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ON THE BLOG: Matthew Barney's epic Cremaster
Cycle (1994-2002) and his 2004 film DE LAMA LAMINA play this
week at the Music Box. We've got some pro and con commentary
from a couple of C-F's contributors about this love-him-or-hate-him
artist on our Blog.
CRUCIAL VIEWING
Howard Hawks' THE BIG SLEEP (American
Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Friday
and Tuesday, 6pm
[It's a great film, but admittedly
not that rare; we're listing it as Crucial because it kicks off the
Film Center's Film Noir class, which is being taught by retired Indiana
University film professor James Naremore, who is a highly regarded
noir expert (author of More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts)
and also a Welles and Hitchcock expert, so it's no surprise that there's
a film by each later in the series. Prof. Naremore's lectures surely
are not to be missed.--ed.]
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Adapted from Raymond Chandler, here
is a movie so storied and so central to so many mythologies that it
can frustrate even the best-intentioned of appraisals. While many (including
Jacques Rivette, who knows whereof he speaks) prefer the preview cut
that surfaced several years back, the version being shown here is the
more familiar, slightly shorter, slightly more incoherent, and considerably
racier theatrical release, including many scenes re-shot and/or shuffled
to capitalize on Bogart's then-escalating affair and all-but-incendiary
onscreen chemistry with Lauren Bacall (whom he would marry shortly thereafter,
following a nasty but necessary divorce). With a screenplay that seems
as much a post-structuralist pastiche of the famous source novel as
an honest attempt to "bring it to life"--courtesy screenwriter
Jules Furthman, the legendary Leigh Bracket, and some guy named William
Faulkner--SLEEP at best skims the surface of the genre tropes that it's
often blamed for introducing: the film is a wonderful example of how
plot, at its extremity, can be made into an instrument of utter exhaustion.
Naremore lectures at the Tuesday screening only. (1946, 114 min, 35mm) JD
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Ben Russell's
TRYPPS #7 (BADLANDS) (Film Installation) &
Ben Russell and Joe Grimm's MAZES
(Live Audio/Visual Performance)
Museum of Contemporary Art - Ongoing
(Trypps) & Friday, 8pm (Mazes)
Local filmmaker Ben Russell makes his
presence known at the MCA this month, with an installation exhibition
and a number of complementary screenings/performances/"lectures."
He is showing his new experimental short film TRYPPS #7 (BADLANDS) as
an installation work in the MCA's 12x12 New Artists/New Work exhibition
series. There is an Opening Friday at 6pm and the work remains on display
until September 27. (Check back next week for a review.) Also on Friday,
Russell and frequent collaborator Joe Grimm present MAZES, a live audio/visual
performance work that they've road-tested in Europe. Both Russell and
Grimm have an affinity for bright, strobing light, loud, assaultive
noise, and immersive environments. We've not seen this particular performance,
but judging from earlier solo and collaborative works it's bound to
make your head spin, cause you fits, and generally make you happy. Russell
explains it: "Positioned behind a fistful of audio circuits and a
pair of 16mm film projectors, media artist Ben Russell sprays white
light in pulsating patterns onto your optic nerves, shaping sound and
eyebeam with fingers/hands that intercede between lens and screen. A
photon's throw away, sound artist Joe Grimm weaves a tangle of hand-built
electronics into a skin of noise, a further manifestation of light pattern
and intensity as real time audio. Light is sound is light, cause and
effect and chaos and hypnosis, again and again and again." PF
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More info here.
Jean-François Richet's MESRINE:
PUBLIC ENEMY NO. 1 (New French)
Landmark's Century Centre Cinema - Check Venue website for showtimes
First thought after the end of MESRINE: KILLER INSTINCT: "Can't
Jean-François Richet do better?" Sure, KILLER INSTINCT was smart,
because Richet is a smart guy and smart guys don't make dumb movies.
But smart's just what lets you look good in a suit or know the right
answer to each (aesthetic) question. KILLER INSTINCT was exciting and
sometimes entertaining and usually well acted. It was better than THE
EXPENDABLES and yet somehow less interesting--a lot of male chauvinist
hokum, but without Stallone's hysteria or the usual Richet verve. PUBLIC
ENEMY NO. 1, the second part of Richet's bank robber diptych, is a vast
improvement. Better action, better pacing, sillier disguises, better
direction. But more importantly, the grain of salt with which Richet
and lead actor Vincent Cassel seemed to be taking everything their anti-hero
said and did in the first film has been upgraded to a pervasive incredulity.
Irony has given way to an actual moral stance: they've gotten to the
essence of the character, and to what exactly is wrong with Mesrine,
a criminal who struggles harder with his own public image than with the
police (represented here by Olivier Gourmet, barely recognizable in
Captain Ahab make-up). Oddly enough, the result is more self-contained
than the first film (it helps that it's more substantial, that it actually
has an ending and that it's 15 minutes longer); while it seems hard
to take KILLER INSTINCT seriously without PUBLIC ENEMY NO. 1, it's possible
to think that PUBLIC ENEMY NO. 1 is a great film without having seen
the preceding one. The big male supporting role here, instead of a slimy
and near-spherical Gerard Depardieu, is Matthieu Amalric. Like the film
itself, Depardieu's performance in KILLER INSTINCT was both enjoyable
and underwhelming, largely because Depardieu (like his American equivalent
Robert De Niro) has become "a real pro"; there's no adventure
left in his acting, which can't be said of nervy Amalric, who still
acts like he has something to prove. (2008, 128 min, 35mm) IV
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More info here.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio's ALAMAR (New
Mexican)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Saturday, 7pm, Sunday, 6pm, and Thursday,
6:15pm
This feature by documentarian (and erstwhile cinematographer) Pedro
Gonzalez-Rubio continues in the tradition of fictionalized ethnography
pioneered by Robert Flaherty--and if the majority of critical opinion
can be trusted, it does so rather movingly. It concerns a little boy
from Italy spending a summer with the Mexican father and grandfather
he hardly knows, both fishermen of an old-fashioned stripe. As in the
nature-fixated films of Lisandro Alonso, all three characters are fictional
versions of the actors who play them; the film conveys emotion through
the real activities the men have spent a lifetime mastering. Praising
the film in the Daily Notebook last fall, Daniel Kasman described
it thusly: "Filmed in such a way as to nearly forget the camera
is there--and if the camera is there, the film's crew must be utterly
minimal--we see the eldest of three generations of men coax and teach
the son and grandson how to fish, how to boat, how to get used to this
life by the sea. We see a variety of fish caught, scaled, cut, cooked,
and eaten; we see the boy bond with a beautiful white egret named Blanquita,
who takes the only female role in the film; we see the father and son
snorkel and play and otherwise have a wonderful time living.... The
notable absence of wives and mothers for all three becomes more tangible
as the egret, with remarkable naturalness, practically becomes a character
in this relaxed vacation on the sea. Gonzalez-Rubio's is a sojourn of
a film, getting the simplicity and details of a wonderful but limited
experience down to their most honest, most untroubled, most tender,
and often most beautiful essences." (2009, 73 min, HDCam video)
BS
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Jacques Tourneur's BERLIN EXPRESS
(American Revival)
Music Box - Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
The Double RR Rule: movies with railroads are always at the very
least interesting and movies with Robert Ryan in them are always good,
so a movie with both RRs must, by definition, be great. After starting
with one of the director's best-known films (CAT PEOPLE), the Music
Box's Jacques Tourneur matinee series delves deeper into the catalog
for its second week and pulls out this excellent though rarely talked
about post-war thriller, which happens to be a Double RR. After a bomb
explodes aboard a Berlin-bound train, Merle Oberon (visual ace Lucien
Ballard's wife and muse at the time) engages the help of four fellow
passengers in unraveling the plot: an American who's just arrived in
Europe to work for the occupation forces (Robert Ryan), a French businessman
and former resistance fighter (Charles Korvin), a talkative British
teacher (Robert Coote) and a taciturn Russian war hero (Roman Toporow).
As BERLIN EXPRESS comes squarely in middle of the 40-year period when
location shooting was fairly uncommon in American movies (and was in
fact the first American production made in Europe after World War II),
the movie finds Tourneur and Ballard taking every low angle they can,
framing characters against touristy vistas and ruined architecture while
also throwing in subtle detailing and narrative expediency via numerous
tracking shots. The Wellesian narration by Mercury Theater company player
Paul Stewart was RKO's idea, but it gives the movie a hypnotic quality,
and much of the train sequence--including Stewart's second-person monologue,
addressed to Ryan's Yankee abroad--would be borrowed wholesale by Lars
Von Trier for EUROPA (aka ZENTROPA). (1948, 87 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
Herbert J. Biberman's SALT OF THE
EARTH (American Revival)
Bank of America Cinema - Saturday, 8pm
Produced independently by Hollywood Blacklistees--who were inspired
to make a pro-labor film as a way of getting even with HUAC--SALT OF
THE EARTH is a landmark act of civil disobedience and the rare film
that's entitled to masterpiece status without having to be any good.
Thankfully, its artfulness is commensurate with its conviction. A docudrama
about a lengthy miners' strike in New Mexico, shot on location and featuring
many of the actual miners as extras, it's also one of the few American
films of the period comparable to the Neorealist masterpieces made in
Italy around the same time. Arguably, the makers of SALT OF THE EARTH
went even further than Roberto Rossellini in developing an artistic
process that reflected their collectivist ideals: The script was frequently
revised according to input from the miners and their families--most
notably, to devote more attention to the role played by wives and mothers
in organizing the strike. (Jonathan Rosenbaum has called this ahead
of its time in its feminist sentiment.) Telling the miners' story in
their own words often gives this the stolid feel of community theater;
but on the other hand, it lends the film a certain no-bullshit authenticity
that separates it from slicker--and ultimately patronizing--stuff like
NORMA RAE. It's also plenty suspenseful. A sort of moral inversion of
the hostage-standoff movie, the prolonged strike sees the workers' community
become more unified as pressure increases from bosses and police. (1954,
94 min, 16mm) BS
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More info at www.bankofamericacinema.blogspot.com.
Nicolas Winding Refn's VALHALLA
RISING (New Danish)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Check Venue website for showtimes
Essentially a big-budget remake of Tony Stone's Mini-DV epic SEVERED
WAYS (which ran at the Film Center last year),
Nicholas Windig Regn's follow-up to BRONSON abandons the cabaret metaphors
in favor of Michael Mannian intuitiveness and a "Viking DEAD MAN" vibe. Those three points of reference make it sound more substantial
than it really is, but that isn't to say that it's insubstantial.
It's more flat than hollow, a lot of very good gestures with no apparent
intentions behind them, though sometimes the pungency of the gestures
and the consistency of the tone overpower the film's shortcomings: the
commitment of Mads Mikkelsen's lead performance, for one, almost makes
it seem as if there's more to his character than vague notions. Morten
Søborg's 4K Redcode images have a rainy haze that would be visceral
if it wasn't the film's main conceit; however, the movie's slow-burn
bad-assery has much to recommend it in terms of execution, if not conception.
(2009, 90 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Tomm Moore's THE SECRET OF KELLS
(New International/Animation)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Check venue website for showtimes
An improbable contestant for this year's
Oscar in Best Animated Feature, THE SECRET OF KELLS is a slender and
simple story, light on the usual Disney and Pixar-style comic relief
and plot machinations. Instead it makes use of the origin myth of Ireland's
national treasure, an illuminated manuscript known as the Book of
Kells, to explore an extraordinary hodge-podge of visual styles,
some stunning, others less so. The major division of style is between
the Stepan Zavrel-style environments and the unarticulated Cartoon Network-style
characters that inhabit them. Art Director Ross Stewart creates atmospheres
that are so divine it's hard to believe they are populated with such
schematic humans, including racial caricatures that really don't fly
anymore. There is one very charming character with some texture (on
his face and clothes); he's a kind of monastic Willie Nelson. But the
humans are beside the point: this movie makes radical use of perspective,
presenting you with panoramic and bird's eye view at the same time,
then dissolving into a kind of boundary-less digital snow-globe world,
not laboring to explain these episodes rationally. Long sections of
the film are wordless, and better for it. The visual language borrows
from Insular artistic tradition but it isn't weighed down by faithful
mimicry. The scenes that are built to resemble illuminated manuscripts
are formidable, but they give way gracefully to Australian aboriginal
geometries and watercolor worlds that resemble Eastern European children's
book painting. And there are always enough obviously digital movement
and lighting effects that the aesthetic doesn't turn into one big, false
nostalgic vision. (2009, 75 min, 35mm) JF
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
The Nightingale presents "Trust Me," a program of work by local queer video maker
and artist Latham Zearfoss on Saturday at 7 and 9pm. Zearfoss
will be in person at both showings, and they're likely to be sold-out--so
we recommend arriving early.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Ken Russell's 1975 film of The Who's rock opera TOMMY plays for a week in a new HD restoration; and Florian Gallenberger's
2009 historical drama JOHN RABE screens Saturday and Wednesday.
Also at the Music Box this week: Samuel Maoz's LEBANON continues (and also plays in the Saturday and Sunday matinee slot);
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: THE RADIANT CHILD is held over for 1:30pm
shows Saturday-Monday only; and Robert Zemeckis' BACK TO THE FUTURE and John Carpenter's first feature, DARK STAR, are the Friday
and Saturday midnight films.
At Facets Cinémathèque this week: Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson's 2009 documentary MUGABE
AND THE WHITE AFRICAN has a run.
Also at the Landmark's Century Centre Cinemathis week: Amir Bar-Lev's documentary THE TILLMAN STORY opens; and MESRINE: KILLER INSTINCT, CAIRO TIME, and
ANIMAL KINGDOM continue.
At the Portage Theater this
week: Stuart Heisler's 1948 film TULSA is the Wednesday matinee
show (1:30pm; from DVD); and the documentary ROUTE 66 TEN YEARS LATER is on Thursday at 7:30pm.
The Chicago Cultural Center screens Gary Hawkins and Emily LaDue's new documentary IN MY MIND on Friday at 6:30pm; and Cinema/Chicago's summer series concludes with
Mitsutoshi Tanaka's 2009 Japanese film CASTLE UNDER FIERY SKIES (Saturday, 2pm) and Guillermo Casanova's 2003 Uruguayan film TRIP
TO THE SEASIDE (Wednesday, 6:30pm). Both from DVD.
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