Jonathan Rosenbaum's Blog: jonathanrosenbaum.com, page 42

How Hip We Are [WITHOUT YOU I’M NOTHING]

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 [...]

A Note on HOLY MOTORS

There’s a particular Parisian tradition that seems peculiar to French aesthetics involving a certain license to behave like a depraved lunatic and receive approval, endorsement, and other cultural rewards in return for this boorishness. (Many years back I tried writing about this subject, in a long review of My Life and Times with Antonin Artaud.) [...]

“What’s up, Doc?”

From The Movie, Chapter 33 (1980). -– J.R.



It was in 1940 that a brisk, buck-toothed city rabbit first sank teeth into carrot. briefly paused, gazed with indifferent aplomb at a lisping country rabbit-hunter with a shotgun and coolly inquired: ‘What’s up, Doc?’ This official debut of Bugs Bunny occurred at the beginning of A Wild [...]

Swinging Both Ways [HIT AND RUNWAY]

From the Chicago Reader (September 7, 2001). — J.R.

Hit and Runway
**
Directed by Christopher Livingston
Written by Jaffe Cohen and Livingston
With Michael Parducci, Peter Jacobson, Judy Prescott, Kerr Smith, Hoyt Richards, John Fiore, and J.K. Simmons.

Hit and Runway – a comedy about a straight aspiring screenwriter in Greenwich Village taking on a gay playwright as a [...]

Eduardo de Gregorio, 1942-2012

This morning, I received the sad news from Pierre Bayle d’Autrange that his longtime partner Eduardo de Gregorio, also a longtime friend of mine (since 1973), died Saturday night at the St. Louis Hospital in Paris, not long after his 70th birthday.

I wrote the following for the festival catalogue of the Buenos Aires Festival of [...]

Diaries, Notes & Sketches — Volume 1, Reels 1-6: Lost Lost Lost

From Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1977, Vol. 44, No. 516. –- J.R.


Diaries, Notes & Sketches — Volume 1, Reels 1-6: Lost Lost Lost
U.S.A. ,1975 Director: Jonas Mekas





Dist–Artificial Eye. p.c /p/sc/ph–Jonas Mekas. addit. ph–Charles

Levine, David Brooks, Peter Beard, Ken Jacobs. Part in colour. ed–Jonas

Mekas. m/songs–including piano music by Chopin, “Abschied” by

Schubert, traditional Lithuanian music, “Kiss [...]

Time Standing Still [A HUMBLE LIFE]

From the Chicago Reader (March 3, 2000). — J.R.

A Humble Life
Rating ** Worth seeing
Directed and written by Alexander Sokurov.


I’ve seen at least a dozen of Alexander Sokurov’s works, but I’ve had a rough time getting a clear fix on him. For one thing, I didn’t recall having seen either A Lonely Man’s Voice (1978), his [...]

Blood for Dracula & The Wedding

From Oui (July 1974). I was able to make my dislike of Blood for Dracula more apparent here than I could when I interviewed Paul Morrissey around the same time in Paris (and for the same magazine), for what proved to be the March 1975 issue. -– J.R.





Blood for Dracula. A Dracula [...]

Changing Direction [JEAN RENOIR, LE PATRON]

From the Chicago Reader (November 25, 2005). — J.R.

Jean Renoir, The Boss: The Direction of Actors
**** (Masterpiece)
Directed by Jacques Rivette
With Jean Renoir and Michel Simon

In 1966 Jacques Rivette made a three-part TV documentary titled Jean Renoir, Le patron (Jean Renoir, the Boss), and its 90-minute centerpiece has rarely been seen since. “A Portrait of Michel [...]

Lucky Lady

From Monthly Film Bulletin, February 1976 (Vol. 43, No. 505). — J.R.



With an outsized budget estimated variously at $12,600,000

(Variety) and £10,000,000 (Daily Mirror), three box-office favourites

and a script deliberately written, according to co-author Gloria

Katz, as “the most commercial thing we could think up”, Lucky

Lady is both conspicuously overproduced and undernourished.

The presence of Stanley Donen [...]