A fey young man storms across Cleo’s to the back room and taps a tall woman on the shoulder. “Kate Winslet called. She wants her face back,” he says before sashaying over to another woman, delivering more bizarrely aggressive compliments as he mingles. The booths are filled with groups of friends dishing amiable celebrity gossip and sipping beer, eyes glancing up at one of the many televisions as this year’s Oscars begin. The ubiquitous sight of heads bent over cellphones indicates the tweeting has also started. It continues all night.

Clooney is universally loved, even if he looks cagey every time the camera pans to his face. The guy from “Short Circuit” elicits multiple cries of “Johnny Five!” when he wins an Oscar for “The Cove.” Nobody has thought of that guy in years. Molly Ringwald, looking terrified in a grape-colored toga and questionable jewelry, inspires one gentleman to mutter, “Pretty in pink, not so much purple,” while passing around a tray of cupcakes. It’s a friendly, low-key affair, though fiery debates erupt over nominees. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Ray Pride

Monday night, Cobra Lounge is ground zero for a six-city experiment, launching the DVD and video-on-demand of the Sundance award-winning documentary, “We Live in Public.” Now situated in Chicago, the so-called “Warhol of Internet TV,” Josh Harris, accompanied by director Ondi Timoner, will take questions before and after a showing of the film.

On a large screen over the bar, a quadrant of feeds from Los Angeles, New York, Denver, Vancouver and Atlanta alternate with images from the Cobra’s own surveillance cameras inside and outside the building. The phone booth has its own flat-screens and cameras. Harris’ ideas were early: he got millions from investors for Internet TV years before broadband made it feasible. Bored, Harris built a bunker in downtown New York, dubbed “Quiet,” where a hundred or so people lived, ate, frolicked and fired off handguns and automatic weapons for free. The only condition? Cameras captured everything and Harris owned the images.

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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 »

Vampires will come and go, but zombies have staying power. As part of the Facets Night School, Facets Cinematheque will show George Romero’s classic “Day of the Dead” at midnight this Saturday, February 20. Facets’ Patrick Ogle, who will lead a pre-screening lecture, says, “George Romero created the ‘movie zombie’ as we know it in ‘Night of the Living Dead.’ Before that—and there are some exceptions to what I am about to say—zombies were ‘voodoo zombies’ or an adaptation of ‘voodoo zombies.’” “Day of the Dead” is the third installment in Romero’s “Dead” trilogy, and as Ogle puts it, “Is the poor stepchild amongst the first three Romero zombie films. It is the grimiest of the movies.” Tickets for the night’s event are five dollars, and include an educational packet with notes, essays and a bibliography for further reading. There will also be raffles for movies, posters and books. And if the movie and discussion isn’t enough for your undead palate, Ogle jokes, “I usually kill an audience member and eat their brains.” (Peter Cavanaugh)

The rumpled red carpet at the State Street entrance of the Siskel Film Center has a bright yellow sign right beside it early Friday evening: FALLING ICE.

In the lobby upstairs, James Allen Smith is nervous. The lobby stirs and buzzes. Smith’s feature documentary, “Floored,” is about to have its first Chicago showing. Three shows on two screens that follow an open-bar reception are sold out. Most filmmakers are nervous before a debut, but this is also a crowd comprised largely of its subjects, floor traders from the CME. They’re potentially its most fervent, eager audience as well. Smith, smiling, realizes he’s clutching an extra copy of the film in its gray plastic box. Greetings are cheery, masculine and plentiful.

“Whoo! Woo! How ya’ doin’, buddy!”

There are women in mostly separate scrums—here’s a fur, a Chanel clutch, “Yes, I remember, we met on the street in Glencoe”—but it’s the men who swan and peacock. There’s some Brooks Brothers with intermittent bowties. A young trader who’s featured loiters in a designer plaid porkpie atop a thick, distressed leather coat. A man juggles two iPhones and a silver card case like a cigarette case. Trader Joseph Gibbons, a producer of the film, wears a bold purple tie below large horn rims and shaved head, twirling a black cigar almost a foot long, the most expensive Tootsie Roll in the Loop. Read the rest of this entry »