From the Chicago Reader (December 1, 2006). — J.R.

Against the Day | Thomas Pynchon (Penguin Press)

Thomas Pynchon’s 1,085-page Against the Day does a lot of things. Some it does well, some it does badly — and some are impossible to judge this early, though scores of people are trying, in the press and on the Internet. And it may still be beyond the capacity of most of us to judge a year from now. In some respects Pynchon remains as difficult to evaluate as globalization with all its facets and ambiguities.

This passionately anticapitalist book, which most likely took a decade or more to write, follows dozens of characters over more than two decades, starting at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and ending, more or less, in Paris in the early 1920s. Meanwhile it skips across the planet several times, stopping in, among other places, the Balkans, central Asia, Cambridge, Gottingen, London, New York, Paris, Telluride, Venice, and Vienna. Pynchon includes labor history, mathematical equations, ambiguously overlapping stories about alchemy and early photography, and the tale of an anarchist coal miner named Webb Traverse — who specializes in dynamiting railroads and who’s tortured to death by hired guns working for a robber baron — and the lives of his children. Read more

Probably Alex Cox’s most underrated movie. From the Chicago Reader (December 4, 1987). — J.R.

WALKER

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Alex Cox

Written by Rudy Wurlitzer

With Ed Harris, Richard Masur, Rene Auberjonois, Marlee Matlin, Peter Boyle, Blanca Guerra, and Miguel Sandoval.

What is it about the American mind that insists on regarding itself as apolitical? It would be easier to understand such an attitude in a country with less political freedom than this one; here it seems willfully self-denying, like ordering a hamburger in a Chinese restaurant. From a Marxist and existential standpoint, being “apolitical” means accepting, hence supporting, the status quo — a political position like any other, acknowledged or not. Yet there is something in the national consciousness that resists such acknowledgment.

Reagan’s appeal has always rested in part on this form of self-deception, which can be traced back to most of his movie roles — the assumption that anyone as bland and as familiar as a favorite uncle can’t be sullied by anything as dirty as politics or ideology. The belated discovery that Reagan’s “apoliticism,” so closely linked with his triumph as Pure Image, chiefly consists of his capacity to do nothing at all, hasn’t eliminated the desire to fill the void with another static, charismatic presence — another movie, in short, to tide us over the many crises to come. Read more

Part of the brilliance of Raul Ruiz rests in his capacity to take on routine documentary assignments for French television and turn them into mind-bending fictions. That’s what happened with this provocative hour-long 1984 film about an actor at the 1983 Avignon Theater Festival; it ingeniously balances reporting on an actual event with Ruizian yarn spinning. Even more impressive is the accompanying 20-minute 1980 short Le jeu de l’oie (Snakes and Ladders) — which was commissioned to promote a map exhibition at Paris’s Pompidou Center — an awesome and hilarious metaphysical fantasy with the tattiest special effects this side of Edward D. Wood Jr., and one of the most purely pleasurable works in the Ruizian canon. Taken separately or together, these gems provide a perfect introduction to the imaginative and labyrinthine universe of a prodigious filmmaker. Ruiz, a graceful and easygoing commentator on his own work, will introduce the films and answer questions at the Saturday screening. (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, April 20, 6:00, and Saturday, April 21, 6:15, 443-3737)

This 1990 sequel to the beastie movie of 1984, directed like its predecessor by the irreplaceable Joe Dante, relocates the hero and heroine (Zach Galligan and Phoebe Cates) in New York, where they’re both working for a vain tycoon named Daniel Clamp (John Glover)an obvious conflation of Donald Trump and Ted Turnerin a midtown skyscraper, where the gremlins manage to run loose and cause all sorts of mischief. Solid, agreeable entertainment that basically consists of plentiful gags and lighthearted satire spiked with Dante’s compulsive taste for movie references, humorously scripted by Charlie Haas but without the darker thematic undertones and the more tableaulike construction of the original. You may want to see this more than once in order to catch all the peripheral details, but there aren’t any depths to explore, just a lot of bright, free-floating comic invention. With Robert Prosky, Robert Picardo, Christopher Lee, Kathleen Freeman, and many cameos (including Daffy Duck and Leonard Maltin). 106 min. (JR) Read more

From the Chicago Reader (March 9, 1990). — J.R.

The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. . . . The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. –Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1845-46)

A good many newspapers and magazines have accompanied their reviews of Vineland, Thomas Pynchon’s fourth novel, with the same 37-year-old photograph of the author grinning goofily from his high school yearbook. Given Pynchon’s refusal to be photographed or interviewed, there are touches of both desperation and petty vindictiveness in this compulsion to objectify and visualize, however inadequately, a novelist who chooses to be identified only through his writing. Read more

In his first three films Bela Tarr — conceivably the most important Eastern European filmmaker currently working — betrays an impatience with cinematic style, focusing almost exclusively on content, but that tendency was radically overturned with this 1984 feature, whose taste and intelligence are specifically (and exquisitely) cinematic and revealed Tarr as a master stylist. Set entirely in an apartment inhabited by an elderly woman, her son, his former teacher, the old woman’s nurse, and the nurse’s lover, the film consists mainly of intense two-part dialogues and encounters largely concerned with the old woman’s money. The remarkable use of color depends on a lighting scheme that divides most areas (and characters) into blue and orange, and the elaborately choreographed mise en scene is consistently inventive and unpredictable, making use of highly unorthodox angles and very slow camera movements. As in Damnation (1987), the mise en scene often seems to be composed in counterpoint to the action, but the drama itself (whose Strindbergian power and sexual conflicts are realized with an intensity and concentration that suggests John Cassavetes) carries plenty of charge on its own. 119 min. (JR)

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This is supposed to be set in 1950 in Alabama (where it was filmed), but the true location is some Never-Never Land in John Sayles’s imagination, sparked by research, a sharp ear for dialogue, and diverse fancies about the birth of rock ‘n’ roll. Yet as in the 1943 musical Stormy Weather, the wonderful cast, mainly black, carries it all with ease, even sailing past occasional false moments, such as a tacky flashback toward the end. Danny Glover, as hard-rock reliable as Spencer Tracy in his prime, plays onetime pianist Tyrone Pine Top Purvis, trying to save his title juke joint from economic disaster by pretending that a young drifter with a guitar (Gary Clark Jr.) is blues star Guitar Sam. He juggles and somehow resolves diverse problems with competition, electricity, cash, his wife, his daughter, and the local sheriff (Stacy Keach), spearheading an overall progress toward communal joy that for me yields the most enjoyable Sayles movie since 1984’s The Brother From Another Planet. PG-13, 123 min. (JR) Read more

From the July 8, 1988 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

JOHN HUSTON & THE DUBLINERS

** (Worth seeing)

Directed by Lilyan Sievernich.

The on-location production documentary, a movie chronicling the shooting of a movie, is a fairly recent phenomenon, although its equivalent in print has been around much longer. (For instance, Micheal MacLiammoir’s Put Money in Thy Purse, about Orson Welles’s Othello, and Lillian Ross’s Picture, about John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage, were both published in 1952.) One usual difference between the written and the filmed reports is that the latter tend to be inside jobs financed by the producers of the features in question, and consequently are promotional in nature rather than critical: Chris Marker’s short feature about the making of Ran and Ron Mann’s documentary about the making of Legal Eagles are two recent examples, and Lilyan Sievernich’s hour-long account of John Huston shooting The Dead belongs in this category. Yet there are a few things about Sievernich’s film that make it rather special.

Huston was 82 and very close to dying when he made The Dead, and everyone connected with the film was acutely aware of it. He directed from a wheelchair, was hooked up to an oxygen machine for his emphysema, and generally viewed the actors on the set from a TV monitor. Read more

Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece, which, like his earlier Solaris, is a very free and allegorical adaptation of an SF novel (Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic). After a strange meteorite hits the earth, the region where it fell is sealed off; known as the Zone, it is believed to have magical powers that can grant the most secret wishes of those who enter it, but it can be penetrated only illegally and with special guides. One such guide (Alexander Kaidanovsky), the stalker of the title, leads a writer and a professor (Nikolai Grinko and Anatoli Solonitsin) through the grimiest litter of industrial waste that you’ve ever seen to reach the Zone’s epiphany. What they find is pretty harsh and it has none of the usual satisfactions of SF quests. But Tarkovsky, who regards their journey as a contemporary spiritual quest, does such remarkable things with his mise en scene–particularly very slow and elaborately choreographed camera movements–that you may be mesmerized nonetheless. The film’s final scene is absolutely breathtaking. Not an easy film (and it runs 161 minutes), but almost certainly a great one. With Alice Friendlich (1979). (Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Monday through Thursday, August 27 through 30, 7:30, 281-4114) Read more

I’ve only seen about half of Robert Kramer’s 253-minute epic, but I can certainly recommend it very highly on that basis. This is a fictional documentary in which a character named Doc (Paul McIsaac), who figured in two earlier Kramer films, travels with cinematographer-director Kramer from Fort Kent, Maine, to Key West, Florida, looking for a job and a home while taking in what’s been happening to this country lately. Doc attends a Pat Robertson-for-president meeting in New Hampshire, visits Walden Pond, and is interviewed for a job in a Manhattan ghetto school. Kramer is an American independent with a background in radical documentaries whose political fiction films (including The Edge and Ice) made a decisive mark in the 60s, but he’s been living in Europe since 1979 and making most of his films there, which regrettably kept both his name and his work out of general circulation in the U.S. This multifaceted road movie represents both a return to his sources and a striking out in fresh directions (1989). (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Sunday, November 18, 2:00, 443-3737) Read more