Xan Aranda/Photo: Jacob Knabb

By Lara Levitan

Chicago filmmaker Xan Aranda approaches her films as an ambassador for their subjects. In her first feature, 2011’s award-winning “Andrew Bird: Fever Year,” she presents a frenetic year in the touring life of the lauded musician; and in her follow-up documentary, “Mormon Movie,” set for completion in 2014, Aranda reveals a little-known filmmaking community within the Mormon church.

“I’m an insider-outsider for these two seemingly cloistered entities,” says the thirty-seven-year-old former Mormon, who says that while the church is “notoriously private, [it is] ever working to convert new believers.” Read the rest of this entry »

 Robert Cicchini’s “Waterwalk,” based on a memoir by Steven Faulkner, is an uplifter following a canoe trek made by a newly fired newspaperman and his adopted Korean teenage son, tracing the route taken by explorers Marquette and Joliet from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to St. Louis in 1673. Spoiler: the latter-day duo doesn’t agree on much. “Waterwalk” is yet another entry in the burgeoning twenty-first-century American tradition of soothing, reassuring, earnest, oh-so-small micro-movies that capture a moment in less-traveled, often verdant reaches of the land. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Ray Pride

By Ray Pride

“Quality over quantity,” Roger Ebert wrote to me when he’d just signed onto Twitter, seeing how much I posted on any given day. But soon after, he was furnishing the Internet with his own personal, characteristic rivulet of riffs, reviews and retweets. His voice sounded in yet another form.

Last weekend, at the fifteenth annual Ebertfest in Champaign-Urbana, tributes were consistent in both quality and quantity. It was a living wake. But the programming, largely by his hand, served as a hyperarticulate last will and testament as well, the shape of which grew more and more emphatic as the five days and nights lengthened. The opening was a 35mm print of Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven,” with hearty ninety-two-year-old co-cinematographer Haskell Wexler in attendance. Five of the fourteen films were 35mm prints, another sort of wake, for the form he had always celebrated, in the format he first found it, bright and nourishing in the communal dark. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Ray Pride

By Ray Pride

EVERYTHING THAT ROGER EBERT WAS, was a newspaperman, and was because he was a newspaperman. Ink, and then film, and then ink about film. That would include appreciating the movement of careers, the motion of plots, like a sportswriter. That would include the late-night badinage of the ink-stained, as in the many years spent, without regret, at O’Rourke’s and the Old Town Ale House. That would include the competitive urge with The One Across Michigan Avenue, the one called the Chicago Tribune. But also the one called “Gene Siskel.” Plus, words and paper with racy asides and winning wisecracks. (And in later years, wisecracks sketched quickly on a small pad of paper and handed to you.) Television didn’t make Roger Ebert, but in a small, small way, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel made television. (And when I was a guest on the show after Siskel’s death, Ebert’s key words of advice were, you’re not doing this or that, it’s not even conversation, you’re committing television.) Words. Anecdotes. There are a lot of them. Read the rest of this entry »

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Chicago filmmaker Frank V. Ross’ “Tiger Tail In Blue,” which hasn’t made the festival circuit, is his sixth feature. While it’s a shame the Downers Grove resident hasn’t gotten more attention for his work, the keenly observant “Tiger Tail,” demonstrates well the gently idiosyncratic voice heard in earlier films like “Audrey the Trainwreck” (2010). It’s an earnest depiction of drifting young married life, telling the story of Christopher (Ross) and  Melody (Rebecca Spence), their schedule-juggling lives. He’s writing a first novel and working as a waiter, where he’s distracted by a co-worker, Brandy (Megan Mercier). Read the rest of this entry »

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SAIC faculty member Chris Sullivan’s first feature is a haunting, organic, decades-long accumulation of fearsome animation of fearful dreams. “Consuming Spirits” weaves together hand-drawn, cutout, stop-motion and clay techniques with the gossamer gloom of moldering nightmare. His Rustbelt Appalachia isn’t a  a wholly forbidding place, but it’s intensely detailed in a way that makes you glad you don’t live there. Comparisons to Sullivan’s Gothic imagination have been made to Cassavetes and the memory pieces of Terence Davies like “Distant Voices/Still Lives,” and those comparisons may not be far of the mark. Read the rest of this entry »

Who ya gonna call? FDR! Just because Bill Murray can do anything he wants doesn’t mean he should do anything. Still, there’s always the cornucopia of interviews and talk-show appearances that accompany any new movie, and that’s a blessing almost beyond compare. “Hyde Park on Hudson,” not so much. A parallel project to the Oscar-winning “King’s Speech,” set in June 1939, “Hyde Park on Hudson” fictionalizes a June 1939 meeting between President Roosevelt (Murray) and the King and Queen of England (Samuel West, Olivia Colman). Olivia Williams is on hand as Eleanor, and Laura Linney plays Daisy, an intimate of the president. Director Roger Michell has made small, compelling, dark movies like “Enduring Love,” “Venus,” “The Mother” and “Changing Lanes,” as well as commercial comedies like “Notting Hill.” Aside from a handsome burnish in its dingy-around-the-edges design, there’s little life in the narrated waxworks: no manic pixie dream savior, this FDR. There are a number of equally dingy sexual innuendos best left to a compulsive washing of the hands after viewing. Murray brings gravity to speechifying and the supping at a glass of whiskey. Is this the Bill Murray we love? Read the rest of this entry »

Digital technology has changed the worlds of film distribution and film production, but there’s always one constant: in Chicago, every third feature that sees the light of day must have a gangster, or a confused foreigner, and the filmmakers must think that gangsters are a hoot and stupid. Technology changes nothing! Boris Wexler’s imperturbably awful “Roundabout American” starts wrong in the first note of its score, with dreadful, cheap-sounding accordion and xylophone music accompanying crude silhouette animation.  A young Frenchman trades cultural stereotypes with a twice-life-size Ron Jeremy lookalike in a tie-dyed muumuu of a T-shirt, leading him to drunken nights and a female escort service run out of a pizza delivery business. Dreadful music also accompanies touristic montage of characters banging around the Bean and the Chicago River downtown, a gentle good thing for keeping the dialogue down. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Parallax Sounds,” a documentary by Augusto Contento, contrasts a gold-flecked perspective of modern-day Chicago locations with the city’s independent-minded music culture since the 1990s, with piquant and sometimes piercing comments by Steve Albini, David Grubbs, Damon Locks, Ian Williams and others. As Albini puts it in the film, “It was an incredible collection of people. There was a criminal element, there were drug dealers, there were hustlers. The unifying characteristic is that they were unwelcome elsewhere; they were real fuck-ups, total disasters in the straight world. In the punk scene, all these different kinds of people, immigrants and faggots and criminals and intellectuals and people who were slightly insane, all these people came together and were able to crate stuff that was really beautiful and powerful.” Read the rest of this entry »

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