RECOMMENDED
The Siskel Film Center’s showing two films this week about John Turturro’s passion for the arts of his ancestral land, including “Passione,” his tribute to the music and musicians of Naples, which I haven’t seen. But 2009′s “Rehearsal For A Sicilian Tragedy” (Prove per una tragedia siciliana) is a sweet, simple travelogue of the actor-writer-director making a personal journey under the eye of director Roman Paska. Read the rest of this entry »
RECOMMENDED
“Pedophilia owns this nation!” Like a distressed thumbprint, “Zielinski” is a formal conniption. Decades before any “Occupy,” talented photographer John M. Zielinski, published in Life magazine and the New York Times, had studded his mind with hashtags referring to vast corridors of connections and collusion and conspiracy. Happening onto public-access cable television, Zielinski began to chronicle crusades against all manner of corruption, cover-ups and turpitude, imagined or real about human trafficking and other black crimes. Chase Thompson and Ryan Walker’s portrait of ”the most blacklisted author in the history of Iowa,” a conspiracy theorist par excellence, the engagingly fractured, blackly comic “Zielinski” debuted at Slamdance 2011 and played the True/False documentary festival a few months later, in Columbia, Missouri, where Zielinski now lives. Read the rest of this entry »
Chicago filmmaker Darryl Roberts returns to the subject of body image in “America The Beautiful 2: The Thin Commandments,” taking on the American fear of full-figured bodies, taking snapshots of weight-loss industries from diets to surgeries and anecdotes. What the press kit refers to as “grassroots” filmmaking, let’s call “micro-budget.” The writer-producer-director puts himself center frame, a la “Super Size Me” to discover. Read the rest of this entry »
Ferran Adrià
RECOMMENDED
“El Bulli: Cooking In Progress” is a captivating process documentary, allowed behind the scenes for a year at the research laboratories and kitchen of chef Ferran Adrià at his now-closed Catalonian restaurant. Gereon Wetzel’s chilly, fascinated documentary follows the six months of research-and-development each year that Adrià would return his staff to the laboratory in search of new alchemical taste-and-texture sensations for their thirty-dish menus. Read the rest of this entry »
What mimes and truly creepy clowns are to most people, puppets, puppeteers and child magicians are to me: weird and chilling. In “Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey,” documentarian Constance Marks works the sunniness and uplift in her sweet-to-saccharine telling of the life story of Kevin Clash, the puppeteer and voice behind Sesame Street’s hug-happy “Elmo” character. Prizes have been lavished at festivals across the nation. If I were four, I’d be bored and aggravated for different reasons, largely the grown-ups who are as sincere and earnest as a painting of sunshine. Read the rest of this entry »
"Into The Abyss"
By Ray Pride
When Werner Herzog first began talking up his second documentary release of 2011, he joked that all of his films could be, should’ve been, called “Into the Abyss.”
The prolific sixty-nine-year-old director has also said there’s no such thing as documentary, that everything is, and ought to be, as much directed as it is observed, and the ultimate goal is nothing less than “ecstatic truth.” Read the rest of this entry »
RECOMMENDED
The dynamic duo of modern design, unconventional husband-and-wife Charles and Ray Eames, are given equal weight in Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey’s invaluable, straightforward “Eames: The Architect and The Painter.” They’re a utopian pair, “a painter that didn’t paint and an architecture school dropout who never got his license,” and the products of their many years of collaboration include what amounts to a reinvention of the chair, with their molded plywood exemplar, and a hundred or so of some of the most effective and beautiful instructional short films of the last century, made for clients ranging from IBM, Westinghouse, Polaroid and the United States government. (“Powers of Ten”: find it.) Read the rest of this entry »
Gary Hustwit concludes a trilogy of film essays on design by documenting architectural projects in cities around the world. “Urbanized” expands the scope of “Objectified,” his 2009 documentary on industrial design, which in turn covered more than “Helvetica,” his 2007 documentary on that typeface. Working once again with cinematographer Luke Geissbühler, an especially clever framer, Hustwit is an enthusiast of fine design and smart designers. “Urbanized,” though, is more inspirational than incisive. Read the rest of this entry »
RECOMMENDED
A growing shelf of documentaries find filmmakers on a quest to understand their parents’ secrets, and by extension, themselves, but few of those quests are as directly about that theme as “The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby.” What secrets did Carl Colby’s father keep? Everybody’s. In a way, it’s biography as autobiography: how was I shaped by the man who shaped key episodes of American clandestine activities for decades? Read the rest of this entry »
Crazy Horse
By Ray Pride
No matter even if you truly wanted to, there’s no way a single viewer could give you an overview of an international film festival with more than a hundred events: you can surmise all you want, based on what festival films have played or have been reviewed at already, or the filmmakers’ reputation. Even festival programmers miss out on sections they’re not part of. I’ll be curious to see statistics after this year’s CIFF to see how many programs the average, but dedicated moviegoer, is able to attend. It’s tough even if you’ve been to a few prior festivals, seen a fistful of advance screeners, availed yourself of advance screenings. But, as luck, fortune or programming may have it, Chicago International has more programs of note in its second week, and a growing number of them have further distribution in the near future. (Disclosure: I was a program consultant for this year’s Docufest section.) Read the rest of this entry »
