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 »

"Un Prophete"

RECOMMENDED

Even with the promise of the highest of high-quality a/c, film programming in the dead of summer is an iffy thing: one beautiful day and a theater has no lovely audience. While the Siskel Film Center has experimented with additions to its repertory, with shorter runs, and promoting subruns of less-well-attended art-house movies like Jane Campion’s “Bright Star” or Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer” for 35mm runs before their arrival on video, this July offers two endearingly ambitious, non-first-run programs. “Vive les Auteurs,” pairs recent releases by French directors with earlier work that also deserves a look-see on the big screen with grand sound. The great André Téchiné’s lovely “The Girl On The Train,” with an ambiguous turn by Emilie Dequenne in the title role, returns (Sun-Mon, Wed), paired with “The Witnesses,” his 2007 ensemble piece that brings the best out of Michel Blanc and Emmanuelle Beart (Fri, Sun, Thu). Next week, Jacques Audiard’s Oscar-nominated “Un Prophete,” a snaky, magisterial prison saga is teamed with his earlier “Read My Lips” (2001), an uncommonly tactile mystery set amid office politics. Laurent Cantet and Catherine Breillat are featured later in the month. The conceit of “Tarantino & Co.” is to pair that director’s work with movies that influenced him; among the attractions this month (then running through the end of August) from QT’s pen and sword, “Grindhouse,” “True Romance” and the two “Kill Bill”s back-to-back. Howard Hawks’ “Rio Bravo” is also on tap, and in early August, the unlikely “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.” A keen way of cutting costs, but also beating the attractions at the multiplex. (Ray Pride)

Full calendar at the Siskel site.

RECOMMENDED

The grail is “Annie Hall”: holy, holy. Who will make the twenty-first-century rendition of that kaleidoscopic romantic whatcha-ma-jigger? Even when its essential poignancy seems impossible to replicate, such as its Chaplinesque moments of disappointment taking flight across Woody Allen’s face, it’s good to see young filmmakers try for that kind of heightened comic urban stenography. “Breaking Upwards”: there’s a neatly prototypical title for a lo-fi no-budget, New York-set, troubled relationship dramedy about twentysomething strivers based on the lives of a filmmaking couple who star in the film, right? As directed by Daryl Wein and written by Wein, Zoe Lister-Jones and Peter Duchan, there’s a low-key warmth and earnestness different from a more-meta indie like, say, the cutie-fest “Four Eyed Monsters,” which it resembles: while keeping to the ground in terms of depicting the negotiation to the end of a four-year relationship, the filmmakers try to tell a fairly straightforward if downbeat romantic story. The characters aren’t aimless or slackers—she’s very much into herself as an off-off-off-Broadway actress, he’s proud of his output as a writer—but they are both deeply, deeply ordinary and in real life, would be deeply, deeply aggravating to anyone else outside of their small, small world, which, despite their central Greenwich Village locale and a nice, large cast, is comprised largely of two. Made for a reported $15,000, “Breaking Upwards” may be as good-looking a movie as you can eke at that budget; Alex Bergman’s location-driven photography is a big plus. With a strong supporting cast, largely drawn from theater, including Julie White (mom in “Transformers”), Andrea Martin, Olivia Thirlby, Peter Friedman, La Chanze, Ebon Moss Bachrach, Pablo Schreiber, Heather Burns. 89m. (Ray Pride)

“Breaking Upwards” opens Friday at Facets.

RECOMMENDED

The Godardian knot: how can a nifty movie fifty years on seem so fresh? For its immersion in signifiers: of snips of pop culture passing for personality. Flip, fluid “Breathless” (Á bout de souffle), in a celluloid restoration with updated subtitles (with no current plans to replace the recent Criterion double disc) is kinetic sculpture in its form, its willful jump cuts (seldom seen in 1959) making light cubism of its story through editing. Drawing from the gangster cool of Bogart and doomed couple-on-the-run romanticism (from films like Joseph H. Lewis’ “Gun Crazy,” which used street locations with the same kind of punch), Godard, the film critic and intellectual, made splendid play of film grammar and fine faces. Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), thick cigarette drooping from his full lips, smoke coiling across his thick boxer mug, is irrationally infatuated with American student Patricia (Jean Seberg), the grandmother of all “manic dream pixies,” peddling the New York Herald Tribune on Parisian streets. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s crunchy, granular black-and-white images (shooting with film meant for 35mm stills) are accompanied by the occasional tracking shot blatantly taken from a wheelchair being backed through pedestrian traffic. Godard was 30 at the time, and the 1960s would be filled with worship of muses like on-and-off-again love/wife Anna Karina, but his love of Jean Seberg’s slender neck is as cruelly erotic as anything he’s ever shot: positioned in a convertible’s back seat, her head three-quarter turned away, Godard photographs her as the eternal present, the center of all things, as the sights of Parisian street life stream past in a sustained series of jumpcuts. Director Jean-Pierre Melville, whose portrait of Montmartre nightlife, “Bob the Gambler,” gets a joke reference, appears as a pretentious novelist whose ambition, he says, is to become immortal, then die. He pulls down his sunglasses and the warm, huge pools of his eyes fix on Patricia. The sphinx, flustered, turns away, and as the image fades, faces us. 97m. (Ray Pride)

“Breathless” opens Friday at the Music Box.

RECOMMENDED

Life’s a grind, but it’s better than the other option, right? The lovingly bruised “Audrey the Trainwreck” is a melancholy meditation on early-onset adulthood, told through the interactions of two young depressives who may be tumbling toward a relationship,  characters adrift in their own ways, hoping for love, or perhaps just a little reassuring simplicity. Chicago writer-director-editor Frank V. Ross’ fifth feature is freighted with the heightened ordinary and his comedic and dramatic instincts are wrapped in a rare concern for the lowered expectations of the modern middle-class. “I can say I’m not afraid of anything, because there’s a lack of options,” one character says; the observation is dry, even though it’s coming from a resigned place in her heart. Ross’ most intriguing pattern is how the everydayness of the jobs and pursuits are interrupted by bits of conflict and violence or unexpectedly apt humor. (In life and in drama, inertia needs to be punctured.) The violence is, well, funny. 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 »

Glen or Glenda

Paul Schrader, who wrote “Taxi Driver,” began his film career as a critic. The genesis of his script for Martin Scorsese’s 1976 picture came as he read the diaries of Arthur Bremer, the man who hoped to kill presidential candidate George Wallace. Bremer had seen a not-so-good film by then-fading auteur Otto Preminger, and Schrader was impressed by Bremer’s descriptive oomph: it was like “a plastic flower stuck in dogshit.”

As a longtime movie reviewer, I’m still a full-on Pollyanna before the lights go down. All right, all players: show me cards. Once the lights come back up, and out of the screening room and onto the street and out of earshot of other professionals, it’s best to be as judgmental, condescending and angry as a bad film deserves. Readers usually remember the harshest pans of a movie anyway, instead of the laciest love letters to something beautiful. But that’s not the same thing as having a masochistic attraction to the baleful and failed. Splendid junk exists, and there has to be ample room for the strange, the pulpy, the unexpectedly weird and wonderful work. The late critic Manny Farber championed “termite art” versus “white elephant art,” a matter of the best instincts of journeymen directors twining something lovely or lifelike, fevered or feral, across the carpentry of genre material. “Good work usually arises where the creators (Laurel and Hardy, the team of Howard Hawks and William Faulkner operating on the first half of Raymond Chandler’s ‘The Big Sleep’) seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture,” Farber wrote in 1962, “but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“I would be the first one out of a job if there were no movies or commercials, but I would not miss them,” Michel Gondry told me while promoting “Be Kind, Rewind” in winter 2008. He published a slim book about the same time, called “You’ll Like This Film Because You’re In It: The Be Kind Rewind Protocol.”

There are a few pages of passages like, “I believe in systems. Well, not the big and vague entity that seems to run the world against everyone.” While brief, it’s valuable, as his French accent is near impossible to transcribe, no matter how fluent and charming he sounds in person when you interview him. Most of the book is composed of exercises and structures drawn from his tries at teaching a group of youngsters with disparate ideas. “”There was a lot of of compromising that ultimately [creates] some absurd narratives. It’s a mix between an exquisite corpse and Scrabble.”

The first feature co-directed by Josh and Benny Safdie, the scrappy shaggy-dog tale of epically failed parenting, “Daddy Longlegs” (known variously on the festival circuit as “Lenny and the Kids,” “Go Get Some Rosemary” and “Rosemary”), brings Gondry’s privileged utopianism to mind. In the future—or even right now—who are filmmakers making their work for? (With Monday’s introduction of the latest iteration of the iPhone, with iMovie editing software installed, it could be as few as two.) The Safdies made well-regarded shorts, and Josh made an earlier feature, 2008′s “The Pleasure of Being Robbed” about a young female pickpocket in Manhattan. Read the rest of this entry »