Encounterculture

Lest I Forget

Jonathan Rosenbaum is probably my favorite pop critic of all time (although I like his books more than his reviews, especially Movie Wars, which is the What Is Cinema? of the modern movie business), but lately he's been kinda falling off a little. He generally makes good points, but he's very much a critic who grew up in the sixties when the Canonical Revolution was starting to take place; as such, he's very protective of his standards and in recent months has shown unwillingness to change, especially when it comes to issues like the capacity of cinema to reflect a multipolar world, which in my mind should be the most pressing concern of pop critics.

And then he goes and does something awesome. I guess Chicago's in the throes of their annual film festival; I'm not really hip to the various festival circuitry, so I don't know if it's still going on, but from the looks of what they're showing, it definitely seems worth checking out if it is. But more to the point, en lieu of doing an actual review, Rosenbaum's been doing introductions to the festival for the last two weeks, and by god damn, they're really goddamn interesting. It's one thing to appreciate a movie; it doesn't really mean anything to just sit there and appreciate something, and though I'm usually more interested in what Rosenbaum appreciates in a movie than, say, Melanie Credle or Anthony Lane, I can't avoid pointing out that that's what he's been doing recently. But here, he's extrapolating things from his appreciation, and that's always worth publicizing. Links:

The first week's intro
The second week's intro