Local Color: Five American Touchstones

Posted March 11, 2024 in Notes

This was commissioned by and written for the Rotterdam International Film Festival — specifically for a booklet of essays entitled Grandeur Locale that they published in late January 1992. — J.R.

1. “We acknowledge with gratitude and admiration the spirit of cooperation of the 25,000 citizens of Phenix City, Alabama,” reads a title after the credits of Phil Karlson’s remarkable film noir, THE PHENIX CITY STORY (1955), shot on location less than a year after the events it describes took place. “…To the Mayors and the City Commissioners, the Chiefs of Police, and the many thousand citizens of Columbus, Georgia, and Phenix City, Alabama, who contributed immeasurably to the making of this picture…our sincerest thanks.” For once, the standard courtesy of such an acknowledgement becomes the literal truth. In many prints of the film, we meet four of the local, real-life participants in the story we’re about to see even before the credits come on. The singular accents and speech patterns of these people are literally the sound of my own childhood: I was thirteen years old and had lived all my life in Alabama when the film was released, and to see the film in 1955 was to experience some of the truth of my home state on the screen for the very first time. Read more

The World

Posted March 11, 2024 in Featured Texts

From the Chicago Reader (July 29, 2005). — J.R.

Suggesting at different moments a backstage musical, a failed love story, a surreal comedy, and even a cartoon fantasy, this beautiful, corrosive, visionary masterpiece by Jia Zhang-ke (2004) is a frighteningly persuasive account of the current state of the planet. Set in an eerie Beijing theme park — a kind of Chinese Las Vegas, with scaled-down duplicates of the most famous global landmarks — it follows a bunch of workers as they labor, carouse, couple, and uncouple, but it’s really about propping up extravagant illusions through alienated labor. Jia, only 35, is the most talented director, and one of the most respected, in mainland China — though this film is his first to get an official release there. In Mandarin and Shanxi dialect with subtitles. 139 min. (I will introduce the 4:20 PM Saturday screening and lead a discussion afterward.) . Music Box

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Chinese Puzzle [ASHES OF TIME]

Posted March 11, 2024 in Featured Texts

From the Chicago Reader (March 10, 1995). — J.R.

Ashes of Time

Rating *** A must see

Directed and written by Wong Kar-wai

With Leslie Cheung, Tony Leung Kar-fai, Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia,Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung, Jacky Cheung, and Karina Lau.

There’s no question that Chinese cinema is in a state of upheaval. On the mainland the government’s film bureau has introduced new legislation that would discourage foreign financing of local production, and it’s blacklisted many of the best (and best-known) independent filmmakers and video artists, including Tian Zhuangzhuang (The Blue Kite), Zhang Yimou (To Live), and Zhang Yuan (Mama). Meanwhile the market for Chinese movies in both Taiwan and Hong Kong has taken a nosedive. Last summer, for the first time in Hong Kong in three decades, Hollywood movies outgrossed locally made movies (with Speed and The Flintstones leading the pack). And according to Asian film specialist Tony Rayns, most of the best Taiwanese directors are seeking new sources of financing and exploring foreign markets now that their local audiences are drifting away. Even the most publicized romance in the Chinese film world, the one between director Zhang Yimou and star Gong Li, is on the rocks. Read more

Diane Johnson

Posted March 10, 2024 in Notes

The following was written in April 2010 for a projected volume on Stanley Kubrick that was being prepared at the time by the Chicago-based magazine Stop Smiling, who commissioned this and a few other pieces by me for it. For a variety of reasons, including the discontinuation of the magazine, the book has never appeared, and the editor, James Hughes, has kindly given me permission to post it here. — J.R.

The reasons given most often of why Stanley Kubrick collaborated in 1979 with this woman on the script for The Shining are confirmed by Johnson herself (in an essay about her eleven weeks of work with him, “Writing The Shining” — one of the best accounts of working with Kubrick that we have): her 1974 psychological novel The Shadow Knows, which he briefly considered adapting, and her expertise about Gothic fiction. To this one should add her sharp critical intelligence, apparent in both her fiction and her non-fiction. The latter ranges from her superb 1982 collection Terrorists and Novelists to her 1984 Life of Dashiell Hammett, and from her introductions to novels by the Bronte sisters, Stendhal, Wharton, and Voltaire to her canny 2005 guidebook Into a Paris Quartier. Read more

Shelley Winters

Posted March 10, 2024 in Notes

The following was written in April 2010 for a projected volume on Stanley Kubrick that was being prepared at the time by the Chicago-based magazine Stop Smiling, who commissioned this and a few other pieces by me for it. For a variety of reasons, including the discontinuation of the magazine, the book has never appeared, and the editor, James Hughes, has very kindly given me permission to post it here. —- J.R.

Shelley Winters performance as Lolita’s Charlotte Haze offers one of the best refutations of the notion that Kubrick was a misogynist who could depict women only as bitches like Marie Windsor in The Killing or as bimbos. (Maybe Christiane Kubrick in the last scene of Paths of Glory, then known as Susan Christian, is another counter-example, but unlike Charlotte, she hardly has time to register as a character.) Winters’ overbearing yet highly vulnerable culture vulture, who has to bear the full brunt of both Humbert Humbert’s patronizing and his private scorn, is portrayed with genuine warmth and sympathy — indeed, more of both than can be found in Nabokov’s novel or original screenplay.

This friend and one-time flat mate of Marilyn Monroe, whose stint with the Actors Studio preceded and probably encouraged her own, Winters (1920-2006), born Shirley Schrift, has suffered no less from the stigma of playing dumb blondes when Hollywood sexism was at its height, implanting the similarly false impression that she was as dumb and as unlettered as her characters. Read more

Retelling Jewish American Story Through History of Cinema

Posted March 10, 2024 in Featured Texts

From The Forward, April 18, 2013. — J.R.

TAJSTC

The American Jewish Story Through Cinema

By Eric A. Goldman
University of Texas Press, 264 pages, $55.

Eric A Goldman’s look at about a dozen Hollywood movies released between 1927 and 2009 can be recommended especially to readers who don’t flinch when they ponder his book’s title. For me, the very notion of postulating such a thing as “the” American Jewish Story — as opposed to, say, “an” American Jewish story (meaning any American Jewish story, of the author’s own choosing), or, better yet, multiple American Jewish stories — is already somewhat problematic. But in fact, Goldman is usually too thoughtful to be quite as categorical as his title threatens. Stories told in and by movies are basically what he’s thinking and talking about, and usually these are ones about American Jewish assimilation: characters stepping beyond ghetto and ethnic boundaries to contemplate such things as intermarriage and other forms of wider acceptance while repositioning historical memories and a sense of cultural identity.

I wish that the movies he picked for close examination, such as “The Young Lions,” “The Prince of Tides” and “Avalon,” were more engaging to me as art. I should admit that it was his book that finally induced me to catch up with the original, Al Jolson version of “The Jazz Singer” (at the age of 9 or so, I saw the 1952 Danny Thomas remake) and made me seek out Jerry Lewis’s strange 1959 made-for-TV version, with Molly Picon, no less, playing his mother.

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Powell & Pressburger: English To the Core

Posted March 9, 2024 in Notes

This essay originally appeared in The Soho News on December 3, 1980. I’ve taken the liberty of revising it slightly.–J.R.

Michael Powell and
Powell & Preesburger
Museum of Modern Art, Nov. 20—Jan. 5

By and large, the Englishman Michael Powell directs, while his longtime Hungarian collaborator, Emeric Pressburger, writes screenplays. But when they started their own  English production company, The Archers, in 1942 — an institution that lasted almost 15 years — the credits of their joint efforts usually read, “Written, directed and produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger”.

A testimony to the rare capacity for collaborative work that helps to distinguish English life and culture from American individualism, the team of P & P offers the working assumptions of auteur criticism a number of interesting challenges. On the one hand many aspects of Powell’s style, temperament and preoccupations can be traced through films that Pressburger didn’t work on. At the same time it would be too simplistic to pretend that one could separate individual contributions to their joint ventures with anything like total assurance.

Indeed, as Ian Christie reminds us in the introduction to his very helpful collection Powell, Pressburger and Others (British Film Institute, 1978), auteur criticism is more a method of reading films than a means of establishing how they were put together. Read more

BEFORE THE REVOLUTION (1964)

Posted March 9, 2024 in Notes

This was written in the summer of 2000 for a coffee-table book edited by Geoff Andrew that was published the following year, Film: The Critics’ Choice (New York: Billboard Books), and tweaked in June 2010. — J.R.

It is not surprising that Bernardo Bertolucci’s second feature — made when he was only 22 and released a year later in 1964 — has never been as fashionable as The Conformist (1969) or as popular as Last Tango in Paris (1972). But even though it is sometimes raggy and choppy as storytelling, Before the Revolution is still possibly the most impressive thing he has done to date.

In 1962, when he was asked to adapt a story by Pier Paolo Pasolini into a screenplay and then to direct it (The Grim Reaper, or La commare secca), thereby paying tribute to his main Italian mentor, he also published his first volume of poetry, In Search of Mystery. And Before the Revolution, which pays homage to his primary French inspiration, Jean-Luc Godard, is in some ways closer to a poetry collection than it is to a novel — despite the fact that the characters are named after those in Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), Bertolucci’s favorite novel at the time, and Parma is the central setting.

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Guys And Dolls

Posted March 9, 2024 in Featured Texts

From the Chicago Reader (March 1, 1991), slightly revised November 30, 2021. — J.R.

guysanddollsbrando

Conceivably the second best picture Sam Goldwyn ever produced (after The Best Years of Our Lives), this 1955 blockbuster musical has an undeservedly bad rep, largely because the two leads — Marlon Brando as professional gambler Sky Masterson and Jean Simmons as Salvation Army recruiter Sarah Brown — aren’t professional singers. In fact, they both do wonders with Frank Loesser’s dynamite score because they perform their numbers with feeling and sincerity, and their efforts to live up to their material are perfectly in tune with the aspirations of their characters (as well as the songs themselves). In short, this may be the only Method musical. Joseph L. Mankiewicz does a creditable job with the stylized, stagy sets and the pungent vernacular of the original Damon Runyon material (which he also adapted). Also on hand, and at their very best, are Frank Sinatra (as Nathan Detroit), Vivian Blaine (as Adelaide), Stubby Kaye, B.S. Pully, Veda Ann Borg, and Johnny Silver. 150 min. (JR)

guysanddolls_ifiwereabell_FC_470x264_030220160329 Read more

Another Day, Another Genre [MATCH POINT]

Posted March 8, 2024 in Featured Texts

From the January 13, 2006 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

Match Point

*** (A must see)

Directed and written by Woody Allen

With Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode, Brian Cox, and Penelope Wilton

Movie gossip writer Peter Biskind described Woody Allen in the December 2005 Vanity Fair as “an artist without honor in his own country” (apparently Biskind’s ecstatic write-up in Vanity Fair doesn’t count). He went on to compare Allen’s fate to those of some of Allen’s heroes, including Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Orson Welles, and Charlie Chaplin (assuming Chaplin’s “own country” was the U.S.). He added that Allen, who’s released 35 features to date, has made at least ten masterpieces “that can hold their own against” any of the four he credited to Robert Altman or the three he assigned to Francois Truffaut.

Altman, Bergman, Chaplin, Kurosawa, Truffaut, and Welles have changed our view of the world and of movies. Allen, despite his output and great one-liners and excellent taste in cinematographers, hasn’t. “If I was the teacher, I’d give myself a B,” he modestly told Biskind. Given his indebtedness to Bergman and Federico Fellini, that B would have to be for effort and polish, not originality. Read more

Recommended Reading

Posted March 8, 2024 in Featured Texts
Laugh Riot
Once again, Fintan O’Toole proves his mettle as a political commentator by explaining or at least identifying the inexplicable with more insight than anyone else I’ve been reading. If like me you’ve been wondering how or why Trump can win over crowds with his brand of thuggery, O’Toole
does a plausible job of making sense out of what appears to be
senseless. [3/8/2024]

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Identity Politics

Posted March 8, 2024 in Featured Texts

From the Chicago Reader (April 1, 2005). — J.R.

I Am Cuba, Siberian Mammoth

*** (A must see)

Directed by Vicente Ferraz

The Journey: Portrait of Vera Chytilova

no stars (Worthless)

Directed by Jasmina Blazevic

Golub: Late Works Are the Catastrophes

*** (A must see)

Directed by Jerry Blumenthal and Gordon Quinn

I Am Cuba, Siberian Mammoth is a 2004 Brazilian documentary about the making of the legendary 1964 Russian-Cuban production I Am Cuba, a preposterous, beautiful, mannerist epic of Marxist agitprop celebrating the Cuban revolution. Early on the documentary — which, like the other two films reviewed here, is showing this week at the Chicago International Documentary Festival — focuses on one of the key sequences in the original film. The coffin of a radical student slain by Batista’s police during a mass uprising is carried by his comrades through downtown Havana, surrounded by a crowd that swells to Cecil B. De Mille proportions. In a delirious, breathtaking two-and-a-half-minute shot, the camera moves ahead of a young woman and past a young man — catching him in close-up as he turns around, hoists the front of the coffin onto his right shoulder, and walks away with the other pallbearers — then cranes up the five floors of a building, past people watching from balconies and parapets. Read more

Art School Is Murder

Posted March 8, 2024 in Featured Texts

From the Chicago Reader (May 12, 2006). — J.R.

Art School Confidential

** (Worth seeing)

Directed by Terry Zwigoff

Written by Daniel Clowes

With Max Minghella, Sophia Myles, Matt Keeslar, John Malkovich, Jim Broadbent, Joel David Moore, Ethan Suplee, Steve Buscemi, and Anjelica Huston

The 2001 live-action Ghost World was the first collaboration involving director Terry Zwigoff, cartoonist Daniel Clowes, and John Malkovich’s production company. Art School Confidential is the second. It’s far more ambitious than its predecessor and suffers from too many ideas rather than too few, making it an inspired, fascinating, and revealing mess. Holding it together is the same anger about the way art is taught that gave so much edgy life to the scenes with Illeana Douglas in Ghost World. Even if one disagrees with some of its points, as I do, it offers plenty to mull over.

Both films faintly echo a four-page catalog of Clowes’s gripes called “Art School Confidential” that appeared in his comic book Eightball. (Having taught courses in film and critical writing in a university art department in the mid-70s,I can testify that art-world careerism was the main preoccupation of both my students and my colleagues.) Clowes clearly felt alienated as an art student and has been spewing bile ever since. Read more

A Brief Reflection on “Winning” and “Losing”

Posted March 7, 2024 in Notes

 

I’ve been haunted lately by a very moving and eloquent comment made last Saturday at a panel discussion which I participated in, held at the Smithsonian. The occasion was a screening of a restoration of Hai Ninh’s lovely 1974 North Vietnamese feature The Little Girl from Hanoi, a film so scarce that I can’t find any stills from it on the Internet to illustrate this post. [Update, 6/13/12: Some stills have subsequently appeared and have been posted with my review of the film, as well as on this page.]

After one of my (American) copanelists remarked that even though “we [sic] lost the war in Vietnam,” the country had a thriving market economy today, and then either he or someone else alluded to America “winning” the Cold War (which provoked an angry riposte from me that if the Cold War had any “winners” at all, these were gangsters on both sides), a Vietnamese diplomat in the audience, who said he was speaking not as a diplomat but simply as a Vietnamese, stated that he thought it was inappropriate to claim that anyone “won” the war in Vietnam. He was right, of course, which got me thinking that the American compulsion to see all of life (and death) in the simplistic terms of sports and games has a lot to answer for. Read more

Three From Vietnam

Posted March 7, 2024 in Featured Texts

From the Chicago Reader (May 13, 1994). I’m delighted that stills from these and other Vietnamese films have finally become available on the Internet — which didn’t appear to be the case in October 2010, when I participated in a panel related to the first of these films in Washington, D.C. — J.R.

*** THE LITTLE GIRL OF HANOI

(A must-see)

Directed by Hai Ninh

Written by Hoang Tich Chi, Hai Ninh, and Vuong Dan Hoang

With Lan Huong, Tra Giang, The Anh, and Kim Xuan.

*** THE GIRL ON THE RIVER

(A must-see)

Directed and written by Dang Nhat Minh

With Minh Chau, Ha Xuyen, Anh Dung, and Tran Van Son.

** THE RETIRED GENERAL

(Worth seeing)

Directed by Nguyen Khac Loi

Written by Nguyen Huy Thiep

With Manh Linh, Doan Anh Thang, Hoang Cuc, and Tran Van.

“16 January 1990

“UNITED NATIONS FORCES ATTACK IRAQ, LAYING THE FIRST BLOW ON SADDAM HUSSEIN . . .

“In Powershift [Alvin] Toffler discusses power in its three forms, violence, wealth and knowledge. Now that knowledge is in the hands of everyone, all people, all Nations, television and satellites have forever made it impossible for one group to manipulate the knowledge of what is happening; World television is bringing this vital knowledge to everyone without being diminished. Read more