Jonathan Rosenbaum

This appeared in the March 3, 1995 issue of the Chicago Reader, under a slightly different title (“TV and Not TV”). — J.R.

Angèle

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed and written by Marcel

Pagnol

With Orane Demazis, Fernandel,

Henri Poupon, Jean Servais,

Toinon, Delmont, and Andrex.

The Brady Bunch Movie

Rating * Has redeeming facet

Directed by Betty Thomas

Written by Laurice Elehwany, Rick

Copp, Bonnie Turner, and Terry

Turner

With Shelley Long, Gary Cole,

Michael McKean, Christine Taylor,

Jennifer Elise Cox, and Henriette

Mantel.

When it comes to Marcel Pagnol (1895-1974) and The Brady Bunch (1969-1974), I’m strictly a novice. The Brady Bunch ran on prime time on ABC when I was living in Paris, but even if I’d been in the United States I would have found other things to do with my Friday nights; the show obviously made its deepest imprint on the preteens who had to stay home. I never saw any Pagnol movies during that period either: my French wasn’t fluent enough for me to follow the Provençal patois of the dialogue without subtitles, and anyway, the standard line on Pagnol’s movies back then was that they were “canned theater.” (Pagnol himself was the main culprit in fostering this impression: “Film is the art of imprinting, fixing, and diffusing theater,” he wrote in 1933.) Read more

From the Chicago Reader (September 7, 1994). — J.R.

Robert Redford’s best and richest directorial effort (1994, 130 min.) unpacks the TV quiz show scandal of the late 50s, when glamorous intellectual Charles Van Doren, star contestant on the quiz show Twenty-One, belatedly confessed that he’d been fed all the questions in advance. As played by Ralph Fiennes (Schindler’s List), Van Doren is lamentably not much more than a shallow icon (though Paul Attanasio’s script works overtime making him appear sympathetic), stripped of the real-life ambiguities and hidden depths that were apparent to everyone who followed the story at the time. Despite these and other predictable simplifications, the story is allowed to retain much of its resonance and suggestiveness — as an instance of ethnic and class conflict as well as a landmark in media bamboozlement — and even some of the network and corporate culprits in the original fraud are singled out and named. Rob Morrow is especially good as Richard N. Goodwin, the feisty and ambitious House subcommittee member who helped to uncover the scandal, even though it meant fingering a man he admired (though the film, based on a chapter in Goodwin’s book Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties, exaggerates Goodwin’s role in the investigation), and John Turturro is effective as Herb Stempel, another Twenty-One contestant whose disgruntlement as an involuntary loser on the show was crucial in bringing Van Doren down. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (January 21, 1994). — J.R.

The late River Phoenix, Samantha Mathis, Dermot Mulroney, and Sandra Bullock all play young country-music hopefuls in a touching romantic comedy-drama inspired by Nashville’s Bluebird Cafe. For perverse reasons known only to itself, Paramount has elected to bury this movie, but the Music Box, bless it, has decided to open it anyway. It bears as little relation to the real Nashville as Altman’s 1975 feature, but director Peter Bogdanovich, the talented cast, and the credited (Carol Heikkinen) and uncredited screenwriters (Bogdanovich, cast members, and Pump Up the Volume‘s Allan Moyle) are so busy conjuring up a charming world of their own that I certainly didn’t mind. Mathis and Bullock are especially good, and Phoenix and Mulroney do a fair job of playing out a jealousy-prone friendship as if they were Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms in Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show. With Trisha Yearwood. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, January 21 through 27.

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One of my first long reviews for the Chicago Reader (September 11, 1987). Reseeing the movie almost three decades later, shortly before being flown to New York to be interviewed about it for a Japanese documentary, I liked it even more, and would give it four stars if I was reviewing it today. — J.R.

TAMPOPO

*** (A must-see)

Directed and written by Juzo Itami

With Tsutomu Yamazaki, Nobuko Miyamoto, Koji Yakusho, Ken Watanabe, Nobuo Nakamura, and Mariko Okada.

True, we eat to preserve ourselves from dying. But cooking, the moment of preparing foods . . . is a pause in the most relentless of natural processes, a moment when the process is retarded, when the food exists as itself, no longer a dead thing, not yet assimilated to a living thing. It exists in a moment out of time, and can therefore become a source of esthetic pleasure — small, fleeting, often deceptive, yet a true esthetic object. So brief is its moment of objectivity, this bit of food, that it quivers with the life it came from and with the life it goes toward — and yet, always, it partakes of a stillness that transforms time. The raw stuff has become food — worked upon, transformed by love and care, made proper with a name — and it is a part, if of a stew, of all other stews ever made and ever yet to be made. Read more

From the January 16, 2004 Chicago Reader:

This hour-long documentary (2002) about one of the great jazz bassists — who was also a major photographer of jazz musicians and performances — has a fascinating story to tell as well as a charismatic subject. In his youth Hinton was injured in a car accident in Chicago while running prohibition liquor and was saved by his boss, Al Capone, from having a finger amputated; as a bassist he quickly rose to the top of his profession, and the clips here show how indispensable he could be as a sideman. Unfortunately, like most other fashioners of jazz documentaries, directors David G. Berger, Holly Maxon, and Kate Hirson can’t resist laying voices over some of the best solos after teasing us with a chorus or two, so that, like Jean Bach’s A Great Day in Harlem (1994), this works better as a historical chronicle and an appreciation of personalities than as a presentation of the music. (JR) Read more

From the Chicago Reader (November 7, 1997).  — J.R.

The Films of Edward Yang

By Jonathan Rosenbaum

Taiwan is somehow within the world system as its citizens are in their city boxes: prosperity and constriction all at once; the loss of nature….What is grand and exhilarating, light itself, the hours of the day, is nonetheless here embedded in the routine of the city and locked into the pores of its stone or smeared on its glass: light also being postmodern, and a mere adjunct to the making of reproducible images.

— Fredric Jameson, “Remapping Taipei,” in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System

These people have so much money stuffed up their ass it’s beyond belief! You know, in ten years this place [Taipei] will be the center of the world. The future of Western civilization lies right here. And you know what the odd thing is? We used to study history–the 19th century was the glorious age of imperialism, right? Just wait till you see the 21st century… — English character in Edward Yang’s Mahjong

The bombs we plant in each other are ticking away. — Edward Yang

During those rare moments of reflection when I’m not doing what film critics are supposed to be doing — watching and evaluating movies that propose various escapes from modern life — I wonder what a different kind of cinema might be, a cinema that would lead us back into the modern world and teach us something about it. Read more

From the Chicago Reader:

Any documentary about the eccentric late cofounder of the Cinematheque Francaise is bound to be watchable, but Jacques Richard’s lumpy 210-minute talking-headathon obfuscates as much as it clarifies. The factionalism in the French film world guarantees that Richard has to choose sides, but he fails to acknowledge this problem, picks the wrong side, favoring fans and bureaucrats over scholars (he fails even to mention Langlois’ principal successor, Dominique Paini), and never owns up to his omissions. His choice of clips is unforgivably hackneyed, and such matters as Langlois’ Turkish past (beautifully handled in Edgardo Cozarinsky’s 1994 documentary Citizen Langlois) and his homosexuality are almost completely bypassed, making a passing allusion to his male lover at his funeral seem a non sequitur. And his poor way of illustrating the visual qualities of nitrate prints only confuses the issue. In French with subtitles. (JR) Read more

From the Chicago Reader (May 20, 2005):

The visionary, transgressive art of director Kira Muratova might be described as bipolar, and these two eccentric comedies, both big successes in Russia, may be her lightest and her darkest. The Felliniesque Passions (1994, 112 min.) considers the wistful dreams of its characters, chiefly a nurse and a circus performer, while the episodes of Three Stories (1997, 109 min.) all deal with cold-blooded murders in postglasnost, posthumanist Russia. Both feature Renata Litvinova, an icy, statuesque blond with the beauty and power of a Hollywood icon; she was a screenwriter by profession, but Muratova turned her into a star (both women won Russian Oscars for their work on Passions). And both exemplify Muratova’s long-standing fascination with animals: Passions revolves around racehorses and takes place partly at a track, while in Three Stories the first episode is set near a zoo, the last one includes a good many cats, and the middle one, scripted by and starring Litvinova, is about an avenging murderess who prefers animals to people. In Russian with subtitles. (JR)

Chicago Reader, April 3, 1995:

After the film’s festival showings, scissors-happy Miramax trimmed eight minutes from this lively 1994 piece of exploitation about the travails of a gay priest in Liverpool, but it still packs a wallop; whether it can sustain much reflection afterward is another matter. It started out as a four-part TV miniseries scripted by Jimmy McGovern, who spent a day cutting away two-thirds of it when it got approved as a feature; director Antonia Bird (Safe) serves up the telegraphic remains in punchy docudrama style. Apart from the inner conflicts of a young priest (Linus Roache) who’s actively gay, the movie throws in his dilemma at being unable to expose incestuous child abuse revealed to him during a confession — a subplot handled in the style of a lurid horror thriller — and generally manages to whip up feelings of righteous indignation about the moral hypocrisy of various Catholic officials while adhering closely to the manner of 50s Hollywood-liberal agitprop. If entertainment passing as deep-dish soul searching is what you’re after, you won’t be disappointed — though with the use of You’ll Never Walk Alone on the sound track, it’s debatable whether the filmmakers know how to stop when they’re ahead. Read more

A “Critic’s Choice” from Chicago Reader, June 5, 1998:

The social status of filmmaking among ordinary people, central to Abbas Kiarostami’s wonderful Close-up and Life and Nothing More, is equally pertinent in this entertaining and sometimes beautiful film. Through the Olive Trees (1994) concludes a trilogy begun with Where Is My Friend’s House?, which focused on the adventures of a poor schoolboy in a mountainous region of northern Iran. Life and Nothing More, the second and best film of the three, fictionally re-created Kiarostami and his son’s return to the area, which had recently been devastated by an earthquake, to look for two child actors from the earlier film. Through the Olive Trees is a comedy about the making of a film, mostly emphasizing the persistent efforts of a young actor to woo an actress who won’t even speak to him. Like Kiarostami’s more recent Taste of Cherry, all three films strategically elide certain information about the characters, inviting audiences to fill in the blanks and in this case yielding a mysteriously beautiful and open-ended conclusion. If you’re unfamiliar with Kiarostami — one of our greatest living filmmakers and certainly the greatest in Iran–this is an excellent introduction. Read more

Chicago Reader, May 1, 1995.

Terry Zwigoff’s penetrating, thoughtful, and disturbing 1994 essay about the great underground comic artist Robert Crumb, best known for Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural as well as his Keep On Truckin’ drawings, though also a semiprofessional musician and connoisseur of early jazz and blues. Made over a six-year period by a longtime friend and fellow musician, the film’s intimate, multifaceted portrait is exceptional in many respects. For starters, it presents Crumb not as a cartoonist but as an artist, plausibly described by critic Robert Hughes as the Brueghel of the second half of the 20th century. It then shows how difficult it is to assess artists, exploring in considerable depth Crumb’s dysfunctional family background, sexual obsessions, working methods, and political positions. By the end of two hours we’re persuaded that if Crumb weren’t drawing constantly and compulsively he’d probably be as doomed as his brothers Charles and Max, both of whom are also comic-book artists. Never letting his participants or his audience off the hook, Zwigoff traces Crumb’s ideological and psychological ambivalence toward his art through the perceptions of friends, acquaintances, relatives, former lovers, and Crumb himself. Zwigoff not only presents a complex human being and the range of his art but also guides us through a profound and unsettling consideration of what it means to be an American artist. Read more

Posted by New Lines (https://newlinesmag.com/) with a different title on June 28, 2023:

It is a pity and a paradox that Jafar Panahi — Iran’s most important living filmmaker, in my judgment (at least among those I’m familiar with) — seems to be valued in the West more for his persecution than for his filmmaking. His first feature, “The White Balloon” (1995), became the first Iranian film ever to win a major award at the Cannes Film Festival (the Camera d’Or), and his four subsequent features — “The Mirror” (1997), “The Circle” (2000), “Crimson Gold” (2003) and “Offside” (2006) — all won awards at major festivals. But it wasn’t until Panahi was arrested in 2010, sentenced to six years in prison and banned from all filmmaking activities for the next 20 years that he was noticed in the mainstream press in the West. (He was charged with “propaganda against the system” for attending the funeral of a student killed during the 2009 Green Movement protests and for attempting to make a film sympathetic to that rebellion.)

Since then, Panahi has miraculously managed to make five more features in defiance of the ban, appearing as himself in each of them. Severely limited in terms of their resources and shooting conditions, the films have nonetheless garnered more attention than the five features made between 1995 and 2006, prior to his arrest. Read more

A contemporary western with political overtones and acerbic gallows humor, Tommy Lee Jones’s first theatrical feature as director (2005) is impressive. Inspired by the unpunished 1997 killing of 18-year-old Ezequiel Hernandez Jr., the script by Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros) concerns the accidental and unpunished shooting of the title character, a Mexican ranch hand (Julio Cesar Cedillo) working in west Texas. Jones plays the ranch hand’s foreman and friend, who kidnaps the border patrolman responsible (Barry Pepper) and drags him and Estrada’s corpse across the border, determined to fulfill his friend’s wish to be buried in his remote hometown. A very capable piece of storytelling, clearly showing the influence of Sam Peckinpah and beautifully shot in ‘Scope by Chris Menges, this recaptures some of the grandeur of the classic western while adding modernist and absurdist ironies. With Dwight Yoakam, January Jones, and Melissa Leo. R, 121 min. (JR)

From the April 28, 2006 Chicago Reader.

I was the head of the critics’ jury at the Hong Kong film festival last spring that awarded half its first prize to this macabre comedy-thriller from Thailand (1999, 114 min.) It’s as commercial as anything from Hollywood — as was writer-director Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s previous feature, which I liked even more, a crazed Tarantino spinoff called Fun Bar Karaoke (1997). Ratanaruang spent eight years in New York studying at the Pratt Institute and working as a freelance illustrator and designer, so his mastery of American-style entertainment obviously owes something to a prolonged absorption in this culture –though I find the Thai and global traits on view here no less striking. This picture might be described broadly as a clever version of Hitchcock lite, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t also have pertinent things to say about the present Asian economic crisis. (JR)

From the Chicago Reader (October 12, 1999). — J.R.

This outrageous comic fantasy may not sustain its brilliance throughout its 112 minutes, but it keeps cooking for so much of that time that I don’t have many complaints. The first feature of both screenwriter/executive producer Charlie Kaufman (who’s written for several TV series) and director Spike Jonze (who’s directed commercials, music videos, and short films), it charts the complications that ensue when an out-of-work puppeteer (John Cusack) gets a filing job on the surrealistically cramped seventh and a half floor of an office building, where he discovers a hidden tunnel that allows its occupant to become actor John Malkovich (playing himself, natch) for 15 minutes before being ejected onto the New Jersey Turnpike. Things get even wilder when the filing clerk and his wife (Cameron Diaz as a pet-store employee) both get the hots for the same woman (Catherine Keener), who has comparable lust for the wife as long as she’s inside Malkovich. What’s great about this lunatic farce isn’t only its premises about sexual and professional identity but also the spirited way the actors and filmmakers flesh them out. With Orson Bean and Mary Kay Place. (JR)

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