Top 5 Domestic Films

“The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan

“Che,” Steven Soderbergh

“Paranoid Park,” Gus Van Sant

“Rachel Getting Married,” Jonathan Demme

“Ballast,” Lance Hammer

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Foreign Films

“Man on Wire,” James Marsh

“Reprise,” Joachim Trier

“Happy-Go-Lucky,” Mike Leigh

“Slumdog Millionaire,” Danny Boyle

“A Christmas Tale,” Arnaud Desplechin

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Films

“Slumdog Millionaire,” Danny Boyle

“Ballast,” Lance Hammer

“Hunger,” Steve McQueen

“The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan

“In The City of Sylvia,” Jose Luis Guerin

—Bill Stamets

Top 5 Films

“Milk,” Gus Vant Sant

“The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan

“Man on Wire,” James Marsh

“Let the Right One In,” Tomas Alfredson

“Rachel Getting Married,” Jonathan Demme

—Tom Lynch

Top 5 Performances – Female

Sally Hawkins, “Happy-Go-Lucky”

Melissa Leo, “Frozen River”

Kristin Scott Thomas, “I’ve Loved You So Long”

Kate Winslet, “Revolutionary Road”

Kat Dennings, “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Performances – Male

Benicio Del Toro, “Che”

Sean Penn, “Milk”

Mathieu Amalric, “A Christmas Tale”

Michel Blanc, “The Witnesses”

Ben Kingsley, “Elegy”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Supporting Performances – Female

Ann Savage, “My Winnipeg”

Nurgul Yesilcay, “The Edge of Heaven”

Viola Davis, “Doubt”

Penelope Cruz, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”

Zoe Kazan, “Revolutionary Road”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Supporting Performances – Male

Michael Shannon, “Revolutionary Road,” “Shotgun Stories”

Danny McBride, “Pineapple Express”

Richard Dreyfuss, “W.”

Toby Jones, “W.”

Anil Kapoor, “Slumdog Millionaire”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Directors

Mike Leigh, “Happy-Go-Lucky”

Joachim Trier, “Reprise”

Danny Boyle, “Slumdog Millionaire”

Tomas Alfredson, “Let the Right One In”

James Marsh, “Man on Wire”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Screenplays

Fatih Akin, “The Edge Of Heaven”

Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt, “Reprise”

Simon Beaufoy, “Slumdog Millionaire”

Charlie Kaufman, “Synecdoche, New York”

Martin McDonagh, “In Bruges”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Domestic Documentaries

“Encounters at the End of the World,” Werner Herzog

“The Order of Myths,” Margaret Brown

“At The Death House Door,” Steve James, Peter Gilbert

“The Unforeseen,” Laura Dunn

“Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father,” Kurt Kuenne

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Foreign Documentaries

“Man On Wire,” James Marsh

“Of Time and the City,” Terence Davies

“Waltz With Bashir,” Ari Folman

“Up the Yangtze,” Yung Chang

“Young@Heart,” Stephen Walker

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Follies

“Speed Racer,” The Wachowski brothers

“The Fall,” Tarsem

“Adam Resurrected,” Paul Schrader

“Australia,” Baz Luhrmann

“My Blueberry Nights,” Wong Kar-wai

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Films You Can’t See Yet

“24 City,” Jia Zhang-Ke

“35 Shots Of Rum,” Claire Denis

“The English Surgeon,” Geoffrey Smith

“Liverpool,” Lisandro Alonso

“Voy a Explotar (I’m Going to Explode),” Gerardo Naranjo

—Ray Pride

 

By Ray Pride

Greater love hath no movie reviewer than for his or her year-end listmaking.

Listen to the bite-sized litanies zipping across the Internet and you’d be convinced the best movie you can see this holiday season would be “Slumdog Millionaire,” with its essentially despairing content—as in Dickens, children will be well and truly endangered—ennobled and made shiny-good by bright, bold Danny Boyle adrenaline.

But tragedy for tragedy’s sake is on the front burner. It’s nothing new, releasing dead-serious pictures at the dead of Christmas. For instance, Michael Phillips recently wrote in the Tribune about his least Christmasy Christmas Day attraction, which I’m pretty sure I also saw on that day as a young, young moviegoer: “Looking for Mr. Goodbar.” Another note: the December 8 New Yorker had a cartoon that cuts to the taste. Under a “CINEMA” marquee, the title, “A LUMP OF COAL,” recommended, of course, as “This season’s feel-bad movie.”

An old sentiment, but not uncommon, nor undeserved. For instance, six films since the last holiday and through the awards-driven movie season before the Oscar nominations are announced could also take on the old, terrible pun, “There’s no business like Shoah business.” “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas”: innocence in the concentration camps. “Defiance”: in the Russian woods, three brothers battle Nazis for revenge. “Adam Resurrected”: an ex-circus performer (Jeff Goldblum) leads the parade in an asylum for survivors of the Holocaust. “Good”: Viggo Mortensen tries to hold onto virtue as Nazism sweeps Germany. “The Reader”: an adaptation of a German bestseller about a teenage boy coming to sexual knowledge at the fine hands of a woman (Kate Winslet) who bears guilt from crimes she committed in World War II. “Valkyrie”: Tom Cruise in the role of a not-a-Nazi who got almost close enough to Hitler to assassinate him. (Am I leaving any out?) The Soviets no longer suffice as villains and Iraq war-set pictures die the death of a thousand silent screens.

After a November mostly spent traveling during a long weekend catching up on movies, a rude, loud sound from my teenage years kept coming to mind. Not a raspberry, not a fart, but something more galvanic. That’s how I felt at one of these double-features, starting with “Australia,” which I was rooting for until the first iteration of “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” where big bad Baz goes all BOOM-bastic and jumps the wombat in bold yet largely inert fashion, dumping a steamer trunk bursting with unrealized potential. “Milk”‘s good, and “Milk”‘s got cinematic language to spare in its understated portrait of a martyr-in-the-making who is conscious of historical moment. The terrible irony of historical awareness is to think that any latter-day American audience would consider foreknowledge of the fate of the first openly gay elected official in San Francisco to be a “spoiler” of the movie. It is a feel-great, feel-bad, feel-hopeful movie. But, coming after the electoral shenanigans in California regarding Proposition 8, it carried its own pronounced intimate “thud.”

The same sound comes to mind about the implosions in the film industry, as in the greater economy, with contractions in production and every other level, with unexpected suddenness and speed. The same with magazines and newspapers. What just happened? The simplest rationalization is that too much money has been thrown at unsustainable industrial and economic models. All that aside, still, aren’t movies still storytelling? A plot or an explosion, a rupture or a riff, whether about splendid beauty or traumatic ugliness, mere mirrors of the smoke of impulse and nascent desire? What stories can we tell ourselves in the echo and reflected light of auditorium, flat screen, laptop, iPod, cell phone, PS3?

The neatest feat of adaptation from a holiday picture is one of the most shattering. Here’s a perfectly sour, sourly perfect passage from its source novel: “Nowhere in these plans had he foreseen the weight and shock of reality; nothing had warned him that he might be overwhelmed by the swaying, shining vision of a girl he hadn’t seen in years, a girl whose every glance and gesture could make his throat fill up with longing (“Wouldn’t you like to be loved by me?”), and that then before his very eyes she would dissolve and change into the graceless, suffering creature whose existence he tried every day of his life to deny but whom he knew as well and as painfully as he knew himself, a gaunt constricted woman whose red eyes flashed reproach, whose false smile in the curtain call was as homely as his own sore feet, his own damp climbing underwear and his own sour smell.” This graceful, downwardly spiraling sentence is typical of Richard Yates’ novel, “Revolutionary Road,” and the adaptation, directed by  and written by Justin Haythe, draws from its source with startling fidelity, the moving result as fine-sliced as translucent prosciutto. There’s much more to say about it when it opens in early January, but the only other movie this season that will seem to prompt delicious conversations for hours afterwards is Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino,” which engages so many social issues with such headlong shamefacedness that it made me giddy with girlish glee [see Film Feature].

There’s even more do-I-not-bleed: “Seven Pounds” is a movie that perhaps only the last movie star could sell to financiers and to audiences, that only Will Smith would want to make, a feel-good tragedy that opens with a suicide threat and dances for its duration around the meaning of its title with its knowing allusion to one of the most known phrases from Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice.” One of the production’s greatest strokes, beyond a moving, mature performance by Rosario Dawson, is the hiring of “Pursuit of Happyness” director Gabriele Muccino, inescapably Italian in almost every creative choice, from editing to pitch of dramatic performance.

“Doubt,” of course, is about dark doings behind the skirts of the Church, and any amount of actorly flamboyance does not mask the fact that it’s also about child endangerment.

Junk tossed for yards about. And silence. The metaphor knocks again and again in near-gone 2008, and not just at, say, My Bloody Valentine’s Aragon concert, with its wall of infernal industrial churn, but with politics, economics, movies, especially in the not-silly season of the holidays. What happens when bottom falls out of bottom? (CRASH). Sarah Palin. (CRASH). Newspaper bankruptcies? (CRASH). The $165 million-plus investment in “Australia”? (CRASH). The suddenness of it all… But, as Jonah Nolan, Christopher Nolan and The Joker might well inquire, why so serious?

That movie’s inching toward a billion-dollar worldwide theatrical gross (not even accounting for the bucks from the three-million-plus units shifted on its first day of DVD release). Come January, there’ll be a reissue of “The Dark Knight.” The studio’s interested in crossing that epic threshold, no matter what it costs. But larger still, Nolan felt a mood and forged a dark and sufficiently ambiguous series of metaphors for contemporary ills that pro- and anti-vigilante interpretations are equally convincing. Even though everyone’s seen it, it may be the most apt holiday movie. (CRASH).

Films take months and years to make, even simple ones, and especially the ones that are in the multiplexes. Scripts like the Wachowski brothers’ “The Matrix” and David Webb Peoples’ “Unforgiven” kicked around for eons before getting produced. But come January, when some of these dour pictures will be reflecting off screens, the world outside will be different: they’ll be read through the emerging zeitgeist. An optimistic post-Bush world paying down unfathomable debt. Laugh or cry? Musicals or dramas of lost legacy? Make your list and check it twice: There’s always sorrow.

By Ray Pride

While an Indian friend of Danny Boyle’s tells the director that his “Slumdog Millionaire” won’t be melodramatic enough for audiences on the Subcontinent, its bustling commotion is a fine, generous surprise in this movie year, bristling with romantic notions about love and destiny. It’s a great entertainment, with some of the basic satisfactions of a movie like “Titanic,” in its idealistic, quixotic telling and in the script’s studious prefigurings and refigurings.

Working from a script by Simon Beaufoy, whose credits include “The Full Monty,” Boyle, shooting in HD on practical locations, makes a seamless weave of present and past in the story of an unlikely contestant, an uneducated 18-year-old orphan, on the Indian version of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” “Slumdog Millionaire” is Dickensian in the true sense of the word, filled with poverty and hope, color and conflict, like an “Oliver Twist” scored to M.I.A. (The rich score is by A. R. Rahman, Bollywood’s leading composure, with Maya Arulpragasam’s “Paper Planes” filling the scene at just the right moment.)

The last time I talked to Boyle, I’d only just read about the “Slumdog” project the night before, weeks before he began shooting, and the idea of his working from a Beaufoy script with digital cameras hurtling through the back-alleys of Mumbai sounded propulsive with potential, and I’d told him so. “It’s funny, innit?” he says in his rapid Scots burr, laughing on the morning of his fifty-second birthday. “I’d love to replay that now, if I could see myself talking about it. ‘Cos it’s weird, you go off and make these things. You’ve talked about them before. Luckily, this weird amnesia sets in about things. You do all these interviews and it does make you very self-conscious about stuff, about why you’re doing stuff, in a way that you never think about normally. And yet clearly, you forget it. Because, when you come to make a film? I never think about what I’ve said to anybody about it. Some amnesiac drug sets in whereby you forget the self-consciousness and you go off on this trip of making a film.”

We still haven’t sat down. “Often when I talk to journalists, I sound coherent! You don’t think in that coherent way when you’re doing things; you make sense of them afterwards, don’t you? Patterns emerge about what sounds interesting and attractive. Some of it’s true and some of it is a bit of a fabrication, but basically you work out this way of talking about it, but it isn’t necessarily the way you’ve made the film at all. But fortunately the two are separate in a way. They don’t… My biggest worry, I’ve just been in Austin, where they gave me this award. I’m terrified of things like that, people start talking—”

Is it over, is that what you’re thinking? “They start talking about the ooov-rah, y’know, about the connective tissue of the films.” Boyle cuts a huge grin. “Fuck! It’s like… ahhhh! But fortunately, it all seems to kind of blur away. You have amnesia when you read a script as well. People have been asking about the script and my line on it, which is true, after about ten or fifteen pages, I knew I was going to make it, even though the prospect of reading it hadn’t been particularly attractive. I’ve been saying, the best way to make the decisions is in the middle, not by the time you get to the end. It’s because you have amnesia when you’re reading a script, of actually what problems you’re going to face making it. You forget the realities of filmmaking, money and stars and studios and distribution and locations.” He lets out his boisterous laugh. “You just forget all that, you just think, ‘Awww, this is fantastic! Wouldn’t this be great?’ And then you get on with it. That’s the amnesia thing that helps you. It’s like they say about women having children. They say hormones are released in women that makes them forget the pain. Otherwise women would only ever have one child! Otherwise no one would be insane enough to go back to that level of suffering!”

Now we take a seat. He remembers I asked about the shooting. “Gather round, gather round. So we’re in the slums. We get a couple of little shacks to have the equipment in and it’s full, these rooms would be full of dry ice. This weird image! The hard drive, the Apple notebook that’s on the cameraman’s back was a MacBook Pro. It’s in a suitcase surrounded with dry ice to keep it cool. Not just because of the temperature of India, which, y’know, adds to it. But because they overheat. That’s one of the biggest technical problems we had with it. So you’d have this weird image full of dry ice, like some kind of rock concert! All these assistants handling dry ice with the special gloves or with tweezers. We’d have three or four of these cameras, and they’d be re-supplying them with dry ice. So that’s high-definition filming in the streets of Mumbai!”

“Slumdog Millionaire” is now playing.

By Ray Pride

Of all the things you could possibly say about the potential of this year’s installment of the Chicago International Film Festival, I’ll start with two: most of the attractions are at two theaters within walking distance of each other, the River East and 600 North Michigan, and of a claimed 175 movies, I’ve seen or can easily recommend a fine total of thirty-eight.

Some will open during the run-up to the year-end awards gauntlet, while others have less chance of being seen elsewhere. Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke continues his explorations with documentary-fiction hybrids in “24 City,” a fascinating critique of socialism in contemporary China. Veit Helmer’s German-Azerbaijani spaghetti-sex-comedy “Absurdistan” posits the world as an eternal backwater ruled by, well, water and women, an equally intriguing perspective. Then again, your life could be a series of repeated gestures year after year and song after song like in the passion of the metal-comic doc, “Anvil! The Story of Anvil.”

Lance Hammer’s “Ballast” is spare American regional filmmaking of uncommon delicacy, while Mike Leigh’s latest, “Happy-Go-Lucky,” partakes equally deeply of the concerns of compassion and empathy. French novelist Philippe Claudel’s “I’ve Loved You So Long” is reed-delicate and wire-taut, as rich as the kind of prose that mirrors life, with a bold central performance by Kristin Scott Thomas as a haunted middle-aged woman. Utterly evanescent but also lived-in is “Nights and Weekends,” by Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg as a long-distance couple in New York and Chicago, more long distance than couple. The glimpse we have of their lives is only the moments of incomprehension, only disconnect. The characters are ill matched and ill starred; the filmmaker-leads palpably suggest the failure of modern romance. A different take on the world today: Danny Boyle’s latest, “Slumdog Millionaire,” about an 18-year-old Mumbai orphan who competes on India’s version of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” Streets teem, lives dance. And, reflecting a pornography-filled culture, there’s the casual obscenity of Kevin Smith’s “Zack and Miri Make A Porno,” which, in a matter of speaking, starts at snowball and snowballs from there.

Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York” is a world within worlds within the veteran screenwriter’s head, to drenching, wrenching result. (I’m moderating Sunday night’s Q&A with Kaufman.) More drama: Darren Aronofsky’s spare “The Wrestler” boasts a painfully physicalized performance by Mickey Rourke as a man whose body is his life, to the threat of both; thematically and acting-wise, Marisa Tomei is his equal as a stripper he knows not well enough. Chicago-set torment is on-screen in “Wesley Willis Joyrides,” an assembly of material about the late, troubled Chicago musician.

Terence Davis, who hasn’t made a movie since 2000′s “The House of Mirth,” returns in smashing form with the “Of Times And The City,” an elegy to his Liverpool hometown that is both comic and heartfelt, sardonic and emotional. American sense of place: Kelly Reichardt (“Old Joy”) returns with more Pacific Northwest minimalism with “Wendy and Lucy,” with a radiant Michelle Williams center screen as a needy woman whose life revolves on her car and her dog. That’s not to overlook special screenings at the Music Box of a restored print of Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time In the West,” as well as John Cassavetes’ “Faces.”

Films from other cultures are always important for an idea of lives lived, sidewalks walked. Jerzy Skolimowski (“Moonlighting,” “Deep End”) reportedly returns to Polish-absurdist form with his “Four Nights With Anna.” The great Arnaud Desplechin (“Kings and Queen,” “My Sex Life, Or, How I Got Into An Argument”) returns with “A Christmas Tale” (pictured), a two-and-a-half-hour family comedy-drama that attains as many mysterious heights as his earlier work. Ace Icelandic editor Valdis Oskarsdottir (“Julien Donkey-Boy,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) debuts with “Country Wedding,” a road movie about two busloads of Icelanders heading off from Reykjavik to a wedding in the countryside with the expected perplexing comic result amid the grand volcanic landscape. “Be Like Others” is a documentary about the Iranian perplex where homosexuality is punishable by death, but sex-reassignment surgery is encouraged: the concept is mind-boggling, and Tanaz Eshaghian does a fair job balancing the personalities of her subjects.

Other notables: Abdel Kechiche’s “The Secret of The Grain,” an explosive admixture of family and food with rich, unpredictable outcomes. Cai Shangjun’s “The Red Awn” is a diverting family drama on a distant Chinese wheat farm. Nina Paley’s “Sita Sings The Blues” is an animated adaptation of the Hindu epic “Ramayana,” mingled with the story of a modern divorce, combining music and images to captivating effect. Nacho Vigalondo’s “Timecrimes” is bright modern sci-fi; Kiyoshi Kurosawa, known for his eerie tales of the otherworldly, works in the genre of family drama, reportedly with the same impact; and James Gray’s “Two Lovers,” which debuted at Cannes to decidedly mixed reviews, transposes bits of Dostoevsky to a somber, contemporary New York romance. Sincere or overstated? Like many of the sweet surprises to be found at any good film festival, it might be a little of both.

Visit chicagofilmfestival.com for a full schedule.