Learning, no matter what your focus, is a lot about finding the people you look up to in the field and taking inspiration from them. For me, that person has been the head film critic at the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum. I found Jonathan’s unique blend of film criticism and social commentary when I was a college student in Chicago and have followed him for the past 6-7 years. I was deeply saddened to find out yesterday, while reading his year end piece, that he plans on retiring this February.

What makes this such a sad occurrence not just for me, but for anyone who cares at all about the cinema, is that of all the major critics today, Rosenbaum not only looks at the cinematic value of a film but he also looks to larger issues of what we have access to as viewers and the politics of moviemaking. For me you can’t talk about the quality of a particular film or of films in general without having a discourse about those things too.This excerpt from his book Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Movies We Can See, shows what I love about Rosenbaum:

If most Hollywood movies today have become as terrible as I’m implying, wouldn’t people stop seeing them? Maybe. But I don’t think the will of the people is as decisive an influence as we like to believe it is. Much as the enforced “consensus” of the Stalinist state made it impossible to figure out what Soviet citizens really wanted until that state was overturned, the interests of corporate executives make it hard to find out what the American public really thinks about movies. And we can’t turn to journalists for a definitive answer, because most of them are devoted to doing variations on the corporate stories.

Consider what might happen if Roger Ebert couldn’t find a single movie to recommend on one of his weekly shows, which has undoubtedly happened. How much freedom would he have to give a thumbs-down to everything, especially if he did it three or four weeks in a row? For all the unusual freedom I enjoy at the Reader, how long could I keep my job if I had nothing to recommend week after week? For just as communist film critics were “free” to write whatever they wanted as long as they supported the communist state, most capitalist film critics today are “free” to write anything they want as long as it promotes the products of multicorporations.

The Reader has a great archive of Rosenbaum’s work, and I recommend looking through it when you have some free internet time one of these days.

A good place to start is his “alternate” top 100 American films in response to AFI’s list: http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/100best.html

He will be missed!