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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 »

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.

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Greta Gerwig: ditz of steel or inspired genius? Discuss. In Mark and Jay Duplass’ follow-up to “The Puffy Chair,” a quartet of friends, all failing actors, retreat to the backwoods after a film-festival exposure to an absolute piece of shit that impresses them, and amid double-talk, flirtations, misbegotten making-out, umming, hemming, hawing, and with camerawork as uncertain as the badinage, decide to make a horror movie. A man with a paper bag over his head ensues. Call it “The Blair Bitch-Session Project.” There’s something just out of grasp that the Duplasses are after here, despite the genial and ultimately sentimental form of their small comedy. Again, the question remains of just how a larger-budget project might waste co-star Gerwig’s twerpitude of magnitude. In the earlier “Hannah Takes the Stairs,” she managed to demonstrate an intelligence that is mere flightiness here; in the forthcoming “Nights and Weekends,” which she co-directed and co-stars in with Joe Swanberg, it all comes together: simply by moments passing, without that much situation, behavior or even drama, that film captures something all these twentysomething filmmakers seem after: drama as quicksilver as breath, as sudden as adrenaline, as memorable as life. In the meantime, a man in the woods with a bag on his head is reasonably goddam scary in carefully calibrated increments. With Steve Zissis, Ross Partridge, Elise Muller. 84m. (Ray Pride)