CRUCIAL VIEWING
Michael Mann's HEAT (Contemporary
Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Monday, 7pm
By 1995, Michael Mann was already one
of the most formally accomplished directors of modern Hollywood. His
TV series Miami Vice brought a new style to the police procedure
genre: streamlined, fixated on technological detail, and coolly--even
inhumanly--detached from its characters. His previous theatrical features,
MANHUNTER and THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, married these qualities to a
rich visual language that drew from centuries of American painting.
But HEAT was a new breakthrough: the introduction of a relentlessly
inquisitive film style, willing to sacrifice focus and even spatial
orientation in order to capture the most stimulating detail of any given
moment. (It was perhaps the first pointillist action movie.) Mann's
gifts as a visual artist would be superficial, though, if he weren't
so thoroughly educated in his subject matter. The obsessiveness of Al
Pacino's Lt. Vincent Hanna in arresting a master thief was inspired
by one of Mann's friends in the Chicago Police Department; and equally
important to the film's power is the near-documentary explication of
almost every bit of surveillance equipment and artillery we see. (As
in his later COLLATERAL and MIAMI VICE [2006], Mann had much of the
cast undergo professional weapons training before production.) Mann's
eternal subject is the shark-like grace of the career professional;
this film conveys, in an epic accumulation of detail, the challenge
of keeping up with him. It also reflects on the professional's struggle
in keeping up with himself. Pacino's Hanna and Robert DeNiro's Neil
McCauley (Hanna's criminal doppelganger) are similar cases of middle-aged
regret, worn down by decades of living by professional code, but Mann
never paints them schematically. This isn't a film about the futility
of law and order, but the codependence between law and crime. It's also
an awe-inspiring portrait of contemporary Los Angeles, as striking a
postmodern (in the architectural sense) piece of art as any of Antonioni's
60s films. (1995, 171 min, 35mm widescreen) BS
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Chris Fuller's LOREN CASS (New Narrative)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Check Reader Movies for showtimes
"Back in 1997," says a voice. Cars pass each other on
the highway. It's a humid Florida night. Okay, Chris Fuller's seen his
fair share Julian Goldberger and Jem Cohen movies. His debut, LOREN
CASS, is set in same South as BENJAMIN SMOKE and TRANS: a purgatory
of delinquents, crust punks, burglars, waitresses, outright bums, skinheads,
and car mechanics. You also get the sense that he's the guy Gus Van
Sant wants to be. I mean, what are Van Sant's independent productions--specifically
the ones about teenagers--if not attempts at making a movie like LOREN
CASS? It's a movie interested not in lowlifes, but in the stuff of low
life: in the way that a bus window at night replicates the effect of
a double exposure, in how a guitar case shifts around the back of a
towed truck or in how exactly one hides beer bottles from a policeman.
Another point of comparison: LOREN CASS is the movie DOG DAYS would
have been if Ulrich Seidl had a sense of empathy, or any real relationship
with the working class beyond the sympathy a well-off man feels while
visiting the ghetto. It's slow-motion nighttime blues, a bit of ordinary
poetry to give images, sounds and words (if not voices--Fuller's people
aren't really talkers, unless they're drunk; more often than not, the
words belong to a trio of omnipresent narrators who frequently speak
in verse) to people who would be called "the dispossessed"
if they'd ever had the chance to possess anything besides time--and
even that they can only waste. (2007, 83 min, DigiBeta) IV
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
All Together Now: Videos by Harry
Dodge & Stanya Kahn (Experimental)
Conversations at the Edge at the
Gene Siskel Film Center - Thursday, 6pm
After watching the slyly comical video
shorts of LA-based performance artists Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn,
one wants to track down the oddly captivating Stanya to hang out in person. The
characters she improvises are at once outlandish and endearing, often
interacting directly with the camera, enveloping the viewer in the dialogue. The
oddball humor at the center of the works plays as part gross-out, part
social critique and part character-study. At times grotesque, most of
these videos deliver subtle satire against a backdrop of deserted urban
environments. The incisive commentary on fame, art, and commerce is
sure to give the CATE crowd plenty to mull over while simultaneously
reminding us that experimental video can be drop-dead funny. Dodge
and Kahn in person. (2002-2008, approx. 90 min total, video)
CL
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More info at www.conversationsattheedge.org.
Edgar G. Ulmer's THE BLACK CAT
(Classic Revival)
Bank of America Cinema - Saturday, 8pm
The biggest budget film of his career,
Edgar G. Ulmer's virtually in-name-only adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's
classic story THE BLACK CAT is instead an incredibly stylish and haunting
study of the power struggle between two friends, which, accidentally
or intentionally, mirrors the vicious jealousy between the film's two
stars, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. A young American couple, traveling
in Eastern Europe, gets stranded at the mysterious villa of a world
famous architect (Karloff) and his visiting friend, Dr. Vitus Werdegast
(Lugosi). Soon Karloff begins to psychologically torment the doctor
with dark secrets from each of their pasts. Full of clear visual allusions
to both Murnau and Lang, Ulmer presents a dark portrait of post-war
trauma set in a world that only looks modern, but is actually still
fighting decades-old moral demons. If nothing else, THE BLACK CAT is
a masterpiece of lighting, with many scenes cloaked half in darkness,
allowing only fragments of the "truth" to be seen. Karloff
and Lugosi's intense hatred for each other adds such a powerful undercurrent
of unease to the film that one wonders if they were cast in opposing
roles for just that reason. Part of a double bill with Roy William
Neill's 1934 film BLACK MOON. (1934, 65 min,
16mm) JR
Lucio Fulci's THE BEYOND
(Cult Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Thursday, 9:30pm
Lucio Fulci is known as one of the
grand masters of over-the-top and ridiculous gore. THE BEYOND is no
exception, for the gore is plentiful, but Fulci wisely throws in enough
bizarre plot twists and genuinely creepy moments (not to mention a pounding
choral score by Fabio Frizzi) to make this the director's strongest
work of the 80s. Set in a sleepy bayou of Louisiana (continuing Fulci's
obsession with "Old America"), a young woman has just inherited
an old hotel, which she soon discovers is, according to local legend,
built on one of the seven doorways to hell. With the help of a visiting
pathologist and s strange blind woman, she tries to stop the forces
of evil from coming through the gateway and destroying the world. Fulci's
not so subtle commentary on class and race conflicts makes its presence
felt throughout the film, though it is most apparent in the opening
lynching scene. THE BEYOND is, at its heart, an Italian outsider's look
at the "corrupt" American south; where better to put a gateway
to hell? The film also features the best 'Scope cinematography of
Fulci's career. To be screened from the recently struck, restored 35mm
print. (1981, 87 min, 35mm widescreen) JR
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Toshio Matsumoto's FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES (Classic/Cult Revival)
Sonotheque - Monday, 6:30pm
A frequent subject in Amos Vogel's
seminal Film as a Subversive Art, Toshio Matsumoto's work is
rarely mentioned in the United States anymore, so Joe Bryl's free screening
of FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES--often listed among his major works--is
a welcome reminder of his career. The film is an unflinching look at
drug abuse, counterculture, and transvestism in 60s Tokyo, purportedly
similar to contemporaneous work by Andy Warhol and William Klein in
its collage of documentary and pop-art sensibilities. (It also shares
a financier--the Art Theater Guild--with some of the most challenging
Japanese films of the era, including Shohei Imamura's A MAN VANISHES,
Yoshishige Yoshida's EROS PLUS MASSACRE, and Oshima's DIARY OF A SHINJUKU
THIEF.) The film was all but unprecedented in Japanese cinema for its
(male) homoeroticism, and this trait only helped to make it more controversial
at home. But in spite of these potentially dating aspects, this remains
powerful filmmaking to many contemporary viewers. Writing on the film
three years ago, Philadelphia City Paper's Sam Adams still found
its despair troubling: "Dipping into Greek mythology as well as
Japanese popular culture...FUNERAL PARADE is alternately haunting and
frenetic, a ghost story for a generation still twitching on the slab.
Clinging to appropriated identities, the film's wayward youth wind up
in a flooded graveyard, where [transvestite hero] Eddie muses, 'I wish
the whole world would sink.'" (1969, 105 min, DVD projection)
BS
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More info at www.sonothque.net.
DOWNTOWN 81 (Classic Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Tuesday, 7pm
Famed artist Jean-Michel Basquiat,
homeless at the time of the film's production, plays an artist evicted
from his apartment, wandering the streets of New York City in search
of a buyer for his artwork. The starving artist searches for a meal
and along the way he meets some interesting people. This elliptical
narrative takes an otherwise banal plot and uses it as framework for
the documentation of the New York art scene in 1980, a thriving culture
hidden underground where only the hippest critics could find it. The
people Basquiat meets range from up-and-coming painters and graffiti
artists, to musicians in the No Wave scene, to a fairy princess Debbie
Harry. Production woes saw this time-capsule go uncompleted until 1999,
by which time it was able to spearhead the wave of critical reappraisal
for the post-punk art world. Featuring performances and music by King
Creole and the Coconuts, James White and the Blacks, DNA, and Basquiat's
own band Gray. (1981/2000, 71 min, 35mm) DM
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Jim Jarmusch's THE LIMITS OF CONTROL
(New Narrative)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Saturday, 7 and 9:30pm & Sunday, 3pm
There are a few observations you can
make quickly about THE LIMITS OF CONTROL. For instance, it's Jarmusch's
least dialogue-centered movie, but also his loudest. Loudest not in
terms of the soundtrack (which sometimes gets quite loud), but in terms
of the images, which abandon Jarmusch's usual witty articulateness
for a loudness worthy of Claire Denis or Sam Fuller; your eyes may go
deaf. Maybe it's the influence of Christopher Doyle who, as a cinematographer,
has always been an enabler; his willingness to chase after lights and
shadows can have a liberating effect, but only on those directors who
are willing to be liberated from their tastes (James Ivory and Gus Van
Sant have steadfastly held on to theirs while working with him; maybe
they're teetotalers). Which isn't to say THE LIMITS OF CONTROL is
hysterical or hoarse. There's a desire to compare it to GHOST DOG
(because of the plot) or DEAD MAN (because of the sprawl), but really
the Jarmusch movie closest is COFFEE AND CIGARETTES, a film underrated
because of its patchwork production--as though a movie made piecemeal
is less of a statement than the one carefully scripted and financed.
The mystery of language, and the way people communicate ideas to one
another, has been one of Jarmusch's key fascinations throughout his
career. Though at first it seems like something typically post-national,
it always seems to fascinate filmmakers who feel directly linked to
a certain culture. If Jarmusch fills a movie with "foreigners" and
shoots it in a "foreign" country, it's always as an American.
His other great concern, first articulated in STRANGER THAN PARADISE,
is what "American cinema" could be; this isn't the tradition of
American cinema, and all of the history and culture it entails, but
the very idea of an "American movie." So Jarmusch gives us beauty
and ugliness. There are the notions of people from different cultures,
voiced clearly to Isaach De Bankolé's largely silent protagonist,
and the sights, sounds and culture peculiar to the places he visits.
There is also Bill Murray as Dick Cheney's double and that sinking
feeling of corporate dread he brings. And the result is probably the
most honest film an American could've made in 2009: WE CAN'T GO HOME
AGAIN with a hopeful ending. (2009, 116 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Kathryn Bigelow's THE HURT LOCKER
(New Narrative)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Check Reader Movies for showtimes
In its narrative structure--an episodic plot following an individual's
development in relation to a professional group--THE HURT LOCKER is more convincingly redolent of classic Hollywood than any other recent
U.S. film. J. Hoberman invoked Howard Hawks in one review, and Kathryn
Bigelow's Iraq "war" movie is unmistakably Hawksian in its
macho existentialism and its gradual transfer of action from day to
night. Bigelow also merits praise for developing character and sympathy
through a Hawksian economy of detail, much of it drawn from recent war
journalism: Her bomb-squad protagonists rarely succumb to phony heroics;
neither is their skilled intelligence made to seem like wisdom. These
are men remarkable only in their daring, and this has been elicited
only by extreme circumstance. Aesthetically, the only misstep of THE
HURT LOCKER is Bigelow's insistence on a fallacy that David Bordwell
recently termed "shaky cam equals reality." The faux-documentary
style, by now a staple of network television, clashes with Bigelow's
typically cinematic conception of her characters. It also suggests,
dismayingly, that the archetypes of a 50s Western are a realistic framework
for considering the current occupation of Iraq. (Even more dismaying
is Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal's failure to humanize any of their
Iraqi characters as fully as John Ford did the Indians of any of his
50s films.) On the whole, however, this demonstrates the strengths of
an immensely talented genre director, and its commercial success promises
a rediscovery of her work. (2008, 131 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
YES MEN FIX THE WORLD (Documentary)
Music Box - Check Reader Movies for showtimes
The second feature-length document
of the political prankster troupe The Yes Men, this new film shows the
group clearly hasn't been idle during the five or so years between
movies. Their rationale is simple: expose the inherent amorality of
the profit motive in the hopes that it will shock enough people awake
to start a dialogue about how capitalism does business. Their pranks
are often outlandish logical extensions of corporate groupthink or simply
a press release announcing the about-face of a contentious policy. And
they're effective, far more so than Michael Moore's bullhorn-waving
posturing. The Yes Men's completely ridiculous presentations often
go without question, exposing the extreme mental gymnastics required
of free-market adherents to see any rise in profit margins as a good
thing. But all of this would be just a series of pranks tied end-to-end
if it weren't for the cohesive interstitial narrative The Yes Men
weave into the film, in which the group's bifurcated masthead of Andy
Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno interviews pundits for their possible solutions
on how to "fix the world." The film is both hilarious and eye-opening,
encapsulated best in the response a role-playing Andy Bichlbaum gives
to a BBC staffer after being asked how it feels to deliver a bit of
good news for once: "I wouldn't want to be a Dow spokesman otherwise."
Yes Man Mike Bonanno in person on Friday at the 7:10 and 9:20pm shows. (2009,
35mm, 87min) DM
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
WILLY WONKA & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (Classic/Cult Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Friday, 6pm, Sunday, 1pm, and Tuesday, 6pm
Even though the lackluster Peter Ostrum (who played Charlie and
thankfully retired from the acting business to become a veterinarian)
covers the film in a slimy, sentimental goo, Mel Stuart's exceptional
but uneven WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY still remains a visual
and rather perverse delight. Get past the interminable "Cheer up
Charlie" song and the flimsy ending and you're left with some gorgeous
color cinematography and the pleasure of watching half a dozen pre-pubescent
miscreants get their comeuppances while Gene Wilder acts bewildered.
Most of the musical numbers are quite good too, and the classroom scenes
with David Battley as an inept grade school teacher are worth the price
of admission alone. (1971, 100 min, 35mm) JA
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
François Truffaut's THE WILD
CHILD (Classic Revival)
Doc Films (University
of Chicago) - Wednesday, 7 and 9pm
The auteur theory teaches us to treat
filmmaking as the second, secret narrative of a movie, with the director
as its protagonist. In some ways, Francois Truffaut is one of cinema's
most complicated characters, which is probably why his films remain
popular--the appeal is as much the idea of Truffaut as the films themselves.
He was a polemical radical and a conservative--or, rather, he was a
polemical radical because he was a conservative. He was amiable
but also very withdrawn. He was a humanist and, occasionally, a misanthrope.
His best known films (the Doinel cycle, the Nouvelle Vague era movies)
mostly follow the humanist tendency and his least successful (A GORGEOUS
KID LIKE ME, which remains unreleased in the United States) come mostly
from his misanthropy. But in the tragic films there's a lot of tenderness
(like in THE SOFT SKIN and THE BRIDE WORE BLACK) and his gentlest films
have little pockets of bitterness (the absent mothers of THE 400 BLOWS
and SMALL CHANGE). THE WILD CHILD, like his two great Henri-Pierre Roche
adaptations (JULES AND JIM and TWO ENGLISH GIRLS), is defined by a weird
synthesis of these tendencies. It's almost romantically anti-romantic.
Nestor Almendros, a cinematographer known for his soft colors, works
here in black and white: the result is vivid without quite being sentimental.
Truffaut himself (underrated as an actor) plays one the two lead roles
as an early 19th century physician who sets out to study (and educate)
a boy (13-year-old Jean-Pierre Cargol) raised away from civilization.
The film will be playing in a new, restored print. (1970, 83 min, 35mm)
IV
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Bob Byington's HARMONY AND ME (New
Narrative)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Check Reader Movies for showtimes
A series of trifles adds up to a trifle of a movie, sure--but trifles
can make for a pleasant 75 minutes. Produced, as these cheap and unambitious
movies usually are, by Filmscience, HARMONY AND ME is not much: just
a series of jokes that remain funny until the next edit and are then
forgotten. It's pretty good comedy, a little like laughing at a comedian
you have no interest in ever seeing again at an open mic. Of course
Justin Rice is in it, and of course he twists and contorts his tongue
through the usual social acrobatics, surrounded by the usual mumblecore
ringers as the twenty- and thirty-somethings and by broad caricatures
as everybody else. Rice is funniest when he doesn't look people in the
face and when it becomes obvious that he's far from being 20. Bob Byington
may not know much, but he knows those two principles, and that's enough
to make a film. (2009, 75 min, DigiBeta) IV
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS:
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center,
in the current Iranian festival, is the great Mohsen Makhmalbaf's
KANDAHAR (Saturday and Sunday) and the documentary double-bill
THE IRANIAN CINEMATOGRAPHERS and ANOTHER SALUTE (Saturday
and Sunday).
Reeling: The Chicago Lesbian and
Gay International Film Festival, presented by Chicago Filmmakers,
opens on Thursday at the Music Box with the film THE BIG GAY MUSICAL.
Director Casper Andreas and actor Daniel Robinson in person. Look for
more coverage on Reeling in next week's list.
Also at Block Cinema (Northwestern University) this week: Charles
Laughton's masterpiece THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER screens Friday;
in the Mumblecore series on Wednesday is a double feature of two films
by Aaron Katz, DANCE PARTY USA and QUIET CITY; on Thursday
filmmaker Anna Biller is in person to present a selection of
her short films and several films by two of her teachers, experimental
filmmaker Morgan Fisher and video artist Paul McCarthy.
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: on Friday
and Sunday afternoon is the latest Woody Allen film, WHATEVER WORKS;
on Saturday at 11:59pm is a Halloween screening of Sam Raimi's
EVIL DEAD 2; on Sunday is Frank Capra's 1931 film PLATINUM
BLONDE; and on Thursday in the Charles Laughton series is Cecil
B. DeMille's 1932 THE SIGN OF THE CROSS.
Chicago Filmmakers screens the contemporary horror film MULBERRY
STREET on Saturday at 8pm.
At Facets Cinémathèque this week: LABOR DAY, a new documentary
about the Service Employees International Union and the 2008 presidential
election, play for a week; in the Facets' Night School midnight series
on Friday is the 2007 Spanish film [*REC], with an talk by Miguel
Martinez, and on Saturday is Benjamin Christensen's 1922 classic
HAXAN, with a talk by Brian Elza and Bruce Neal. These both from
DVD.
Also at the Music Box this week: Lars von Trier's ANTICHRIST
continues; the anime feature EVANGELION: 1.0 YOU ARE (NOT) ALONE continues as a midnight film Friday and Saturday and in the Saturday
and Sunday matinee slot; the other midnight film this weekend is THE
ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW and the other matinee is the 1925 classic
THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
"Halloween Havoc 2" continues Friday at the Portage Theater with KING KONG VS GODZILLA, HOUSE OF DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN
MEETS THE WOLFMAN, and JAWS 2. On Saturday at 8pm it's
the 48 Hour Film Project, with a screening of shorts made, well,
in only two days. |
