CRUCIAL VIEWING
Michael Mann’s PUBLIC ENEMIES (New Narrative)
Various Venues - Check Reader Movies for theaters and showtimes
There's no new movie playing anywhere in the world as modern as PUBLIC ENEMIES. That's something you can be certain of, just like you can be certain that Michael Mann is the most modern director in American cinema—funny considering he's 65 years old, and because his new movie takes place ten years before he was born. Everything is clear in this muddled film. Everything is completely new in this old story shot in old places with familiar faces playing people who've been dead for decades. PUBLIC ENEMIES is shameless and free; it's not interested in distinctions between naturalism, realism or expressionism, just in what a few spoken words, an image, a sound, a voice, an edit, or a gesture can do. It's a gangster film made as if gangster films had no imagery, as if we'd never seen a Tommy gun, a moll's dress, or a bank vault before. A "Hollywood" movie made as though Hollywood didn't exist, as though we didn't know who Johnny Depp or Christian Bale were, as if we'd never seen their faces and would never see them again. We know there was a script because we see it in the credits, but nothing here feels written or planned. It happens, as though for the first time. We hear Depp use those snarky pick-up lines on Marion Coitillard, and they feel fresh. The quietest voices, the loudest gunfire you've ever heard. Night as though no one's ever filmed it before, the daytime sky—imposing blue in the opening prison escape—as though no one's ever dared point a camera at it. The Little Bohemia Lodge, the movie theater where Depp sees his face on the screen, the evening show of MANHATTAN MELODRAMA that becomes Mann's dream of the dream of John Dillinger. It's mysterious because it seems completely real. (2009, 143 min, 35mm) IV
George Romero's THE CRAZIES (Classic Revival/Cult)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Wednesday, 7pm
Less than two weeks after Facets' midnight screening of DAWN OF THE DEAD, Doc Films revives one of George Romero's lesser-known works, THE CRAZIES. Along with JACK'S WIFE (1972), the film marked a great step forward for Romero as a social commentator; only a few years later with MARTIN (1977) and DAWN (1978) would he find a perfect balance between genre-film excitement and satirical observation. A small Pennsylvania town becomes the victim of a mysterious gas that turns people into homicidal maniacs: What begins as a gory black comedy (a sort-of Andy Griffith Show gone mad) mutates into something much more unnerving when the National Guard is called in to bring down the rabid townspeople. Though he would develop this theme with greater nuance in DAY OF THE DEAD, Romero identifies here a central tension of American life—the population's potential for violence versus the government's potential for violent social control—one which was most prescient at the time of the film's making. Romero's aesthetic is as exhilarating here as it was in the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Though defiantly unpolished, its political conviction and regional detail (both supplied by the largely non-professional cast) make it tower over much of American independent cinema today. (1973, 103 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Isidore Isou's TREATISE ON VENOM AND ETERNITY /
Walter Ruttman's WEEKEND (Experimental/Essay)
Sonotheque - Monday, 6:30pm
"My film shall be liked Hell—composed of circles." Almost 60 years ago, Isidore Isou scratched and scrawled his polemic on celluloid. Isou is dead now—he died in 2007, the same week as Bergman and Antonioni—and he'd been sick and wheelchair-bound for years before his death. Maybe this is the sort of death he wanted: the old infirm body gone so all that remains is this vicious film. The soundtrack seems to spit in your ear. Every word is a little piece of shit. TREATISE ON VENOM AND ETERNITY is so goddamn angry that it becomes incoherent; the words turn into gibberish expressing anger at its most basic, most physical level. It's an attack on cinema and on anyone who dares to watch it. Sonotheque's DJs don't spin punk, but they're more than making it up for it with this screening. Also on the bill is WEEKEND, a rare short by Walter Ruttman. Like VENOM AND ETERNITY, its attack lies in its soundtrack and its “offensive” image—in this case, a black screen. (1951/1930, 123 min/11 min, DVD) IV
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More info at www.sonotheque.net.
Carl Dreyer's THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (Classic Revival)
Live cello score performed by Lori Goldston
The Nightingale - Tuesday, 7pm
For films about female torture, one might think of turning to Lars Von Trier. However, Carl Dreyer did it first—and better—in THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC. Dreyer apparently got such an anguished performance from lead actress Renée Falconetti by resorting to actual torture (something Von Trier also tries to emulate in his work). Her daughter claims she never took another acting job because of the arduous physical conditions Dryer put her through, which included making her kneel on stone floors until in physical pain and shaving her hair off. Dreyer thought this would provoke and refine a greater level of real distress, and he wasn't wrong. The outcome is made all the more unbearable to watch by the fact that he shot much of the film in close-up. Although Richard Einhorn's Voices of Light accompanies the Criterion DVD release, Dreyer never selected a score for the film, intending it to be watched in silence. However, it has been presented over the years with a variety of live scores. Lori Goldston accompanies this screening on the cello, improvising moments of the score live, translating her own emotion into the film at the moment of being watched. Goldston's cello progressions perfectly translate Joan's suffering into musical form. Bring the tissues. (1928, approx. 114 min, 16mm) BC
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More info at www.nightingaletheatre.org.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Albert Lewin’s PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN (Classic Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
Part Breton’s Nadja, part Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN inhabits a dream-like realm punctured by tragic love and macho bravado. Although it’s set in the early 1930s, and is infused with both a Surrealist-tinged l’amour fou and the ennui and resignation common to the inter-war American ex-pats in Europe, it ultimately has the feeling of a film out of time—appropriately so given its many mythological references and its basis in the legend of the Flying Dutchman. Albert Lewin is known (as much as he is known) for a literary flair (his first three films were adaptations of W. Somerset Maugham, Oscar Wilde, and Guy de Maupassant) and for rich atmospherics—rather than for an assured auteurist style—and PANDORA excels here. It also has a wonderful perverse undercurrent, which partly accounts for its almost cult-like following. A stunning Ava Gardner is Pandora—an American beauty living in Spain and a woman whose looks and charm are the siren song that leads men to their deaths. She is obsessively framed in a manner which recalls Joseph Cornell’s boxes on Hollywood stars such as Hedy Lamarr and Lauren Bacall or, more fittingly, his great film ROSE HOBART. Cinematographer Jack Cardiff’s obscenely lush Technicolor work transforms Gardner into a radiant fetish object worthy of a film so fixated on lust and destruction. (1951, 122 min, 35m) PF
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
SCOTT WALKER: 30 CENTURY MAN (Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Saturday and Sunday, 8pm; Thursday, 8:30pm
Early on in Stephen Kijak’s 30 CENTURY MAN, someone makes an absolutely spot-on comment about the reclusive musician Scott Walker: that most people know of him primarily as a name to drop so they sound musically knowledgeable. Indeed, more people have heard his myth—former teen idol releases several critically lauded solo albums and then disappears for decades at a time—than have heard his music. 30 CENTURY MAN makes a move to remedy this disconnect by spending a disproportionate amount of time playing full songs by Walker. This tactic amounts to a listening party with several notable musicians—David Bowie, Brian Eno, and Jarvis Cocker among them—as we watch them listen to and comment on the tracks currently playing. Considering Walker’s metamorphosis in 40 years from teen sensation to maker of industrial music, the chronological ordering of the song selection makes for an interesting approach. The film is every bit as difficult and idiosyncratic as its subject, but it does an excellent job of deflating the myth and catching a fleeting glimpse of the true Scott Walker. Nothing new here for diehard fans but, then again, how many of them really were there in the first place? (2008, 95 min, 35mm) DM
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Erick Zonca's JULIA (New International)
Facets Cinémathèque – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
Tilda Swinton, like her American cinematic cousin Parker Posey, makes any movie better. She just does. And she's shockingly convincing as a brassy, vulgar alcoholic in JULIA. In desperate straits, she kidnaps the eight-year-old grandson of a billionaire electronics kingpin for ransom. And you know that's not going to solve anything. Her bad decisions, aggravated by her inability to stay sober, reach their apex when they accidentally cross the border and end up in Tijuana. Swinton is the main attraction here, creating a full-bore characterization that grabs you by the throat. She's like a cross between Eddy and Patsy from ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS and Gena Rowlands in GLORIA (in fact, this film's plotline plays like a sort of inversion of that Cassavetes film). Her performance galvanizes the movie and makes the story's aggressive lack of credibility irrelevant. Just when you think you know where things are headed, you realize you don't. The uneasy dark comedy of the first half evaporates by the time the story gets to Mexico, when some harrowing twists turns the movie into a violent suspense thriller. It's tough to say what it all adds up to but it's certainly gripping. (2008, 144 min, 35mm) RC
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More info at www.facets.org.
Steven Soderbergh's CHE [Roadshow Edition] (New Narrative)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday and Monday, 3pm; Wednesday, 6:15pm
A recent article by Daniel Kasman suggests that Steven Soderbergh takes a Premingerian approach to the title historical figure in the first half of this massive epic. Kasman intends the comparison as an insult. But if it's true, it would be another directorial guise for Soderbergh, following previous turns as Kubrick (SOLARIS), Curtiz (THE GOOD GERMAN), Lester (The OCEANS series) and even Rohmer (sex, lies and videotape). However, Soderbergh is not merely an imitator or curator of obsessive homage, like DePalma; rather, he simply uses different techniques depending on the subject and story at hand, invariably bending the materials to his own idiosyncratic ends. In this way he truly does resemble Preminger, who (successfully or not) took on many different genres. Soderbergh reuses the tools of a master like Preminger or Kubrick to take us places that those filmmakers never went. In an interview with the AV Club, Soderbergh declared, "The time to do the trickiest shit is when you're sitting pretty. When I've been on an upswing, I've tried as much as possible to start pulling out the stuff that's tricky." CHE certainly fits that description. The political ramifications of a revolutionary figure like Che Guevara for the "American way of life" have rarely, if ever, been explored by a Hollywood movie in a nuanced way, and certainly not with such scope. (2008, 257 min, 35mm) RC
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
THE GIRL FROM MONACO (New French)
Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
A renowned Parisian lawyer is hired to defend a high-profile murder case in Monaco. He is even assigned a bodyguard by his paranoid employer. The lawyer, a kind of impotent playboy, enjoys seducing women, making them fall for him without ever consummating the affair. A lover of the game but not so much the prize, we think, until he himself is seduced by a nubile young weathergirl he meets at the television station when he shows up for an interview. In steps the bodyguard, heretofore merely a nuisance in the lawyer’s love life, attempting to shut down the affair. Does he act out of jealousy or security? As the events in the courtroom begin to mirror the lawyer’s experiences with the mercurial naïf, things begin to take a darker turn. Director Anne Fontaine’s film shares much in common with last year’s A GIRL CUT IN TWO (Claude Chabrol), but here the focus lies with the seductive power a young girl has over an older man rather than the other way around. How easy it is to do something counterintuitive merely because it’s for love. Or rather, what one thinks is love. (2008, 95 min, 35mm) DM
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More info here.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS:
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week is a curious but appropriate double feature: Andy Warhol’s 1967 LOVES OF ONDINE (rescheduled from last Wednesday) and Curt McDowell’s barely-known 1972 feature PEED INTO THE WIND. One filmmaker is famous and the other not-so-famous but both are important artists in American avant-garde cinema and queer film history. Showing on Wednesday with a two-for-one admission price.
The Nightingale presents an Animation Double Feature: Chicago & Seattle on Sunday. Chicago takes the screen in the 6pm show curated by local animator Jodie Mack. Included is Alexander Stewart’s excellent Xerox film ERRATA and Jim Trainor’s simple and charmingly strange construction paper stop-motion LEAFY LEAFY JUNGLE. Also work by Lale Westvind, Gonzalo Escobar, Lisa Barcy, Jon Satrom, Basia Goszcynska, Emily Kuehn, Lauren Gregory, Lori Felker, Clara Kim, Jared Larson, Ernest Kim, Carolina Gonzalez Valencia, and Matt Marsden. The 8pm show presents works from Seattle, curated by Stefan Gruber. Featured are several works by Gruber and other Pacific Northwest-types.
The Music Box plays the romance film I HATE VALENTINE’S DAY and holds over SERAPHINE. The Saturday and Sunday matinees are Frank Capra’s IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK; and the Friday and Saturday midnight films are RAIDERS (I guess so early risers and night owls both have a shot to see it) and Sam Raimi’s new DRAG ME TO HELL.
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) presents an outdoor screening (from DVD) of Jon Favreau’s IRON MAN on Wednesday at dusk (approx. 9pm)
Also at the Film Center this week: return engagements for two animated features: AZUR & ASMAR and SITA SINGS THE BLUES; and HERB & DOROTHY, Megumi Sasaki’s documentary on an unlikely art-collecting couple (Friday, Sunday, and Tuesday only).
The Portage Theater hosts the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Chicago/Midwest chapter’s screening of Robert Dunlop’s documentary THE HAPPY HOOKER: PORTRAIT OF A SEXUAL REVOLUTIONARY, with producer John Patrick Patti in person, on Thursday.
The Chicago Cultural Center screens John Porozzi’s music documentary SLEEPWALKING THROUGH THE MEKONG, about the L.A. band Dengue Fever’s tour of Cambodia, on Sunday and Nadir Moknèche’s French narrative PALOMA DELIGHT on Wednesday. Both from DVD.
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