RECOMMENDED

There’s a terrible truism that novels have always been betrayed by feature film adaptation, that the ideal source material is a short story, something that requires thematic amplification rather than narrative compression. Much of the wealth of recent microbudget American movies that’s meandering through festivals and cinematheques works best with deadpan and apparent minimalism. One masterful example would be Alex Ross Perry’s “The Color Wheel,” seemingly shambling but in fact arching toward a single powerful revelation. David Lowery’s kids-on-the-run “St. Nick” and his bedtime story short “Pioneer” also rush with powerful undercurrents. And Chicago’s own Frank V. Ross (the Desplechin-in-the-rough “Audrey the Trainwreck”) is moving toward something eccentric and mysterious. Simple as an anecdote, as transparent as a single bad idea, throw notions up in the air, as if story has become a succession of straightforward sentences rather than an intricate weave of experience and observation, transformed. “Bad Fever,” writer-director Dustin Guy Defa’s self-identified “feature film about self-expression” (edited by David Lowery) features Kentucker Audley, himself a practitioner of low-fi, no-budget filmmaking, as Eddie, a Salt Lake City loner who has unlikely dreams of becoming a stand-up comedian. Read the rest of this entry »

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Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks’ globe-girdling Canadian documentary, based on Ronald Wright’s bestseller “A Short History of Progress,” asks, is the earth at the end of “a failed experiment”? Galvanic and bristling, it sleekly surveys factors threatening life itself on earth, including, but not limited to, centuries of industrial development, elevated levels of consumption, overpopulation, largely unstemmed pollution and global warming.  Shooting in New York, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Shanghai, Beijing, Brasilia, Sao Paolo, DC and Dubai, “Surviving Progress” arrays smart people to offer a startling array of pessimistic analyses. Read the rest of this entry »

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Director-editor P. David Ebersole’s “Hit So Hard: The Life And Near Death Story of Patty Schemel” is a raucous documentary about a figure from the band Hole just as strong as notorious bandleader Courtney Love, drummer Patty Schemel. Schemel’s home movies, preserved as a carrying case of Hi-8 videotapes, provide pronounced muscle to the bone-hard construction of the film, illustrating more than one meaning to a familiar phrase: “live through this.” The video imagery is a profuse mess, unselfconsciously mirroring the slur-and-drang sound the band accomplished. Drug addiction is swept to the side by testimony to Schemel’s importance as a musician and as an openly lesbian rock ‘n’ roll figure. Read the rest of this entry »

Udo Kier

RECOMMENDED

The first question that comes from watching most Guy Maddin films, “What on earth?” should actually be, “Where on earth?” The usual answer is Winnipeg; the correct one is “in this man’s mind.” “Keyhole,” (2011) his tenth feature, also takes place in a haunted house, and in a cracked black-and-white simulacrum of a 1930s gangster feature. Maddin, like few others, understands that the criminally under-used Jason Patric was meant to be a noir leading man. Read the rest of this entry »

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“Boardwalk Empire” producer Rudd Simmons, who’s also worked on Jim Jarmusch and Wes Anderson films, is an eagle-eye-on-the-wall in his self-financed “The First Season,” as he follows the fortunes of New Yorkers Paul and Phyllis Van Amburgh across five years after they’ve moved upstate to live the lives of dairy farmers, raising three children with another on the way while reviving a defunct dairy farm. Romantic? Back-to-the-earth? More like a fresh grindstone, however appealingly stark the surroundings. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

One of two films on globalization presented in advance of the NATO summit shutdown of Chicago, Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre’s “Maquilapolis (City of Factories)” profiles women who work at a Tijuana factory run by a multinational, or a maquiladora, who fight for severance pay after their employers take flight, leaving behind lost jobs and toxic waste. Read the rest of this entry »

Peter Lord

By Ray Pride

Beaming fifteen-inch figures stand at rubbery attention in front of a roaring fake fire in a cleared-out hotel bar. Peter Lord, director of “The Pirates! Band Of Misfits” and co-owner of Aardman films, is not impressed.

“It’s a rubbish fire,” he says, “Rubbish,” as we sit before the audience of the Pirate Captain, various cohorts and a squishy little Dodo, the most agreeable of the lot from “The Pirates! Band of Misfits,” the animated eighteenth-century-set seafaring send-up from Aardman. During the 3D stop-motion action, which was produced on actual scale sets, I wondered if there would be a squeezable bath toy based on this little fellow. Now I make the mistake of reaching for the Dodo, and neither of us can get it back on its extinct feet. Read the rest of this entry »

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A survey of the last of the elderly whippersnappers left living in the 160 studios atop New York’s Carnegie Hall before the Carnegie Hall Corporation began evictions in 2007 toward renovation to office space, Josef Birdman Astor’s “Lost Bohemia” (2010) is bittersweet diversion. A twenty-year tenant himself, Astor recorded several hundred hours of his neighbors across an eight-year span, and their cultural memories evoke times already lost, as well as the rarefied air of prior tenants, including Norman Mailer, Isadora Duncan, Marlon Brando, Enrico Caruso, Charles Gwathmey, Andrew Bergman and Bill Cunningham (whose digs are seen in the more dynamic documentary, “Bill Cunningham New York”). Read the rest of this entry »

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“The Hunter” shares pedigree with a new generation of Australian filmmaking, including co-producers behind the impressive gangster film “Animal Kingdom” (2010), and a novel for source material by Julia Leigh, who made her directorial debut with the controversial sexual allegory “Sleeping Beauty” (2011). Willem Dafoe plays a mercenary, dispatched by a Euro-biotech conglomerate to the Tasmanian wilderness to search for an animal supposedly extinct since the 1930s, the Tasmanian tiger. Can a cold, closed-off man dropped into teeming countryside of forest and fog, in search of something so rare, find what’s long dormant in himself? Blah-blah-blah, yes, but director Daniel Nettheim, an experienced director of Australian television drama, contrasts epic with intimate in chilly measure and keeps the eco-allegory to a light chill. Read the rest of this entry »

Taika Waititi. Photo by Ray Pride.

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New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi relaxes the quirk a tad after his first feature, “Eagle Vs. Shark,” (2007) the memorably eccentric comic love story that introduced Jemaine Clement, one half of “Flight of the Conchords” to the larger world. Waititi claims a mild strain of autobiography—”true and imagined memories”—in the 1980s-set coming-of-age story, “Boy,” (2010), based on his Oscar-nominated short, “Two Cars, One Night,” and which became his home country’s highest-grossing film. Waititi’s deadpan comedy about a Michael Jackson-and-E.T.-obsessed eleven-year-old boy, named “Boy,” in gorgeous rural Waihau Bay (ripe with the tall greenery of cannabis) isn’t as extravagantly strange as “Eagle Vs. Shark,” but his affable comic rhythms are his beguiling own. Read the rest of this entry »