"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.

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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.

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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 »

RECOMMENDED

By Ray Pride

Sad to say, there’s more drama in the film industry than in most movies these days.

One snapshot: “The kind of cinema that we used to make is drying up, I’m afraid,” the Irish filmmaker-novelist Neil Jordan told his biographer recently. “The distribution is vanishing. The funding is vanishing.” An ominous enough quote, but here’s another snapshot: Memorial Day weekend had the worst attendance at North American movie theaters in seventeen years. Among informed observers, at least Roger Ebert’s an optimist, twittering on Monday, “Public rejecting Hollywood’s move to dumb formulas. Good movies, they’ll attend.” Bring on the good movies! Aside from vanishing finance and finicky audiences, what, pray, is going well at the movies?

Restorations and reissues, at least, drawing on the large (but ultimately finite) fount of great movies: “Bicycle Thieves” ended a run at Siskel Thursday and a new 35mm print of Godard’s “Breathless” is coming this summer (even if the 79-year-old auteur’s elliptical high-definition “Film Socialisme” bewildered much of the Cannes-going scribe tribe). For inveterate moviegoers, these reissues and restorations come as a revelation, and for me, at least, it’s not because the movies have changed, but because we have: our memories of the old movies fade as life’s other experiences come along. And there is one new-old film that I’m happy not to have seen in any form for many, many years, as my only memories of it will be of a version close to its original form: Fritz Lang’s 1927 “Metropolis,” now entitled “The Complete Metropolis,” at the Music Box. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Opening on more than 200 screens this week, Anurag Basu’s “Kites” is gaudy, multiculti desi masala, an unpredictable, tonally gaga fable of fate in the form of a couple-on-the-run love story between two dancers, the Indian J. (Hrithik Roshan) and Mexican immigrant Linda (Bárbara Mori Ochoa), who longs to marry a rich American. J., a dancing instructor in Vegas, has a sideline in green-card marriages. But this time… he’s fallen in love. Unfortunately, he’s engaged to a fabulously rich woman whose violent father owns a Las Vegas casino, and whose brother is engaged to “Natasha”—his green-card ex under a new name. (The family estate is vast, making any spread in Architectural Digest seem insufficiently vulgar and nouveau; Dad, or “Bob,” is shown as a top-dog bad guy with a bit of “Reservoir Dogs”-style lobe slicing.) Plot synopsis would baffle more than the story’s unfolding, even in its fractured, post-Tarantino style, and while it’s overstuffed after the fashion of Indian pop movies, it’s still a glory of delirium. “Destiny” is repeatedly invoked, but the greatest virtue of “Kites” is that unlike an overly developed or workshopped screenplay, anything can, and does, happen. I long for an Amer-indie movie with the same lunatic verve. Exuberant diaspora kitsch ensues. It’s the most fun I had at the movies all Tuesday. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Seconds after the theater’s gone dark, high in the star-strewn sky, far above crowds of rowdy fans amped up by pounding rock music and a phalanx of cheerleaders, Iron Man rockets, then plunges, through stories-high curtains of geysering fireworks, only to land precisely with a satisfying small thud on the balls of his feet on an exact spot directly in the spotlight.

That inspiration, in the reality-television-style editing of the opening scene of Marvel (Disney)-Paramount-Jon Favreau’s “Iron Man 2″ is not only a suggestive objective correlative to the innards of Robert Downey, Jr.’s essence and self-effacing speed-mumbling performance style, but also for the contemporary blockbuster: stars burst in the air, hit their marks, do a little twirl, but soon enough, the home of the brave will go fickle. And it starts with the heat-seeking zeitgeist-humpers whose commentary moves at the speed of Wi-Fi: While Robert Downey, Jr. offers up another serving of his greedy knack for scene-stealing—tempered, less manic Hamlet than Ham and “hot damn!” on wry—jaded observers yawn. Predictably, even with a battery of grumpy, dismissive reviews, “Iron Man 2″ punched through the box office with an estimated $128 million in North America. Does reporting dwell on the conflicted but still jabbing commentary on the egos that run our military procurement system, or paraphrasing Eisenhower’s “the military-industrial complex” as “the military-industrial age”? Nah, most of the Monday and Tuesday morning columnizing-solemnizing questions whether money was “left on the table” for not having done a sloppy-shitty headache-inducing post-production conversion to simulated 3-D akin to the eye-bleeding swirl of muck in “Clash of the Titans.” Read the rest of this entry »