While awaiting a conversation with Todd Solondz outside a boutique hotel room, a recording of urgent, furious songbirds echoes down the corridor. Another chorus awaits inside.

The 50-year-old writer-director’s latest movie is marbled through with his bleak, black humor, but there’s a shell-shocked character to the figures in his story. Living lives they can’t manage in a society they can’t reckon with, they all seek some manner of forgiveness. The words “forgive me” echo like the word “fuck” in a Judd Apatow movie. On one level, this newest film is a variation on his 1998 “Happiness,” where those figures are played now by other actors (such as Paul Reubens for Jon Lovitz). That carapace is readily shed even a few scenes in. Despite his penchant for shock, Solondz seems to have crafted an empathetic, if dark fable for “Life During Wartime.” The pedophile from “Happiness” is released from prison just as his youngest son, Timmy, anticipates his bar mitzvah. To be a man is to understand what happened to his father, what terrorists are, what 9/11 means. The shroud of the past decade cloaks all his characters like the Holocaust did an earlier generation (a linkage which the script does not shirk). Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

By Ray Pride

The prescriptive yet apocalyptic anti-nuclear proliferation documentary “Countdown to Zero” has you reaching for the comforting simplicity or even banality of song lyrics; not necessarily Radiohead’s “Reckoner,” which plays at extended length, or The Cure’s “M,” (“ready for the next attack”) but something like Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize??,” as in “Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?”

Yes, the topic today is thermonuclear Armageddon, which would offer perhaps only half an hour of anticipation followed by a second of detonation, illumination and incineration. “Countdown to Zero” does not shy from the toxic poetry of the prospect of annihilation. Hair-raising, bloodcurdling and wholly despairing, this cry-of-the-mind from the producers of “An Inconvenient Truth,” Lawrence Bender (“Pulp Fiction,” “Inglourious Basterds”) and Participant Media, is chock-full of fascinating material and articulate interviewees from former spies to statesmen, as assembled by talented writer-director-for-hire Lucy Walker (“Blindsight,” “Devil’s Playground”). For instance: What’s the best way to hide fissile material being smuggled across the sea? Put it inside a cargo container filled with kitty litter; kitty litter triggers radiation detectors. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Laughing with or laughing at?” is a question arising with more and more movies, from the trainwreck exhibitionism of a movie like “The Room” or the more tender “Winnebago Man,” in which a young filmmaker searches for a curmudgeonly figure of YouTube fun who may or may not be alive. (Oh, he’s alive; Jack Rebney is so fucking alive, but that’s another review when that movie finally opens in Chicago.) What’s most alive about writer-director Michael Paul Stephenson’s “Best Worst Movie,” a documentary revisiting the Utah town where “Troll 2″ was shot in 1989, is how genial everyone is about their experience working on an almost unfathomably incompetent movie that was made with great sincerity. You might be “smiling with and tearing up at,” which was my reaction to much reaction to this oddly charming film. Here’s the setup: At the age of 10, Stephenson was the star of “Troll 2.” The man who played his father is now a beloved Alabama dentist who embraces the idea that there are audiences who love the film. Then there’s the Italian director: Claudio Fragasso, whose accent is a great Fragasso sea of mumble and harrumph. There are repetitions and a few questionable moments (such as scenes with the now-reclusive woman who played the child-actor’s mother), but at its best, “Best Worst Movie ” is a love letter to unlikely fame, a big bucket of serendipity and nonsense. Let the fans bay. 93m. (Ray Pride)

“Best Worst Movie” opens Friday at the Music Box.

RECOMMENDED

Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio’s very smart, genuinely troubling “Cropsey” revisits a tale that had been told when they were children on Staten Island, a much-embellished urban legend about an escapee from a nearby mental institution. Cropsey was the local bogeyman, the all-purpose chiller of children, handy to keep the tykes in line. But Cropsey was a real man, one Andre Rand, who was tried for the disappearances of disabled local children, and Zeman and Brancaccio’s horror documentary is a real jaw-dropper. Comparisons have been drawn to the fear-filled “Blair Witch Project” and David Fincher’s close, clammy “Zodiac,” as well as Stephen King stories and “Capturing the Friedmans,” yet the parallels are mere flattery, considering the film’s own unique savor, an alternately genial and sinister tone: I’d go more for saying this deeply paranoid chiller plays like Errol Morris in a good mood, sharing his favorite shaggy-dog story about true-life murder. And about true-life suspicion, real-world ambiguity: as in “Zodiac,” you’re hardly certain if Rand is criminal or scapegoat. “Cropsey” is small, but small like an earwig, cozying up in your memory once you’ve seen it. The local, the most personal things, will, at the best instants, always suggest the universal, and “Cropsey” does. Children must have their bogeymen, fear is cultivated like a perennial crop. I don’t want to describe Geraldo Rivera’s role in the story’s unfolding, but he’s a compelling key. (The Ghost Robot production company presentation logo that opens the film is a swift delight.) 84m. (Ray Pride)

“Cropsey” opens Monday at the Music Box; it continues after its Thursday closing on VOD on cable systems until August 12.

RECOMMENDED

By Ray Pride

“Lovers of Hate” is the name of a novel that will likely never be written as well as a squirm’s turn of a title that perfectly suits one of the three protagonists in Austin writer-director-editor Bryan Poyser’s third feature, an exquisitely calibrated black comedy of sibling rivalry which debuted at Sundance and South by Southwest 2010.

There’s a little bit of both those festivals in the movie, from character types to physical locations. Two grown brothers are separated by geography and by success. Rudy (Chris Doubek) is the older, first seen at an Austin car wash at bleak early morn stripping off in an impromptu shower. He’s living in his car after breaking up with his wife Diana (Heather Kafka), who wants nothing more to do with him. Younger brother Paul (Alex Karpovsky), a successful writer of young-adult books who lives in a “small” New York apartment, arrives, wrenching Rudy’s self-pity party. Paul’s best-selling success with his Harry Potter-like hero comes from stories Rudy told him when they were children, and he dedicates the series to “the original Invisible Kid.” But Rudy’s not invisible, not yet; he’s like a sad terror that’s risen out of the grubby, grassy Texas in the brusque, taut cinematography by David Lowery (“Audrey the Trainwreck,” director, “St. Nick”) on a low-end Panasonic HVX camera. Diana briefly goes along with the charade they’re still a couple, but the putative author of “Lovers of Hate” will fuck it up again and again. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

(Kynodontas) I’ve thrown out half-a-dozen ways to write about Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Dogtooth,” a weird gem of Greek black comedy made with an uncommonly assured hand. Contemporary Greek cinema, which I’ve watched a lot of in the past decade, sometimes offers moments of grace and beauty but seldom a fully realized film. “Dogtooth” is a revelation, especially arriving from Greece. Even the elder statesman of Greek cinema, Theo Angelopoulos, began a drift into mannerism with “The Weeping Meadow,” no matter how glorious its production. (Angelopoulos has gone on record as being an admirer of Lanthimos, which is in a class with Ingmar Bergman anointing Lukas Moodysson, the brightest hope of Swedish cinema after his second feature.) “Dogtooth,” which I had the fortune to see among a few hundred extremely amused young Icelanders at the Reykjavik Film Festival, attuned to the film’s black world, is funny peculiar, funny ha-ha and a remarkable singularity: it should come across as pastiche, as a rehash of provocations and surrealist gestures past. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Sequel-making at its best, Spanish chiller “[REC] 2″ picks up fifteen minutes after the end of its 2007 predecessor and hurtles headlong from the start. The setting’s the same, a quarantined building where the virus-ridden tenants-turned-zombies first had their way with TV reporters who were following a fire brigade. Now the point-of-view switches to four members of a SWAT team with cameras and the requisite government scientist. Again directed by the team of Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, the bursts of violence are mostly inspired, the claustrophobia of the gorgeously dark, grim spaces intense and, with its increasing turns to the supernatural, it would not be hyperbole to think of “[REC] 2″ as a manic remake of, or at least satisfying variation on “The Exorcist.” “Paranormal Activity 2,” consider your ass pre-kicked. “[REC] 2″‘s opening line kicks the proceedings off properly (in Spanish): “Record it all, motherfucker!” And the last shot? The most disgusting thing I’ve seen in months that didn’t involve politics. Keep your eyes open, at least most of the time. With Manuela Velasco,  Javier Botet, Ferran Terraza, David Vert, Alejandro Casaseca, Ana Isabel Velásquez, Andrea Ros, Juli Fàbregas. 85m. (Ray Pride)

“[REC] 2″ opens Friday at the Music Box. Trailer is below. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

You had me at “Nice penis!”

That’s the first words we and John C. Reilly’s character hear out of the mouth of the ever-beguiling Marisa Tomei in Mark and Jay Duplass’ “Cyrus,” their first film financed by a studio (and executive-produced by Tony Scott and Ridley Scott). John, also the character’s name, is a morose film editor who still hasn’t gotten over a failed marriage from years before, and his ex-wife (Catherine Keener) seems not to be his best friend, but his only friend. The complications that ensue are pretty simple, captured perfectly in the film’s advertising tagline: “John met the woman of his dreams. Then he met her son….”

The 21-year-old son, Cyrus, is played by Jonah Hill, and the possibility of a too-close connection between he and his mother is played for comedy in the highly-improvised movie, done in the fashion of “The Puffy Chair” and “Baghead,” the Duplasses’ earlier features. Hill’s shorn his hair almost to the nub and his staring eyes are often wider than a raccoon’s that’s been foraging behind the local meth lab. “He looks scary in the trailer,” a friend said. “What did you think?” I said something along the lines of “stabby-stabby, killy-killy.” Not so much that his character seems capable of torturing and murdering John, but that the passive-aggressive freakishness he’s enacting is so much more convincing than me wishing the character dead. While a route to loving loverliness between John and Molly doesn’t have to bloom into a perfumed garden path right away, Reilly and Tomei have such charm in their exchanges—he an adept of confusion and consternation, she both mothering yet unaware of her son’s predations—you’d almost like to see them throw the keys of the near-barren apartment Cyrus’ way and have them take a nice sublet in another movie in the theater next door. They’ve done well with the Duplass’ freedoms. Then there’s tubby Cyrus in the kitchen in the middle of the night with a knife, his t-shirt tail barely cuddling his drawers. Read the rest of this entry »

Best Worst Movie

By Leor Galil, with another take by Ray Pride

In the trailer for the new movie “Birdemic: Shock and Terror,” the film’s hero celebrates a million-dollar deal with a high-five from a co-worker. That money is an achievement, a goal people think about endlessly.

It’s something recent DePaul University graduate Patrick Dowell ponders from time to time. And Dowell knows just what he’ll do with that cash.

“I just wish I had one-million dollars: I’d buy every bad movie ever made if I could,” Dowell says.

Dowell is not alone in his love for bad cinema. People across the country have been packing movie theaters at midnight for decades to see these oft-terrible films. Though the phenomenon surrounding bad movies, and their role in cult film culture, is nothing new, it’s seeing a sudden resurgence.

“I don’t remember ten years ago there being this kind of new, must-see midnight event,” says Brian Andreotti, the program director for the Music Box, an independent Chicago movie theater. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Harmony Korine, as screenwriter and director, has had his ups and downs over the years, filling some of the downtime with ventures into novels, artists and artists’ books. The exuberant, garish escapade that is “Trash Humpers” looks toward the art gallery in the rearview but toward incidental, short-feature-length narrative on the horizon ahead. Korine’s entertaining interviews on the subject of the latest film have included the sentiment that “Trash Humpers” should seem like an object found in a ditch. Shot on late-1980s-era VHS cameras and edited with equipment that retains the jagged rainbows of erase-head start-stops on the finished project, the 37-year-old filmmaker’s fourth feature released in theaters looks (and behaves) like no other movie that comes to mind. Shot at night around his Nashville neighborhood, the film takes the form of vignettes, or “skits,” a word Korine might appreciate, following the boisterous exploits of a group of senior citizens (including Korine and his wife) in rubber masks that wouldn’t look out of place at Leatherface’s family picnic. These aged souls like to, well, hump trash carts, fences, tree branches. They’re celebrating. What are they celebrating? The mere fact of being alive, I’d like to think. Superficially disturbing, yet weirdly festive and triumphant, this mock-documentary is Korine’s most formally accomplished production. Something deeper, darker, accrues from the post-adolescent prankishness. If we survive, we will all grow elderly, lunatic and happy-go-lucky. There are disturbing images, including cavortings with prostitutes and a generalized contempt for baby dolls, which the crew consistently mistreat. Co-produced by Agnes B., “Trash Humpers” is the first film distributed by Chicago’s Drag City. 78m.  35mm. (Ray Pride)

“Trash Humpers” opens Friday at Siskel. Korine will appear after Friday’s 8:45pm show. The “Trash Humpers” website is here. A trailer is embedded below. Read the rest of this entry »