10 Frames (aka My Dog Ate My Homework) by Brian Wyrick

Group 312, the Chicago chapter of Group 101, is a not-for-profit collective of filmmakers who collaborate every month to produce a short based on a chosen topic. Group 101 began in Los Angeles on New Year’s Day in 2000. A year later, Serena Schonbrun and Galina Schevchenko founded the Chicago chapter.

The relaxed group meets monthly to screen the previous month’s shorts and mingle with fellow filmmakers. The viewings often feature a wide variety of genres; the current organizer of Group 312, Richard Syska, says interpretations can be “as abstract as taking the word and using it in dialogue.” Read the rest of this entry »

Chicago filmmaker Darryl Roberts returns to the subject of body image in “America The Beautiful 2: The Thin Commandments,” taking on the American fear of full-figured bodies, taking snapshots of weight-loss industries from diets to surgeries and anecdotes. What the press kit refers to as “grassroots” filmmaking, let’s call “micro-budget.” The writer-producer-director puts himself center frame, a la “Super Size Me” to discover. Read the rest of this entry »

Goodbye, First Love

By Ray Pride

After summer’s somersaults, autumn through Christmas is when the grownup movies come out to play, and the forty-seventh edition of the Chicago International Film Festival has a lot to celebrate. In this rundown, I’ll keep “great” as a random adjective to a minimum. (Disclosure: I was a program consultant for this year’s Docufest section.)

From the highlights of the program, it seems like it’s going to be a strong season for good, solid movies in coming months. The range of films being shown that have been submitted for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award seem to be uncommonly strong as well. While there may well be other discoveries to be made, most of the films recommended here will show up in commercial or art-house release. Screenings can sell out in advance, which may partly be due to the capacity of the smaller screens at River East. The festival is keeping a running tally of shutouts on their Facebook page. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“It’s still stormin’.” A taut masterpiece of prescient dread, writer-director Jeff Nichols’ control in “Take Shelter” is exemplary, and a huge leap from the already strong work in his observant first feature, “Shotgun Stories.” Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) works as a sand miner and lives along a tornado alley in a rural Ohio town with his wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and six-year-old daughter Hannah, who is deaf. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Process manna: Bob Hercules and Gordon Quinn’s ” A Good Man” follows often-controversial choreographer Bill T. Jones during the two-year creation of his “Fondly Do We Hope… Fervently Do We Pray,” a piece commissioned by the Ravinia Festival to commemorate the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. Patient and observant, as the best work from Chicago’s own Kartemquin Films always is, “A Good Man” studies the daily dynamic between Jones and his dancers: the emotional and sometimes heated give-and-take of creating meaning from motion, of extracting consequence from gestures of the human form. Read the rest of this entry »

Ray Lambert and John Davies

Twenty years ago, John Davies got his first job as a producer working on Siskel and Ebert’s “Sneak Previews.” This month, his documentary “Phunny Business” will premiere at the Gene Siskel Film Center, a fitting return to the Chicago film scene.

The documentary focuses on All Jokes Aside, a South Loop comedy club that helped launch the careers of celebrities like Jamie Foxx and Chris Rock. Davies first encountered the club when he visited Chicago to run a charity event at the venue and was invited to see the normal show by owner Raymond Lambert. “What I saw that night stuck with me,” he says. “It was a really interesting club doing a different kind of comedy.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“We have over 500 years of prison time at this table. That’s a lot of fucking wisdom.”

Just over fifteen years after “Hoop Dreams,” Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz followed another Chicago group’s dreams, members of CeaseFire, offenders gone right, across four seasons of interventions in Englewood. Almost every spoken word is as piercing as that profane insight from a meeting at CeaseFire headquarters. “Violence interrupters,” they’re called, working from the idea of CeaseFire’s founder, epidemiologist Gary Slutkin, that violence is in itself “an infectious disease.”  Read the rest of this entry »

The debate over which part of the country has the best music has been teetering back and forth since vinyl was first mass-produced and sold in record stores across the country.

So it’s natural to think a film about the nineties post-rock scene in Chicago would be a sprawling treatise on how the quality of music here regularly trumped that of the grunge marketing machine in the Northwest. That’s not the case with ”Parallax Sounds.” While the still-in-progress documentary by Italian director Augusto Contento focuses on that unique movement, it’s more about discovering how the landscape of a city affects the art created there from an outsider’s perspective. Damon Locks, Ken Vandermark and Steve Albini have already participated.

“It’s not really a documentary about post-rock, or music,” says the film’s assistant director Kenya Zanatta, who worked with Contento on his last documentary, “Tramas,” about life in São Paulo, Brazil. “It’s more general, about Chicago, creation and the spirit of the city, and how that spirit is embodied in the art here. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The first feature by Chicago director Dean Peterson, “Incredibly Small: A 300-Square-Foot Love Story,” is indeed an incredibly small, incredibly understated and indelibly bittersweet romantic comedy. Shot in Minneapolis on a fourteen-day schedule, “Small” follows Anne (Susan Burke) as a proficient law student who moves into a bashed, battered, filthy, too-small apartment with her life-to-be-determined-later sculptor-escalator attendant boyfriend Amir (Stephen Gurewitz). Peterson’s apparent influences range from Eric Rohmer to Woody Allen, and he does a more-than decent job of fitting himself for their boots. Read the rest of this entry »

Catie Olson has always had a fascination with short films. She says they’re a bit like a one-liner. A quick, sometimes simple setup that, if done correctly, can have an enormous response. The 38-year-old artist says she watched several short-film festivals and screenings come and go in her sixteen years in Chicago before she began to consider doing one on her own.

In 2007, along with her husband, Erik Brown, Olson launched Spiderbug, a mobile festival that’s a mash-up of music and visual art drawn from a broader theme she provides. In the past, Spiderbug has called for filmmakers to submit their worst short film, or create one around the idea of pH  (yes, as in the measurement of acidity in a liquid). A bit of a vague task, Olson admits, but it’s part of the fun.

“I really wanted to create a unique experience, something that went a little further beyond a normal film screening,” she says. Read the rest of this entry »