At Northwestern’s University Hall there is a small room, perfectly square, with walls lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that are all but empty. A large flatscreen TV hangs on the front wall, next to two chairs facing the audience at different angles.

As part of a discussion titled “Where the Arts Meet,” writer Alex Kotlowitz and filmmaker Steve James are seated in these chairs, prepared to discuss a currently filming collaborative project titled “The Interrupters” and the intersection between film and nonfiction prose.

On storytelling in general, Kotlowitz mentions “a constant state of astonishment of being knocked off-balance.”

James, donning a navy blue fleece sweater, explains the premise of his 2002 film “Stevie,” a documentary about a man he met ten years ago in rural Southern Illinois who was once an “at-risk youth” in a Big Brothers Big Sisters program, now awaiting trial for a molestation charge. “Instead of this tidy little first-person portrait of a half-hour long,” James says, “it ended up being this two-and-a-half-hour documentary.” He then shows a clip featuring Stevie and his friend Tim, who is later dubbed “the existential fisherman.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Tom Lynch

Roscoe Village’s Hungry Brain becomes modestly packed as it nears 10pm. On the bar’s small stage, a projection screen has been set up for tonight’s screening, a romance-themed evening from local video blog Everything is Terrible! in acknowledgement of Valentine’s Day. When an emcee introduces the work, the silent, candlelit room, stocked with twentysomethings and endless PBR, gazes in anticipation.

The video mash-up begins. Clips and scenes from direct-to-video movies, infomercials and instructional tapes, all edited down and slammed together to form one film. An eighties tape that teaches the various styles of kissing; a quick look at Alaska Men magazine, the place to find single Alaskan masculinity; a god-awful horror show that features Fabio dressed as some sort of knight.

The crowd loves it. Laughs at every turn, often riotous. (“Alaska Men” really does them in.) When it’s finished, the emcee—who says the Everything is Terrible folks are out of town at the moment—gives away some DVDs as prizes and takes a vote on how the rest of the evening should play out, a mock choose-your-own-adventure. The crowd votes to watch the entire Fabio film.

Of course, as it turns out, two of the seven members of the Everything is Terrible! coalition are in the audience. They’re just apprehensive about appearing in public without their monster costumes. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, Chicago Filmmakers will host the work of local filmmaker Adele Friedman, who will show nine films that span from her 1983 portrait of her grandmother and father (“Sarah and Norman”) to a couple working in a kitchen in Paris in 2008 (“Pauline and Patrick, Le Marais, Paris”). Friedman’s work revolves around the use of portraiture, focusing on friends. “My work is often about cultural people, and how their lives are informed by their cultural interiors and artistic tastes,” Friedman says. “They surround themselves with what moves them.” It is a decided break from the celebrity-centric media we are usually saturated with, and Friedman aims to show how her subjects (oftentimes, those in the art world) cannot just stop being who they are when they are away from it all. “People don’t leave their culture at the museum or the office; they bring it home and live with it,” the filmmaker says. “It’s part and parcel of the daily fabric of their lives.” (Peter Cavanaugh)

Chicago not-for-profit film production company Split Pillow has produced “Life as Lincoln,” a seventy-minute documentary darling, directed by local filmmaker Caitlin Grogan, about men who make their living—or at least part of their living—as Abraham Lincoln impersonators. “Presenters” is the term they prefer, and as the film focuses on three of these men it shows duties much more rewarding than ribbon-cutting at mall openings. Lincoln presenters are often called upon to appear and speak at schools; they are educators as much as they are entertainers. Grogan’s film, which bounces between Decatur, Indiana, Kentucky and Washington D.C., shines a light on three men who take their jobs as Lincoln very seriously—in many ways, we learn, their calling toward the great president saved their lives. Read the rest of this entry »

Chicago filmmaker Hurt McDermott’s feature follow-up to his Slamdance-premiered “Nightingale in A Music Box” (2002), filmed under the title “Silent E Squared,” is a latterday adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” centering around the farcical romantic failures of the owner of a Lincoln Avenue art-house (the late Three Penny Cinema, shot after its closing in 2007) and spiraling outward with extremely tepid results. Taylor Nichols (“Barcelona”) stars as the fired-film-critic-turned-theater-operator who programs double features like “Safe” and “Poison” and expects to make a living; McDermott is the type of writer-director-editor who shows the letterboard as “Safe Poison” and expects an audience to chortle. Bits by local theater veterans Jim Ortlieb and Andy Rothenberg are pleasing as they go through their paces. The DePaul-area locations, even beyond the Three Penny, are time-capsule material already. 100m. (Ray Pride)

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One of the more intriguing developments in the “democratization” of filmmaking with inexpensive video equipment and modest budgets is the development of an unexpected new form of star system. Specialized videos on motorcycles, guns and fishing have been bubbling under for more than a decade, sold and traded among the aficionados of the most specialized objects imaginable. (I’d never heard of most of the fish in a raft of successful fishing videos made around the world by an uncle of mine in the nineties.) With “Helvetica” and “Objectified,” Gary Hustwit’s made a fine line in successful self-distribution to designers worldwide, capturing process, but also the faces behind the work that inspire this small yet substantial potential audience. (“Floored,” which premiered at Siskel this month, may find similar trade among present and former members of the financial industry around the planet.) Just like they say in the magazines, the stars? They’re just like you and me. “It becomes obsolete, which is what makes it valuable,” someone observes under the opening titles of “Typeface,” capturing the enterprise both of the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, as well as Justine Nagan’s documentary, a Kartemquin Films production.  Nagan’s “Typeface” has a tactile character that’s unexpected. It’s awe-inspiring enough to see racks and racks and racks of beautiful, aged, oiled, dated wood type, but Nagan observes; the museum’s director flicks on circuit breakers as the day begins: thwock-thwock-thwock. It’s a fine example of how the past isn’t past. Best, it doesn’t feel nostalgic, but appreciative of history, its weight and its wonder. “It’s wood. How can you not like wood, right?” 58m. DigiBeta. Shown with Kartemquin’s short about the Chicago Chicano mural movement of the 1970s, “Viva La Causa.” 16mm. (Ray Pride)

“Typeface” opens Friday at Siskel. Nagan appears at Friday’s screening.

RECOMMENDED

Noah Buschel’s “The Missing Person” was well-regarded in its 2008 Sundance premiere, but makes it to theaters only now. (Elements involving the Twin Towers may be part of the reason for the modest, delayed release.) A knottily plotted detective yarn, more film blanc than noir, it features Chicago’s own Michael Shannon as a 1940s-style detective whose unintentional specialty is finding psychological damage all around him. The twenty-first century needs definition, if not detection, and Buschel’s work is a peck of poetic longeurs and narrative crisscross. The pacing is eccentric yet foreboding, suiting the elegant unease of Shannon’s performance. He’s difficult, his character is unlikable, but you can’t tear yourself away from the simmering mood, the glowing performance. From “Bug” to “Revolutionary Road” to “My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?” Shannon populates a world all his own, but manages to bring the movies he’s in along, revealing something about our own as well. With Amy Ryan, Frank Wood, Linda Emond, Paul Sparks, Margaret Colin, John Ventimiglia, Yul Vazquez, Merritt Wever, Daniel Franzese. 95m. (Ray Pride)

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The sorrowful echo beneath Judith Paine McBrien’s accomplished documentary, “Make No Little Plans: Daniel Burnham and the American City” is that contemporary urban planning of any sort of vision is largely unheard of: we need a Burnham and we get the latter-day acolytes of Robert Moses or we get… wait, who does Chicago have planning its future? On the hundredth anniversary of Burnham and Edward Bennett’s 1909 “Plan of Chicago,” a chunk of Chicago’s post-Great Fire past comes through Burnham’s faith in the future of cities, and McBrien effortlessly moves through his work around the country and the world, as well his collaborations with partner John Root on the Rookery and Monadnock buildings. His monumental achievements are moving in themselves; this is a fine study. 59m. (Ray Pride)

“Make No Little Plans: Daniel Burnham and the American City” plays Sunday and Monday at Siskel. McBrien will appear.

On December 6, Empty Bottle will screen “Wesley Willis’ Joy Rides,” a documentary about the late local musician and artist. “It was a lot of following him around during his everyday routine,” says Kim Shively, co-director of the documentary. The film is compiled of footage shot over the five years before Willis’ death in 2003. “The first time we filmed was in 1999 I think, and we went up until his death,” Shively says. “We actually weren’t even sure if we were going to finish when he died. We didn’t know if it would be appropriate, but it turned out to be a good tribute.” Willis himself wrote a song about the Empty Bottle, and he often referred to the venue in his lyrics. Shively describes her first impressions of Willis: “It was intimidating at first, being around him, but after you got past the initial uneasiness, you saw he was a great person. He had a bizarre sense of humor, and a unique perspective on the world, and pop culture in particular.”

RECOMMENDED

Is Roland Emmerich hoping to suggest a Fritz Lang fueled on Ecstasy and poppers?  The Teutonic apocalypticist has topped his customary grandiloquence with bursts of grandeur in the 158-minute “2012,” a bravura, breathtaking, ridiculous, assured, intermittently political, berserk masterpiece about the end of the world. As a director-producer-SFX-house-owning Euro-auteur, he has no parallel. (Timur Bekmambetov needs to notch a few more conflagrations in his belt.) The economic critique leveled against form-follows-function disjuncture in movies like “Fight Club” could escalate to Titanic scale against this pinnacle of Emmerich’s appetite for destruction. As lit and framed by Dean Semler and designed by ranks and ranks of designers, Emmerich’s provocations aren’t meant to capture the hushed, stoppled intake of breath upon encountering a finely ruined world. There’s gallery-drowned influence that’s only grown with time. Some of his images hope to sleep cheek-by-jowl with work like Maurizio Catellan’s “La Nona Ora” (The Night Hour), in which a Pope has been slain by a small, perfectly aimed bit of meteorite. Amusingly, Emmerich has shown off the yields of his profits: he’s made his London home into a gallery of boldly political art, some commissioned. He wears the galleristic influence with confident glee. He adds more and more politicized sarcasm to the kind of enterprise that was considered programmatic, say, “Gone in Sixty Wonders of the World.” Emmerich is a mephitic prankster and the perfume comes from a perfect nose, a perfect nose for what he does. With John Cusack, God bless ‘im, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, Danny Glover, Patrick Bachau. 158m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen. (Ray Pride)

“2012″ opens Friday.