CRUCIAL VIEWING
IMAMURA: Week 3 (Classic Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Showtimes noted below
Though described in Jonathan Rosenbaum's capsule review as an assigned project, it's easy to see why the great Shohei Imamura would agree to direct MY SECOND BROTHER (1959, 101 min, 35mm widescreen; Saturday, 5:30pm): Its story of impoverished Korean orphans in a Japanese mining town fit perfectly with his career-long fascination with taboo subjects. (Korean immigrants were for a long time a perennial underclass in Japan whose plight was generally disregarded by the native population.) The Japanese equivalent of a Hollywood "message picture" of the same era, this should be of interest to see how a cynical filmmaker like Imamura handled such inherently sentimental material—as well as for the black-and-white widescreen photography, which has been a consistent high point in the Imamura films screened thus far. Though not filmed in CinemaScope, VENGEANCE IS MINE (1979, 128 min, 35mm; Saturday, 3pm & Wednesday, 6pm) is arguably the director's quintessential work. Following the exploits of a serial killer in 1960s Japan, it is at once a disturbing case study (the main character is based on a real convicted murderer) and the last word in Imamura's ongoing critique of postwar society. Some critics have taken the film's charismatic antihero Iwao Enokizu as a deadly rebuke to the stultifying hypocrisies of Japanese culture. As Michael Atkinson wrote in his Criterion Collection essay, "The movie abounds with behavior begging to be avenged with a cold dose of prairie justice; every family unit we meet is self-poisoning and run through with secreted rot." Whatever the ultimate moral of Imamura's masterpiece, the film is thoroughly enthralling as cinema: It is at this point in his career that Imamura exchanged the frenzied style of his early films for a more objective style which views hysteria with worldly understanding. BS
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
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William Castle's THE TINGLER (Classic Revival)
LaSalle Bank Cinema – Saturday, 8pm
If ever there was a dissertation-ready film, William Castle's tale of fear-borne spinal infections curable only through primal scream therapy is it. For once, the nostalgic "they sure don't make 'em like they used to" mantra is warranted: for THE TINGLER's initial run, Castle rigged random cinema chairs across our fair country with handshake buzzers activated by doubtlessly gleeful projectionists as Vincent Price (who else?) commands the crowd to "SCREAM FOR YOUR LIVES!!!" And just like that, the fourth wall is irreparably shattered, the monster is captured in a film can (!), and a room full of unsuspecting moviegoers are enjoying some light anal stimulation. Post-THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, supplemental horror thrills require a T1 line and do relatively little for your brain, nevermind your ass... they sure don't make 'em like they used to. (1959, 82 min, 35mm). MK
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Venue Information here. ALSO RECOMMENDED
POPAGANDA: THE ART & CRIMES OF RON ENGLISH (Documentary)
Chicago Filmmakers – Saturday, 8pm
Pedro Carvajal's POPAGANDA: THE ART & CRIMES OF RON ENGLISH is a rough and ready doc about guerilla artist and coporate agitator Ron English. His work, a gleefully satirical mix of hijacked coporate imagergy and popular culture icons, has gained plenty of admirers but has never enjoyed mainstream gallery success. Able to "liberate" a billboard in as little as 7 minutes with the help of his team, English has coordinated more than 900 "artivist" protests since the mid 80s in cities all over the world. Carvajal's film captures English in the act and at home, creating a flattering portrait of the artist and his work. (2005, 78 min). CL
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More info at www.chicagofilmmakers.org.
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Woody Allen's MANHATTAN (Classic Revival)
Music Box (Matinee Series) – Saturday & Sunday, 11:30am
Woody Allen's only film in CinemaScope—but not his last evocation of classic black-and-white cinematography (ZELIG, BROADWAY DANNY ROSE, etc.)—this remains the most commercially successful film of his career and, for many fans, his high water-mark as well. A comedy-drama about romance versus practicality, this has a host of sophisticated one-liners and a lot of asides about the beauty of New York City. Allen plays a TV writer dating a precocious high school student who enters into a more "responsible" romance with his best friend's mistress. The cast—which includes Michael Murphy, Diane Keaton, and Mariel Hemingway—is memorably good, as is Gordon Willis' cinematography. Famously refusing to follow characters as they walk in and out of the frame, Willis developed a unique approach to film comedy; it's been referenced in recent films as diverse as THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS and Godard's IN PRAISE OF LOVE. (1979, 96 min, 35mm widescreen). BS
More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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AMERICAN ZOMBIE
Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 8pm & Sunday, 6pm
Grace Lee (THE GRACE LEE PROJECT) turns her eye for personal filmmaking towards the mockumentary with her first fiction feature, AMERICAN ZOMBIE. The plots' clever premise pits Lee (playing herself) against her co-director (SNL writer, John Solomon) as they grapple with the meaning behind their current project—a verite style documentary about LA's marginalized "zombie community." Grace strives to remain an objective observer of their daily lives while John grows ever-more anxious to explore the rumored practice of flesh-eating, a topic the "revenants" seem hesitant to discuss. ZOMBIE, though an abrupt departure for Lee, provides a few moments of delicious satire and injects some much needed humor into the seemingly endless dialogue about objective documentary filmmaking. (2007, 90 min, DigiBeta). CL
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
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TAMALA 2010: A PUNK CAT IN SPACE (Underground)
NWesternAve – Tuesday, 8:30pm
Though few critics noticed when it was released in 2003—and roundly dismissed as a cult item—much of the plot of this anime feature is taken directly from Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. It's a fact worth noting, since Pynchon's singular output is regularly assumed to be "un-adaptable," even within the limitless possibilities of the movies. Perhaps the author's imagination—capable of imagining entire worlds, intricate paranoia plots and a disarming fusion of seemingly every genre imaginable—could be responded to only by the amorphous reality of animation. (Indeed, he's a frequent reference point on The Simpsons.) Adding a science-fiction twist to Pynchon's story of a centuries-old conspiracy involving the postal service, TAMALA 2010 follows the title character (a sort-of X-rated Hello Kitty) on her intergalactic voyages as she runs from/is used by various shadow forces. Allegedly animated entirely by one person (!), the look of this black-and-white cartoon sometimes suggests a cross between Max Fleischer and Fritz Lang's silent films—which, come to think of it, is an apt summary of Pynchon's worldview as well. (2003, 92 min, DVD projection).
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The feature will be preceded by EVERYTHING WILL BE OK (2006, 17 min, DVD projection), Don Hertzfeldt's short film about a drudge worker forced to confront mortality when afflicted by a terminal illness. It marked a great step forward for Hertzfeldt, a talented animator whose sarcastic humor never put to such moving expression as it is here. BS
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Venue info at NWesternAve.com.
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Charles Walters' GOOD NEWS (Classic Revival)
Portage Theater – Wednesday, 1:30pm
One only needs to look at the "Drum Crazy" sequence in Easter Parade to know that Charles Walters is a filmmaker of the highest order. The low compositions and the careful rhythms in that scene connect so wholly with the dance and the performer–it's the perfect Hollywood musical number. Walter's GOOD NEWS (1947, 35mm) is a favorite among his fans, and is a loose, fast, fun college-set romp with June Allyson, Peter Lawford, and the incomparable Joan McCracken. This is McCracken's only film role and easily on par with Renee Falconetti for great cinematic one-off performances. The highlight numbers in the film include "The French Lesson," (the uncomfortable) "Pass That Peace Pipe," "Varsity Drag," and the title song. (1947, 93m, 35mm). JM
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More info at www.portagetheater.org.
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FOCUS ON ASIAN CINEMA (Classic & Contemporary Revival)
Block Cinema – Showtimes noted below
Comparison is a film writer's worst habit. So many critics think in mathematical terms these days, they might as well write in formulas. They're so busy finding past analogues that what's really new tends to pass under their noses. Saying Jia Zhang Ke is "Tati + Godard" is like saying that Dostoevsky was "Hugo + Schiller;" it's praise, but it doesn't even begin to describe the depth and originality of his work. His THE WORLD (2004, 143 min, 35mm; Wednesday, 8pm), set in a massive theme park outside of Beijing, is a film that understands better than almost any other how cinema turns the world into a metaphor for itself.
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As CINE-FILE contributor Ben Sachs once pointed out, there aren't many exercises more futile that attempting to think of Japanese cinema in terms of Western directors and trends. A Kenji Mizoguchi can only be described as a Kenji Mizoguchi film. Mizoguchi's tender, brutal, gentle, devastating THE STORY OF THE LAST CHRYSANTHEMUM (1939, 148 min, 35mm; Friday 8pm) is the second entry in Block's chronological series of his essential works.
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Rounding out this week's entries in Block's concurrent Asian series, SOPYONJE (1993, 112 min, 35mm; Thursday, 8pm), a key film by South Korean living legend Im Kwon-Taek, who directed his 100th feature film last year. Kwon-Taek's work is known for its chronicling of Korean culture and folklore, and for its exploration of how traditional ideas can be integrated with modern modes of expression: a remarkable, non-reactionary alternative to globalization, an issue that's helped make his films from the 1990s seem more and more timely as they've aged.
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ALSO PLAYING: Block Cinema will be participating in Northwestern University's marking of Martin Luther King Jr. Day with a free matinee screening of the documentary THE TRIALS OF DARRYL HUNT (Monday, 2 pm / 2006, 103 min, DVD). IV
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More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.
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THIS WEEK AT DOC FILMS
As if to coincide with Jonathan Rosenbaum's recently-announced
retirement from the Chicago Reader, Doc Films' auteurist winter
schedule continues to screen some of his favorite movies: this week's
selections include the Sam Fuller rarity PARK ROW (1952, 83min, 16mm;
Monday, 7pm), a typically ham-fisted and passionate depiction of
downtown New York's hypercompetitive Newspaper Row in the 1880s.
Fuller worked for these newspapers as a teenager in the 1920s, and it
is in this (commercially unavailable) film that the director's
trademark hyperactive sincerity is at its most appropriate and crowd-pleasing. Screening the next day is the lesser-seen Jacques Demy/
Michel Legrand UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG followup, THE YOUNG GIRLS OF
ROCHEFORT (1967, 120min, 35mm; Tuesday, 7pm)—Rosenbaum's favorite
musical, which in its proto-psychedelic jazz-suffused intensity "defamiliarizes the concept of the musical." One might pair Demy's
sensational tribute/subversion of that genre with the disingenuous
humility of John Carney's colossal art-house summer sleeper ONCE
(2007, 85min, 35mm; Saturday, 7pm, 9pm, 11pm; Sunday 4pm), which
overcomes multiple obvious weak points (faux-proletarian protagonists,
tepid "soulful" songwriting, plot summary out of uncountable
international film festival entries) to rapturously demonstrate the "romance" of artistic collaboration. Alternatively, one might also
pair it with the garishly colorful campiness of Almodóvar's screwball
classic WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN (1988, 90min, 35mm;
Wednesday, 7pm). The week opens with Ang Lee's NC-17 international
award-winner (and domestic bomb) LUST, CAUTION (2007, 157min, 35mm;
Friday 7pm, 10pm; Screening Canceled), and also includes Dirty-Harry-prefiguring late noir exemplar THE BIG HEAT (1953, 89min, 35mm;
Thursday, 7pm); I, A WOMAN (1965, 95min, 35mm; Thursday, 9pm), an
obscure work of Danish pseudo-erotic juvenilia from the future
cinematographer of GOOD BURGER; and two German silent comedies from
the young Ernst Lubitsch, THE OYSTER PRINCESS (1919, 47min, 16mm) and
gender studies dissertation-fodder I DON'T WANT TO BE A MAN (1918,
41min, 16mm; both Sunday, 7pm). MC
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Full details at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
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ICONOCLASSICS: Films by W. C. Fields & The Marx Bros. (Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Showtimes noted below
It's hard to say who was better served by their transition to film: W. C. Fields or the Marx Brothers. The Marxes' brand of fast, endlessly associative, protean humor certainly seems the better suited to cinema, but Fields was so completely the author of his own persona, so grounded in his every misanthropic nuance, that he is, in the end, the less exploitable figure, purer in his onscreen achievements (whether in his own films or staggering through something like Cukor's DAVID COPPERFIELD) than the Marxes proved to be. To put it another way, Fields would be the auteur of this (perhaps unfair) comparison, and nowhere is this more evident in his well-nigh universally acknowledged chef d'oeuvre THE BANK DICK (1940, 72 min, 35mm; Sunday, 3pm & Wednesday, 8:30pm), where—much as in the Marxes' DUCK SOUP—everything that should have been working in his movies to this point does work, with all the elements of the Great Man's shtick marshaled in the service of a comedy that somehow, and in a far more repressive climate than SOUP, managed to elude the watchdogs of Hollywood taste and restraint. Whereas SOUP's particular place at the pinnacle of the Marx canon may be attributable in large part to Leo McCarey, Fields had always been at his own helm, and THE BANK DICK is basically his show: he is its star, writer, and force majeure, and is mercifully left more or less to his own devices. Aside from his early shorts, THE BANK DICK is the best place to bask in the unalloyed pungency of Fields' one-man war on mediocrity.
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Also playing in the Iconoclassics series this week, the Siskel wraps up its program of "all the good Marx Brothers movies" with ANIMAL CRACKERS (1930, 98 min, 35mm; Friday, 6pm & Monday, 7:45) and MONKEY BUSINESS (1931, 77 min, 35mm; Sunday, 4:30pm & Tuesday, 7:30): the former another transplant from a popular Marx-led Broadway show, with all the attendant creakiness and irrelevant plot-business (but also lines like, "We took some pictures of the native girls, but they weren't developed … we're going back again in a couple of weeks"), and the latter a sublime shipboard runaround, with the Marxes as nameless trickster stowaways. JD
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
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John Sayles's HONEYDRIPPER (New Release)
Music Box – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
A man's business venture ( Danny Glover's eponymous deep south watering hole) is in danger of going under, so he gambles it all on one big do-or-die extravaganza (here a performance by a sort of proto-Chuck Berry) - it's a premise durable enough to have buttressed backstage inspirationals ranging from 42ND STREET to UHF, but rarely has it been handled with such restraint. It's also rather beside the point, as writer/director/editor John Sayles's finest moments are in the margins, spread among his ensemble cast. These include a masterly digression wherein a well-meaning white woman (Mary Steenburgen) unconsciously condescends to her black maid (Lisa Gay Hamilton) that achieves the sort of earnest discomfort Todd Haynes fleetingly captured in FAR FROM HEAVEN, minus the air quotes. Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, a native Alabaman always quick to play the inauthentic card, placed this in his year-end list, and Sayles's typical lack of ham-fistedness inspired a fan letter from none other than recent revival house favorite Charles Burnett: "it is a joy to watch Sayles, as he does in his other films, work socially relevant issues into his stories without compromising the narrative." The script's emphatic sincerity is matched by Dick Pope's gently luminous photography, bringing the same dignity to Glover's hole-in-the-wall as he does to Britain's kitchen sinks as Mike Leigh's house cinematographer. MK
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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PERSEPOLIS (New Release)
Landmark Century Centre – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
Were it not for America's embarrassing lack of knowledge regarding the country that just might be our next military target, Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical graphic novel-turned-animated feature would prove significantly less critical a cultural artifact and education piece. Satrapi's tragicomic rendering of her childhood in post-revolution Iran (and beyond) comes across as softly self-indulgent, but nonetheless provides much needed subtext to the rhetorical posturing of US pundits and politicians around the "Iran problem," which will only intensify in the coming year. In this week's Reader, JR Jones published a sharp long review of PERSEPOLIS, calling out some of the disappointing decisions made by the film's less than cognizant US distributor, Sony Pictures Classics, which guarantee that the film will only be seen by a small, specialized audience in spite of its broad relevance. Out of context, this is a good movie; in this sociopolitical context, it's topical to an extreme. (2006, 95 min, 35mm). DW
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More info at www.sonypictures.com.
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