Jonathan Rosenbaum

From the Chicago Reader (June 4, 2004). — J.R.

The Day After Tomorrow

* (Has redeeming facet)

Directed by Roland Emmerich

Written by Emmerich and Jeffrey Nachmanoff

With Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Ian Holm, Emmy Rossum, Sela Ward, Dash Mihok, Kenneth Welsh, Jay O. Sanders, Austin Nichols, and Perry King.

Roland Emmerich’s latest summer blockbuster is an exceptionally stupid movie. Of course the consensus is that summer blockbusters, even ones that come out in the spring, are supposed to be stupid. But occasionally a summer blockbuster is also expected to offer some food for thought. The Day After Tomorrow, the latest big-budget SF disaster flick, broaches — or stumbles over — the issue of global warming, or what I prefer to call Bush weather, a topic that’s surely worthy of some reflection.

Al Gore declared that this movie was at least an honest fiction about global warming — unlike the fictions about the subject emanating from the White House. Using a stupid movie to call attention to a serious problem put him in a less-than-dignified position, but if he hadn’t tied his arguments to a stupid movie the news media might well have ignored him.

When JFK came out in 1991, all of a sudden, decades after the event, the New York Times and other papers decided the assassination of John F. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (June 15, 1990).

Regarding Peter Biskind’s hyperbolic overestimation of Beatty, then and now — matched in a way by Beatty’s own jokey comparison of Biskind to Trotsky, as reported by Biskind in his recent and sometimes unwittingly hilarious Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America (2010) — it seems that this has only grown over the past 20 or so years. In his Introduction, Biskind rhetorically asks, “how many defining motion pictures does a filmmaker have to make to be considered great?” and then rhetorically answers, “very few,” going on to assign only one or two each to Welles, Renoir, and Kazan, and just one to Peckinpah, but no less than five to Beatty, evidently regarding Bugsy as a towering achievement alongside such trifles as The Magnificent Ambersons, French Cancan, or Wild River. But this is the same writer who can call Kaleidoscope “James Bond lite,” allowing one to ponder what he might actually regard as James Bond heavy — or even as James Bond normal. — J.R.

DICK TRACY ** (Worth seeing)

Directed by Warren Beatty

Written by Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr.

With Warren Beatty, Charlie Korsmo, Glenne Headly, Madonna, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, William Forsythe, and Charles Durning. Read more

What distinguishes the criminal indictment of Trump in Georgia from his three preceding indictments is its finally forcing the media to call the man a gangster via its repeated use of the term “racketeering”. This brings us, at long last, to the basic ground level of understanding and acknowledging held by Americans in the 1920s who had the clear sight and honesty to call Al Capone a crook, meanwhile implicitly or explicitly dubbing him the king of Chicago. But why has it taken our media this long to call a former President a crook? It seems that more Americans today believe in him as their public servant than 20s Americans thought the same about the mobsters in their midst, although I might be wrong about making this assumption. Either way, the 20s crowd was way ahead of us in acknowledging their own living conditions. And in appreciating them: Capone cared about culture (e.g. opera) whereas the Donald can only succeed if or when he makes us meaner and uglier.

Read more

A special sort of Christmas essay from the Chicago Reader (December 23, 1994). — J.R.

Over the past year we’ve been hearing a lot about the theme of redemption in current movies. Actually the seeds of this trend were probably sown back in 1980, when Raging Bull came out, but now “redemption” is becoming something of a buzzword. I recall being taken slightly aback when I heard Harvey Keitel, speaking at the 1992 Toronto film festival, employ the term without any trace of irony in regard to Reservoir Dogs. And since then I’ve been hearing it more and more, mainly in relation to movies associated with Quentin Tarantino (not only Reservoir Dogs but also True Romance, Natural Born Killers, Killing Zoe, and Pulp Fiction) and such varied films as Cape Fear, Cliffhanger, Forrest Gump, The Professional, and even Heavenly Creatures.

What’s surprising is not only the odd assortment of movies in this new canon but those that are automatically excluded. Looking over last year’s releases, one might logically conclude that movies dealing with the spiritual redemption of their lead characters would include, say, Schindler’s List, Little Buddha, Savage Nights, The Shawshank Redemption, Bill Forsyth’s grossly neglected Being Human, and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue, White, and Red. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (July 6, 1990). — J.R.

WITHOUT YOU I’M NOTHING

** (Worth seeing)

Directed by John Boskovich

Written by Sandra Bernhard and Boskovich

With Sandra Bernhard, John Doe, Steve Antin, Lu Leonard, Ken Foree, and Cynthia Bailey.

Once upon a time, before postmodernism came along, art tended to be about reality and the world — not always, to be sure, but more often than today. Then a group of professors and hucksters (as well as huckster-professors) got together and said, “What are reality and the world except particular versions of what we used to call art? And anyway what do we know about the world apart from what we see on TV, which is a form of popular art? The subject of art has always been other art, and postmodernism — unlike modernism, which is old hat by now, and all art prior to modernism, which is even older hat — is up-to-date art about other art. And what’s up-to-date is what sells.” Or words to that effect.

If capitalism is devoted in part to developing new markets, and advertising and journalism are devoted to promoting them, then postmodernist criticism is a means of backing up that promotion with hard intellectual currency. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (April 11, 1997). I’ve suppressed the title/headline originally given to this piece, which I greatly regretted at the time, “Tortured Genius”. There are a few contributions of my own here that I also regret, but, for the record, I’ve decided to let this text stand. — J.R.

Films by Mohsen Makhmalbaf

It’s tempting but dangerous to approach artists from exotic cultures in terms of more familiar reference points — such as comparing Zhang Yimou’s Ju Dou to The Postman Always Rings Twice or reading Souleymane Cisse’s Brightness as if it were an African Star Wars, as some American and English critics have done. Yet to describe the styles and visions of the two major Iranian filmmakers of the 80s and 90s, Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, I’ve been exploring comparisons to Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky — a project obviously fraught with booby traps, but one that clarifies some of the important differences between these two major figures.

Last June the Film Center brought us seven features and nine short films by Kiarostami, and this month it’s showing ten features and one short documentary by Makhmalbaf, as well as three documentaries about him (one of them Kiarostami’s remarkable Close-up). Read more

From the Chicago Reader (September 23, 1988). — J.R.

1. A front-page story in the August 24 Variety begins, “Last week’s Republican National Convention garnered the worst network ratings of any convention in TV history.” An interesting piece of information, but not, as far as I know, one that was noted in daily newspapers, weekly newsmagazines, or on TV. Why does one have to go to Variety to discover this morsel of recent history? Perhaps it has something to do with Variety‘s status as a trade journal. Mainstream print and TV journalism may be part of the entertainment business, but they’re not generally about entertainment in the sense that a publication like Variety is.

The story in Variety goes on to report that both of this summer’s political conventions significantly boosted video rentals; a couple of large video rental chains reported increases in business between 30 and 57 percent. Do we interpret this as an opting for entertainment over news coverage, or as a preference for one kind of entertainment over another? Do we read it as a sign of desperate cynicism, or as a sign of healthy liberation? Or, if we read it as the latter, was it liberation only from the standard TV shows that the conventions were preempting? Read more

From the Chicago Reader, November 22, 2007. Many thanks to Lance Booth for tracking down a contemporary response to this review that’s well worth reading (and heeding), regardless of whether it was Bob Dylan or someone else who wrote it. — J.R.

I’m Not There 

Directed by Todd Haynes

I’ve owned copies of Don’t Look Back and Nashville Skyline for decades, but I’d never describe myself as a hard-core Bob Dylan fan. Obvious as his talent may be, he often mixes metaphors and combines images in a way that skirts the edge of incoherence. And as the appointed spokesman for my generation — born in 1941, only a couple of years before me — he sometimes strikes me as little more than a series of shifting masks and poses. So I went into I’m Not There, Todd Haynes’s ambitious new film about the man, fully prepared to feel out of step, and was surprised to find my misgivings addressed at every turn. Widely described as a tribute, it frequently comes across as a series of insults.

To call the film biographical is misleading. If anything, it’s a speculative essay that uses Dylan to comment on his audience and the 60s in general. Read more

From the Summer 2023 Cinema Scope:

As a lifelong film buff who became a professional film critic in my late twenties, I’ve spent much of my life ever since trying to reconcile these two distinct and in some respects conflicting identities. Many of my colleagues seem to regard criticism and fandom as reverse sides of the same commercial coin–compatible and mutually reinforcing facets of the same impulses, sometimes blissfully fusing into a sincere form of advertising. (A perfect example of this in action is Andrew Sarris’s rapturous and well-informed two-part review of Resnais’ Muriel, which has recently become my favorite piece of Sarris prose, thinking and feeling with equal amounts of passion.)

For me they’re periodically in conflict with one another, philosophically, and aesthetically. Giving a mixed review to Gjon Mili’s Jammin’ the Blues in 1944, James Agee seems to have felt this way about his former taste as an indiscriminate jazz buff, maintaining that the short “is too full of the hot, moist, boozy breath of the unqualified jazz addict, of which I once had more than enough in my own mouth…”

Although we often overlook the religious piety and the reverence—arguably another form of addiction–that accompanied the politique des auteurs as it developed in France in the 1950s, the degree to which it was informed by such protocols is difficult to deny. Read more

My column for the Spring 2022 issue of Cinema Scope. — J.R.

My pandemic home-viewing choices are invariably and inescapably matters of chance and accident—basically, what turns up and when. In different ways, all of the dozen items discussed below are examples of what I mean.

1. On its own initiative, Icarus Video sends me Prisms and Portraits: The Films of Rosine Mbakam, a four-disc DVD box set. Three of the four discs fall out of the box as soon as I open it, and I decide to start with Prism (2021). But the disc turns out to be a 2018 documentary by Vitaly Mansky, Putin’s Witnesses, a different Icarus release that has been accidentally affixed with a Prism label, so I watch that instead.

I’m glad that I did. Mansky was an official videographer of Putin’s during the latter’s first year in power, and this lesson in statecraft is valuable not only for its use of outtakes, but also for Mansky’s retrospective and critical voiceovers attached to some of the material he was expected to shoot. The most striking (apparent) outtakes consist of Mansky’s dialogues with Putin about his understandable objections to Putin reinstating the Soviet national anthem to replace the Russian one, and Putin about a year later expressing to Mansky a seemingly sincere preference for democracy over monarchy and autocracy, saying that he foresees and even looks forward to eventually becoming a private citizen again. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (October 4, 1991). — J.R.

HANGIN’ WITH THE HOMEBOYS **** (Masterpiece)

Directed and written by Joseph B. Vasquez

With Doug E. Doug, Mario Joyner, John Leguizamo, Nestor Serrano,

Kimberly Russell, and Mary B. Ward.

Sometimes wonderful movies just don’t have a chance. Hangin’ With the Homeboys is more truthful, more fully realized, and more densely felt than Jungle Fever, Up Against the Wall, Straight Out of Brooklyn, Boyz N the Hood, and Livin’ Large. But it’s turned up after these others, and it has fewer calling cards: no stars, no violent deaths, no preachy slogans, no film-festival hoopla or media hype. And it has a lousy title to boot, one that sounds like a movie you’ve already seen but remember only vaguely. (I wanted to give this movie a better chance by making it a “Critic’s Choice” last week, but the paper was already loaded with them.)

After Dave Kehr’s rave review in the Tribune a week ago, however, I had some hopes for the film’s chances. And wanting to take a second look, I caught the late show at the Broadway the same night. The others who were there seemed to love the movie as much as I did, but there weren’t very many of us. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (December 2, 1994). — J.R.

Caro Diario (Dear Diary)

*** (A must-see)

Directed and written by Nanni Moretti

With Moretti, Jennifer Beals, Carlo Mazzacurati, Renato Carpentieri, Antonio Neiwiller, and Mario Schiano.

How many movies put us in touch with real people as opposed to stars and characters? Not very many, perhaps because we tend to go to movies to escape people — or at least to encounter them in more circumscribed and protected ways than we would in real life. Thanks to movies and TV, a good many of us think of some real people as heroes, villains, and other stock figures; witness the recent election campaigns.

One form of literature, and by extension, one form of film that’s designed to place us directly in contact with individuals is the personal essay. According to writer Phillip Lopate — an expert theorist and practitioner of the form whose invaluable anthology The Art of the Personal Essay was published earlier this year — “The hallmark of the personal essay is its intimacy. The writer seems to be speaking directly into your ear, confiding everything from gossip to wisdom. Through sharing thoughts, memories, desires, complaints, and whimsies, the personal essayist sets up a relationship with the reader, a dialogue — a friendship, if you will, based on identification, understanding, testiness, and companionship.” Read more