Jonathan Rosenbaum

A medical intern (Emmanuel Salinger), the son of a deceased French diplomat in Germany, is en route to Paris when he suddenly comes into possession of a decapitated head and is drawn into a world of espionage. A disturbing commentary on the aftermath of the cold war, this 1992 first feature by Arnaud Desplechin (My Sex Life . . . or How I Got Into an Argument) has already won a cult following with its casual portraiture of a yuppie milieu, its fascinating mystery story, and its paranoid but morally concerned indictment of Europe in the early 90s. Oddly, the Paris where most of this unfolds is rather lackluster, but Desplechin has a vivid sense of character, and the cast is pretty strong. With Thibault de Montalembert, Marianne Denicourt, Jean-Louis Richard, and Valerie Dreville; Salinger contributed to the screenplay. (JR) Read more

I’m too big a fan of director James Whale (1896-1957) to take a film about him lightly, and I’m afraid this speculative 1998 movie about his last days won’t do. Yes, the man was gay, and Ian McKellen plays him with wit and flair, but reducing Whale to his gayness, which this quaint piece of cheese periodically does, robs us of too much. Like the other highlighted aspects of his character, career, and pastworking-class childhood, World War I, his Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, all presented in crude semaphorethis boils everything down to a few movie-familiar rudiments and ignores the rest; any five minutes of Whale’s The Great Garrick or The Old Dark House will tell you more about him, and certainly more of value, than all of this feature. Instead the film mainly replays Death in Venice and Sunset Boulevard, without either Wilder’s craft or the sensitivity of, for instance, Richard Kwietniowski’s Love and Death on Long Island. (There’s also a bitchy party supposedly given by George Cukor where a dead ringer for Elizabeth Taylor turns up.) The obligatory hunk is playednot very convincinglyby Brendan Fraser, though an unrecognizable Lynn Redgrave gives a more interesting performance as the obligatory German maid. Read more

Essential viewing. This documentary about a group of American and Vietnamese war veterans, many of them disabled, bicycling 1,200 miles from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City is many things at onceact of witness, multicultural exchange, sports documentary, investigative journalism, and a mourning for the devastation of war. Ultimately it may be too many things to yield a cumulative effect, yet its scenes of former soldiers struggling with the meaning of the war are more moving than anything I’ve seen on the subject since Winter Soldier (a wartime agitprop film in which American veterans confessed their war crimes). The corporate sponsorship of the bicycle marathon adds many ironic layers, but the emotional encounters it permitted seem more important than anything else I’ve seen about our involvement in Vietnam. Coproduced by Chicago’s Kartemquin Films and directed by Jerry Blumenthal, Gordon Quinn, and Peter Gilbert (Hoop Dreams). 130 min. (JR) Read more

Conceptual to a fault, writer-director Todd Haynes (Poison, Safe) realizes one of his oldest and most cherished projectsa celebration of the glam-rock era and the bisexuality it turned into an opulent circuswith wit, glitter, and energy, but with such a scant sense of character or period that it leaves one feeling relatively empty as soon as it’s over. Apart from its coy prologue (positing Oscar Wilde as the grand precursor to glam) and its cumbersome borrowings from the narrative structure of Citizen Kane, this 1998 film offers enough entertaining surface, snappy montage, and musical theater to keep one absorbed, but little of the tantalizing mystery that made Safe such an enduring experience. Executive producer Michael Stipe had a hand in the sound track, which mixes vintage recordings with new material performed by Mike Watt, Bernard Butler, Ron Asheton of the Stooges, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood, and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Steve Shelley. With Ewan McGregor, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Eddie Izzard, and Toni Collette. (JR) Read more

This fascinating and highly original 1997 nonfiction feature by Nicholas Barker, shot in New York City, portrays two men and two women who search for mates via classified ads. Not simply a documentary in any conventional sense, it?s a highly stylized affair that works from a script generated by interviews with all four individuals, who then wind up “playing” themselves. The results are both disturbing and funny, often revealing the plight of singles in urban American culture, and the characters themselves are unforgettable. (Interestingly enough, the men here are much more bitter than the women.) On all counts, one of the most interesting films I’ve seen in recent years. Read more

Howard Hawks’s 1932 car-racing drama is characteristic of himand even personalbut it’s also fairly routine. (It runs a poor second to his freakishly mannerist but much more lively 1965 racing movie Red Line 7000, which treats many of the same themes.) James Cagney is wonderful as a champion racer who warns his brother away from the track even as he refuses to quit himself, yet this plays like something we’ve all seen many times before. With Joan Blondell, Ann Dvorak, Eric Linden, Guy Kibbee, and Regis Toomey. 85 min. (JR) Read more

Of all Yvonne Rainer’s films, this 1972 first feature most clearly bridges her formidable career as an avant-garde dancer and choreographer and her subsequent work as an experimental filmmaker. Its 14 fiction and nonfiction episodes chronicle and/or comment on Rainer’s performances, using sound and intertitles in various inventive and unorthodox ways and concentrating on issues of power and gender that culminate in a reenactment of the movie stills that illustrate the published screenplay of Pandora’s Box, the silent G.W. Pabst film starring Louise Brooks. Rainer’s dry vernacular humor is also much in evidence, bouncing off her feminism: “Well you know, Shirley, that I have always had a weakness for the sweeping revelations of great men.” Shot in ravishing black and white by Babette Mangolte; Rainer will attend the screening. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, November 20, 6:00, 312-443-3737. –Jonathan Rosenbaum

Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still. Read more

Sam Raimi’s provocative, in some ways rewarding, but ultimately disappointing attempt to make a mainstream art film (1998) harks back to Erich von Stroheim’s Greed in terms of story material. The characters of Scott B. Smith’s novel, which he’s adapted for the screen, receive an unexpected windfall and their lives are destroyed by it. It’s a suggestive premise, but Raimi and Smith lack the focus of a Stroheim or a Frank Norris (Stroheim’s source for Greed) to work out precisely what’s being suggested. The script dawdles, and in spite of a good castBill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton (who’s especially resourceful), Bridget Fonda, and Brent Briscoethe movie tends to amble around its points rather than drive straight toward the heart of the matter. It’s still a better-than-average melodrama with thriller elements, and it uses its remote midwestern setting almost as well as its actors, but don’t expect a fully achieved work. R, 121 min. (JR) Read more

An exciting and visually beautiful 1997 period film from Austria by writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky, set in a farming village after World War I. A tyrannical farmer is found murdered, and in his spiteful will he leaves all his holdings to his peasants. A rival farmer tries to buy the farm at a discount, but the peasants rebel and decide to run the place themselves. An enormous number of ideas get played out in this bucolic mystery-action-comedy-drama–about class, collectivity, bigotry, and independence–but Ruzowitzky makes it work dramatically as well as intellectually; with some justice he calls the film an Alpine western, and his sense of place and landscape is especially sharp. Fine Arts. –Jonathan Rosenbaum

Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still. Read more

Jill Godmilow describes this recent half-hour short as a precise remake, in color and English, of Harun Farocki’s 1969 black-and-white German film Inextinguishable Fire, and while I have some quarrels with it, this fascinating intervention is bound to generate some interesting debate (at this screening she’ll discuss it with experimental filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, which should throw the issues into even sharper relief). Farocki’s powerful film, never shown in the U.S. until recently, describes Dow Chemical’s development and manufacture of Napalm B and the effects of its use during the Vietnam war. By adroitly remaking the film three decades later Godmilow wants to call attention to a model of political filmmaking, though one might argue that she runs into trouble when she describes her own work as “agitprop” in the same sense that Farocki’s was: after all, he was addressing a contemporary issue, and in a sense her kind of political filmmaking is yet another excuse for avoiding our current problems. (A curious and fascinating coincidence: Elisabeth Subrin was remaking another 60s political documentary in the midwest around the same time, though her film, Shulie, showing later this month at the Film Center, fosters a more dialectical relationship between past and present.) Read more

An exciting and visually beautiful 1997 period film from Austria by writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky, set in a farming village after World War I. A tyrannical farmer is found murdered, and in his spiteful will he leaves all his holdings to his peasants. A rival farmer tries to buy the farm at a discount, but the peasants rebel and decide to run the place themselves. An enormous number of ideas get played out in this bucolic mystery-action-comedy-dramaabout class, collectivity, bigotry, and independencebut Ruzowitzky makes it work dramatically as well as intellectually; with some justice he calls the film an Alpine western, and his sense of place and landscape is especially sharp. (JR) Read more

Edward Zwick’s liberal, semisuccessful efforts to upgrade our notions of the Civil War (Glory) and the gulf war (Courage Under Fire), aided in both cases by Denzel Washington, are roughly matched by his efforts here to make sense of Palestinian terrorists, at least from a relatively uncomprehending American point of view, in a 1998 thriller about their setting off explosions in New York City. On the other hand, the Arab American Action Network has understandably denounced the film for its demonizing stereotypes. The problem, as always, is that when you try to mix cliches with more complicated data it’s often the cliches that win out. Washington in this case plays a virtuous special agent of the FBIan organization that is treated here with hushed piety, at least in comparison with the muddled CIA (represented by Annette Bening’s case officer) and the relatively unscrupulous army (represented by Bruce Willis’s general). What emerges is a better than average assemblage of platitudes, with some occasionally witty and pertinent dialogue (by screenwriters Lawrence Wright, Menno Meyjes, and Zwick) andyou guessed itplenty of explosions. The always interesting Tony Shalhoub plays Washington’s Lebanese-American partner, but like everyone else in the movie he’s playing a type, not a character. Read more

In choosing Jacques Demy’s greatest feature, one might argue strongly for Lola (1960), The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), or the lesser-known Une Chambre en Ville (1982). But Demy’s most ambitious film and the one I cherish the most is this 1967 big-budget musical shot exclusively on location, a tale of various dreamers searching for and usually missing their ideal mates, who are usually only blocks away. The score is Michel Legrand’s finest, with various jazz elements, lyrics in alexandrines by Demy, and intricately structured reprises that match the poetic, crisscrossing plot. Demy pays tribute to the American musical yet mixes in accoutrements of French poetic realism: dreams and reality coexist more strangely and stubbornly than in most other musicals. The results may be quintessentially French, but the energy and optimism are clearly inspired by America, and Gene Kelly’s appearances are sublime. With Catherine Deneuve, Francoise Dorleac, Daniele Darrieux, George Chakiris, Grover Dale, and Michel Piccoli. In French with subtitles. 124 min. (JR) Read more

Woody Allen at his most inconsequential and insubstantial; don’t expect to remember this black-and-white throwaway of comic sketches five minutes after it’s over. The art movie reference this time is La dolce vita, and Kenneth Branagh has been enlisted to play Allen playing the Marcello Mastroianni part. Judy Davis, as Branagh’s estranged spouse, also plays Allen, at least until she starts imitating Mia Farrow. It appears that the widespread critical support of sexist and racist films like Mighty Aphrodite and Deconstructing Harry has further emboldened Allen in depicting women as blow-job machines and blacks as sexual athletes; he knows in advance that most of the New York press will never desert him and probably will applaud his courage in the bargain. Others in the cast include Melanie Griffith, Leonardo DiCaprio (playing himself much as Quentin Tarantino did in Four Rooms), Joe Mantegna, Winona Ryder, Michael Lerner, Famke Janssen, Charlize Theron, Hank Azaria, and Bebe Neuwirth (1998). (JR) Read more

Jill Godmilow describes this half-hour short as a precise remake, in color and English, of Harun Farocki’s 1969 black-and-white German film Inextinguishable Fire. Farocki’s powerful film describes Dow Chemical’s development and manufacture of Napalm B and the effects of its use during the Vietnam war. By adroitly remaking the film three decades later Godmilow wants to call attention to a model of political filmmaking, though one might argue that she runs into trouble when she describes her own work as agitprop in the same sense that Farocki’s was: after all, he was addressing a contemporary issue, and in a sense her kind of political filmmaking is yet another excuse for avoiding our current problems. On the other hand, Godmilow does a fine job of stirring the pot, and this fascinating intervention is bound to generate some interesting debate. (JR) Read more