RECOMMENDED

Fracking, they call it; a new way of extracting natural gas by blasting water, sand and chemicals through rock deep beneath the earth that has the potential to destroy water supplies as natural gas and other effluents shoot through the planet’s crust after “hydraulic fracturing.” Halliburton is the entity that came up with the idea. (You’ve heard of Halliburton? Among other enterprises, they’re involved in the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico.) “Gasland,” Josh Fox’s abashed, darkly funny personal documentary that asserts that the oil and gas industry’s newfound practice of “fracking” could destroy our inland water supplies is the scariest movie I’ve seen this year if its implications and inferences are even fractionally true. Fox, a theater artist established in New York, owns rural property and was curious when he received a $100,000 offer to buy mineral rights, and eventually traveled to thirty-two states to consider the brief history of this form of natural gas extraction. Kitchen taps that burst into flame? That’s only the beginning of what’s on-screen in this visually expressive, sometimes experimental narrative. Read the rest of this entry »

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(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

Narrated by screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (“Milk”), Reed Cowan’s “8: The Mormon Proposition,” highlights the ongoing danger of California’s ballot proposition law. In this case, it’s the matter of money and volunteers flooding that state to eliminate the California marriage equality law, a vast volume of cash and foot armies from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The film is shaped by talking-head interviews, but its strength lies in the revelation of hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents, including emails,  detailing strategy and recordings of Elders urging action. The church’s leader, the Mormon Prophet, issued a call for members to “[donate] your means and time to preserve the sacred institution of marriage.” (“Means and time” is a promise made by members to the church, “code,” one subjects says, for the potential loss of eternal life.) The battle was joined. It’s a chilling story, told in subjective fashion. Would you expect the Mormon Church to participate? As troubling as vast political funding by religions against secular society is the implied larger picture: money, rivers of it, decides the course of contemporary politics. It’s an unholy alliance. 80m. (Ray Pride)

“8: The Mormon Proposition” opens Friday at Siskel.

RECOMMENDED

The masterful “Casino Jack and the United States of Money” is the latest from prolific Academy Award-winning documentary muckraker Alex Gibney (“Taxi to the Dark Side”), and it is as lucid, damning and infuriating as his other work. He and his deft production team weave a compelling, sardonic and elementally shocking portrait of the lobbyist and convicted swindler Jack Abramoff and his connections to the disgraced-but-not-shunned conservative money machine. It’s a heist movie with America the victim: it’s too late to reach for your wallet. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The visually exquisite “Women Without Men,” (Zanan-e bedun-e mardan, 2009), fine artist Shirin Neshat’s feature debut, after a career in photography, installations and visually lush experimental video, adapts Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel, set in the months leading up to the 1953 CIA coup in Iran that led to the return of the Shah. By detailing the lives of three Tehrani women from different classes, Neshat provides a perspective apart from the machinations of powerful men. Understated and elegant, “Women Without Men” is rich with indelible imagery and Neshat’s pictorial, oblique approach to narrative is to be admired. Her earlier work draws upon calligraphic tradition, and her film is filled with lyrical strokes of similar ornament. The beauty is timeless, as is the political import, as reflected in the volatile state of Iran today. The effective score is by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Abbas Bakhtiari.  An excellent background piece is here; an extended trailer is embedded below. 99m. (Ray Pride)

“Women Without Men” opens Friday at Siskel. The Monday 8pm show will be introduced by the Art Institute’s James Rondeau. Wednesday’s 8pm show will be introduced by Hamid Naficy from Northwestern,  author of “An Accented Cinema: The Making of Exile Cultures.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“A parent says to me, ‘Oh my kid goes to a great school,’ and I said, ‘Lady, your kid can’t read or add two and two!–what do you mean it’s a good school?’” That’s New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a graduate of Medford High School in Massachusetts. Bob Bowdon, a graduate of Cypress Creek High School in Houston, Texas, places this C-SPAN clip near the start of his first documentary, “The Cartel,” wherein he muckrakes public education in “the #1-spending state in the #1-spending country.” That would be New Jersey, where Bowdon covered regional news, worked for Bloomberg Television and now plays fake TV reporter “Brian Scott” for the Onion News Network. He also heads an Internet marketing firm in Hoboken that specializes in VFRs (“Videostreams for Retail”). “The Cartel” sells a distressing expose of New Jersey’s school boards and teachers union. Some numbers: $30 million spent on Malcolm X. Shabazz Field and Stadium. Abington Avenue Middle School spent $436,096 per classroom, with only about one-eighth of that going to pay the teacher in each of those classrooms. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Buenos Aires has a timeless air, but that illusory sensation masks history. In “The Secret in their Eyes,” the 2009 Academy Award-winner for Best Foreign Language Film by writer-director-editor Juan José Campanella, a flashback-driven structure makes its characters’ histories both distinctly of their time but also embedded in memory.

A former Buenos Aires state court investigator, Benjamin Espósito (Ricardo Darin, “Nine Queens”) has just retired and to get some kind of perspective on his life, starts to write a novel about the memory from his career that most troubles him: the unsolved brutal murder of a young woman twenty-five years earlier, in 1974, in the months just before the dictatorship took over the country. Espósito is impressed by the devotion of the woman’s widowed husband, which mirrors his relationship with his superior, Irene Menéndez Hastings (Soledad Villamil): how far can fixation go, and last, if unrequited? In the husband’s case, it’s the separation enforced by death; in Benjamin and Irene’s, there are issues of class, of propriety, of simple shyness that keeps a dance of flirtation from becoming a tango toward commitment. The story, based on a novel by co-writer Eduardo Sacheri, shifts confidently back and forth in time, with surprises not only in plotting but in character development. Campanella’s work on U. S. television includes episodes of “Law & Order SVU,” which, while at a stylistic remove from the cinematic style of “Secret,” suggests the director’s range of storytelling skills. (His next project is an animated film based on… Foosball.) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Extravagant” would be so much an understatement it would be damning with faint praise when it comes to the latest film by 70-year-old Italian director Marco Bellocchio (“Fists in Pocket,” 1965; “Devil in the Flesh,” 1986; “My Mother’s Smile,” 2002). Under the rule of Berlusconi, younger directors are turning out fierce, stylized work, such as Matteo Garrone’s “Gomorrah” and Paolo Sorrentino’s “Il Divo” (both 2008). Yet the elder Bellocchio’s fictionalizing of the story of Mussolini’s secret wife and son shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, the gorgeously shot and melodramatically enacted “Vincere” (Win), is even more searing, more tantalizing in the telling than their estimable accomplishments. From the opening scene where the young, handsome, mustachioed, fulminating future Il Duce (Filippo Timi) challenges God to strike him down at a public meeting and he catches the eye of a young woman (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), Bellocchio is in command of his craft as a filmmaker. Timi and Mezzogiorno, too: sparks strike, erotic conspiracy results. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

(Tano Da Morire) Roberta Torre’s 1997 molto kitschy musical, “To Die For Tano,” recounts the life of Tano Guarassi, a Palermo butcher and small-time Mafia enforcer who gets hit by the Corleone crime family. For the first few reels, the bizarre musical results of his four sisters and characters drawn from the real-life neighborhood are fascinating, but the Neapolitan nonsense and the mad, motley score by Nino D’Angelo aren’t likely to convince every moviegoer his rise and fall were worth the recounting. While it was a hit on its home turf and an award-winner way back at the end of the twentieth century, think of this “trash musical” as extremely uncomfortable karaoke, and you have a small notion of the in-your-face experience. It’s a surreal provocation even when you don’t know what the hell’s going on. Plus mullets. Lots of mullets. With Ciccio Guarino, Enzo Paglino. (Sample “Tano’s Rap” below.) 75m. 35mm. (Ray Pride)

“To Die For Tano” opens Friday at Facets. Read the rest of this entry »

David Peace’s “Red Riding” books, drawing on the real-life “Yorkshire Ripper” cases, are a marvel of surrealism and despair, finding language both vernacular and incantatory to capture the failed attempts of investigators and journalists to solve brutal serial killings in Leeds, Yorkshire, across two decades. The quartet of novels is pared to a trilogy, rich, compelling noir movies that were produced for British television: “Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974″ (directed by Julian Jarrold, “Kinky Boots,” shooting in Super 16; “Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1980″ (James Marsh, “Man on Wire,” shooting in 35mm widescreen); “In the Year of Our Lord 1983″ (Anadd Tucker, “Shopgirl,” shooting with the Red One camera). The visual style in all three is as dark as the crimes on show, unafraid of the possibility of the perfume of pretension and the funk of sadism: think “Se3en” instead of “Se7en.” “1974″ may be the most successful, following Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield, “Boy A”), a young reporter for the Yorkshire Post who’s returned after time spent “down South.” (The invocation of “The North”—”The North, we do what we want”—and its ways so often would be comical if not consistently menacing.) Referring to a recently disappeared peer, Peace’s novels open, “All we ever get is Lord fucking Lucan and wingless bloody crows,’ smiled Gilman, like this way the best day of our lives… Waiting for my first Front Page, the Byline Boy at last.” Young spunk meets cloacal immersion: confronting a local real estate entrepreneur John Dawson (Sean Bean) is the first instance of Eddie’s putting of many of a foot wrong. Prolific expert David Thomson has overreached in asserting these films as the equal of “The Godfather” and “The Godfather II,” but despite their gloom, violence and despair, they’re roundly thrilling: the parochial cruelty—do the police use the crimes as cover for avenging their own enemies?—is unrelenting and the depths of viciousness can hardly be guessed. Each director finds their own style, but the unity comes from screenwriter Tony Grisoni’s proficient distillation of the material and themes. In Marsh’s “1980,” Paddy Considine may give the series’ best performance as a police investigator running an internal affairs investigation of the 1974 events.) In the best possible way, “The Red Riding Trilogy” harks back to U. S. and British thrillers of the 1970s: deeply skeptical and bold in accepting that compromise and failure are an ineffable part of the human condition, or at the very least, of the genre of thrillers pitting authority against avarice. With Rebecca Hall, Peter Mullan and Eddie Marsan. 105m; 96m; 104m, respectively. (Ray Pride)

“The Red Riding Trilogy” opens Friday at the Music Box, with viewing options including a Roadshow-style marathon sit. The Channel 4 website has trailers and more.