Jonathan Rosenbaum Quotes & Sayings

Whether these characters are lovable or detestable, they're lovable or detestable in a TV way - defined by a minimal set of traits that are endlessly reiterated and incapable of expansion or alteration, a fixed loop. — Jonathan Rosenbaum

It's a sign of this film's greatness that the enormous sadness that accompanies the final leave-taking of the circus interior is a good deal more than the conclusion of an unpretentious evening's entertainments; it's a sublime and awesome coda to the career of one of this century's greatest artists. — Jonathan Rosenbaum

Since many people have been asking me to elaborate on why I think "Inglourious Basterds" is akin to Holocaust denial, I'll try to explain what I mean as succinctly as possible, by paraphrasing Roland Barthes: anything that makes Fascism unreal is wrong. For me, "Inglourious Basterds" makes the Holocaust harder, not easier to grasp
as a historical reality, I mean, not as a movie convention. Insofar as it becomes a movie convention, it loses its historical reality. — Jonathan Rosenbaum

Judging by the the movie's enduring popularity, the message that stupidity is redemption is clearly what a lot of Americans want to hear. — Jonathan Rosenbaum

Just as Freud couldn't always be blamed for the Freudians, Bresson didn't always feel obliged to behave like a Bressonian. — Jonathan Rosenbaum

But the strength that remains, which is principally destructive, is the film's dialectical relationship to most of the other movies that we see, its capacity to make their most time-honored conventions seem tedious, shopworn, and unnecessary. This originality often seems to be driven by hatred and anger, emotions that are undervalued in more cowardly periods such as the present... — Jonathan Rosenbaum