Jonathan Rosenbaum

The Virgin Suicides

Posted June 14, 2017 in Featured Texts

From the Chicago Reader (March 27, 2000). — J.R.

A very curious and eclectic piece of work — fresh even when it’s awkward — that’s built around an unsolved mystery, like Picnic at Hanging Rock. Adapted from a Jeffrey Eugenides novel by director Sofia Coppola, and set in small-town Michigan a quarter of a century ago, it focuses on five teenage sisters as perceived by some of their male classmates; James Woods and Kathleen Turner play the girls’ parents and Giovanni Ribisi narrates. With Kirsten Dunst, Hanna R. Hall, Chelsea Swain, A.J. Cook, Leslie Hayman, Josh Hartnett, Danny DeVito, and Scott Glenn. 96 min. (JR)

Wild Wild West

Posted June 3, 2017 in Featured Texts

From the June 1, 1999 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

I never saw The Wild Wild West, a comic SF western series about two undercover agents working for President Grant that ran on TV from 1965 to 1970, but from the look of this sprightly spin-off it must have been pretty good. The director (Barry Sonnenfeld) and costar (Will Smith) of Men in Black join forces with Kevin Kline and half a dozen writers to yield an entertainingly offbeat blend of 19th-century science fiction and Hope and Crosby Road comedies (with Salma Hayek in the Dorothy Lamour part). The putative plot involves a mad scientist and Confederate sore loser reduced to an upper torso (Kenneth Branagh) who’s contriving to take over the United States with the aid of an 80-foot mechanical tarantula. Though the movie is as gadget happy as any Bond flick, the pictorial pleasures deriving from Bo Welch’s production design and Michael Ballhaus’s cinematography are central to its charms. This is even lighter stuff than Men in Black, but Sonnenfeld’s cheerful irreverence keeps it reasonable. (JR)

Everybody Wins

Posted June 1, 2017 in Featured Texts

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

Although it’s far from being wholly satisfying, this bizarre, slow-moving thriller about a righteous detective (Nick Nolte) and a schizophrenic prostitute (Debra Winger) trying to uncover the corruption in a small town in Connecticut that sent an innocent young man to prison for a brutal murder — the first movie scripted by playwright Arthur Miller since The Misfits — has the virtue of coming across like a picture from another era: a 40s film noir, or a neurotic melodrama from the 50s. Directed by Karel Reisz (Morgan!, The French Lieutenant’s Woman) and produced by Jeremy Thomas (Insignificance, The Last Emperor), the film explores its subject atmospherically rather than analytically or in terms of slam-bang action, and what mainly makes it interesting isn’t so much its lame mystery plot as Winger’s character and performance — which manage to triumph over the femme fatale slot the part seems destined for — as well as a peculiar young religious outcast (Will Patton) whose preoccupations form the background to the murder. While parts of the overall conception (including the detective hero) seem innocent and dated, it’s still a welcome relief from the usual right-wing buddy-cops nonsense. Read more

Two “Best” Lists for Sight and Sound, 2016/2017

Posted January 5, 2017 in Notes

Included in Sight and Sound‘s January 2017 issue and on its web site. — J.R.

1. Best Films

The Day Before the End
Year: 2016
Director(s): Lav Diaz

Everybody Wants Some!!
Year: 2016
Director(s): Richard Linklater

Aragane
Year: 2016
Director(s): Oda Kaori

Paterson
Year: 2016
Director(s): Jim Jarmusch

La Mort de Louis XIV
Year: 2016
Director(s): Albert Serra

The first on my list, a short, I caught at the estimable Filmadrid; the third, a documentary by a former FilmFactory student of mine, I saw via a Vimeo link. Worthy runners-up would include João Nicolau’s John From, Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship, and Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Journey to the Shore — and perhaps certain other contenders I haven’t yet caught up with.

2. Best DVDs and Blu-Rays

Nico Papatakis Box Set (France, 1963-92) (Gaumont Vidéo, DVD).

I Want to Live! (U.S., 1958) (Twilight Time, Blu-Ray)

Electra, My Love (U.K., 1974) (Second Run Features, Blu-Ray).

Early Murnau (U.K., 1921-1925) (Masters of Cinema, Blu-Ray box set)

Marcel Hanoun: Les Saisons (France, 1968-1972) (Re:Voir, DVD)

Five exemplary releases condemned to obscurity by their resistance to being summarized in sound bites:

A comprehensive portrait of a singular filmmaker from Ethiopia and Greece (not simply a Greek, any more than Barack Obama is simply black), with excellent extras subtitled in English; a powerful piece of melodramatic filmmaking from Robert Wise that justifies its opening endorsement by Albert Camus; the first Miklós Jancsó Blu-Ray accorded to an exhilarating, colorful Hungarian musical pageant that unfolds in just a dozen shots; an essential package of five beautiful silent German features with many clarifying extras; and a neglected cycle of films by a major French independent. Read more

My Lists for Indiewire, 2016

Posted December 20, 2016 in Notes

My lists for Indiewire, submitted before I saw La La Land, Fire at Sea, 20th Century Women, and Passengers (among others). — J.R.

Best Film:

1. Paterson
2. Cemetery of Splendour
3. Everybody Wants Some!!
4. Moonlight
5. Arrival
6. The Love Witch
7. Indignation
8. Hell or High Water
9. Certain Women
10. Miles Ahead

Best Director:

1. Barry Jenkins, Moonlight
2. Richard Linklater, Everybody Wants Some!!
3. Jim Jarmusch, Paterson
4. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Cemetery of Splendour
5. Anna Biller, The Love Witch

Best Actress:

1. Isabelle Huppert, Elle

Best Actor:

1. Jeff Bridges, Hell or High Water

Best Documentary:

1. Becoming Mike Nichols
2. I Am Not Your Negro
3. OJ: Made in America
4. The Thoughts That We Once Had
5. Cameraperson

Best undistributed film:

1. The Death of Louis XIV
2. Scarred Hearts
3. John From

Best first feature:

1. Indignation (also best screenplay)

Mr. Deejay Pays a Visit (a chapter from an unpublished novel)

Posted December 31, 2014 in Notes

The novel in question, my third and last to date, The Best of Brand X, was written in New York and Paris in the late 1960s and early 70s. My first two novels, also unpublished, written successively in high school (The Manufactured Country, 1961) and college (Away from Here, 1965), were both partially autobiographical family chronicles that mainly juggled with the same characters and materials; the third was more experimental and abstract but no less personal. — J.R.

Mr. Deejay Pays a Visit

Mr. Deejay has a long way to go. Straight through a bumper crop of twenty thousand of his listeners -– all of them senior citizens of the lower and middle income brackets, planted in the hot Texas ground up to their necks, each bearing a set of earphones that enclose their gravestone faces like parentheses. A long, long way to go past nurses with medical carts and trays on the narrow paths dividing the twenty thousand heads into neat rows, carry a hand-mike with him as he chatters compulsively against the midsummer heat: “Hot piece-a weather we’re havin, 96 degrees and cloudless sky here on Havingford Acres, givin these people some cool hot-weather music with lemonade, iced tea and all the best medication to see that they look up at the day and smile, my name’s Mr. Read more

Out 1 Solitaire

Posted September 30, 2014 in Notes

mubi.com/notebook/posts/out-1-solitaire

Out 1 Solitaire on Notebook

The following “messages” were sent to Kevin B. Lee as part of the preparatory work for our video Out 1 Solitaire: Part of the impact of Out 1 derives from the way

mubi.com|By Jonathan Rosenbaum and Kevin B. Lee

[09/30/14]

Venom And Eternity

Posted May 22, 2014 in Featured Texts

From the Chicago Reader (March 7, 1996). — J.R.

It’s a contradiction in terms to speak of a classic avant-garde film — especially one that aims at both extreme provocation and innovation — but this rarely screened masterpiece (1951) by Jean-Isidore Isou, poet and founder of the French Lettrist movement, qualifies if anything does. Beginning, like a book, with a catalog of all the previous works by the same author, it proceeds with a lengthy account of an impassioned theoretical debate following a Paris cine-club screening, then with a love story of sorts, but the film’s narrative and dialogue are recounted almost entirely offscreen, in voice-overs; what we see is the hero walking in Paris’s Left Bank in the early 50s, eventually followed by other kinds of shots that are sometimes viewed upside down and often scratched over in various ways, making this partially an animated film. Though some of the rhetoric is dated (mainly a misogynistic rant or two, and some anti-jazz invective as objectionable as Theodor Adorno’s), the direct address to the audience via titles and commentary couldn’t be more pointed, and the passion of the whole enterprise is often breathtaking. As an indication of how influential this movie was and is in France, the last sequence of Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep (see separate listing) would be unthinkable without its example. Read more

Urgently Recommended Reading

Posted May 1, 2014 in Featured Texts

http://www.secessionfromthebroadcast.org/blog/2013/10/29/secession-broadcast-internet-crisis-social-control/ [5/1/14] Read more

Best DVDs and Blu-Rays of 2012 (My DVD Beaver Ballot)

Posted December 20, 2012 in Notes

At the suggestion of a reader, Philadelphia cinephile David Ortega, here is the ballot I submitted to DVD Beaver‘s poll late last year. Note: Sadly, the absence of any titles from the excellent U.K. label Masters of Cinema can probably be explained by the fact that this label stopped sending me any of its releases about nine months ago, after sending me all of its releases prior to that — a decision that I continue to find baffling. [P.S.: A couple of people have pointed out that, in fact, Park Row wasn’t released on Blu-Ray; it came out only on DVD. Sorry for this error. This is also available, by the way, from Masters of Cinema, but I haven’t included that version because I haven’t seen it — although Craig Keller was kind enough to send me a PDF of that edition’s excellent accompanying booklet.] — J.R.

Top 10 SD-DVD Releases OF 2012

(NOTE: Please ONLY DVD releases that are NOT available on Blu-ray!)

1.DANIÈLE HUILLET & JEAN-MARIE STRAUB, Volume 7 (Editions Montparnasse)

2. DRIVER X 4: THE LOST AND FOUND FILMS OF SARA DRIVER (filmswelike)

3. ECLIPSE SERIES 34: JEAN GRÉMILLON DURING THE OCCUPATION (Criterion)

4. POLISH CINEMA CLASSICS (Second Run)

5. Read more

Here’s Another Film in the Making That I’d Really Love To See (2013 update)

Posted December 11, 2012 in Notes

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nickray/action-master-class-with-nick-ray

Here’s a Movie in the Making That I Really Want To See

Posted August 20, 2012 in Notes

Please go to kickstarter.com/projects/1209470946/a-fuller-life/posts for details. — J.R. [8/20/12]

Raymond Durgnat’s Web Site is Growing

Posted March 11, 2012 in Notes

I was delighted to discover just now that the Raymond Durgnat web site — relaunched about half a year ago, and one of my favorite movie-related web sites (which, even better, includes a lot of material about things other than movies, including some rare poems), has been growing and expanding lately; see, especially, Articles, Poems, and Additional Resources and Links for some of the new additions. It’s also worth recalling that Ray’s pioneering A Mirror for England came out in a second edition late last year, with a new Introduction by Kevin Gough-Yates, his literary executor, and this was about a year after the publication of a second edition of A Long Hard Look at ‘Psycho’, with a new Introduction by Henry Miller. (May 21 update, wonderful news: Miller has also edited a superb Durgnat collection of previously uncollected pieces that the British Film Institute plans to bring out in December 2012.)…On the web site, I haven’t found any activity yet on the Forum, but I’m hoping that this will start to grow soon as well. [3/11/12]

Apology

Posted October 1, 2011 in Notes

Through a gross blunder on my part, I’ve just deleted all my posts in this section and under Notes over the past six weeks and all the future posts I had set up to go out over the next few weeks! Until or unless I can find a way of recovering some or all of these, the usual “new” content on this site will have to be held in abeyance. If anyone who works with WordPress and knows anything about recovering lost content can help me out with this, I’ll be immensely grateful; please email me at jonathanrosenbaum2002 at yahoo.com. Update, a few hours later: thanks to cached posts on Google, I’ve recovered most or all of the older posts by now, as users of this site can see. But I haven’t yet found a way to recover any of the future, not-yet-posted texts. I also no longer recall which long reviews from the Reader I had scheduled (which are easily recoverable, but only if I can identify which ones they are), so if any readers happen to notice any of these missing texts from this site, I’d welcome hearing about them. — J.R., 10/1/11 Read more