Cine-File Blog

The 14th Annual European Union Film Festival
Gene Siskel Film Center
Week Two (Friday, March 11 — Thursday, March 17)

A number of our contributors weigh in on a selection of titles from Week Two of the EU festival. Screenings are listed in chronological order based on the first show date. Watch for possible additions during the week.

Pedro Costa’s CHANGE NOTHING (NE CHANGE RIEN) (Portugal/France)
Friday, 6pm and Thursday, 8:15pm
We don’t have an in-house write up for this, but it’s Pedro Costa, so we’ve got to give it its due! Check out Cine-File contributor Ben Sachs’ review for the Chicago Reader here. (2009, 99 min, 35mm)

THE RED CHAPEL (Denmark)
Saturday, 7pm and Monday, 6:15pm
This documentary was partially financed by Lars von Trier’s production company, and it bears many of the hallmarks of von Trier’s work as director. The videography is purposefully crude, and the tone could be described as occupying a gray zone between black comedy and genuine discomfort. What distinguishes the nauseating allure of THE RED CHAPEL from anything directed by von Trier is that its central subject—the totalitarian culture of North Korea—truly is disgusting: there’s no need for moral equivocation here. The movie is a record of director Mads Brügger’s visit to North Korea with the titular comedy duo, two Koreans who have lived in Denmark since birth. Posing as sympathizers of Kim Jong-Il’s regime, they arrange to perform a vaudeville show in Pyongyang as a political prank comparable to what The Yes Men do, but the plan quickly backfires. The revue is revised almost immediately according to State censorship; even worse, the group’s ostensible cultural visit turns out to be a rigid, highly surveilled process by which government officials aim to indoctrinate the comedians. “Postmodern irony never came to North Korea,” Brügger muses at one point, but the movie’s message is hardly so simple. Complicating matters is the fact that one of the Red Chapel performers has cerebral palsy, a condition that would have gotten him executed at birth in North Korea. His very presence is an affront to the nation’s culture of intolerance, but it’s hard to feel any sense of victory, ironic or otherwise, in Brügger’s tactic of throwing him into painful social situations like a lamb to the slaughter. As in von Trier’s movies, the deliberate insensitivity is sure to upset a lot of people, but others may find some food for thought. If nothing else, this is highly watchable as an on-the-ground profile of life in Pyongyang, of which we have very few. (2009, 88 min, DigiBeta video)—Ben Sachs

João Pedro Rodrigues’ TO DIE LIKE A MAN (Portugal/France)
Saturday, 8:45pm and Wednesday, 7:45pm
Occasional Cine-File contributor Gabe Klinger’s (slightly excerpted) write up on TO DIE for Mubi.com: “In João Pedro Rodrigues’ TO DIE LIKE A MAN (2009), Fernando Santos’s Tonia is an aging transsexual who’s falling from grace at the Lisbon club where she has performed for years. Her dilemma is front and center, though it only becomes clear near the end of the film, when Tonia and her junkie younger boyfriend Rosário make the sojourn to a forest where they meet with two enigmatic drag queens named Maria Bakker and Paula, as well as a doctor named Felgueiras who cites German prose together with Maria. Together they go searching for mushrooms, capture a “glow-worm,” and are bathed in a Martian red light. For an extended sequence, the characters sit still as the audience listens to the hypnotic “Cavalry” by Baby Dee. The song lyrics include verses like “Jesus don’t weep for me/Weep for your children instead” and “What happened to your momma/Where has your daddy gone” that [resonate as one] thinks back to Tonia’s religious devotion, as well as to an earlier confrontation with her estranged son Zé Maria. The slow rock ballad tinges the film with a degree of melancholy, before restoring it with impassioned energy by having Fernando Santos sing a fado, complete with carnival plumes and a jeweled crown. [...] The combination of folkloric elements and the contemporary situation of a transsexual give the film its distinctive force and elevate Tonia and Rosário from potentially sad figures into glorious depictions, each as richly and lovingly carved out as a religious icon in [a] Caravaggio [painting]. Both the Baby Dee and fado songs are presented in their integrity, which just goes to show the viewer how serious Rodrigues is in his intent. A lesser filmmaker would have chopped the scenes by a third, thus only giving a fleeting or touristic view rather than allowing for the possibility to feel as though one had lived through this story.” (2009, 134 min, 35mm)—Gabe Klinger

TWO IN THE WAVE (France)
Sunday, 3:15pm and Wednesday, 6pm
There are numerous high-brow approaches to documenting the trajectory of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut’s friendship, most of which are adopted in Emmanuel Laurent’s film at one point or another. At times, the project seems to have a spiritual objective, rooted in Laurent’s unfailing reverence for the cultural legacy of these two men and his presentation of the French New Wave as a sort of prelapsarian state for cinema. In this devotional context, Godard and Truffaut’s bitter falling out takes on the magnitude of a veritable schism. In its more secular moments, the film seems to have a sociological slant, using the directors’ disparate upbringings as a way of addressing their distinct critical viewpoints and diagnosing their eventual conflict. But even in its most studied and self-serious moments. TWO IN THE WAVE feels like a blind gossip item whispered amongst giddy, loyal fans. The film’s most notable attempt at objectivity is its lack of contemporary interviews with surviving friends, collaborators, or critics, so that the entire history is recounted only through primary sources—excerpts from Cahiers du cinema, footage from the pair’s early films, clips of old interviews, and the occasional tabloid article. Rather than conveying neutrality, it feels like an invitation from Laurent to approach the public works and personal lives of Truffaut and Godard as a fellow outsider and enthusiast. (2010, 91 min, HDCAM video)—Anne Orchier

Christi Puiu’s AURORA (Romania)
Sunday, 5pm and Tuesday, 6:15pm
The passage of time seems not to factor into the design of quite a number of movies, which is strange, given the medium’s temporal basis. Refreshingly, AURORA operates along the logic of many experimental films: exploring time, allowing its length to tease out its own little epiphanies. Chantal Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN is perhaps an apt comparison. Events unfold in real time, with Christi Puiu, the film’s director and lead actor, showering, wandering about town, and packing up his belongings in preparation for renovating his flat. Early in the film (well, relatively early in the film, as it takes the movie ten minutes to get to the opening credits) Puiu buys a customized firing pin for a gun, a gun which later receives intermittent screen-time yet commands the conscience of the audience throughout the film. Remembering Chekov’s famous dictum, we know this gun will be used by Puiu, we just don’t know on whom; the fact that Puiu skulks around trailing after strangers forces us to play a morbid guessing-game. With the trigger pulled only halfway through the film, the game adds a new wrinkle, asking us to not only spot the victim but also to understand Puiu’s increasingly irrational actions and his potential motivation. This is Christi Puiu’s first time acting, yet his sense of timing is that of a veteran, with long passages of time consumed by the minutia of his character’s movements. It is a treat to observe and the mundanity of these small moments, ironically, will benefit from a big-screen viewing. (2010, 181 min, 35mm)—Doug McLaren

Jan Hrebejk’s KAWASAKI’S ROSE (Czech Republic)
Sunday, 5pm and Wednesday, 8pm
The world needs minor artists, wrote Robert Warshow, and the movies need more directors like Jan Hrebejk (UP AND DOWN, SHAMELESS). A maker of light comedies about recognizably messy emotions and a human-scaled chronicler of political controversies, Hrebejk often recalls James L. Brooks (BROADCAST NEWS, SPANGLISH) in his social observation, but he lacks Brooks’ incessant begging for his audiences to like him. Hrebejk is not afraid of making his characters unlikeable (particularly the most masculine ones), nor does he try to reconcile their conflicts by the end of every film. The last scene of KAWASAKI’S ROSE is a fine example of Hrebejk’s understated complexity. It’s a moment of bitter confrontation, staged as domestic comedy, between a man returning from exile and the romantic rival who sold him out to State authorities thirty years earlier. Surrounded by family and friends, the two appear to have reached some kind of friendly truce—until the exile proceeds with the film’s final monologue, which insists that recovery has only begun. His words are eloquent, funny, and dripping with recrimination. This is some of the most human writing to grace recent movies. KAWASAKI’S ROSE doesn’t operate on this level throughout. Like Hrebejk’s other films, it’s a mixed bag of insight and shallowness: Some characters are introduced only to advance the story; certain scenes (particularly those of marital discord that take up much of the first third) will feel familiar even to casual viewers of the domestic drama. Yet these weaknesses cannot take away from the film’s underlying maturity. The film slowly reveals itself to be about Czech abuses of power in the years following the Prague Spring of 1968, and it’s surprisingly forthright in implicating members of the liberal “Velvet Revolution” in this corruption. Hrebejk couches the politics in a rather low-stakes drama about a TV producer working on a profile of his distinguished father-in-law, a Velvet Revolutionary with buried ties to the 70s police state. In hindsight, Hrebejk’s focus seems entirely apt: Rather than indulge in the impotent breast-beating of exposing past corruption, the film considers what it’s like to live, day-to-day, with its legacy. As always in Hrebejk’s films, the acting is fine and warmly indulgent of character quirks; as a visual artist, Hrebejk remains unassuming but never dull. (2009, 95 min, 35mm widescreen)—Ben Sachs

The 14th Annual European Union Film Festival
Gene Siskel Film Center
Week One (Friday, March 4 — Thursday, March 10)

A number of our contributors weigh in on a selection of titles from Week One of the EU festival. Screenings are listed in chronological order based on the first show date. Watch for possible additions during the week.

BIBLIOTHEQUE PASCAL (Hungary)
Friday, 6:00pm and Monday, 8:15pm
The Opening Night screening for the EU Festival is a superbly done fairytale revolving around the delirious misadventures of Mona. In the framing story of the film, Mona, recently returned from England, is attempting to retrieve her daughter out of Child Welfare, where the daughter was placed thanks to the negligence of her aunt Rodica. In explaining the mix-up to the social worker, Mona drums up a fantastic story comparable to Terry Gilliam’s best bohemian tales. From a homophobic criminal who can project his dreams to a street performer cum manager of a literary-themed brothel, the characters in the film are ridiculous send-ups that also never feel contrived. The Gilliam comparisons are apt, considering Gilliam’s own penchant for happenstance logic; Mona’s employment by the one “nice” pimp, Pascal, owner of the titular brothel, feels a bit like a continuation of TIDELAND (if that film were more like DR PARNASUS). And it is here in this English brothel that the most fantastic portions of the story flourish. Sold into slavery by her septuagenarian father, Mona is smuggled to England and finds herself in the Joan of Arc room at Bibliotheque Pascal, presumably because she’s too old for the Lolita room and certainly not a right fit for the Dorian Gray room. In here, despite Pascal’s congenial behavior, only the dreams of her daughter can save her. In here, despite the film’s previous flights of fancy, Mona is still shot up with heroin, trapped in a graphomaniac’s room, forced to recite Saint Joan for the erotic pleasures of English elite. But don’t fret: it’s only a fairytale, told to get her daughter back. None of it could have really happened, right? Director Szabolcs Hajdu and star Orsolya Török-Illyés in person for the Friday screening. (2010, 111 min, 35mm)—Doug McLaren

MY QUEEN KARO (Netherlands)
Saturday, 3pm and Monday, 8pm
A snapshot of failed utopianism taken from a child’s perspective, Dorothee Van der Berghe’s semi-autobiographical film references her own upbringing in free-spirited 1970′s Amsterdam without drowning in cynicism or sunny nostalgia. Most of the film takes place inside the commune where ten-year-old Karo (Anna Franziska Jager) has relocated with her parents, Raven and Dalia, and group of their like-minded friends, who have all opted to maintain the creature comforts laid out by 1960′s hippie ideals while abdicating any actual sense of political commitment beyond participating in protest culture and arguing about whether or not to put up walls or pay the electric bill. The space itself is characterized by varied centers of activity that resemble Karo’s alternative elementary school more than any other living space, and is always lit in either bright natural light or near total darkness, conveying a sense of shared and semi-public childhood tinged with moments of extreme intimacy. Karo herself often looks noticeably fretful amongst her playful adult companions, with wide, concerned eyes and a furrowed brow that are made even more prominent by her homemade haircut and its jagged, too-short bangs. Her collective caretakers perpetuate an idea of freedom that is entirely literal and reactionary, but through Karo’s particular lens of anxious curiosity, the value of these ideals is questioned not so much in terms of their political relevance, but in terms of their ability to promote a sense of solidified sadness that seems premature in children and stunted in adults. This is not to say that childhood in the commune is dominated by this sadness, but rather by an uneasy sense of what it might mean to never grow out of its uninformed and unarticulated aspect, providing a dark edge to the film’s glowing photographic quality. (2009, 102 min, HDCAM Video)—Anne Orchier

DISCO AND ATOMIC WAR (Estonia)
Saturday, 5:15pm and Thursday, 8:15pm
A very funny and often eye-opening history lesson, Jaak Kilmi’s cine-essay charts the last decades of the Cold War through the infiltration of his native Estonia by Western pop culture. The general argument is that the threat of atomic war did less to drive Soviet Bloc nations to capitalism than the individualist allure of disco, TV shows like Dallas and Knight Rider, and the soft-core classic EMMANUELLE—all of which came into Estonia through Finnish television signals bolstered (most likely) by CIA technology. Kilmi’s approach is closer to the jolly irony of Dusan Makavejev than the paranoid counter-history of Adam Curtis, though he shares with both filmmakers a talent for assembling footage with the winding logic of a collage artist. The film is an exciting mix of old broadcasts, interviews with strange men (including a self-styled inventor who secretly built satellite antennas in the 80s), and staged sequences based on Kilmi’s childhood memories. Kilmi ties the elements together with a wry, self-effacing narration that’s hard not to like: “Michael Knight [David Hasselhoff's character on Knight Rider] taught me how to speak to foreign cars using my digital watch,” he says at one point, before cutting to the sweet image of a child actor doing exactly that. It’s a wise moment, suggesting at once the vapidity of Reagan-era consumerism, the impressionability of Soviet Bloc culture, and the child’s imagination that could find wonder in them both. Kilmi invokes this imaginative spirit through most of the film. (2009, 77 min, DigiBeta video)—Ben Sachs

HABERMANN (Czech Republic)
Saturday, 7:15pm and Tuesday, 8pm
Set in the Sudentenland in the years leading up to and following the Nazi occupation, HABERMANN is a mostly conventional historical drama with a buried element of subversive horror. The only thing more shocking than seeing certain taboo histories addressed so bluntly on film is seeing them addressed by Juraj Herz, a Slovak filmmaker best known for his complex and poetic approach to anything political, including the atrocities suffered and perpetrated throughout World War II. The opening moments of HABERMANN do readily invoke some of Herz’s earliest and best known works—the first image of a violent village mob resembles nothing so much as an infinite-headed, bloodthirsty beast-creature and has the same enthralling quality of his surreal horror fable BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, and another early image of the machinery in August Habermann’s mill, with its seemingly diabolical spinning, spitting teeth, recalls the heavy political symbolism of THE CREMATOR—but overall, the majority of the film leans toward a straightforward depiction of the war and its major players that is entirely expected and tolerable, with upsetting scenes of betrayal and cruelty and bodily damage offset by scenes of natural beauty and heroism and pure transcendent love between nations. The final moments of unspeakable horror are hinted at throughout the film and then realized in its last few minutes, when Herz addresses the treatment of native Germans in the Sudentenland after the war ended, showing how those victims who had suffered at the hands of the Nazis during the occupation turned, suddenly and viciously, against anyone they perceived as related to that structure. At this point in the film, the bands of antagonists and victims shift so quickly that the most disorienting thing about it is how, at first, it’s hardly disorienting at all, just another chapter in this history of inhumanity. (2010, 104 min, 35mm)—Anne Orchier

AMER (Belgium)
Saturday, 9:15pm and Wednesday, 8:45pm
The psychosexual development of a young female, Ana, is explored with minimal dialogue in three episodes, tracking childhood, adolescence, and womanhood. The first (and best) episode takes its stylistic cues from Dario Argento, complete with a Goblin-esque soundtrack during the movie’s opening credits. Primary-color lighting and extreme close-ups hint at what a children’s horror movie made by Argento would look like, and this episode pins it down quite nicely. A terrified child’s interpretation of the mystical phenomenon of a grandparent’s death and his subsequent viewing are perfect for a kid’s version of giallo. Unfortunately, the rest of the film does not hold up to the first half hour, once it abandons its SUSPIRA aping (It returns at the end to lesser effect.), and is often dragged down by repeated shots of erect nipples under sundresses and panties flashed by a breeze. It’s an unfortunately masculine interpretation of female sexuality, rivaling only BLACK SWAN in its absurdly faux-feminist approach. Still, this first section stands so strongly it is worth sitting through (or, gasp!, walking out on!) the later portions of the movie. (2009, 90 min, DigiBeta)—Doug McLaren

THE PORTUGUESE NUN (Portugal/France)
Sunday, 3pm and Wednesday, 6pm
The title and plot synopsis of THE PORTUGUESE NUN—a French actress looks for love and meaning while working abroad in Lisbon—make it sound like something that would show up in October at CIFF. This is, however, the fourth full-length film by Eugène Green—a Francophile who became French (and mastered their native art: the French Film), only to turn to Lusophilia in this recent production. His previous feature, LE PONT DES ARTS (2004), is—depending on which Cine-File contributor you ask—one of the greatest movies of all time, or a sort of highbrow NAPOLEON DYNAMITE. In that film Green achieved a simultaneously unholy and holy fusion of the mannered non-acting of Bresson’s “models”; a historical sensitivity bordering on the academically perverse; and a passionate ardor for intimate musical performance that brought the tears of nerds to Facets’ sticky floor. But Green (here playing “himself” as the director of the titular, equivalently avant-garde, film-within-a-film) is like a Bresson who would be delighted to take you out for drinks until dawn, discussing philosophy of film and awkwardly dancing to downtempo acid jazz; he is pretentious in such stunning and novel ways it reminds you of how awesome pretentiousness was in the first place. For when these characters speak in metronomic, increasingly ecstatic epigraphs, it’s not a self-parodying joke running on the trace fumes of L’ANNÉE DERNIÈRE À MARIENBAD (1961)—it’s in the service of a deliberate and classically-designed narrative, however frequently invisible its structure may be. While Green’s visual form is characterized by both DP Raphaël O’Byrne’s gorgeous static/painterly compositions and his trademark audacious, Interrotron-esque shot/reverse-shot close-ups, the mood and feeling he generates is different, and it involves sound as much as sight. He wants to repeatedly evoke—sometimes explicitly, and sometimes implicitly—the ineffable sensation of walking on cobblestone streets, into a mysterious and alluring nightclub, or a church (or a movie theater…) in an unknown city; and discovering, behind a parted curtain, on a modest stage, the sublime. More recommended than you can really know. (2009, 127 min, 35mm)—Michael Castelle

HELLO! HOW ARE YOU? (Romania)
Sunday, 5:30pm and Thursday, 8:15pm
What a pleasure it is to see a middling romantic comedy that still looks like a real movie. No matter how awful the jokes get, the director, Alexandru Maftei, has the good taste not to bludgeon them into us with reaction shots of someone making a funny face, as is the case in so much current Hollywood product; also missing is the typical bevy of idiot straw-men that exist solely to make the viewer feel better about him or herself. Maftei has even fashioned a distinct look to match his subject matter (which could be summarized, after the intentional bad-joke titles of David Cross’ first album, as “Sex on the Internet?!”): Much of the film takes place under dim, warm lighting that suggests afternoons leisurely wasted over board games and Playboy magazines; and Maftei caps a lot of the scenes with lateral tracking shots that make the action feel as though it’s taking place in a dollhouse. Much of the irksomeness of contemporary Hollywood is still here: the feeble topical references (See previous parenthetical), the disposable secondary cast, the hypocritical formula of stuffing the first half of the movie with risqué gags and then endorsing monogamy in the second. Still, Maftei finds plenty of room for generosity within the narrow parameters of the sex farce, and this alone makes the movie worth seeing. The only breasts that Maftei’s camera ever lingers over are the asymmetrical pair of the movie’s middle-aged heroine (and this when she’s learning to admire her body in the mirror). Also prominent in the mise-en-scene are the forty-something hero’s receding hairline and a supporting character’s triumphantly mismatched bra and panties. (2010, 102 min, 35mm)—Ben Sachs

CINE-FILE 2010 BEST OF LISTS

ROB CHRISTOPHER

Thirteen Great Movies I Watched in 2010

THE ADULTS IN THE ROOM (Andy Blubaugh, 2010)
THE BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS (Werner Herzog, 2009)
BEFORE SUNSET (Richard Linklater, 2004)
I AM LOVE (Luca Guadagnino, 2009)
INCEPTION (Christopher Nolan, 2010)
INSIDE JOB (Charles Ferguson, 2010)
IN THE LOOP (Armando Iannucci, 2009)
LAPORTE, INDIANA (Jason Bitner, 2010)
TO BE OR NOT TO BE (Ernst Lubitch, 1942)
TUESDAY, AFTER CHRISTMAS (Radu Muntean, 2010)
UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)
UP IN THE AIR (Jason Reitman, 2009)
THE WHITE RIBBON (Michael Haneke, 2009)

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JOSEPHINE FERORELLI

Best features that screened in Chicago in 2010

3 IDIOTS (Rajkumar Hirani, 2009)
BRIGHT STAR (Jane Campion, 2008)
DISTRICT 13: ULTIMATUM (Patrick Allesandrin, 2009)
POSTCARD TO DADDY (Michael Stock, 2009)
SCRAPPERS (Brian Ashby, Ben Kolak, Courtney Prokopas, 2009)
A PROPHET (Jacques Audiard, 2009)
I AM LOVE (Luca Guadagnino, 2009)
SKELETONS (Nick Whitfield, 2010)
I’M STILL HERE (Casey Affleck, 2010)
TRUE GRIT (Coen Bros., 2010)

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KALVIN HENELY

White materialWild grassWorld on a wire.The Social Network/Tiny Furniture/Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives#The Ghost Writer.Certified Copy

[Posted with intended formatting.—Ed.]

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JB MABE

1. DISTANCE (Julie Murray, 2010)
FEBRUARY, NEITHER, NOV. UNTITLED (Kyle Canterbury, 2010)
2. SLAVE SHIP (T. Marie, 2010)
3. SORRY (Luther Price, 2010)
4. COLLISION OF PARTS (Mark Street, 2008)
5. SHADOW CUT (Martin Arnold, 2010)
BUTTERFLIES HAVE NO MEMORIES (Lav Diaz, 2009)
STEP UP 3D (Jon Chu, 2010)
6. HATERZ (Chad Knutson, 2009)
7. NON-AYRAN (Abraham Ravett, 2009)
8. BENEATH YOUR SKIN OF DEEP HOLLOW (Malena Szlam, 2010)
DAYLIGHT + THE SUN (Karen Johannesen, 2009)
SOUND OVER WATER (Mary Helena Clark, 2009)
TRYPPS #7 (BADLANDS) (Ben Russell, 2010)
9. ATLANTIQUES (Mati Diop, 2009)
HOT TUB TIME MACHINE (Steve Pink, 2010)
LEDO AND IX GO TO TOWN (Emily Carmichael, 2010)
10. WHEN DOES A DREAM BECOME A NIGHTMARE? (WolfgoreShow, 2010) or
GIMMIE PIZZA SLOW (philipmserious, 2010)

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DOUG MCLAREN

Dissonant (Manon de Boer, 2010)
Dogtooth (Giorgos Lanthimos, 2009)
The Four Times (Michelangelo Frammartino, 2010)
Home Movie (John Price, 2010)
I Am Love (Luca Guadagnino, 2009)
I’m Still Here (Casey Affleck, 2010)
Red (Robert Schwentke, 2010)
The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)
Summer Grass 2/10 (Mie Kurihara, 2008)
Sweetgrass (Ilisa Barbash & Lucien Castaing-Taylor, 2009)
Unsubscribe Series (Jodie Mack, 2010)
The Velvet Underground in Boston (Andy Warhol, 1967)

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ANNE ORCHIER

Favorite new releases of 2010:

DOGTOOTH (Giorgos Lanthimos, 2009)
HADEWIJICH (Bruno Dumont, 2009)
THE STRANGE CASE OF ANGELICA (Manoel de Oliveira, 2009)
BARBE BLEUE (Catherine Breillat, 2009)
TINY FURNITURE (Lena Dunham, 2010)
THE A-TEAM (Joe Carnahan, 2010)
WHITE MATERIAL (Claire Denis, 2009)
TRASH HUMPERS (Harmony Korine, 2009)
L’ENFER D’HENRI-GEORGES CLUZOT (Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea, 2009)
THE SOCIAL NETWORK (David Fincher, 2010)

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BEN SACHS

Favorite New Releases of 2010

1. THE GHOST WRITER (Roman Polanski, 2010)

2. VINCERE (Marco Bellocchio, 2009)

3. THE FATHER OF MY CHILDREN (Mia Hansen-Love, 2009)

4. I’M STILL HERE (Casey Affleck, 2010)

5. THE SUN (Aleksandr Sokurov, 2005)

6. EVERYONE ELSE (Maren Ade, 2009)

7. Tie: 35 SHOTS OF RUM (Claire Denis, 2008) + WHITE MATERIAL (Claire Denis, 2009)

8. ANTON CHEKHOV’S THE DUEL (Dover Kosashvili, 2009)

9. MICMACS (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2009)

10. Tie: HEREAFTER (Clint Eastwood, 2010) + BOXING GYM (Frederick Wiseman, 2010)

11. THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN (Andre Techine, 2009)

12. VENGEANCE (Johnnie To, 2009)

13. LIVERPOOL (Lisandro Alonso, 2008)

14. WILD GRASS (Alain Resnais, 2009)

15. SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD (George Romero, 2009)

16. Tie: ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE (Thet Sambath & Rob Lemkin, 2010) + GHOST TOWN (Zhao Donyang, 2008)

17. ZERO (Pawel Borowski, 2009)

18. BLUEBEARD (Catherine Breillat, 2009)

19. BEESWAX (Andrew Bujalski, 2009)

20. UNSTOPPABLE (Tony Scott, 2010)

Some random notes on this list:

I was surprised by how dismissive audiences were of HEREAFTER and SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD, considering that both were made by preeminent national artists working at the height of their craft. Both were, in part, tributes to film genres long since out of fashion: in Eastwood’s case, the metaphysical romance epitomized in the 30s and 40s by Frank Borzage; in Romero’s, the pared-down Westerns of the late 40s and early 50s. I suspect the dismissal of these films has to do with the general lack of familiarity with the genres in question.

The single most overlooked release of 2010? I cast my vote for ANTON CHEKHOV’S THE DUEL, which was marketed as a second-tier costume drama and forgotten almost immediately after opening at the Music Box. But this was one of the finest film adaptations of Chekhov I’ve seen, surpassing nearly everything I saw in the Film Center’s Chekhov centenary series from last April. Never studied in its recreation but brimming with the liveliness, humor and eroticism of Chekhov’s writing, the film was also a worthy follow-up to director Dover Kosashvili’s great first feature, LATE MARRIAGE–which was plenty Chekhovian in its own right. In terms of visual craft, THE DUEL marked a leap forward for Kosashvili, who seemed to draw inspiration for his nimble mise-en-scene from the Impressionist paintings that were being made at the same time that Chekhov was writing.

Is it only a coincidence that four of my top five choices are about the consequences of unchecked power? And that all four were unexpectedly hilarious in parts?

It’s a shame that Jeunet’s MICMACS wasn’t taken more seriously–or that more people didn’t see it, period. I was astonished by how bluntly it confronted the corruption of the arms industry and by how sincerely it tried to respond to it, through the universally-beloved comedy of silent films. In its ethical stance, at once admirable and naive, it’s the closest equivalent in recent movies to THE GREAT DICTATOR.

Along with IF I WANT TO WHISTLE, I WHISTLE, an outstanding Romanian title that played in the International Festival, ZERO (which played at EU and the Polish Film Festival) was the most inventive new film from Eastern Europe that I saw this year. I hope that both find larger audiences in the States.

Further overlooked releases, in alphabetical order:

DEVIL (John Erick Dowdle, 2010)

DOG SWEAT (Hosein Keshavarz, 2009)

A FILM WITH ME IN IT (Ian FitzGibbon, 2008)

IF I WANT TO WHISTLE, I WHISTLE (Florin Serban, 2010)

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS (Terry Gilliam, 2009)

JUST ANYBODY (Jacques Doillon, 2008)

SHAMELESS (Jan Hrebejk, 2008)

SOLITARY MAN (Brian Koppelman & David Levein, 2010)

THE END OF AN ERA: GOODBYE TO A CHICAGO INSTITUTION

Saturday, December 18 will see the final screening at the Bank of America Cinema. That still sounds strange—Bank of America Cinema—for many people it’s still thought of as the LaSalle Bank Cinema; folks of a certain age probably still occasionally catch themselves saying Talman. When LaSalle was bought by Bank of America a few years back, and the venerable screening series had to change it’s name from a cozy neighborhood one to a decidedly institutional one, many people wondered whether a large corporation would show the same respect and hands-off attitude as the previous local banks whose names adorned the series over the previous years had. Some wondered whether the screenings would continue at all. Turns out they did—but only for a time. The bottom line wins out. Now, after nearly 40 years, a much-loved fixture of the Chicago film scene comes to its end. Can’t say it wasn’t a good run, though! We at Cine-File would like to thank and congratulate all of those who ran the series over the last four decades—their dedication and often-unheralded efforts are truly worth remembering and celebrating. Good show!

Below is a personal reminiscence by Mike King, the previous Programmer at LaSalle/BAC. For the last couple of years, the series has been headed-up by Michael Phillips, with invaluable contributions by Becca Hall and Julian Antos. The three of them have plans afoot to continue the spirit of the LaSalle in a different space. Watch Cine-File (mid-February is the target date) for information on this new venture—and support it as much as you can! It will be yet another example of the against-the-odds independent and grassroots film programming in the city that needs the support of all those who love film.—Ed.

A REMEMBRANCE
By Mike King

This Saturday, Chicago loses its most idiosyncratic movie palace, the Bank of America Cinema (née LaSalle, née Talman, née North West Federal), where the Saturday Classic Film Series has been running week-in, week-out since 1972. One last time, for those unlucky souls who haven’t been there: yes, it’s really a movie theater, with popcorn, a big screen, 35mm and 16mm projectors—the works. And yes, it’s really in a regular Portage Park bank branch, with tellers, a vault, and everything. It’s totally unmarked from the outside, and you enter through the alley, like a speakeasy. The programming is hardcore talkies-era Hollywood (with the occasional silent film), and the vibe is that of a secret society. No small amount of the Cinema’s success is due to the subversive charge of slipping into a bank on a Saturday night alongside 150 fellow eccentrics to eat Goobers and watch Gun Crazy.

Although it shows mostly old movies to mostly old people, the Bank is no nostalgia house. This is largely due to the fact that, for most of its history, the Bank’s curators have been markedly younger than its clientele. I was 24 when I lucked into the gig, and didn’t have the faintest idea who Jeanette MacDonald was. I began inhaling Turner Classic Movies to try to get up to speed, and quickly discovered just how deep Hollywood’s well ran. I became a zealot for the kinds of directors most revival houses rarely touch, but that the Bank has always specialized in: Rouben Mamoulian, John Brahm, Jean Negulesco, Joseph H. Lewis, Henry Hathaway. It seemed to me not only impossible but also unjust that there weren’t Robert Siodmak retrospectives happening all the time. So when I eventually booked those pre-code Ernst Lubitsch musicals with MacDonald, it was because I was dying to see them for the first time, not out of misty-eyed nostalgia. Of course, while I was being blown away by Monte Carlo and hyping Criss Cross with the fervor of the newly converted, much of the audience was already long hip to it. Some of the die-hards had probably even seen it once or twice at the Bank over the decades, when a previous programmer was first discovering it.

Nowadays, you can get films by all these great also-ran masters on DVD, which for the most part strikes me as almost inconceivably good luck. But it’s not a replacement—what you don’t get at home, as every good cinephile knows, is the audience. For oddball charm, the Bank’s clientele rivaled the character actors populating a Preston Sturges comedy. A particularly divisive regular was “laughing man,” a guy who, at one random point during every show, let out a big, booming “HA!” Every screening contained an element of suspense: what incidental camera move or pedestrian reaction shot would trigger his yuk this time? I could never unlock the secret. Many of these people knew far more about classic Hollywood off the top of their head than I ever will, and I learned a lot about how to watch movies from them. The best way to appreciate classic Hollywood’s unique rhythms and eloquent staging is to experience it with an audience, and, having grown up with the stuff, this crowd was tuned into it on a subliminal level. Jokes that I had not even detected when previewing International House alone in the booth now struck me as utterly hilarious.

Of the many lessons the Bank taught, the most crucial was that even masterpieces have dumb parts, and it is okay to acknowledge them. Take a film like The Lady From Shanghai. When it plays Doc Films at University of Chicago, the undergrads laugh straight through it, to prove how smart they are. Go see it at Gene Siskel Film Center, and nobody laughs at all, as if they are humbled by how smart the film is. At the Bank, people would laugh along with the jokes, but also chuckle at first hearing Orson Welles’ wretched fake Irish accent. Because it’s funny. But that doesn’t make the film any less powerful, and strikes me as a useful, realistic way to approach cinema. You can’t take art seriously if you are constantly in deference to it. Orson Welles wasn’t some tragic genius, whose every studio-mandated compromise was to be mourned forever, or at least not only that. He was also a guy who did a lousy Irish accent. This is what they don’t teach in film school.

This under-the-radar Chicago institution began as a classic movies club in the basement cafeteria of a North West Federal Savings and Loan in 1971, and has survived multiple corporate takeovers and mergers. LaSalle’s buyout by Bank of America in 2007 marks the first time the Cinema’s owning bank has been based out of town, and three years later it’s closing down. To a bank, the cost of running the Cinema is peanuts—certainly far less than many bankers’ annual bonuses—and it more or less broke even anyhow. Before Bank of America came along, it was viewed as a community service, but nowadays much of what passes for corporate outreach is name-above-the-title sponsorship of events that would happen anyways (during the takeover, Bank of America was in a hurry to slap their name on the Chicago Marathon—meanwhile, we couldn’t get anyone on the phone). When the definition of community is stretched to encompass global marketing events, it’s tough to make a case for a little revival house in Portage Park. And as anyone who’s ever sat in that mustard room knows, the Cinema wasn’t exactly something you could show off to investors. In the past few years, Bank of America has screwed over thousands of Americans far more egregiously than Chicago-area cinephiles, but it’s still difficult to see this as something other than the banks taking one more thing away from us.

Revival houses are different now. In many ways, the Bank is a relic of a time before DVDs (before VHS even), when scratchy 16mm prints were acceptable because there was literally no alternative. For the most part, the survivors have stepped up their game. Every night, Chicagoans are treated to pristine prints at cathedrals like the Siskel, where the projection is better, the seats are more comfortable, and the popcorn butter presumably doesn’t originate in disquieting gelatinous sleeves. But you will never see lunatic whatsits like Gabriel Over The White House there. That was the Bank’s beat, and its looming absence leaves a major programming void—in order to fully grasp American film history, you have to venture well beyond the canon.

But as much as the Bank’s curators have cherished resurrecting oddball titles and overlooked directors, they were just movies. More than anything, the Bank was a throwback to an even earlier time, when movie theaters were social hubs for the surrounding community. People don’t show up at the AMC River East hours before every single show to talk with friends that they made there, and then hang around talking afterwards until the last possible minute, when the programmer sends them home. This happened without fail, before and after every Bank show I ever worked, and is ultimately what I’ll miss most about the place: the feeling that the movies were incidental.

Ned Farr’s A MARINE STORY (New American)
Landmark: Tuesday, 7pm
A MARINE STORY shares some of the Budweiser grit of other Iraq war dramas, like Kimberly Pierce’s STOP-LOSS and Kathryn Bigelow’s THE HURT LOCKER, but it’s at once more politically conservative and more aesthetically progressive. Dreya Weber plays Alex Everett, an honorably discharged Marine major returning to her arid California hometown with a secret and a drinking problem. The narrative ambition here is to perform the absurdity of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy by creating a portrait of a worthy lesbian Marine. It does so schematically, without delving too deep or kicking up dust in any of the neighboring political issues. But while it fails to break plot ground, it succeeds in doing something else impressively; it’s a rare movie that is so sensually interested in the bodies of women without objectifying those women. Here we have the same cinematic gaze that has admired furrowed brows and sweaty muscles for generations, in THE GETAWAY, RAMBO, YOUNG GUNS, etc. It’s a gaze that admires strength and discipline but still can caress a curve, and it’s put to especially subversive use in shots of a bar brawl that clearly refer to the central scene of THE ACCUSED.
(2010, 95 min, DigiBeta)
-Josephine Ferorelli

Andrew Blubaugh’s THE ADULTS IN THE ROOM (New Documentary)
Landmark: Monday, 7pm
Film-fest regular Andy Blubaugh’s first feature-length movie combines making-of documentary with personal-historical reenactment to crack his life open and inspect the contents. The movie concerns an affair the 15-year-old Andy had with a much older man, Peter. At the heart of the matter, can it have been a love affair when it was a crime and an abuse of power? Blubaugh goes to great lengths not to answer this question absolutely; he is deeply attached to the legacy of this romance, but recognizes the damage it did. As an adult now Peter’s age and a high school film teacher, he has a vivid understanding of that age divide. And as a gay educator he brings into focus the fear, censure and internalized homophobia that prevents him from being out with his students, even as his films deal in candor and personal revelation. Scenes of casting the film-within-a-film and whether to tell Peter about the movie give ethical issues a fresh workout. Blubaugh deeply integrates story with methods of storytelling; his movie vibrates on the resonant human frequency.
(2009, 82 min, DV)

Susi Graf’s LOST IN THE CROWD (New Documentary)
Landmark: Saturday 1:45
LOST IN THE CROWD is a meticulous longitudinal study of the lives of 6 queer street kids in New York that feels immediate and unsentimental. The film’s subjects have unusually clear-eyed views of their own situations, particularly Kimy, a young sometime-tranny runaway from rural Utah. He speaks with a kind of scathing optimism that provides the affective pulse of this doc. Many of the kids consciously, willfully defy stereotypes even as they endure the classic ordeals of street life; drug abuse, prostitution, violence. In a surprising and joyful middle chapter, Graf finds several of her subjects walking balls, the drag fashion and dance extravaganzas made famous 20 years ago in Jennie Livingston’s PARIS IS BURNING. The late Willi Ninja gives an interesting interview.
(2009, 75 min, DV)

Stu Maddux’s GEN SILENT (New Documentary)
Landmark Century Saturday 12pm
The best documentaries teach you things you should know just by letting you get intimate with people you haven’t met. An insightful view of what’s happening as the GLBT front-guard ages and dies, GEN SILENT is as timely as it is warmly efficient. The movie begins with soft-focus, dreamy shots of smiling elders in the Boston pride parade, with voice-over from one of our subjects, Lawrence. There’s a prettiness to the look of this movie that doesn’t cover up suffering, but draws you into it gently. Lawrence, in his 60s, is 20 years younger than his partner Alexandre, who suffers from Parkinson’s and dementia, and lives in an assisted-living facility. Scenes of Lawrence spoon-feeding Alexandre and putting lotion on his hands have the deep pathos of someone else’s routine. This is Alexandre’s second old-folks’ home; they didn’t feel safe in the first one. In interview after interview, the elderly and their advocates voice the same basic mistrust for mainstream institutions. These people have a living memory of pre-Stonewall persecution; some of them were forcibly hospitalized and ‘treated’ for deviance, and all of them lived in fear of that possibility. Graphics appear on-screen several times, keywords like FEAR, INSENSITIVITY, and ISOLATION, giving the impression that this movie could be repurposed as training materials for care-givers if necessary. Some of the captions have typos, and this somehow adds to the feeling of urgency and practicality of the project, rather than distracting the viewer. If time-saving tricks were used in post-production, none of the footage feels rushed or casual. This is a movie with an important story to tell about how big the purview of love is.
(70 min, 2010, DV)

Nick Whitfield’s SKELETONS (New British)
Friday- 8:30, Saturday- 4:20, Monday- 10:15
Reviews have already compared Whitfield’s debut feature to Samuel Beckett’s GHOSTBUSTERS or a very British LETHAL WEAPON. While these are good starting off points for a plot summary, the mechanics of the story and the hermetically sealed aesthetic universe are in place to allow something more delicate and radical to occur. At the risk of getting heavy on this mischievous, astral comedy, the central drama resembles nothing so much as a very productive group session of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Bennett (Andrew Buckley) and Davis (Ed Gaughan) are two round, middle-aged men in suits, trudging through a British countryside that’s been scrubbed clean of any decade-giveaways. They make house-calls in which they semi-literally get the skeletons out of people’s closets through an analog mechanical exorcism, and then leave their clients quickly to avoid the fallout. Davis has been using their technology on the sly to return again and again to a memory from his childhood while Bennett threatens, cajoles, bargains with him to stop, but ultimately covers for him to their superior, the Colonel (Jason Isaacs, with a handsome fishing cap and a thin scar the whole way round his neck). They meet their profound match in the household of Jane (Paprika Steen), who wants them to use their skills to find her missing husband. Even though he may be alive, she’s been digging for him in the yard, different holes every day (“can’t dig in the same place twice, that’d be crazy“), while her young son kicks a ball against a wall and her adult daughter Rebecca (Tuppence Middleton), who hasn’t spoken in three years, practices witchcraft in a shed. Davis’s bad habit of repeating the past causes something to go wrong in the exorcism, wherein he can suddenly only speak Bulgarian (a ‘hazard of the trade’). An unlikely duo on the outside, Davis and Rebecca meet on the astral plane (the unconscious) and dispatch the Imaginary Father together (their fantasies, both good and bad, of the fathers who abandoned them), return to their positions in the Symbolic order, and reclaim Le Nom Du Pere and language, before returning to consciousness to confide in their maternal figures (Bennett and Jane, respectively). Meanwhile Bennett and Jane have done some analysis of their own; By the end of the film Jane is using her shovel to make a garden, and Bennett has re-engaged with the Pleasure Principle: after years of living by the rules, he makes himself seen by Jane. The psychological intentions of this movie (even if they were never explicitly Lacanian) are clear in the absence of bells and whistles and the minimum of supernatural explication: we get only what information we need to move us inside the characters. That visual and narrative modesty is what helps this movie do something really weird and exceptional.
(94 min, 2009)
-Josephine Ferorelli

Valerio Mieli’s TEN WINTERS (New Italian)
Monday- 5:30, Tuesday- 8:15
In praising this subtle, insightful movie, permit me one unflattering comparison: it’s got structural similarities to WHEN HARRY MET SALLY. Our protagonists, Silvestro (Michele Riondino) and Camilla (Isabella Ragonese), meet at the beginning of college, and re-meet more or less annually until they are older and wiser. But unlike Ephron and Reiner’s battle-of-the-sexes middlebrow manifesto, Mieli’s series of vignettes pushes no agenda. We aren’t being dragged anywhere, and when we move forward in time we must use our brains to understand what’s changed. Despite the imposed structure that the title implies, we aren’t bound too strictly to a formula; sometimes it’s February, sometimes it’s November. We travel from rainy Venice outskirts to snow-blanketed Moscow and back. This movie is a long complicated interaction between two smart, prideful, insecure people, and the movement from one affective relationship to the next feels propelled by those characters and not by plotting demands. Similarly, the humor (and it’s very funny) arises without strain from observant writing and intuitive acting. And though Silvestro and Camilla are witty people, sometimes their humor isn’t played for comedy. Their relative ability to make each other laugh is a good barometer for how well they are getting along each winter.
(99 min., 2009, 35mm)
-Josephine Ferorelli