RECOMMENDED

An auto-interview with the fantastically flaky Nick Nolte (interviewed by a TV journalist alter ego) amuses far more than you’d think: Nolte’s bemused knack for toying with interviewers is matched by his passion for performance. What should the gimmick here be called, one-on-one? Nick-on-Nick action? In making “Nick Nolte: No Exit,” director Tom Thurman is wise to stand aside. It’s not in the same league as James Toback allowing Mike Tyson to narrate the voices that ripple inside that man’s troubled mind, but it’s in that league. The frame falls away in the face of a wry and articulate man’s talky ramble, and appearances by other actors like Ben Stiller and Rosanna Arquette are mostly fun. “Nobody has ever asked me to be silent,” Nolte claims. Not when you’re this entertaining, no. With Jacqueline Bisset, Powers Boothe, F.X. Feeney, Barbara Hershey, Paul Mazursky, Mike Medavoy, Alan Rudolph. 74m. (Ray Pride)

“Nick Nolte: No Exit” opens Friday at Facets.

RECOMMENDED

In a follow-up to “Neil Young: Heart of Gold,” Jonathan Demme shoots Young rocking two nights three years ago in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. On this Chrome Dreams II tour, Young and his band had played two nights at the Chicago Theater the month before. Demme skips the interviews and backstage footage found in his 2006 concert documentary, shot over two nights in Nashville. Country and bluegrass artists don’t share Young’s stage in “Trunk Show,” nor are there the polished tracking shots DP Ellen Kuras crafted for “Heart of Gold.” Cinematographer Declan Quinn, along with Demme and five other shooters, wield digital camcorders for mostly handheld coverage. There’s some Super-8 and a few nine-screen grids, but this is more concert than film from the distributors of “The Singing Revolution,” “We Live in Public” and “Incident at Loch Ness.” Stage design is limited to remnants of an old-time theater marquee with random letters, a red telephone and a pirate flag fluttering by a fan. There is no giant microphone wrangled by hooded druid-like roadies with flashlights for eyes, as in the 1978 San Francisco concert Young turned into the film “Rust Never Sleeps.” In “Trunk Show” he performs an alternately rousing and reflective set, sometimes playing piano and banjo. The 64-year-old Canadian stomps on stage like a shaggy workhorse. Hunched over, he brandishes his electric guitar like a farm tool. His gruff-honey voice has the timbre of hardwood bark. His elderly bandmates come off as seasoned artisans, not burnout longhairs in denial, as one extended instrumental with his bassist and rhythm guitarist proves. 82m. (Bill Stamets)

“Neil Young Trunk Show” opens Friday at the Music Box.

Photo: Ray Pride

By Ray Pride

An assured polemic that plays as an eyes-wide thriller, Don Argott’s “The Art of the Steal” is also a rousing entertainment as layered and skeptical as a marathon of episodes of “The Wire.”

The Barnes Foundation operates a museum, five miles from Philadelphia, in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, created by the late Dr. Albert C. Barnes to hold his Post-Impressionist and early Modern art. The numbers bloom: 181 Renoir, sixty-nine Cézannes, fifty-nine Matisse, forty-six Picasso, seven Van Gogh, six Seurat. Barnes didn’t care for the elite of Philadelphia, 1922.

“People didn’t like him. He insulted people,” one of the many articulate interviewees tells us, and the art establishment of Philadelphia used similar language about the documentary. Horrors! Barnes was “extremely inflammatory toward his contemporaries.” At his death in 1951, Barnes left the collection to a small African-American college, but in recent years, there’s been a movement to break the strict conditions of his bequest and relocate the multi-billion-dollar-valued collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 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 »

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“Avant-Gondry,” the Siskel capsule for “Celestial Navigations: The Short Films of Al Jarnow” begins, and it’s a good start for this heartening selection of seventeen animations by Al Jarnow, mostly from 16mm originals, whose work ranges from pieces for children’s television and personal, more “avant-garde” work. Jarnow’s 1984 time-lapse film “Celestial Navigation” is an enthralling experience: measuring the light that falls in an upstairs room, ideal and bright for an artist’s studio. But it’s also eye-widening to realize that Jarnow animated for “Sesame Street”: films like these, drawing on a wide range of animation and experimental traditions, were part of the currency of education not so long ago. They snuck, unannounced, into cultural consciousness (and unconsciousness, as several are uncannily familiar to anyone who would have seen them as but a child). “Cosmic Clock,” a hand-wash lovely, defines seconds and minutes then centuries and millennia as a young man with a stopwatch, lying at a lean on a hill overlooking a lake, considers eons as Jarnow’s gentle animation pencils away. A hypnogogic time capsule to savor. A half-hour documentary, “Asymmetric Cycles,” will be shown, too, following Jarnow’s creative process. 90m. DigiBeta. (Ray Pride)

“Celestial Navigations” shows Friday and Saturday at Siskel. The Numero Group releases a DVD in coming weeks that has a total of forty-five pieces, along with the documentary.

RECOMMENDED

(Hijos de Cuba) “Sons of Cuba,” Andrew Lang’s delicate, powerful, entertaining debut documentary, follows three handpicked young boxers at the Havana Boxing Academy in 2006, all under 12, all ready to train and devote their lives to being “good communist fighters.” With uncommon access, Lang forges a coming-of-age tale rife with all manner of implication, but without neglecting his characters or his empathic narrative style. Lang has an intuitive sense of how to fill the frame as well as the heart: this parallel tale to “Hoop Dreams” is intimate as well as lovingly shot. 88m. U. S. theatrical premiere. (Ray Pride)

“Sons of Cuba” opens Friday at Facets.

On Friday, Chicago Filmmakers will host the work of local filmmaker Adele Friedman, who will show nine films that span from her 1983 portrait of her grandmother and father (“Sarah and Norman”) to a couple working in a kitchen in Paris in 2008 (“Pauline and Patrick, Le Marais, Paris”). Friedman’s work revolves around the use of portraiture, focusing on friends. “My work is often about cultural people, and how their lives are informed by their cultural interiors and artistic tastes,” Friedman says. “They surround themselves with what moves them.” It is a decided break from the celebrity-centric media we are usually saturated with, and Friedman aims to show how her subjects (oftentimes, those in the art world) cannot just stop being who they are when they are away from it all. “People don’t leave their culture at the museum or the office; they bring it home and live with it,” the filmmaker says. “It’s part and parcel of the daily fabric of their lives.” (Peter Cavanaugh)

Chicago not-for-profit film production company Split Pillow has produced “Life as Lincoln,” a seventy-minute documentary darling, directed by local filmmaker Caitlin Grogan, about men who make their living—or at least part of their living—as Abraham Lincoln impersonators. “Presenters” is the term they prefer, and as the film focuses on three of these men it shows duties much more rewarding than ribbon-cutting at mall openings. Lincoln presenters are often called upon to appear and speak at schools; they are educators as much as they are entertainers. Grogan’s film, which bounces between Decatur, Indiana, Kentucky and Washington D.C., shines a light on three men who take their jobs as Lincoln very seriously—in many ways, we learn, their calling toward the great president saved their lives. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Damani Baker and Alex Vlack’s sweet and inevitably bittersweet “Still Bill” is an understated portrait of Bill Withers, the musician behind memorable pop like 1971’s “Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Lean on Me” and “Just the Two of Us.” The avalanche of music documentaries are a long way from simple records of performances in front of an audience, and the best dig into the quirks of personality that provide inspiration for the mystery that is tune and song. Intimacy is key. Bill Withers walked away from a career that didn’t begin until he was grown, not owning a guitar until he was 32. Why the silence since his last music release in 1985? The filmmakers shot over 300 hours of footage across two years as Withers approaches his seventieth year. A trip back to his childhood home in the worn coal town of Slab Fork, West Virginia inspires Withers’ rich reminiscence. (There’s a present-day detour as Withers records a song with his daughter in his home studio.) Withers is also prone to aphorism: “I think I’m kind of like pennies. You have ‘em in your pocket but you don’t remember they’re there”; and “It’s okay to head out for wonderful, but on your way to wonderful? You’re gonna have to pass through ‘all right.’ And when you get to ‘all right’, take a good look around and get used to it, ‘cos that may be as far as you’re gonna go.” “Still Bill” passes through all right. Talking heads include Cornel West, Tavis Smiley, Jim James from My Morning Jacket, Angelique Kidjo and, erm, Sting. 78m. (Ray Pride)