Jonathan Rosenbaum

From the October 10, 2003 Chicago Reader.

Having taken his formalist bent to extremes in The Circle (2000), Jafar Panahi switches to lumpy neorealism with minimal loss of force. The script by Abbas Kiarostami (who also wrote Panahi’s 2000 The White Balloon) was inspired by a news story about a pizza deliveryman in Tehran who shot a jeweler and then himself in the course of a robbery attempt. Panahi cast a real pizza deliveryman, Hussein Emadeddin, as the robber, only to discover that his overweight, middle-aged lead was a paranoid schizophrenic, which may account in part for his deadpan, oddly commanding presence. The film’s candid treatment of the class resentments brewing in contemporary Tehran have made the film unshowable in Iran, where the government has branded Panahi an American agent — a painful irony given that he couldn’t even enter this country if he wanted to without an inordinate amount of red tape and humiliation. In Farsi with subtitles. 97 min. (JR) Read more

From the March1, 2002 Chicago Reader.

Shot in 16-millimeter black and white with Dolby sound, then blown up to 35-millimeter, this singular experimental feature from Thailand (2000, 83 min.) is a freewheeling collaboration between filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul and villagers he encountered while driving south from Bangkok. After hearing a story en route, Weerasethakul asked others to continue and/or modify it; back in Bangkok, he shot portions of the narrative with nonprofessional actors. The entire film is a heady mix of fiction and nonfiction, with fantasy and actuality rubbing shoulders at every stage, and what emerges from the collective unconscious of the participants is surprising and fascinating. Weerasethakul packages his findings in diverse and inventive ways: as an improvised outdoor musical performance, as a game played by school children, as a collaborative description in sign by two teenage deaf-mutes. I can’t think of another film remotely like it. In Thai with subtitles. Read more

From the February 15, 2001 Chicago Reader. 

This brooding chamber piece (2000) about a love affair that never quite happens is so minimalist that it succumbs to the law of diminishing returns–yet for some reason it sticks in my gut. Director Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong’s most romantic filmmaker, is known for his excesses, and in that sense the film’s spareness represents a bold departure. Claustrophobically set in adjacent flats in 1962 Hong Kong, where two young couples find themselves sharing space with other people, it focuses on a newspaper editor and a secretary at an export firm (Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, the sexiest duo in Hong Kong cinema) who discover that their spouses are having an affair on the road. Wong, who improvises his films with the actors, endlessly repeats his musical motifs (including a melancholy violin theme and three familiar ballads sung in Spanish by Nat “King” Cole) and variations on a handful of images, rituals, and short scenes (rainstorms, cab rides, stairways, tender and tentative hand gestures), while dressing Cheung in some of the most confining (though lovely) dresses imaginable, with collars like neck braces. This isn’t among my favorite Wong Kar-wai features (in a pinch I’d pick Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, Ashes of Time, and Happy Together), but that doesn’t mean my eyes weren’t glued to the screen. Read more

From the Chicago Reader, February 2, 2001.

Set in the late 18th century, this dazzling epic by Im Kwon-taek (Fly High Run Far) concerns the love between a prostitute’s daughter and the son of a provincial governor who marry in secret but are then driven apart. Im is Korea’s most prestigious filmmaker (with 96 features to his credit), and his stirring 2000 drama is both historically resonant and strikingly modern, remarkable for its deft and spellbinding narrative, its breathtaking color, and above all its traditional sung narration, which he periodically shows being performed with drum accompaniment before a contemporary audience. This is one of those masterpieces that would qualify as a musical if Hollywood propagandists hadn’t claimed the genre as their personal property. A must-see. 120 min. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, February 2 through 8.

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From the December 1, 1989 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

Made for West German television in 1980, William Klein’s very entertaining and energetic documentary portrait of the rock-and-roll idol was shot mainly in Macon, Georgia, Little Richard’s hometown, at a time when the singer was a media evangelist for a company selling expensive commemorative Bibles. Midway through production, Little Richard had a financial dispute with the Bible company and announced that he’d received a message from God telling him to walk out on the film. He promptly disappeared. Ordinarily, this would have left the film and filmmaker high and dry. But a deft use of archival footage of Little Richard in his prime, combined with Klein’s usual fascination with media fanfare — including a hilarious procession of black and white Little Richard impersonators — gives the film more than enough to sink its teeth into. And because this is William Klein, the teeth are sharp and the bite is sure. (JR)

From the August 20, 2004 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

I headed the critics’ jury at Rotterdam in 2004 that gave its top prize to Yutaka Tsuchiya’s exceedingly weird fiction documentary video about teenyboppers drifting around Shibuya, Tokyo’s fashionable shopping district. (Another big fan of the film, incidentally, is Claire Denis.) Bewildering in the best sense, this kinky low-tech digital video is fascinating for its Martian-like characters — dressed like fairy-tale figures and preoccupied with obscure rituals — and its singular use of space, which combines the claustrophobia imposed by small cubicles, TV screens, and surveillance cameras with the vast exterior reaches of the urban landscape, confounding our usual grasp of inside and out, public and private. Imagine Blade Runner restaged inside someone’s closet. In Japanese with subtitles. 98 min. (JR)

My column for Caimán cuadernos de cine, submitted in April 2023.

One of the limitations of auteurist criticism is its overlooking of certain remarkable film directors who lack clear auteurist profiles, such as Alfred E. Green, Mervyn LeRoy, and Roy Rowland.

To consider them in reverse order: My work as  consultant on the 1998 re-editing of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil enabled me to become acquainted with Janet Leigh, and when I once asked her whom her favorite director was among those she worked for, her answer was neither Welles nor Hitchcock, both of whom she revered, but the much lesser known Rowland, the first one who directed her (in The Romance of Rosy Ridge, 1947), because he was kind enough to teach her certain basics about moviemaking. When Samuel Fuller cited LeRoy along with John Ford as a role model, I suspect he was thinking not only of LeRoy’s versatility but of his particular distinction in directing such powerful social dramas as I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and They Won’t Forget (1937).

Alfred E. Green (1889-1960), a favorite of mine, started out as a silent actor and a director of two-reelers and ended his career directing TV episodes. Read more

From the January 24, 2003 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

Ernst Lubitsch’s only completed film in Technicolor (1943), and the greatest of his late films, offers a rosy, meditative, and often very funny view of an irrepressible ladies’ man (Don Ameche in his prime) presenting his life in retrospect to the devil (Laird Cregar). Like a good deal of Lubitsch from roughly The Merry Widow onwards, this is a movie about death as well as personal style, but rarely has the former been treated with such affection for the human condition. Samson Raphaelson’s script is very close to perfection, the sumptuous period sets are a delight, and the secondary cast — Gene Tierney, Charles Coburn, Marjorie Main, Eugene Pallette, and Spring Byington — is wonderful. In many respects, this is Lubitsch’s testament, full of grace, wisdom, and romance (as well as a certain amount of sexism). 112 min. A 35-millimeter print will be shown. Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, Monday, January 27, 8:00, and Thursday, January 30, 6:00, 312-846-2800.

From the April 14, 2006 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

A powerful 1996 neorealist feature by the French Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne that follows the instinctive, makeshift moral progress of a 15-year-old boy named Igor (Jerome Renier), the son of a slum landlord who rents to recently arrived immigrants, some of them illegal. One tenant, from Burkina Faso, falls from a scaffold and makes a dying request to the boy to take care of his wife (Assita Ouedraogo) and infant son; Igor spends the remainder of the movie trying to honor that request, even when it means breaking away from his own father and coping with the scorn and incomprehension of the widow. This is a beautifully realized, richly detailed story, full of humor as well as pathos, and part of the Dardennes’ strength in telling it is their openness to experience and the world around them without being hampered by didacticism. in French with subtitles. 93 min (JR)

From the Chicago Reader (March 1, 1997). — J.R.

Though more amateurish than the other celebrated first features of the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette’s troubled and troubling 1960 account of Parisians in the late 50s remains the most intellectually and philosophically mature, and one of the most beautiful. The specter of world-wide conspiracy and impending apocalypse haunts the characters — a student, an expatriate American, members of a low-budget theater company rehearsing Pericles — as the student tries to recover a tape of guitar music by a deceased Spanish emigre who may have committed suicide. Few films have more effectively captured a period and milieu; Rivette evokes bohemian paranoia and sleepless nights in tiny one-room flats, along with the fragrant, youthful idealism conveyed by the film’s title (which is countered by the opening epigraph from Charles Peguy: “Paris belongs to no one.”) With Jean-Claude Brialy. In French with subtitles. 140 min. (JR)

From the Chicago Reader (December 19, 1994). — J.R.

After Health probably the worst of Robert Altman’s Nashville spin-offs, disappointing in the thinness of its characters and the overall toothlessness of its satire. Altman and cowriter Barbara Shulgasser take on the French fashion world, and among the many plot strands are an amorous reunion of old lovers played by Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren (with a direct allusion to one of their scenes in Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow), a rivalry between three fashion magazine editors (Linda Hunt, Sally Kellerman, Tracey Ullman) hoping to hire a top fashion photographer (Stephen Rea), a liaison between two designers (Richard E. Grant and Forest Whitaker) depicted with a kind of snickering homophobia that seems 20 years out of date, an impromptu romance between two American reporters (Tim Robbins and Julia Roberts), a Marshall Field’s retailer who likes to dress in drag (Danny Aiello), an unconvincing corporate takeover involving Anouk Aimee (the closest thing to a real character in the movie), Rupert Everett, and Lyle Lovett, and an idiotic roving TV interviewer (Kim Basinger). Many of these strands appear to be setups for surprises or payoffs that either never come or are muffled when they do (some last-minute cutting by Miramax probably didn’t help). Read more

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