By Ray Pride

Even with an early image of forbidden splatter that would never make it into even a conversation about an idea of the possibility of a studio-made picture, there’s a strange calm to Bobcat Goldthwait’s fierce black comedy “God Bless America.” It’s surely the year’s only movie that evokes the highway of Capra’s “It Happened One Night,” the fulminations of “Network” and the fumes of Gaspar Noé’s “I Stand Alone.”

As Frank, an everyman figure in Syracuse, New York, thrown to the wind, Joel Murray is supremely calm. And when he speaks? He’s just a guy making sense. His life and work are falling down around him, he’s getting headaches, he’s worried about whether he may be terminally ill and everything he sees on television seems like a terrible hallucination of a world, and country, gone wrong. It’s mild compared to your everyday online comment section, but it’s rarely portrayed in contemporary movie comedies. After getting fired, Frank buys a gun and sets out to stalk celebrities, and quickly enough, an equally pissed-off teenager (Tara Lynne Barr) attaches herself to his crusade. (“Did you just kill Chloe? Awesome.”) Read the rest of this entry »

Photo by Ray Pride.

By Ray Pride

All the movies here are about forgiveness and mortality, I message a friend in the midst of last week’s fourteenth edition of Ebertfest in Champaign-Urbana.

The quick, glib text in turn: “Isn’t that all movies, really?” Since I didn’t know I was going until a couple days ahead, I hadn’t looked over the list of twelve “overlooked” features that Roger Ebert and his festival staff had programmed. All I really knew was that no movies or presentations overlap, and ample time is slotted for lunch and dinner; that is, lots of gab.

On opening night, “Joe Vs. The Volcano” (1990), shown at the sold-out downtown 1,525-seat Virginia Theatre (built 1921), is about a white-collar worker who escapes “Brazil”-like drudgery when he’s told he has six months to live. John Patrick Shanley’s cracked romanticism ensues. Mortality of another stripe came to light afterwards, when cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt said a DCP digital copy of the film had been mastered especially for Ebert, and he thought it looked finer than it had ever looked in its photochemical form. Still, the sixty-seven-year-old cinematographer admitted, he’s yet to shoot a movie in any digital format. Read the rest of this entry »

Ian Williams in "Parallax Sounds"

Of a dozen or so features I was able to sample from CIMMFest, the Fourth Chicago International Movies and Music Festival—playing this year at the sparklingly renovated Logan Theater as well as the Wicker Park Arts Center and Society for the Arts—Silvia Beck’s process doc, “Nyman in Progress” is a delight, following the composer puttering through his cluttered-to-collapsing studio as well as traipsing the world performing his music. “The energy comes in through my front door and my windows,” he says, saying he’s as content at home as on the road. But we also see Nyman combining his music with video images he’d collected randomly for years, for gallery consumption. Read the rest of this entry »

As if a daylong lineup of films about music isn’t enough, The Chicago International Movies & Music Festival boasts a lineup of live music by night, inspired by the movies it screened earlier in the day. The festival, which takes place at various venues throughout Wicker Park and Logan Square, is all about highlighting the symbiotic relationship between music and film. For the organizers of the festival, one wouldn’t be what it is without the other.

Musician Josh Chicoine and film editor Ilko Davidov co-founded CIMMFest in 2009 when they met as neighbors at a housing co-op for artists and musicians in Bucktown. Read the rest of this entry »

Gorilla Tango Theatre, best known for its nerdy burlesque shows, is expanding beyond the stage with a new film branch, Gorilla Tango Motion Pictures (GTMP). Gorilla Tango also recently purchased Skokie Theatre, where the company plans to both screen its films and add more showings of its theater performances. 

“We have these shows that are a big success, but a tour is very difficult and cost-wise it doesn’t always make sense,” says Gorilla Tango founder Dan Abbate. Film was an appealing option, he says, because it is “inherently distributable.”  Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Andrew Davis began his career as a cameraman in Chicago in the 1960s, and before his largest success, “The Fugitive” (1993), Davis was a poet of the Chicago streets in action films like “Code of Silence” (1985) and “The Package” (1989). (A variation on the Oswald-was-a-patsy conspiracy theory, “The Package” used dozens of Chicago locations to economically suggest other cities and countries.) One of Davis’ most notable obsessions in his Chicago-set films was to make them as topographically accurate as possible—that is, his skillful, adroit camera placement and cutting could, in fact, take place in the real world, rather than being pieced together from disparate locations miles apart, which filmmakers most often do. Beyond its serviceable plot, his first feature “Stony Island” is most valuable, more to be treasured, as a lovely mash note to a passed version of the South Side and a music scene that has not stood still in the past thirty-five years. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Josh Filauri

Film noir may have had its heyday in the forties and fifties, but it is no less entrancing on today’s screens. Hesperidian Productions roots their new neo-noir short “Stiletto” in present-day Chicago, a twenty-five-minute film that pays homage to noir while also aiming to create something new. “You can see all the roots [of film noir in the short], but it is something that people who love noir and have watched it extensively haven’t seen before,” says Kyle Thomas, president of Hesperidian Productions and director of “Stiletto.” “It’s really interesting being able to take that essence and then be unlimited to create something that expands upon it.” Read the rest of this entry »

Dark and tragic, “After Fall, Winter” is an internalized take on Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet.” “I wanted to portray two individuals who are desperately seeking intimacy, but have psychological roadblocks,” says director and screenwriter Eric Schaeffer, noting that he wanted to make a story that people could identify with.

As with many of his films, Schaeffer himself plays the male lead, Michael, a failing writer who moves to Paris in the hope of starting anew. When he meets Sophie (Lizzie Brocheré), a hospice nurse for the terminally ill, the two become involved in a relationship rife with secrets, emotional distance and an overwhelming desire to connect.

While Michael hides his interest in BD/SM, Sophie keeps secret the time she spends as a dominatrix. Read the rest of this entry »

By Kristen Micek

“Silhouettes” takes the heart of a romance, the weight of reflection on culture and race and the pain of isolation and transplants them into the city of Chicago and a single day. Screenwriter Tom Silva, with co-writer and director Gustavo Bernal-Mancheno, have created a love story about Aamod (Silva) and Nadia (Fawzia Mirza), two successful individuals drawn together by a chance encounter and a common sense of discord in their lives because they are torn between two cultures. The film’s combination of themes and genres is an attempt to break free of the preconceptions of ethnic characters and make a poignant and accessible film. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »