RECOMMENDED

Filmmaker Paul Cotter has told film-festival audiences that his captivating directorial debut, “Bomber,” was made for “less than the cost of a Prius,” and it’s one of the most accomplished no-budget movies I’ve seen in months. The contours of the story—grown son hits the road with his aging father and mother to make amends with the father’s past—could make it sound like any number of movies, like “Little Miss Sunshine,” but it’s always in the details, isn’t it? As a writer and director, Cotter’s eye for humor and simple human behavior is assured. And the father’s compulsion to return to Germany sixty years later to “apologize” for bombing a village is an inspired taking-off point. He’s seen the damage from the sky, and now he wants to see what’s there on the ground. And what’s on the ground? A bickering family. The acting has a genial ensemble flavor, but Shane Taylor (“Band of Brothers”), playing the son, invests himself fully in the character. It’s the family’s self-knowledge that grows from the impulse to apologize, making “Bomber” all the richer. Cotter’s widescreen images are beautifully composed: any thought of his tiny budget will quickly disappear. It’s common for reviewers to say that you look forward to the second feature of a debut director; I look forward to seeing “Bomber” again, on the big screen. (Cotter cites the example of Abbas Kiarostami—”Taste of Cherry,” “Ten”—whom he met in a 2005 workshop, as his inspiration to go to Germany with three actors and a crew of seven.) With Benjamin Whitrow, Eileen Nicholas. 85m. HDCAM video. (Ray Pride)

“Bomber” plays Friday-Tuesday and Thursday at Siskel. A trailer is below. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“You mustn’t be afraid to dream even bigger, darling,” a character says in “Inception” (and in its trailers), elevating an enormous weapon into frame and immediately blasting away his adversaries.

A lesson heeded over the course of a decade of writing and production on Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” a hall of mirrors of artistic allusions in the form of a heist thriller that takes place in the space of sleep. The intricate carpentry and lacquering of “The Dark Knight” director’s filmmaking shines when you see it a second time: craftsmanship has pleasures, if not limitless mystery. Putting plot synopsis aside—the story’s contours are so neatly delineated and dovetailed, describing them at length defines the word “Spoiler”—Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb assembles a dream team of experts, in the best tradition of heist thrillers, to commit an anti-heist in the dreams of a powerful man: inserting themselves into his subconscious and leaving behind a powerful suggestion.

Like Alain Resnais’ aggressive mind loop, “Last Year at Marienbad,” “Inception” revolves around memories of a past love, which may or may not be “true.” Memory is fallible, dreams are malleable. Charmingly, Nolan has said he’d only ever seen that feat of bold parallel editing after completing this James Bond-scaled movie, but he felt all the other films that had been influenced by “Marienbad” had influenced him. What other influences rest lightly on Nolan’s shoulders? Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

You had me at “Nice penis!”

That’s the first words we and John C. Reilly’s character hear out of the mouth of the ever-beguiling Marisa Tomei in Mark and Jay Duplass’ “Cyrus,” their first film financed by a studio (and executive-produced by Tony Scott and Ridley Scott). John, also the character’s name, is a morose film editor who still hasn’t gotten over a failed marriage from years before, and his ex-wife (Catherine Keener) seems not to be his best friend, but his only friend. The complications that ensue are pretty simple, captured perfectly in the film’s advertising tagline: “John met the woman of his dreams. Then he met her son….”

The 21-year-old son, Cyrus, is played by Jonah Hill, and the possibility of a too-close connection between he and his mother is played for comedy in the highly-improvised movie, done in the fashion of “The Puffy Chair” and “Baghead,” the Duplasses’ earlier features. Hill’s shorn his hair almost to the nub and his staring eyes are often wider than a raccoon’s that’s been foraging behind the local meth lab. “He looks scary in the trailer,” a friend said. “What did you think?” I said something along the lines of “stabby-stabby, killy-killy.” Not so much that his character seems capable of torturing and murdering John, but that the passive-aggressive freakishness he’s enacting is so much more convincing than me wishing the character dead. While a route to loving loverliness between John and Molly doesn’t have to bloom into a perfumed garden path right away, Reilly and Tomei have such charm in their exchanges—he an adept of confusion and consternation, she both mothering yet unaware of her son’s predations—you’d almost like to see them throw the keys of the near-barren apartment Cyrus’ way and have them take a nice sublet in another movie in the theater next door. They’ve done well with the Duplass’ freedoms. Then there’s tubby Cyrus in the kitchen in the middle of the night with a knife, his t-shirt tail barely cuddling his drawers. Read the rest of this entry »

Pickup trucks that weave through alleys and whose beds are filled with old piping, appliances whose days are behind them, any other metals for the taking can be seen throughout Chicago. Filmmakers Ben Kolak, Brian Ashby and Courtney Prokopas immersed themselves in this culture of metal scavenging, and from their time amidst the scraps and the people who search for it, salvaged a distinctly Chicago story.

“Scrappers” will make its world premiere at the Gene Siskel Film Center on June 27 at 4:45pm as part of the seventeenth annual Chicago Underground Film Festival. “Since this was a longitudinal study and we knew we needed to gain a lot of information, we spent six months in the scrap yard talking to people,” says Kolak. The filmmakers, whose first inclination to make a film about scrappers came from seeing the trucks in Hyde Park alleys while at the U of C, then spent another two years filming scavengers, their finds and the sales they made.

The film focuses on two Chicago scrappers—Oscar, an undocmented immigrant from Honduras, and Otis, a South Side native who’s been selling scrap metal for decades. “Our subjects are both family men,” says Ashby, “and what we encountered were not thieves as they’re often portrayed, but honest guys who couldn’t find work or didn’t have papers.” The filmmakers find that the business is as diverse as any, from a scrapper collecting cans in a shopping cart to an operator with dozens of employees who buys scrap from large industrial companies and resells it in large amounts. Oscar and Otis reside somewhere in the middle, clearly good at what they do but dealing with an array of economic, political and family issues. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Life’s a grind, but it’s better than the other option, right? The lovingly bruised “Audrey the Trainwreck” is a melancholy meditation on early-onset adulthood, told through the interactions of two young depressives who may be tumbling toward a relationship,  characters adrift in their own ways, hoping for love, or perhaps just a little reassuring simplicity. Chicago writer-director-editor Frank V. Ross’ fifth feature is freighted with the heightened ordinary and his comedic and dramatic instincts are wrapped in a rare concern for the lowered expectations of the modern middle-class. “I can say I’m not afraid of anything, because there’s a lack of options,” one character says; the observation is dry, even though it’s coming from a resigned place in her heart. Ross’ most intriguing pattern is how the everydayness of the jobs and pursuits are interrupted by bits of conflict and violence or unexpectedly apt humor. (In life and in drama, inertia needs to be punctured.) The violence is, well, funny. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“What are you going to do with your life?” asks narrator Bill Murray at the opening of “Ballhawks,” a local-color documentary about a local pastime. Mike Diedrich directs and shoots a lustrous answer by portraying grown men with baseball gloves who gather on the streets outside Wrigley Field during Cubs games. He makes his sympathies clear in the understated, bittersweet score by Eric Sproull. Nicely designed graphics place on screen the key stats for each of the seven “ballhawks” who zealously chase balls that fly over the stadium wall. They fumble Diedrich’s softball questions about why. It’s “definitely a distraction from life itself,” admits Dave. Moe testifies: “It’s nothing that’s life-changing or anything, although it’s my life.” Diedrich never doubts them, not even the one, maybe math-impaired, who states he has “eight million things signed by Ernie Banks.” Another actually thinks he should get a lifetime pass to the bleachers by “donating” to their original owner 4,000 baseballs he caught: “I earned it, you know, with the things I’ve done at the park over the years.” Mike Leonard, an NBC Today Show feature correspondent, argues: “Anything with passion is heroic.” Batting practice or grand slam, an out-of-the-park Major League Baseball ball is like life. “Catch something. Hold on to something. And we’re all trying to hold on to something. I don’t think that’s crazy at all,” philosophizes the Winnetkan, who may not mean it when he says, “I hate to get all metaphysical. I think people who laugh at them [ballhawks] are crazy.” 74m. (Bill Stamets)

“Ballhawks”‘ Friday 8pm screening at  Siskel  is sold out; Diedrich and ballhawks will appear. Some tickets are left for screenings Friday 6pm, Saturday 8:30pm, Sunday 5:30pm.
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Chicago filmmaker Ron Lazzeretti, whose work includes the 1999 feature “The Opera Lover,” as well as writing and producing “The Merry Gentleman,” (2009), Michael Keaton’s directorial debut, returns with a quartet of Windy City-set stories in “Something Better Somewhere Else,” an improvised romantic comedy, shot, reportedly, over an eight-year period. Hurrah for local color and local filmmakers. Many improv-style everyday psychological mortifications may be anticipated. With John G. Connolly, Stephanie Childers, David Pasquesi. 76m. Preceded by “Graveyard,” a short (7m) from a thirteen-part series about tall tales, by Lazzeretti, Pasquesi, and Christian Stolte. DigiBeta video. (Ray Pride)

“Something Better Somewhere Else” plays May 21 and 24 at Siskel; Lazzeretti and producer Ed Amaya will appear.

Portage Theater

Last Thursday, Rosa Rio died in Florida at the age of 107, one of the last living theater organists from the silent film era. The theater organist provides the live score to silent films, giving characters depth, giving action life and giving a voice to the filmmakers who first brought us to the cinema. “The best compliment a theater organist can get is for someone to say I didn’t even notice it playing,” says Jay Warren, photoplay organist at the Portage Theater. When the accompaniment is one with the film, Warren says, he’s done his job like Rosa Rio and Gaylord Carter before him.

The organ at the Portage Theater is red and crescent-shaped,  encased in a white wall three feet high with an opening for its player to the right. The 1927 Kimball Pipe Organ recently rescued by the Silent Film Society of Chicago from five years of silent storage is completely functional but still in the process of renovation. Read the rest of this entry »

Jennifer Burns’ 2009 “Vincent: A Life In Color” is the future of documentary in the here-and-now: a hand-to-mouth portrait of a local eccentric with touching elements in the central character’s life story. There’s gonna be a lot more of them in the foreseeable future: anecdotes that could be shorts that are expanded to feature length. (Everybody thinks everybody’s got a story.) Vincent P. Falk, legally blind with extreme tunnel vision, worked as a computer programmer for Cook County and lives in a Marina City condo. In his off-hours, draped in coats of many colors, none drab, all as bold as lightning, he haunts the bridges over the Chicago River and the fishbowl windows of local television news broadcasts, often doing dervish-y spins of joy. Nicknames supposedly abound: “Fashion Man” and “Man of a Thousand Coats” as well as “Riverace” (pronounced like “Liberace”). Despite a troubled childhood, detailed at length, Vincent comes across as an odd but supremely contented man. Viewers’ taste for Vincent’s taste in puns may vary. Roger Ebert is a central supporter of “Vincent,” reviewing it last June on his website before a release was set, and programming it at his recent Ebertfest in Champaign.  96m. DigiBeta. (Ray Pride)

“Vincent: A Life In Color” opens Friday at Siskel. Burns and Falk will appear at all Friday-Sunday shows and Monday-Thursday 8pm shows. A reel of Falk’s spins-for-the-camera is embedded below. Read the rest of this entry »

Local filmmaker James Allen Smith’s debut feature documentary, “Floored,” debuted at the Siskel Film Center in January, and was a record-breaking attraction. Whether the audiences for this run are also drawn from the Chicago commodities milieu, the film will still play as elegy. Louder-than-life figures give way to a requiem about the demise and demolishing of a Chicago, generational, blue collar, money-spinning industry. The pits were a way up for generations of the Chicago working class. Computerized trading that has winnowed the population of the pits to ten percent of what it once was. “A baschun of capitalism,” a subject calls it. “There are cliques, Jewish, Irish, Italian cliques. I’m Polish. I don’t think we have a clique.” Another: “We lose open outcry, we’ve lost an institution!” It’s a Chicago story, and ripe for dramatic adaptation: surely there are generations of stories left on the hard drives in the edit-room bay. (Ray Pride)

“Floored” opens Friday at Siskel. The film’s website is here.