Jonathan Rosenbaum

Joseph McBride, a friend, asked me to contribute a list of some sort to The Book of Movie Lists (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1999), which he put together, and here’s what we came up with. -– J.R.

The 10 Best Jazz Films

by Jonathan Rosenbaum

What follows is a personal list of neither the best films on jazz (e.g., Jazz on A Summer’s Day) nor the best examples of jazz on film (such as the Fats Waller soundies or the 1981 Johnny Griffin at the Village Vanguard), but something more special and rarified: films in which the aesthetics of jazz and the aesthetics of film find some happy and mutually supportive meeting ground.

1.Black & Tan (DUDLEY MURPHY, 1929). Remarkable not only as an experimental narrative by the (often uncredited) main author of Ballet mécanique and as a radical political statement about to whom jazz belongs, but also as a ravishing, poetic marriage between the music of Duke Ellington and the poetics of death and orgasm. Only twenty-one minutes long, but the aesthetics of jazz and film start here.

2.When it Rains (CHARLES BURNETT, 1995). A twelve-minute miracle, and, alas, the only film on this list by a black filmmaker, this is a jazz parable about the discovery of common ‘6os roots via a John Handy album in contemporary L.A., Read more

From the Chicago Reader, February 10, 1995. — J.R.

Ron Vawter (1948-1994), who died of AIDS, was one of those rare actors who, like Tilda Swinton in England and the late Delphine Seyrig in France, remained equally active in commercial and experimental productions. He played the psychiatrist in sex, lies, and videotape and appeared in such Hollywood features as The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia. But Vawter also played the male lead in Mark Rappaport’s ground-breaking and visually stunning Postcards and in Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s Made in Hollywood (both from 1990) and appeared with Willem Dafoe and other members of the Wooster Group in Ken Kobland’s elegantly creepy and cadaverous video Flaubert Dreams of Travel but the Illness of His Mother Prevents It (1986), a series of surrealist tableaux presented with diverse sound elements. Remembering Ron includes the Rappaport and Kobland tapes, a ten-minute excerpt from Made in Hollywood (unfortunately too fragmented to give much sense of the whole), and Leslie Thornton’s brand-new The Last Time I Saw Ron. This powerful memoir combines glimpses of Vawter in a Belgian stage production, Philoktetes Variations, with diverse kinds of found and new footage and uncanny sound effects. Read more

The fourth feature (1995) by this country’s most gifted black filmmaker, Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep), is his first with a directly political edgea heartfelt and persuasive look at the racism and corruption of the Los Angeles police force, based on a true story and calculated to burn its hard lessons straight into your skull. The plot concerns the adjustments made by a sincere black rookie cop (Michael Boatman) who joins an all-white precinct and wants to be accepted by his fellow officers; his only real ally turns out to be the one woman in the precinct (Lori Petty, in a singular performance), a Jew who gets plenty of abuse herself. When a murder case arises involving a black suspect (Ice Cube), the hero’s decision to perjure himself in order to support his white partner opens a Pandora’s box of ironies and ambiguities that the movie squarely faces. The distributor forced him to tone down the anger and despair of his original ending, but this still packs a mighty punch. With Elliott Gould and M. Emmet Walsh. 108 min. (JR) Read more

For many of its historical details, I found this James Ivory-Ruth Prawer Jhabvala account of Thomas Jefferson’s five-year stint as ambassador to France (1784-’89) a lot more absorbing and interesting than their usual brand of Classics Illustratedeven if the Gourmet-style consumerist spreads remain pretty much the same. But by the time they get around to articulating a story, the inhibitions imposed by their good taste begin to seem more like gutlessness, and what initially promises to be an exposure of American liberal doublethink about slavery winds up as a querulous wimp out on a subject that the underrated Mandingo is better equipped to deal with. I don’t feel qualified to comment on the accuracy of this portrait of Jefferson, but Nick Nolte does what he can to suggest unplumbed depths, and the other actorsincluding Greta Scacchi, Gwyneth Paltrow, Thandie Newton, Seth Gilliam, Simon Callow, Nancy Marchand, Charlotte de Turckheim, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Michael Lonsdale, and James Earl Jonesvie with the varied decor in holding one’s respectful attention (1995). (JR) Read more

Clint Eastwood resurrects the star system, the Hollywood love story, and middle-aged romance, but despite all his craft and sincerity, he and screenwriter Richard LaGravenese can’t quite turn Robert James Waller’s cardboard best-seller into flesh and bone. The one big exception is Meryl Streep’s beautiful and fresh performance as an Iowa housewife resigned to a disappointing life. Eastwood plays a National Geographic photographer who happens along while her family is gone, a fantasy figure who seldom adds up to anything more than his sketchy profile. As long as these two are on-screen one can forget the treacle that brought them theretheir first moment of physical contact is exquisite and unforgettableand the film makes a plausible conservative argument for adultery as a preserver of marriage. This self-styled relic (1995) only fitfully transcends the Reader’s Digest aura it seems so eager to honor and justify, but it’s earnest and it has the unfashionable courage to be slow. With Annie Corley, Victor Slezak, Jim Haynie, and a wonderful jazz sound track featuring singer Johnny Hartman. 135 min. (JR) Read more

This 1995 film works so well as storytelling and action adventure that you may want to overlook the dubious if well-intentioned premise: the slaughter of the Burmese populace becomes significant only to the degree that an American tourist (Patricia Arquette), seeking to overcome a tragedy in her own life, becomes personally involved with it. Ace director John Boorman took over this project from other hands, and he shows his customary flair with ‘Scope compositions, gorgeous sunsets, and suspenseful, exotic spectacle. What left me a little uneasy is epitomized by Hans Zimmer’s hack score, which aims at sounding vaguely Southeast Asian (wooden-sounding flutes and the like) rather than specifically Burmese to get us all in the right paternalistic frame of mind. But if you don’t mind such casual insults, you’re likely to be glued to your seat. Alex Lasker and Bill Rubenstein wrote the script; with Frances McDormand, Spalding Gray, and U Aung Ko. 99 min. (JR) Read more

From the Chicago Reader (January 5, 1996). — J.R.

I can’t recall a worse year for Hollywood than 1995. This suggests that either my memory or the studio system is disintegrating. My guess is it’s the latter. I don’t mean to say the business is coming apart; sadly, Hollywood has often found it easy to make money with junk, especially if the public is willing — as it still apparently is — to go along with the film industry’s manipulations. (However, given the scant means available to most people to make themselves heard on such matters in this “free” society, I don’t want to jump to too many conclusions about this.) Rather I believe that what’s coming apart is the social contract between the industry and filmgoers, which allows some form of customer satisfaction that isn’t predicated on deception and a fundamental contempt for the audience.

A symptom of the problem could be found in an article by Peter Bart in Variety late last October bemoaning the poor box-office returns for “such pricy projects” as Jade, The Scarlet Letter, Strange Days, and Assassins. “Rubbing salt into the wound,” added Bart, “is a new Yankelovich opinion survey…which indicates that 43 percent of filmgoers interviewed say they would attend more films all year round if a ‘better selection’ of movies were available. Read more

Commissioned by the Portuguese quarterly Electra for its fall 2025 issue, devoted to Fear.

In their original forms as novels, Mary Shelley’s sophisticated novel of ideas, Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s simpler and pulpier Dracula (1897) were published almost eighty years apart. Although only the second of these appeared during the Victorian era (1837-1901), it doesn’t seem like a stretch to associate both novels with the repressions and displacements of what we regard today as Victorian.

By contrast, the releases of the movie adaptations of these novels made at Universal studios in 1931 were only a little over eight months apart. An earlier, unauthorized film adaptation of Dracula called Nosferatu (1922) is also worth mentioning, as are other early silent German features that belong to the horror genre (e.g., The Golem in 1915 and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1920). But the commercial successes of Dracula and Frankenstein, both of which drew on elements from silent German films, were arguably what established horror as an ongoing international genre, working with both repression and its subsequent unleashing and/or explosive consequences. At least since the 1950s in the U.S., when teenagers were first identified as a social class and a market, horror movies have been commonly viewed as the ideal “date” movies for teenagers, largely because the fear they provoke can draw couples closer together for mutual comfort and assurance. Read more

Commissioned by The Chiseler, and posted there on July 4, 2020. — J.R.

My first encounter with Werner Herzog was at the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in 1973, where I first saw Aguirre, the Wrath of God in an English-dubbed version that included, if memory serves, a few Brooklyn accents in 16th century Peru. (This is why it took some rethinking and retooling before the film could be successfully exhibited in the U.S., in German with subtitles.) But what flummoxed me the most  — in spite of the film’s awesome visual splendor and its crazed poetic conceits — was what Herzog revealed about the opening intertitle when I asked him about it during the Q & A.

The intertitle: “After the conquest and sack of the Incan empire by Spain, the Indians invented the legend of El Dorado, a land of gold, located in the swamps of the Amazon tributaries. A large expedition of Spanish adventurers led by Pizarro sets off from the Peruvian sierras in late 1560. The only document to survive from this lost expedition is the diary of the monk Gaspar de Carvajal.” Herzog’s cheerful admission: the bit about the document and the diary was a total lie, invented by him because he reasoned that people wouldn’t accept the film’s premises otherwise. Read more

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Far and away the best SF movie of the 80s, Ridley Scott’s visionary look at Los Angeles in the year 2019a singular blend of grime and glitter that captures both the horror and the allure of Reagan-era capitalism with the claustrophobic textures of a Sternberg filmwas a critical and commercial flop when it first appeared (1982). Loosely adapted from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the film follows the hero (Harrison Ford) as he tracks down and kills replicants, or androids. Much of the film’s erotic charge and moral and ideological ambiguity stems from the fact that these characters are very nearly the only ones we care about. (We never know for sure whether the hero is a replicant himself; in the director’s cut version that uncertainty is even greater.) The grafting of 40s hard-boiled detective story with SF thriller creates some dysfunctional overlaps, and the movie loses some force whenever violence takes over, yet this remains a truly extraordinary, densely imagined version of both the future and the present, with a look and taste all its own. With Rutger Hauer, Edward James Olmos, Joe Turkel, and William J. Sanderson. R, 112 min. (JR) Read more