brother’s Wedding and To Sleep With Anger); this one deals episodically with the life of a slaughterhouse worker. Shot on a year’s worth of weekends for under $10,000, this remarkable work is conceivably the single best feature about ghetto life. It was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry as one of the key works in American cinema — ironic and belated recognition of a film that, until this recent restoration, had virtually no distribution. It shouldn’t be missed. With Henry Gayle Sanders. 87 min. (JR)

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