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 »
Jennifer Burns’ 2009 “Vincent: A Life In Color” is the future of documentary in the here-and-now: a hand-to-mouth portrait of a local eccentric with touching elements in the central character’s life story. There’s gonna be a lot more of them in the foreseeable future: anecdotes that could be shorts that are expanded to feature length. (Everybody thinks everybody’s got a story.) Vincent P. Falk, legally blind with extreme tunnel vision, worked as a computer programmer for Cook County and lives in a Marina City condo. In his off-hours, draped in coats of many colors, none drab, all as bold as lightning, he haunts the bridges over the Chicago River and the fishbowl windows of local television news broadcasts, often doing dervish-y spins of joy. Nicknames supposedly abound: “Fashion Man” and “Man of a Thousand Coats” as well as “Riverace” (pronounced like “Liberace”). Despite a troubled childhood, detailed at length, Vincent comes across as an odd but supremely contented man. Viewers’ taste for Vincent’s taste in puns may vary. Roger Ebert is a central supporter of “Vincent,” reviewing it last June on his website before a release was set, and programming it at his recent Ebertfest in Champaign. 96m. DigiBeta. (Ray Pride)
“Vincent: A Life In Color” opens Friday at Siskel. Burns and Falk will appear at all Friday-Sunday shows and Monday-Thursday 8pm shows. A reel of Falk’s spins-for-the-camera is embedded below. Read the rest of this entry »
While Matthew Vaughn’s comics adaptation “Kick-Ass” has a nerd-tacular, recessive male lead, David Lezewski (Aaron Johnson), its solid center is 13-year-old Chloë Grace Moretz, playing Mindy, the daughter of a disillusioned former cop (Nic Cage) out to avenge his wife’s death by New York’s most powerful gangster. Yeah, it’s a parody of a pop plot that jibes superhero potboilers even while indulging familiar excess. Still, it manages to be antisocial in ways that movies costing over, say, a couple million dollars, don’t often indulge. Read the rest of this entry »
Circumstances are ripe for upstart filmmakers to define what the movies are for years to come, if only new kinds of storytelling and models of distribution emerge. “The Pink Hotel,” the first feature by Chicago filmmaker (and Kalamazoo native) Chris Hefner, 26, takes a loving look back to a past that never existed—both in cinema and in Chicago landmarks including the Music Box (which comes off as a threadbare Marienbad). Shot in Super-8 black-and-white reversal film and set in a luxury hotel filled with strange tenants with stranger dreams, “The Pink Hotel”‘s 1930s-that-never-was is steeped in dread and fear, slippery as smoke and elusive as cryptic, recurring dreams.
Begun over the past three and produced in the last year, Hefner worked in bursts between his day job as an art handler, usually at the MCA, but with occasional freelance gigs at art fairs and other museums. “I’ve been making shorts for several years,” Hefner told me over the weekend, “and had developed a vocabulary for how I put those together. I felt antsy to see myself develop things further, rather than keep doing what had become fairly easy for me. I think a lot of the drive behind the production came from my feeling that if I didn’t do it, and do it now, then I would feel stagnant and lazy.” Read the rest of this entry »
“Chloe,” Atom Egoyan’s thirteenth feature, was intended as a directorial project for producer Ivan Reitman.
But after working on a screenplay with screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson (“Secretary”), the director of “Ghostbusters” decided the story might better suit fellow Canadian Atom Egoyan, whose “Exotica” he admired. Egoyan’s dense, cool, yet luxuriantly imagined movies play tricks with time and perspective, but this script is linear. Catherine (Julianne Moore), a Toronto gynecologist, suspects her music-professor husband David (Liam Neeson) has been cheating on her, and she hires a young call girl (Amanda Seyfried) she encounters in a bar in the city’s pricey, middle-aged Yorkville district to reveal how far he might go with flirtation. The greater flirtation in Wilson’s juicy script is with absurdity, but what’s on screen is the most compelling, even hypnotic Egoyan film in years. Read the rest of this entry »
Brian Andreotti and Bill Schopf/Photo: Alyssa Miserendino
By Tom Lynch
You’re probably sick of hearing it by now, but “The Hurt Locker” is the least-seen of all Best Picture Oscar winners in history. In an age when funding for modest pictures is scarce, and studios are less interested in taking risks with films lacking marquee names, an art-house action drama (of considerable caliber, of course) bested the highest-grossing movie of all time. This was no small upset: On a Wednesday a full month after its release, “Avatar” took in more money than “The Hurt Locker” did during its entire theatrical run.
With cash tight all over, movie studios have been limiting their independent-film divisions. In 2008, despite co-producing high-quality pictures like “No Country for Old Men” and “There Will Be Blood,” most of Paramount Vantage was consolidated into its parent studio. (Paramount retained the brand name, however.) But when most film studios were sprinting as fast as they could away from art-house fare, Music Box Theatre owner Bill Schopf saw an opportunity.
The Music Box Theatre, on Southport Avenue in the Lakeview neighborhood, has maintained a solid reputation as both a high-class art-film exhibitor and midnight-movie cult-film destination. Built in 1929 and barely changed since, the theater’s overwhelming old-time movie-house atmosphere is as much a part of the experience as the actual film you’re there to see—whether it be a midnight screening of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” a weekend matinee of some Hitchcock, or the new Terry Gilliam film. And, of course, there’s the live organist.
In 2007, Schopf, a high-profile attorney and real estate developer, who took control of the Music Box in 2003, began considering an expansion, first horizontally. His team began searching for other theater possibilities in Chicago, but the realities of actually finding a good venue set in quickly, and distribution entered the conversation. The vertical leap of a movie theater venturing into film distribution is a substantial move, and a risky one at that, given the financial climate. At first, everyone tried to talk Schopf out of it. Read the rest of this entry »
David Peace’s “Red Riding” books, drawing on the real-life “Yorkshire Ripper” cases, are a marvel of surrealism and despair, finding language both vernacular and incantatory to capture the failed attempts of investigators and journalists to solve brutal serial killings in Leeds, Yorkshire, across two decades. The quartet of novels is pared to a trilogy, rich, compelling noir movies that were produced for British television: “Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974″ (directed by Julian Jarrold, “Kinky Boots,” shooting in Super 16; “Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1980″ (James Marsh, “Man on Wire,” shooting in 35mm widescreen); “In the Year of Our Lord 1983″ (Anadd Tucker, “Shopgirl,” shooting with the Red One camera). The visual style in all three is as dark as the crimes on show, unafraid of the possibility of the perfume of pretension and the funk of sadism: think “Se3en” instead of “Se7en.” “1974″ may be the most successful, following Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield, “Boy A”), a young reporter for the Yorkshire Post who’s returned after time spent “down South.” (The invocation of “The North”—”The North, we do what we want”—and its ways so often would be comical if not consistently menacing.) Referring to a recently disappeared peer, Peace’s novels open, “All we ever get is Lord fucking Lucan and wingless bloody crows,’ smiled Gilman, like this way the best day of our lives… Waiting for my first Front Page, the Byline Boy at last.” Young spunk meets cloacal immersion: confronting a local real estate entrepreneur John Dawson (Sean Bean) is the first instance of Eddie’s putting of many of a foot wrong. Prolific expert David Thomson has overreached in asserting these films as the equal of “The Godfather” and “The Godfather II,” but despite their gloom, violence and despair, they’re roundly thrilling: the parochial cruelty—do the police use the crimes as cover for avenging their own enemies?—is unrelenting and the depths of viciousness can hardly be guessed. Each director finds their own style, but the unity comes from screenwriter Tony Grisoni’s proficient distillation of the material and themes. In Marsh’s “1980,” Paddy Considine may give the series’ best performance as a police investigator running an internal affairs investigation of the 1974 events.) In the best possible way, “The Red Riding Trilogy” harks back to U. S. and British thrillers of the 1970s: deeply skeptical and bold in accepting that compromise and failure are an ineffable part of the human condition, or at the very least, of the genre of thrillers pitting authority against avarice. With Rebecca Hall, Peter Mullan and Eddie Marsan. 105m; 96m; 104m, respectively. (Ray Pride)
“The Red Riding Trilogy” opens Friday at the Music Box, with viewing options including a Roadshow-style marathon sit. The Channel 4 website has trailers and more.
Juanita Wilson’s “The Door” (Ireland, 17m), is a broodingly photographed, icy heart-pounder of a family’s exit from their home after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine. “Instead of Abracadabra,” by Patrik Eklund (Sweden, 22m) is a wide-angle variation on contemporary Nordic film comedy; Tomas (Simon J. Berger) still lives at home, after failing at his dreams of becoming a proper magician. Berger’s portrayal of the fumbling figure amuses. In Luke Doolan’s “Miracle Fish” (Australia, 17m), a 2009 Sundance entrant, a clever-if-tricksy story of an 8-year-old’s birthday wishes for a world without people that seems to have come true. “Kavi” (US-India, 19m), director Gregg Helvey’s USC thesis project, follows an Indian boy who wants to go to school and play cricket is forced to work as a slave in a brick kiln. Neatly constructed activist fiction. Joachim Back’s “The New Tenants” (Denmark-US, 20m), written by Anders Thomas Jensen (“Open Hearts,” “Brothers,” “Wilbur Wants To Kill Himself”) is a gratifyingly cynical dark comedy that starts with “We are just fucked beyond all measure” and “Gross, you just gave her dead-guy flour” and moves to unplanned romance and opportunities for ripe performance. It’s like a 1970s movie from a clever parallel universe. With Kevin Corrigan, David Rakoff, Vincent D’Onofrio, Liane Balaban, Helen Hanft, Jamie Harrold. Program 95m. (Ray Pride)
“Oscar Nominated Short Films: Live Action” opens Friday at Landmark Century.
Fabrice O. Joubert’s “French Roast” (France, 8m) satirizes café life in Paris with the story of a businessman’s lost wallet and a second cup of coffee. Joubert’s beautifully dimensional CG animated world suggests the live-action work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, but the timing and crisply comic sound design bear worthy comparison to Tati. Nicky Phelan’s “Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty” (Ireland, 6m) finds a disoriented grandmother making “Sleeping Beauty” into nightmare material for her granddaughter. Lovingly paced with the comedy enhanced by the rolling Irish accents. Javier Recio Gracia’s “The Lady and The Reaper” (Spain, 8m) follows another nice old woman, this one awaiting the Grim Reaper with complications to come late one night. The use of space and light suggests the dourness of Shane Acker’s “9″ but bursts into speed and color and gaudy 3-D animation as the story kicks in. Nick Park’s latest Wallace & Gromit, “A Matter of Loaf and Death” (30m, UK) returns to the handmade style that Park’s fans remember best. The dashing duo have opening a successful bakery, “Top Bun,” at 62 West Wallaby Street, but the murders of other bakers leads to a murder mystery. The clockwork comic inspiration is largely inspired. Read the rest of this entry »
There’s a concept lurking whenever I talk to people who write about film, or filmmakers, or film people at festivals. Let’s call it “the conversation.”
The conversation is the cultural conversation: how does storytelling stand out and seep into the larger consciousness in the twenty-first century? I’m writing this as the early figures have come in from Sunday: yes, “Avatar” has been beaten at the box office for the first weekend since it opened by “Dear John,” a movie directed toward a female audience, from a Nicholas Sparks novel. “Dear John” made $32.4 million, $10 million more than the most optimistic estimates. Multiple movies directed toward multiple constituencies or demographics, all making money: that’s how an industry survives and thrives.
But the Monday morning number that’s more striking is the ratings estimate of the Super Bowl, its 106 million viewers set to topple the “Most Watched Television of All Time” title held by the last episode of “M*A*S*H.” There’s the conversation: what gets more than a roomful of people talking for more than five minutes. It’s more than the nominal idea of the “water cooler conversation”: it’s about a notion or an idea taking root and being handed along. With new distribution strategies, it’s a difficult concern for, say, a social-issue documentary like Steve James and Peter Gilbert’s superb contemplation of the death penalty, “At the Death House Door,” which was financed by IFC and made available on cable and on demand. In the mid-1990s, when “Hoop Dreams” was made, a theatrical release window before video was the first of a series of platforms, and along the way, not only the film but its concerns were discussed in the media. But nowadays, there’s the danger that a finely tuned documentary with sports at its center can have a sterling first-shot audience if it debuts on ESPN, but it doesn’t strike a chord in the culture. “On-demand,” on the vast scrolling menus, can mean “no demand.” Each film becomes part of the cultural clutter; it’s a plateau instead of a platform. Subtextual issues of race, class and economy don’t become part of the conversation.
Steering clear of how “the conversation” is steered in contemporary politics, and staying with movies, in the case of “Avatar” the most prevalent conversational topic has been “is it worth the extra money?” and “Oh yes, it’s worth the extra money.” Nothing wrong with a smooth ride. Then other factors, and media memes erupt: is it an anti-American tract? Is that abrupt ending transcendent or nihilist? Is its story a match to “Strange Days,” a movie by Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron about transplanted consciousness that had its genesis at the same time as “Avatar”? Is this ride a rebirth of the moviegoing experience or the death of literate cinema? Its sleek success as the highest-grossing movie in history becomes a topic in itself: are 3-D and IMAX tariffs going to necessitate putting an asterisk beside its entries like a steroid-injecting baseball player? (Probably not questions to pose directly to Cameron: filmmakers and writers are supposed to be a little off the mark in life, and surfacing after years in the “Avatar” bathysphere, he’s living up to his own bold reputation.)
Nothing succeeds like success, it’s said, but nothing gets talked about like success. One of my treasured experiences this decade was seeing the entirety of Jacques Rivette’s twelve-hour-and-fifty-three-minute-long “Out One” over a Memorial Day weekend at Siskel; sold out, buzzing, a conversation onscreen and off, but quickly, you realize that single 16mm print has only been exhibited less than fifty times and that auditorium holds 197 people. 197! That conversation will eddy outward.
After Sunday night’s Super Bowl, not being in the company of full-on sports fans, the conversation afterwards was about the eight spots for upcoming movies and for a single commercial that were satisfying as narrative in the way that good movies are. Notably, it was the first broadcast ad for Google search. By yesterday afternoon, before it was identified as the ad Google would run, more than a million people had watched the sixty-second clip, “Parisian Love,” since its YouTube upload in November. A slosh in the bucket, still, compared to the Super Bowl audience.
There are a lot of striking things about it (including cleverly avoiding the clever ending of clicking on “I’m Feeling Lucky” as the final image of the commercial), but in terms of moviegoing today, and how people talk about movies (such as “The Hangover” or “The Blind Side”), as well the evolution of the distribution of smaller films, of foreign language films, “art-house films,” to use a phrase used as little as possible by distributors today, is the embedding of the phrase “Who is François Truffaut?”
It’s a bright, breathless ad but in the middle of its rush, that was the pause for me: that question has to be asked? But immediately the eyes-wide realization: that rhetorical question breezed past 106 million sets of eyes, not 197. Audiences are fragmented, attention is diverted, but subversive little details drop into the conversation. Plus, it’s the best short I’ve seen so far in 2010, with a late, great filmmaker name-checked in an elegant piece of commercial whimsy. And yes, “Avatar” is anti-human.
By Ray Pride
