By Ray Pride

When does work become a “work”?

Almost as fascinating as the cool, perfectionist sheen of David Fincher’s version of “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” is the tattoo of tales of the making of the movie. Collaborators seem to go to special lengths to point out that the painstaking focus Fincher applies to his work is just what he does: his splendid perfectionism isn’t workaholism, it’s work, the work. He’s Lisbeth Salander in his own immodest analytical skills. As the film industry transforms in so many ways, in every way, from distribution to projection to production, the directors who’ve unapologetically forged their own way are often as fascinating behind-the-scenes as they are on screen. Read the rest of this entry »

Crazy Horse

By Ray Pride

No matter even if you truly wanted to, there’s no way a single viewer could give you an overview of an international film festival with more than a hundred events: you can surmise all you want, based on what festival films have played or have been reviewed at already, or the filmmakers’ reputation. Even festival programmers miss out on sections they’re not part of. I’ll be curious to see statistics after this year’s CIFF to see how many programs the average, but dedicated moviegoer, is able to attend. It’s tough even if you’ve been to a few prior festivals, seen a fistful of advance screeners, availed yourself of advance screenings. But, as luck, fortune or programming may have it, Chicago International has more programs of note in its second week, and a growing number of them have further distribution in the near future. (Disclosure: I was a program consultant for this year’s Docufest section.) Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

A man, a woman, a cellphone. A man, a woman, some penis pills. A woman, a man, her hand. A man, a pregnant woman, a woman. A man, a woman, some errant intimate AVI files.

That’s as simple as a movie gets outside of landscape studies and outright porn these days, and it comprises much of the dramatis personae of Adam Wingard and Joe Swanberg’s four-episode sex-on-the-West-Side-of-Chicago sketch film “Autoerotic.” Read the rest of this entry »

"HERE"

By Ray Pride

They come to the city on the hill, by air, by roads, seekers of wisdom headed west into the wilderness, into the mountains, beneath crystal blue skies, among dreamers and ideas in thin bracing air, amid Starbucks and Stella Artois, among official sponsors and “riff-raff” brands to the side, ten days formally kicked off with Robert Redford’s annual, perennial peroration of what independent cinema is and will be for the immediate future, foreseeable budgets and attention spans.

Sundance. Films and filmmakers, press agents and sales agents, and agents galore, shuttles shuttling the small hamlet of Park City, engorging its paths and runnels from its year-round resort-town population of under 10,000 to a figure estimated as high as fourteen million. Actually, it only seems that packed on opening weekend: 120,000 was one of the highest estimates, and it’s plausible—the traffic is worse than cross-town Manhattan even in the middle of the day, or Chicago when there’s a compelling multiple-car pileup on the side of the Kennedy. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

The moment is past but the moment is now: In 2009 Williamsburg, Shelly, a woman of 23 or so, (Stella Schnabel) contends with intense desires, average expectations, quotidian disappointments. Shelly’s inner life is suggested by a voice-over that’s as much interior monologue as it is diary entry or recitation to a therapist, as well as a visual style fashioned in multiple bold formats. There’s an intermittent score by Will Bates as well that uses a percussive tattoo like an accelerated heartbeat, shared by Stella and the film itself, in the same fashion Jon Brion did with his music for “Punch-Drunk Love.” Ry Russo-Young’s second feature, “You Wont Miss Me” (sic), at first glance resembles other contemporary low-budget, digital video idioms, but in fact, it’s a quietly constructed, sharply observed, unsentimental of-the-minute “Alice in Wonderland.” Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

By Ray Pride

Ten years is greater than the blink of an eye. Trying to fashion some sort of great overarching structure for an arbitrary patch of lifetime always leaves me like the kid at the end of “Kids,” who wakes from a ruckus to ask, “What just happened?”

How do you summarize a city’s decade of filmmaking and filmgoing that starts with John Cusack the quavering voice of a generation in “High Fidelity” but finds him as dad-bait in “2012″ in 2010, while once-perennial sidekick Jeremy Piven is an Emmy-winning star-and-a-half? There’s an epic tale right there.

Chicago could be the most cinematic of cities, if you look at Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies,” slavishly recreating Lincoln Avenue of the Dillinger era with some pricey set dressing, but hardly having to build a thing, or if you fly with “The Dark Knight” into the gleaming sky. There are  two movies that understand  the great city, burned to the ground, its skyline rising from ashes. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Monday afternoon is cold and rainy in Chicago and it’s cold and rainy in Austin, Texas, “a rarity,” Bob Byington, writer-director of “Harmony and Me” tells me.

“I’ve put the Pixies on for our chat,” he types from Texas; Syd Barrett sings “Dark Globe” in the café where I stare out onto the avenue. Byington’s latest smart comedy of discomfort, his third feature, “Harmony and Me,” which benefited from development at the Sundance Institute, debuted in the spring at New Directions New Films in New York City to strong reviews. Austin thirtysomething Harmony (Justin Rice from Bishop Allen) works in an office and feels the pangs of a recent dumping by his girlfriend, Jessica (co-producer Kristen Tucker). Harmony is obsessed. No one wants to hear it. His pain and anger move toward making a song. Along the way, Byington’s wry comic precision and crisp characterization is matched by a gift for laidback yet kaleidoscopic, naturalistic performances getting from actors and non-pros alike.

Byington is self-distributing, opening for a week at Siskel, and was on a panel at the Austin Film Festival on Sunday about comedy writing. Is that your area of perceived expertise? I ask. “Yes, but I have no training and little expertise. I look at someone like Woody Allen who wrote jokes for ten years before he made his first movie. But he was unavailable, I think.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Come to think of it, every frame of every film asks, “What is cinema?” Some frames scream, others mutter, some stumble in literal and figurative darkness. Then there are filmmakers like Carlos Reygadas, whose stubborn, implacable, sublime spiritual tale “Silent Light” has emerged from distribution backwaters to limited theatrical exhibition (it opened Friday at Facets). I’m happily surprised it’s finally playing here.

Last week, I observed a masterclass at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival by Vilmos Zsigmond, whose philosophy as cinematographer boils down to storytelling as lighting, as seen in paintings and stills. Composition, he confidently stated, is secondary, since there is only ever one proper place to put the camera. Read the rest of this entry »