Jonathan Rosenbaum

Written for the December 2022 issue of Caimán Cuadernos de Cine. — J.R.

I’ve recently been working on a book that collects my uncollected film, literary, and jazz criticism, ordering all my inclusions chronologically so that they’re allowed to commingle, meanwhile exploring ways that all three of these art forms (film, literature, music) can inform and reflect one another. Because this project rejects the “targeting” mentality ruling academic presses and their all-powerful publicists—which follows the Reaganite economic principle of exploiting and exhausting markets that already exist, not proposing new ones—it took me some time to find a publisher.

Still more recently, I’ve been rereading Louise Brooks’ informative, thoughtful, and beautifully written Lulu in Hollywood, a collection of essays combining autobiography with criticism, film history with social and fashion history, and even a certain kind of fiction with non-fiction.

The latter combination requires some explanation. While recounting her memories of her own acting in films (especially Beggars of Life and Pandora’s Box) and of Humphrey Bogart, Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, Greta Garbo, Lillian Gish, the neglected director Edmund Goulding, and the even lesser known Pepi Lederer (lesbian niece of Marion Davies, older sister of screenwriter Charles Lederer, and close friend of Brooks who committed suicide at the age of 25), Brooks renders scenes in such fulsome and intricate detail—extended dialogue, facial expressions and gestures, locations, furnishings, clothes, food and drink at meals—that it quickly becomes apparent that she must be fleshing out whatever she can remember with imagined specifics. Read more

Participant:

Jonathan Rosenbaum, critic (joinathanrosenbaum.net) and sometime educator (FilmFactory, KinoKlub in Split), United States

Films: 

1.

The Banshees of Inisherin, Martin McDonagh, 2022

Memoria, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021

Men, Alex Garland, 2022

Potemkinistii, Radu Jude, 2022

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2021

I have conflicted relations to all five – even Memoria, the only one I’ve seen twice and which I’m still trying to understand. The Jude film is a short, and the Hamaguchi feature beautifully juxtaposes three formally and thematically related shorts.

The Banshees is the first McDonagh film I’ve halfway liked–much as Tár, its big-city near-equivalent in social critique, is the first Todd Field film I’ve halfway liked. But the facile defeatism of both features depresses me: small-town stupidity and brutality motored by a colossal sense of  entitlement, big-city smarts comparably preening and braying through the brutality of celebrity culture. Both register like bad jokes told with enough sarcastic relish and wit to make them sporadically blossom out of their gnarled bitterness into something resembling good jokes

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2.

American: An Odyssey to 1947, Danny Wu, 2022. This documentary about Orson Welles’ politics in the 30s and 40s doesn’t even have a distributor yet, but it taught me a lot. Read more

One of Raul Ruiz’s earliest French features — an adaptation of Pierre Klossowski’s autobiographical novel about the conflict between rival doctrinal factions within the Catholic Church — this is also one of his most intractable, though some critics regard it as one of his best. It takes the form of a film within a film, involving the making of a film in 1971 that is an amalgamation of two earlier unfinished films made in 1942 and 1962. Alternating between black and white and color, and shot through with Ruiz’s deadpan humor and his taste for labyrinthine structures, it addresses the quintessentially Ruizian theme of institutions — how they function and how they survive (1977). (JR)

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From the Chicago Reader (January 1, 1990). — J.R.

This charming 1958 comedy about witches is never quite as good as you want it to be, but it’s still a lot more entertaining than its director (Richard Quine) and its reputation suggest. Kim Novak is at her most luminous as a good witch who seduces publisher James Stewart away from the woman he expects to marry, and Jack Lemmon, Ernie Kovacs, Hermione Gingold, and Elsa Lanchester all manage to shine as well. Adapted by John Van Druten from his own play; the Candoli brothers, Pete and Conte, provide some dreamy, muted trumpet jazz in a nightclub. If memory serves, and clearly thinking of the two leads, French writer Bernard Eisenschitz once called this an optimistic Vertigo. 103 min. (JR)

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Ben Kenigsberg emailed me a few questions on November 27 for a story about the authorship of the Citizen Kane screenplay, tied to the upcoming commercial release of David Fincher’s Mank, for the New York Times. Since I regarded this as a fake issue designed to make a piece of infotainment sound more ‘serious’ than it actually was (which is why I refuse to include a still from Mank here), and despite my knowing that the Times will never print criticisms of its own positions, I responded as follows: :

1. Have you seen “Mank”? If so, what did you think? And if not, what do you think of the idea of the project?

Yes, I’ve seen Mank, and I wrote about it briefly on my site.

2. How would you explain to readers who know nothing about “Raising Kane,” “The Kane Mutiny” or even “Citizen Kane” itself why the authorship of the screenplay matters (assuming it matters)? Movies drawn from real events take liberties all the time, but what’s different about “Mank,” which implies (with maybe a bit of plausible deniability) that Mankiewicz deserved sole credit for the script, is that it resurrects a debunked idea that has a history and a subtext. Read more

From the February 7, 1992 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

A fascinating 1988 film essay about photography by Harun Farocki. One of Germany’s most interesting independent filmmakers, he combines the freewheeling imagination of a Chris Marker with the rigor of an Alexander Kluge, and has a materialist approach to editing sound and image that suggests both Fritz Lang and Robert Bresson. Central to the argument of this film are some aerial photographs of Auschwitz taken by American bombers looking for factories and power plants and missing the lines of people in front of the gas chambers — which are contrasted with Nazi photographs and images drawn by an Auschwitz prisoner, Alfred Kantor. Farocki’s provocative reflections on these and related matters and his highly original fragmentization and manipulation of music make this an excellent beginning to a long-overdue retrospective of his work, which until now has not been available in the U.S. Farocki will be present for a discussion; cosponsored by the Goethe-Institut. (Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W. Belmont, Wednesday, February 12, 7:30,281-8788)

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

George of the Jungle

Rating ** Worth seeing

Directed by Sam Weisman

Written by Dana Olsen and Audrey Wells

With Brendan Fraser, Leslie Mann, Thomas Haden Church, Holland Taylor, Richard Roundtree, Greg Cruttwell, Abraham Benrubi, and the voice of John Cleese.

There’s no getting around it: George of the Jungle is an amiable, highly ingratiating piece of lowbrow entertainment, and the audience of mainly young children and parents I saw it with on Saturday night clearly had a ball. So did I, for that matter. If consumer advice on where to take your kids is what’s needed, change “worth seeing” into “a must-see.” On the other hand, if I — a nonparent — had to choose between seeing it a second time and seeing the black-and-white Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942) for the third or fourth time on video, I wouldn’t blink before selecting the latter. Both movies, as it happens, are comedies — though klutzy George, who swings on vines directly into trees, is an even more ironic version of the noble savage — but there are also major differences between them that I suspect are generational. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (June 1, 2000). — J.R.

A failure, but an endlessly fascinating one. Between making his only SF film (The Damned) and his first successful art movie (The Servant), blacklisted expatriate Joseph Losey directed this 1962 film, adapted by Hugo Butler and Evan Jones from a James Hadley Chase novel, about a washed-up Welsh novelist of working-class origins (Stanley Baker) who unsuccessfully pursues a high-class hooker (Jeanne Moreau) while effectively driving his wife (Virna Lisi) to suicide. The film is pretentious and plainly derivative; I’ve always regarded as unwarranted and philistine Pauline Kael’s ridicule of Antonioni, Resnais, and Fellini in an article of the period called “The Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties”, but she might well have included Losey’s film, with its clear debt to all three. It’s a painful testament of sorts (Losey himself can be glimpsed in a bar during a pan that also introduces the hero, showing his personal stake in the proceedings from the outset), though it makes wonderful use of locations in Venice and Rome and features an excellent jazz score by Michel Legrand (with a pivotal use of three Billie Holiday cuts). A decadent period piece and a sadomasochistic view of sexual relations, this singular, resonant, and at times even inspiring mannerist mess is far more interesting than a good many modest successes. Read more

From the July 1, 1998 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

An uncharacteristically somber and mainly straightforward 1997 drama by prolific Chilean-born French postsurrealist Raul Ruiz (Three Lives and Only One Death). Catherine Deneuve plays a defense lawyer whose young client (Ruiz standby Melvil Poupaud) has murdered his aunt. (The aunt had belonged to a psychoanalytic group that believed criminal tendencies form by the age of five, an issue prominently debated throughout the film.) Over time the young man begins to associate the defense lawyer with his dead aunt while she identifies him with her dead sona relationship that grows even stranger once the two become lovers. The film has strong performances by Deneuve and Poupaud as well as by Monique Melinand (as the lawyer’s mother), Michel Piccoli (as the head of a psychoanalytic group), and Bernadette Lafont. Beautifully shot and relatively concentrated for Ruiz — who usually prefers to ramble, constructing baroque visual tangents to his fictions — it delivers the sting of a sharp novella. (JR)

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From the August 2, 1991 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

For my money, this is funnier than both Naked Guns combined, even down to the final joke-strewn credits. Putatively a parody of Top Gun, it also includes send-ups of Dances With Wolves, Full Metal Jacket, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Superman, and even Gone With the Wind. Directed and cowritten (with Pat Proft) by Jim Abrahams, one of the three writer-directors who launched Airplane!, this shares more with that 1980 laugh getter than an exclamation point and Lloyd Bridges; there’s also much of the same pleasure in milking cliches and ridiculing poker-faced straight men with their own compliance (Charlie Sheen is every bit as well cast here as Leslie Nielsen is in the Naked Gun movies), and the airborne antics are realized with a lovely sense of craft. With Cary Elwes, a very sexy Valeria Golino, Kevin Dunn, Jon Cryer, William O’Leary, Kristy Swanson, and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. (Webster Place, Ford City, Bricktown Square, Burnham Plaza, Golf Mill, Lincoln Village, Water Tower)

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From the Chicago Reader in late 1987. — J.R.

A rather novel Flashdance spin-off, this coming-of-age dancing romance (1987) is set in a Catskills resort during the summer of 1963. What sets it apart from others of its ilk is that some of the leads — notably Jennifer Grey, who achieves her apotheosis by learning the mambo, and Jerry Orbach — actually resemble real people rather than actors. The plot hinges on class differences between resort customers and staff members (dirty dancing is what the latter do at their own parties), and before the movie collapses into the utopian nonsense that seems obligatory to this subgenre, a surprising amount of sensitivity and satirical insight emerges from Eleanor Bergstein’s script and Emile Ardolino’s direction. There’s also a memorable use of the resort location, and while the music on the soundtrack is predictably overloud, the period detail is refreshingly soft-pedaled. PG-13, 97 min. (JR)

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Written in March 2011 for Madman Entertainment, an Australian DVD company.

One couldn’t say that there’s any firm consensus that Frank Tashlin’s dazzling 1957 satire about advertising and television is his greatest film. Some Tashlin fans would opt for either of the two late Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis vehicles that he directed for Paramount, Artists and Models (1955) or Hollywood or Bust (1956), or else would select his earlier CinemaScope vehicle for Jayne Mansfield at Twentieth Century-Fox, The Girl Can’t Help It (1956). But there’s certainly no doubt that Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? stands apart from the rest of his work, as the freest and the most deconstructive of all his comedies — and it’s worth adding that Tashlin himself cited it to Peter Bogdanovich (who interviewed him in 1962, during the shooting of It’$ Only Money) as the film he was “most satisfied with”. (In another interview, he suggested that The Girl Can’t Help It was his other personal favorite; it appears that the role played by executive producer Buddy Adler in granting Tashlin an unusual amount of freedom and leeway on both pictures had a lot to do with these judgments.) In keeping with George S. Read more