Jonathan Rosenbaum

From the Chicago Reader (October 21, 1988). — J.R.

BIRD

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Clint Eastwood

Written by Joel Oliansky

With Forest Whitaker, Diane Venora, Michael Zelniker, Samuel E. Wright, Keith David, and Damon Whitaker.

CELEBRATING BIRD

** (Worth seeing)

Directed by Gary Giddins and Kendrick Simmons

Written by Gary Giddins.

Two telling documents that we have about Charlie Parker, both from the early 50s:

(1) During a live radio broadcast from Birdland on March 31, 1951, there’s an electrifying moment when Parker leaps into his solo on “A Night in Tunisia,” combining cascading machine-gun volleys of notes — wailing 16th notes and dovetailing triplets — into what sound like two successive melodic somersaults, each one in a separate direction, that miraculously turn the rhythm around with shifting accents — an awesome tumble in midair over four free bars until he triumphantly splashes into the next chorus.

To understand the genius of that moment — a fusion of passionate acrobatics and spontaneous formal patterning — it might help to detect the evidence of rage that one hears just before the number begins. Symphony Sid Torin, an obnoxiously loquacious disc jockey, has been blathering at length about “Round Midnight,” the previous number played by Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell, which he has repeatedly called “Round About Midnight.” Read more

report/challenge…was Stephanie Ruhle’s: “It put up lots of towers with Trump’s name on them.” (10/13/22)

From the October 13, 1988 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

After many years of being vastly overrated, this liberal adult western of 1952 may be underrated in some quarters today. While the film angered Howard Hawks into making one of his masterpieces (Rio Bravo) as a kind of rebuttal, it got smothered in Oscars; still, it’s not entirely devoid of virtues. Gary Cooper is a sheriff who’s about to retire (so he can marry Grace Kelly) but has to face a final gunfight alone when all of the townspeople refuse to help him. Carl Foreman wrote the script and planned to direct until the Hollywood blacklist made this impossible; Fred Zinnemann took over and did a fairly good job of milking suspense out of the situation — the film’s 84 minutes are meant to correspond to the actual time in which the plot unfolds — with his usual somewhat mechanical polish. Some of the results ring false, but the memorable theme song and some equally memorable character acting (by Thomas Mitchell and Lon Chaney Jr. more than Lloyd Bridges and Katy Jurado) help things along. (JR) Read more

From the Chicago Reader (December 17, 2004). I’m wondering now (August 2015) whether I underrated Spanglish as much as I overrated As Good As It Gets. But the fact that I keep changing my mind about James L. Brooks probably says as much about me as it says about him. (In March 2016, having just reseen this, I like it still more, although, as always with Brooks, some irritations remain.)  — J.R.

Spanglish

** (Worth seeing)

Directed and written by James L. Brooks

With Adam Sandler, Tea Leoni, Paz Vega, Cloris Leachman, Shelbie Bruce, Sarah Steele, and Ian Hyland

One reason I can’t regard Pauline Kael as a great film critic is her unshakable belief that she needed to see a movie only once — that she could immediately form an opinion and never have to revise it. She was thought of as an industry gadfly, but her blind faith in first impressions often fit industry calculations perfectly, helping to validate things like test-marketing and seeing movies as disposable.

I readily admit that changing one’s mind about movies days or years later can also be a problem. But we outgrow some films and mature enough to value the challenges of others. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (July 1, 1988). Criterion has released an elaborately bonus-filled Blu-Ray of this comedy. — J.R.

BULL DURHAM

*** (A must-see)

Directed and written by Ron Shelton

With Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Trey Wilson, Robert Wuhl, and Jenny Robertson.

I cannot tell a lie: Bull Durham gave me so much old-fashioned moviegoing pleasure the first time around, in spite of my complete lack of interest in baseball, that I wasn’t too concerned about the sources of my fun. Entertaining movies are often deft at discouraging reflection. But two weeks later, when I went back to see this one again — mainly to refresh my memory — I came out feeling a little embarrassed about how and why I’d been taken in.

It’s not that the movie doesn’t have its share of singular virtues, especially considering that it’s Ron Shelton’s first feature as a director (he also wrote the script). Genuine star performances — as opposed to those in hyped-up vehicles like Big, Red Heat, The Presidio, and Big Business — are not all that commonplace these days, and Shelton gets them here from both Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon. He also strikes a very satisfying balance between the fast and furious dialogue — much of it slangy, staccato jargon that reflects Shelton’s ball-playing background — and the transitional montage sequences, overlaid with pop songs, that allow us to glide and drift between the gabfests. Read more

This was organized by my dear friend Sunčica Fradelić, who was one of the mainstays of FilmFactory in Sarajevo (2013-2016), where I taught four times. She’s now working as the director of Kino Klub Split, where I’ve subsequently lectured and taught several times, and  the only reason why she couldn’t attend the Workshop’s final (and only) Zoom meeting, which was yesterday, is that her boiler broke. But because she belongs in the picture below, I’ve added a picture of her that I took at a panel at Split’s Kino Klub last year.

Even though not all of the seven students, located in different parts of Serbia and Croatia, made it to the end of the workshop –- which was conducted via emails shared by everyone before our 105-minute “in-person” gathering yesterday — I told the five who made it through that they were the brightest reviewers I’ve ever been lucky enough to teach, even though the English they wrote in was their second language.  The films they wrote about were Last Year at Marienbad, Rio Bravo, The Enchanted Desna, and Rear Window, and the reviews they read aloud and discussed yesterday will be posted later on Kino klub Split’s web site.[3/21/21] Read more

A catalog entry for the 2022 Viennale. — J.R.

How could an experimental documentary about the dismantlement of the world’s largest nuclear plant encompass, among other things, a survey of 20^th century painting, a political statement, a site for meditation, and a philosophical song about annihilation and creation being parts of the same process? Thirty-five-year-old Lithuanian filmmaker Emilija Škarnulytė shows us how, and her vision is so spellbinding that it demonstrates how the finest lessons of 2001: A Space Odyssey in merging art and science and the early films of Alain Resnais in executing slow, steady, and hallucinatory camera crawls across, into, and around documentary subjects can be creatively applied.

“In my films from the last ten years,” she has said, “I have mostly researched places where contemporary political issues are staged between human and non-human worlds, the shifting boundaries between ecological and cosmic forces. I want to feel out all kinds of non-human and post-human scales in the depths of space and time.” Thus her opening images offer rocks that resemble planets, a voluptuous nuclear explosion is rhymed with trees, an animated disassembly becomes a Constructivist dance, and a snake slithering around the same circuitry previously traversed by her camera becomes a bold Surrealist encounter. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (August 9, 1996). — J.R.

Red Hollywood

Rating *** A must see

Directed and written by Thom Andersen and Noël Burch

Narrated by Billy Woodberry.

By Jonathan Rosenbaum

When Peter Wollen wrote about canon formation in the English film magazine Sight and Sound three years ago, he conceptualized “a motley set of cultural gate-keepers and taste-makers.” Archivists come first, determining which films to acquire, preserve, and screen; then come the academics and critics, singling out the touchstones and masterpieces; they’re followed by filmmakers and, finally, the audience. As Wollen notes, “The process of cultural negotiation among these many gate-keepers of taste results not only in the surface phenomena of lists and programs, but also in the crystallization of an implicit aesthetic paradigm at a deeper level.”

I can think of several sources critical to the formation of my own canon. When I was in my early teens, the only sources I could find were library books like Arthur Knight’s The Liveliest Art, which is useful as a beginner’s survey, and Agee on Film, which is hampered by its limited coverage. During my freshman year in college I purchased my first film magazine: the Winter 1961-’62 issue of Sight and Sound, which contained the results of an international poll of critics about the ten best movies ever made; I resolved to see as many movies on the composite and individual lists as possible. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (May 1, 1991). — J.R.

Jean-Luc Godard’s third feature and first studio production (1960) starts with a subversive premise: a neorealist musical in which the major characters (Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, and Jean-Claude Brialy) can’t really sing and dance, much as they’d like to. Periodically ravishing to look at (it’s Godard’s first foray into both color and ‘Scope) and listen to (Michel Legrand did the nonsinging score), it’s also highly deconstructive in the way it keeps jostling us away from these pleasures and in the general direction of indecorous reality. (It’s also packed with both subtle and obvious references to other movies.) While its slender plot (stripper Karina wants a baby and turns to Belmondo when her boyfriend Brialy won’t oblige her) can irritate in spots, the film’s high spirits may still win you over. It’s perhaps most memorable for being a highly personal documentary about Karina and Godard’s feelings about her at the time, brimming with odd details and irreverent energies. In French with subtitles. 83 min. (JR)