By Ray Pride

Fran Lebowitz has been around the block.

The writer’s block, famously. Still not yet the most constipated of talented Manhattan-centric writers—that dubious honor falls to Joseph Mitchell, the brilliant miniaturist who remained on staff at the New Yorker, doing daily rounds, taking notes, making genial small talk, years after he’d stopped producing—Lebowitz prides herself on her daily circuit of walking the island. She procrastinates, perambulates, percolates. And smokes. And coughs. And hacks. Her anecdotes are riddled with semi-colons, apostrophe, appositives, backstrokes, attenuated clauses. (Scorsese catches her in one story about attending a Nobel Prize dinner that turns into implausible nonsense; her grin grows as she works to extricate herself.) Lebowitz’s reputation rests largely on two tiny volumes, “Metropolitan Life” and “Social Studies,” sardonic, cynical collections of model-slim bursts of attitude. In “Public Speaking,” a worthy, quotable quickie from Martin Scorsese, she gargles her laugh that it’s something else, it’s “writer’s blockade… Very much like the Vietnam War. Didn’t know how I got into it, don’t know how to get out of it.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

New York-born, New York-talking actor Michael Rapaport first came to attention with 1992′s “Zebrahead,” a Detroit-set interracial love story; there’s an urban authenticity to his way of speech that can’t be fake, and it extends to his first feature as a director, the documentary “Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest.” It’s an impressive feat of observation, compression and empathy, briskly editing three decades in the life of four musicians from Queens who’ve known each other since they were teenagers, Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Jarobi White. While they broke up more mysteriously than acrimoniously in 1998, after five gold and platinum-selling albums in less than ten years, Rapaport catches the influential hip-hop band on their 2008 “Rock the Bells” tour, with a gratifying amount of access. While “Beats, Rhymes” collects stories from dozens of other New York hip-hop legends, the story always returns to the quartet, and most uncomfortably, and most importantly, Q-Tip and Phife Dawg. There are at least two revelations that open your eyes wide, the first involving one member’s sudden misfortune, the other a clash backstage of an intensity seldom captured by a first-time filmmaker who’s somehow allowed to be a fly in the soup at a career-changing moment. “Beats, Rhymes” was shot by former Chicagoan Rob Benavides. With DJ Red Alert, Monie Love, the Jungle Brothers, Busta Rhymes, De La Soul, and many more. (Ray Pride)

“Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest” opens Friday at Landmark Century.

RECOMMENDED

Pierre Thoretton’s “L’amour fou,” the third feature-length portrait of the life of iconic French designer Yves Saint Laurent, attempts to distill his essence, after his death in 2008, through the eyes of his partner of five decades, Pierre Bergé. It almost immediately takes on the form of memento mori, the camera prowling their palatial, art-and-artifact-choked home on the day before art movers come to separate objects from context. Death is everywhere, all that has passed: a life to be cataloged in recollection, past styles to be paraded in distinctive archive footage. The camera prowls: an image of Warhol prompts quaint 1970s black-and-white video of Saint Laurent, Warhol and a distinctly distracted and definitely younger Mick Jagger at a party. The camera returns and returns to the laden digs until we see it all go for nearly half-a-billion dollars under the hammer of a Christie’s auctioneer. Bergé looks the sleekly stolid French businessman in all regards, and speaks with nothing but fundamental respect and regard for the man who preceded him in death. “I loved Yves from the first day I met him and it has lasted until the day he died, and I can tell you that even now as we speak I love him still,” Bergé tells the camera without a whisper of melodrama. He is as dignified as a bill of lading. Cool, muted passions reign. Read the rest of this entry »

(Encontrarás dragones) Independent distributors learn new tricks to survive. Reacting to the 1990s heyday of Oscar-chasing pictures from Miramax, other studios set up specialty releasing arms, but only long-lived Sony Pictures Classics and Universal’s Focus Features remain. Smaller distributors like Vitagraph and Variance now release movies creatively alongside elders like Zeitgeist and Strand Releasing. Then there’s the mid-range of distributors who combine virtues both large and small, for which I have to assume Roland Joffe’s “There Be Dragons” is a prototypical beneficiary. Newly minted FilmDistrict has a hit horror film, “Insidious” while also releasing the Christian-themed  “Soul Surfer” more quietly, and to a targeted audience. The small-scale success of “Winter’s Bone,” and its awards nominations brought attention to Roadside Attractions, which specializes in finding diverse niches to profitably market their releases to. It’s intriguing how little attention has been paid to Samuel Goldwyn Films’ slate of recent years, positioned largely to satisfy an elderly moviegoing crowd that has both money and time on their hands. Read the rest of this entry »

“Vidal Sassoon The Movie” joins the runway of documentaries about fashion-industry celebrities: “Unzipped,” “The September Issue,” “Yves Saint Laurent: His Life and Times,” “Lagerfeld Confidential” and “Valentino: The Last Emperor.” Craig Teper directs and edits an in-house hagiography of the English-born hairstylist with the slogan: “If you don’t look good, we don’t look good.” In the sixties, his Bauhaus-inspired cuts popularized the idea of design for hair. For everywoman, not just models. One talking head compares Sassoon to the key designer of Apple computer products: beyond international branding, the impact of their particular looks raises consciousness about design in general. Teper also shows Sassoon hammering nails in New Orleans, rebuilding housing after Katrina. Among his other causes, unlisted in the film, is The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He does talk about his youthful membership in a Jewish militant group that attacked Fascist rallies in postwar London. “Vidal Sassoon The Movie” makes a case that the engaging 83-year-old has had a good career. On camera, he talks himself into believing he’s also a good man leading a good life. That’s quite believable, once you get past the hyperbole, hosannas and human potential clichés. “We think Sassoon, we also think liberation,” states one woman, unbelievably. 87m. (Bill Stamets)

“Vidal Sassoon The Movie” opens Friday at the Music Box. Sassoon will appear at the March 18 opening night.

RECOMMENDED

In “And Everything Is Going Fine,” monologist Spalding Gray narrates his life from beyond the grave in Steven Soderbergh’s inspired collage. Soderbergh had collaborated with Gray on the monologue film “Gray’s Anatomy” (1996), about the writer’s failing vision, as well as directing one of the most convincingly grim portraits of a despairingly doomed writer in “King of the Hill” (1993). Gray died in 2004, a likely suicide off a ferry after an earlier accident had damaged his lucid, limber memory. Soderbergh’s knack for fluid, inventive editing serves him well in this refined narrative, drawn from a reported ninety hours of original footage. Gray said he was dyslexic, and had said he remembered the previous telling when he performed more than he would recall a set text or consult his familiar notebooks or a tall clear glass of water. In its accomplished form, “And Everything…” replicates that organic palimpsest that existed only in the unique formations of one man’s brain. And not to forget, what a funny guy. What an observant man. What an estimable artist. Soderbergh didn’t carve a monument: he finished a sentence. Or, rather, allows Gray to finish his many sentences: he’s the sole narrator, his solitary subject, in this final version of all his tale-telling and truth-digging. The ending “lamentation” is discovered, found, observed, and perfect—the hearing of a kindred spirit. (89m. HDCAM video.) (Ray Pride)

“And Everything Is Going Fine” opens Friday at Siskel.

RECOMMENDED

At a dense, tidy ninety minutes, Yony Leyser’s “William S. Burroughs: A Man Within,” narrated by Peter Weller, serves as more than an introduction to the charismatic writer, Beat figure and all-around eccentric who long outlived his peers (he lived to be 83) and served as a sinister grandfather figure to later generations of artists. It’s a compact entertainment as well as a survey of his fascination with guns, mind control and all things pharmaceutical. A wealth of previously unseen archival footage of Burroughs and recordings of his idiosyncratic, unshakable voice bring the man and his sincerity to life. John Waters sees him “as almost a religious figure”; Leyser makes the case as well with “A Man Within.” With Patti Smith, Diane DiPrima, Lee Ranaldo, David Cronenberg, Gus Van Sant, Amiri Baraka, Genesis P-Orridge, Andy Warhol, Iggy Pop, Thurston Moore, Jello Biafra, Laurie Anderson. (The filmmakers are Chicagoans.) 90m. (Ray Pride)

“William S. Burroughs: A Man Within” opens Friday at the Music Box.

RECOMMENDED

Paul Fierlinger and Sandra Fierlinger’s “My Dog Tulip” unreels fourteen years in the life of man and dog. Man has the murmuring voice of Christopher Plummer; dog has an owner who finds “touching that she should find the world so strange and wonderful.” The minimal, stylized watercolor and pen-and-ink animation is melancholy in a way that suits bittersweet reminiscence. (The film was hand-drawn on a computer.) Based on J. R. Ackerley’s 1956 memoir of sharing a dog’s life of food and shit and sex and affection, the words are wise and playful and Plummer’s sometimes plummy delivery wonderful, and I know at least one dog-lover who will surely heave with sobs upon seeing “My Dog Tulip.” The gorgeous animation will sate others’ appetites. With the voices of Isabella Rossellini as a veterinarian who knows the central source of Tulip’s ills, Lynn Redgrave, Peter Gerety, Brian Murray, Paul Hecht, Euan Morton. 83m. 35mm. (Ray Pride)

“My Dog Tulip” opens Friday at Siskel.

By Ray Pride

Goodness had nothing to do with it.

The bold, murderous acts of 1970s terrorist-for-hire Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, who took on the nom de guerre, “Carlos,” that is—there’s no goodness there–but Olivier Assayas’ “Carlos” has something to do with greatness. It’s shockingly fluid, elemental and elegant, feeling almost weightless despite its substantial heft and ambition: a nearly five-and-a-half-hour tapestry of a criminal’s life across two decades, with more than 120 speaking roles, acted in a buffet of languages that include English, Spanish, French, Japanese, German and Arabic, most of which Carlos (Edgar Ramírez, “Domino,” “The Bourne Ultimatum,” “Che”) speaks in the film. (Ramírez’s rangy performance is thrilling for more than his linguistic fluency: he can be deliciously subtle or abruptly bold.)

As a filmmaker, Assayas is equally fluent, working in different modes to suit his subject matter, ranging from the jaunty “Irma Vep” (1996) to the jagged “Demonlover,” (2002) from the stately yet subversive “Summer Hours” (2008) to the moving meditation on mortality, “Late August, Early September”  (1998). The editing of the 55-year-old director’s movies has a felicity and seldom-matched tactile character: you can feel his impatience with each jumpcut, each elided motion or gesture. He’s on the scent of something. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“Made in Dagenham” is a political movie, but it’s also a pointed, polished entertainment.

Modestly scaled like most British movies, Nigel Cole’s film opens with a feat of costume design, of women arriving in 1968 at an English Ford factory on bicycles, a panoply of elegant drab, of commonplace fabric and pattern, fanning out in vital profusion. One hundred-eighty-seven women sewing car-seat upholstery in a decrepit 1920s shop alongside plants where 55,000 men work. Desmond Dekker’s “You Can Get It If You Really Want” plays, and the lyrics soon take on a literal meaning. Equal pay for women! They put the finishing touches on Ford cars, what “mad men” of the era would have written ads for, as period footage in the montage attests. Superimposed over the sequence is a pile-on of the production credits: “BBC Films presents/UK Film Council presents/In association with HanWay Films, BMS Finance and Lip Sync Productions/A Stephen Woolley/Elizabeth Karlsen/Number 9 Films production/In association with Audley Films.”

Yikes. Is that what it takes to get an intelligent yet clever English language movie made in the modern economy? As many as ten sources of finance? On top of that, what are the best commercial hopes for “Made in Dagenham” (slurred as “dagen’em”)? U. S. distributor Sony Pictures Classics getting awards notice, whisking it along the red carpet onto the stage of the Kodak Theatre at the end of February? Read the rest of this entry »