Jonathan Rosenbaum

From the Chicago Reader (December 10, 2004). — J.R.

A fascinating blend of fiction and documentary, this feature by Michael Pressman chronicles his emotionally complicated LA production of Terrence McNally’s play Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. Pressman’s wife, Lisa Chess, costarred in the show with his old friend Alan Rosenberg, until difficulties with Rosenberg convinced Pressman to take over the part himself. These three and many other people (including Kathy Baker and Hector Elizondo) play themselves in the movie, which only begins to suggest the ambiguities Pressman exploits to the utmost. Emerging from all this is a fascinating look at the nuts and bolts of theater work and an often hilarious depiction of how personal neuroses help and hinder it. R, 95 min. (JR) Read more

From the Chicago Reader (November 17, 1989). — J.R.

APARTMENT ZERO

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Martin Donovan

Written by Donovan and David Koepp

With Colin Firth, Hart Bochner, Dora Bryan, Liz Smith, Fabrizio Bentivoglio, James Telfer, Mirella D’Angelo, Juan Vitali, and Francesca d’Aloja.

Although it qualifies technically as an American movie, Martin Donovan’s ambitious, disturbing thriller Apartment Zero is one of those international hodgepodges that are somewhat disorienting almost by definition. Set in Buenos Aires, made with actors and technicians from three continents, and filmed in English by an Argentinean director who has lived mainly in Italy and England since the 70s, it has the sort of multinational sprawl that only a strong script and a forceful style could hold together. Fortunately, Apartment Zero has both script and style in spades. It may not be to everyone’s taste, but to me it’s an exciting piece of controlled cinematic delirium.

I first encountered this movie at a midnight screening at the Berlin Film Festival last February, having been guided to it by a perceptive rave in Variety by Todd McCarthy. Ever since then I’ve been wondering when and how it would eventually turn up in Chicago. It lacks most of the usual commercial calling cards (big stars, lovable nerds, genre cliches, babies, body switches, Spielberg lighting), it was passed up by the New York and Chicago film festivals, and it didn’t seem the sort of picture that Vincent Canby would like. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (October 3, 2003). — J.R.

Broadly speaking, this is Richard Linklater’s French Cancan — that is to say, a humanist’s joyful exploration of the musical in which the actors’ personalities resonate as much as the characters they play. Or maybe it’s what Jean Renoir might have come up with if he’d remade Don’t Knock the Rock and cast 12-year-olds as the musicians. Though this seems like a personal film, Linklater was hired to direct a cannily commercial script by Mike White, about a rock ‘n’ roll loser (Jack Black) who, fired from his job and his band, impersonates his wimpy substitute-teacher roommate (White) to land a teaching position at an upscale elementary school. This infantile character hasn’t got a thought in his head except for rock music, but somehow he becomes a model teacher, and through stealth and sheer perseverance he turns his fifth-grade class into an inspired gang of rockers. The kids, all real musicians performing, are wonderful, and so is Black; Joan Cusack is both charming and funny as the principal. 108 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, City North 14, Crown Village 18, Ford City, Gardens 1-6, Gardens 7-13, Lawndale, Lincoln Village, Norridge, North Riverside, 600 N. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (February 11, 2000). — J.R.

My Best Fiend

Rating * Has redeeming facet

Directed and written by Werner Herzog.

What’s the difference between artistry and bravado? This isn’t a question I generally feel inclined to ask, but I’m compelled by the work of Werner Herzog, who scrambles the two until it’s difficult to tell which is which. My Best Fiend — Herzog’s documentary feature about his tumultuous collaborations with Klaus Kinski, the mad actor with whom he made some of his most notable films — also compels questions about Kinski’s bravado and artistry, and suggests that it might not always be easy to distinguish his from Herzog’s.

One might call My Best Fiend, which is playing this week at Facets, the art-movie equivalent of writer-director Blake Edwards’s Trail of the Pink Panther. Edwards and Peter Sellers reportedly were at each other’s throats throughout their many collaborations on Pink Panther comedies — largely, it appears, because of Sellers’s hyperbolically neurotic behavior. Herzog and Kinski had a similarly volatile relationship, which ended only after Kinski died, in 1991. Herzog got his revenge by releasing outtakes of his difficult star, much as Edwards continued to fiddle around with unreleased footage of Sellers as Inspector Clouseau in Trail of the Pink Panther. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (February 28, 1992). For earlier reflections on both films, go here and here. — J.R.

TWHYLIGHT (DUELLE)

**** (Masterpiece)

Directed by Jacques Rivette

Written by Eduardo de Gregorio, Marilu Parolini, and Rivette

With Juliet Berto, Bulle Ogier, Hermine Karagheuz, Jean Babilee, Nicole Garcia, and Jean Wiener.

NOR’WESTER (NORÔIT)

**** (Masterpiece)

Directed by Jacques Rivette

Written by Eduardo de Gregorio, Marilu Parolini, and Rivette

With Geraldine Chaplin, Bernadette Lafont, Kika Markham, Larrio Ekson, Jean Cohen-Solal, Robert Cohen-Solal, and Daniel Ponsard.

Dagger in hand, I scaled the heights of raw power, thanks to the male role that Rivette gave me. . . . This kind of sexual metamorphosis, this strange androgyny, never appeared in the French cinema before Rivette. After I performed the role of Giulia in Norôit I felt that I was capable of anything. Rivette changed my ideas about acting; for me, he is a kind of Mao and his films are a Cultural Revolution. — Bernadette Lafont in an interview, 1977

Though no one would ever think to call Jacques Rivette a realist, the fact remains that all of his first six features take place in a sharply perceived environment that can arguably be called the “real world.” Read more

From the Chicago Reader (January 28, 2000). — J.R.

L’ennui

Rating *** A must see

Directed by Cedric Kahn

Written by Kahn and Laurence Ferreira Barbosa

With Charles Berling, Sophie Guillemin, Arielle Dombasle, Robert Kramer, Alice Grey, Maurice Antoni, and Tom Ouedraogo.

“To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!” This despairing reflection by Swann about Gilberte appears at the very end of “Swann in Love,” the longest chapter — a little over 200 pages — in Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. The chapter serves as a rehearsal for the even more torturous obsessive love of Marcel, the narrator of Remembrance of Things Past, for Albertine — a topic that practically becomes the novel’s principal subject over the thousands of pages to come.

This acknowledgment of the neurotic irrationality that underlies amorous and erotic obsessions is one of Proust’s key passages, and I was reminded of it periodically over the course of Cedric Kahn’s brilliant and hilarious new sex comedy, L’ennui. Yet one of the most striking aspects of the film — adapted from La noia, a 1960 novel by Alberto Moravia that I haven’t read (also the source for a trashy Bette Davis vehicle, The Empty Canvas) — is the way it confounds its Proustian model of jealousy and sexual paranoia with a dash of healthy common sense. Read more

Top 4K UHD Releases of 2020

1. Sudden Fear Cohen Film Collection (my mistake–this was released in 2017)
2. Showboat Criterion
3. A Bread Factory Grasshopper Films (includes 1 DVD, 1 Blu-Ray)

Top Box sets of 2020 

1. Ida Lupino: Filmmaker Kino Lorber
2. The Complete Films of Agnes Varda Criterion
3. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: The Complete Fourth Season (Warner Archive)

FAVORITE LABEL: Arrow Academy

FAVORITE Commentary of 2020 (or commentaries): Jeremy Arnold, Sudden Fear, Cohen Film Collectiomn

Best Cover Design Nominations: The Complete Films of Agnes Varda, Criterion

Favorite DVD of the Year: Beau travail, Criterion Read more

From the Chicago Reader (May 25, 1990). This is also reprinted in my first collection, Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism. — J.R.

ALMANAC OF FALL

*** (A must-see)

Directed and written by Bela Tarr

With Hedi Temessy, Erika Bodnar, Miklos B. Szekely, Pal Hetenyi, and Janos Derzsi.

1. Problems

One reason that Eastern European films often don’t get the attention they deserve in the West is that we lack the cultural and historical contexts for them. If Eastern Europe’s recent social and political upheavals took most of the world by surprise, this was because most of us have been denied the opportunity to see the continuity behind them: they seemed to spring out of nowhere. The best Eastern European films tend to catch us off guard in the same way, and for similar reasons.

My own knowledge of Hungarian cinema is spotty at best, despite the fact that, according to David Cook in A History of Narrative Film, the Hungarians “seem to have identified film as an art form before any other nationality in the world, including the French.” (One of the first major film theorists, Bela Balazs, was Hungarian, and a contemporary film studio in Budapest is named after him.) Read more

After hearing about this movie for most of my life because it was the last thing John Dillinger saw (on July 22, 1934 at the Biograph Theater — a movie house that was still in operation when I moved to Chicago in 1987), I finally caught up with it on TCM and am surprised what a good picture it is. However idealized the two leading characters are — a good-natured gangster (Clark Gable at his very best) and a principled lawyer (William Powell), childhood pals, both of them loved by a good-natured and principled woman (Myrna Loy) — the diverse changes rung on our sympathies remain complex and nuanced throughout. I hope Dillinger liked it too. The continuing ambivalence of the Chicago public towards him can be measured by the fact that a restaurant located next to the Biograph was named after him.

There are many other reasons for liking this movie. I put off seeing it for so long because it was directed by W.S. Van Dyke (or “One-Take Woody” as he was known at MGM), which led me to ignore the fact that the screenplay was cowritten by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, which I suspect helps to account for its overall intelligence. Read more

A column for Caimán Cuadernos de Cine‘s September 2022 issue. — J.R.

For me, the most horrible implication of the recent mass shootings in Buffalo, New York and in Uvalde, Texas is the suggestion that guns functioned for two alienated and tongue-tied eighteen-year-old boys as vehicles for their alleged “self-expression”, even though what was actually being “expressed” by them were only mindless replications of other nihilistic slaughters. In a country that habitually disparages or dismisses art in favor of its “entertainment” -– which is clearly why entertainers with zero interest in art such as Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump wind up as treasured ideologues — the potential entertainment value of guns can function as a handy substitute for art as a self-assertive kind of performance. This already tends to be the dramaturgical and discursive function of guns in the various forms of cinema that these teenagers accessed, which makes it only logical that it should become their own dramaturgical and discursive form of “self-expression”.

In other words, what la caméra-stylo represents for France as a form of art, la caméra-fusil represents for the United States as a form of entertainment — a form that basically mandates that the entertainer “shoot first and ask questions later” (whether this is done with a camera or in terms of military combat), if, indeed, questions are ever asked at all. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (January 29, 1993). Since writing this, I’ve come to like Basic Instinct much more than I did. — J.R.

BODY OF EVIDENCE

* (Has redeeming facet)

Directed by Uli Edel

Written by Brad Mirman

With Madonna, Willem Dafoe, Joe Mantegna, Anne Archer, Julianne Moore, Stan Shaw, Charles Hallahan, Lillian Lehman, Mark Rolston, Jeff Perry, and Jurgen Prochnow.

DAMAGE

* (Has redeeming facet

Directed by Louis Malle

Written by David Hare

With Jeremy Irons, Juliette Binoche, Miranda Richardson, Rupert Graves, Ian Bannen, Leslie Caron, Peter Stormare, Gemma Clark, and Julian Fellowes.

The pointed absence of scenes of sexual intercourse in such recent releases seemingly calling for them as The Crying Game, The Hours and Times, and Scent of a Woman is curious when weighed against a tendency in some other movies, including two that opened recently, to highlight transgressive or dangerous sex. In Body of Evidence it’s not only bondage and sadomasochism but sex leading to the male partner’s cardiac arrest, an effect the female partner may have intended. In Damage it’s not only illicit sex between an older, prominent government official and his son’s fiancee, who has incest in her past, but also the unconventionality of their couplings: they often remain partly clothed, and the positions they assume border on the pretzellike. Read more

Commissioning a director from each of the 25 European Union countries to make a five-minute work displaying a vision of Europe sounds like a swell idea, but the result is more problematic: I’d hate to see these films and videos scattered to the winds as filler in state TV broadcasts, yet this 138-minute marathon (some directors went over the limit) is a bit of a glut. Still, it pinpoints what I like about Finland’s Aki Kaurismaki (facetious folklore) and Hungary’s Bela Tarr (an endless, sorrowful tracking shot) and don’t like about Peter Greenaway (a disgusted fascination with nudity) and the recently assassinated Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh (crude derision). Other contributors include Barbara Albert (Austria), Christoffer Boe (Denmark), Tony Gatlif (France), Sharunas Bartas (Lithuania), Teresa Villaverde (Portugal), and Jan Troell (Sweden). In English and subtitled European languages. (JR) Read more

From the November 19, 1999 issue of the Chicago Reader. — J.R.

Sleepy Hollow

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Tim Burton

Written by Andrew Kevin Walker and Kevin Yagher

With Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, Miranda Richardson, Michael Gambon, Casper Van Dien, Jeffrey Jones, and Christopher Walken.

Tim Burton’s new movie is gorgeous — shot by shot it may be the most impressive thing he’s done. So I hope I’m not being too disrespectful if I balk at the idea that his movie is based on Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

I was an English major in college and graduate school, yet I can’t remember reading a word of Irving until I read this wonderful 180-year-old story a few days after seeing the movie. He may be one of America’s great writers, but apparently few people still read him, even though his prose is clear and vivid. Take the seventh paragraph of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” for instance:

“I mention this peaceful spot [Sleepy Hollow] with all possible laud for it is in such little retired Dutch valleys, found here and there embosomed in the great state of New York, that population, manners, and customs, remain fixed, while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them unobserved. Read more