Walking up the stairs in the space owned by Chicago Filmmakers is not weird. Walking up those wooden stairs on the second Saturday of the month when a group with the name Dyke Delicious hosting a “Babes in B-Movies” night really isn’t even that weird. In fact, it’s downright inviting. On the second floor, amid posters of previous showings and a spread of chips, salsa and Girl Scout cookies, one of the Dyke Delicious leaders, Sharon Zurek, and a host of dedicated volunteers welcome each audience member. It’s like walking into one of those storied bars, only the regulars don’t glare, rather they are quick to embrace. The group started showing their films about seven years ago at Chicago’s annual Reeling Festival, but as Zurek says, “We didn’t want to wait a whole year to get together.” Now they show films every second Saturday of the month. “We usually try to make it fun and irreverent,” says Sharon. “Well, mostly irreverent.”

Tonight, ladies are grouping up around a table to make 3-D glasses. A few discuss beading and the difference between “craft” and “Craft.” The reel of black-and-white commercials featuring none other than Ronald Reagan stops, and Zurek tells everyone to try out their new glasses. A scene projects on the front screen with a few blurry faces. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Independent films have always had a home in this city. In honor of this, Chicago Avenue’s Sonotheque has put together “Indie Flicks,” a January 13 event showcasing the talents of local independent filmmakers. Don Bitters III, motion graphics designer for the film “Chicago Overcoat,” describes the project as “a Chicago-based mob film following [fictional] former mob hitmen who are coming out of retirement.” Another film being shown is titled “Between Western and California,” about an artist dealing with gentrification in his Humboldt Park community. “There’s a lot of hostility in the neighborhood,” says Britt Richardson, co-director of the film, which was inspired by the backgrounds of both of the film’s writers. “Considering everything we went through [in making the film], there’s still something to be proud of.”

Saturday night, as part of their once-monthly video screenings, the Roots and Culture gallery hosts Pizza Dog—an almost indefinable art-plosion (basically) born of animator Thorne Brandt.

Attending the event, it can be immediately surmised that Pizza Dog is more than just a video screening. Any other conclusions about Pizza Dog, however, are less readily realized and require patient participation in all of the evening’s activities. Even seemingly in-the-know attendees are scratching their heads.

“I don’t know what Pizza Dog is,” confesses one.
“Pizza Dog is Thorne, I guess,” muses another.

Pizza Dog began with the first public practice of an exquisite corpse-type exercise from which the Pizza Dog character—a dog that just can’t stop ordering pizza—was born. The crowd, mostly comprised of Art Institute grads (“a kind-of collective,” according to Joshua Conro), are encouraged to add frames to the blank poster-sized comic strips taped all along the gallery’s walls.

“The [exquisite corpse comic drawing] exercise is meant to get you to a place of Zen where you are not thinking too hard,” explains Brandt. “It’s like slowed-down art-improv that really allows for the creation of worlds.”

That place of Zen described by Brandt is, apparently, easily accessed by the crowd. Almost all attendees enthusiastically add frame after frame to the poster-sized strips between their sips of gallery-provided PBR. It seemed as if all are in their element and comfortably acquainted with Pizza Dog, but confusion still creeps below the surface.

“What is Pizza Dog?” one attendee publicly inquires.

The communal art-making portion of Pizza Dog is followed by a video presentation of Brandt’s animations, many of which are inspired by private exquisite corpse comic-drawing exercises.

The video consists of an orgy of outside-the-box images and is accompanied by Brandt, dressed as a dog with a chain of pizza around his neck, on the drums. The display draws laughs, claps and occasional sweeps of silence from the crowd, the most notable of which take place at the end.

A comprehensive definition of Pizza Dog is never provided.

“Pizza Dog is…I don’t know. It’s hilarious. It’s funny. It’s good,” sums up Vanesa Zendejas, to nods of approval. (Meaghan Strickland)

Under the Sea
Confined beneath the surface of Disney’s copyrighted sea for nearly twenty years, “The Little Mermaid” is swimming to the Music Box’s silver screen at the end of this month, and after a painstaking, yet rewarding, battle with the animation empire, the latest catch for the theatres “Sing-A-Long” agenda is guaranteed to make a big splash. The theater was forced to hop over legal fences with Disney in the past in order to screen a “Mary Poppins” sing-a-long, and the process of acquiring “The Little Mermaid” was no different. “I just think that Disney is very protective of their animated films because that’s really what they’re most known for,” says Brian Andreotti, the program director at Music Box, one of only two theaters permitted to screen the film. “The Disney studio locks their animated films in the vault,” and, dozens of phone calls later, the movie house has, for the second time, picked the lock. Beginning August 22 and running until the end of the month, guests are encouraged to dress up as their favorite character; goodie bags full of props will be distributed for use during the film.

Beginning July 18 the Gene Siskel Film Center will host the theatrical debut of “Indestructible,” a film directed by Ben Byer, whose life had been claimed earlier this month by Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), a disease for which a cure is just as much a mystery as its contraction. Read the rest of this entry »