Margaret
Top 5 American Films
“Margaret”
“Drive”
“Tree Of Life”/”Take Shelter”
“Martha Marcy May Marlene”
“Road to Nowhere”
—Ray Pride
Top 5 Foreign Films
“Melancholia”
“Shame”
“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”
“Incendies”
“Aurora”
—Ray Pride Read the rest of this entry »
Summer’s over, kids. Sure, temperatures might still be in the nineties, and we’re going to enjoy one last hurrah this Labor Day weekend, but weather or not, fall is here. How do we know? The arts calendar, in hibernation these last couple of months, is on the verge of awakening with an explosion of activity. And as we do every year at this time, we’ve distilled it to a short list of highlights in order to help you put you personal fall calendar together.
Start out with our “big eleven” events for fall and then explore these links to the various fall previews we’ve created:
Fall Art Preview
Fall Dance Preview
Fall Film Preview
Fall Music Preview
Fall Resto Preview
Fall Stage Preview
The debate over which part of the country has the best music has been teetering back and forth since vinyl was first mass-produced and sold in record stores across the country.
So it’s natural to think a film about the nineties post-rock scene in Chicago would be a sprawling treatise on how the quality of music here regularly trumped that of the grunge marketing machine in the Northwest. That’s not the case with ”Parallax Sounds.” While the still-in-progress documentary by Italian director Augusto Contento focuses on that unique movement, it’s more about discovering how the landscape of a city affects the art created there from an outsider’s perspective. Damon Locks, Ken Vandermark and Steve Albini have already participated.
“It’s not really a documentary about post-rock, or music,” says the film’s assistant director Kenya Zanatta, who worked with Contento on his last documentary, “Tramas,” about life in São Paulo, Brazil. “It’s more general, about Chicago, creation and the spirit of the city, and how that spirit is embodied in the art here. Read the rest of this entry »
By Alex Baumgardner
Being a film lover in a place like Central Ohio isn’t easy. Phil Morehart, an editor at Facets Multimedia, grew up there and doesn’t take for granted the access a cinephile like himself has in a major metropolitan area.
“Chicagoans are lucky,” he says. “There are still a lot of small video stores where you can find things. But when you have someone who lives somewhere in the middle of Ohio or Indiana, there are no independent videos stores.”
So it would make sense that Morehart is now the operator of what is essentially Facets’ attempt at making the independent video store a national experience. He runs the company’s mail-delivery-service website—what amounts to Facets’ take on Netflix, an online portal into its library of obscure, foreign and out-of-print films.
“That’s what we pride ourselves on,” Morehart says. “We take great care of that. If we can track down some obscure film, or even some cruddy film that we might not have but is only on VHS, we’ll get it just to make sure it’s available.”
While Netflix and Blockbuster have made access to massive film libraries cheap, legal and accessible to people in every corner of the country, there remains an uncountable number of films that might never enter either company’s ever-expanding collection. But since 2009, Facets has made more than 65,000 of its hard-to-find titles (Netflix reached 100,000 films right around the same time) available to film buffs across the country. Two years later, Facets’ online service now reaches across the continental United States, with subscribers in all of the lower forty-eight, Morehart says. Read the rest of this entry »
Bryan Wendorf/Photo: Ray Pride
The Chicago Underground Film Festival turns eighteen this week. On Memorial Day, we checked in with Bryan Wendorf, longtime artistic director and programmer (who’s quick to note the “hugely instrumental” role of festival coordinator and assistant programmer Lori Felker this year).
“Submissions were just over 1,000 this year, down a little from our highest point between 1999 and 2001,” Wendorf says, “which may be the result of spending less on advertising our call for entries. But this still gives us a lot of work to choose from.” But, for the first time in several years, CUFF thinks locally on opening night. “This is the first time in several years that we’ve opened with a local filmmaker’s premiere, ‘Some Girls Never Learn,’ by School of the Art Institute grad Jerzy Rose.” Kicking off with Chicago-made work, he says, “always means better attendance and I think a lot of people are excited by this film and by the festival as a whole. The past few years we’ve opened with work that had come with awards and positive word-of-mouth from other festivals, but people really get more excited by something local. Jerzy is a very talented filmmaker who makes films that are too odd for most indie fests but too ‘narrative’ for most avant-garde-experimental festivals. In many ways, he’s the perfect type of filmmaker for a festival like ours.” Read the rest of this entry »
The Social Network
Top 5 Domestic Films
“The Social Network,” David Fincher
“Winter’s Bone,” Debra Granik
“Ghost Writer,” Roman Polanski
“Exit Through the Gift Shop,” Banksy
“Inception,” Christopher Nolan
— Ray Pride
Top 5 Foreign Films
“Carlos,” Olivier Assayas
“Everyone Else,” Maren Ade
“Dogtooth,” Yorgos Lanthimos
“Father of My Children,” Mia Hansen-Løve
“I Am Love,” Luca Guadagnino
— Ray Pride
Top 5 Films
“Animal Kingdom,” David Michôd
“Enter the Void,” Gaspar Noé
“Inception,” Christopher Nolan
“Lourdes,” Jessica Hausner
“Monsters,” Gareth Edwards
—Bill Stamets
Top 5 Documentary Films
“Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno,” Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea
“Sweetgrass,” (no director credited) [Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor]
“The Oath,” Laura Poitras
“Videocracy,” Erik Gandini
“Rembrandt’s J’Accuse,” Peter Greenaway
—Bill Stamets Read the rest of this entry »
On Coal River
By Ray Pride
George Hickenlooper’s death Saturday at the age of 47 ended a career that more and more typifies how curious, ambitious filmmakers are keeping their line of business alive in a moment of seismic upheaval in the film industry: alternating features and documentaries.
Hickenlooper has a final film arriving around Christmas, the Kevin Spacey-starring based-on-true-graft “Casino Jack,” yet his forays into nonfiction are his legacy, especially the co-directed “Hearts of Darkness,” the “Apocalypse Now” making-of doc, painstakingly constructed and sculpted from Eleanor Coppola’s raw footage from the epic’s extended Philippines shoot.
In conversations with Hickenlooper dating back to the nineties, he always talked about what he wanted to accomplish in the vein of a John Schlesinger or a Hal Ashby, but his path always led back to nonfiction. Beginning as a journalist who conducted interviews with filmmakers for early laserdiscs, Hickenlooper struck up acquaintances with 1970s “Hollywood Renaissance” figures like Dennis Hopper and Peter Bogdanovich, and later made documentaries about their work. European directors like Wim Wenders have dabbled in both forms, but economics of big-budget features versus low-project means of production tempt more and more working American filmmakers (Jonze, Gondry, Kuras). Even an established heavy-hitter like Jonathan Demme has drawn from the template Hickenlooper lived: Demme hasn’t tempted the rocky shores of “adult drama” since 2008′s “Rachel Getting Married,” in which he and his cinematographer Declan Quinn applied what the director had learned about working on the fly and embracing what mistakes may come in at least six documentaries since 2000. Read the rest of this entry »
Pickup trucks that weave through alleys and whose beds are filled with old piping, appliances whose days are behind them, any other metals for the taking can be seen throughout Chicago. Filmmakers Ben Kolak, Brian Ashby and Courtney Prokopas immersed themselves in this culture of metal scavenging, and from their time amidst the scraps and the people who search for it, salvaged a distinctly Chicago story.
“Scrappers” will make its world premiere at the Gene Siskel Film Center on June 27 at 4:45pm as part of the seventeenth annual Chicago Underground Film Festival. “Since this was a longitudinal study and we knew we needed to gain a lot of information, we spent six months in the scrap yard talking to people,” says Kolak. The filmmakers, whose first inclination to make a film about scrappers came from seeing the trucks in Hyde Park alleys while at the U of C, then spent another two years filming scavengers, their finds and the sales they made.
The film focuses on two Chicago scrappers—Oscar, an undocmented immigrant from Honduras, and Otis, a South Side native who’s been selling scrap metal for decades. “Our subjects are both family men,” says Ashby, “and what we encountered were not thieves as they’re often portrayed, but honest guys who couldn’t find work or didn’t have papers.” The filmmakers find that the business is as diverse as any, from a scrapper collecting cans in a shopping cart to an operator with dozens of employees who buys scrap from large industrial companies and resells it in large amounts. Oscar and Otis reside somewhere in the middle, clearly good at what they do but dealing with an array of economic, political and family issues. Read the rest of this entry »
Three summers ago, Buffalo, New York native Addison Henderson went to Ghana with one question: what is identity? He brought with a film crew, his father and three friends to approach topics of identity, belonging and heritage in the West African nation where centuries before the Transatlantic Slave Trade had thrived. Their journey is inspiration for “The Experience,” which will make its Chicago premiere at the Portage Theater on June 23. Henderson, who wrote, directed and edited the film, says he had wanted to make a film about cultural heritage for years. “The project evolved to a film about a journey to Africa to one about identity because I realized that identity is what the journey was really all about,” he says. Along with his father who is a bishop in Buffalo, Henderson brought fellow filmmaker Corey Green, Alex Gyambrah, who immigrated to the U.S. from Ghana, and Kush Bhardwaj, a professor at Buffalo State. “I tried to bring together people that represented the entire cultural spectrum of Buffalo,” Henderson says, “which is a mirror of the culture of the entire country.” The film shows each man’s journey individually, but it also shows a shared human journey about identity and love, a journey that Henderson believes everyone should experience. Henderson, an actor, filmmaker and science fiction screenwriter, sees the search for identity as an ongoing process that is arduous at times but immensely rewarding. “I wanted to tell a story about people’s lives because we all go through similar things, and when people watch documentary films, they can relate to the stories being told,” he says. The screening at 8pm will be preceded by the chance to meet Henderson and Corey Green at 7pm and followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers as part of the “Know Your Identity Tour.” (Andrew Rhoades)
Portage Theater
Last Thursday, Rosa Rio died in Florida at the age of 107, one of the last living theater organists from the silent film era. The theater organist provides the live score to silent films, giving characters depth, giving action life and giving a voice to the filmmakers who first brought us to the cinema. “The best compliment a theater organist can get is for someone to say I didn’t even notice it playing,” says Jay Warren, photoplay organist at the Portage Theater. When the accompaniment is one with the film, Warren says, he’s done his job like Rosa Rio and Gaylord Carter before him.
The organ at the Portage Theater is red and crescent-shaped, encased in a white wall three feet high with an opening for its player to the right. The 1927 Kimball Pipe Organ recently rescued by the Silent Film Society of Chicago from five years of silent storage is completely functional but still in the process of renovation. Read the rest of this entry »
