Jonathan Rosenbaum

Posted on The Chiseler, May 27, 2020. — J.R.

As a lark, Daniel Riccuito sent friends and colleagues his angry screed on Joe Biden. Jonathan Rosenbaum brought him up short with a surprisingly reasoned, and typically eloquent. response.

DR: Please name the most recent Democratic nominee for president who was even more repellant than Joe Biden. I’m speaking wholistically, taking into account Biden’s political record, his rhetoric, his documented public groping of women and girls – all of it. I’ll start by answering that nobody comes to mind. And, without immediately avoiding a direct answer by uttering “BUT… Donald J. Trump!”, please confront the facts as they pertain to Biden himself. On an objective basis, he is the most anti-Choice nominee since Roe became law (Gore is a close second, though his progressive shift was sharp and consistent, not so Mr. Biden’s). The infamous Crime Bill flowed directly from the successful launch of mass incarceration which Biden, moving to Reagan’s political right, started in the 1980s. Ok, I’ll stop loading up the question and ask again: Who the fuck (in recent decades) was worse than this schmuck? I lied. A few more words: Bill Clinton is my idea of the worst US President in history on the basis of NAFTA alone, which fundamentally altered capitalism and made unions largely irrelevant – not to mention whatever broken shards of representative democracy were extant pre-NAFTA. Read more

The Chiseler, June 6, 2020. — J.R.

 

Once again, The Chiseler’s Daniel Riccuito fires off an adrenal email to Jonathan Rosenbaum. It would seem that current protests, spreading globally, fuel both men with hope – as opposed to handwringing dismay.

DR: One of my pet worries has been that Me Too operates within the same bourgeoise comfort zone that always seems to define (and even helps establish adamantine parameters around) the most represented form of “Feminism” – the word itself has historically been equated with American whiteness, racism and elitist “glass cieling” (a metaphor that reveals all) politics. Ask Angela Davis. The glorious thing about our current global “crisis” (I call it “OPPORTUNITY!”) is that we can no longer avoid socio-economic class – i.e., the intrinsic relationship between capitalism and racism. When we focus on black people and ask “What could possibly make life fairer,” ALL the issues automatically come into play: environmental racism, mass incarceration, unacceptable poverty rates, race-based joblessness, lack of medical care, defunded education – we are COMPELLED to attack capitalism at its roots.

JR: I share your optimism. This is anti-capitalism without much of the privileged white delusion of 60s radicals that we need to wipe the slate clean and start all over again from scratch (as if any of us even knew what scratch consisted of).

From the August 1, 2000 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

One of the best contemporary war films I know is this singular 1988 feature, the first by Guinea-Bissau filmmaker Flora Gomes (Po di sangui). The first half, as elemental and as unadorned as Samuel Fuller’s The Steel Helmet, concentrates on women fighting alongside guerrillas at the end of Guinea-Bissau’s war of independence in 1973, attacked by Portuguese helicopters as they travel on foot close to the border. The second half, more diffuse and at times more rhetorical, deals with the ambiguous conditions of the war’s aftermath. The title means those whom death refused, and true to that notion the heroine (Bia Gomes) has been fighting for about a decade. Gomes (no relation to the director) manages to convey the loss of her children in a wordless and underplayed moment that shook me to my core. Flora Gomes appears in a cameo as president of a postwar sector. 93 min. (JR)

From the Chicago Reader (November 16, 2001). — J.R.

Fritz Lang’s first real blockbuster was this 1924 two-part silent epic — Siegfried and Kriemhild’s Revenge — based on the 13th-century German legend that also inspired Wagner’s Ring cycle. In part one, Siegfried (Paul Richter), the son of a Norse king, wins the hand of the beautiful maiden Kriemhild (Margarethe Schon) and uses a magic sword to battle a fire-breathing dragon in the forest. Part two occurs after the death of Siegfried, when his widow accuses her half brother Hagan of murdering him. Her revenge entails marrying the king of the Huns and bearing him a son, and culminates in a bloody feast. These stunning, seminal features, restored to something resembling their original form and length in 35-millimeter by the Munich Film Museum (part one is 143 minutes, part two is 129), are even more impressive in their mythical splendor than Lang’s much better known Metropolis, anticipating everything from Fantasia (one lovely segment in Siegfried is animated) to Batman to Star Wars while showing Lang’s plastic gifts at their most impressive. Very highly recommended. David Drazin will provide live piano accompaniment, though unfortunately he won’t be performing the stirring 1924 score by Gottfried Huppertz. Read more

From the June 22, 2001 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

This peculiar, locally made black-and-white feature by Jim Sikora premiered at the Chicago Underground Film Festival in 1996 and surprisingly it’s been screened here only once since then, despite the fact that it’s enjoyed well-received runs in both New York and Los Angeles and played at European festivals. Apart from John Terendy’s effective cinematography, the film is notable for its impressive leads: Jeff Strong is creepily enigmatic as a misfit whose gratuitous phone prank, referred to in the title, leads to a murder and the subsequent incarceration of a young woman (a superbly composed Lara Phillips) who was the patient of his sister (Paula Killen) at a health clinic. The style is mainly classic low-rent noir, but Sikora adds a few interesting touches, such as Strong evaporating from certain shots rather than making conventional exits, a few striking freeze-frames toward the end, and some odd uses of music by the Denison-Kimball Trio. Joe Carducci collaborated with Sikora on the script; with David Yow and Richard Kern. 83 min. Showing as part of “Starring Chicago!,” the Film Center’s retrospective of films shot or set in Chicago; Sikora will attend the screening. Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (May 10, 2001). — J.R.

It seems scandalous that Charles Burnett, the most gifted black American director offering purely realistic depictions of black urban life, was able to make this 1990 feature only because Danny Glover agreed to play a leading role. Harry Mention (Glover), an old friend from the rural south, arrives on the doorstep of a Los Angeles family, wreaking subtle and not-so-subtle havoc on their lives. The family is headed by a retired farmer (Paul Butler) and his midwife spouse (Mary Alice), whose two married sons (Carl Lumbly and Richard Brooks) are in constant conflict. Burnett’s acute and sensitive direction is free of hackneyed movie conventions; even something as simple as a hello is said differently from the way you’ve heard it in any other movie. All of Burnett’s features have the density of novels, rich with characters and their interplay, and this one is no exception. 102 min. (JR)

From the April 17, 1992 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

The acting is raw and unglued, the guest-star appearances of aging 60s icons (Arlo Guthrie, Timothy Leary, David Carradine) are self-conscious and arch, and the sprawling episodic construction is underlined by conceptions that are sentimental to a fault. But this odd little road movie — a first feature written and directed by Abbe Wool, who cowrote Sid & Nancy — still got to me, mainly because of its sincerity and its relative novelty in trying to locate the dregs of American counterculture in various portentous and philosophical roadside encounters. The semifantastical plot concerns the absurdist journey of two bikers (John Doe and Adam Horovitz, members respectively of the bands X and the Beastie Boys) from southern California through parts of Nevada. Doe, the older biker, is a grizzled factory worker literally searching for a place called El Dorado, where he wants to scatter the ashes of an acquaintance (David Anthony Marshall) who died in a freak accident; Horovitz is a younger biker with a Motel 9 fixation who insists on tagging along. At its worst, this registers like an unconscious parody of Easy Rider; at its best, it suggests a flea-bitten yahoo version of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Hawks and Sparrows. Read more

From the November 1, 1992 Chicago Reader. — J. R.

Query: How do you make a satire about contemporary corruption in the U.S. Congress, much of it based on real-life abuses, with a former speechwriter for Walter Mondale (executive producer Marty Kaplan) as cowriter, and somehow ensure that it never intersects with reality? Answer: Cast Eddie Murphy in the lead. Murphy plays a con artist who scams his way into the Senate, then (you guessed it) belatedly develops a conscience; the filmmakers treat all the characters, not to mention the audience, as sitcom puppets. Jonathan Lynn (My Cousin Vinny) directed, and the costars are Lane Smith, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Joe Don Baker, Victoria Rowell, Grant Shaud, Kevin McCarthy, and Charles Dutton (1992). (JR)

From the Chicago Reader (September 1, 2001). — J.R.

One of the great transgressive moments in 50s Hollywood was Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” playing over the opening credits of this black-and-white melodrama (1955, 101 min.) about unruly boys in a slum high school. This was released a year before the movie Rock Around the Clock, and the fact that the earlier film was an MGM release only added to the punch. A crew-cut Glenn Ford, the squarest of teachers, tries to tame Vic Morrow and Paul Mazursky, among other hoods, and win over Sidney Poitier (in one of his best early roles). As Dave Kehr suggested in his original Reader capsule, the kids are better actors than the adults (who also include Anne Francis, Louis Calhern, and Richard Kiley). Writer-director Richard Brooks had a flair for sensationalism, and his adaptation of Evan Hunter’s novel is loads of fun as a consequence, but don’t expect much analysis or insight. (JR)

Here’s part of the text I wrote for an audiovisual appreciation of Yasuzo Masumura’s Black Test\ Car and The Black Report for an Arrow Video DVD & Blu-Ray of those films, released in August 2020. — J.R.

What Masumura Does with Our Madness

Jonathan Rosenbaum

There’s a dialogue exchange in Billy Wilder’s Cold War comedy One Two Three where someone asks, more or less rhetorically, “Is everybody corrupt?”, and the reply is, “I don’t know everybody.” 

Billy Wilder was a cynic, but I’m not entirely sure that we can categorize Yasuzo Masumura that way as well. Certainly his vision of society was just as dark, but I think he also qualified as an intellectual more than Wilder ever did—and conversely, Wilder qualified as more of a journalist, because that’s how he started out professionally. Also, Wilder tended to make his characters heroes or villains whereas Masumura sometimes, as in Black Test Car, makes virtually all of his characters villains. (If he makes a few of the characters superior to the others—such as an executive who tears up a payoff check, or a woman who rejects her fiancé after he forces her to prostitute herself in order to spy for his company, or her fiancé once he finally reforms himself at the end of the film—this is only because they feel more disgust than the others do about becoming scumbags.) Read more

Unlike all of my previous social media posts, this one is important. I don’t mean to say that I thought my earlier Facebook posts were wanting in importance when I wrote them and sent them out blindly to everyone; even rereading them now, I can taste their urgency. But the logic of the marketplace — that yesterday’s groceries are today’s piss and excrement (which is why and how Rachel can and will promise a “big show tonight,” never a small one, just like Ed Sullivan did in the 1950s) — decrees that things can only seem important when they become part of the present tense and therefore become susceptible to our buying power, our hallowed credentials as treasured customers with digestive systems. The staying power of nondigestible items isn’t worth thinking about. But saying that this particular one is extra-important now ensures that it will become expendable tomorrow. So you might want to save this post for later and then throw it away. Read more

While I can’t vouch for how well this 1991 documentary interprets Stephen Hawking’s best-selling book, this is my favorite Errol Morris picture after Fast, Cheap & Out of Control — a cogent and fascinating presentation of Hawking’s theories about the origin and fate of the universe, intercut with an account of Hawking’s life (including how he has managed to cope with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). I find the material from the book much more important and fascinating than the inspirational life story; though interesting in its own right, it’s a standard triumph-over-adversity scenario that periodically threatens to trivialize Hawking’s ideas and work. However, the alternation between Morris’s usual talking-head approach for the biography and Hawking’s computer-generated voice and various kinds of illustrations to recount most of the theory creates a dialectic that the film profits from stylistically. Philip Glass composed the music. (JR)