Terror In the Aisles is a film series that doesn’t want to send you heading for the hills screaming—they want you coming back for more. All in all, it’s “a lot of fun for a very small amount of money,” says Mary Wolfe of Movieside Film Festival, which produces the event.

“Terror In the Aisles was started during the summer of 2008 because we felt like there wasn’t really any kind of venue where you could get that great, fun drive-in movie kind of experience in the city,” Wolfe says. “We are all about community and we wanted to have a place where kids of all ages could get together and have fun for cheap and enjoy being scared and laughing together.”

This is the sixth Terror In The Aisles showing, and it’s still promising fantastic 35mm prints of terrifyingly wonderful horror films: “Creepshow,” “Tales From The Darkside: The Movie” and the North American premiere of “Clive Barker’s Book of Blood.” John Harrison, director of “Tales” and “Book of Blood” and composer of “Creepshow,” will make a guest appearance. Read the rest of this entry »

For those looking for something to reconcile a love of underground film and architectural history, Saturday’s Backyard Film & Music Festival has a solution. Now in its third year, the expanding festival has moved camp south to the Pullman State Historic Site, at the heart of the landmark company town famous for railroad car manufacturing and the 1894 Pullman Strike.  The shorts cover a wide range of approaches to filmmaking (documentary, feature, music video, animation, experimental) as well as production values. “BFMF started as a way to showcase work by people maybe just starting out, who maybe haven’t seen their work projected on a screen,” says festival spokesman Fred Koschmann. “But that’s not an absolute… there’s some very professional work as well.” This year’s festival will also be the first to feature live music, with acts like Dosh, Light Pollution and Nathan Blake Lynn performing. (Todd Hieggelke)

July 24, Noon, $15, bfmf2010.com

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 »

The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art in Evanston will play host Friday to the eighth installment of Sonic Celluloid, a joint venture between Block Cinema and WNUR 89.3FM. A marriage of silent film and live music where four bands will play accompaniment to six short screenings, what can one expect at an event called Sonic Celluloid? Even the event organizers don’t really know. Lori Crasnic booked the lineup and left the bands in charge of choosing a film to accompany and how to do so. “This is really the fun part because the bands are really in charge of everything. We never know how it’s going to be,” Crasnic says. In the past, some bands have improvised their music and others have chosen a film that fits nicely with their songs. One of this year’s bands, Fat Worm of Error from Massachusetts, has written new music specifically for Sonic Celluloid 8. “They should be interesting,” Crasnic says, “because Fat Worm of Error does a lot of performance art with their music.” The rest of the lineup includes C. Spencer Yeh, Fielded, and Illusion of Safety. With a variety of experimental silent films and bands that get to do pretty much whatever they want in an art museum, Crasnic admits that it might be a new experience for some. But because it brings together film and live music, she says “even people who don’t really like experimental music or silent film have had fun in the past.” Experiment with Sonic Celluloid May 21 at 8pm at Block Cinema.

Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 North Clark, will be screening rare archival footage this weekend as part of its “Forbidden Film Series.” The programs, curated by historian and archivist Dennis Nyback, will include films from Nyback’s collection that are grouped and presented in a context that will draw attention to issues of race and gender representations, fear and censorship. Nyback will present three programs this weekend entitled “I Know Why You’re Afraid” (Friday), “Terrorism Light and Dark” (Saturday) and “Bad Bugs Bunny” (Sunday). Todd Lillethun, programming coordinator for Chicago Filmmakers, was pleased Nyback accepted the invitation to visit Chicago Filmmakers as part of his national tour. “The three programs play well together; they have a lot of overlapping themes,” says Lillethun. Sunday’s program will include animations from Warner Brothers from the 1930s and 1940s that have been pulled because of their racy content. Lillethun says audience members at “Bad Bugs Bunny” will “see interesting studio representations of race and gender, and the program will address themes of censorship.” The programs are meant to directly engage the audience in the media being screened. Nyback will introduce the films and lead a discussion on pertaining issues. “We always try to have a Q&A in our screening,” Lillethun says, “because it brings a different dimension to the show.” Programs will begin at 8pm on Friday and Saturday and at 3pm on Sunday. (Andrew Rhoades)

Moloch Tropical

This weekend, the “Haiti on Screen” film series will conclude at Northwestern’s Block Cinema in Evanston with five films screening between Friday and Saturday. The series, organized by Doris Garraway and Christiane Rey of Northwestern’s Department of French and Italian, seeks to show the complexities of Haitian life, past and present, in light of January’s devastating earthquake and media coverage of it. “Part of the impetus for using cinema was to counteract the images the media used to portray Haitians as helpless victims,” says Garraway. The selected films instead show Haitians as agents of culture—political actors, artists and groups resisting marginalization. Garraway says that the organizers wanted films that covered a range of topics including, history, art, globalization and relations with the U.S. in an effort to “bring forward a view of contemporary Haiti.” The films will represent “the diversity of Haiti and show the viewers the complexities and richness of Haitian art, culture, and religion…[as] a thoughtful response to the images of Haitians as only dying victims,” Garraway says. On Friday April 30 at 7pm, “Moloch Tropical” by renowned filmmaker Raoul Peck will make its Chicago premiere. The 2009 film depicts a fictional Haitian president amid very real political strife. It was filmed at an eighteenth-century fortress in the north of Haiti, which Garraway says gives viewers a sense of Haiti’s geography and cultural history. All screenings are free and will be followed Saturday by a roundtable discussion featuring activists and academics each with particular expertise on an aspect of Haitian culture. (Andrew Rhoades)

Harold Ramis, "Year One" vintage

Two lecterns sit beneath the screen at Film Row Cinema in a Columbia College building. One, wooden, appears to be like any other lectern; the other, gray, looks like a converted bookcase. The lecterns and chairs behind them remain empty as the background “evidence” for tonight’s debate is presented to the audience. The topic? “Happiness,” Todd Solondz’s controversial 1998 film about pedophilia, masturbation, murder and unhappiness, among other fun themes of human depravity. The evidence is funny to the crowd; it’s disturbing to the crowd. There are times that dialogue cannot be heard over the laughter of the Columbia crowd, and there are moments of the dead silence of collective discomfort.

Harold Ramis watches from the very back row where his celebrity, his big belly and his bigger beard all go unnoticed by the crowd. In a referee shirt, Ron Falzone explains the rules of “Cinema Slapdown,” a debate on divisive films. This event, which he says “has gone from a cult…to a ‘thing,’” will be the last of its kind until the fall.

After a brief introduction, Falzone calls for the night’s combatants. Dr. Fred Miller, a slender and balding Chicago psychiatrist, will man the gray lectern on the right, and to his right, in a beige suit, Ramis, who Falzone introduces as a recently dubbed “Illinois State Landmark.” Ramis sits on his provided chair; Miller remains on his feet. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

The movies have a great future behind them.

Circumstances are ripe for upstart filmmakers to define what the movies are for years to come, if only new kinds of storytelling and models of distribution emerge. “The Pink Hotel,” the first feature by Chicago filmmaker (and Kalamazoo native) Chris Hefner, 26, takes a loving look back to a past that never existed—both in cinema and in Chicago landmarks including the Music Box (which comes off as a threadbare Marienbad). Shot in Super-8 black-and-white reversal film and set in a luxury hotel filled with strange tenants with stranger dreams, “The Pink Hotel”‘s 1930s-that-never-was is steeped in dread and fear, slippery as smoke and elusive as cryptic, recurring dreams.

Begun over the past three and produced in the last year, Hefner worked in bursts between his day job as an art handler, usually at the MCA, but with occasional freelance gigs at art fairs and other museums. “I’ve been making shorts for several years,” Hefner told me over the weekend, “and had developed a vocabulary for how I put those together. I felt antsy to see myself develop things further, rather than keep doing what had become fairly easy for me. I think a lot of the drive behind the production came from my feeling that if I didn’t do it, and do it now, then I would feel stagnant and lazy.” Read the rest of this entry »

“How on earth could a group of adults be involved in something so stupid?” is the question Jarrett Spiegel hopes viewers have leaving a “Bad Meaning Good” event. With their twelfth installment showing at The Burlington in Logan Square (3425 West Fullerton) on April 5, “Bad Meaning Good” will celebrate its first anniversary of showcasing achievements in cinematic futility. “Bad Meaning Good” was founded by Spiegel and fellow film buff Jason Deuchler after they, while drinking one night, began to talk about how many legitimately terrible films they had each seen. The monthly showcases spawned by that conversation display some of the worst of film failures across different genres. Past installments have included a martial-arts double feature: “Samurai Cop” and “Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky” and last July, the cult favorite “The Room.” “There’s something endearing about a movie where everyone involved is trying their hardest and failing on every level,” Spiegel says. “We try to play stuff that is less self-conscious of its badness. A movie like “Snakes on a Plane” is trying way too hard to manufacture that camp appeal.” Viewers at the screenings, on the first Monday of the month, are encouraged to heckle the films and find ways to take pleasure in the overall stupidity on screen. Hosted by John Wilson, the event began as just a bad-movie night with some of Spiegel’s and Deuchler’s friends and has become bigger and badder each month. The April installment of “the very worst rock ‘n’ roll themed horror trash”—with “Hard Rock Zombies” at 8pm and John Fasano’s 1987 directorial debut, “Rock ‘N’ Roll Nightmare,” at 10pm—will be followed by music until close provided by DJ’s Popstatic [Spiegel] and Intel [Deuchler]. The event is free and will include some surprises in celebration of a year of trash films. (Andrew Rhoades)

In trying to share some personal favorites from The Chicago Short Film Brigade’s season premiere at the Hideout this week, curator-executive director Xan Aranda struggles to stop herself, laughing, “I love them all.” And the lineup is impressive, with two shorts from Al Jarnow, an animation from Lyle Pisio and many more. “The idea is that we are very aware that you can watch short films on your laptop or your iPod,” says Aranda of the Brigade’s mission. “We really like the idea of people leaving their houses, and laughing and being critical together.” Aranda also aims to get short films out of their usual festival and university circuits. Ergo the Hideout, with its decidedly non-academic and more relaxing environs. “We want to remove that barrier. People are like ‘What, I can drink beer and watch shorts?’ It’s meant to be as unpretentious as possible, but very high quality,” says Aranda. She warns that previous shows have sold out, and encourages people to preorder $8 tickets for Thursday (8:30pm) and Sunday (6pm) at filmbrigade.com. The night, Aranda promises metaphorically, will be “a really good meal made up of a lot of really good snacks.” (Peter Cavanaugh)