All Michael Bay’s “Transformers” in 3D is missing is a 40. (Take a 40, please.) Robustly cynical, “Transformers: Dark Of The Moon,” credited to screenwriter Ehren Kruger (“Scream 3,” “The Ring Two,” “Transformers 2″), serves up generous lashings of counterfactual pulp, including an Autobot-Decepticons-NASA-JFK-Nixon conspiracy with a soupcon of Chernobyl for spice. It’s like a Bizarro World Warren Report reduced to postage-stamp size. (The briefly seen JFK stand-in resembles someone who took second place in a Donald Trump look-alike contest.) “TDOTM” premiered at the Moscow Film Festival, and some of the most jazzed-up (yet largely incomprehensible) passages resemble the winningly cheesy special effects of local mogul Timur Bekmambetov’s “Night Watch” and “Day Watch,” but with less rude charm. Hope for keenly choreographed mayhem quickly fades. If not on the level of Michael Kidd and Vincente Minnelli’s work on “The Band Wagon,” say at least a few bars of “Collateral Damage,” the musical? When you’re working with Decepticons, a sentient race of mechanical beings that preceded film executives, you can hope to be the biggest and the best, but at best, you could only ever be ne plus Ultraman. (Or “Cars 3,” with eager-school-leaver Shia LaBeouf in the role of “Mater.”) Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

What’s in a title? While Oscar contenders linger in the theaters, “Rapunzel” is only a couple of weeks away from grossing over $200,000,000 in the U.S. and Canada.

Oh, wait. It’s “Tangled”—not “Rapunzel.” The studio made a mid-course correction in the content and title of its movie, fearing the all-powerful Boy. An adventure about a Girl? No, thanks, dude. One of the season’s most gratifying successes at the box office is the Coen brothers’ most successful film yet, “True Grit,” which has passed $150,000,000. Yes, it’s an adventure about a girl, but even in the Oscar race, Hailee Steinfeld, who plays the lead of the film, the bossy, obstinate, fierce, willful Mattie Ross, is nominated in the “Best Supporting Actress” category.

Still, studios gamble on stories with strong younger women. Focus Features has placed a modest bet on Joe Wright’s comic-booky “Hanna,” with two strong girls in the international trailer, at least—Jessica Barden, eyes-wide and manic again as she was in “Tamara Drewe,” even if the center of the 1960s-styled killer-thriller is young Saoirse Ronan, the angry marvel in the midst of “Atonement.” It looks to be “Kick-Ass” with grown-up eye candy (and Cate Blanchett as a secret agent!). Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Contrails crosshatch and feather a deep blue sky to the sound of planes. A camera pointed upward, soon to come to earth to trace how the lives of three adults’ lives criss-cross.

Shocking and shockingly beautiful, Jean-Luc Godard’s “Every Man For Himself” [Sauve qui peut (la vie)] is as brutish as it is sensitive. First released in the U.S. in 1980, Godard called it his “second first film,” marking his return to European art-house film after a decade experimenting first with didactic political films and then with emerging video technology. Francis Coppola was the original U. S. distributor, and was set to produce an ill-fated American gangster movie by Godard, “The Story.”

Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc) is a television filmmaker fighting with his girlfriend, Denise (Nathalie Baye), who cross paths with a prostitute, Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert). The camera’s gaze remains as simple as those opening shots. Blunt statements about power and sexual violence are threaded throughout, and are usually also in the service of describing filmmaking as being an equally brutal act. (The scenes of sexual display are largely absurd, including a Rube Goldberg-style roundelay in a hotel room that resembles a tableau from a late Fassbinder film as well as a mockery of how movies are directed.) Read the rest of this entry »

John Wayne

By Martin Northway

Western movies were once as common as today’s Bourne-type thrillers and as ubiquitous on television as modern reality programming. In my youth they were part of my generation’s universe of discourse.

If you’re younger than I, and there’s a good chance you are, we had it better. This is not simple nostalgia speaking. You missed something, and with each new Western film that comes along—and they are few and far between—I hope for your sake this will be the one that revives the genre.

Back in the day, when my friends and I argued about who was cooler, Steve McQueen or James Dean, even though Dean made only three movies before his untimely death, one was a modern Western.

And McQueen, well, McQueen—whose film career likely interrupted a delinquent youth’s arc toward a life of crime—was a principal in one of the most influential Western movies of all time, “The Magnificent Seven.” Was it a great film, in the way “The Searchers” is great? Hardly. Nor was it a very realistic depiction of the old West. 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 »

RECOMMENDED

When Francis Coppola “presented” Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s mammoth, 442-minute 1977 “Hitler: A Film From Germany,” roadshow-like limited runs were the rule, and Coppola retitled the film “Our Hitler.” Syberberg’s musings on the use of abuse of perceptions of the meaning of Hitler are more German than universal and more Syberbergian than something that gained footing in its culture. Still, there is one filmmaker who took from the use of rear projection and shafts of light suggesting the bright cone of white that comes from projected film: even on the not-very-good U. S. DVD transfer, it’s evident that Quentin Tarantino and cinematographer Robert Richardson consulted “Hitler,” and the sequence of the apocryphal cinema-set killing of Hitler draws lovingly from this film. For most viewers, the slog of repetition, narration and monologue will soon grow tiresome, but there is a fierce intelligence at humorless play. As was the case with his staunchest defender, Susan Sontag, who considered Syberberg “the first film director since Godard who really matters.” Defending her extended essay in The New York Review of Books, Sontag wrote on of the “complexity of Syberberg’s views, and their formal and imaginative profundity.” She continued, “The subject of Hitler makes moralists of us all—moralists with a facility that is perhaps the last of the corruptions which is Hitler’s legacy.” It may be profitable to see how Syberberg’s 1970s explorations resonate against the work of “moralists” today. 7 hours, 22 minutes. (Ray Pride)

“Hitler” A Film From Germany” shows twice Saturday and once on Monday and Wednesday at Siskel. A video adaptation of Susan Sontag’s NYRB essay about the film is below. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

By Ray Pride

I went into Rob Reiner’s “Flipped” fearing a coming-of-age romantic comedy that would live up to Roger Ebert’s notorious pan of the director’s “North”: “I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it.” I love being wrong when foolish expectations get stamped out, and there are moments in “Flipped” to be loved, loved, loved.

An extended piece in the Los Angeles Times in July on the movie’s marketing left me fearful. “I wanted the story to feel timeless and pure, in a time before texting and Facebook,” Reiner told a columnist. “I thought it was important to strip away the technology so we could get at the true emotions and feelings and make it as innocent as possible. I guess you could say I wanted to make it closer to my own childhood.”

In a small town in Michigan along Bonnie Meadow Lane in the six years leading up to 1963, in the season before the murder of JFK, lives a boy, Bryce Loski (Callan McAuliffe) and across the street, a girl, Juli Baker (Madeline Carroll). The values of their respective families resonate through their behavior toward each other, from Bryce’s stodgy, frustrated father (Anthony Edwards, who throws away the line, “I hate cool”) to Juli’s (Aidan Quinn), whose strength and compassion comes from unexpected places. McAuliffe is Cera-esque in the ways that people who don’t like Michael Cera describe that actor: a milquetoast for Juli to invest her substantial imagination in. You wonder what this wonderful girl sees in him: hope, potential, pretty eyes? She’s a smart child, tomboy with pigtails: Carroll has a feline cast to her eyes, a little of the young Anna Paquin to her features. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Chills, baby, chills. In “Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands,” Canadian filmmaker Peter Mettler, whose visionary work includes “Gambling, Gods and LSD” (2002) takes to the skies above that province to explore the vast industrial forces being assembled to draw out the 200-million-year-old fossil fuels in the world’s second-largest reserve. Shooting in high definition, Mettler’s work is almost entirely image and sound, moving from placid natural beauty to man’s remaking of the landscape. Like his countryman, the photographer Edward Burtynsky (who is thanked), Mettler is unsentimental. This is what is in front of us, this is what lies beneath, this is the skin and surface of our planet. And while the film was made for Greenpeace Canada, “Petropolis” isn’t an activisit tract or merely evidence and witness. It holds terrible beauty and fierce horror. The score and sound design are impeccable, of a piece with Mettler’s insistently paced imagery. Shown with Jorge Rivero’s “La Presa” (The Dam) about how growth returns to a flooded valley. Program 59m. (Ray Pride)

“Petropolis” plays August 13 at 8pm at Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 North Clark. A trailer is below. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »