From the August 16, 2002 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

I was lucky enough to see John Coltrane’s classic quartet several times in the 60s and was always amazed by his total relaxation amid the cascading wails and yodeling fast runs that came out of his saxophone. He, pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones were completely absorbed, listening to one another so intently that one couldn’t help but join them, even in a noisy nightclub. This 1992 documentary by writer-director Robert Palmer, codirected by Toby Byron, starts off with familiar talk about family and church, some of it voiced over scratchy and blotchy TV performance footage, so I was prepared for the worst. Then comes a lively sequence that cuts between still photographs in sync with “Giant Steps,” and from then on this is pure pleasure. Byron and Palmer are among the few jazz documentarians with the good sense to let us listen to the music for reasonably long stretches without interruption; they present an entire fine Coltrane solo on “So What” with Miles Davis, a relatively stiff rendition of “My Favorite Things” on TV followed by a much better version in concert, a complete performance of “Impressions” with Eric Dolphy on alto sax and a fleet solo by Tyner, an equally full version of “Alabama” punctuated by talking heads, and two healthy chunks of “Naima” that exemplify Coltrane’s later and freer style. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (April 24, 1992). — J.R.

MY COUSIN VINNY

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Jonathan Lynn

Written by Dale Launer

With Joe Pesci, Marisa Tomei, Ralph Macchio, Mitchell Whitfield, Fred Gwynne, Lane Smith, and Austin Pendleton.

WHITE MEN CAN’T JUMP

*** (A must-see)

Directed and written by Ron Shelton

With Wesley Snipes, Woody Harrelson, Rosie Perez, Tyra Ferrell, Cylk Cozart, and Kadeem Hardison.

“Why is this film so popular?” Michael Sragow asked a little plaintively about My Cousin Vinny in the New Yorker last week. Then he suggested an answer: “Perhaps because it gives Pesci a chance to combine his commercial signature, pop scabrousness, with old-fashioned virtues like ‘heart.'” This hypothesis implies that audiences go to comedies for highly esoteric reasons — just like some film critics.

Personally, I’d rather believe that My Cousin Vinny is popular for reasons that have more to do with reality and recognition — specifically, with an appreciation of American regionalism that most contemporary American movies never even attempt, much less convey. Read more

A watershed in the history of Chinese cinema, this first feature (1998) directed by Lu Yue — the remarkable cinematographer of Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl and several recent features of Zhang Yimou, including Shanghai Triad — is an eye-opening comedy about adultery in contemporary Shanghai. Much of the dialogue is improvised by the talented actors — Shi Jingming as the husband, a professor of traditional Chinese medicine; Zhang Zhihua as his factory-worker wife; and Chen Yinan as his mistress and former student — and both the shooting style and the emotional directness of the performances suggest the filmmaking of John Cassavetes. Though this is unquestionably one of the key films of the 90s from mainland China, it unaccountably disappeared from sight after winning the Golden Leopard at the Locarno film festival in 1998, and as far as I know this [in August 1999] is its first commercial run. Viewers requiring the validation of the New York Times or the New Yorker before making their cultural decisions will therefore have to take a pass on this, and it will be their tough luck. (JR) Read more

From the Chicago Reader (August 1, 1999). — J.R.

At once complex and gentle, this 1998 feature concludes Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons series and is one of the best films of his career. It’s about the perils and rewards of rediscovering love in middle age, though, characteristic of Rohmer, it has important young characters as well. Beautifully capturing the southern Rhone valley, it focuses on lifelong best friends — a bookseller (Marie Riviere) and a wine grower (Beatrice Romand) — and the efforts of the bookseller and a young friend of the wine grower (Alexia Portal) to find their friend a lover. Riviere and Romand are both seasoned Rohmer actors, and even played together once before in Summer (1986); the charisma generated by them and Alain Libolt — one of the prospective boyfriends, who looks like Charles Boyer — is central to the film’s success, along with the casual precision and growing momentum of Rohmer’s script and direction. In French with subtitles. 112 min. (JR)

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The Circle

****

Directed by Jafar Panahi

Written by Kambozia Partovi and Panahi

With Maryam Parvin Almani, Nargess Mamizadeh, Fatemeh Naghavi, Fereshteh Sadr Orafaei, and Mojhan Faramarzi.

By Jonathan Rosenbaum

Last month I was taken aback by an E-mail from a colleague that said, “I thought, as an apparent defender of the Islamic Republic of Iran, that you should read this.” Before I accessed the link–an AP story about a woman stoned to death by court order for appearing in porn movies–I wrote back to say I was insulted by the implication that my regarding Iranians as human beings meant I supported a totalitarian regime. He promptly sent back an apology, but added, “It’s just that sometimes it sounds as if you regard their regime as ‘better’ than ours. Perhaps I’m misreading you.”

His second E-mail upset me even more than the first. The first could be rationalized as a sick joke–reminding me of being called a “nigger lover” when I was an Alabama teenager (an epithet sometimes followed by “Just kidding!”)–but the personal pronouns of the second revealed a blood-chilling us-versus-them mentality. That kind of either-or thinking is surely the most primitive as well as the most dangerous of cold war legacies, and it only reinforces this country’s isolationism. Read more

I’ll concede that Todd Solondz’s absorbing 134-minute epic of sexual disgruntlement in the New Jersey suburbs (1998) is worth seeing, and not only for shock value. But I don’t think it deserves all the high marks it’s been getting for compassion and understanding, especially given its campy use of elevator music whenever the misery of its large cast of characters gets too close for comfort. Everyone who likes this movie calls it disturbing, but what disturbs me most is the self-loathing laughter it provokes, similar to what one often hears at Woody Allen and Michael Moore comedies. So even if I’m touched by the treatment of a child molester who loves his son, I don’t like that I’m also supposed to sympathize with the molester when he’s working as a therapist who doesn’t listen to his clients. An obsessive primitive with a clodhopper sense of excess, Solondz has already proved in Welcome to the Dollhouse (a better film overall) that he can carry dark obsessions further than most. But he still stoops to teenage gross-out antics like those of the Farrelly brothers, calling it art rather than entertainment and knowing that the media eagerly charting Clinton’s semen flow will go along. Read more

An exchange done via email for MUBI in November 2020. — J.R.

Jonathan Rosenbaum: What were the personal (or autobiographical) aspects of your film Farpões Baldios (Barbs, Wastelands), and what were the less personal aspects?

Marta Mateus: In any art, everything’s autobiographical, isn’t it? This film is based, first, on the experience and history of the people I grew up with, on the stories they shared with me since my childhood. These stories are in their hands, their gazes, in what binds us together, perhaps also in our blood and in our dreams. Landscapes also participate in it: it’s the source, the roots, a matter of fertility, hope, grief, shadow, solitude, birth, rebirth, joy, struggle. Therefore, there is also collective experience, historical memory and the landscape has its marked wounds, just like us. Thousands of years of exploitation, of nature and of man by man. There was a very clear route to follow, for us all, but no need to be spoken. Filming was a form of communion, in search of our other selves and each other–maybe a ritual, not “recreation” or narration but action. It was a very long process but made in a state of emergency; we only became aware of some things afterwards. Read more

On balance, Dogma 95 probably has more significance as a publicity stunt than as an ideological breakthrough, judging from the first two features to emerge under its ground rules, Lars von Trier’s The Idiots and Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration. Both films are apparent acts of rebellion and daring that are virtually defined by their middle-class assumptions and apoliticism. Von Trier’s movie boasts one good scene surrounded by a lot of ersatz Cassavetes; Vinterberg’s work, even more conventional in inspirationthink Ibsen, Strindberg, Bergmanis genuinely explosive because it’s so powerfully executed. Shot with the smallest and lightest digital video camera available, The Celebration (1998) chronicles the acrimonious and violent family battles that ensue at a country manor where the 60th birthday of the family patriarch is being observed, not long after the eldest son’s twin sister has committed suicide. In Danish with subtitles. 105 min. (JR) Read more

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Jia Zhang-ke’s second feature (2000) may well be his best work to date and one of the greatest of all Chinese films. Its subject is the great theme of Chinese cinema, the discovery of history, which links such otherwise disparate masterpieces as The Blue Kite, Blush, Actress, The Puppet Master, and A Brighter Summer Day. The story charts the course of the Cultural Revolution’s aftermath for about a decade, noting shifts in values and lifestyles, culture and economy, as China moves inexorably from Maoism to capitalism, as witnessed by five actors in a provincial traveling theater troupe. Many episodes unfold in single long takes, with offscreen sound playing an important role, and the beautifully choreographed mise en scene recalls the fluid Hungarian pageants of Miklos Jancso in the 60s and 70s. Originally 192 minutes long, the film was recut by Jia to its current 155 minutes and improved in the process. In Mandarin with subtitles. (JR)

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Written for MUBI Notebook on May 11, 2020. — J.R.

“Stranger Than Paradise” in One Shot

“We can bet that this film will be a flop,” blurbed Jean Eustache about his fellow post-New-Wave underachiever and pal Luc Moullet’s Anatomy of a Relationship (1975), an early exercise in self-scrutiny coauthored by Moullet’s partner Antoinetta Pizzorno. “That’s the best for me: I’ll plunder it more easily.” In comparable fashion, a 1964 commercial flop made by one of the masters of both Eustache and Moullet, Jean-Luc Godard — who incidentally had helped to launch the careers of both of these disciples — was successfully plundered by Jim Jarmusch twenty years later in Stranger Than Paradise. More specifically, Jarmusch appropriated a black-on-white principle exploited by Godard mostly in interiors to depict a deadbeat trio of two male lowlifes secretly smitten by a foreign female while planning their inept capers in drab surroundings — Claude Brasseur, Sami Frey, and Anna Karina (a Dane in France) in Band of Outsiders; John Lurie, Richard Edson, and Eszter Balint (a Hungarian in the U.S.) in Stranger Than Paradise. The white void seen here by Jarmusch’s trio in a suburban Ohio snowscape, subsequently replicated by a white void in a suburban Florida seascape, is mostly physical — unlike the metaphysical void faced by Godard’s trio in a Paris suburb, who have only movie clichés to fill their plans and imaginations.

Possibly from the October 26, 1995 issue of Chicago Reader. I’m only guessing, because the Reader itself dates this review a decade earlier, about seven years before the film was made. — J.R.

Tom Kalin’s 1992 first feature is a postmodern retelling of the Leopold and Loeb story, playing up the suppressed gay subtext (at their murder trial in 1924 and then in prison) and playing down more familiar aspects of the case, such as Clarence Darrow’s role. Strikingly shot in black and white by Ellen Kuras and generally well acted, the film is a bit pedantic and mechanical in its revisionism and not always persuasive in its treatment of the period, yet it still carries some interest—if you can accept its polemical stance of treating the men’s crime as a secondary issue. With Daniel Schlachet, Craig Chester, Ron Vawter, Michael Kirby, Michael Stumm, and Paul Schmidt.

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This appeared in the June 11, 1993 issue of the Chicago Reader; I’ve also appended an irate response from a reader that appeared in a subsequent issue, along with my response. –J.R.

CLIFFHANGER

** (Worth seeing)

Directed by Renny Harlin

Written by Michael France and Sylvester Stallone

With Sylvester Stallone, John Lithgow, Michael Rooker, Janine Turner, Rex Linn, Caroline Goodall, Leon, Paul Winfield, and Ralph Waite.

Kitsch is the daily art of our time, as the vase or the hymn was for earlier generations. For the sensibility it has that arbitrariness and importance which works take on when they are no longer noticeable elements of the environment. In America kitsch is Nature. The Rocky Mountains have resembled fake art for a century.

There is no counterconcept to kitsch. Its antagonist is not an idea but reality. To do away with kitsch it is necessary to change the landscape, as it was necessary to change the landscape of Sardinia in order to get rid of the malarial mosquito. –Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (1959)

Cliffhanger #1 (rating: four stars): Towering mountain ranges, yawning chasms, awesome expanses of stony matter, endless reaches of empty space, daunting inclines, imposing immensities that cause your jaw to drop and freeze into a painful rictus. Read more