If you're presently in college, or have graduated within the last five years, there's a good chance that you've had a friend forward you one of the Derrick Comedy videos. These NYU grads were responsible for viral favorites such as Bro Rape and Blow-job Girl, and since graduating the members of the troupe have found success in film, television and literature.
The members of Derrick may each be busy with new endeavors, but they still are constant collaborators, and the latest product they have to show for their efforts is Mystery Team, the group's first feature film. The group produced the project themselves, and are now in the process of rolling it out in screenings across the country before releasing it on DVD. The film is showing this weekend at the Music Box and the members of Derrick will be on hand for a Q&A following the screening.
Tickets can be purchased online for the shows which are February 5th and 6th at midnight at the Music Box Theatre (3733 N. Southport)
The action genre should be kissing director Pierre Morel's feet for adding a little fire and insane fun back into its tired ass. Working for and under the production guidance of Luc Besson for several years (he's also set to direct the reboot of Dune), Morel directed two dynamite-in-your-pants fun movies, District B13 and last year's surprise hit Taken, with Liam Neeson. Both films seemed intent on making their action sequences feel as unrehearsed and unchoreographed as possible. The results are some of the most raw and shocking fight scenes I've seen in a long time. With his latest work (from a screenplay by Adi Hasak from a Luc Besson story), Morel takes his organic style adds a layer of crazy in the form of a bald John Travolta, playing the ugliest of ugly American operatives who enters the City of Lights and blows most of it up.
Jennifer Hudson's meteoric rise from Chicago's South side to Hollywood really is the stuff dreams are made of. From her days as a contestant on "American Idol" to her Academy Award-winning turn in 2006 in Dreamgirls, Hudson has continued on the road to a burgeoning career in movies.
But even rising starlets have to hit a bump in the road; for Hudson, the "bump" comes via Winnie Mandela, ex-wife of former South African president, Nelson Mandela.
Hey everyone. Before I dive into this week's column, I wanted to alert to the single greatest event in film history, and it's happening the Friday before Valentine's Day right here in Chicago.
A lot has been written (some of it by me) about both the film The Room and its creator Tommy Wiseau in both the mainstream and underground press. The speculation has run rampant about both the man and his notorious work. Last year at Comic-Con, I came this close to securing an interview with Wiseau, but we just couldn't make our schedules sync up. But I did talk to him on the phone for a bit, and was like I'd put my ear up to the mouth of God.
Tommy Wiseau, producer/director/writer/star of cult classic The Room, will be present for a pair of screenings of his masterpiece at the Music Box on Feb. 12 -- and our very own Steve Prokopy will be conducting a rare Q&A with him!
The screenings are at 8pm and 11:30pm, with Q&As following each screening. Steve will be leading the questions for the 8pm show; AV Club Chicago's Steve Heisler will oversee the late show. Advance tickets are $15, or $20 with a copy of The Room on DVD -- which is a deal over Amazon's $8.99. And the whole thing is a bargain for lovers of fine cinema.
Less than a month ago, I named the ensemble drama Crossing Over as the single worst movie I saw in 2009. The overwrought film that dealt with the many aspects of immigration literally buried itself with do-gooder intention, terrible writing, and largely phoned-in performances, including what I would consider the single laziest and least-inspired work I've ever seen from Harrison Ford. But Ford's latest work, Extraordinary Measures, might be just a tiny bit worse, but not because Ford isn't trying. If anything, he's trying waaaaay too hard, as is the movie-of-the-week screenplay that lays the groundwork for one of the most overly sentimental films I've seen outside the Lifetime network in a very long time.
Sometimes it's better to stay in and watch a movie. You can curl up with your blanket and stare at the screen for hours wearing whatever you want to. What could be better? If you find yourself this weekend in this lazy but intelligent mood hop on your computer and watch the short local film Marlin. Starting today and ending on Sunday, January 17, director, writer, and producer Matt Dworzanczyk has made his first production available for stream on the film's official website. You can watch the film as is or have the option to watch it with Dworzanczyk's commentary via links from the site. The Columbia College graduate took heavy inspiration from folk and fairy tales to create a twisted story about a kidnapper Marlin who steals war orphans in hopes of using them to regain his past childhood memories. As his attempts fail, Marlin puts his last hopes on a little girl named Fawn who believes him to be Santa Claus. So gather those blankets, fire up your computer, and watch Marlin in the comfort of your own home while it's still available.
I've poured over all of the possible synonyms for the first word that popped into my brain to describe the long-overdue new movie from The Hughes Brothers (From Hell, Dead Presidents, Menace II Society, American Pimp), but nothing quite does it justice. So I'll just say it: The Book of Eli is a cool movie. It's not a great movie; it's far from a masterpiece. But it is unabashedly cool, and I don't use that word often. But when you combine one of the coolest American actors of his generation and pit him against one of the coolest British actors ever and then throw in Tom Waits in a supporting part, well, that math lands you squarely at Cool.
On February 26 and 27, threewalls gallery will host Chasing Two Rabbits as part of a two week animation festival featuring animation programs curated by local and national artists. Chasing Two Rabbits is a special event curated by Sonia Yoon and Shannon Stratton that pairs animators with live performances by sound artists and musicians.
Inspired by the experimental films of Norman McLaren, who combined abstract imagery (including scratching and painting into the film stock in earlier work, as well as paper cut-outs and live action and dance) with imaginative music and sound, Chasing Two Rabbits acts to pair artists in both genres to produce a unique event with sound and vision illuminating each other.
Currently threewalls is looking for proposals from both animators and sound artists and/or musicians who would like their work to be matched up with each other's. Pairings will be chosen from submissions, with animations provided to musicians and sound artists to review and score for live performance in February.
Animators can submit pieces for sound, no longer than 10 minutes in length, on DVD. Sound artists can send audio files (mp3, aiff, wav) on CD to Chasing Two Rabbits, c/o threewalls, 119 N Peoria #2D, Chicago, IL, 60607 or can send files or links to Shannon and Sonia c/o rabbits@three-walls.org. Materials must be submitted by this Friday, January 15.
It's no secret that the world is being bombarded with vampire movies and TV shows. The best of the recent crop is Sweden's Let the Right One In; there's no debating that. It's a fact, so shut up. But I put to you that coming in at a close second is this week's Daybreakers, a science-fiction terror film with a deep subtext about exploiting natural resources and human greed. Rightfully and blessedly so, the film also features nasty monsters, gore galore (both thanks to WETA Workshop), and an exceptional cast of actors, led by Ethan Hawke as a blood researcher and reluctant vampire (he refuses to drink human blood) determined to find a blood substitute before the human blood supply runs out in a world dominated by vampires.
Call me crazy, but I actually waited until the year was over before I finalized my Best Of... list. I managed to squeeze in a few more movies in the last two weeks of the year that were serious contenders for at least one of my lists. And if you think that a list of the 30 finest pieces of cinema of 2009 in overindulgent or just plain unnecessary, please feel free to stop at Number 10.
As in most years, I simply couldn't help myself — plus there were way too many great movies this year to ignore, and I'm not a big fan of simply piling all of the almost-made-it movies into a list. I've got 30 features, 15 documentaries, and 20 of the worst pieces of dung I got to endure in the past 365 days. With the first 10 of my Top 30, I've included excerpts of my original reviews. I'm sure you'll all disagree with my choices, so allow me to throw raw meat to the lions and wave a red rag in front of a bull. Enjoy.
I was fortunate enough to catch a press screening of Guy Ritchie's richly triumphant, energetic, and fiercely intelligent Sherlock Holmes a couple weeks ago, and everyone I've told how good it is has reacted in a combination of surprise and relief (with a twinge of doubt that will be erased as soon as they see the movie themselves). People clearly want this film to wok, but Guy Ritchie has been on a bit of a downward streak since Snatch, and it's satisfying to see him use his talents as a visual acrobat in combination with a script that almost couldn't fail in the hands of any competent director. I'm not putting Ritchie down by any stretch; to the contrary, his loose and kinetic style with the camera brings this story to life in ways the trailers don't even hint at.
After the wrapping paper has been discarded and Christmas dinner is nicely digested, a trip to the Music Box Theatre may be in order. On Christmas day the Music Box is screening a restored print of Jacques Tati's 1953 film Mr. Hulot's Holiday. The first of many Hulot appearances, Mr. Hulot's Holiday follows the pipe-smoking clown on his August vacation at a beach resort. His carefree demeanor quickly annoys his fellow posh and conservative vacationers and, of course, leads to some comedic moments. Though the film is not silent, Tati uses many classic silent comedy techniques such as sight gags and slapstick to get his Hulot in and out of trouble. As Roger Ebert said in his review of the film, "Is it 'funny'? No, it is miraculous." The new 35mm print looks drastically better than the previous. The print has been lightened so that the images in the film and crystal clear, and all major scratches have been removed. If you have seen this film before, the new print makes it feels like watching you're watching a completely different movie.
Mr. Hulot's Holiday plays at the Music Box through January 7th. Tickets are $9.25 and can be purchased at the Music Box box office.
Is there anything left to say about writer-director James Cameron's years-in-the-making epic Avatar? Well first of all let's look at something about that question and notice the term "writer-director." Avatar is not another special effects-driven studio film made by committee to please a target audience; instead, it is the vision of one man whose ability to wow and entertain us is nearly unrivaled in film history. Sure, thousands of people helped make this movie, but the spectacular 3-D images on the screen come straight from the brain of Cameron, who hasn't helmed a feature film in 12 years. Apparently he simply waited until technology could catch up to the worlds he wanted to create.
Now make no mistake, I have a small handful of real issues with Avatar, beginning and ending with the fact that it's so damn derivative — both of Cameron's previous work and some fairly high-profile works by other filmmakers — that it's almost distracting. I've read a couple of critics who compared the movie to Dances with Wolves, and that's not exactly right. Avatar isn't similar to Dances with Wolves; it's a fucking carbon copy of Dances with Wolves at times (I might also throw in a little The New World). Granted, there hasn't been a truly original movie plot for a big-budget studio film since the silent-film era, but holy Christ was I surprised to see this story of a military man sent in to tame an indigenous population and ends up "going native" after falling in love with one of the locals. Some people might not be able to forgive Cameron for this lift, but I eventually looked past it and into a world and palette of images that simply robbed me of words.
The centennial of Daniel Burnham's Plan of Chicago is coming to a close, and it wouldn't be complete without the first full-length feature of the man and his revolutionary vision for urban life.
Director and producer Judith Paine McBrien has compiles letters, official memos and Burnham's designs in Make No Little Plans: Daniel Burnham and the American City to present a portrait of his professional life from his birth in Upstate New York to his sudden death in 1912.
My first thought after viewing director Clint Eastwood's latest noble stab at accumulating more Oscars was "That was a story told." And before I write another word, let me make it clear that I am absolutely recommending Invictus, the story of how recently elected South African President Nelson Mandela found a way to unite all races in his nation using a sport closely identified with the white Afrikaners that oppressed the black population for decades under apartheid. And while there was never any doubt in my mind that Eastwood could tell this inherently interesting story in the manner we have become accustomed from one of America's greatest storytellers, I felt the film was a touch on the dry side to really pull me in the way I wanted to be.
I go back and forth on this point, because there are absolutely times when I was immersed in this true story. Eastwood wisely lets the story unfold organically, with no artificial sweeteners. He's simply too good to ruin a great story with such ploys. And the screenplay from Anthony Peckham (from the book Playing the Enemy by John Carlin) is smart in making sure every nuance of Mandela's thinking and the team's playing is examined and made clear. For example, Peckham understands that most Americans don't know a thing about the rules of rugby, so he includes a sequence in which the almost entirely white South African team goes to an all-black township to teach the children the game. And guess who else gets to learn the basic rules of the game as a result of this makeshift rugby camp?
Connections are the most important thing we make as human beings, but not everyone is capable or driven to make them. And then there are those select few human beings that actively discourage connections with other people or possessions. In the case of Ryan Bingham (played with a marvelous, understated blend of charm and contempt by George Clooney), the only connections that matter are those at airports (although being the seasoned business traveler that he is, he probably would laugh at the very idea of booking a flight that required a connection), and the only groups he wants to belong to usually involve a platinum card that is earned after millions of miles of flying or staying at the same hotel chain for the better part of a given year.
What is it with all of these end-of-days movies? A couple weeks ago, it was 2012, and early into next year, we have Legion (which I guess technically counts as pre-apocalypse) with Paul Bettany, and The Book of Eli, starring Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman. And while 2012 is about hope and action in the face of near-certain death, author Cormac (No Country for Old Men) McCarthy's The Road is about something much more serious and believable — the final existence of life on Earth. Existing in a world set afire by unnamed forces (the biblical undercurrent runs very close to the surface here), this story is about the lengths people would go to when they are starving, when all the planet's animals are dead, water is poison, and the only meat available to them is that of other human beings. The Road is certainly the grimmest movie of 2009, but there's an elegance and dignity to this telling of the novel (directed by The Proposition helmer John Hillcoat and adapted by Joe Penhall) that also makes it a work of great beauty in its own grey and haunting manner.
Local production house Split Pillow is releasing their latest, a locally-produced horror flick that tries to pay homage to the types of psychological/metaphysical thrillers that gave birth to the best of the horror genre. Complete with creaky mansion! Eye of the Sandman felt a bit like Gaslight + Frankenstein's monster + a Misfits song / Tongue-In-Cheek References to Convention. The premiere tonight at the Gene Siskel Film Center is sold out, but a third show was added for Saturday at 8pm.
It's difficult to write reviews of movies like Eye of the Sandman. Done on a low budget with local actors, obviously the job is not to judge it against the types of movies that Steve at the Movies over there in your right-hand column tackles. Yet having been subjected to the vanity projects of any number of aspiring musicians/filmmakers/artists, I don't have much patience for something that doesn't grab and hold my attention, and provide entertainment value worth the time I'm sacrificing. So before I popped the press screener of Eye of the Sandman into the DVD player, I decided my rubric would be: if I was standing outside the theater where the movie was playing, and the people in line asked me if they should be forking over cash or time to see the movie, what would I say?
Here's what I would say: It'll actually entertain you, one way or another. And it looks good.
The first time we see vampire Edward Cullen (still pale with ruby red lips, and hair slightly less crazy than in Twilight), he's walking through a high school parking lot in slow motion, looking like he just stepped out of a goth band's music video. For about 90 percent of New Moon, Jacob Black (a beefed up Taylor Lautner) is walking around shirtless, wearing only tattered sweatpants, looking like he just stepped off a gay porn set. Never having read any of Stephenie Meyer's novels about the tortured romance between Edward (Robert Pettinson) and human heroine Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), I may be a little late to this revelation, but seeing Edward and Jacob at their best and worst in New Moon made me realize that this is a film about the classic female dilemma — does she allow herself to fall for the more stable but still temperamental, hunky jock (he's also good with machines), or does she stray to the dark gothy side of life, possibly even becoming a vampire herself (which she seems more than willing to do)?
Cinema 16, a touring film program that brings the feeling of silent 20s film viewing to the modern age, is making their final stop here in Chicago November 25th at the Chopin Theatre. Cinema 16 picks three short films and finds one local act to make an original score to accompany the films, letting audience have an old movie house experience complete with cocktails. Chandelier will provide a live score to the three films with DJ Hunter Husar playing between screenings. Each film brings something different to the mix from the strange story-writing of William S. Burroughs in Junky's Xmas (1993), the dance-driven Oramunde (1933), or the first and final film by Wallace BermanAleph (1966).
The event is sponsored by Drambuie, who will be providing free cocktails throughout the night. Because of the free drinks provided this event is 21+. The screening starts at 7:30 pm and admission is free with RSVP.
Be honest. When you first saw the trailer for or clips from 2012, you got a little sexually excited, didn't you? It's OK, I won't tell anyone. At Comic-Con in July, when director and co-writer Roland Emmerich showed an extended clip of California essentially dying from the earthquake to end all earthquakes (literally), I voided my bowls, ran to the men's room, changed my adult Huggies, and voided them a second time. And as much as Emmerich has made some colossal missteps over the years (Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow and the worst of all, 10,000 B.C.), the man also knows how to make some interesting if not entirely engaging works, such as Universal Soldier, Stargate, Independence Day and The Patriot. The guy also knows how to blow stuff up on a spectacular scale; what he has failed to do time and time again is draw even somewhat believable characters that seem like anything more than gameboard pieces to be moved around, screaming, running, looking terrified, and occasionally die.
Local film Hannah Free is returning to Chicago for another engagement at the Gene Siskel Center November 27th through December 3rd. Hannah Free, which was shot in Chicago last year, has had a great reception elsewhere in the U.S. since it left Chicago after it's official debut. It won the "Best Feature Film" award in Philidelphia's Q Fest and "Best Narrative Feature Film" at Austin's Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, and has been screened at other film festivals across the country with great reception. The film is also currently nominated for five Midwest Independent Film Festival awards.
The film has been a huge hit in the lesbian community, mainly because of one of it's lead actresses Sharon Gless (of "Queer as Folk" fame). Hannah Free, based on the play of the same name, follows the love story of Hannah and Rachel from their first meeting at age ten to their later years.
Tickets are now on sale for the screenings via Ticketmaster and the Gene Siskel box office. General admission is $10, students are $7 and Film Center members are $5.
You can file this under "story so utterly ridiculous that it has to be true." This is one of those tales you may have heard your favorite neighborhood conspiracy theorist mutter about over the years. The idea that the U.S. Army had a small unit of men singled out because they possessed even a hint of psychic abilities seems preposterous, yet if even one such soldier proved to have such abilities, the military immediately attempting to somehow capture and weaponize these powers seems all too believable. And according to newspaper man Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor presumably standing in for source material author Jon Ronson), that's exactly what happened.
With Hollywood movies based on board games and ridiculous love premises in production, audience seem to be turning more and more to local independent cinema for their entertainment. The Indie Incubator Film Festival is ready to show Chicago's best short films in it's ninth year and promises to be better than ever. The festival shows anything (within appropriate means of course) from comedy, horror, sci-fi, you name it. The Chicago Film Office and the PBS show "Image Union" both have supported the festival in the past, most likely because of it's unique nature. Unlike a typical film festival, the Indie Incubator's selection is shown in a bar which breaks down the exclusive atmosphere that some of Chicago's other festivals can impress on the common movie goer. There's nothing like booze and movies to make a normal night turn into a great one. Every filmmaker takes home something, but the "Best of the Fest" winner is decided by a judges panel made up of professionals in the film industry.
The Indie Incubator Film Festival takes place at the Original Mother's on November 17th. Doors are at 7 pm and cover is free. This year's festival is hosted by filmmakers and comic book creators Matt Kubinski and Charles Klein. A dance party follows the screenings and awards ceremony.
Reeling, Chicago's 28th annual Lesbian and Gay International Film Festival, part of Chicago Filmmakers, begins Thursday, November 5 with more than 150 films showcasing gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender films from all over the world from social documentaries and introspective featurettes to fusions of musicals, drama and horror flicks.
There'll be 59 different screenings, 33 narrative feature films, 10 documentaries, 16 screenings of short films and about seven after-parties at venues including Lincoln Park's Landmark Century Centre Cinema, 2828 N. Clark St., the South Loop's Film Row Cinema at Columbia College, 1104 S. Wabash Ave., Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave., and Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark St.
I don't think I'm the only person who has a deep philosophical interest in carny culture. Otherwise, why would the Department of Cultural Affairs organize a month of carny-related arts programming? The DCA, in conjunction with Silent Theatre Company, is putting on a play of sorts, called Carnivale Nocturne, surrealistically recreating the underground world of a traveling carnival. With a live band and physical acts of carnival performance, this original dark fable by the STC ensemble, directed by Tonika Tordova, combines the styles of Tim Burton and Edward Gorey, telling the story of a curse between a group of fire breathers, fortune tellers, bestial tamers and natural freaks.
Perfect for Halloween: filmmaker EJ Park produced a documentary about Ari Lehman, who as a 13-year-old portrayed the young Jason Voorhees in the original Friday the 13th. "Now a struggling musician, he seeks to reclaim his momentary stardom -- transitioning from Jewish reggae to 'horror rock' as the lead singer of FirstJason."
Let's start by putting aside the ethical decision to release this film in the first place. I have less of a problem with Sony releasing this film so soon after Michael Jackson's death and more with the fact that the unpolished nature of the work being shown would never have seen the light of day if Jackson were still alive. The performer was a perfectionist to a fault, and having footage of him at anything less than his absolute best simply wouldn't have been allowed to be viewed by the public. But Michael Jackson is not in control of his image anymore, or even his own output.
This Is It is the first of what I'm sure will be many film and music releases that will now make their way to the public, and you know what? I thought it was pretty strong material. You have to remember that unpolished Michael Jackson is better than 95 percent of most other singers and performers in the world. The footage is taken from a series of rehearsals from March to June 2008, but the stuff I liked the most are the unguarded moments where Jackson issues forth orders to his band, his dancers, and his production director Kenny Ortega (who also assembled this film).
News broke this week that the Chicago Outdoor Film Festival may not return next summer. The popular film series is one of many events and services on the list to be cut in the City's 2010 budget; other cuts include Venetian Night and the Chicago Criterium bike races. The Mayor's Office of Special Events told Reel Chicago that the film festival was cut to help reduce a $512 million budgetary shortfall. The $300,000 event cost more than was covered by corporate sponsorships.
Fans of watching movies in the park will still have an option, though: the Chicago Park District's Movies in the Park series, which spokesperson Marta Juaniza confirmed was still on the schedule for next year. Since its budget comes from the Park District instead of Special Events, it wasn't under the same pressures as the Outdoor Film Festival.
Movies in the Parks screens mostly kids fare -- recent animated films, broad comedies and occasional blockbusters that will appeal to the families with young children who make up the bulk of the audience. Whether such movies will interest folks who came out to see classic films at the Outdoor Film Festival is anybody's guess.
"It's hard to say, because it's a downtown audience versus out in the neighborhoods, but we do still plan to support the program," Juaniza said. The 2010 schedule for Movies in the Parks hasn't been released yet.
When it comes to biography films, the absolute worst thing you can be is pointless. But in so many ways, this look at the famous years of Amelia Earhart's life and career is exactly that. When a historical figure's accomplishments are so well documented and their demise so infamous, you don't need to spend as much time detailing the events that are in every history book. In fact, it's an excellent opportunity to get inside the head and heart of the subject. What's particularly frustrating about Amelia is that I know so little about Earhart as a child and her upbringing — all of the things that brought her to such notoriety — yet the film decides to introduce us to her after she's already fairly famous and well on her way to becoming the most famous woman in America.
Unbeknownst to this writer, my favorite theater in the city the Music Box also has a film distribution company called Music Box Films. Since 2007 Music Box Films has exposed American audiences to some of the premiere foreign cinema through television, DVD, and screenings at movie houses across the country. Most recently, they acquired the rights to distribute the film adaptation of the Steig Larrsson novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The novel, which is a part of Larrsson's posthumous Millennium trilogy, was one of the best-selling novels across the globe, and the film itself has been greeted with great success overseas in Scandinavia. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is set to hit independent theaters in March of 2010, so if you're a fan of the novel or the story in general keep an eye out. Though the trailer is in Swedish it looks like it's going to be a great foreign release.
Tonight's the night for documentaries about icons, apparently. You have two to choose from:
One Fast Move or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur documents Jack Karouac's life post-On the Road, as he recoiled from sudden fame and retreated to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin in the Big Sur woods of northern California, chronicled in his semi-autobiographical novel Big Sur It screens tonight only, at 8pm at Webster Place, 1471 W. Webster St. Tickets are $10.
Hori Smoku Sailor Jerry is a film about Norman K. "Sailor Jerry" Collins, the legendary tattoo artist and pioneer of mid-century American tattoo culture. The Metro, 3730 N. Clark St., hosts a screening tonight, with a Q&A with director Erich Weiss and Sailor Jerry Rum drinks afterward. It's free with RSVP, but you have to be 21 or older.
Director and co-writer Spike Jonze and co-writer Dave Eggers (Away We Go) have given birth to a type of film that defies conventional film criticism. To say you loved, like, were neutral on, or hated their adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are doesn't quite get the job done. No, this work demands a far purer emotional response and deep psychological self-examination to get to the heart of why this telling of this very simple story gets to the root of what we are as human beings. Jonze might be better at this than any director working today. He doesn't thrust cold, therapeutic analysis at us. With films like Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, he takes us by the hand and guides us into the often-scary world inside our collective mind and shared experiences as both children and adults.
With Where the Wild Things Are, Jonze and Eggers acknowledge the very real and often totally overlooked (at least in movies) fact that children's minds work in an awesomely different way than the minds of adults. So often in films, kids are written simply as tiny adults — smarter and more in control of their thoughts and feelings than any kid I've ever met. I'm not saying there aren't smart children; there are. But no matter how intelligent a child may be, you can't accelerate maturity. Even a kid with a high IQ can have a temper tantrum. In fact, the odds are pretty great that they will. In Wild Things, Max (played by the gifted Max Records) may or may not be smart, but he is highly creative and has an imagination that may be so highly refined it might be a hindrance rather than an asset. Dressed in his wolf costume for dinner, he climbs on a counter and demands that his mother (Catherine Keener) "Feed me, woman!" in his most booming voice, her reaction is a mixture of anger and humiliation (her new boyfriend — Mark Ruffalo — is in the next room).
Today marks the first full day of screenings for the Chicago International Film Festival, this year a rather subdued affair all taking place at the AMC River East theaters. There are slightly fewer offerings this year, but in most cases, there are more showings of each film, which is always a good thing. Forgiving the open-night selection Motherhood, an abysmal self-important treatise on hipster parents starring Uma Thuman (more on the film when it opens in a few weeks), the rest of the festival is a promising mixture of accessible art house fare, a solid selection of foreign films that have been gathering acclaim on the festival circuit, and even a couple of films that feature Oscar-hopeful performances. Here's a quick rundown of some of the films playing in the first week of CIFF that you might want to consider checking out.
Antichrist
In what was the most divisive film at the Cannes Film Festival, and may end up being the most divisive of the year, period, Lars Von Trier's Antichrist opens with what is the most beautiful prologue you will see in 2009. It ends with acts of sexual brutality (inflicted by a man and a woman against each other and themselves) that are difficult to describe even on the filterless internet. In between these unforgettable book ends is actually where the controversy occurs. There's a whole lot of psychobabble between a distraught wife (the wonderfully neurotic/psychotic Charlotte Rampling) and her therapist husband (the remarkable Willem Dafoe). I found the on-the-go, free-flowing analysis fascinating; others have found it mind-numbingly inane and insufferable. And I don't think I'd pick of fight with people who feel that way. The cabin-in-the-foggy-woods setting and the bizarre, excessive mutilations in the film's final minutes gave the entire experience a fairy tale quality to it, and I think it's possible that Antichrist actually hypnotized me. If less intriguing and talented actors were at the center of this movie, I don't think I would have liked it as much. But Dafoe and Rampling maneuver through this murky plot like masters. If you have the stomach for the violence, the rest of Antichrist will probably impress you. My first reaction after the film ended was that it was neither as bloody or shocking as I'd been led to believe. It was the emotional trauma of the entire work that stuck with me and not simply the shocking visuals. Give this one a try, if only to celebrate the fact that Von Trier is still making movies that people cannot stop talking about.
There are two things you need to do before seeing Zombieland for the first of what will inevitably be many times. The first thing is to erase the memory of Shaun of the Dead, if only for the 90-minute duration of this film. Despite both works being very funny, bloody and full of zombies, they are two very different creatures. Zombieland is not the American version of Shaun — it's certainly not trying to be — and any comparisons between the two are foolish and lazy. The second thing you need to do is stay as far away from any cast list you might have access to for this film. If you've already seen a reference to a certain extended cameo in this film, they you've ruined one of the truly great sequences in any film of 2009 for yourself. Maybe you stumbled upon it by accident, who knows. But going in not knowing gave me one of the true joys of going to a movie this year. And here's the thing, somebody actually told me about the appearance, and I just plain forgot. Thank god for that. My point is, go into Zombieland pure and with a head just empty enough to truly appreciate what director Ruben Fleischer and writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick have carefully constructed — a film that appears to be all about the fun-filled world of the zombie Apocalypse but has a little something for your mind and soul as well. You will laugh, without a doubt, but you're also going to feel something for these characters and their individual situations.
The Chicago Public Radio show Sound Opinions is giving Chicago the opportunity to see David Byrne. On the big screen. Sound Opinions is hosting a screening of the 80s concert movie Stop Making Sense at the IMAX Theater at Nay Pier October 1st. Stop Making Sense is a live Talking Heads show that grows from just Byrne and his acoustic guitar to one of the craziest stage set-ups in rock history. The Talking Heads teamed up with director Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs, Rachel Getting Married) to create one of the most unique concert documentaries ever filmed, with large-scale sets and a simple yet aesthetically pleasing set up. The film has been digitally remastered so that the sound is up to par for IMAX standards.
The screening starts at 7:30 pm. Pre-sale tickets are sold out right now, but may be available at the door. To those who already have tickets, moviegoers who dress up like David Byrne (an over-sized white pant suit), will be entered to win an Altec Lansing premium sound system.
UPDATE - Tickets are now on sale for a 10pm screening of Stop Making Sense. Tickets are $11 and can be purchased here. Sound Opinions hosts Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis will be at both screenings to introduce the film. Get them before they sell out again!
Films like this remake of Fame are frustrating for so many reasons, chief among them is that it's clear they aren't trying particularly hard to be great. Contrary to foggy memories, the 1980 version of Fame isn't that great a movie. It's sort of the prequel to A Chorus Line, showing a group of dancers, singers, musicians, actors, and other artistic types at a high school for the performing arts, where a group of teachers ply them with skills, push them harder than they've ever been pushed, and load them up with all of the cliches about effort and talent and placing the art before the celebrity they may or may not achieve. If even this plot description makes you roll your eyes, imagine the experience of watching the film.
Hey everyone. Before we dive into this week's mainstream and art house offerings, I wanted to alert you to a neat little film festival taking root in Chicago for the first time this year at the Music Box Theatre for one week. The Chicago United Film Festival features a weird little mixture of documentaries, shorts and features, but there are some gems in the mix (at least among the films I've seen or am familiar with). The crown jewel of the bunch is the Jaws documentary The Shark Is Still Working: The Impact and Legacy of Jaws, narrated by the late Roy Scheider and featuring interviews with many of those responsible for getting that film made. But the movie also examines the new redefining of the summer blockbuster as a result of that film. It's playing three times this coming weekend, and you should absolutely see it. As a bonus film, Friday night at midnight sees a screening of the original Jaws in all its bloody glory.
I'm also going to highly recommend the doc The Providence Effect, which tells the almost impossible to believe story of Chicago's own Providence St. Mel school and its 30-year, 100 percent college placement record. Their way of teaching and putting much of the responsibility of learning on the students and their parents is remarkable and it is baffling why other schools aren't following this model. I'll have a longer review soon, when the film opens in wider release.
For information on purchasing tickets and the full screening schedule, go to theunitedfest.com/chicago/. There's some good stuff here, and if I wasn't heading off to Fantastic Fest in Austin next week, I'd be hitting quite a bit of it.
I've spoken to enough directors over the last 11 years or so to know that scraping together a handful of short films and getting them shown at festivals has been the path that many successful filmmakers have taken to land them their first feature film job. About five years ago, I saw a wonderful live-action short called Cashback, from writer-director Sean Ellis. About two years following the short's acclaimed journey through the festival circuit, Ellis took his short and made it the centerpiece of a feature-length work of the same name that garnered a great deal of acclaim from most critics who saw it (including me). Ellis has since directed another feature, but continues making shorts as well. In 2005, writer-director-student Shane Acker developed a groundbreaking and much talked about animated short called 9, which showed up in animation and other film festivals. It caught the attention of Tim Burton and others who were eager to work with Acker and add him to the growing list of directing greats in the animation universe. The result of this process is a feature-length version of 9 that does not feature material from the short, although it certainly does take place with the same lead character in the same post-apocalyptic world. It's actually kind of rare that a first-time director will get to make an enhanced version of their own short as their premiere movie, but both Ellis and Acker are the worthy exceptions to the standard operating procedure.
Let's face it, Hollywood is running out of original ideas. How many more Saw movies must we see before we lose our own minds? The cinema world may look bleak, but some people are looking to change that by getting the creative process started earlier than college.
Fresh Films brings together high school teens for one unique experience. Since 2002 the company, along with Dreaming Tree Films, has been pushing teens across the country to get creative and make their own films. In one week they must write, cast, shoot, and edit their film. It's enough to pull your own teeth out, but the end product for the Chicago group is not only hilarious but well done. The team entered their comedy short The Substitute into the Airheads Out of Control competition, which is judged by Funny of Die creators Adam McKay and Chris Henchy. In the Substitute a classroom full of students is subjected to humiliation and confusion by their very strange substitute teacher. The Chicago team not only got to work with professional film technology but also with professional actors, the highlight being directing comedy actor Rob Riggle (recently in the Hangover and a cast member on the Daily Show).
Watch The Substitutehere on the Fresh Films website and vote for them to win. Chicago's film is neck to neck with the two others it's competing against and needs the extra push! Plus, every vote enters you in a contest to win a Flip Ultra HD camera. But hurry, voting ends tomorrow, September 10th.
Have you ever wondered what Walter from The Big Lebowski (the angry Vietnam vet played by John Goodman) would look like wearing pasties? Well, how about if Walter were played by a burlesque professional by the name of Wham Bam Pam? Titillating, perhaps?
The workplace is undoubtedly a great environment to base a whole lot of comedy, and the first time writer-director Mike Judge wrote a film about how much genuine inanity was borne in the world of white-collar business, he called it Office Space, and it was good. Judge had already established his place as a scary observer of human behavior with Beavis & Butt-Head (both the TV show and the feature film), but Office Space was so right on the money that a generation of middle managers and cubicle dwellers turned the film into their source for the finest quotes the world had to offer at the time. Judge hasn't exactly transplanted the Office Space template and moved it into a factory assembly line setting for his latest film Extract, but the results are just as funny, even if some of the best humor takes place outside of the work environment.
The first thing you notice about Extract is that the employees actually seem to like their boss, Joel (played by Jason Bateman), who built this small, privately owned factory that makes a special brand of extracts with flavor that lasts longer. Joel has done well for himself, but he's frustrated because his wife (Kristen Wiig) hasn't slept with him in weeks. After a serious industrial accident involving an employee (Clifton Collins, Jr.) losing a testicle, a temp shows up to work on the line in the form of Mila Kunis' Cindy, a seemingly sweet, beautiful woman who seems genuinely interested in Joel's line of work. After some prompting from his best friend Dean (the bearded Ben Affleck, as a sort of stoner philosopher), Joel realizes that the only way he could even dream of cheating on his wife with Cindy (he kind of makes that leap with consulting Cindy first, but let's not get lost in the details) is if his wife cheated on him first. One male prostitute (the hilarious Dustin Milligan) later, Joel is ready to make a play for Cindy, but nothing in this movie is that easy. In fact, that's part of the problem I had with Extract.
Hey, everyone. Thanks to a combination of me missing a couple of screenings and a couple films not being screened for critics at all this week, the column this week is a little light. That said, I've heard nothing but great things about the documentary It Might Get Loud, opening at the Landmark Century Center Cinema today. From director Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth), the film is about nothing less than the evolution of the sound and styles of the electric guitar, featuring a gathering of three of the guitar's most influential players: Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White, who not only talk but also jam together. I cannot wait to see this film.
Under the category of running scared we have two horror films sneaking onto screens today that were too underwhelmed by their own magical powers to show the critics (I'll still see them, mind you). Rob Zombie's Halloween 2 and The Final Destination (in 3-D!) were kept from critical eyes so that we wouldn't muddy the opening weekend. The truth is, I've enjoyed most of the Final Destination movies, so it really surprises me that they didn't screen this one, especially considering the 3-D aspect. Anyway, hope that helps you in planning your weekend movie-going endeavors.
Taking Woodstock
You have to give Taiwan-born director Ang Lee credit for at least one thing. The guy never, ever repeats himself. Lee has been making movies for less than 20 years, with about half of his productions being English-language films that have been highly regarded for their sensitivity. Of course, he also like to kick ass with such works as the original Hulk movie and one of the finest wire-fu offerings ever made, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. If you haven't seen them, his earliest films — Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman — are equally beautiful, funny and moving efforts that transition nicely into his tellings of Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, Ride with the Devil and his masterpiece, Brokeback Mountain. His last movie, Lust, Caution, was explicit in its sexuality and its emotional nakedness, but many of the critical press rejected it. I found myself enraptured by its beauty, lust and fascinating wartime story. With Taking Woodstock, Lee returns to his lighter origins, and I think it suits him, at least for now.
My greatest regret going into writing this review is that I've only seen this film once so far, at Comic-Con about three weeks ago. While writer-director Quentin Tarantino has certainly crafted films that almost demand that you see them two, three, four times before you really soak in all of their nuances, his latest, Inglourious Basterds, is a beast of an entirely different nature. And seeing twice before even legally being allowed to discuss it seems necessary. So I guess I'm breaking the law, but here goes.
Basterds feels like the film that Tarantino has been building steam toward his entire career, which I guess goes without saying since it is his latest work. But I'm talking about something different. I don't think Tarantino could have made a film with this scope and level of sophistication without having gone through some of the finest trail-and-error exercises a filmmaker in the modern age has ever gone through. There's a patience and elegance to Basterds that I simply wasn't prepared for. Sure, the blood flows like a geyser at times, but not nearly as much as I thought it would, which makes the film infinitely better. You are actually able to settle down with the movie's many American, German and British characters, and get comfortable in their presence by simply listening to them chat and interact with each other. Then, when the violence begins, it breaks the serenity and lets Hell rush out until it consumes you. Not to be overly dramatic or anything, but that's really what it felt like.
I've seen this film twice now, under fairly similar circumstances in two different cities, and I'm really dying to see this very different take on the "alien invasion" style of film plays to a paying audience that really has no idea just what kind of film District 9 transforms into before your very eyes. I'm tempted to keep this review extremely short. I've said this before about other films, but in the case of this one, I think it's crucial that you know as little going in as possible. What you have seen on the film's various websites and different commercials and trailers is certainly a part of what District 9 is about, but the marketing people for this film have been almost incomprehensibly wise about not showing too much. And what they have shown you isn't even a fraction of the most interesting elements of this seriously well-made science fiction epic that combines politics, social commentary, aliens, extreme cartoony violence, and one of the best classic Hitchcock-ian, wrong-man-pursued plots in recent memory.
Hey everyone. I just wanted to toss in a couple notes before we move on to the reviews regarding some recent headlines that have moved across my desk in the last couple of days.
For those of you who were at my Ain't It Cool screening of Public Enemies at the end of June, I told the very true story of how John Landis' The Blues Brothers and Michael Mann's Thief were the primary reasons when I was in high school that I wanted to move to Chicago. When the summer of 1986 came around, I had just graduated high school and was mentally preparing for my move from a suburb of Washington, D.C., to Northwestern University in an immediate northern suburb of Chicago. In June 1986, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, written and directed by the recently departed John Hughes, came out, and I went from planning a big move to Chicago to actually having a blueprint for some of the things I wanted to do when I got there. Chicago stopped being a big, scary city and became a place where I was going to have fun for a very long time. A year or so later, my all-time favorite Hughes film was released, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, an absolute holiday standard in my house every Thanksgiving.
Feel free to go to a thousand other sites to get a complete list of all the movies John Hughes directed, wrote, or otherwise had a hand in. But favorite films and favorite directors aren't about lists; they're about the personal connection you have to that person's work. And these two films hold a very special place in my life, as do many of Hughes' works. I vividly recalled seeing The Breakfast Club and immediately slotting in my friends into the different roles and types presented in that film. It also made me realize that it was OK for someone under the age of 18 to have grown-up thoughts. Even reading the David Bowie lyrics that open that movie made me shutter and think, This filmmaker knows me: "And these children that you spit on / As they try to change their worlds / Are immune to your consultations / They're quite aware of what they're going through." Indeed.
In 2006, former Chicagoan and Found Magazine co-founder Jason Bitner's LaPorte, Indiana placed a focus on the townspeople of the book's namesake, a small town in Northwest Indiana, though photos found in the vast collection of Frank Pease the town's long-time portrait photographer. In my review back then, I said "LaPorte, Indiana could very easily have been all about mocking the yokels -- there are a couple pretty goofy looking folks in there -- but Bitner's commentary-less presentation avoids all that and instead provides a venue for us to examine these people without irony or judgment. It's a wonderful document of a place and time not so far removed from where we are now."
Now, the book is becoming a documentary film. Bitner has teamed up with Emmy-nominated editor and first-time director Joe Beshenkovsky to film interviews with 15 of the subjects from the Frank Pease photos, and follow the lives of several young LaPorteans as they graduate from high school, get married and settle down or move away.
Falling somewhere between The Straight Story, Errol Morris' films, and the Up series, LaPorte, Indiana will help shed some light on how communities help shape their citizens and how people make the decision to stay in the town where they were raised, or why they decide to find their way elsewhere.
Bitner and Beshenkovsky are looking for help funding the project through Kickstarter; you can provide the funds to help finish the film, and maybe even get your name in the credits. The deadline for their goal to raise $7,500 is August 21.
Hey, everyone. Sorry about not having any reviews for you last week, but my prep work for and travels to Comic-Con 2009 basically wrecked my writing time. But because this week is kind of light on the new releases (at least new releases that were screened in advance for critics), I've included all of the films I should have had for you last weekend. So, Funny People opens this week, and all the rest of the films in this column opened last week. Enjoy.
It's that time of year again. Chicago-centric non-profit filmmaker collective, Split Pillow is seeking proposals for their fifth annual Chicago360 film series. This year's theme: "Aliens in the City."
While trying to incorporate the intricacies of Windy City life with this year's intergalactic theme, filmmakers are asked to submit their documentary description, production schedule and estimated budget, among other guidelines by Aug. 17, 2009. The lucky five to be approved for filming will have Split Pillow pick up the tab of production for the 10-20 minute documentary film to be screened in various Chicago venues in Fall 2010.
fotomattic captured this photo of the MC at Tuesday's record-setting outdoor screening of the Marx Brothers classic "Duck Soup." Over 4000 people showed up to break the Guiness World Record for "the most people wearing Groucho Marx glasses."
Split Pillow's Chicago360 film project is calling for proposals! Submit proposals for short films that explore undiscovered aspects of the city. This year's films will focus on the theme of "Aliens in the City" and should plan to be 10-20 minutes long. Submit by August 17; five filmmakers will be selected to go forth with their visions and have their work shown around the city next year. More details.
The Kartemquin film In the Family was nominated for "Outstanding Informational Programming - Long Form" by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences this past Tuesday, July 14th. This Chicago-made film had previously been a finalist for the NIHCM Foundation's Health Care Radio and Television Journalism Award and premiered in 2008 on PBS' series "P.O.V."
In the Family follows director and producer Joanna Rudnick after she finds out she's tested positive for the breast cancer gene at the young age of 27. Rudnick battles with the emotional and physical actions she must take in fear of this gene becoming deadly. Should she take the preventative measure of having her breast removed, or should she hope that this gene remains passive? Because of her unique situation the documentary also raises questions about the necessity of predictive genetic testing. Rudnick also plays a huge part in Kartemquin Films, acting as a producer for the company since 2003.
The News and Documentary Emmy Awards will be presented on Monday, September 21st in the Time Warner Center in New York City.
The Bicycle Film Festival schedule for Chicago has been announced! It opens with an outdoor showing of Pee Wee's Big Adventure and then on to tons of films and some serious after-parties. The festival is at several venues around the city Aug. 12-16.
One of the many great joys of watching the sixth, and most deeply satisfying, installment in the Harry Potter film series is watching returning director David Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves beef up characters whose roles (in the movies, at least) have been soundly in the background up to this point. I liked watching members of the Weasley family finally be brought to the foreground in anticipation of major contributions from them in the final two-part Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows finale. I was particularly impressed with the way Tom Felton has transformed Draco Malfoy from a sneering bully into a genuine source of tortured menace, worthy of being both feared and pitied. But more than anything, it's great watching every element of the sweeping overall story come together so wonderfully and have the acting by the one-time child performers be able to match the power of the maturing plotlines.
About a month ago, there were sightings of a film crew lurking around the Bridgeview Bank in Uptown, shooting scenes for what was rumored to be a new "Green Hornet" web series connected to the film being developed by Seth Rogan. We tracked down that film crew to find out what's going on.
The Green Hornet web series turns out to be produced by local indie producer Eric Neal. He and Pek Pongpaet, who plays the Hornet's sidekick, Kato, were nice enough to answer a few questions.
So, first things first: Is this directly tied to the Green Hornet film?
Eric Neal: Absolutely not. We've been very careful to let anyone and everyone involved know that we're in no way connected with the film. In fact, we'd only referred to the show by a psuedonym title until just recently, to keep those lines from crossing. Our show has been in the works for some years and it's just coincidence -- or fate? I don't know -- that both versions are congealing at the same time.
A review of Sacha Baron Cohen's latest sort-of documentary featuring a character that brings out the very worst in American behavior and prejudices is set loose on the world this weekend, and while there are many differences between the flaming Austrian fashion show host Brüno and Kazakhstani traveler Borat (or the British hip-hop wannabe Ali G, for that matter), it's the things that are similar to Cohen's other characters that make the film work so well despite a few shortcomings. With the very clear objective of finding the ultra-shallow and the wildly homophobic in the world today (Brüno does travel the world a bit in this film), Cohen is a master manipulator and instigator; he also feeds off other people's discomfort, and I completely understand how addictive that is, because I certainly enjoy watching it. And while a review for this film could easy just be me describing or transcribing joke after joke, I'm not going to ruin any more of the fun than the trailer already has. Well, maybe a little.
It is hard enough to break into the acting scene without having to deal with searching for and deciphering audition requests. Now Chicago actors and actresses are getting some help from TheatreInChicago.com and its new Auditions Page. A comprehensive list provides Equity and Non-equity theater and film auditions throughout Chicago, making it easy for actors to find job opportunities.
The Auditions Page is updated frequently, and each listing shows all the information actors need such as audition material, time commitment, locations, play and character summary, and who to contact. Right now there are auditions separated into Equity, Non-equity, Dance, and Film, but another section for technicians, directors, etc. will be debuted soon. On top of auditions and job postings, there will be a Resources Page available to locate head-shot photographers, acting classes, and various other networking tools.
No sign-up or registration is necessary to use this web page, so actors can start using it today. For further questions, inquiries, or suggestions, please email auditions@theatreinchicago.com.
Although the trailers for Michael Mann's latest slice of magnificence emphasize the more action-oriented scenes from his film about the latter days of bank robber and cultural icon John Dillinger, in truth the strength of Public Enemies is not entirely in those moments. There are certainly a handful of bank robberies and moments where law enforcement corner Dillinger and his gang that feature some ferocious gunplay, but it's what happens between the scenes of bullets flying that impressed me the most and helps this become one of the greatest films about the birth of modern day crime and crime-fighting that I've ever seen.
Public Enemies also serves as a much-needed reminder that Johnny Depp gained his reputation as one of the greatest actors living today by actually acting and not simply creating real-life cartoon characters with pale skin, funny makeup and wigs. With Mann's guidance, Depp breathes life and soul into a man who has served a lengthy prison sentence and learned much while behind bars about military-style bank heists and what's important to him. Depp doesn't play Dillinger as overly tough or as some ridiculously suave ladies man. His flaws and qualities aren't nearly as easy to spot immediately, but Depp does a fantastic job of parceling out personality details about John Dillinger in a way that we grow eager to discover more as the film goes on.
Before we dive into this week's offerings, I wanted to tell you about a little movie that you've probably never heard of (or only heard about in whispered tones in dark alleys) that is finally, after six long years of playing almost non-stop in a Los Angeles theater, making its way to a screen in Chicago. The film is called The Room, and that's really all you need to know about it, other than it's playing at midnight shows at the Music Box Theatre June 26 and 27, and July 24 and 25.
I get mad when I see critics attempt to review or even summarize The Room because it's impossible to capture in words just how truly bad this movie from writer-director-producer-star Tommy Wiseau is. I love that Chicago audiences will finally get a chance to watch this movie, one that needs to be seen in the comfort and safety of a crowd. The film is simply too dangerous to watch alone at home. That being said, the only thing greater than The Room as a theatrical event are the extras on the DVD release, which features an interview with Wiseau that is beyond hilarious. Free promo DVDs will be given out to the first 50 people at each Music Box performance.
Wiseau himself has taken to calling the film a dark comedy, which is a load of crap. I firmly believe he thought he was making high drama when he spent what I'm hearing is millions of dollars making this movie. But don't take my word for it. This film has a celebrity endorsement from none other than Paul Rudd, who first brought the film to my attention a couple years ago. More recently, Rudd's I Love You, Man director John Hamburg told me, "I've been in Paul's bedroom. He has a little table next to his side of the bed, and the only thing on that table is a copy of The Room." There you have it. If someone told me today that The Room was an elaborate hoax, made deliberately bad to make people laugh, I'd almost believe it, but not quite. There are things in this film that you just couldn't make this bad on purpose. See it and then see it again. You've been warned and encouraged; the rest is up to you. All else opening this week pales in comparison, but here it is anyway.
Film festivals can be intimidating, even for a seasoned filmophile. There's the stars, the crowds, the fear of not knowing enough to fit in with the "cool kids." Gen Art Chicago makes the concept of a film festival a little less intimidating with it's yearly Gen Art Film Festival. Gen Art is hosting it's third annual screening series at local film houses known for premiering the nation's best in independent cinema. The film festival and Gen Art are known for bringing unique independent art and films to Chicago, coupling bigger name features with short films to expose a mass audience to emerging filmmakers. This year's line-up includes the sure to be summer hit (500) Days of Summer as well as three other up and coming feature movies.
Each screening also has an after-party, hosted at some of the city's hottest bars and clubs. With tickets for the screenings and after parties for only $20 per screening, it's easy to feel glamorous without the price tag attached it to. The festival starts Tuesday, June 23rd and runs until Saturday, June 27th. A full listing for the Gen Art Film Festival can be seen after the jump.
Before I begin my review, I must vent: I just finished watching the hideous incarnation of "At the Movies" with Bens Lyons & Mankiewicz (I watch it purely for scientific purposes, like observing the mating habits of wild slugs). Anyway, these two turd burglars (in particular Mankiewicz) did something I consider something above and beyond the realm of their normal level of assholishness: they spoiled a significant plot point about the Duncan Jones film Moon. Yes, the plot point in question is probably all over the internet for those who love the spoilers, and yes, to a degree, the trailer gives away that something stinky is up in Denmark. But the trailer wisely keeps the film's mysteries cloaked and uncertain; it's actually a magnificent trailer that is even more misleading than you might think and I love it for that very reason. Regardless, the Bens flat out said what the film's only real twist is and they are a couple of dicks for doing it.
That said, I don't think anything could truly ruin the experience of watching Moon, one of the finest works of cinematic science fiction that I've seen in a very long time. I've been telling people that it's the best sci-fi work I've seen in five years, but that timeframe isn't really tied to a particular movie. For all I know, it's the best science fiction film made in 20 years. I keep searching my personal databank to think of a film set in the future that I've enjoyed more, and I have to go back to some major league classic to find one. Like most of my favorite films in this genre, Moon is based on reality. I thoroughly believe that if scientists discovered that the surface of the moon had an energy source stored in it (called Helium 3), it wouldn't take long for a corporation or two to find ways to set up massive mining operations to scrape off the moon's surface, process the material, and ship it back to Earth. I also firmly believe that said corporations would be so cheap that they would use as few employees as possible to man these operations, maybe as few as one worker.
Cinema/Chicago, the presenter of the Chicago International Film Festival, is once again teaming up with Chicago's various foreign consulates and cultural organizations to present the sixth annual International Summer Screening Program at the Chicago Cultural Center. Showing a film from a different country every Wednesday, the International Summer Screening program seeks to spread the word about national cinema in the Chicagoland area before the International Film Festival starts in October. This year's selection ranges from cute love stories to twisted thrillers and gory action flicks. From the wide range of genres and subject matters, there's sure to be one film to capture your attention.
Every event is free to the public. A full listing of films can be seen after the jump and on Slowdown, or at the official International Connections page.
As the summer solstice creeps upon us, we look to our neighborhood parks for new games to play and people to meet. But maybe we should all head over to the Gene Siskel Film Center to get an idea of how a real sport is played. Left Field is a documentary about that sport that both terrified and excited us in grade school -- kickball. Played in an almost anarchistic sense of competition, Chicago transplants Sarah Hart and KC Haywood find themselves in the midst of the most spirited kickball league in Illinois and end up loving every minute of it. The league grows larger and these kickball aficionados soon find themselves inundated with rules and competition instead of good old fashion playground fun. Filmmakers Ben Steger and Chris Batte followed the Humboldt Park kickball league that included KC Hollywood's team the Fighting Cocks for over two years, even going as far to join the team later in the shooting. It's a film full of comradery, team spirit, and at times tragedy but the true essence of the game is never lost.
Left Field will be screening at the Gene Siskel Film Center Sunday, June 14 at 5:30 pm and Monday, June 15th at 6 pm. Advance tickets can be purchase on Left Field's official website, which is recommended since this movie sells out fast.
The not-so-big secret about the 1974 version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (which was the actual title) was that the heist itself was just an excuse to get to know some really interesting and very human characters on both sides of the crime equation. Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw would have been nearly as interesting playing two people checking out library books as they were as a transit cop and subway hostage taker, respectively. Watching that film today, the stakes seem ludicrously low and New York is a very different place.
The 2009 edition of 1 2 3 is a beast of a different nature, but director Tony Scott is wise enough to at least leave the fundamentals the same as he navigates Brian Helgeland's far more dense screenplay. The focus is still on characters, even if the characters aren't nearly as compelling as they were 35 years ago. Much has been updated to this story of group of angry New Yorkers who hijack a subway car filled with passengers and demand a massive sum of money in one hour before they start killing hostages, and for the most part I didn't mind the changes. The head of the criminals, Ryder (played by John Travolta), has motivations behind his actions that seem solid. The film also acknowledges the role that modern telecommunications would play in such an incident — yes, in some cities, you can get a wireless signal in the subway. Above ground is an entirely different story...
On Saturday, June 6, Heaven Gallery hosts a tea party and benefit to raise money for Clara Alcott's short film Kick, "an experimental narrative about two women's anxiety over contemporary technology." The tea party will be steeped in musical performances, featuring local bands Coupleskate, Coins, The Blue Ribbon Glee Club,Fielded, and Stacian. The benefit will also feature screenings by Lilli Carré, Marie Losier, Sarah Weis and Arturo Cubacub, Jung a woo, Shayna Connelly, Polina Malikin, Clara Alcott, Mary Scherer, Catie Olsen, Laura Klein, Matthew Stenerson and Megan Huber, Catie Olson, Rebecca Kressley, Jack Myers and Karen Shapiro, Shayna Connelly, Marc Mozga, Huong Ngo, Jeff Walker and Audrey Walker, Michelle Harris, Ellen Lake, Amy Caron, and The Pretty Things. And of course, no tea party would be complete without treats.
The festivities start at 6 p.m. and will simmer down somewhere around 10. There is a $10 suggested donation.
Heaven Gallery / 1550 N. Milwaukee Ave., 2nd floor
This may be one of most unusual reviews of any movie I've ever written for the plain and simple fact that I saw the film two times, and each time I had radically different reactions to it. Of course, every critic — hell, every human being — has good days and bad days; we bring prejudices into a film, both positive and negative; and we all think we're mature enough to not let those things influence the opinions we put forth in the most unbiased way possible. We go into each film with higher or lower expectations than we did the last one for various reason, whether it be a particular actor in the film or the movie's director, plot, writers, etc. The key to dealing with these prejudices is to acknowledge them and compensate for them when formulating a critique.
The other thing I do, when given the opportunity, is take note of how an audience of non-critics reacts to a certain film. I'm not looking for cues when to laugh or scream or cry; but if I go to a movie aimed at little kids, and I'm not enjoying it but the kids in the audience clearly are, I'll mention that in my review. It won't in any way change my opinion of the film, but parents contemplating taking their kids will at least know that their youngsters might enjoy a movie even if I didn't. With horror films, I'm not easily scared or shocked, but if the crowd seems freaked out by a certain amount of blood or scares, I'll mention that in my write-up, especially if I didn't like the movie. As a rule, I'm not a big fan of watching comedies or scare films in a roomful of critics; the reactions very often seem off and not like those of audiences made up on the general public. I love my Chicago critical peers, but they are a tough audience. If you can win them over, they will love you; but if you can't, it kind of poisons the experience for me. This isn't always the case, but when that Chicago screening room is quiet when it's meant to be filled with laughter, the silence is deafening. Sometimes, the silence is well deserved; other times, I'm less sure. Case in point: The Hangover.
Don't have anything to do tonight? Do you have a lifeguard uniform just laying around in your apartment collecting dust? Or perhaps do you have a small obsession with the classic television series "Baywatch?" If any, or in the slight chance all, of these things appeal to you then tonight's screening of Riffraff may be for you.
Riffraff is an independent film all about the glamorous job of Chicago lifeguards and to celebrate it's local roots Orange Chair Productions and the Gene Siskel Film Center are hosting a special screening of the film with a life-saving spin. Any local lifeguards are able to see the movie for only $7, and Orange Chair will be holding a lifeguard uniform contest and giving out prizes all night. Grab your floaties, because it's going to be a long night.
Doors at the Gene Siskel Film Center open at 8pm and the screening starts at 8:30. Tickets are $9 general admission, $7 for students, $4 for student and faculty of the School of the Art Institute, and $5 Film Center members. A Riffraff after party will be held at the Emerald Loop at 10:30
Sometimes fans don't like it when a director strays too far from what they perceive to be his/her comfort zone. And probably an equal number of fans hate it when a director repeats himself a few too many times. You can't please everybody (I think I'll copyright that because it's so damn original). It's tough to think of another director that fans would love to see do nothing more than repeat himself than Sam Raimi. If he did nothing but make Evil Dead and Spider-Man movies, most of the world's geeks would be completely satisfied. But if that had happened, we would have never gotten such tasty nuggets as Dark Man, A Simple Plan or The Gift. But a director like Raimi, like the consummate artist that he is, needs to stretch his wings every so often just to remind himself that he can. Watching a nearly finished work-in-progress print of Drag Me To Hell at SXSW last March saw Raimi somehow managing to do something I didn't think was possible — satisfying both schools of thought by making a non-franchise movie that still managed to tap into all of the thrill-house antics that have made him so damn much fun to watch over the nearly 30 years since The Evil Dead first changed the face of horror.
First off, some exciting news for those of you in town over the holiday weekend concerning one of the films reviewed this week, The Brothers Bloom. Writer-director Rian Johnson will be doing a post-screening Q&A (with yours truly) on Saturday night, May 23 after the 7pm showing at the Landmark Century Center Cinema (Clark/Diversey); as a bonus, Rian will be sticking around to introduce the 10:10pm showing as well. Rian's a fantastic talker, and the evening promises to be an entertaining both during and after the film. I'm expecting a capacity crowd for the 7pm show, so get your tickets early if you can; this is not a free screening, but tickets will probably sell out. Hope to see you there.
Terminator Salvation
This fourth installment in the end-of-the-world franchise is not really science fiction at all. Nope, this is director McG's big, loud, gritty, steely-gray war epic. Gone is the philosophy and metaphors about time travel, the dangers of letting machines and computers take over our lives, the loss of innocence, motherhood. With this new film, the other thing that has officially vanished from the Terminator universe is heart — ironic since the human heart is a major plot point in Terminator Salvation. What we're left with is a collection of hardened bad-asses battling some of the meanest fucking robots I've ever seen. In any other movie, I might be less bothered by this. But one of the things I always loved about Cameron's first two films, and even the subpar third movie and the "Sarah Connor Chronicles" TV show (which I contend got progressively better as it went on), is that not everybody in each story was supposed to be a grizzled soldier. Sarah Connor was an unremarkable woman when we met her; she became remarkable to protect her son, who in turn grew into a little shit who had to learn to fight from a friendly Terminator sent back to protect him.
Ravenswood-based Fresh Films is teaming up with Funny or Die this summer to give teen filmmakers a chance to create a short comedy film starring Funny or Die talent. The winners of the Out of Control Comedies! competition will make a short film this summer with an all-teen crew, and Adam Mckay (writer/director of Anchorman,Talladega Nights, and a former iO and Second City performer) and Chris Henchy (producer of Land of the Lost and Entourage) will view the finished films.
If you're a funny teenager (or if you know of any funny teenagers), the deadline to enter is May 25th!
The porn industry is one of the highest-grossing business not only in film but in our economy. No matter how bad it gets, there's always an audience hungry for nudity. Chicago Filmmakers is screening a rare behind the scenes look (no pun intended) of the seemingly glamorous jobs in the gay porn scene with their monthly Reeling screening series choice <em>eXposed: The Making of a Legend on May 22. Following thirty-nine men and one woman on the set of BuckleRoos, eXposed explores every aspect of the gay porn industry from the actors to crew members to award-winning directors. Mr. Pam, the cavalier female videographer of BuckleRoos, takes us through the seventeen day shooting schedule full of nakedness, drama, and food poisoning.
Chicago Filmmakers is hosting a 7pm social hour prior to the screening, which starts at 8pm. Admission is $10 for general audiences and $8 for Chicago Filmmaker members.
People sure did spend a lot of time picking apart every small detail, plot hole, inconsistency or just dopey maneuver in Star Trek last week; let's see if these same people bother to do the same with the second big-screen adaptation of author Dan Brown's Robert Langdon stories, Angels & Demons. My guess is nobody will for two reasons, and one of them isn't "because the film's plot is flawless." The first reason is that nobody cares as much about Langdon's exploits as they do about the folks of the Trek universe. Second, Angels & Demons isn't nearly as ambitious or adventurous as Trek or 75 percent of the other films I see in a given summer. It's not the kind of film people bother analyzing ad nauseum, which I guess brings me back to reason one. There wasn't a moment in this film's entire 2-hour 20-minute length that I didn't know what most of the bigger-picture secrets were in this story. I knew who were going to be revealed as the real hidden bad guys and what kind of treachery they were up do. Not that the movie doesn't have its share of lofty intentions and a great cast to give those intentions weight and significance; it does. But at some point early in the film, I stopped caring what happened to most of the characters or even whether Vatican City was lost to the world with the help of a bomb created out of antimatter. I guess it's the lapsed Catholic in me.
Let's get into some of the performance first, because at this point you either know the basic plot or you don't because — all together now — you don't care. Robert Langdon is the least interesting character from an actor that has spent his entire career creating memorable and interesting characters, even when the elements that made them so weren't in the script. Langdon uses history to solve ancient puzzles. I'm sure in print, reading the innermost thought processes of Langdon is fascinating, but this massive amount of brain activity does not translate well to a visual medium. Tom Hanks spends a lot of time vocalizing his thoughts as he combs through the Vatican archives (long kept away from his prying eyes because of what happened in The Da Vinci Code). But here's the thing, Langdon is following a trail that has been in existence for hundreds of years. If the ancient order of the Illuminati changed even one small detail of this path (which they easily could have), Langdon's smarts would be of no use. This deduction led me to believe that the powers-that-be wanted Langdon to find the bomb in a very specific manner, which would lead into a series of predictable events, blah, blah, blah. This is how I figure shit out; it's not that tough.
The Chicago History Museum will screen three outdoor films this summer featuring famous Chicago landmarks and neighborhoods. All the movies are "B.Y.O.P." (bring your own picnic) and screen in Uihlein Plaza, directly behind the history museum in Lincoln Park.
Here's the lineup:
June 23 -- My Big Fat Greek Wedding
July 14 -- Ferris Bueller's Day Off
Aug. 18 -- The Break-Up
All the films begin at dusk and admission is free. More information can be found on the museum's website.
I've noticed a lot of people who have reviewed this film so far have felt obligated to detail their personal history for the Star Trek franchise over the decades. Fair enough, although one of many beautiful things about J.J. Abrams' indecently entertaining take on the Trek universe is that it truly doesn't matter how much history you have with many series and feature films. My Star Trek history is simply: I worshipped the original series, never watched a single episode of any of the follow-up series, and faithfully lined up every few years to see each new film version on the day it opened. I loved that the original series wasn't afraid to laugh at itself as often as it took itself with a degree of seriousness usually reserved for medical dramas or detective shows. When I was young, I never noticed that almost everything was done on the cheap and that Captain Kirk seemed to care as much about his hair and his blinding-glow tan as he did about saving his crew and his ship. I focused on and admired the moral code that Starfleet operated under, on the that the show's creators saw space travel as more than just jaunts from Earth to the moon or to Mars. This was the first indication in my mind that space went on forever in every direction.
What I've had to endure in recent years (through subpar TV episodes and lesser films) is a franchise that has been bleeding integrity. J.J. Abrams' job with his new Star Trek film wasn't to reboot it — anyone who calls this a reboot is truly missing the essence of this movie — it was to save it and breathe new life into it by making us see these characters in ways we'd never dreamed possible. These are the same men and women who took us into space in 1966; none of the characters have been radically reinvented, and their core personality traits and flaws are all still here for all the faithful to see. What Abrams and writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman have done is build a world before the series that will impact the world during and after the series. They haven't hit the 'Reset' button exactly, but they have taken the events we know, rewound them to the beginning, and laid out the possibility that things may not play out the same way this time around. I'm making this sound far more complicated than it actually is, because what I'm really impressed with is that the creative team behind Star Trek have made the first real film in the franchise that doesn't feel like an extended version of a TV episode. That said, I have no idea where Abrams and Co. could possibly go from here in a way that won't feel like episodic television. I can't imagine these characters in anyone else's hands right now, or anyone else playing these fine folks, but time will tell.
This week in Washington, Chicago filmmaker Gordon Quinn and other advocates prepare for the next battle for filmmakers' right to quote from their culture. Mass-produced DVDs often encrypt films so that they can't be copied, and filmmakers can't excerpt them without circumventing the copy-protection. Right now, cracking into these DVDs is a crime -- even if it's legal to use the media behind the locked door. Quinn and others argue that filmmakers should be exempt from this law, the Digitial Millennium Copyright Act.
It pains me to report that the first official film of the summer movie season doesn't even quite reach the level of so-so. Somehow actor Hugh Jackman, director Gavin Hood, and whoever else stepped in with the intention of making Wolverine a better, more exciting work, have instead created a film that is a patchwork plot populated by characters that we never get to know or care about. Remember when Wolverine was arguably the most interesting character in any of the X-Men film? I'm not sure what happened to that dude. What this film consists of is character after character trying to out-badass each other by looking meaner or dressing cooler than the next guy. The Black Eyed Peas' Will.I.Am in cowboy attire was more than I could take.
By the time you read this, I'll be well into my long weekend in Champaign attending my first-ever Ebertfest (also known as the 11th Annual Roger Ebert Film Festival and formerly known as the Overlooked Film Festival). In the last year or so, I've become friendly with Ebert and his lovely wife Chaz, although I think it goes without saying that without Ebert's influence in my life, you wouldn't be reading this column right now. Because Roger's ailment renders him without speech, for the past couple of years, he's asked various film industry types and peers (including the Tribune's Michael Phillips and the Sun-Times Richard Roeper) to come and handle some of the panel discussions and post-screening Q&As with filmmakers and actors. And as bizarre, unlikely, and somewhat disturbing as it may seem, Ebert asked me to handle some of these duties this year. I'll be taking part in a panel called "Film Critics and the Internet" on Friday morning and doing a Q&A with Catinca Untaru, the young star of writer-director Tarsem's great film from last year, The Fall.
It goes without saying that being invited to take part in this event might be the biggest honor of my career as a film critic. My respect and admiration for Ebert's accomplishments are well documented in both my condemnation of the current version of the "At the Movies" television show, and my interview with Ebert in October of last year. So I'm off to Champaign. I have little idea what to expect, and I fully expect that all of the lessons I've learned from my years of public speaking will fly right out the window. But I'm excited as hell about the lineup this year, and about being at a film festival that does actually seem to bring filmmakers and film lovers together in a setting where they might actually get to talk to each other. What a concept. Anyway, here are a bunch of movies coming out this week, including a couple very good ones.
Something that struck me almost immediately about the smart, complicated, and wholly satisfying State of Play were the three men credited with the screenplay. Now, I have no idea whether these three collaborated in any way — I'm guessing not — but they are three screenwriters who have impressed me with their knowledge and means of telling convincing stories about journalists and those who occupy positions of power in our world. And the result of this carefully crafted screenplay (based on the much-praised BBC miniseries of the same name, which I have not seen but is sitting on my shelf ready to be watched very soon) is a tale that is more about the way in which even the purest forms of journalism can be influenced and less about simply a scandal and possible cover-up involving big business and corrupt politicians.
The absolute best way to see this movie is to stop reading this or any other review of it. I'm not so much concerned about critics giving away too much of the plot or the best lines. No, it's more about letting slip just how messed up this depraved piece of perfection truly is. I saw this film for the first time at SXSW, and I struggled trying to remember the last time a film, especially one with this many laughs, really shook me up like this. This is a film with no moral compass, no mercy, and with a soul as dark and poisoned as the most hardened criminal. This is a movie borne of a crack whore mother and absent father (who probably could have been any one of a dozen men), given to be raised by a 300-pound uncle who spent his days beating this movie and his nights committing unspeakable acts. This film ran away from home at 15, and turned tricks with businessmen in alleys stinking of long-dead fish and rat shit, while catching every festering disease in the book. Now imagine, if you can, what a movie like this would look like, smell like; then imagine this movie is a comedy.
In a strange and wonderful way, I'm both a little ticked off and extremely pleased with the folks that are marketing the latest film from writer-director Greg Mottola (The Daytrippers, Superbad) entitled Adventureland. Most of you probably think this is a silly comedy about a bunch of teenagers who work at a rundown amusement park circa the 1980s, and you'd be about half right. There's a big part of me that wants you to walk into Adventureland thinking you know exactly what you're in for, so if you like surprises then walk away from this review right now. While I won't spoil any major plot points in this review, those of you who continue reading need to understand that you're going to discover that the tone and plot of this film are a lot more interesting and weighty than any of the advertising might lead you to believe. As long as you're cool with knowing that ahead of time, continue reading.
One of the biggest corners of my heart is held in reserve for old (usually black-and-white) sci-fi films. I'm talking ginormous man-in-suit monsters, slow-moving aliens with tentacles and either one or 50 eyes, or regular-sized animals that are made to look humongous as they terrorize poor citizens like us. Watch any of them repeatedly and you notice one thing almost without fail: they are about 85 percent chatter and 15 percent actual creature feature... if you were lucky. The philosophies and theories bandied about were pretty hilarious, and were usually just an excuse to keep the cameras rolling to get that running time to at least 75 minutes. Now imagine taking the best parts of these alien invasion flicks, these giant spider films, these creeping menace pictures, and these home-grown mutated abominations of nature movies and tossing them all into one big 3D animated work, and you have some idea of just how much fun Monsters vs. Aliens was for me.
Not that a truly funny film featuring Paul Rudd and Jason Segel is all that surprising (Knocked Up or Forgetting Sarah Marshall, anyone?), but this is a work that has probably been under the radar for a lot of you, and I think it's time to blow the door off this I Love You, Man's cloak of invisibility and get you excited about seeing it.
I'm sure a day will come when Paul Rudd will star in a bad R-rated comedy, but that day will have to wait just a little longer. It almost doesn't seem fair. Back when I interviewed him for Role Models, we talked a great deal about I Love You, Man, and it was very clear that he was pretty happy with the script and the way the film turned out. He seemed especially pleased with the non-mean tone of the film. For the most part, this isn't a movie about people insulting each other or putting each other down for the sake of a laugh. Certainly, Rudd has been in films like that and they remain some of the funniest things I've ever seen. And I'm not implying that I Love You, Man is some kind of feel-good horseshit that makes you want to skip out of the theater and hug 100 strangers because you've found a new lease on life. Instead, the movie manages to earn its laughs from a combination of good old-fashioned writing and trusting in its actors to do what they do best — ad lib some of the funniest jokes and references the human brain can produce. So what is this film about exactly? Allow me to let Paul Rudd explain...
I was not a Crash hater; I don't think it deserved to win the Best Picture Oscar a couple years back, but I was a supporter of the film that featured intersecting storylines to illustrate the fractured state of race and human relations in the world. I even went back a second time to watch it just to try and understand why those who despised it did so with such fervor. I never quite figured that part out. Cut from the same cloth (at least in theory) is the long-delayed Crossing Over. (Side note: have you noticed that just about every film from The Weinstein Company these days can be preceded by the phrase "long-delayed"?) The biggest difference between Crash and Crossing Over is that the latter film takes a great idea and compelling structure — exposing the current state of immigration and earned citizenship in America with several stories about different types of legal and illegal immigrants — and then forgets even some of the most basic fundamentals of filmed storytelling, like credible acting, editing that makes sense, believable scenarios, and not feeling like the film's message needs to be broadcast from a megaphone atop the tallest building in the land.
Every March the nation's coolest kids head to Austin, TX for South by Southwest, a series of film, interactive, and music festivals and conferences where the newest emerging artsists and technologies are showcased. This year, two of Chicago's own will be heading down for the SXSW Film Festival, where their short film will be presented. Teenager of the Year, also known as Joe Avella and Tim Racine, made Scatterbrained!, which will be shown as part of the "Midnight Shorts" series.
Hey everyone. Just a brief introduction to this week's column to explain two things about what's happening here. First off, this is the opening weekend of the Gene Siskel Film Center's European Union Film Festival, for my money the single best and most reliable film festival the city has to offer. This is a solid collection of the best of European cinema right now, and a great deal of what plays at this event will get released through the year, with many of these offerings either being their nation's selection for 2008 Oscar consideration or being those selected for this year's Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Check out the entire schedule at the Siskel Center's website.
More immediately, you'll notice I do not have a review of Watchmen this week, and that's for the plain and simple reason that the studio only had one advance screening of the film in Chicago, and it happened to coincide with a screening I had organized for another film, a screening that included guests I deemed far more important than Watchmen. I am seeing the film over the weekend in IMAX (possibly even twice), so it's not like I'm ignoring it... I'm just not reviewing it.
Tonight at the Landmark Century Centre 2828 N. Clark, there's a screening of the documentary Song Sung Blue, which follows the lives of "Lightning & Thunder," a husband-and-wife Neil Diamond and Patsy Cline tribute band from Milwaukee. Read Steve at the Movies' review of this fantastic film on Ain't It Cool News.
Tonight's screening starts at 7:30pm, and will be followed by a Q&A with director Steve Kohs. Tickets are $10, available in advance here. The screening is part of the Midwest Independent Film Festival.
If you believed the trumped-up, self-generated hype surrounding Joaquin Phoenix these days (hint: the crazy, bearded behavior is all being documented and compiled for a Borat-style fake documentary) then Two Lovers might be his last work as an actor. And after two pretty weak collaborations with director James Gray in The Yards and We Own the Night, Phoenix has finally hit his emotional stride with Gray at the helm. In the previous two efforts, Gray cast Phoenix as a tough guy thug type, but with Two Lovers, Gray taps into Phoenix as a purely emotional and slightly unstable creature who is trying desperately to get over the grief of losing a fiancee by throwing himself into an unwise relationship with a party-girl neighbor, played beautifully by Gwyneth Paltrow.
Think you've got what it takes to write the next Slumdog or Juno? Chicago Filmmakers is offering two screenwriting classes this spring to help get your Keyser Sözes out of your head and onto the page. If you're familiar with the basic structure of movie scripts and how to write them (do you capitalize the character's name when they enter the story?), you can probably jump into Screenwriting II, a five-person workshop class where students critique 10 to 15 pages of each others' scripts each week, with a finished movie script as the end goal.
If that's a little over your head but you still think you might be the next Michel Gondry, Screenwriting I teaches the basics: character development, dialogue, structure, narrative progression (you know, story), and includes an hour-long lecture at the beginning of each class.
Both class fees are $395 and are taught by Columbia College screenwriting teacher Paul Peditto.
"It's a good bargain," Peditto says. "At Columbia it's what, two grand? Here I teach the same stuff. It's in half the time, but it's a quarter of the money."
Screenwriting II classes start March 12 and meet on Thursday nights from 6:30 to 9:30pm at Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark Street. Screenwriting I begins March 30 and meets on Mondays at the same time and location. More information is available on the Chicago Filmmakers website. Currently both classes still have space. Call 773-293-1447 to register by phone.
Hey, everyone. I was brutally tempted to skip the column this week, but one of the two films that I'm reviewing is particularly worth seeing, so I didn't want to the opportunity to talk it up pass me (or you) by. The weekend of the Oscars is usually pretty slow for new releases because studios believe that everyone is out catching up on any nominated films they may not have seen yet, and that's a good thing. That also explains why the new Tyler Perry film, Madea Goes to Jail, is opening this weekend and didn't screen for critics. We'll have a slightly more beefed up line up for you next week.
Fired Up
I'll give this silly comedy some credit. At least this film has some jokes in it, and it doesn't resort to sensory memory to get its laughs the way films like Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie, Epic Movie, Date Movie and all of those other terrible movies that end in Movie do. On a certain level, Fired Up certainly has fun with the cheerleader movie format. Specifically, it's a send-up of Bring It On; hell, there is even a scene in which all of the cheerleaders at a three-week cheerleading camp watch Bring It On with the earnestness that many of us would watch The Godfather. That scene at least made me laugh. Let me rephrase that: that's the only scene is this movie that made me laugh.
Despite its exceptional cast and a usually inventive and visually thrilling director, the new political thriller The International is a classic case of a film being crushed under the weight of its own unnecessarily dense and confusing and more dense plot.
Before I talk about the film at all (I won't even attempt to summarize the plot here; it's nearly impossible), I do want to underscore one sequence that every review you read for this film will talk about at length, and with good reason. There is an action sequence at the heart of this two-hour endurance test that is nothing short of spectacular. The filmmaker knows it, the actors know it, everybody connected with this sequence knows it is absolutely one of the coolest things you're going to see ever in a rough and tumble shoot out-type scene maybe ever. And a big part of the reason the sequence is so wonderful is that it's set on the winding ramps of New York's Guggenheim Museum. I shit you not when I say that Clive Owen as Interpol Agent Louis Salinger and a crew of thugs shoot the living shit out of the Guggenheim. No surface or exhibit is left without a bullet hole or nine by the time the shooting stops... actually I'm not sure it has stopped. The destruction and staging and spurting blood is glorious, and if The International was an even slightly better movie, I'd say that this sequence is worth the price of admission. Better hope it shows up as an isolated clip in YouTube.
I've never read the Neil Gaiman novel that inspired director-adapter Henry Selick to create this magnificent work of stop-motion animated art, and frankly I may never want to. I certainly have nothing against Mr. Gaiman's writing, but Selick has done such a complete and fulfilling rendition of the world inhabited by young Coraline Jones that my heart and imagination are stuffed to capacity.
Selick has wowed up in the past with such film miracles as The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. He's even played God for Wes Anderson, who charged Selick with inventing new species of undersea life for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zizou. And who better to literally invent life forms. He has promoted and elevated the art of stop-motion filmmaking to such a degree, I can't imagine studios not taking a step back from so much CG animation and try having this level of patience with the creative process. In every conceivable way, Coraline is a celebration of the riches and beauty of all things handmade. Not only is everything we see on screen made by hand, but the story itself is about creating a world by hand.
For the better part of the last 365 days, the Luc Besson-written and -produced Taken has been opening country by country across the world until it finally hits screens in America this weekend. I'm guessing this film has been out on DVD already in some lands for quite some time, so those of you desperate enough to see this probably already have. But for the rest of us, the long wait it over — I've been seeing trailers for this film on and off for about six months now. And I'm happy to report the wait is mostly worth it. This is a quick-fix, shot of adrenaline in the brain work that doesn't offer much in the way of character development or plot, but has just enough of both to make this an above-average thriller and one of the better offerings I've seen from the Besson camp in recent years.
Perhaps an unlikely — although certainly not unwelcome — choice for our hero is Liam Neeson playing Bryan Mills, a seemingly mild-mannered father who has recently quit his government job and relocated to be closer to his 17-year-old daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace, once of "Lost"), who has lived with her mother (Famke Janssen) and exceedingly wealthy stepfather. Kim seems open to allowing her long-absent father back into her life, but a lot of time has passed when he hasn't been there for her because of his mysterious job, and Bryan is impatient to reconnect. On the eve of a lunch Bryan and Kim area supposed to have together, Bryan is pulled by some old work buddies into a one-night, well-paid security job that involves playing babysitter to a young pop star, whose life Bryan saves from a stalker's knife. This is the first chance we get to see just how well trained this man is, and the veil is slowly lifted from his past.
Perhaps the story is part of the huge publicity machine that surrounds the ceremony, fighting the battle against its sagging ratings ("this'll get those Chicagoans to watch this year!"), or maybe news producers really find the statuette story that fascinating. But as one Yelper said about R.S. Owens: "They create amazing, gorgeous, world-class statuettes and awards which are bestowed to the mediocre performers honored at the Academy Awards, Emmys and MTV Awards. But that's not their fault." Like any savvy Chicagoan, it sounds like Ellen M. knows where the real story is.
The Village North Theatre, a locally owned dive movie theater in Rogers Park, has closed its doors due to mounting legal and money woes. A reporter for the Chi-Town Daily News recently found the theater "covered with signs simply reading, 'Theater Closed For Good.'" That sounds pretty final -- although the owner has stated plans to renovate and re-open in the spring and restore the building's historic facade. Some people aren't holding their breath. The Chi-Town Daily News reports:
While many are excited about the desire and work to save and improve the theater, others have developed a wait-and-see attitude. "The trend of developers in Rogers Park seems to be focused on demolishing beautiful nearly century-old buildings," says [Bill] Morton, who has lived in Rogers Park for the past 10 years. "This has been the case with the Adelphi Theater, the North Shore School, and the Lerner Building."
Part documentary, part animated splendor, part fever dream, writer-director Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir (having just captured the Golden Globe in this category, it's probably the current frontrunner for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar) is a surreal, sometimes terrifying essay on the fragile nature of memory as related to times of war. Folman was in the Israeli Army in the early 1980s, during the first Lebanon War, and he had led a life believing that his recollections about that time in his life are solid and accurate. But when an old army buddy tells Folman about recurring nightmare he's had, the two men convince themselves that both the nightmare and other aspects of their waking and sleeping state are a reaction to a time during that war that neither of them can recall accurately, if at all. Folman's film collects testimony primarily from men he served with or who served in the Israeli Army at the same time in the same place as he did, and he tries to piece together this missing fragment of his life. For the most part, the conversations we hear between Folman and these other men are the actual taped conversations he had with them in doing research for this film, but rather than simply show us talking heads in the form of a traditional documentary, Folman and a team of animators have pieced together something far more captivating.
Attention anyone who's ever listened to "Pissing in a River" in a dark room by themselves: Patti Smith will be at the Jan. 30th screening of Patti Smith: Dream of Life at the The Block Museum of Art and will participate in a post-screening discussion with the film's director, Steven Sebring, and Sound Opinions co-host Jim Derogatis.
Tickets are $11 ($8 students) and go on sale Jan. 23, but you must pre-register to purchase them.
Well, we're three weekends into the new year, and I'm already doing a movie roundup. And this might be the absolute worst week to pull something like this, but I've been so busy that I must resort to capsule reviews. But the good news is, I've got links to some pretty kick-ass interviews I've done in the last month or so, if I do say so myself. Enjoy.
The single best science fiction film of 2008 (OK, so the film came out in 2007 in most European nations and isn't really being released wide in the U.S. until 2009, but I saw it for the first time in March 2008, so suck it) is a movie that has no special effects and only four characters... OK, technically it has six characters, but three of them are the same guy. The least science-fictiony of all of the year's sci-fi works is from Spain, and it's called Timecrimes, a marvelous mind-bender of a movie that uses very simple storytelling to bend us around the same few hours of one day three different times, each time revealing just a little bit more about elements of the plot that were there from the beginning, we just didn't realize it until the end of this 90-minute masterpiece.
Karra Elejalde plays Hector, who is staying at what appears to be an isolated country home with his wife Clara (Candela Fernandez). While sitting in his backyard looking through is binoculars, Hector spots a beautiful young woman (Barbara Goenaga) removing her clothes in the woods behind his home. He also spots a strangely dressed man with bloody bandages around his head, and he runs to the woods to investigate. He finds the young woman lying naked and out cold against a tree. When he goes to help her, he is stabbed in the arm by the strange man, and he runs through the woods to escape what he assumes is immediate danger. He ends up at a nearby laboratory with a sole occupant, a scientist (the film's writer-director Nacho Vigalondo) working after hours on a secret project. With a crazed maniac supposedly coming after the two men, the scientist hides Hector in a strange tank filled with water and bright lights. When Hector emerges seemingly minutes later, he discovers that it is actually earlier that same day, right around the time these events began to unfold in the first place. The tank was in fact a time machine, and when Hector comes out of it, the scientist naturally has no idea who this man is stepping out of his equipment. Got it?
Happy New Years and all that good stuff. Let me first have you take a quick peek at this. First of all, I'm inviting this guy to every screening I host. Clearly he has good taste in films (see my Best of 2008 list below to see why I think this), but really I'd like him to come because he personifies the frustration my fellow film lovers and I have felt over the years as we try desperately to enjoy films without the distraction of human voices, cell phones, and all manner of devices that emit light. If you read this column regularly or don't but profess to being a film lover, let's make a New Year's Resolution Pact: turn everything off when you enter a movie theater. Don't put it on vibrate, don't dim the light; just turn it off. You can go two hours, give or take, without communication with the outside world. And if you can't, a) you have a problem bordering on addiction, and b) you don't belong in a movie theater. Especially in this day and age, people are clearly getting a lot pickier about how they spend their entertainment dollar. If they choose to spend it at a movie, they don't want a frickin' circus going on around them.
I'll tell you why I especially feel for this guy in Philadelphia — because in recent months, I've been pretty forward about telling me to shut up or turn things off. Let's face it, most theater management won't do shit about disruptive patrons. I remember one foreign film I went to see a couple years back with an especially chatty bunch. I complained to the manager, and his response (no lie) was "Well, the movie has subtitles; you don't need to hear it." Please feel free to count the number of wrongs that statement is. As terrifying a prospect as it is to confront talkative moviegoers, nine times out of 10, asking them to be quiet one time gets the job done. I realize when you're at a movie that attracts a younger crowd (I'm talking Bolt young), there's a noise source you can't really do anything about. But there's no damn excuse for talking through Benjamin Button or anything else for that matter. Let the (non-violent) revolution begin in Chicago; it seems like the sensible place. We've already seen at least one push for change out of our little corner of the Midwest. This call to action seems like small potatoes, and a lot easier for everyone to get on board with. Vote 'Yes' for shutting the fuck up and letting me watch my movies in piece.
First up is my wrap-up on 2008, followed by a couple reviews for films opening this first weekend of 2009.
If all goes as planned, I'll have my Best & Worst of 2008 piece for you in about a week. But here's a little preview: David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button will be at the top of my Best list. I could, quite literally, spend 4,000 words talking about this single film and ignore almost everything else that opened in theaters this holiday weekend (everything except The Wrestler; that one will be on my list too). Instead, I'll try to break it down to its essentials.
First and foremost, Benjamin Button will engage you emotionally, in the most pure and fulfilling way possible. If you cry at movies, you'll cry at this one. If you don't cry at movies, well, you'll probably cry at this one. At the very least, you'll be like me. I never cry at movies. But I do get this strange strain in the back of my throat that is probably my body hurting me just a little because I refuse to cry. I never feel like I'm holding back the tears, but that strange sensation is just a friendly reminder that if I responded to emotion like a human being, I'd be crying at that moment. I've seen Benjamin Button three times to date, and I've gotten that feeling every time.
I also love the fact that Benjamin Button celebrates the fine art of great storytelling but giving us not only an examination of a full life — birth to death — but also a life lived fully. In this age of biography films seeing a resurgence — Milk being the most recent example — even the finest of those films only gives us a fraction of a life, usually some turning point in a person's journey. But screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, The Insider, Ali, The Good Shepherd) takes the germ of F. Scott Fitzgerald's original short story and transforms it into something, well, transformative. It's a film that takes full advantage of its primarily New Orleans locales by adding healthy doses of surrealism, magic and, yes, even a touch of spirituality to tell one of the most complete and fulfilling films in recent memory.
I think in the end Clint Eastwood's latest directed effort (his second of the year, in case you're counting, after Changeling) will be remembered as a minor effort from one of the greatest living American directors. But I can also see Gran Torino being a real crowd pleaser, as Clint returns to film acting in a sort of Grumpy Old Bigot Man role that I'm 75 percent sure is supposed to be funny even though the film dives into some fairly serious shit concerning gang violence, rape and the healing power of racism. But in the end, I can't really recommend the film because, outside of Eastwood's performance, the acting in the film is god-awful — strictly amateur hour, after-school special level stuff that I could never get into or get past.
Eastwood plays Korean War vet Walt Kowalski, whose wife has just died. The film opens at her funeral service in the local church, and we immediately see that Walt has little patience for other human beings, even those in his own family. He literally snarls at anyone who pisses him off...which is pretty much everyone. He's mad at two people whispering and smiling during the service; he's mad at the way his granddaughter dresses for the event; he's mad at the young priest (Christopher Carley) who was friendly with Walt's wife and who promised her before she died that he'd check in on Walt to make sure the crotchety bastard was doing alright. Every offer for help, every attempt by his grown kids to move Walt out of the terrible neighborhood where he lives (he is apparently the only white guy still living in the crime-ridden area) is met with something that goes beyond resistance. Walt hates the world and the world responds in kind.
Thursday and Friday night at the Lakeshore Theater, the original cast of "Mystery Science Theater 3000" -- Joel Hodgson, Trace Beaulieu, J. Elvis Weinstein, Frank Conniff and Mary Jo Pehl -- reunite as "Cinematic Titanic" to ridicule more movies. The set-up is a little different -- no robots this time, but more silhouette silliness -- and sure to please MST3K die-hards. Tickets are $35.
Here's the lineup:
Thursday Dec. 18, 7:30pm: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
Friday Dec. 19, 7:30pm & 10:30pm: Blood of the Vampires
Saturday Dec. 20, 7:30pm & 10:30pm: Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks
Why has science fiction been so horrible this year? For every solid work like Wall-E or even Cloverfield, we get crap like The Happening, the second X-Files movie, Journey to the Center of the Earth and Jumper. Do people who make these films understand that we don't need conventional love stories or cute kids or cuddly animals cluttering up and diluting our science fiction? Do the writers of such fare realize that the minute they include a scene of one person insisting on saving another person before they get around to the business of, oh, I don't know, saving the world ("I won't leave without [insert name of loved one]!") that I immediately get angry and disconnected from the film in every possible way? The remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still has about a million such scenes, or at least it feels like it does.
When I'm preparing to watching a franchise film (take High School Musical 3, for example), I tend to watch the movies that came before the most recent to reacquaint myself with the characters and situations. But with remakes, I stay away from the originals until after I've seen the newer version. Every new film deserves to be judged on its own merits and not on strictly how carefully version 2.0 follows the source material. But I know the original TDTESS pretty damn well; I have a poster of it in my bathroom and stare at it lovingly while I'm using the facilities. And other than a few names and the very basic starting-off point, the makers of the remake — director Scott (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) Derrickson and writers David Scarpa and Edmund H. North — have gutted and rebuilt this legendary sci-fi plot. Let me rephrase that, they've taken a perfectly workable, easily updatable work, destroyed it with a wrecking ball and C4 explosives, and tried to put it back together with Scotch tape, thumb tacks, a stapler and bubble gum.
The greatest feeling I get from any film is one of inspiration. Sometimes the inspiration is simply to feel something more than I did when I first sat down to watch the movie. Other times I'm driven to act or think a little differently about a person or circumstances than I did previously. And in the case of many of the film featuring screenplays by Peter Morgan (The Queen, The Last King of Scotland), I'm inspired to dig a little deeper into the real events that inspired him to write his extraordinary story-behind-the-story works. With The Queen, Morgan wanted to show us how an entire nation's feeling toward its monarchy shifted as a result of a tragedy. And with Frost/Nixon, based on Morgan's celebrated play, he delivers to us the inner workings of one of the most legendary television interview programs in history, an interview that not only was the informal trial of Richard Nixon that the nation never got thanks to Gerald Ford's knee-jerk pardon of Nixon when he took office, but also the opportunity for Nixon to essentially apologize to the nation for shaming the office of President.
It might seem like old hat today to look upon the office of president with some amount of disdain (both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both have much to answer for), but at the time — the summer of 1977 — the nation was still hurting deeply from a single man who resigned from the office without a hint of apology or admission of wrong doing. In an early scene in Frost/Nixon (set three years prior to the interviews), David Frost (played to perfection by Michael Sheen, who did an equally fine job as Tony Blair in The Queen) has just finished taping his Australian talk show when he catches live footage of Nixon leaving the White House and getting onto the helicopter that took him away. He sees the smiling face of Richard Nixon (Frank Langella, who won a Tony for played the role on Broadway), but just before he turns to get on the helicopter, the facade drops and the face of ultimate defeat shows itself. I have no idea if Nixon really looked that way upon his departure, but the scene shows the spark of inspiration that drove Frost to ask for the face to face with Nixon.
Twilight
I've never read one of Stephenie Meyer's novels about the tormented love affair between the human Bella and the vampire Edward, so when I speak about Twilight, I am only discussing the film version and whether or not I was indoctrinated into this story to any degree of satisfaction. I want to know if screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg and director Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown) have constructed a compelling film for those of us who know nothing about novels or where the tale of these angst-ridden teens is headed. The truth is that Twilight is a beautiful-looking work with a pair of the most bizarre and frustrating characters you're likely to see in a film this year. I'll give the movie credit for avoiding most of the infuriating trappings of modern vampire films, but that doesn't make the resulting work all that captivating.
And let me add this right up front, if you do go see Twilight and coo and swoon over the film and try to tell me it's a great movie, I'm going to point you right at a theater in this city playing Let the Right One In to give you a prime example of a truly great young vampire tale. I realize it's not fair to compare these two movies, but for all its trumped-up drama, longing gazes and breathy dialogue, Twilight doesn't hold a candle to the emotional weight of the stark Swedish vampire story about a 12-year-old boy who falls in love with a same-aged vampire girl.
The Criterion Collection releases an expanded version of Wes Anderson's debut film, Bottle Rocket, next Tuesday, Nov. 25. The packaging features artwork by Chicago illustrator/artist Ian Dingman. "Which, as a lot of people know, is a departure for Anderson since he has always used his brother to create the art," GB reader Bryan Barker notes. Love the hand-drawn Futura.
Buy the new edition on Amazon in ether DVD or Blu-Ray format.
A Not Too Distant Past explores radical politics in Chicago by compiling short films created in the 1960s through the present. Spanning a range of perspectives and styles, the collection focuses on responses to seminal Chicago events such as the Haymarket affair and the assassination of Fred Hampton, alongside the sexual politics of traditionally marginalized groups. In so doing, it contextualizes the history of radicalism in the contemporary political discourse.
Still from Gean Jenet in Chicago by Frédéric Moffet [2006, video, 26 min]
A screening of A Not Too Distant Past will be presented along with an introduction by and a discussion with the film's curator, Marc Moscato, during the Select Media Festival. The event will be 7pm Sunday, November 16, at the Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S. Morgan St.
Wesley Willis' Joyrides, new documentary on the legendary outsider artist and musician, is part of the Chicago International Film Festival; there's one more screening today (Monday) at 4pm at the AMC River East 21.
It's not the first documentary on Willis. In 1994, Jeff Kilpatrick produced a half-hour documentary, which he recently posted it on YouTube in three parts. Video after the jump.
When he died of cancer in 1991, the 57-year-old Scots-born filmmaker Bill Douglas left behind a body of work that included four feature-length titles and a handful of short films. Among these films are what some critics regard as the highest achievements of British cinema from the 1970s -- specifically the series of three films that are now available to American audiences with Facets Multimedia's release of the double-DVD Bill Douglas Trilogy set.
Throughout his career, Douglas had juggled a number of jobs as an actor and screenwriter, all the while continually scrambling to find funding for his projects. It was with financial backing from the British Film Institute that he was able to produce his first three features My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1974), and My Way Home (1978). As a trilogy, these films constitute an autobiographical account of Douglas's own life from the ages of 8 to 18 -- from his gritty, poverty-stricken childhood in the Scottish mining village of Newcraighall, to his escape from the slums to the deserts of Egypt via service in the Royal Air Force. As a coming-of-age saga, traumas are many and triumphs few in Douglas's story; but the narrative unfurls in a loosely episodic and bleakly poetic style.
The Bill Douglas Trilogy is currently available for sale in the U.S., and will be available for rental from Facets Multimedia in late September.
If you weren't able to catch the Chicago Film Archives earlier series on the 1968 Democratic Convention, or if you did and loved it, then you may want to check out what Facets Cinémathèque has in store for the end of this month. In a series entitled "40 Years After: Filming the '68 Revolution," they'll be showing at least two films every night for a week on the events of that tumultuous year. Some highlights include "Berkeley in the '60's," a documentary about the rise of student activism, and "Medium Cool," a film about a journalist who discovers that his work is being used for sinister governmental purposes. The series will culminate in a panel discussion with some of the filmmakers on their experiences documenting and drawing inspiration from a social and political revolution. Check out the Facets website for the full schedule of events beginning on August 22.
The Chi-Town Daily News posts a profile of local filmmaker Bruce Orenstein, who uses video to engage communities in critical thinking and activism. Orenstein says he wanted to provide film/video technology "for low income people to compete in a world where ... virtually every major corporation in the country has their own in-house video production facility and they use it to project a message, to shape an image."
The Music Box Theatre is in the midst of a James Bond film festival. Fortunately it’s not too late to catch a showing of the first four films in the iconic series: Dr. No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, and Thunderball will all be screened this week. Just hearing those titles makes me nostalgic for the good old days when men were still men and Connery was still Bond.
In addition to more thrown hats, iconic white bikinis, and martinis than you can shake a loaded gun at, the series offers you the chance to see films which have inspired countless sequels, spoofs, and would-be spies. Few franchises have had such longevity and success and James Bond has become an international symbol of taste, style, and ass-kicking. Sure, the movies are sometimes silly (Pussy Galore and Molly Goodhead, anyone?) but they’re also seminal works in the development of the action film as a genre.
Showtimes can be found here – no gadgets necessary.
As the pundits prognosticate about the upcoming Democratic Convention, the Chicago Film Archives asks us to look back 40 years to the infamous 1968 Convention held in Chicago. Their latest series, “Out of the Vault: Year of Confrontation,” will present four restored films that explore not only the conflict between police and protesters at the convention but also how the media coverage was manipulated by the city after the fact.
Kt Andresky, the coordinator for Press/Play, is seeking documentarians to contribute a five-minute piece on the Chicago art scene. Check out the details at Justseeds.
MGM Pictures is celebrating the 90th anniversary of the founding of the original United Artists with a touring film festival, and Chicago is one of the major stops. Hollywood Chicago reports that the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport, will host the festival starting in April. A schedule of films after the break.
The festival aims to "blend all forms of art, dance, text, music, and visual art into performances that capture and stimulate the mind." And media isn't the only diverse aspect of the festival. Take a peek at the subject matter. McIlvain's "dance for the camera," Three Men in Two Parts, follows three young men through a night in a bar. Shabam!'s West Side Story Redux views today's racism and division through the lens of the eponymous musical. Munch's Rubber Coated Chlorine takes a stab at "political speak" while the audience hears recordings of Adlai Stevenson at the United Nations in 1962. Performances will range from political and serious to light and warm-hearted, while subjects range from a Baptist church, to mid-life discovery, to death. There are even promises of belly dancing and traditional Butoh dancing!
Tickets are $15 ($10 students). Shows are March 13 and 14 at 7:30 at the Hamlin Park Fieldhouse Theater, 3035 N. Hoyne. 773-486-8261
Leap year only happens every four years. What are you going to do with your extra day? The following list of arts and culture activities should keep you busy, at least for the next three days...
Literary
Escape the chill and the impending 1-3 inches of snow tonight at Clever Alice where book lovers and other literary types gather for a Bookslut reading. Featured guests include writers Paul Verhaeghen, Deb Olin Unferth, and Dominique Fabre.
Film The Other Boleyn Girl, starring Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson, opens Friday. Based on the historical novel by British author Philippa Gregory, the film looks at the sibling rivalry of two sisters, Anne and Mary Boleyn, who compete for the attention of King Henry VIII. The book is a sumptuous, delicious read, packed with details about court life and the equally shrewd personalities of Anne Boleyn and the King she set out to win. The film is directed by British director Justin Chadwick.
The 2008 Academy Award Nominated Shorts
Here's your chance to see all 5 of the nominated films for the Best Animated Short category, including I Met the Walrus, the Canadian documentary about 14-year-old Jerry Levitan's interview with John Lennon, which he procured after sneaking into the music icon's hotel room in 1969. The films screen at the Landmark Theatre on Friday and Saturday.
The Counterfeiters
Oscar winner for Best Languague Film, this Austrian film documents the true life story of Salomon Sorowitsch. Arrested for counterfeiting in a concentration camp, he went on to work for the Nazis, churning out banknotes in the currency of the enemy countries as the war came to a halting close. Opens on Friday.
Chicago's comprehensive history of community organization and social justice make it an optimal city for arts-based not-for-profits. The first inception of arts education began in Chicago at Jane Addams's Hull House in the late 1800s and in the past few... Read this feature »
News broke this week that the 
Tonight's the night for documentaries about icons, apparently. You have two to choose from:
About a month ago, there were 
