Jonathan Rosenbaum

More or less contemporary with Mad when it was still a comic book, this late (1952) entry in the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby/Dorothy Lamour road series, the only one in color, displays a similar penchant for what critic J. Hoberman has termed vulgar modernismloads of self-referential gags and parodic allusions to movies of the periodwithout the street-smart social satire. I loved this at the age of nine and suspect that some of it’s still pretty funny when it isn’t being self-congratulatory; the Technicolor and guest-star appearances undoubtedly help. Hal Walker directed. 90 min. (JR) Read more

London’s Guardian has aptly described this hour-long animated puppet nightmare by Dave Borthwick (1993) as taking place in a filmic netherworld where Eraserhead and Pinocchio meet. Part of what makes it so creepy is the use of real people as well as puppets, part is the overall surrealist imagination. I didn’t much care for the story, which mixes Star Wars medievalism with Brazil futurism, but the images are eerie enough to stock a solid month of bad dreams. The music is by Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones. (JR) Read more

In this low-budget independent comedy from 1992, writer-director John O’Brien gives us a young, quarreling couple from New York who drive up to rural Vermont to get married. Unfortunately, O’Brien’s idea of a good laugh is playing a jazzy version of The Farmer in the Dell every time he shows a cow or a goose. Shot cinema-verite style with impromptu zooms and jump cuts, this is an uneasy blend of folk documentary and romantic comedy in which the authentic locals are in effect invited to upstage the petulant, fictional couple. Part of the intention is clearly to celebrate old-time American lifestyles on the verge of extinction, but the cuteness and the contrivance keep getting in the way. With George Thrush and Marya Cohn. (JR) Read more

Jean Renoir’s uncharacteristic free adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with the great Jean-Louis Barrault (1959). Shot in black and white for French TV, this oddball horror comedy allowed Renoir to experiment with TV techniques, using multiple cameras and microphones to follow his actors from different angles at the same time. Barrault’s performance in the title rolea retiring middle-class professor who, after inadverently releasing the fury of his own id, delights in such activities as abusing cripples on the streetis one of the most sublime, disturbingly funny, and complex actorly creations ever committed to film, and it illuminates many corners of Renoir’s oeuvre in provocative ways: Cordelier’s shambling walk can be traced all the way back to Michel Simon’s Boudu, and, as Dave Kehr and French critic Jean Douchet have noted, the film is the dark mirror of the Dionysian fantasy of Picnic on the Grass, made the same year; here liberation from repression leads to nightmare rather than utopia. (JR) Read more

Ken Loach’s first theatrical feature (1969), adapted from a novel by Barry Hines, focuses on an alienated working-class schoolboy in Barnsley, England, and his pet kestrel, which he trains to hunt. Widely applauded at the time of its original release, the film did much to establish Loach’s international reputation; like most of its successors, it was shot cheaply on location using a nonprofessional cast. With David Bradley and Colin Welland. 113 min. (JR) Read more

Writer-director Woody Allen mounts a lively farce (1994) set in Manhattan in 1928in a milieu that interfaces prohibition gangsters with Broadway theaterand has a number of amusing things to say about the interactions between art and commerce, both seen here in their crasser forms. Like Husbands and Wives and Manhattan Murder Mystery, though to somewhat less effect, this shows a certain improvement in Allen’s work; the material is certainly lively, though the plot becomes a bit mechanical toward the end. The performances, however, are very enjoyable, with first honors going to Chazz Palminteri and Dianne Wiest. Most of the othersJohn Cusack as the playwright-director hero, Jennifer Tilly as a gangster’s moll forced into Cusack’s production as an actress, Rob Reiner, Jack Warner, Mary-Louise Parker, and Harvey Fiersteinaren’t too far behind. 99 min. (JR) Read more

Just as The Ten Commandments (1956) was the apotheosis of Eisenhower conservatism, this 1960 blockbuster, which broke the Hollywood blacklist by crediting screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, seems the quintessence of Kennedy liberalism. Anthony Mann directed the first sequence but then was replaced by Stanley Kubrick, who said he enjoyed the most artistic freedom in the scenes without dialogue. Kirk Douglas and Jean Simmons are appealing as the eponymous rebel slave and his love interest; no less juicy is the Roman triumvirate of Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, and Laurence Olivier, playing one of the first bisexual characters in a major Hollywood film (unfortunately one also has to put up with the embarrassing accents and performances of Tony Curtis, John Dall, and Nina Foch, among others). This may be the most literate of all the spectacles set in antiquity. This restored version, including material originally cut, runs 197 minutes, including Alex North’s powerfully romantic overture. (JR) Read more

With this epic account of a Chinese family from the 1940s to the ’70s, Zhang Yimou seems to have abandoned the high aestheticism of his Red Sorghum, Ju Dou, and Raise the Red Lantern for a more popular and didactic kind of filmmaking (The Story of Qiu Ju can now be seen as a transitional work). To Live is masterful in its own right, and filled with so many barbs at the Cultural Revolution and its immediate aftermath that Zhang has been forbidden to make any films in China with foreign financing for two years (though the stated charge against him is illegal distribution of this film). Adapted by Yu Hua and Lu Wei from Yu’s novel Lifetimes, the film focuses on a wealthy gambling addict (comic actor Ge You) with a pregnant wife (Gong Li) and young daughter who loses his family’s fortune and becomes a shadow puppeteer shortly before civil war erupts; ironically, it’s his recklessness as a gambler that eventually saves him from execution, the first of many sociopolitical paradoxes the movie has to offer. Some of the story’s details recall Farewell My Concubine and The Blue Kite, but Zhang has his own story to tell and his own points to make. Read more

This gripping and well-acted theatrical duet (1993) evokes a kinder, gentler Oleanna; the setting is the apartment of a paralegal assistant (Karen Sillas) and the circumstance is her first date with a coworker (writer-director Tom Noonan). Neither character is quite who she or he appears to be, and a subtly modulated power shift between the two gradually takes place as each unveils an inner self. The film won a screenwriting award at Sundance, and the actors both seem to know what they’re doing every step of the way. Music Box, Friday through Tuesday, December 16 through 20. Read more

The most oversold French movie of 1994, rivaled only by the previous year’s Germinal (which was directed by the producer of this one, Claude Berri). This unpleasant period spectacle of sweat, gore, grime, and dry humpingbased on Alexandre Dumas’ novel, and built around the bloody intrigues ensuing in 1572 from the forced marriage of Marguerite of Valois (Isabelle Adjani), the French king’s Catholic sister, nicknamed Margot, and Henri of Navarre (Daniel Auteuil), an unkempt Protestantwas reduced with the director’s input from 164 to 143 minutes, apparently to acquire an R rating. I haven’t seen the longer version, but they still haven’t cut out all the boring parts, and what anyone could have liked about this movie to begin with is a mystery to me. Patrice Chereau, the director, who wrote the script with Daniele Thompson, has a reputation as one of the best opera and theater directors around, and his previous feature, L’homme blesse, has many defenders. But apart from the production values, I would never have guessed it on the evidence offered here. With Jean-Hugues Anglade, Vincent Perez, Virna Lisi, and Jean-Claude Brialy. (JR) Read more

Playing a contemporary southern wild child who grew up in the wilderness with limited human contact, Jodie Foster seems so determined to win her third Oscar that there are moments when you want to give it to her just so she’ll leave you aloneespecially when the movie seems to be going out of its way to remind you of The Accused. But insofar as one can forget all this huffing and puffing and get involved in the storyadapted by William Nicholson and Mark Handley from Handley’s play Idioglossiathis is a touching and often involving variation on the theme of Truffaut’s The Wild Child about what constitutes civilization and why, with more emphasis given in this case to the motives of a humane doctor (Liam Neeson) and an ambitious psychologist (Natasha Richardson) who try to come to terms with this mysterious individual. Michael Apted directed, somewhat unevenly, but with a fine sense of the North Carolina locations, and Dante Spinotti’s cinematography is excellent (1994). With Richard Libertini, Nick Searcy, Robin Mullins, and Jeremy Davies. (JR) Read more

Though I wouldn’t call it an unqualified success, this highly evocative black-and-white short feature by Chicagoan Louis Antonelli, which has already received some well-deserved praise from Hollywood actress-director Ida Lupino, re-creates (or, more precisely, rediscovers) Chicago between 1945 and the present in a lovely noirish mood piece–shot in both film and video–about one woman’s loneliness, guided by her offscreen narration. In the dislocations between sight and sound, past and present, fiction and documentary, a haunted obsessional nostalgia takes shape, surrealist in feeling. Antonelli’s wonderful selection of period music (including Frank Sinatra, Claude Thornhill, Cab Calloway, and early Nat Cole) to inflect and caress his images works as effectively as his skilled cast, headed by RKO veteran Bonnie Blair Parker. With Randy Steinmeyer, Kayla Klien, Joan Paxton, and Tracie Harkovich. On the same program, another new film by Antonelli, The Wizard of Austin Boulevard, which I haven’t seen, about the quest of Chicagoan Alexander Kouvalis to restore the northwest side’s Patio Theatre, where this program is being held. There’s also a performance by Dennis Scott on the theater’s organ. Patio, 6008 W. Irving Park, Sunday, December 11, 2:00, 736-0956 or 777-5628. Read more

Rightly described by Dave Kehr as Jacques Rivette’s “breakthrough film, the first of his features to employ extreme length (252 minutes), a high degree of improvisation, and a formal contrast between film and theater,” this rarely screened 1968 masterpiece is one of the great French films of the 60s. It centers on rehearsals for a production of Racine’s Andromaque and the doomed yet passionate relationship between the director (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) and his actress wife (Bulle Ogier), who leaves the production at the beginning of the film and then festers in paranoid isolation. The rehearsals, filmed by Rivette (in 35 millimeter) and by TV documentarist Andre S. Labarthe (in 16), are real, and the relationship between Kalfon and Ogier is fictional, but this only begins to describe the powerful interfacing of life and art that takes place over the film’s hypnotic, epic unfolding. In the rehearsal space Rivette cuts frequently between the 35- and 16-millimeter footage, juxtaposing two kinds of documentary reality; in the couple’s apartment, filmed only in 35, the oscillation between love and madness, passion and mistrust, builds to several terrifying and awesome climaxes in which the distinctions between life and theater, reality and fiction, become virtually irrelevant. In many ways this is Ogier’s richest, finest performance, and Kalfon keeps pace with her every step of the way. Read more

Former U.S. marshal Wesley Snipes is hot on the trail of a team of skydiving computer crooks (including Gary Busey) who killed his brother, but who cares? This is a stupid, cliche-ridden, characterless action romp (1994), directed by John Badham from a script by Peter Barsocchini and John Bishop, and the absence of much moment-to-moment story logic isn’t much compensated for by the skydiving sequences, which aren’t a patch on those in Point Break. With Yancy Butler and Michael Jeter. (JR) Read more

A quirky and intermittently interesting period drama about the 16th-century humanitarian doctor and involuntary prophet who allegedly foretold, among other things, the French Revolution, the rise and fall of the British Empire, World War I and World War II, Hitler, the John F. Kennedy assassination, and the moon landing (though whether he also foretold black-and-white newreels and TV documentary footage, complete with the right camera angles, as this film implies, is something else again). Working from an OK script by Knut Boeser and Piers Ashworth, director Roger Christian, a former art director, does a good job of holding one’s interest without insulting one’s intelligence, and the performancesincluding Tcheky Karyo as Nostradamus, Amanda Plummer as Catherine de Medicis, and Julia Ormond, Assumpta Serna, Rutger Hauer, and F. Murray Abrahamare all serviceable. (JR) Read more