From the Chicago Reader (December 11, 1992); also reprinted in Movies as Politics. — J.R.

MALCOLM X

** (Worth seeing)

Directed by Spike Lee

Written by Arnold Perl and Spike Lee

With Denzel Washington, Angela Bassett, Albert Hall, Al Freeman Jr., Delroy Lindo, and Spike Lee.

“At the top of 1968, over the vehement protests of my family and my friends, I flew to Hollywood to write the screenplay for The Autobiography of Malcolm X. My family and my friends were entirely right; but I was not (since I survived it) entirely wrong. Still, I think that I would rather be horsewhipped, or incarcerated in the forthright bedlam of Bellevue, than repeat the adventure — not, luckily, that I will ever be allowed to repeat it: it is not an adventure which one permits a friend, or brother, to attempt to survive twice. It was a gamble which I knew I might lose, and which I lost — a very bad day at the races: but I learned something.” — James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work (1976)

“If the complexity that was Malcolm X survives this moment as only a T-shirt or a trademark, then it is no wonder that Clarence Thomas has emerged as the perfect cooptive successor–an heir-transparent, a product with real producers; the new improved apparition of Malcolm, the cleaned-up version of what he could have been with a good strong grandfather figure to set him right. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (March 9, 1990); revised in October 1995 for my collection Movies as Politics. — J.R.

THE PLOT AGAINST HARRY *** (A must-see)

Directed and written by Michael Roemer

With Martin Priest, Ben Lang, Maxine Woods, Henry Nemo, Jacques Taylor, Jean Leslie, Ellen Herbert, and Sandra Kazan.

I hate stars. There’s a part of our culture that devotes itself ceaselessly to producing, promoting, and consuming them, and a lot of people would have you believe that they rule our consciousness — our politics, our fantasies, our ideas, our conversation, our art and entertainment. But one of our best-kept and most precious secrets is that a great deal goes on in our culture and in our lives that has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with stars and everything to do with ordinary people.

Insofar as we can distinguish between illusion and reality — and the popularity of someone like Reagan suggests that we neither can nor want to very much — ordinary people, not stars, form the fabric of our daily existence; and most movies, simply by virtue of the fact that they have stars, ignore, deny, and impugn that fabric. An inordinate amount of energy in our society is devoted to proving that stars (Reagan or Bush, Cruise or Streep, Madonna or Jagger, Trump or Warhol, Spielberg or Sontag) are ordinary people just like you and me, when it might be more useful to prove that ordinary people — the people we live with — are the stars that actually belong in our constellations. Read more

From the December 1, 1997 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

If James Cameron (Titanic) is entitled to risk making a fool of himself, why not Sally Potter? The writer-director of the wonderful if much-reviled The Gold Diggers (her first black-and-white musical) and the mediocre if much-praised Orlando plays herself in this second black-and-white musical, a wistful pipe dream set in Paris, London, and Buenos Aires, about learning the tango from a master (Pablo Veron, also playing himself). She’s always dreamed of being a dancer, he’s always dreamed of being in a film, and the main problem between them in this joint enterprise is who gets to lead — a metaphorical premise that?s milked for everything it’s worth, and then some. Meanwhile Potter is seen writing a script for what appears (in color snatches) to be a god-awful film combining the worst elements of her first two features, and there’s some enigmatic material about both characters supposedly being Jewish. The film’s division into 12 “lessons” might at times seem a little arch, but when Potter and Veron are dancing — which is at least half the time — the movie becomes rapturous and joyful, so who cares if she’s being presumptuous? Read more

Written for a Criterion rerelease, released in November 2020.. — J.R.

Along with Dead Man, his previous narrative feature, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai marks a quantum leap in the Jim Jarmusch universe — a discovery of history (both antiquity and tradition) that carries with it a sense of gravity and even tragedy missing from his first five features. And paradoxically, along with his embrace of antiquity comes an uncanny intimation of the future from a 1999 perspective — an anticipation of social media and their mythical assemblies of identities and fanciful hashtags, a full decade before Facebook and Twitter rose to prominence, all the more surprising from a committed Luddite who would subsequently opt for faxes over email and post only on Instagram.

Jarmusch’s special way of evoking contemporary online individualities is a mix-and-match game of movie-genre tropes (including a final shoot-out scene), references to particular films (e.g., pigeons kept on a New Jersey rooftop, from On the Waterfront), and diverse literary touchstones ranging from The Wind in the Willows to Frankenstein. It also involves mythical profiles that sometimes merge with (or at least suggest) star presences, something Jarmusch has long depended upon, including his evocations (and invocations) of Elvis in Mystery Train (1989) and Nikola Tesla in Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), and his uses of, among many others, Roberto Benigni and Tom Waits in Down by Law (1986), Gena Rowlands and Winona Ryder in Night on Earth (1991), Johnny Depp and Gary Farmer in Dead Man (the latter of whom briefly returns in Ghost Dog), Forest Whitaker and Henry Silva in Ghost Dog, Cate Blanchett (in two roles) in Coffee and Cigarettes, and Isaach de Bankolé, Tilda Swinton, and Bill Murray in several films each.  Read more

From the November, 8, 2002 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

Not one of Billy Wilder’s best efforts (I wonder if it was motivated by his desire to show his ideological “correctness” during the Red Scare, by celebrating a much-beloved antisemite), this lengthy 1957 account of Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic, shot in CinemaScope, still has some interest because of James Stewart’s performance, which is very nearly a one-man show. With Patricia Smith, Murray Hamilton, Marc Connelly, and a score by Franz Waxman. 138 min. (JR)

`Written in late 2020 for a Re:Voir DVD release. — J.R

Seen as a troubled diptych, Troublemakers (filmed in Newark during the fall of 1965, two years before the riots) and In the Country (1966) offer, respectively, public and private glimpses of the political frustrations faced by young white radicals in the United States during this volatile period. Robert Kramer–producer, writer, and director of the second film–receives no credit on the first, but he’s one of the more vocal radicals appearing in it, expressing some of the same disillusionment with mainstream, workaday politics that the second film is also wrestling with. The son of a Park Avenue heart specialist and a textile designer, Robert attended private schools, Swarthmore College, and Stanford, carrying around his privilege like an albatross, as a guilt-ridden handicap to overcome.

The implicit hope that led members of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society)–including the very young Tom Hayden, Kramer, and filmmakers Norman Fruchter (sound) and Robert Machover (camera and editing)–to join and/or recruit the efforts of black activists in their Newark ghetto and the explicit bitterness of a nameless, fictional white radical couple (William Devane and Catherine Merrill) retreating to and brooding within their privileged rural isolation need to be viewed as reverse sides of the same countercultural coin. Read more

From the August 1, 1995 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

Dracula’s daughter — and more specifically, Lambert Hillyer’s Dracula’s Daughter (1936) — comes to Manhattan’s East Village in a quirky, lyrical independent feature by writer-director Michael Almereyda. It’s shot in luscious, shimmering black and white, with prismatic, pointillist interludes shot with a toy Pixelvision camera (also used by Almereyda in Another Girl, Another Planet, his previous feature), transferred to 35-millimeter without letterboxed framing. Produced by David Lynch, who turns up in a cameo, this offbeat horror item works much better as a dreamy mood piece with striking poetic images and as a semicomic appreciation of a few quintessential low-budget actors than as straight-ahead storytelling. In some ways it’s a throwback to the pathos of Twister, Almereyda’s first feature — a black comic treatment of various dysfunctional family members yearning for normality. With Elina Lowensohn, Martin Donovan, Peter Fonda, Galaxy Craze, Suzy Amis, Karl Geary, and Jared Harris. (JR)

Written for The Unquiet American: Transgressive Comedies from the U.S., a catalogue/ collection put together to accompany a film series at the Austrian Filmmuseum and the Viennale in Autumn 2009. My thanks to Sara Driver for introducing me to this feature.  — J.R.

IDIOCRACY (2006)

My only concession in this series to the recent vogue in gross-out, bad-taste comedies (as exemplified by such Farrelly brothers features as Dumb & Dumber, There’s Something About Mary, and Stuck on You) as well as comedies predicated on their characters’ stupidity (on which both Sacha Baron Cohen and the Coen brothers have virtually built their respective careers) is this dystopian satire (2006), directed and cowritten by Mike Judge, the creator of MTV’s Beavis and Butt-Head. It’s mainly set in the year 2505, when fast-food franchises and all-American stupidity, helped along by The Great Garbage Avalanche, have taken over the mental, spiritual, and physical landscape of presumably the entire planet, to the exclusion of everything else. (The implication that the entire planet now consists of a single country -– or else that, solipsistically speaking, the United States’ lack of awareness of the remainder of the planet has now become total -– is never spelled out, yet it remains inescapable.) Read more

Commissioned by the French quarterly Trafic for its 102nd issue (Summer 2017). — J.R.

1. Jarmusch as dialectician

For some time now, Jim Jarmusch has been operating as an

autocritical dialectician in his fictional features. Politically as

well as commercially, The Limits of Control offers a sharp

rebuke to his preceding film, Broken Flowers, by following

Bill Murray as a protagonist — a bored and diffident Don Juan

roaming across the United States to visit four of his former

lovers, in order to discover which one he impregnated with

a son — with Isaach de Bankolé as a protagonist, a hired

assassin in Europe pursuing Bill Murray in the role of Dick

Cheney as he hides out in a bunker until the assassin

finally strangles him with a guitar string. But even more

striking is the radical contrast between Jarmusch’s most

elitist feature (and in many ways my least favorite), Only

Lovers Left Alive, about a romantic, middle-aged married

couple played by Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston —

vampires named Adam and Eve who evoke junkies, rock

stars, and Pre-Raphaelite artists, living on separate

continents in Tangier and Detroit — and Jarmusch’s

most populist feature (and one of my favorites),

Paterson, about a younger romantic couple living together

in Paterson, New Jersey, a bus driver named Paterson

(Adam Driver) who writes poetry in his spare time and a

housewife named Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) who cooks,

specializes in creating black and white décor and clothing,

and is learning to play the guitar. Read more