Cine-File Blog

Black Harvest International Festival of Film and Video
Gene Siskel Film Center — Ongoing (Check Venue website for complete schedule)
The annual Black Harvest festival, now in its 16th year, continues through September 2.
—
More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.

Made in Chicago (Shorts Program)
Saturday, 8:15pm
The highlight of this local shorts program is the three-minute opening shot of PAUSE, with a handheld camera busily following characters in a packed bar; one wishes the whole thing was just that one scene and that the shot would run for another ten minutes. Unfortunately, PAUSE doesn’t maintain that scene’s vigor, and pretty soon it descends into the usual slick ironic-twist stuff you’ve seen in a million short films, with a philandering cop becoming convinced that his wife is having an affair with his straight-arrow friend. SON OF AMERICA has some good shots of acrobats and gymnasts, interspersed with the usual narrative convolutions and contrivances. THE CONCERT’s measly production values match its measly ideas (though the filmmakers do manage to get a good tracking shot in). LOOSE CHANGE, shot in the sort of South Loop locations you see over and over again in Columbia College student films, seems to be trying to make this city look as bland as possible. Easily the shoddiest-looking of all the films on the program (iMovie editing, multi-font credits, auto-focus), HELL AIN’T FULL is also somehow the most likable; besides having the best title in the fest, it also has Russell Norman, who makes up for his shortcomings as a screenwriter and a director with a good dose of charisma.

Micki Dickoff &Tony Pagano’s NESHOBA: THE PRICE OF FREEDOM
Sunday 5:15 pm and Monday 8:15 pm
An unambitious early-2000s-TV-style documentary, complete with zoom-ins on the file photos and B-roll footage of the interview subjects walking through their gardens, but vastly improved by the disarming access the filmmakers were granted to their subject. Beginning as another Civil Rights Era book report, with the 1964 murder of three activists in Mississippi at the center, the movie more or less changes gears with the arrival of Edgar Ray Killen, the Klansman brought to trial for their deaths in 2005. By then an old man — and with an overconfidence that’s ultimately his undoing — he’s seen tending to his farm and repairing his Confederate Flag lawn ornaments while he talks about his marriage, life, views on race and his claims of innocence; in the meantime, his brother, who keeps holstered guns on a living room table crowded with knickknacks, spouts forth convoluted analogies about segregation and bird feeders. The usual “true crime” routine disrupted by a clan (pardon the pun) of fascinating myopic rubes. (2009, 86 min, DigiBeta)

Rik Cordero’s INSIDE A CHANGE
Monday, 6:30pm and Thursday, 8:15pm
None of the visual verve of Codero’s music videos, and not much else either except a few good actors and an alright story. HD with that fake bleach-bypass look, a small-time criminal visiting his mother for her birthday the day before he starts his six-months sentence, largely unobtrusive and sometimes charismatic performances (exception: Donté Bonner, as the main character’s brother, always sounds like a high school guest speaker). A stylish music video director tries to prove that he’s not “style over substance,” forgetting that style is substance; his unpretentiously silly / old-school video for Kid Sister’s “Big’n'Bad” had a better sense of milieu than this attempt at ostensible realism. (2009, 88 min, DigiBeta)

Urban Visions (Shorts Program)
Wednesday, 8:15pm
Along with the already-screened AMAZON WOMEN, FATHER’S DAY is the best short of the fest so far: understated and elegantly constructed, with every performance, framing (special mention should go to cinematographer Matt Mitchell, whose naturalistic color palette makes sly use of rich blues and reds) and nearly every edit just right. It makes you hope that director Brian Rolling will eventually transition to features. Otherwise, it’s more of the same: NO CHASER continues the shorts programs’ fixations with timestamps (across Made in Chicago and Urban Visions, they now outnumber all the leg shots in the Sex African-American Style program), overlong opening credits and ponderous narration while also throwing in some poorly framed / edited action involving guys trying to look cool while holding Airsoft guns. FOR YOUR SAFETY makes sometimes striking use of black & white HD and THREE BLIND MICE is a fairly good calling card film set in D.C. A SPOT IN HEAVEN, in the meantime, is the worst film of the festival, and the less said about it the better.

Black Harvest International Festival of Film and Video
Gene Siskel Film Center — Ongoing (Check Venue website for complete schedule)
The annual Black Harvest festival, now in its 16th year, continues through September 2.
—
More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.

Joshua Conro’s SHARKULA: DIARRHEA OF A MADMAN
Friday, 8:15pm
With its appalling title alluding to a potent metaphor for the profuse stream-of-consciousness rapping style of its subject, SHARKULA is an ostensive documentary about local cult hip-hop hustler Brian Wharton, who—like the Joe Goulds, Wesley Willises, Thax Douglases, Party Steves, and other legendary eccentric bohemians before and alongside him—represents the dynamic extremes of true, corporeal social embeddedness, as the rest of us barely notice our retreat into the telecommunications revolution which threatens to bring everyone you’ve ever known into increasingly tangential and irrelevant contact. This necessarily persistent urban lifeworld is ephemerally documented here: Sharkula navigates the remaining bustling streets of our city, affably flattering hundreds of strangers every day in succession: “Do you like hip-hop?” before moving in for the $5- cassette kill—and if this hasn’t happened to you, maybe you just moved here yesterday. Perhaps less relevant to the preceding issue is the film’s meticulous depiction of the cultural background from which this singularity emerged: the borderline male-separatist triumverate of graffiti, breakdancing, and freestyle rapping. This underground scene (inscribed here by the limited set of interviewees, including PNS of the Molemen and J2k of Flosstradamus), sometimes literally underground (a drunken Sharkula video filmed in a wintry basement), trivially problematizes the conception of Wharton’s drawing/breaking/rapping as “outsider art”, for each regional participant scarcely seems confident of their own objective status as successful “insiders” or otherwise. While their discussions are often funny, they are all but conclusively downbeat, unable to deflect the perpetuation of the all-too-familiar Second-City self-deprecating anxiety towards “making it” (which while fully endemic to hip-hop and the (professionalized) visual arts, is thankfully not a universal cultural condition here). Quoted in New City last March, Sharkula laid bare his armchair demography: “There’s nine million people in Chicago…a thousand new people here everyday. I got to sell CDs.” Whether his (incessantly) recorded material can ever be recognized as meaningful to a greater public, one is left to respect this one last man’s wish to stand at our crossroads (in snow, rain, heat, gloom of night) and to touch as many other fellow humans as possible, in some slight way. (2010, 98 min, Mini-DV) — Michael Castelle

Sex African American Style (Shorts Program)
Saturday, 8:15pm and Thursday, 8:15pm
The weakest entries (THE MATTRESS HUSTLE, THE MORNING AFTER, an episode of the web series LENOX AVE.) in this program are a blur of pricey negligees, silk sheets, attractive people, oddly featureless rooms, and slooowwww jamz (drinking game: take a shot every time one of these shorts opens with a slow pan up or across the legs of a reclining woman, starting at the feet). Incidentally, the head-and-shoulders standout, Kiara Jones’ AMAZON WOMEN, includes all of those things—even the opening leg shot—which just goes to prove that greatness and dullness can be achieved through the same basic elements. What AMAZON WOMEN has that these three already-mentioned films don’t is an unhurriedness to the plot and a sparingness to the edits and shots. Unlike those three mentioned offenders, it doesn’t set out to make a statement about sexuality or relationships, but only about its characters—two stoned young women (Frances Turner and Nicole Roderick, in what could, respectively, be called the “Juliet Berto” and “Dominique Labourier” roles) still dressed to the nines at the end of an uneventful evening—and doesn’t feature a sex scene, yet it’s franker than those three films combined. Marcus Thomas’ CASTING NOTICE is a fun, good-looking trifle in which a struggling actor (Brandon Young, from the Baltimore Sun season of The Wire) considers doing porn; Keith Purvis’ ONLINE is essentially an extended single-gag skit, though there’s nothing really wrong with that. — Ignatius Vishnevestsky

Carmen Madden’s EVERYDAY BLACK MAN
Monday, 8:15pm and Wednesday, 6pm
Essentially a late-period Charles Bronson movie disguised as a times-are-tough-in-the-neighborhood drama, with Henry Brown in the Bronson role (complete with that mustache, deliberate delivery, and the two marks of a true Bronson character—a boring job and a daughter) and all the requisites: cutaways to what-the-bad-guys-are-doing, an uncomfortable balance between multiculturalism and xenophobia, nostalgia for a community of “good people” overrun by nogoodniks, a slow-boil structure light on action and heavy on establishing the protagonist as a man whose hand is forced, and even the use of a violent act against a woman as a turning point. Brown plays a man struggling to run a small business who takes on a young Muslim man as a partner, unaware that his charismatic new associate is a drug dealer. It’s more J. Lee Thompson than Michael Winner (thankfully), though with none of Thompson’s craftsmanship; however, if Bronson was still alive, Carmen Madden could direct FAMILY OF COPS IV. A low-key but unsubtle B-film of the 1980s variety; you film studies types will have a field day watching a single-star sub-genre founded on thinly-veiled racism get divorced from its context and lead. (2010, 105 min, DVCam) — Ignatius Vishnevestsky

Martin Baer and Claus Wischmann’s KINSHASA SYMPHONY
Sunday, 5:15pm and Monday, 6:15pm
Bearing a strong resemblance to one of Jia Zhangke’s Shanxi movies—that is, feeling like a Chinese movie made in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by German documentarians—and following a group of people trying to promote Western art in Africa, KINSHASA SYMPHONY could be described (both in terms of its plot and its production) as a story of cultural appropriation and re-contextualization. The titular symphony is reportedly sub-Saharan Africa’s only Western-style classical orchestra, composed of part-time musicians of varying levels of skill (the brass section is noticeably warbly), many of whom have had to make their own instruments and must contend with power outages during rehearsals. A good report on an obscure subject and a good surface full of keen images, it’s the sort of thing that’s more substantial when taken apart (whether as ideas or pulled stills) than when kept together (whether as actual sequences or an entire film). Nothing bad can be said about it; it’s a good way to spend 95 minutes and not much else. (2009, 95 min, HDCam) — Ignatius Vishnevestsky