May 02
RECOMMENDED
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 »
May 02
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 »
May 02
RECOMMENDED
“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 »
May 02
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 »
May 02
Photo by Ray Pride.
By Ray Pride
All the movies here are about forgiveness and mortality, I message a friend in the midst of last week’s fourteenth edition of Ebertfest in Champaign-Urbana.
The quick, glib text in turn: “Isn’t that all movies, really?” Since I didn’t know I was going until a couple days ahead, I hadn’t looked over the list of twelve “overlooked” features that Roger Ebert and his festival staff had programmed. All I really knew was that no movies or presentations overlap, and ample time is slotted for lunch and dinner; that is, lots of gab.
On opening night, “Joe Vs. The Volcano” (1990), shown at the sold-out downtown 1,525-seat Virginia Theatre (built 1921), is about a white-collar worker who escapes “Brazil”-like drudgery when he’s told he has six months to live. John Patrick Shanley’s cracked romanticism ensues. Mortality of another stripe came to light afterwards, when cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt said a DCP digital copy of the film had been mastered especially for Ebert, and he thought it looked finer than it had ever looked in its photochemical form. Still, the sixty-seven-year-old cinematographer admitted, he’s yet to shoot a movie in any digital format. Read the rest of this entry »
Apr 25
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 »
Apr 25
RECOMMENDED
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 »
Apr 25
RECOMMENDED
Acute, perceptive, compelling, “Monsieur Lazhar” is a rich portrait of a man finding his calling under unlikely circumstances. Canada’s nominee for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, adapted by Philippe Falardeau from Évelyne de la Chenelière’s one-act stage monologue, keeps its focus on its singular character, Bachir Lazhar (Fellag), an Algerian immigrant who applies for a job just at the moment a grade-school class desperately needs a replacement instructor after the trauma of their teacher’s suicide after hours in the classroom. Why is he in Montreal? What about him will make him not only the ideal substitute teacher for this troubled, troubling moment in the lives of the kids in the classroom, but also the kind of teacher who will be remembered, gratefully, by all of them? Read the rest of this entry »
RECOMMENDED
