RECOMMENDED

Producer-directors Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel’s documentary “Louder Than A Bomb” chronicles the largest teen poetry slam in the world, the first week in March each year in Chicago, the healthiest teenage linguistic nerd-dom as practiced by a trio of contenders and a team from Steinmetz High. Sixty-plus Chicago-area high schools contend. Naiveté and bravado bristle. Cheer and hope rise. Jacobs and Siskel’s filmmaking has an urgency that makes it suggest we’re watching the most important, most momentous thing on earth. The virtue of that? It’s just how these kids feel across the months of being observed in 2007 and 2008. “Be here now” and all of that: it’s on screen. “Poet breathe now,” star poet says his dog told him. And breathe and exhale and expel they do, and words tumble, ramshackle, run amok, rhythmic, contentious, clattering, rising, rhyming, running, aloft on concerted adrenaline. Winner of the Audience Choice Award and a Special Jury Prize at the Chicago International Film Festival.  HDCAM video. 99m. (Ray Pride)

Opens Friday at Siskel Film Center. Poets, including some Steinmenauts, will appear Friday 8pm, Saturday 7:45pm, Sunday 5pm. Jacobs and Siskel will appear at 8pm screenings Monday-Thursday. A trailer is below. Read the rest of this entry »

The third edition of CIMM boasts seventeen venues with seventy films and ten concerts in four days this weekend, and the range of attractions promised, from experimental work to music bio-docs looks extremely strong. One feature I previewed, Lev Anderson and Chris Metzler’s “Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone,” narrated by Laurence Fishburne, is a model of how to tell the tale of a powerful punk-funk band’s rough road in a twenty-five year career. The power of musical and political conviction carries the day. Musicians in various lineups include Tim Rutili and Gillian Lisee as well as legendary Chicago art-punks Tutu & The Pirates. I’m most excited to witness Sam Green (“The Weather Underground”) and Dave Cerf’s “live documentary,” “Utopia in Four Movements,” a look back at the twentieth century that encapsulates the possibility of utopian ideals in the twenty-first. Debuted to acclaim at Sundance 2011, Green narrates a visual barrage of stills and moving images, while Cerf does live sound from samples and loops, while The Quavers, fine soundtrack composers, play a live score. No two performances are the same. Without having seen the live version, I’ll leave it to the words of documentary collagist Adam Curtis: A “brilliantly witty, but also moving meditation on our loss of faith in the dream of progress. Sam has created something completely original—a new form of live story-telling that draws you in emotionally in a way that traditional documentaries almost always fail to do.” There’s a promise to deliver on. Full schedule at cimmfest.org. (Ray Pride)

By Ray Pride

With the sly and understated “Win Win,” writer-director Tom McCarthy’s unstated goal is again to depict how goodness and kindness can come in the most ordinary lives.

In suburban New Jersey, attorney Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti) is a lawyer for elderly patients, with a good wife (Amy Ryan), two kids and a practice that’s coming apart in our economy. He’s a high-school wrestling coach as well, sharing duties with office mate Jeffrey Tambor. A questionable business choice volunteering to be guardian to a client, Leo (Burt Young), leads to complications, including a runaway grandson, Kyle, who’s a star athlete. Alex Shaffer, a first-time actor who in fact is a champion wrestler, plays Kyle with gentle assurance as a quiet, bright sullen young guy in bad circumstances. But for Mike? He could sure use him in the high-school program…

McCarthy, whose earlier mixtures of comedy and drama are “The Visitor” and “The Station Agent,” again explores bonds in an unlikely community borne out of affinity more than through blood. While McCarthy has said he’d rather be slightly ordinary than to take us out of his characters’ lives, the dialogue in “Win Win” (co-written with his high-school wrestling buddy Joe Tiboni) is almost as stylized as “True Grit,” in a way, which includes a sophisticated take on swearing. “That’s funny,” McCarthy tells me. At times, you hear a “fricking”‘ or a “fracking,” but these people in this modern moment express themselves in different circumstances through a combination of saying “Fuck, shit, frackin’” and “crap.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

With “Hall Pass,” the Farrelly brothers return to what they do best: goodness, kindness, male cupidity, female patience and abrupt scatology in a generous R-rated package.

Working from the template of a script by Chicago native Pete Jones (“Project Greenlight”), Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s Providence-set comedy works from a simple premise that takes its sweet time setting up. Two essentially nice but quintessentially thick middle-aged ordinary guys (Owen Wilson, Jason Sudeikis), have decent home lives with their wives (Jenna Fischer, Christina Applegate, respectively) but feel a little bit of the itch when another woman catches their eye. (Good gags from them thinking their wives don’t notice and why, and later reveals that the wives do, and how.) The set-up’s sneaky: once the story’s gimmick kicks in—you’ve got a week off from marriage, see how you like them Applebee’s lady patrons—the jokes flow and bounce. It would be a disservice to give away the wealth of keen and foul, but there is one perfectly realized sight gag, in framing, timing and context, that tops even “There’s Something About Mary”‘s hair gel. Read the rest of this entry »

The historic Portage Theater is dressed to the nines for a very special premiere tonight, bringing a little bit of Hollywood to Chicago’s Northwest Side. Tonight sees the debut screening of Chicago writer/director Matt Helderman’s film, “The Alumni Chapter,” a story about four friends trying to move on with their lives after college. The film, Helderman’s first feature, bears the caveat that it was originally conceived of and written while Helderman was still an undergrad at Lake Forest College.

Walking into the theater, your first stop, as with any properly exclusive affair, is a name check. Inside, the lobby is packed with people in all manner of evening wear, from groups of film students more casually attired in sport coats and blouses, to the Chicago indie-film cognoscenti sporting sveltely cut black suits and sharply profiled sheath dresses. One man, who looked to be a Marine Corps officer, came in full dress uniform including such a dazzling array of hardware on his chest as to be easily mistaken, given the context, for a character in the film. Read the rest of this entry »

America’s consumption habits are thoroughly documented, studied, analyzed and satirized. The whole world knows we have a problem but no one seems to have a solution. “Lunch Line,” a documentary film by local directors Michael Graziano and Ernie Park, searches for one in the institution that feeds millions of Americans daily: our public schools.

“There should be a veggie garden in every school,” insists Greg Christian, founder of Chicago’s Organic School Project and inspiration for “Lunch Line.” There needs to be “more food made from scratch,” he goes on to explain. Christian, who has been working on National School Lunch Program reform for six years now, has a plan to remedy America’s struggle with nutrition. But what’s stopping this food revolution? A long history of bureaucratic disagreement and a lack of incentive by the USDA are two of the culprits. Read the rest of this entry »

"HERE"

By Ray Pride

They come to the city on the hill, by air, by roads, seekers of wisdom headed west into the wilderness, into the mountains, beneath crystal blue skies, among dreamers and ideas in thin bracing air, amid Starbucks and Stella Artois, among official sponsors and “riff-raff” brands to the side, ten days formally kicked off with Robert Redford’s annual, perennial peroration of what independent cinema is and will be for the immediate future, foreseeable budgets and attention spans.

Sundance. Films and filmmakers, press agents and sales agents, and agents galore, shuttles shuttling the small hamlet of Park City, engorging its paths and runnels from its year-round resort-town population of under 10,000 to a figure estimated as high as fourteen million. Actually, it only seems that packed on opening weekend: 120,000 was one of the highest estimates, and it’s plausible—the traffic is worse than cross-town Manhattan even in the middle of the day, or Chicago when there’s a compelling multiple-car pileup on the side of the Kennedy. Read the rest of this entry »