CRUCIAL VIEWING
Benning's ONE WAY BOOGIE WOOGIE & 27 YEARS LATER (Experimental)
Experimental Film Club / Film Studies Center (U of C) – Saturday, 8pm
This Saturday, the EFC will be pairing James Benning's best-known film, ONE WAY BOOGIE WOOGIE (1977, 16mm)--an investigation of decay and urbanization in his native Milwaukee--with his recent revisitation of the same material in 27 YEARS LATER (2006, 16mm). The former is a classic of experimental cinema, often cited as one of the key works of structural film (the hour-long piece is composed of 60 meticulously composed, static shots), but is also a highly personal, humorous, and beautiful film. His shot-by-shot "remake" is no less distinctive. In re-telling the "same" story in a different era, the recent film highlights Benning's deep connection to his material, exposing a world that has moved on and alluding to an artist that has changed with it. More info and full program can be found here.
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Pedro Costa's COLOSSAL YOUTH (New Foreign)
Landmark Century Centre – Tuesday, 8:30pm
At last year's Toronto Film Festival, a small group of critics led by Scott Foundas could be seen wearing T-shirts that read, "VOTE FOR PEDRO." No, not that Pedro (i.e. the king of middle-brow melodrama), but the other Pedro (Costa): a Portugese filmmaker following up 2000's IN VANDA'S ROOM with the two-and-a-half hour digital video epic, COLOSSAL YOUTH (JUVENTUDE EM MARCHA). A mixture of documentary and fiction assembled from more than 300 hours of footage shot over 15 months, the film follows many of the same Cape Verdean immigrants who populated IN VANDA'S ROOM as they are forced out of their Lisbon slum and into government housing projects. Past, present, reality, and fantasy merge in a challenging and beautiful film whose visual style recalls Rembrandt and El Greco. Perhaps the most divisive film of the festival circuit last year, reportedly splitting the Cannes jury in two, COLOSSAL YOUTH is an unquestionable polemic that will leave no viewer without a passionate response. (Portugal, 2006, 155 min). More info at www.latinoculturalcenter.org/filmfest.
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Charles Laughton's NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (Classic Revival)
Doc Films and Block
Cinema – Thursday, 6pm / 8pm, respectively
Two prestigious universities, representing both the North and South side, deliver Charles Laughton's masterpiece on the same night. It seems appropriate that Chicagoans will be surrounded by THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER--a quintessential paranoid experience. Robert Mitchum, in his best villain role, plays a sinister preacher with LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles, an image "anticipated" last week at the Film Center's screening of DO THE RIGHT THING. Dave Kehr writes,"Laughton's direction has Germanic overtones--not only in the expressionism that occasionally grips the image, but also in a pervasive, brooding romanticism that suggests the Erl-King of Goethe and Schubert. But ultimately the source of its style and power is mysterious--it is a film without precedents, and without any real equals." (1955, 93 min, 35mm).
x CHICAGO PALENSTINE FILM FESTIVAL (Contemporary)
Gene
Siskel Film Center – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
The Film Center's 6th annual Chicago Palestine Film Festival is a vanguard event, "representing the spirit and mood of contemporary Palestinian life... dedicated to exhibiting film and video work that is open, critical, and reflective of the culture, experience, and vision of the artists" (Barbara Scharres, Program Director). The festival kicks off with the documentary LEILA KHALED: HIJACKER (Saturday, 8pm & Monday, 6pm), a portrait of the world's first female hijacker, "a motherly but unrepentant 60-year-old," still defending the Palestinian cause nearly 40 years after her initial act of rebellion; scholar Hamid Dabashi will be present to lead a discussion. PALESTINE BLUES (Sunday, 5:15pm) is a feature-length documentary that traces a path along the infamous security wall, telling stories that give a dire but hopeful account of contemporary Palestine. Both films will be preceded by shorts; additional features will screen next week. More
info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
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Paul Verhoeven's BLACK BOOK (New Release)
Music Box – Screening Daily, check Reader Movies for showtimes
Dutch iconoclast Verhoeven, mastermind behind ROBOCOP, SHOWGIRLS, STARSHIP TROOPERS, and a host of other brilliant American blockbusters, has turned out another insightful masterpiece in BLACK BOOK, his first Dutch film in almost a quarter century. It takes guts to make a World War II film that suggests that anti-fascism can be as narrow-minded as fascism or that any notion of national identity (the identity of the oppressed just as much as the oppressors, the resistance fighters just as much as the forces they resist) is a lie... And then have the gall to start and conclude in Israel! The film also reconsiders mainstream cinema and its genres, inventively twisting thriller and spy movie tropes to mold Verhoeven's most thorough moral and political statement to date, and arguably his most thrilling. (145 min, 35mm). More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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ALSO RECOMMENDED
BEST OF THE FOUND FOOTAGE FESTIVAL (Documentary)
Chicago Cultural Center – Friday, 7pm
The Found Footage Festival is a special live event featuring clips from videotapes found over the years at thrift stores, garage sales, and in warehouses and dumpsters. From the curiously-produced industrial training video to the forsaken home movie donated to Goodwill, the Found Footage Festival resurrects these forgotten treasures and serves them up in a lively celebration of all things found. Featuring co-hosts and co-curators, Nick Prueher & Joe Pickett. Text from the FFF program. Location: Cassidy Theatre, Chi Cultural Center, 77 E Randolph.
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BOY I AM (Documentary)
Chicago
Filmmakers – Saturday, 8pm
The Dyke Delicious screening series hosts this presentation of BOY I AM, with co-director Sam Feder appearing in person. From the ChiFilms website: "...a compelling and provocative look at the place of trans issues within the larger queer community. For some within the lesbian community, the act of FtM (female-to-male) transitioning is viewed at best as a naïve social trend or, at worst, an anti-feminist rejection of butchness and female power in favor of male privilege. This riveting documentary focuses on the lives of three transmen as they prepare for their transitions and questions how the emergence of FtM visibility affects the dyke community they have come from. Their stories serve as the backdrop for smart and provocative interviews with leading gender theorists, journalists, activists, lawyers, and professors including Judith "Jack" Halberstam, author of Female Masculinity. BOY I AM is a timely and much needed exploration of this controversial topic by getting to its historical and cultural roots." (2006, 72 min, video). More
info at www.chicagofilmmakers.org.
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GIRL CRAZY (Classic Revival)
LaSalle
Bank Cinema – Saturday,
8pm
Norman Taurog's by-the-numbers musical sees Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland--a wholesome duet, at the height of their collaboration--staging a Wild West Show to save their school. But the real highlight of this film is the musical finale, an insane number featuring dozens of crooning cowboys, directed by the increasingly kooky Busby Berkeley. The scene was apparently too much for MGM and the film's stars; as the scene wrapped, Berkeley was promptly fired and replaced with the dependable Taurog (1943, 99 min, 16mm). Venue
Information.
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IDIOCRACY (Cult Revival)
Music
Box – Friday & Saturday,
midnight
Last year, Twentieth Century Fox buried the theatrical release of Mike Judge's angry, righteous sci-fi satire, failing to promote their $30 million investment, which opened only in a handful of multiplexes and ultimately grossed less than half a million. Fortunately, the Music Box is picking up the slack, resurrecting this curmudgeon's delight at midnight. Luke Wilson (in the role he was born to play) is a couch potato who finds himself transported 500 years into the future, to an America overrun by morons. The brilliantly dumbed-down dialogue verges on haiku, but Judge articulates his slyest jokes in the scenery: making good on his background as a cartoonist, the art direction and set design exaggerate NASCAR-style overbranding to kaleidoscopic extremes. Like last year's other dystopian warning siren, CHILDREN OF MEN, the scariest proposition of IDIOCRACY is how far-fetched it is not. (2006, 84 min, 35mm). More
info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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TOYS ARE NOT FOR CHILDREN (Cult Revival)
Music
Box – Friday & Saturday,
midnight
The third installment in Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford's Sleazoid Express series is the ultra-obscure 1972 drama, TOYS ARE NOT FOR CHILDREN. Despite is deceptively sleazy title, the film contains little sex or violence, instead painting a haunting portrait of psycho-sexual obsessions. The only film made by director Stanley Brassloff, TOYS remained in virtual obscurity until it was "discovered" in 1993 by Something Weird Video and released on DVD. TOYS is easily the best film in this series and, despite its low budget, manages to be both moving and disgusting at the same time. Shown with exploitation trailers. (Stanley H. Brassloff, 1972, 85m). More
info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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Sam Fuller's FORTY GUNS (Classic Revival)
Music
Box – Saturday & Sunday,
11:30am
The Music Box's Barbara Stanwyck retrospective charges on with Sam Fuller's gender-bending western. Fuller's story is unusually convoluted and somewhat beside the point--FORTY GUNS functions best as a series of tense set-pieces executed in stylish black and white CinemaScope. Nearly every scene is a tense showdown featuring innuendo-laden dialogue between Stanwyck, forty-odd gunslingers, and one foxy gunsmith. Michael Atkinson: "If the movie is unrecognized as diesel-powered camp, perhaps it's because Fuller's ironic-yet-sincere vulgarianism is still hard to pigeonhole…this ferociously hormonal oater stands beside JOHNNY GUITAR and RANCHO NOTORIOUS in the annals of hyper-feminized genre freaks." (1957, 79 min). More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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Spike Lee's MALCOLM X (Revival w/ Lecture)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday & Tuesday, 6pm
MALCOLM X--a movie Spike Lee once said he was born to make--is an impassioned tribute to an American hero, too often cast as a villain in history books. Adapted from Alex Haley's radical biography, the film is both substantially subversive and deeply engaging. And yet, in spite of its potency and Lee's apparent victory in a struggle with Warner over budget and creative rights, Lee's subject is perhaps more complex than his characteristically forthright style allows. Jonathan Rosenbaum: "The necessity of creating a pious 'official' ( i.e. middle-class) portrait squeezes out too many aspects of Malcolm's varied experience and mercurial intelligence; even at 201 minutes, this often feels like a skim job." But none of the movie's shortcomings undercut its relevance and the introduction and lecture by film scholar Jacqueline Stewart bookending Tuesday's screening will provide an unequaled opportunity for critical reflection. (1992, 202 min). More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
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Sharon Lockhart : PINE FLAT (Experimental)
Conversations
at the Edge / Gene
Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 6pm
Los Angeles photographer/filmmaker Sharon Lockhart’s latest project is an exquisite, meditative portrait of youth in Pine Flat, a small community in the foothills of central California. Shot over two years and made up of twelve ten-minute static shots, Lockhart’s camera captures her young subjects in repose, at play, and in the tentative embrace of adolescent desire--telegraphing the vulnerability, bliss, and loneliness of childhood. Text by Amy Beste, CATE. (2006, 135 min, 16mm). Screening
details at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
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ALSO PLAYING AT DOC
FILMS
More of a relaxed, cerebral comedy than a horror film, James Whale’s THE INVISIBLE MAN (1933) is the sort of mis-remembered classic that begs for public reassessment. Thursday’s screening adds to a much-needed local rediscovery of Whale, following LaSalle Bank’s recent revival of THE GREAT GARRICK and continuing with DOC’s upcoming screenings of FRANKENSTEIN and THE OLD DARK HOUSE. Also on the DOCket: a program of shorts by forgotten silent star Mack Swain; HELL’S HIGHWAY (1932), a muckraking drama thematically similar to I WAS A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG; the final part of Masaki Kobayashi’s monumental anti-war epic THE HUMAN CONDITION (1961); and an uncharacteristic murder mystery from Douglas Sirk, THUNDER ON THE HILL (1951). Full schedule and details
at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
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ALSO PLAYING AT BLOCK
CINEMA
Continuing their program of contemporary Turkish cinema, Block screens the last film by national legend Atif Yilmaz, whose prolific filmography lists some 119 titles. THE BORROWED BRIDE (2005, 119 min, 35mm), a controversial hit in Turkey, is a lush romance set in the 1920s that confronts the chauvinism of national tradition. On Wednesday and Thursday, the theater will show two episodes of LIFE IN THE UNDERGROWTH, a BBC documentary series about insects. Both screenings will be free of charge and accompanied by lectures; Thursday's screening will feature a live insect petting zoo! Synopses and more info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.
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LATINO FILM FESTIVAL (New Foreign)
Facets Cinematheque / Landmark Century Centre / Piper's Alley
Over the next two weeks, the 23rd Chicago Latino Film Fest will be screening an assortment of South American, Spanish, and Portuguese cinema. Readers are advised to consult the Latino Cultural Center's website, as well as the Reader's guide to the festival. Along with the exciting inclusion of Pedro Costa's COLOSSAL YOUTH (discussed above in our "Crucial" listing), our picks include 2006 festival favorite LA PERRERA (THE DOG POUND) (Uruguay/Argentina/Canada/Spain, 110 min; screening Monday & Tuesday) and the latest from seasoned Brazilian filmmaker Francisco Ramalho Jr., CANTA MARIA (Brazil, 2006, 95 min; screening this Thursday & next Friday). Full schedule and details at www.latinoculturalcenter.org/Filmfest/.
x CREMASTER CYCLE (Avant Garde)
Gene
Siskel Film Center – Check Reader
Movies for showtimes
By popular demand, the Film Center resurrects its run of films by divisive New York art star, Matthew Barney. This week's focus is the 5 part CREMASTER CYCLE, along with Alison Chernick's documentary, NO RESTRAINT. The highlight is the epic sexual allegory CREMASTER 3, Barney's most spectacular and accomplished work, if perhaps his most self-indulgent and overblown. More info
at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
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IN SEARCH OF MOZART (Avant Garde)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Screening daily, check Reader Movies for showtimes
This British film—supposedly the first feature-length documentary about Mozart—premiered last year in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the genius composer’s birth. Critics have labeled this a “corrective” to Milos Forman’s AMADEUS, as director Phil Grabsky rooted his film in extensive historical research instead of myth. But the film is also a portrait of late 18th century Europe and its impact on contemporary music, featuring interviews with many of today’s leading historians and classical musicians. Talking heads notwithstanding, a two-hour investigation of some of the most beautiful music ever written can't fail to please. (2006, 128 min, DigiBeta video). More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
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STILL SHOWING: THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY (New Release)
Music Box – Screening Daily, check Reader Movies for showtimes
A muckraker in the tradition of the moral Christian Socialists of the late 19th and early 20th century, Ken Loach has always been committed to exploring the realities of the oppressed and disadvantaged through cinema. His work focuses on people who might be incidental characters or even extras for other directors—BREAD AND ROSES, a recent, stellar example, told the story of striking Latino cleaning workers. Winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2006, THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY is Loach's leftist take on the struggle for Irish independence at the beginning of the 20th century--an oppositional melodrama seeking to debunk British myths surrounding the conflict. Unfortunately, it's also one of his most mainstream works, middle-brow both aesthetically and politically. Nonetheless, it's interesting to see the usually modest and always combative Loach working on such a large scale. More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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ALSO
PLAYING |
