May 02
RECOMMENDED
Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks’ globe-girdling Canadian documentary, based on Ronald Wright’s bestseller “A Short History of Progress,” asks, is the earth at the end of “a failed experiment”? Galvanic and bristling, it sleekly surveys factors threatening life itself on earth, including, but not limited to, centuries of industrial development, elevated levels of consumption, overpopulation, largely unstemmed pollution and global warming. Shooting in New York, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Shanghai, Beijing, Brasilia, Sao Paolo, DC and Dubai, “Surviving Progress” arrays smart people to offer a startling array of pessimistic analyses. Read the rest of this entry »
May 02
RECOMMENDED
Director-editor P. David Ebersole’s “Hit So Hard: The Life And Near Death Story of Patty Schemel” is a raucous documentary about a figure from the band Hole just as strong as notorious bandleader Courtney Love, drummer Patty Schemel. Schemel’s home movies, preserved as a carrying case of Hi-8 videotapes, provide pronounced muscle to the bone-hard construction of the film, illustrating more than one meaning to a familiar phrase: “live through this.” The video imagery is a profuse mess, unselfconsciously mirroring the slur-and-drang sound the band accomplished. Drug addiction is swept to the side by testimony to Schemel’s importance as a musician and as an openly lesbian rock ‘n’ roll figure. Read the rest of this entry »
May 02
RECOMMENDED
“Boardwalk Empire” producer Rudd Simmons, who’s also worked on Jim Jarmusch and Wes Anderson films, is an eagle-eye-on-the-wall in his self-financed “The First Season,” as he follows the fortunes of New Yorkers Paul and Phyllis Van Amburgh across five years after they’ve moved upstate to live the lives of dairy farmers, raising three children with another on the way while reviving a defunct dairy farm. Romantic? Back-to-the-earth? More like a fresh grindstone, however appealingly stark the surroundings. Read the rest of this entry »
May 02
RECOMMENDED
One of two films on globalization presented in advance of the NATO summit shutdown of Chicago, Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre’s “Maquilapolis (City of Factories)” profiles women who work at a Tijuana factory run by a multinational, or a maquiladora, who fight for severance pay after their employers take flight, leaving behind lost jobs and toxic waste. Read the rest of this entry »
Apr 25
RECOMMENDED
A survey of the last of the elderly whippersnappers left living in the 160 studios atop New York’s Carnegie Hall before the Carnegie Hall Corporation began evictions in 2007 toward renovation to office space, Josef Birdman Astor’s “Lost Bohemia” (2010) is bittersweet diversion. A twenty-year tenant himself, Astor recorded several hundred hours of his neighbors across an eight-year span, and their cultural memories evoke times already lost, as well as the rarefied air of prior tenants, including Norman Mailer, Isadora Duncan, Marlon Brando, Enrico Caruso, Charles Gwathmey, Andrew Bergman and Bill Cunningham (whose digs are seen in the more dynamic documentary, “Bill Cunningham New York”). Read the rest of this entry »
Apr 18
RECOMMENDED
Robert Greene’s documentaries “Kati With An I” and “Fake It So Real” possess a vivid “presentness”: it’s a combination of observant cinematography and a keen editing sense honoring the tradition of cinema vérité. In the case of his latest, the terrific “Fake It So Real,” which he photographed along with Sean Price Williams, Greene makes vivid work of a single week in the lives of a ragged bunch of North Carolina independent wrestlers before a big Saturday night show. The gritty shooting style is an appropriate joy: seemingly casual but splendidly caught, the rehearsals and boasts and tale-telling and talk establish a straightforward slab of white working class Southern culture. Read the rest of this entry »
Apr 18
RECOMMENDED
Kevin Macdonald (“Touching The Void,” “One Day In September”) directs an intimate, detailed portrait of Jamaican reggae legend Bob Marley (1945-1981). Made with his family’s cooperation, this polished documentary lists his musician son Ziggy Marley as an executive producer, along with Chris Blackwell, who signed Bob Marley to Island Records in 1971. Marley recorded “Judge Not” in 1962 at age sixteen. His early days included overnighting in a cemetery to overcome stagefright, and covering “Teenager in Love.” The account of his family life looks at his absent white father and his own distance from his offspring with different mates. Read the rest of this entry »
Apr 11
RECOMMENDED
“If we could tell a film then why make a film?” Heard the one about the prisoner who had a saw smuggled into prison in a cake? Ollllld joke. The absurdist modern version that ekes only a mordant “Ha!” is the journey of “This Is Not A Film” (In Film Nist) from Tehran to the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, a seventy-one-minute digital film smuggled out on a USB thumb drive tucked into a pastry. Read the rest of this entry »
Apr 10
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 »
RECOMMENDED
