Ian Williams in "Parallax Sounds"

Of a dozen or so features I was able to sample from CIMMFest, the Fourth Chicago International Movies and Music Festival—playing this year at the sparklingly renovated Logan Theater as well as the Wicker Park Arts Center and Society for the Arts—Silvia Beck’s process doc, “Nyman in Progress” is a delight, following the composer puttering through his cluttered-to-collapsing studio as well as traipsing the world performing his music. “The energy comes in through my front door and my windows,” he says, saying he’s as content at home as on the road. But we also see Nyman combining his music with video images he’d collected randomly for years, for gallery consumption. Read the rest of this entry »

As if a daylong lineup of films about music isn’t enough, The Chicago International Movies & Music Festival boasts a lineup of live music by night, inspired by the movies it screened earlier in the day. The festival, which takes place at various venues throughout Wicker Park and Logan Square, is all about highlighting the symbiotic relationship between music and film. For the organizers of the festival, one wouldn’t be what it is without the other.

Musician Josh Chicoine and film editor Ilko Davidov co-founded CIMMFest in 2009 when they met as neighbors at a housing co-op for artists and musicians in Bucktown. Read the rest of this entry »

10 Frames (aka My Dog Ate My Homework) by Brian Wyrick

Group 312, the Chicago chapter of Group 101, is a not-for-profit collective of filmmakers who collaborate every month to produce a short based on a chosen topic. Group 101 began in Los Angeles on New Year’s Day in 2000. A year later, Serena Schonbrun and Galina Schevchenko founded the Chicago chapter.

The relaxed group meets monthly to screen the previous month’s shorts and mingle with fellow filmmakers. The viewings often feature a wide variety of genres; the current organizer of Group 312, Richard Syska, says interpretations can be “as abstract as taking the word and using it in dialogue.” Read the rest of this entry »

"Space, Land and Time: Underground Adventuers With Ant Farm"

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Fourteen programs of features and shorts about design around the world comprise The Architecture & Design Film Festival, which looks to be a solid, diverse bunch. Wendy Keys’ “Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight” played Chicago last year, and its portrait of the articulate, archetypal New Yorker never fails to, well, inform and delight, as the title epigraph from Horace has it. The subversive 1970s architecture collective Ant Farm is represented in “Space, Land and Time: Underground Adventures With Ant Farm”; their stunts and exploits could likely fill a feature longer than the seventy-eight minutes here. There’s a rich portrait of Canadian architect Phyllis Bronfman Lambert in the film “Citizen Lambert: Joan of Architecture,” a complex woman from a powerful Canadian family, known for her chilliness yet for visionary zeal. I found Kaspar Astrup Schröder’s fifty-minute “My Playground” to be an unexpected thrill, combining the intellectualizing of young architects in Copenhagen about urban space with Parkour and Freerunning practitioners bouncing off the city’s walls and roofs with the open encouragement of its government. The combination of the feats of the human body with a luscious soundtrack are a stellar combination. A four-minute video from the film, is below. “My Playground” made me as happy as any documentary I’ve seen this year. It has passages that are simply magic. I love it. (Ray Pride)

The Architecture & Design Film Festival runs May 5-9 at Siskel and The Wit. Complete film listings are at adfilmfest.com

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Tired of champagne brunch with mom? Get your wire hangers ready: the Music Box Theatre will be celebrating Mother’s Day on Sunday with its fourth annual screening of “Mommie Dearest,” the cult-classic film adaptation of Christina Crawford’s depiction of an abusive childhood with Joan Crawford.

“It’s a pretty camp-tacular film,” says Music Box general manager Dave Jennings.

The event will only add to the fun, with a pre-screening show with members of local theater company Hell in a Handbag portraying Joan and Christina, a music-video viewing of “Joan Crawford Goes to Hell” by The Joans and, of course, Mystery Science Theater-style commentary of the actual film.

“I think the best part is experiencing a so-bad-it’s-fab movie with a full house of people with a similar mindset,” says Richard Knight, who will be emceeing the event as Dick O’Day, “the ultimate show-biz narcissist.”

Knight has emceed in previous years, and says he’s always surprised by how enthusiastic people get. “There’s a scene—the famous wire hanger scene—and she’s dressed up in the robe and she looks like kabuki. A guy came dressed up like that and jumped up on stage and started throwing all this cleanser around. You never really know what’s going to happen.”

A portion of proceeds from this year’s show will go to support Vital Bridges, a nonprofit that assists families affected by HIV and AIDS, and for a donation, you can snag a photograph with members of Hell in a Handbag in costume. As an added bonus, the first 300 people in the door will receive a commemorative wire hanger.

“It’s a pretty hilarious event to say the least,” Jennings says. (Shaunacy Ferro)

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)

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 »

Christmas in Chicago brings to mind a lot of images—store windows on State Street, the tree in Daley Center—but for a lot of Chicagoans it’s singing along to Christmas carols with 750 of their closest strangers in an old-fashioned movie house and yelling at the screen during “It’s a Wonderful Life.” This Friday, for the twenty-seventh year in a row, The Music Box Theatre will be hosting its annual Christmas Show featuring carolers, sing-alongs, Santa Claus, “White Christmas” and, of course, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

“It’s a living tradition,” notes Brian Andreotti, The Music Box’s Program Director. “You see the excitement as you talk to people who have been coming for five, ten, fifteen, twenty years, people that have left Chicago and fly back. What on paper seems like a simple event, people are pretty connected to it.”

Indeed, the event has grown so popular that the Music Box has had to keep adding shows to meet the demand. What started as a one-shot lark on a Christmas Eve in 1983 has gradually become a six-day extravaganza with seventeen performances, almost all of them selling out. Read the rest of this entry »

Professor Snape, Bellatrix Lestrange and Hermione Granger will stroll on the same side of Michigan Avenue Thursday night. Expect wizard robes, wands, maybe even a Voldemort mask scattered in the “hordes of wizards” marching to the IMAX theater at Navy Pier for the midnight viewing of the series’ penultimate cinematic installment.

“We wanted to see how many people we could actually get,” says Lori Mages, the march’s organizer and founder of the Chicago Harry Potter Fans Facebook group. “We were afraid we wouldn’t even get twenty.”

At least 120 people have marked “attending” on the event’s Facebook page (Wizards March to Deathly Hallows Part 1), with a potential addition of another seventy maybes. “We have people coming from all over the country: Alabama, North Carolina, Michigan, Indiana,” says Mages. Read the rest of this entry »

It began in 2002, as a screening, coupled with a night of bowling at a tiny, rundown bowling alley in a shady part of town in Louisville, Kentucky. By 2004, Lebowski Fest was in full swing, with two nights of music, movies and bowling, traveling the country in a way The Dude would appreciate.

This year the fest, no doubt reeking of White Russians, will come stumbling into Chicago again, demanding to know who pissed on the rug.

“Chicago seems to be a great town for Lebowski Fest. It loves bowling, loves drinking, there’s a big Polish population—lots of Lebowskis in the area,” Will Russell, co-creator says. “If Lebowski Fest had a second home, it would be Chicago.” Read the rest of this entry »