CRUCIAL VIEWING
SOUND
BRAKHAGE (Experimental / Special Event)
Chicago
Filmmakers – Saturday,
8pm
Honoring the work of two pioneering artists who are no
longer with us, Chi Filmmakers presents a program of sound films
by avant-garde legend Stan Brakhage (1933-2003), with a particular
emphasis on works scored by composer James Tenney (1934-2006).
Although the vast majority of the approximately 400 films Brakhage
made in his lifetime are viewed in reverential silence, the
handful of scored works offer alternate methods of engagement.
This program includes early "psychodramas" INTERIM (1953)
and DESISTFILM (1954), as well as later abstract works CHRIST MASS
SEX DANCE (1991) and "..." REEL 5 (1998), along with
BOULDER BLUES AND PEARLS AND... (1992), featuring music by Rick
Corrigan. Read
Fred Camper's Reader writeup here. More
info at www.chicagofilmmakers.org.
x
THE LAST REFUGE FOR THE SENSES (Experimental)
Cinema
Borealis (1550 N Milwaukee) – Sunday,
8pm
"The Last Refuge for the Senses," aka "Noise
Hippies Against All War," or simply "The Providence Show," is
an explosive series of experimental films promising "sixty-plus
minutes of total eye-and-ear chaos." The traveling spectacle,
programmed and introduced by filmmaker / UIC professor Ben Russell,
premiered in the Noise Rock capital of Providence, RI last month and
will be making its way around the states before heading to Europe
for the summer. "A new breed of noise/post-psychedelia has sprung
up, " Russell explains, "as the only rational response to
an increasingly alienating form of global capitalism, in an increasingly
violent-and-joyless politicized existence – this new media responds
with a Chaos of Sound and Light that seeks to overwhelm you but stops
before you’re lost, its Kind Hippie Heart beating out a space
for you to occupy and own." (64 min, 35mm & 16mm). Full
Program here.
x
EUROPEAN UNION FILM FESTIVAL (New Foreign)
Gene
Siskel Film Center
Throughout March, the Film Center will be running its 10th Annual European Union Film Festival, featuring 55 new films from 24 countries. This year's lineup includes works by some of the greatest living filmmakers as well as enticing genre cinema from all over the continent. This week's highlights:
x
PRIVATE
FEARS IN PUBLIC PLACES (COEURS) (France)
Versatile
octogenarian master Alain Resnais returns with a film that
Cahiers du cinema designated the best of 2006 (an honor
shared with Sokurov’s
THE SUN). Resnais,
who secured his legacy as far back as 1955 with the seminal
NIGHT AND FOG, seems unburdened by a need to hash out twilight
masterpieces or reflexive examinations of film history
(à la Godard).
Working with a stable of talented regulars (Sabine Azema,
Lambert Wilson, Andre Dussollier) and adapting a second
work by English author Alan Ayckbourn, he develops
irreverent but highly insightful commentaries on modern
Parisian life. Deceptively simple, the true "heart"
of COEURS is the director's weightless mastery over his
material. This screening represents
a “preview” before its full theatrical run
at the Music Box in May. (2006,
120 min, 35mm widescreen). Screening
Friday, 6:00pm.
x
THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO CINEMA (UK)
After
inspiring last year’s eponymous documentary, cultural theorist
Slavoj Zizek returns to the big screen with this animated lecture
about the psycho-sexual history of movies, delivered from the reconstructed
sets of PSYCHO, DR. STRANGELOVE, and THE GREAT DICTATOR (to name
a few). While the film’s provocations are largely intellectual,
the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw argues that it also contains
one of the great performances of the year: “[Zizek] fires off
fluent reveries in his mangled, dentally challenged English like
a virtuoso. Tremendously exhilarating stuff.” (2006, 150 min,
DigiBeta video). Screening Saturday,
7:30pm & Wednesday,
6:30pm.
x
ADDITIONAL HIGHLIGHTS
LONGING, a subtle, impressive debut
feature by German filmmaker Valeska Grisebach, chronicles the
fragile marriage between a small-town metalworker and a chorus
singer, employing non-professional actors and giving the film
a highly distinct air of realism; Austrian director Barbara
Albert’s
second Stateside release FALLING brings
a creative eye to its story of a thirty-something girls’ night
out; KLIMT provides
the always interesting Raul Ruiz's interpretation of the famous
Viennese painter, with John Malkovich in the title role; and
viewers dying for a film about the 80s New Wave scene in Sweden
will be rewarded with GOD SAVE THE KING,
by comic filmmaker Ulf Malmros.
x
Full program details at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
x
x
CRUCIAL ENCORE PRESENTATIONS:
BAMAKO
(New Foreign)
Music
Box – Saturday
& Sunday, 11:30am
This weekend, the Music Box provides two final opportunities
to view one of the sharpest and most powerful political films
of recent years. A refreshing antidote to the
cinema of individualism that dominates our culture, Abderrahmane
Sissoko's BAMAKO puts the World Bank and the IMF on mock trial,
letting citizens, lawyers, and judges from his native Mali
voice their opinions and grievances in a humble courtyard
bustling with quotidian life. The director has said, "When
we live on a continent where the act of making a film is rare and difficult,
we say to ourselves that we can speak in the name of others: faced with the gravity
of the African situation, I felt a sense of urgency to evoke the hypocrisy of
the North towards the countries of the South." Perhaps
a lesson learned from his time at the VGIK film school in Moscow, Sissoko asserts
the cinema's capability to think abstract concepts while resisting the personalization
of conflict to construct a beautiful film that is at once intellectually engaging
and emotionally moving. More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
x
David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE
(New Release)
Music
Box – Screening
Daily, check Reader
Movies for showtimes
The Music Box is bringing
Lynch's latest back by popular demand, providing
more opportunities to catch one of the most interesting and important
releases of 2006. Using video for the first time in his career,
Lynch probes the dark corners of the Hollywood (via Poland!)
for pockets of enlightenment, and in the process, creates his
most sophisticated exploration of human consciousness yet. Jonathan
Rosenbaum's long review in the Reader is an excellent endorsement.
(2005, 179 min, video on 35mm). More
info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
x
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Busby
Berkeley's THEY MADE ME A CRIMINAL (Classic
Revival)
LaSalle
Bank Cinema – Saturday,
8pm
With all those
GOLD DIGGERS finally behind him, Busby Berkeley took a break
from choreography to direct this tight, melodramatic proto-noir.
Proto-Brando John Garfield feared tough-guy typecasting with
this early role as a boxer on the lam, but he got over it – THEY
MADE ME A CRIMINAL was a clear template for BODY AND SOUL,
the debut of Garfield’s short-lived independent Enterprise
Productions (which also churned out FORCE OF EVIL and works
by De Toth and Olphus in its brief run). Not coincidentally,
legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe shot them both.
(1939, 92 min., 16mm). Preceded by the Tom & Jerry cartoon “Jerry’s
Cousin” (1950, 7 min., Hanna-Barbera). Venue
Information.
x
Wilder / Chandler's DOUBLE INDEMNITY (Classic
Revival)
Music
Box – Saturday
& Sunday, 11:30am
Along with Howard Hawks’ TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (co-scripted by William
Faulkner from an Ernest Hemingway novel), this title is one of the quintessential
writers’ movies in American cinema. Adapted by Raymond Chandler from a
James M. Cain novel in collaboration with director Billy Wilder--a once-in-a-lifetime
convergence of cynical, metaphoric wits that produced memorably sharp dialogue
and a chilling meditation on American amorality. Considered by Woody Allen to
be the greatest film ever made. (1944, 107 min, 35mm). More
info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
x
A Conversation with ROBERT TOWNSEND (Special
Event)
IFP Chicago (1104
S. Wabash, Room 302) – Monday,
6:30pm
IFP hosts a special engagement
with renaissance man / Chicago native Robert Townsend: writer,
comedian, director of films such as HOLLYWOOD SHUFFLE (1987),
THE METEOR MAN (1993), and the upcoming OF BOYS AND MEN (2007),
and President of the Black Family Channel. This
event is free. RSVPs are requested: chicago@ifp.org / 312-235-0161.
x
Akerman's
THE EIGHTIES & GOLDEN EIGHTIES (Underground)
NWesternAve – Monday,
8pm
Chantal Akerman's work has always benefited
from tensions between her experimental inclinations and
commercial aspirations. THE GOLDEN EIGHTIES (1983, 96
min, DVD) lives in both worlds--an intensely saccharine
but formally inventive musical romance, composed of numerous
interlocking subplots. In THE EIGHTIES (1983, 82 min,
DVD)--essentially a documentary about the making of THE
GOLDEN EIGHTIES--Akerman complicates the situation by
probing beneath the generic artifice of her musical,
drawing attention to the fakery and excess at the genre's
core, and ironically evoking greater pleasure even as
she deconstructs its mechanisms. Dave Kehr: "If
you don't know Akerman's work, this is an excellent place
to start: it's a very funny, very idiosyncratic piece
from one of the most sympathetic of modernist filmmakers." More
info at NWesternAve.com.
x
KOTA EZAWA: Videomaker
(Multimedia / Lecture)
Gallery
400 (UIC) – Tuesday,
5pm
San Francisco-based
media artist Kota Ezawa
will be appearing at
UIC's Gallery 400 to
speak as a part of their
ongoing Voice Lecture
Series. According to
the program notes, "Ezawa's
work rearticulates iconic
moments from mass media
and the history of photography
into animated videos,
slide projections and
prints. Hand-drawn, frame
by frame, these works
are highly stylized,
vividly colored interrogations
of the camera and its
operations. By reducing
images to their most
crucial two-dimensional
elements, Ezawa emphasizes
the malleability of photography
and film while exposing
their importance to the
construction of a collective
cultural identity." More
info
here.
x
Charles Burnett's
THE GLASS SHIELD (Revival / Lecture)
Gene
Siskel Film Center – Tuesday,
6pm
The Film Center continues its excellent African American Auteurs series with
THE GLASS SHIELD, the most mainstream and least mythological of Charles Burnett's
films. Much of Burnett's work focuses on the history of the African American
experience and its relationship to the present, but here the story is more immediate.
Based on the true story of black rookie cop who participates in a cover-up to
fit in with his white colleagues, the film resembles a modern update of Samuel
Fuller's pulpy morality, with its low budget and character actor cast (including
M. Emmet Walsh, Lori Petty and Ice Cube) giving it the B-movie feel that goes
with the territory. This screening will be accompanied by a lecture from
film scholar Jacqueline Stewart. Read Rosenbaum's empassioned
Reader endorsement here. More
info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
x
THE BOTHERSOME MAN (New
Foreign)
Facets
Cinematheque - Screening Daily, check Reader
Movies for showtimes
Forty-year-old Andreas arrives at an isolated desert café with no memory
of how he got there. He is driven to an unnamed city, given a comfortable apartment,
new clothes and a job. However, there is something very weird, as everyone is
constantly pleasant but strangely unemotional. Life, like the food, is without
flavor; booze never gets you drunk; and sex is purely mechanical.
When Andreas tries to leave, he finds that there is no way out. In this fable
of modern life, filmmaker Jens Lien has created a fascinating dystopia in this
offbeat postmodern nightmare (among the most noteworthy
Norwegian releases in recent years). (2006, 95 mins, DVD). Text excerpted from
the Facets website. More
info at www.facets.org.
x
MAFIOSO
(New Foreign)
Music
Box – Screening
Daily, check Reader
Movies for showtimes
While the seeming decline in the quality of contemporary
output has many critics decrying "the death of cinema" all over
again, rediscovery has become a profitable trend for many film
distributors--digging through backlogs, hunting for forgotten
classics (such as Hal Wallis' BECKET, which screened in Chicago
last week) and undistributed foreign works (like the Melville
masterpiece ARMY OF SHADOWS, which finally toured North America
nearly 30 years after its initial release). This week, the Music
Box offers the rare opportunity to view Italian comedy
director Alberto Lattuada's crowd-pleasing MAFIOSO (1962) as
intended: with an audience. More
info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
x
STILL SHOWING:
Bong Joon-ho's
THE HOST (New Foreign)
Landmark
Century Centre – Screening Daily, check Reader
Movies for showtimes
Fifty-odd years after GODZILLA
v.1.0, America’s imperial recklessness
has birthed a new Asian cine-monster. THE
HOST is a truly unconventional megablockbuster
with a surprisingly sharp conscience,
pushing the boundaries of CG technology
and sci-fi absurdism, and developing insightful
political subtext throughout. J. Hoberman: “Bong
has no difficulty integrating the horrifying,
the stooge-like, and the everyday. (In
that, he's even more extreme than our own
masters of sociologic shock schlock—George
Romero, Larry Cohen, and Joe Dante). Just
as grisly bio-horror is tricked out with
cheesy effects and inappropriate music,
so do spasms of naturalistic grief-coping
alternate with pop-eyed slapstick.” This
film has broken every box office record
in its native South Korea; in our collective
dreams, the U.S. top grosser would be half
as good. (2007, 119 min).
x
ALSO
PLAYING |
