CRUCIAL VIEWING
Jacques Rivette's AROUND A SMALL
MOUNTAIN (New French)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Check Venue website for showtimes
An Italian driving to Spain meets an Englishwoman in a small town
in France. We don't know what he (Sergio Castellitto) does for a living,
but he owns a nice car and seems to have a lot of time on his hands,
though it might just be because he has enough money to afford sitting
around when he feels like it. She (Jane Birkin) is a member of a circus
family who left the business 15 years ago, but has returned for a few
days to help with a tour. They're both somewhere in late middle age.
His name is Vittorio; hers is Kate. As he tries to figure out her mystery,
he befriends the circus performers, including Alexandre (Andre Marcon),
a veteran clown who performs a complicated routine involving dinner
plates. Like in Chaplin's LIMELIGHT, the circus performances are shown
without crowd noise, but not because we're to assume the role of the
theater audience; there's simply no one there to applaud. The clowns
and acrobats perform to small handfuls of bored people, and when they
discover that Vittorio appreciates their work (and actually laughs!),
they want his friendship just as badly as Vittorio wants Kate. For those
who've never seen a Jacques Rivette movie, or don't know him by reputation,
36 VUES DU PIC SAINT LOUP (titled AROUND A SMALL MOUNTAIN for English
release, a name like a 1930s Japanese movie) will be a well-acted, somewhat
elusive, small film. Those who've seen even just a handful of Rivette
movies will probably be struck by the film's weightlessness; a Rivette
film, which usually seems to drain all of the mental and emotional resources
of its actors and director, has never been made with so little apparent
effort. Rivette's a curious case for two reasons: first, the closer
his films get to "the mainstream," the less "marketable" they
seem to become (at roughly half the running time of the average Rivette
film and with no paranoia, AROUND A SMALL MOUNTAIN should be easier
for the average audience to appreciate, and yet it's much harder to
explain the appeal of this film than it is to explain the appeal of
his 13-hour-long, intensely paranoid OUT 1); second, despite being a
director who devotes himself above all to the filming of actors, he
benefits the most out of all the ex-Cahiers
critics from auteurism. It's become something of an idée fixe that Rivette is "the least well-known of the French New Wave's most
talented directors," but there's a reason for it: few people have
sought out a Rivette film without knowing who Rivette was. It's unfortunately
likely to remain that way, but a moviegoer should acquaint themselves
with Rivette for the same reason a reader should acquaint themselves
with Balzac: because they represent what it's possible to accomplish
by placing the work above the works. Rivettians will have the theater
and the unseen ghosts they've come to expect and the Lubtchansky clan,
whose own family business partly consists of making Jacques Rivette
films and who are here represented by editor Nicole and cinematographer
Irina. Those who want to see a movie with Jane Birkin in it or a movie
about the circus or just a good way to spend an hour-and-a-half or so
will get all of those things, plus some great uses of the color blue
and some fine clowning. These two groups will see something different
in every scene, but what they'll be able to enjoy together are the movie's
last twenty minutes or so, which are beautiful and direct in a way that
requires no explanatory notes. (2009, 84 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Frank Borzage's MOONRISE (American
Revival)
Bank of America Cinema - Saturday, 8pm
The great Frank Borzage is one of the few infallible directors--one
whose estimation of human beings was so authentically hopeful that he
rarely had to resort to platitudes--and Chicagoans should consider themselves
lucky that his work has been revived so often lately. This year has
already seen screenings of HISTORY IS MADE AT NIGHT, SEVENTH HEAVEN,
and I'VE ALWAYS LOVED YOU; now the city is treated to another, decidedly
stranger work in the Borzage canon, the noir/romance mash-up
MOONRISE. Danny Hawkins (Dane Clark, a bland supporting actor who would
spend most of the next fifty years playing walk-on roles on television)
has been an outcast all his life because his criminal father was sentenced
to death; fueling his neurosis as an adult is the fear that he will
succumb to violent behavior himself. Like many Borzage heroes, he finds
true, renewing love in a beautiful woman (Gail Russell, equally forgettable),
but his attempt to act on it draws him into the sort of danger he's
spent his life avoiding. The combination of black-book fatalism and
dreamy night photography is all but one-of-a-kind (though anyone who
attended last month's revival of Allan Dwan's SLIGHTLY SCARLET should
be somewhat prepared); that the director wrests the tawdry material
to fit his personal theme of transcendence is even more surprising.
Here's what Kent Jones had to say about the film, in "The Sanctum
Sanctorum," his essential piece on Borzage: "MOONRISE, marking
the end of Borzage's unhappy tenure at Republic [Pictures], may be a
throwback, but to what? The film's neo-primitive expressionism anticipates
THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER in some ways, but it also seems designed to
pay lip service to the paranoia that had crept into modern cinema (something
that Borzage later professed to despise). Although MOONRISE is finally
just as romantic as the rest of his work, the disembodied visual scheme
of its first half, designed as an illustration of psychological trauma
is a singular event in Borzage--an interesting choice of material that
probably marked a sly compromise between the directors' own concerns
and the more fashionable notions of the day." (1948, 90 min, restored
archival 35mm print) BS
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Read Jones' entire essay here.
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More info at www.bankofamericacinema.blogspot.com.
Johnnie To's VENGEANCE (New
Hong Kong)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Saturday, 5:15pm; Monday and Wednesday, 6pm
While looking for the men who killed his daughter's family in neon
Macau, gnomish, trenchcoated hitman-turned-restauranteur Johnny Hallyday
hires a trio of assassins (including Anthony Wong and Suet Lam) with
whom he can only speak in accented English and who are also working
for a vengeful gangster (Simon Yam). This is business as usual for Johnnie
To: the casting of regulars Wong, Yam, and Lam; a script by Wai Ka-Fai,
heavy on group dynamics and coincidence; the significance of objects,
specifically photographs, combined with pulp Freudianism and 1950s-style
character psychology; an indulgence of the director's Francophilia,
which involves not only putting Hallyday in the starring role, but also
naming him after Alain Delon's character in LE SAMOURAI, casting Sylvie
Testud as his daughter, and throwing in yet another UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG
reference in for good measure; Macau, language-games, car rides through
the city at night. But just because it's business as usual for To doesn't
mean that VENGEANCE is workmanlike or routine. In fact, it's kind of
a masterpiece. To, one of the greatest directors in the world, is incapable
of making a bad movie or "taking it easy"; a roughly 15-minute
sequence set in a wooded park at night features the finest, most intense
directing you'll probably see on the screen this year. Like all To films,
this is essential. (2009, 108 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Dyana Gaye's SAINT LOUIS BLUES (New
Senegalese/French) &
Alla Kovgan and David Hinton's NORA
(New International)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Sunday 3:15pm and Tuesday 6:30pm
Within the space of two shorts--the talky Morris-Engel-in-Dakar
miniature OUSMANE (2006) and her new and ambitious Demy-esque musical
SAINT LOUIS BLUES (2009, 48 min, BetaSP)--Dyana Gaye has proven
just how much drama it's possible to put into a movie without really
having much of a plot. In OUSMANE, a young boy begged people on the
street so he could raise enough money to pay a letter-writer to send
a note to Père Noël; in SAINT LOUIS BLUES (the original French title
is UN TRANSPORT EN COMMUN), two groups of people--the passengers and
driver of a route taxi and a father and son on a day out who are joined
by a young woman--travel from Dakar to Saint-Louis (aka Ndar). Gaye's
stories are as simple as sentences, and a four-hour car trip hardly
seems to warrant a 48-minute film, even if one counts Baptiste Bouquin's
Legrand-style musical numbers. But Gaye makes the everyday stuff compelling
through simple close observation, focusing on subtle details and conversations
instead of expounding them into grand metaphors, neither hurrying not
lingering. Her two major shorts contain no villains and little in the
way of conflict (the furthest SAINT LOUIS BLUES gets to one is the young
woman's avoidance of her aunt, who is one of the taxi passengers), and
yet they're defined by constant movement and action--the movement and
action of life. This is one of two films playing at the Film Center
this week to have been shot by rising French cinematographer Irina Lubtchansky
(daughter and longtime assistant of the legendary William, who passed
away this May)--the other being AROUND A SMALL MOUNTAIN--and it benefits
greatly from the lithe movements of her camera. It's a shame that this
35mm-shot film will be screening from BetaSP, but it'd be an even bigger
shame to miss it. Joining SAINT LOUIS BLUES on the bill is Alla Kovgan
and David Hinton's Flahertyan biopic NORA (2008, 35 min, HDCAM),
in which Zimbabwe-born dancer Nora Chipaumire re-enacts her childhood
and teen years through a series of largely dialogue-less scenes punctuated
by intertitles. It would be easy to qualify NORA by saying that it's
the perfect antidote to epic-level time-waster THE CREMASTER CYCLE (which
will unfortunately be clogging up the Music Box with its self-importance
next week) or that Mkrtich Malkhasyan's shots of ordinary people in
dusty buildings look better than the over-stuffed shit Matthew Barney
and Peter Strietmann pull off--but Kovgan and Hinton's movie has a lot
more going for it than just that, not the least of which is Chipaumire's
vast array of controlled facial expressions and athletic contortions.
It makes a good double bill with SAINT LOUIS BLUES because, through
Kovgan, Hinton, and Chipaumire's intense focus, the dancer's unremarkable
backstory becomes something both beautiful and mundane: the best kind
of "personal art." Two films that prove that ordinary life
is always a worthwhile subject. IV
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Zummer Tapez: Jesse
McLean (Video Mix Tape)
Roots & Culture Gallery (1034 N. Milwaukee Ave.) - Sunday, 8pm
Videomaker Jesse McLean probes the depths of our shared memories.
However, her works, which often repurpose found video footage, do better
than just recycle popular culture for our ironic entertainment. McLean's
inquiry is more complex. Her work eschews the easily recognizable icons
of our collective childhood and instead finds less commercialized segments
of VHS tape to mine--snatches of moments of heightened emotion or rituals
and activities that bring people together in groups. She seems to be
interested in what shakes people into realms of the ecstatic or transcendent and,
luckily for us, without forgetting the humor inherent in looking back. For
tonight's program, McLean has created a mix tape which she has titled
"Mind Magic" and describes it as "a collection of screen gems...strategically
interwoven...enabling the viewer to ply the delicate line between illusion
and reality that is the human psyche." The program promises a sneak
peak of some new work and cohort Criss Angel is scheduled to be in person.
Not to be missed. (Various Years, approx. 60 min total, Various Formats)
CL
Jacques Tourneur's CAT PEOPLE (American Revival)
Music Box - Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
The Music Box launches its new weekend series of Jacques Tourneur
films (curated by C-F's own Doug McLaren) with CAT PEOPLE, maybe Tourneur's
best-known work. The film was the first release from Val Lewton's legendary
B unit at RKO Pictures--which, through nine films made over five years
(1942-1946), more or less created psychological horror as we know it
today. Making the most of low budgets, Lewton turned screen horror inward,
focusing on the lives of frail men and women who end up the victims
in horror-movie plots. He found his greatest collaborator in Tourneur,
a gifted director of actors capable of drawing rare psychological nuance
from his players. CAT PEOPLE stars Simone Simon as a timid young Serbian
émigré who fears she will become a predatory cat if she consummates
her marriage. For Martin Scorsese, who featured it prominently in his
PERSONAL JOURNEY THROUGH AMERICAN MOVIES (and paid muted tribute to
it in his recent SHUTTER ISLAND), the film was a breakthrough for its
integration of subtext into genre storytelling. In this regard, it's
"as influential a movie as CITIZEN KANE." Even though this
is quite clearly "about a woman's fear of her own sexuality"
(Scorsese again), it remains evocative as horror--in part because Simone
is so believably vulnerable that we fear for her no matter what happens.
(1942, 73 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
Teinosuke Kinugasa's A PAGE OF MADNESS
(Silent Japanese Revival)
Facets Cinémathèque - Saturday, Midnight
Also known as A PAGE OUT OF ORDER or THE CRAZY PAGE, this is, regardless
of the title, a madhouse riot of a movie. Traumatic and nauseating,
it's easily the most horrifying movie made during the Silent Era, a
weird and queasy dance of death directed by former female impersonator/future
Oscar & Palme d'Or winner Teinosuke Kinugasa and written by future
Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata. Part avant-garde suicide finale, part
Lynchian creepshow, this unhinged Japanese contemporary to German Expressionism
(a movement A PAGE OF MADNESS's makers were apparently unaware of) would
be considered a seminal film if anyone had actually seen it, but it
was forgotten and believed lost until the 1970s. The film's simple-yet-somehow-indescribable
plot involves a janitor working at the asylum where his wife is a patient.
Everything about this movie is borderline insane. The screening will include live accompaniment
by the five-piece musical ensemble Cursed Bird. (1926, 78 min, DVD projection) IV
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More info at www.facets.org.
Djibril Diop Mambéty's TOUKI BOUKI
(Senegalese Revival)
DuSable Museum - Sunday, 2pm
It's a great week for seeing Senegalese films in Chicago. The present
and future of Africa's greatest national cinema is at the Siskel (Dyana
Gaye's SAINT LOUIS BLUES, playing as part of the Black Harvest Film
Festival), while its rich history is, appropriately enough, at the DuSable
Museum. TOUKI BOUKI was the 1973 feature directing debut of Djibril
Diop Mambéty, the angriest and most experimental of Senegalese cinema's
founding fathers (the Republic of Senegal itself was only 13 years old
at the time, and a true African cinema had only emerged a decade prior
with Ousmane Sembène's first film). Maybe due to Sembène's example,
the greatest Senegalese films have always been distinguished by their
candor. However, the opening sequence of TOUKI BOUKI, in which a peaceful
scene of cattle being herded across a dusty plain is followed by unbelievably
gruesome documentary footage of their slaughter on the killing floor,
sets a new and brutal standard. Mambéty's nightmarish/playful "anti-realist"
brashness finds its outlet in (of all things) a comedy, and one about
a motorcycle-riding petty crook to boot, though everything seems to
take on new and strange meanings through the bright colors and striking
compositions of Georges Bracher's cinematography. Joining TOUKI BOUKI
on the program will be ATLANTIQUES, a stunning 15-minute short by Mambéty's
niece, Mati Diop, best known as the star of Claire Denis' 35 SHOTS OF
RUM. (1973, 85 min, video projection--we think) IV
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More info here.
Christophe Honoré's
MAKING PLANS FOR LENA (New French)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Check Venue website for showtimes
"How many people will you send packing?"
"My life pisses you off. The way I think pisses you off. I should
just vanish for good."
"I never said that."
"That's exactly what you just said. And you're probably right. Get
lost!"
"You get lost!"
"Asshole!"
"Loser!"
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It's baffling how melancholy the French always seem to be inside their
charming rustic country homes, and Christophe Honoré really keeps the
tradition alive. Chiara Mastroianni's histrionic Lena absconds with
her children to her parents' chalet in the dead of night in an attempt
to leave her unfaithful husband Nigel, but what awaits her is, well,
her family. And like many people yearning for an undefined sense of
freedom, Lena does not take any counsel, well meaning or not, with much
grace. Honoré has populated this film with a full range of neurotic
characters all groping in the dark, but what keeps them human is his
light touch, aided considerably by cinematographer Laurent Brunet's
compositions. Mastroianni's performance is superb, but for Lena as well
as the film, it is the family that adds to the complexity and makes
it hard to stay away. (2009, 105 min, 35mm) DM
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Samuel Maoz's LEBANON (New Israeli)
Music Box - Check Venue website
for showtimes
A war film, a formalist exercise, and an act of personal therapy,
Samuel Maoz's narrative debut recounts the 1982 invasion of Lebanon
from the perspective of four Israeli soldiers stationed in a battered
tank. Maoz purportedly based this on his own military experience, and
it's the rare film that's commendable for its limited perspective. All
we see of the outside world is through the tank's periscope (which casts
every image of Lebanon into a potential target). The drama consists
exclusively of the soldiers' panicked responses to the carnage and hastily-given
orders from the higher-ups. With the exception of a gung-ho commanding
officer and a sadistic Christian mercenary, the characters are all but
interchangeable. LEBANON is primarily a film of atmospherics, appropriately
claustrophobic and unsettling, but it's not without moments of levity,
even wonder. Reflections of the interior in a puddle of water take on
a near-abstract quality, as do the tank's gauges when they fill up with
leaking oil. Moaz is surprisingly resourceful as an image-maker, finding
nearly every conceivable angle within his one cramped set. His refusal,
however, to issue a pro-military statement or a work in solidarity with
Lebanese victims has made the film controversial in its native country.
J. Hoberman, in his rave review for the Village Voice, offered
the following analysis: "Less agonized than confined, confused,
and utterly self-absorbed, the soldiers in Rhino are unwilling conscripts
yearning for normality, ignorant of their enemy, misled by their superiors,
and totally fixated on personal survival. LEBANON may be the movie's
title, but, blindly plowing through everything in its path, the beleaguered
tank is Israel." (2009, 90 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
Tamra Davis'
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: THE RADIANT CHILD
(New Documentary)
Music Box - Check Venue website
for showtimes
The Music Box opens its venerable aisles
in embrace of SAIC and Columbia's incoming Class of 2014 with the art-school
orientation date movie of the year, a pleasant assault of period photo-
and videographic 80s ephemera which re-glamorizes in familiar fashion
the rise and fall of this sufficiently-legendary Brooklyn-brownstone
wunderkind. Set primarily to a selection of ASCAP electro classics (curated
by Ad Rock and Mike D in their sleep) to inform the Little Village loft
parties of the near future, the talking heads on the screen (including
Julian Schnabel, Fab 5 Freddy, Jeffrey Deitch, and others you'd better
know) accompany the Talking Heads on the soundtrack in a valiant effort
to reproduce the grand individualist mythology necessary for the bare
minima of cognitive survival to complete a B.A. in Visual and Critical
Studies. This involves generating the spectator's conviction that not
everyone is genuinely "too fragile for this [art] world",
that one is not quite becoming irrevocably enamored of an unmeasurably
fickle culture industry in which, statistically speaking, economic failure
is all but assured. And (like art itself), against all odds, it works:
Basquiat's paintings (in a restless montage of pans and slow zooms)
look better and better; brilliant turns of phrase--if not fully-formed
ideas--appear in your head; and one gains a legitimate appreciation
for the social productivity and pragmaticism of that insular and transitory
ritual, the "show." Sure, some Friday in a white room, there'll
be such a celebration in your name; Oh, this unworldly and radiant enigma
beside you (eyeing you with suspicion in the theater), they'll give
you a ride home: and perhaps in that abandon only may you or your fellow
classmates truly aspire to die like this man. (2010, 88 min, video)
MC
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
Neil Marshall's CENTURION (New British)
Various Venues - Check Reader Movies for theaters and showtimes
Neil Marshall's typically termitic new movie pits glum and largely
interchangeable Roman men against two infuriatingly independent Pictish
women and a lot of grisly gorehound violence. Michael Fassbender's the
ostensible lead, getting to do a few weird variations on his HUNGER
role during the torture scenes, but it's really all about Olga Kurylenko
(one facial expression: dismissive anger) as the film's equivalent of
the "treacherous Indian scout" and Imogen Poots (a downright
lovely face + a surname to make 10-year-olds titter) as the village
witch. The writer/director's usual men vs. women dynamics (or, more
accurately, characters governed by allegiances and social conventions
against characters governed by principles) get a good workout, and there's
almost enough ridiculously-hard-boiled dialogue and narration to qualify
this as a "Roman noir." While Marshall's last movie, DOOMSDAY,
achieved a surprising coherence while trying to be a different movie
in every scene (MAD MAX, a Daniel Craig-era James Bond, ALIENS, V FOR
VENDETTA, EXCALIBUR), CENTURION goes all over the place while trying
to mostly be GLADIATOR (another point of reference in DOOMSDAY), including
some late Studio Era-style establishing shots which look like matte
paintings even though they're not and a few handheld sequences that
wouldn't look out of place in UN LAC. (2010, 97 min, 35mm) IV
Richard Linklater's DAZED AND CONFUSED
(American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Saturday, 7 and 9pm
Usually when a movie relishes its period detail this intensely it
cuts corners elsewhere, but the rare feat of DAZED AND CONFUSED is its
fully inhabited nostalgia. On the last day of school in the year of
the bicentennial, incoming freshmen and seniors try on their respective
roles for the first time through hazing rituals and the party to end
all parties. Slapstick, sadism, stoner silliness, and sentiment all
have their moments, but never overwhelm. Of course we can laugh at the
pants and hair absurdities of high school in 1976; the aesthetic is
not so far off from That 70's Show, but the difference is that
while a cool guy is cracking a dirty joke at a freshman's expense, there's
room onscreen for the pathos of the freshman's subtle facial reaction.
Here the collar is wide, but the heart is true. Like all Linklater movies,
DAZED AND CONFUSED is in no hurry to get anywhere, because
it's all right there. This generous patience pays off; every
character is worth spending time with, or they wouldn't be in the movie,
right? Spanning from the last day of school until the following dawn,
conversations get looser and more astral as the movie progresses, allowing
even the squarest kids a chance to express some truly wonderful thinky-thoughts.
Throughout the night the little triumphs and scores settled aren't inflated
cinematically, they remain human-sized through Linklater's even-handedness,
the large number of characters, and the skill of the young performers.
It's an impressive cast of familiar faces, most at the very beginning
of careers, and that wave of earnest effort floats the movie, giving
it a very optimistic feeling. (1993, 103 min, 35mm) JF
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Jean-François Richet's
MESRINE: KILLER INSTINCT (New French)
Landmark's Century Centre Cinema - Check Venue website for showtimes
Vincent Cassel is the charmer. The father. The soldier. The wifebeater.
The thief. The prisoner. The killer. The two films that comprise the
life story of famed French gangster Jacques Mesrine rely heavily on
Cassel's performance as he attempts to act out Mesrine's unbelievable
antics. Part one, KILLER INSTINCT, contains none of the ebb and flow
of a traditional epic. It ends a bit awkwardly (Has it been two hours?
I suppose we should stop now. Come back next month for the conclusion!),
but when you're adapting an autobiography rife with exciting scenarios,
the choice is either a five-hour film or two shorter ones, I suppose.
And you have to make the split somewhere, right? Jean-François Richet
is somewhat unknown in the US, but he's appraised rather favorably in
Europe and his 1997 film depicting Paris' banlieue,
MA 6T VA CRACK-ER, is incredibly well-regarded. As an action
film, MESRINE merely suffices; it works best when it opens up and lets
Cassel romp about as the dashing international criminal. And there is
plenty, plenty of that. (2008, 35mm, 113 min) DM
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More info here.
Billy Wilder's THE LOST WEEKEND (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Friday, 7 and 9pm
Though frequently cited as the first serious Hollywood film about
alcoholism, Billy Wilder's Best Picture winner is far less sanctimonious
than that label would suggest. For one thing, it's stuffed with Wilder's
characteristically hard-edged dialogue--his characters were constantly
cracking wise even when they weren't being funny--and it observes lower
Manhattan with an eye for detail that's part beat reporter and part
ethnographer. It isn't mentioned often enough that the Austrian-born
Wilder learned English on the sets of Hollywood productions: One of
his enduring strengths is an immigrant's curiosity about American idioms
and the flair with which they're delivered. This extends to Wilder's
handling of detail both particular (in this film, the jargon spoken
by a failed writer) and general (the overall character of self-pity
in men raised to be self-reliant). It extends, also, to Wilder's direction
of actors, made to seem full of character no matter how long they're
on the screen. Consider how Jane Wyman's caring girlfriend--which would
be a throwaway role in so many other films--struggles visibly between
compassion and pity. Or how the seedy-looking pawnshop owner tells Ray
Milland near the end of the film that it's Yom Kippur; he's a near-caricature
who suggests foreboding in a way that can't be easily described. (It's
hard to think of another filmmaker with more direct influence on the
Coen Brothers.) Milland creates what is still a definitive portrait
of addiction; when the film was first released, Manny Farber wrote of
his performance, only half-sarcastically, that "he succeeds in
a spectacular way in making Birnam [the alcoholic writer] good entertainment."
It's a largely externalized version of addiction, yet true to the character,
a born storyteller reduced to constructing lies for his enablers. Milland's
charisma--his actorly resourcefulness--is perhaps necessary to fully
realize a man like him. (Farber conceded in the same review: "This
is one of those rare movies in which a small action sometimes seems
wonderfully colored by the character of the person and pervades not
only the expression of his impulse, but his manner of carrying it out
and his reaction to it.") Wilder, famed cynic, refuses the character
sympathy at exactly the moments where it would detract from the truth
of a scene. This makes the moments of kindness all the more bracing--such
as an extended, Lubitschian flashback showing how Milland and Wyman
first met--as much so as the famed Expressionist stylings of the scenes
of Milland in withdrawal. (1945, 101 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
Also at the Music Box this week: ANTON CHEKHOV'S THE DUEL
is held over in the Saturday and Sunday matinee slot; John LaFlamboy
and Mike Bradecich's local film THE MOLEMAN OF BELMONT AVENUE
screens Saturday at 10pm; Greame Clifford's 1989 GLEAMING THE CUBE
is Friday and Saturday at Midnight; and Rafa Alcantara's 2010 DECADE
OF DISTURBED is Friday at Midnight.
The Silent Film Society of Chicago concludes its summer festival
at the Portage Theater on Friday at 8pm with a 35mm print of POLLYANNA (1920). The star here (Mary Pickford) is more important than the director
(Paul Powell - yeah, we don't know him either). Live organ accompaniment
by Dennis Scott and pre-show music by the West End Jazz Band at 7pm.
Chicago Filmmakers presents the program Summer Sideshow on Friday at 8pm, which
scours the CF collection for an odd assortment of fifteen shorts (1979-1990),
some of which feature Teri Garr, Ron and Nancy Reagan, and The Residents
and some of which were made by Greg Mottola (SUPERBAD), Gus Van Sant
(MILK), and SNL alum Tom Schiller.
Also at the The Portage Theater this week: the Chicago Browncoats host a charity screening of SERENITY
on Saturday at 8pm. The event benefits Equality Now and The House of
the Good Shepherd. The Wednesday matinee (1:30pm) program this week
is TOPPER RETURNS (1941). From DVD.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: the Black Harvest International Festival of Film and Video concludes. In addition to SAINT LOUIS BLUES/NORA (see Crucial Viewing
above), the remaining programs are the feature films NIGHT CATCHES US,
BLUES MARCH: SOLDIER JON HENDRICKS, CHICAGO HEIGHTS, DOG JACK, and ON
THE FRONTLINE: TAKING BACK OUR STREETS, and the shorts program "Love
African American Style."
Also at Facets Cinémathèque this week: Kornél Mundruczó's 2008 Hungarian/German drama DELTA has a run.
The Chicago Cultural Center continues to host Cinema/Chicago's summer series with Micha Lewinsky's
2009 Swiss film WILL YOU MARRY US? (Saturday, 2pm) and Mitsutoshi
Tanaka's 2009 Japanese film CASTLE UNDER FIERY SKIES
(Wednesday, 6:30pm). Both from DVD. |
